Antithesis of My Design Education (Part 1) by Lucien Ng

The Antithesis of My Design Education

Edited by: Lucien Ng

â&#x20AC;&#x153;He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.â&#x20AC;?

– 1984 (George Orwell)

Desig n Mat ter s 01 Fi rst Thi ngs Fi rst Mani festo ( Ken Garland)

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02 Desig n for The Rea l World ( Victor Papanek)

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03 W hy Desig ners Can’t Thi n k ( M ichael Bier ut)

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04 How Desig ners Dest royed t he World ( M i ke Montei ro)

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05 Fi rst Thi ngs Fi rst Mani festo 20 0 0 024 0 6 Reject ion A nd The Desig ner ( Desig n Obser ver)

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07 Cr it ica l Graphic Desig n: Cr it ica l of W hat? ( Desig n Obser ver)

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08 W hy Desig ners St i l l Can’t Thi n k ( Joe Mar ianek)

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09 Fi rst Thi ngs Fi rst 2014 036 10

The Essence of Matter ( Er i k Spieker mann)

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Fut u rolog y 11. The Promise and Per i ls of Sy nt het ic Biolog y

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12. Sachs on t he Cr isis, t he Recover y, and t he Future ( Econta l k)

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13. Kel ly on t he Future, Product iv it y, and t he Qua lit y of L i fe ( Econta l k)

0 79

14. Dav id Autor on The Future of Work & Polany i’s Paradox ( Econta l k)

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15. 26 Ideas From The Future ( Ideas.TE D)

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16. Eng i neer i ng t he Per fect Baby ( M I T Press)

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17. The Black Swan: The I mpact of t he High ly I mprobable ( N Y Ti mes)

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Under sta nd i ng Ou r selves 18. The P ur pose of P ur pose ( Victor Cheng) 14 4 19. The Secret Histor y Of Thoughts ( N PR Inv isibi lia Podcast)

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20. The Power Of Categor ies ( N PR Inv isibi lia Podcast)

189

21. How To Become Bat man ( N PR Inv isibi lia Podcast)

225

22. Fearless ( N PR Inv isibi lia Podcast) 264 23. 3 Clues to Understand i ng Your Brai n ( VS R amachand ran)

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24. Nav igat i ng Stuck ness ( Jonat han Har r is)

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25. Is De- Sk i l li ng K i l li ng Your A r ts Educat ion? ( Huf f i ng ton Post)

320

Literacy & Educat ion

26. The New L iteracies (Clive Thompson) 325 27. Better A l l The Ti me ( James Surow ieck i) 327 28. Elizabet h Green on Educat ion & Bui ld i ng a Better Teacher ( Econta l k)

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29. James Tooley on Pr ivate Schools of t he Poor and t he Beaut i fu l Tree ( Econta l k)

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30. A r t A s E xper ience ( John Dewey) 375 31. Eureka: Inf i nit y of Space ( Edgar A l lan Poe)

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32. I, Penci l. My Fami ly Tree as told to L eonard E . Read ( Econ lib)

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Ma rkets & Economy 33. How Capita lism is K i l li ng Democracy ( Foreig nPolicy)

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34. Unma k i ng Globa l Capita lism (Sam Gi nd i n) 394 35. Plat for m Economics Wi l l Ru le t he Inter net of Thi ngs ( Wi red)

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36. M ichael Munger on M i l k ( Econta l k Podcast)

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37. James Otteson on The End of Socia lism ( Econta l k Podcast)

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38. M ichael Munger on t he Shar i ng Economy ( Econta l k Podcast)

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Mora l & Et h ics 39. Wait. W hat? We Can Rew i re Our Sense of Mora lit y? ( M ichel le Qui nt)

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4 0. The Tragedy of Common- Sense Mora lit y ( Joshua Greene)

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41. The Mora l Roots of L ibera ls and Conser vat ives ( Jonat han Haidt)

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42. Jonat han Haidt on t he R ighteous M i nd ( Econta l k)

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43. Joshua Greene on Mora l Tr ibes, Mora l Di lemmas, and Ut i litar ianism ( Econta l k)

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4 4. Russ Rober ts on How Adam Smit h Can Change Your L i fe ( Econta l k)

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45. W hitePaper: Et hics i n Desig n ( Tom Myers)

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4 6. Et hics i n Desig n, 10 Quest ions (Clive Di lnot)

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Culture & Society 47. Fa k i ng Cu ltura l L iteracy ( N Y Ti mes) 570 48. There is Such a Thi ng as Societ y ( Eye Magazi ne)

574

49. How Cu ltures A round The World Ma ke Decisions ( Ideas.TE D)

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50. M ichael Munger on Cu ltura l Nor ms ( Econta l k)

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51. The Scourge of “Relatabi lit y ” ( N Y Ti mes)

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Tech nolog y & Ou r selves 52. W ho O w ns t he Future? ( Jaron L anier) 60 0 53. Socia l A n x iet y: W hy You Did n’t Have A L i fe In 2014 ( The Fader)

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54. How t he Web Became Our ‘E xter na l Brai n,’ and W hat It Means for Our K ids

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55. W ho Shou ld O w n t he Inter net? ( Ju lian A ssange)

613

56. Technolog ies Smar t Enough to E xploit Human Nature ( M I T Press)

617

57. Gar y Marcus on t he Future of A I and t he Brai n ( Econta l k)

620

58. Merely Human? That’s So Yesterday (A sh lee Vance)

639

59. Better Than Human ( Kev i n Kel ly) 653 60. 2045: The Year Man Becomes I mmor ta l ( T I M E)

662

Ed ible Idea s 61. Genet ica l ly Mod i f ied Organisms R isk Globa l Rui n ( Med ium)

677

62. Can A r t i f icia l Meat Save The World ( Tom Foster)

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63. The Next Food Revolut ion ( Jamie Oliver)

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64. Freedom From Food ( Nicola Tw i l ley) 697 65. Greg Page on Food, A g r icu lture and Carg i l l ( Econta l k)

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66. How Food Shapes Our Cit ies (Caroly n Steel)

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Sustena nce On Ea r t h 67. A re Mushrooms The New Plast ic? ( Eben Bayer)

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68. Usi ng Natureâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Genius i n A rchitecture ( M ichael Pawly n)

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69. Nasi m Ta leb on t he Precaut ionar y Pr i nciple and GMO ( Econta l k)

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70. How I Fel l i n L ove w it h Fish ( Dan Barber)

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71. Desig n for A l l L i fe (Core77) 762

Desig n i ng Possible Fut u res 72. The Advantages of Desig n i n The 21st Centur y (Chad Mazzola)

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73. A Caut ious Promet heus? A Few Steps Toward a Phi losophy of Desig n

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74. The Cr it ica l i n Desig n (Clive Di lnot) 785 75. 10 L essons to Young Desig ners ( John C Jay)

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76. World Bui ld i ng i n a Crazy World ( Jonat han Har r is)

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77. Specu lat ive Ever y t hi ng ( Dunne& R aby) 816

Design Matters. Design Maters. Design Matters. Design Maters. Design Matters. Design Maters. Design Matters. Design Matters. Design Matters. Design Matters. Design Matters. Design Matters. Design Matters. Design Matters. Design Matters. Design Matters. Design Matters. Deign Matters. Design Matters. Deign Matters. Design Matters. Deign Matters. Design Matters. Design Matters. Design Matters. Design Matters. Design Matters.

Design Matters. Design Mat ters. Design Matters. Design Mat ters. Design Matters. Design Mat ters. Design Matters. Design Matters. Design Matters. Design Matters. Design Matters. Design Matters. Design Matters. Design Matters. Design Matters. Design Matters. Design Matters. De sign Matters. Design Matters. De sign Matters. Design Matters. De sign Matters. Design Matters Design Matters. Design Matters Design Matters. Design Matters

First Things First

DESIGN MATTERS

The original First Things First manifesto was published by 22 signatories in: Design, the Architectsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Journal, the SIA Journal, Ark, Modern Publicity, The Guardian, April 1964.

A Manifesto We, the undersigned, are graphic designers, photographers and students who have been brought up in a world in which the techniques and apparatus of advertising have persistently been presented to us as the most lucrative, effective and desirable means of using our talents. We have been bombarded with publications devoted to this belief, applauding the work of those who have flogged their skill and imagination to sell such things as: cat food, stomach powders, detergent, hair restorer, striped toothpaste, aftershave lotion, before shave lotion, slimming diets, fattening diets, deodorants, fizzy water, cigarettes, roll-ons, pull-ons and slip-ons. 13

By far the greatest effort of those working in the advertising industry are wasted on these trivial purposes, which contribute little or nothing to our national prosperity.

It is impossible to abolish advertising. So how do we solve this issue of exploitation?

We do not advocate the abolition of high pressure consumer advertising: this is not feasible. Nor do we want to take any of the fun out of life. But we are proposing a reversal of priorities in favour of the more useful and more lasting forms of communication. We hope that our society will tire of gimmick merchants, status salesmen and hidden persuaders, and that the prior call on our skills will be for worthwhile purposes. With this in mind we propose to share our experience and opinions, and to make them available to colleagues, students and others who may be interested.

We are helping corporations to get richer only to control & ruin our lives even further!

MANIFESTO BY KEN GARLAND

In common with an increasing numer of the general public, we have reached a saturation point at which the high pitched scream of consumer selling is no more than sheer noise. We think that there are other things more worth using our skill and experience on. There are signs for streets and buildings, books and periodicals, catalogues, instructional manuals, industrial photography, educational aids, films, television features, scientific and industrial publications and all the other media through which we promote our trade, our education, our culture and our greater awareness of the world.

BOOK BY VICTOR PAPANEK 14

Design For The Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change (Excerpts) Design for the Real World has, since its first appearance twenty-five years ago, become a classic. Translated into twenty-three languages, it is one of the world’s most widely read books on design. In this edition, Victor Papanek examines the attempts by designers to combat the tawdry, the unsafe, the frivolous, the useless product, once again providing a blueprint for sensible, responsible design in this world which is deficient in resources and energy.

Victor Papanek Victor Papanek is a UNESCO International Design Expert and Dean of the School of Design at the California Institute of the Arts. He studied at Cooper Union in New York, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and with the late Frank Lloyd Wright. In North America he has taught at the Ontario College of Art, the State University of New York, the Rhode Island School of Design, Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina, and Purdue University in Indiana.

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Professor Papanek has specialized for many years in design for the handicapped, the Third World, the sick, the poor, and people in need. He has taught and travelled in seven countries, and lived with an Eskimo tribe as well as with the Hopi Indians of the American South West. With James Hennessey, he is co-author of the recently published Nomadic Furniture. Preface There are professions more harmful than industrial design, but only a very few of them. And only one profession is phonier. Advertising design, in persuading people to buy things they don’t need, with money they don’t have, in order to impress others who don’t care, is probably the phoniest field in existence today. Industrial design, by concocting the tawdry idiocies

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hawked by advertisers, comes a close second. Chapter 3: The Myth Of The Noble Slob Much has been said about the decadence of Rome when the barbarians where outside the gate. There are no barbarians outside ours: we have become our own barbarians, and barbarism has become a do-it-yourself kit. Chapter4: Do-It-Yourself Murder Even if the corporate greed of many design offices makes this kind of design impossible, students should at least be encouraged to work in this manner (10% non-profit). For in showing students new areas of engagement, we may set up alternative patterns of thinking about design problems. We may help them to develop the kind of social and moral responsibility that is needed in design. (…)What may be needed here is a designers’ commune. Most communes in this country have determinedly marched into the past. But baking bread, playing a guitar, weaving fabrics, and doing ceramics are not the only rational alternatives to a consumer society. Nor is the mind-blowing violence of a Charles Manson. With most of the communes poised in a choice between nihilism and nostalgia, a commune of planners and designers might prove to be the best alternative.

Chapter 5: Our Kleenex Culture That which we throw away, we fail to value. When we design and plan things to be discarded, we exercise insufficient care in designing or considering safety factors. Property tax laws in many states are also helping to make the concept of

BOOK BY VICTOR PAPANEK

(…)Souvenir-like objects are then manufactured, using native materials and skills, with the pious hope that they will sell in developed countries. They do, but for a short while only, for by designing ‘decorative objects for the home’ and ‘fashion accessories’, we merely tie the economy of that country to the economy of other countries. (…)Ideally: the designer would to the country and do all the things indicated above. But in addition, he would also train designers to train designers. In other words he would become a ‘seed project’ helping to form a corps of able designers out of the indigenous population of the country. Thus within one generation at most, five years at the least, he would be able to create a group of designers firmly committed to their own cultural heritage, their own life style, and their own needs. (…) Design itself must always be a seed project, always operative.

It is impossible to abolish advertising. So how do we solve this issue of exploitation?

BOOK BY VICTOR PAPANEK

‘temporary use’ rather than ‘permanent ownership’ more palatable to the consumer public. (…) And the concept of being owned by things, rather than owning them, is becoming clear to our young people. Chapter 6: Snake Oil And Thalidomide In the United States, design is not overtly used in a political manner: rather, it unblushingly serves purely profit-oriented clients. But the implicit message of this design is one that caters almost exclusively to the wants of the upper middle class. (…) In order to work more intelligently, the whole practice of design has to be turned around. Designer can no longer be employees of corporations, but rather must work directly for the client group—that is, the people who are in need of a product. (…) And this turnabout in the role of the designer can be accomplished. Our role is changing to that of a facilitator who can bring the needs of the people to the attention of manufacturing, government agencies, and the like. The designer then logically becomes no more (and no less) then a tool in the hands of the people.

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Why Designers Can’t Think First appeared in Statements: The American Center for Design, Spring 1988.

Graphic designers are lucky. As the people who structure much of the world’s communications, we get to vicariously partake of as many fields of interest as we have clients. In a single day, a designer can talk about real estate with one client, cancer cures with another, and forklift trucks with a third. Imagine how tedious it must be for a dentist who has nothing to do all day but worry about teeth.

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The men and women who invented graphic design in America were largely self-taught; they didn’t have the opportunity to go to fully developed specialized design schools, because none existed. Yet somehow these people managed to prosper without four years of Typography, Visual Problem Solving, and Advanced Aesthetics. What they lacked in formal training they made up for with insatiable curiosity not only about art and design, but culture, science, politics, and history.

There are many ways to teach graphic design, and almost any curriculum

ESSAY BY MICHAEL BIERUT

Today, most professionals will admit to alarm about the huge and evergrowing number of programs in graphic design. Each year, more and more high school seniors decide that they have a bright future in ‘graphics;’ often without much of an idea of what graphics is. This swelling tide of eighteen-year-old, would-be designers is swallowed up thirstily by more and more programs in graphic design at art schools, community colleges, and universities. A few years later, out they come, ready to take their places as professional designers, working for what everybody cheerfully hopes will be an infinitely expanding pool of clients.

ESSAY BY MICHAEL BIERUT 18

The Swiss-style process schools seem to have thrived largely as a reaction against the perceived “slickness” of the portfolio schools. While the former have been around in force for only the past fifteen years or so, the latter are homegrown institutions with roots in the 1950s.

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will defy neat cubbyholing. Nevertheless, American programs seem to fall into two broad categories: process schools and portfolio schools. Or, if you prefer, “Swiss” schools and “slick” schools. Process schools favor a form-driven problem-solving approach. The first assignments are simple exercises: drawing letterforms, “translating” threedimensional objects into idealized high-contrast images, and basic still-life photography. In the intermediate stages, the formal exercises are combined in different ways: relate the drawing of a flute to the hand-drawn letter N, combine the letter N with a photograph of a ballet slipper. In the final stage, these combinations are turned into “real” graphic design: Letter N plus flute drawing plus ballet slipper photo plus 42 pt. Univers equals, voila, a poster for Rudolf Nureyev. Of course, if the advanced student gets an assignment to design a poster for, say, an exhibition on Thomas Edison, he or she is tempted to (literally) revert to form: combine the letter E, drawing of a movie camera, photo of a light bulb, etc. One way or another, the process schools trace their lineage back to the advanced program of the Kunstgewerbeschule in Basel, Switzerland. Sometimes the instructors experienced the program only second or third hand, having themselves studied with someone who studied with someone in Basel.

While the unspoken goal of the process school is to duplicate the idealized black-and-white boot camp regimen of far-off Switzerland, the portfolio school has a completely different, admittedly more mercenary, aim: to provide students with polished “books” that will get them good jobs upon graduation. The problem-solving mode is conceptual, with a bias for appealing, memorable, populist imagery. The product, not process, is king. Now, portfolio schools will rebut this by pointing to the copious tissue layouts that often supplement the awesomely slick work in their graduates’ portfolios. Nonetheless, at the end of the line of tissues is always a beautifully propped photograph of an immaculate mock-up of a perfume bottle. Seldom will portfolio schools encourage students to spend six months on a twenty-part structural analysis of, say, the semiotics of a Campbell’s soup label as an end in itself. Unlike the full-time teachers of process schools, the portfolio schools are staffed largely by working professionals who teach part time, who are impatient with idle exercises that don’t relate to the “real world.”

Oddly, though, the best-trained graduates of either camp are equally sought after by employers. East Coast corporate identity firms love the process school graduates; anyone who’s spent six months combining a letterform and a ballet shoe won’t mind being mired in a fat standards manual for three years. On the other hand, package design firms are happy to get the portfolio school graduates: not only do they have a real passion for tighter-than-tight comps, but they can generate hundreds of stylistically diverse alternatives to show indecisive clients.

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However politely the two camps behave in discussions on design education, the fact is, they hate each other. To the portfolio schools, the “Swiss” method is hermetic, arcane, and meaningless to the general public. To the process schools, the” slick” method is distastefully commercial, shallow, and derivative.

What, then, is wrong with graphic design education? If there’s a smorgasbord of pedagogical approaches, and employers who can find use for different kinds of training, who suffers? The answer is not in how schools are different, but how they’re the same. Both process schools and portfolio schools have something in common: whether the project is the esoteric Nureyev poster or the Bloomingdale’sready perfume bottle comp, what’s valued is the way graphic design looks, not what it means. Programs will pay lip service to meaning in design with references to “semiotics” (Swiss) or “conceptual problem solving” (slick), but these nuances are applied in a cultural vacuum. In many programs, if not most, it’s possible to study graphic design for four years without any meaningful exposure to the fine arts, literature, science, history, politics, or any of the other disciplines that unite us in a common culture.

Well, so what? What does a graphic designer need with this other stuff ? Employers want trained designers, not writers and economists.

But five or ten years down the road, how can a designer plan an annual report without some knowledge of economics? Layout a book without an interest in, if not a passion for, literature? Design a logo for a high -tech company without some familiarity with science?

ESSAY BY MICHAEL BIERUT

Perhaps the deficiencies in the typical design education aren’t handicaps at first. The new graduate doesn’t need to know economics any more than a plumber does; like a tradesman, he or she needs skills that are, for the most part, technical.

ESSAY BY MICHAEL BIERUT

Obviously, they can and do. Some designers fill in their educational gaps as they go along; some just fake it. But most of the mediocre design today comes from designers who are faithfully doing as they were taught in school: they worship at the altar of the visual. The pioneering design work of the 1940s and 1950s continues to interest and excite us while work from the intervening years looks more and more dated and irrelevant. Without the benefit of intensive specialized programs, the pioneers of our profession, by necessity, became well-rounded intellectually. Their work draws its power from deep in the culture of their times. Modern design education, on the other hand, is essentially value-free: every problem has a purely visual solution that exists outside any cultural context. Some of the most tragic victims of this attitude hail not from the world of high culture, but from the low. Witness the case of a soft-drink manufacturer that pays a respected design firm a lot of money to “update” a classic logo. The product of American design education responds: “Clean up an old logo? You bet,” and goes right to it. In a vacuum that excludes popular as well as high culture, the meaning of the mark in its culture is disregarded. Why not just say no? The option isn’t considered.

Our clients usually are not other designers; they sell real estate, cure cancer, make forklift trucks. Nor are there many designers in the audiences our work eventually finds. They must be touched with communication that is genuinely resonant, not self-referential. To find the language for that, one must look beyond Manfred Maier’s Principles of Design or the last Communication Arts Design Annual.

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Nowadays, the passion of design educators seems to be technology; they fear that computer illiteracy will handicap their graduates. But it’s the broader kind of illiteracy that’s more profoundly troubling. Until educators find a way to expose their students to a meaningful range of culture, graduates will continue to speak in languages that only their classmates understand. And designers, more and more, will end up talking to themselves.

How Designers Destroy The World (Notes) You are directly responsible for what you put into the world. Yet every day designers all over the world work on projects without giving any thought or consideration to the impact that work has on the world around them. This needs to change.

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https://vimeo.com/68470326

Notes:

Designers get to make things. But design is not just an act of creation but also of choosing what to create.

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Design is your job, not your clients. Do not put the work on them. We can’t do our job without clients.

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Designers need to take responsibility for their careers. You have a responsibility to yourself, your clients, and the world.

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Facebook’s designers made decisions about the privacy settings of their groups product. These in turn have created painful situations for people who have had their private information revealed without their consent. This is irresponsible design.

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Business decisions go through design. Designers have a role in these decisions. Sadly design often happens without a designer, with a designer that didn’t see the issue, or worse a designer that didn’t see it.

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When something is badly designed and potentially harmful, you have one of three possible situations: ignore it, run it up the chain, the chain of command ignored.

TALK BY MIKE MONTEIRO

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TALK BY MIKE MONTEIRO

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Bad design makes it out into the World not through malicious intent but through no intent at all.

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Why? Who can pull the plug on something that sucks? You.

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You see things going out the door all the time that you don’t think are right. You can stop it.

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Design is not how something looks and feels but also how it works and how it affects people.

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If designers disregard their obligations, they are being negligent.

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We need to fear the consequences of our work more than we worry about speaking up and more than we love clever technical solutions.

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Victor Papanek = “There are professions more harmful than industrial design, but only a very few of them.”

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Taking responsibility is not a nice-to-have design skill.

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The Web is extremely pervasive—it has the power to destroy us all. What goes on the Web goes through us. We can make sure it doesn’t.

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The monsters we unleash into the World will be named after us.

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Design works in the service of a better World. This is not a choice.

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Are the problems you’re taking on problems worth solving? Stop flipping companies and start flipping tables.

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You have more power than you think. Recognize the power you have.

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Designers have a responsibility to the craft. You represent us all.

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When designers let down clients they make things harder for all designers who need to rebuild lost trust in design.

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Designers have a responsibility to clients. Pick the right ones. Find problems worth solving that you are qualified to solve.

DESIGN MATTERS

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If every designer prevented clients from going to a bad place, less clients would.

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Be willing to get fired. You have to tell your clients when they are preventing them from doing their job.

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Designers have a responsibility to self. This isn’t about altruism—this is how you make a living.

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The work we take on defines us. Consider the long term repercussions of this.

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You are not bigger than the problems you are solving. Your ego is fear getting in the way of good solutions.

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You will be wrong, there will be people better than you, you will make mistakes, and you will recover from them.

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Care what you work on. Be intentional. A designer that doesn’t care about what they work on is like a chef that would serve you rancid food.

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Ask your superiors to help you solve problems. Don’t tell me how, tell me what.

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Your design education was terrible. We need gate keepers not pixel pushers.

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You always have a choice. It is easier to recover from loosing a job or client then to recover from compromising yourself.

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You are responsible for what you put into the World because we only have one.

TALK BY MIKE MONTEIRO

No one hired you to be their friend. Make them give you what you need to do your job.

DESIGN MATTERS

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MANIFESTO BY ADBUSTERS 24

First Things First 2000 The First things first 2000 manifesto was an updated version of the earlier First things first 1964 Manifesto published in 2000 by some of the leading lights of the graphic design, artistic and visual arts community. It was republished by Emigre, Eye and other important graphic design magazines and has stirred controversy (again) in Graphic design.

We, the undersigned, are graphic designers, art directors and visual communicators who have been raised in a world in which the techniques and apparatus of advertising have persistently been presented to us as the most lucrative, effective and desirable use of our talents. Many design teachers and mentors promote this belief; the market rewards it; a tide of books and publications reinforces it.

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Encouraged in this direction, designers then apply their skill and imagination to sell dog biscuits, designer coffee, diamonds, detergents, hair gel, cigarettes, credit cards, sneakers, butt toners, light beer and heavy-duty recreational vehicles. Commercial work has always paid the bills, but many graphic designers have now let it become, in large measure, what graphic designers do. This, in turn, is how the world perceives design. The professionâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s time and energy is used up manufacturing demand for things that are inessential at best. Many of us have grown increasingly uncomfortable with this view of design. Designers who devote their efforts primarily to advertising, marketing and brand development are supporting, and implicitly endorsing, a mental environment so saturated with commercial messages that it is changing the very way citizen-consumers speak, think, feel, respond and interact. To some

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extent we are all helping draft a reductive and immeasurably harmful code of public discourse. There are pursuits more worthy of our problem-solving skills. Unprecedented environmental, social and cultural crises demand our attention. Many cultural interventions, social marketing campaigns, books, magazines, exhibitions, educational tools, television programs, films, charitable causes and other information design projects urgently require our expertise and help. We propose a reversal of priorities in favor of more useful, lasting and democratic forms of communicationâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;a mindshift away from product marketing and toward the exploration and production of a new kind of meaning. The scope of debate is shrinking; it must expand. Consumerism is running uncontested; it must be challenged by other perspectives expressed, in part, through the visual languages and resources of design. In 1964, 22 visual communicators signed the original call for our skills to be put to worthwhile use. With the explosive growth of global commercial culture, their message has only grown more urgent. Today, we renew their manifesto in expectation that no more decades will pass before it is taken to heart.

Designers talking to themselves.

MANIFESTO BY ADBUSTERS

ESSAY BY DESIGN OBSERVER

Rejection And The Designer Adrian Shaughnessy on Design Observer.

All designers live with rejection. It comes with the terrain—a terrain where decision-making is frequently based on personal taste and capriciousness (“Sorry, I just don’t like it”); a terrain where blunt commercial considerations trump everything (“Sorry, our market won’t understand this”); a terrain where a friend of mine who works for one of the big beasts in global corporate branding tells me that very little of her work is ever published (“Sorry, our new CEO has ordered a change of strategy”).

What are the results of working in a discipline where rejection, and its first cousins, compromise, dilution and modification, are ubiquitous? Does rejection harden ambition and act as a spur to better work? Or does it inject a debilitating toxin into the organs of creative ambition? Social rejection has a harshness that we don’t find in other types of emotional setback. People are rejected by lovers, employers, institutions, friends, even parents. And the reason rejection hurts is because our brains have been formed by evolution to see expulsion as an early warning sign of danger: anything that places us outside the protective embrace of the group means that our survival is threatened.

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Of course it’s not social rejection that designers fear, but it’s almost as deeply felt, and strikes at the core of what it means to be a creative producer. How designers cope with rejection of their work is fundamental to how they progress and develop as creative practitioners. The novelist David Mitchell catches the exquisite pain of rejection so often experienced by neophyte writers: “I got a rejection letter from an editor at HarperCollins, who included a report from his professional reader. This report shredded my first-born novel, laughed at my phrasing, twirled my lacy pretensions around and gobbed into the seething mosh pit of my stolen clichés. As I read the report, the world became very quiet and stopped rotating. What

What Mitchell is describing here is the fact that although in order to preserve our self-esteem we usually characterize rejection of creative products as an act of unfairness, the truth is that sometimes rejection is deserved. And since design is mostly about serving the needs of clients, it might not be unreasonable to say that any failure to meet those needs is the fault of the designer.

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poisoned me was the fact that the report’s criticisms were all absolutely true. The sound of my landlady digging in the garden got the world moving again. I slipped the letter into the trash... knowing I’d remember every word.”

But few of us think like this. Instead we develop strategies for dealing with rejection. Some develop protective psychological armor that rejection bounces off; others take rejection as a personal slight and nurse wounds that never heal. And there’s a paradox here for designers: if we wish to avoid rejection we nearly always have to choose blandness, but on the other hand, if we want to make work with depth and resonance, we have to risk rejection. So unless we decide to settle for blandness and cosy consensus, we have to live with the near permanent threat of rejection. 27

It’s a situation made more hazardous by the emergence of yet another terrain on which to experience rejection: the Internet and social media encourages open season on new work in ways that were unthinkable a decade or so ago. Hundreds of trolls telling us—and the world—that our logo, web design or typeface “sucks” may lack the informed critical acumen of David Mitchell’s “professional reader,” but like an insect bite, it can still hurt long after the wound is inflicted. Shortly after writing that last sentence I randomly picked up a copy of Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections—a book I hadn’t looked at for years. I opened it to a page that described his recovery from illness. ESSAY BY DESIGN OBSERVER

He wrote (my italics): “It was only after the illness that I understood how important it is to affirm one’s own destiny. In this way we forge an ego that does not break down when incomprehensible things happen: an ego that endures, that endures the truth, and that is capable of coping with the world and with fate. Then, to experience defeat is also to experience victory. Nothing is disturbed—neither inwardly nor outwardly, for one’s own continuity has withstood the current of life and of time.”

ESSAY BY DESIGN OBSERVER

Francisco Laranjo on Design Observer.

28 It was popularized by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby through their firm, Dunne & Raby. Anthony Dunne first coined the term in his book Hertzian Tales (1999)

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Critical Graphic Design: Critical of What?

Critical graphic design is a vague and subjective term. The meaning of the word “critical” in relation to graphic design remains unclear, resulting in an overuse and misuse in design magazines, books and websites. The term was popularized by the much-cited traveling exhibition Forms of Inquiry: The Architecture of Critical Graphic Design first shown in 2007, and by the Dutch design studio Metahaven, among others. Yet, the ambiguous criteria used by the Forms of Inquiry curators to support the term, and designers’ struggle to match the ambitions of their political, social and cultural research with its visual output, indicate a continuing need for critical discussion of critical graphic design. In recent years, however, there has been disenchantment and even skepticism toward graphic design work that is labeled as critical. If we look for critical graphic design online, the first search result is an open-submission Critical Graphic Design tumblr predominantly filled with humorous responses to design work, designers, publications and institutions generally associated with the term. Here, we can listen to the designer Michael Oswell’s satirical electro track, “The Critical Graphic Design Song,” absurdly repeating the names of designer Zak Kyes (co-curator of Forms of Inquiry) and Radim Peško, whose typefaces Kyes often uses in his work. Also mentioned is the popular blog Manystuff, which disseminates many works commonly described as critical, though its press-release style of presentation is inherently celebratory and uncritical. The tendency to gather and repeat familiar names shapes an echoing, self-referential canon that is automatically self-validated. An updated post-financial crisis cover created for Adrian Shaughnessy’s

This is not revealed on the Critical Graphic Design tumblr, nor does there seem to be any intention with most of these responses to construct a coherent argument. Despite their popularity online, these critiques of criticality also remain largely unquestioned. Are these hacks really contributing to a better understanding and questioning of these undebated trends? Or are they merely tickling the clique they intend to provoke? Are LOLz enough? Can jokes bring down (supposedly) critical design projects? Most of the submissions online reveal an ironic suspicion toward critical design and this attitude will presumably be reflected in the critics’ own practice, as they try to avoid doing what they criticize. A clarification of what is meant by “critical” may provide some answers.

Critique for the sake of critque is not critique!

ESSAY BY DESIGN OBSERVER

As we design we have to constantly have the conservation about who we are designing for and why we are designing. Before we can be critical about others we have to examine ourselves first!

In the book The Reader (2009), the design researcher Ramia Mazé suggests three possible forms of criticality in design. The first has to do with a critical attitude toward a designer’s own practice. The designer makes an effort to be self-aware or reflexive about what he or she does and why. Mazé argues that this can be understood as a kind of internal questioning and a way of designers positioning themselves within their practice. The second form is the “building of a meta-level or disciplinary discourse.” This involves what Mazé calls, “criticality within a community of practice or discipline,” and trying to challenge or change traditions and paradigms. Designers are critical of their discipline while actively and consciously working toward its expansion and evolution. In the third kind of criticality, designers address pressing issues in society. The critique is not targeted at a designer’s own

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book How To Be a Graphic Designer Without Losing Your Soul suggests that criticality is a luxury in the current conditions under which graphic design is produced. Other works include parody photos of Metahaven’s three-dimensional representation of Sealand, and images that imitate the visual styles of some of the most celebrated critical designers and academic institutions—Yale is often mentioned. These references seem to have three different goals: (1) to provoke the “critical graphic design” clique exemplified by the participants in Forms of Inquiry and the recent exhibition All Possible Futures; (2) to express disappointment toward traditional forums for public debate and legitimation: essays, lecture series, publications and academia; and (3) to challenge the shallow and predictable stylistic approaches used by designers to address critical issues. As the nonsensical critiques, literal illustrations and animated GIFs appear on the screen, they raise some pertinent questions about critical graphic design: What does this poster or image add to the issues at stake? Where is the critique? How does it contribute to written modes of research? What are the criteria and who makes these decisions?

ESSAY BY DESIGN OBSERVER

discipline, practice or even at design in general, but at social and political phenomena. In practice, the three modes of criticality often overlap, intersect and influence each other.

Where or how does the learning begin? If the education system in america is clearly driven by job and weath attainment?

Mazé’s categorization is not new. A direct connection can be made with the Dutch designer Jan van Toorn’s view on design pedagogy. As a design educator, Van Toorn tried to raise awareness of the tension between private and public interests. In User-centred Graphic Design (1997), he argues that the “student must learn to make choices and to act without attempting to avoid the tensions between individual freedom, disciplinary discourse and public interest.” This assertion of the personal, disciplinary and public levels that a designer should always consider anticipates Mazé’s three forms of criticality. Two influential European design schools focus on the development of critical design practice. The Werkplaats Typographie (WT), founded in 1998 by the Dutch designers Karel Martens and Wigger Bierma, bases its educational model on a modernist form of reflexive practice, following the idea of the “workshop” developed by the English typographer Anthony Froshaug and designer Norman Potter. The WT normally concentrates on typography as a point of departure in assignments set either by the school, external clients, or the students; these usually take the form of publications. The WT’s type of criticality falls between the first and second definitions put forward by Mazé.

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The other Dutch design school with a strong critical orientation is the Sandberg Institute, which emphasizes the third type of criticality. Its design department presents itself as a “Think Tank for Visual Strategies,” with students seeking critical reflection and engagement through work that explores design’s role and potential in relation to public and political issues and public discourse. Some examples of this are Femke Herregraven’s Taxodus, Ruben Pater’s Drone Survival Guide, Noortje van Eekelen’s The Spectacle of the Tragedy, Belle Phromchanya’s The Rise of the Moon and Simone C. Niquille’s Realface Glamouflage. Despite the rejection of the label “critical graphic design,” most notably by the designers Stuart Bailey (in Dot Dot Dot no. 20, 2010) and James Goggin (in Most Beautiful Swiss Books, 2008), the term is still relevant. It emerged at a time when the discipline was in a generally uncritical state, providing a necessary distinction from routine practice and awarding a kind of merit badge to designers or studios who deviated from the norm. For designers who scorn the label, criticality in its many forms is intrinsic to graphic design and therefore a special term is unnecessary and redundant.

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The term also highlights an important transition in graphic design practice and education: from the designer as author to the designer as researcher. This is not only a consequence of the maturation of the discipline, seeking legitimacy to be used as an investigative tool, but also the result of an increased importance of the social sciences, humanities and their multiple research methods being applied, changed and appropriated by design education and designers. On the one hand, graphic design aims to use its own processes and production methods to contribute new knowledge to the areas it works in. On the other, the absorption of ethnography and data collection methods shows an increasing reliance on other disciplines’ methodologies. The widespread presence of “design research” in design’s lexicon is a sign of these developments, despite recurrent confusion as to what constitutes research in graphic design. In the age of Behance, of earning badges and appreciations, when one of the most used words in the site’s feedback circle is “awesome” and likes and followers are easily bought, graphic design has another opportunity to reexamine its apparently incurable allergy to criticism. Within interaction design, speculative and critical design is now being openly questioned and the critical design projects’ political accountability and relevance to society debated.

ESSAY BY DESIGN OBSERVER

Not only Critical Graphic Design runs the risk of becoming irrelevant. Graphic Design itself runs the risk of becoming automated if designers do not transcend beyond worshipping visuals and start being cultural influencers.

As a term, critical graphic design will probably be replaced in the permanent rush to coin the next soundbite. Criticality in graphic design will surely continue to be a topic for discussion, but a design work is not instantly critical just because of the intentions of the designer, or the pressing issue being researched. A talk, song, scarf, flag, web meme, website, installation or publication may all be valid ways to pose a critique. However, it’s time to publicly discuss the means, effects and especially the quality of the critical design projects, not just to celebrate and retweet them. If that doesn’t happen, critical graphic design runs the risk of not being as substantial and meaningful as it could be. Or worse, it will become irrelevant to society. For a discipline that aims to contribute to public debate—let alone social and political change—that would be a disastrously wasted opportunity.

The incessant desire for gratification hinders any form of critique.

ESSAY BY JOE MARIANEK 32

Why Designers Still Can’t Think Revisiting a classic Michael Bierut Essay

Last year, when I was preparing a syllabus for my students at the School of Visual Arts, I came across a paint-covered folder that I’d kept from my college days but hadn’t touched in nearly ten years. In it was a robust variety of classic design writing: Wassily Kandinsky on color, Beatrice Warde on invisible typography, and Steven Heller on pretty much everything else, along with excerpts from Baudrillard and Barthes, to confuse and upset, respectively. I also found a heavily worn second-generation scan of a thirdgeneration photocopy of a 24-year-old essay titled “Why Designers Can’t Think,” by a then-rising designer named Michael Bierut.

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I first saw the essay as an undergraduate, and it practically became required reading for employees of Pentagram (where I now work) when it was republished in Seventy-Nine Essays on Design. Rereading it here was difficult—I’d forgotten that some of my professors had the habit of typesetting handouts in Linotype Syntax at a bracing 6.5 points on canary-yellow paper. Luckily, I had decorated the pages with some doodles. Bierut’s essay, which distinguishes between process- and portfolio-based schools (“Swiss” versus “slick”), remains a sobering plea to designers and teachers to improve design education through cultural literacy. Many themes still hold true, and a few others are in desperate need of updating. What’s the same: The schools still hate each other. Bierut writes: “To the portfolio schools, the ‘Swiss’ method is hermetic, arcane, and meaningless to the general public. To the process schools, the

How will we begin to even create a better community/society if we are unable to be open minded about another person’s beliefs/ viewpoint?

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‘slick’ method is distastefully commercial, shallow, and derivative.” I was lucky to have gone to a process school (the Rhode Island School of Design), and I’m happy to teach at a portfolio school, but my loyalties are to neither. Students from process schools are trained in the meticulous iteration of formal issues. Josef Albers, Wolfgang Weingart, and various contributors to Dot Dot Dot are their heroes. Assignments are most often cultural or probono projects that deal with complex structures—a poster for a Steve Reich performance, an Amtrak schedule, a logo for the architect Mario Botta. Projects like these may yield a career in planning, crafting, and deploying identity, environmental, or digital programs—all in happy, ascetic isolation for so-so wages. These students are picky about typefaces and kerning, and scorn lowbrow commercial clients unless absolutely necessary. “Educators deserve a noogie and a raise. In addition to their previous responsibilities, they now must also act as traffic directors, conductors, and filters.” On the other side, portfolio schools pressure students to attend to the realities of commercial practice by building a thick and pretty portfolio. Students are pushed into “hot” apprenticeships at name-brand agencies and design firms, and count Milton Glaser and George Lois as their idols. Their portfolios show a dizzying array of theater posters, organic-tea packaging, and fastfood-chain websites. These clean-cut, linked-in young guns can jump in at any agency; deploy ideas, trends, and clip art; play Foosball; network; drink beer; work; drink more beer; and repeat. They can jam out ads that any halfawake subway rider will understand and snicker at. Their portfolio websites are updated daily, while the process-school students are busy choosing a content-management system.

What has changed: The best graduates don’t want full-time employment, which is hard to find.

Like me, most of my students grew up in the 1980s and ’90s and witnessed the internet boom and bust. They know that being adaptable and collaborative

ESSAY BY JOE MARIANEK

Bierut writes that “the best graduates of either camp are equally sought after by employers.” The new reality is that there are fewer traditional graphic design jobs than there are graduates. The smartest students know this and are more likely to be entrepreneurs, finding their own niche. The best-trained graduates are their own designers, illustrators, photographers, project managers, writers, editors, social-media strategists, and typographers, and they need to be able to work with anyone.

ESSAY BY JOE MARIANEK

is crucial to their survival, and they’ve plotted out careers around their interests with self-initiated enterprises and projects. UnderConsideration, the Feltron Annual Report, and Airbnb are just a few models. What’s the same: Designers still talk to themselves. In the second part of his essay, Bierut criticizes both camps for giving too much attention to design at the expense of meaning: “Programs will pay lip service to meaning in design with references to ‘semiotics’ (Swiss) or ‘conceptual problem solving’ (slick), but these nuances are applied in a cultural vacuum. In many programs, if not most, it’s possible to study graphic design for four years without any meaningful exposure to the fine arts, literature, science, history, politics, or any of the other disciplines that unite us in a common culture.”

ON POINT!

Learning the language of design and the technical practice in four years is hard enough. It’s implausible to expect a designer to accumulate multiple degrees in that time. And while half-hearted attempts at integrating the liberal arts into the design-school vacuum exist, they’re rarely applied in the design classroom. 34

Instead of engaging with the larger world, many students “worship at the altar of the visual,” as Bierut writes. One new culprit is the tools that aggregate visual “inspiration.” Ffffound, Tumblr, and the other design-porn galleries are addicting but tacitly encourage sameness and self-referential practice in lieu of meaningful communication. (Trendlist.org has collected most of these.) A positive side effect is peer-to-peer bonding around mutually agreeable work, but who wants to see diagonal hairlines or black-and-white pictures of outer space on everything?

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Read how to build a better teacher in Literacy & Education chapter.

Bierut writes: “Until educators find a way to expose their students to a meaningful range of culture, graduates will continue to speak in languages that only their classmates understand. And designers, more and more, will end up talking to themselves.” Even when a valuable site like Brand New attempts to host an intelligent dialogue about a well-executed identity project, the comments devolve into snipes over superficial qualities at the expense of critical thinking about the work in a broader cultural context. The conversation tends to end in naive arguments over good taste. I wince every time an outsider (or a client) stumbles onto one of these blogs and posts a comment like “You guys are a bunch of arrogant jerks.”

What most young designers only ever talk about.

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What has changed: Cultural literacy is only as strong as the weakest internet signal (or educator). It’s the subject of all search engine commercials: Everyone is an expert or can quickly fake it. Whether my client makes forklifts, forks, or foghorns, I can quickly get up to speed in the ten minute cab ride to the meeting. What you can’t fake is breadth of knowledge. It’s easy to use quick searches to plug holes and spout facts, but it’s certainly not enriching, and it seems as though it’s making us stupid. I had a professor who always hammered at us: “You have to read The New York Times every day. It’s good for you.” (I didn’t then, but I do now.) I’ve tried this tactic on my students, and it didn’t work. One protested, “We’re really busy.” The rest of them just lied about reading it. Rather than accept defeat, I send my students articles related to their projects and interests. I don’t know if they read them, but I cross my fingers that they do. But it’s rare to find a design student, Swiss or slick, whose only interest is design. They tend to be pack rats of idiosyncratic topics, from thermodynamics to the art of Ukrainian Easter-egg decoration. There is a huge opportunity to build on students’ esoteric interests while also building self-reliant designers.

Educators should encourage curiosity and direct students away from the navel of design, toward broader topics. Design Observer, Kottke.org, and Brain Pickings are exquisite portals to both design and nondesign content. They are easy gateways to cultural literacy, and I don’t know what I’d do without them. Besides collecting books at the Strand to fill in the gaps, I’ve also been lucky to find accidental paths to enlightenment through projects, coworkers, and even clients.

Most employers only expect a designer to make things look nice. And it is precisely that lack of expectation that breeds this illiteracy.

ESSAY BY JOE MARIANEK

Educators deserve a noogie and a raise. In addition to their previous responsibilities, they now must also act as traffic directors, conductors, and filters. Content is cheap and there is too much of it. Employable designers are everywhere, but no one necessarily needs them. Given the new economic realities and lack of traditional employment, design schools are responsible for producing culturally engaged graduates who are resourceful, open-minded citizens of the world and who also happen to be designers. Until then, we still won’t be able to think.

FIRSTTHINGSFIRST2014.ORG

First Things First 2014 A Manifesto

We, the undersigned, are designers, developers, creative technologists, and multi-disciplinary communicators. We are troubled by the present state of our industry and its effects on cultures and societies across the world.

We have become part of a professional climate that: • • • • •

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•

prizes venture capital, profit, and scale over usefulness and resonance; demands a debilitating work-life imbalance of its workers; lacks critical diversity in gender, race, and age; claims to solve problems but favours those of a superficial nature; treats consumers’ personal information as objects to be monetised instead of as personal property to be supported and protected; and refuses to address the need to reform policies affecting the jurisdiction and ownership of data.

• Encouraged in these directions, we have applied ourselves toward the creation of trivial, undifferentiated apps; disposable social networks; fantastical gadgets obtainable only by the affluent; products that use emotion as a front for the sale of customer data; products that reinforce broken or dishonest forms of commerce; and insular communities that drive away potential collaborators and well-grounded leaders. Some of us have lent our expertise to initiatives that abuse the law and human rights, defeat critical systems of encryption and privacy, and put lives at risk. We have negated our professions’ potential for positive impact, and are using up our time and energy manufacturing demand for things that are redundant at best, destructive at worst.

Once again, we are only talking to ourselves, how can we expect change if our whole profession is based on the interaction with the client and the consumer? We need to stop talking to ourselves and start speaking to the masses!

It is also our responsibility as members of our industry to create positive changes within it. We must work to improve our stances on diversity, inclusion, working conditions, and employeesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; mental health. Failing to address these issues should no longer be deemed acceptable by any party.

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There are pursuits more worthy of our dedication. Our abilities can benefit areas such as education, medicine, privacy and digital security, public awareness and social campaigns, journalism, information design, and humanitarian aid. They can transform our current systems of finance and commerce, and reinforce human rights and civil liberties.

Ultimately, regardless of its area of focus or scale, our work and our mindset must take on a more ethical, critical ethos. It is not our desire to take the fun out of life. There should always be room for entertainment, personal projects, humour, experimentation, and lighthearted use of our abilities.

Donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t get me wrong, I am all for this.

Instead, we are calling for a refocusing of priorities, in favour of more lasting, democratic forms of communication. A mind shift away from profit-overpeople business models and the placing of corporations before individuals, toward the exploration and production of humble, meaningful work, and beneficial cultural impact.

In 1964, and again in 1999, a dedicated group of practitioners signed their names to earlier iterations of this manifesto, forming a call to put their collective skills to worthwhile use. With the unprecedented growth of technology over the past 15 years, their message has since grown only more urgent. Today, in celebration of its 50th anniversary, we renew and expand the First Things First manifesto, with the hope of catalysing a meaningful revolution in both our industry and the world at large.

FIRSTTHINGSFIRST2014.ORG

ESSAY BY ERIK SPIEKERMANN DESIGN MATTERS

The Essense Of Matter Erik Spiekermann on Design Observer.

Despite the contradiction, being revolutionary doesn’t mean having to be noncommercial. Designers have the capacity to affect social change beyond their written remit, and also earn a living. When architects were bored with functionalism, they turned Louis Sullivan’s dictum “form follows function” into form follows fun; they added arbitrary elements to their buildings—towers, concrete sails, ziggurats, arches, architraves, and all sorts of embellishments that served no purpose except embellishment. When graphic designers got bored with the perfection offered by the newly arrived computers that could render artwork to within a tiny pixel, they rebelled by writing programs that randomized individual letters and whole pages every time a printer processed them. One designer who didn’t like what a copywriter had delivered set the text in illegible pictograms and icons. That act of incredibly courageous defiance made him famous, at least within the circles of students who were destined for lives as layout slaves in advertising agencies. I even had a design professor call me a traitor for driving my employees to work in the service of sinister capitalist enterprises; he, meanwhile, praised his own fight on the barricades of the profession against such exploitation, a fight that consisted of making posters protesting the spread of AIDS or world hunger. He thought those were incredibly risky anti-establishment messages. (It should not be necessary to say that he now

It is, indeed, hard to live with the contradiction of designing messages to get people to spend money they do not have on things they do not need. When they leave design school, young women still want to make children’s books and young men posters against the world’s evils. Months later they are glad to be able to sit in front of a computer, churning out endless variations of diagonally striped labels for yet another “light” product variety. Meanwhile, our world is in a pretty sad state. Our public services are broken, traffic is a nightmare, the air not fit to breathe, politicians corrupt and high unemployment the rule, not the exception. Shouldn’t we turn our considerable skills as strategists, communicators and problem solvers to those issues? Fix public transport? Design efficient and sustainable energy systems, affordable housing and inhabitable neighborhoods? When the First Things First manifesto from 1964, signed by twentytwo visual communicators from Britain, was republished in 2000, it was underwritten by a long list of designers from several countries. Most of those worked and still work in an environment that the manifesto describes thus: “designers... apply their skill and imagination to sell dog biscuits, designer coffee, diamonds, detergents, hair gel, cigarettes, credit cards, sneakers, butt toners, light beer, and heavy-duty recreational vehicles. Commercial work has always paid the bills, but many graphic designers have now let it become, in large measure, what graphic designers do. This, in turn, is how the world perceives design.

This discussion took another fourteen years to come up again. First Things First 2014 is more concerned with us designers selling data rather than dog

ESSAY BY ERIK SPIEKERMANN

The profession’s time and energy is used up manufacturing demand for things that are inessential at best. I also signed this manifesto because I do believe that we could apply our skills more effectively to solve more pressing issues than the ones described above. But who would pay our bills? Governments and other institutions are notorious as bad clients, constantly underestimating and undervaluing what we do. Being perceived as what we mainly are—people who apply make-up to the ugly face of capitalism—we are not seen as worthy contributors beyond the confines of the commercial world.

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enjoys a state pension after thirty years of safe employment while I still crack the whip over my poor dependents in the studio.) It has always been easy to protest within the safe environment of art magazines or galleries with their audiences of designers who would be artists if there were safe prospects of money in it.

ESSAY BY ERIK SPIEKERMANN DESIGN MATTERS

biscuits, but it nicely brings our issues into the digital age. Rather fittingly, the undersigned this time around call themselves designers, developers, creative technologists, and multi-disciplinary communicators. New job descriptions, same old issues. This vicious circle will not be broken by protesting its viciousness. Neither will we make new friends outside our own world by pretending to bite the hand that feeds us. Protesting against the world of overconsumption and overdesign by displaying our “noncommercial” work in art galleries in the evening and then going back to work for The Man in the morning may ease our conscience, but it doesn’t solve the dichotomy of our situation. Not that I have an answer. When my son accuses me of shoring up this sick system, I can reply only that I at least provide a decent environment for our designers. We have central heating, an espresso machine, fast computers, and good lighting. We pay regular wages, grant thirty vacation days and provide maternity and paternity leave, and nobody gets hired without his future peers’ agreement. We won’t work for really evil purposes like cigarette brands or banks. While we wouldn’t kill or let ourselves get killed for our clients, we respect them, and they treat us as well as we treat them. We provide an environment with as little alienation as possible. It is not through what we do but how we do it that we can truly influence. I cannot think of a more honest answer.

This vicious cycle is our own doing, it starts and ends with us!

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Notes

ESSAY BY ERIK SPIEKERMANN

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Futurology. Futurology. Futurology Futurology. Futurology. Futurology Futurology. Futurology. Futurology Futurology. Futurology. Futurology Futurology. Futurology. Futurology Futurology. Futurology. Futurology Futurology. Futurology. Futurology Futurology. Futurology. Futurology Futurology. Futurology. Futurology Futurology. Futurology. Futurology Futurology. Futurology. Futurology Futurology. Futurology. Futurology Futurology. Futurology. Futurology Futurology. Futurology. Futurology

ARTICLE BY THE NEW ATLANTIS 44

The Promis And Perils Of Synthetic Biology Jonathan B. Tucker, Raymond A. Zilinskas.

Over the past fifty years, several pivotal advances have transformed the life sciences, including the discovery of the structure of DNA, the deciphering of the genetic code, the development of recombinant DNA technology, and the mapping of the human genome. Synthetic biology is another transformative innovation that will make it possible to build living machines from off-theshelf chemical ingredients, employing many of the same strategies that electrical engineers use to make computer chips. Drawing upon a set of powerful techniques for the automated synthesis of DNA molecules and their assembly into genes and microbial genomes, synthetic biology envisions the redesign of natural biological systems for greater efficiency, as well as the construction of functional “genetic circuits” and metabolic pathways for practical purposes.

FUTUROLOGY

Among the potential applications of this new field is the creation of bioengineered microorganisms (and possibly other life forms) that can produce pharmaceuticals, detect toxic chemicals, break down pollutants, repair defective genes, destroy cancer cells, and generate hydrogen for the post-petroleum economy. Although synthetic biology is chiefly an engineering discipline, the ability to design and construct simplified biological systems offers life scientists a useful way to test their understanding of the complex functional networks of genes and biomolecules that mediate life processes. Today, synthetic biology is at roughly the same level of development as molecular genetics was in the mid- to late 1970s, some five years after the invention of recombinant-DNA technology. In June 2004, the first international conference devoted to the new field, “Synthetic Biology 1.0,” was held at the

Many of the enabling technologies for synthetic biology have existed for several years. The metabolic engineering of bacteria for natural product synthesis was first achieved in the early 1970s, and engineered bacterial plasmids for biotechnology were developed during the 1980s. Genetically modified organisms with relatively sophisticated systems for gene expression and containment have been around for nearly as long. The main difference between genetic engineering and synthetic biology is that whereas the former involves the transfer of individual genes from one species to another, the latter envisions the assembly of novel microbial genomes from a set of standardized genetic parts. These components may be natural genes that are being applied for a new purpose, natural genes that have been redesigned to function more efficiently, or artificial genes that have been designed and synthesized from scratch.

If the history of molecular biology is any guide, synthetic biology research will generate a vast amount of new information about life processes—from the role of specific genes to the metabolism of whole organisms—as well as numerous applications in medicine, agriculture, industry, bioremediation, and energy. And as with any powerful new technology, synthetic biology is

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Although much of the current work on synthetic biology is taking place in the United States, research groups are also active in Europe, Israel, and Japan, and the technology will surely spread to other countries. Over the next decade, synthetic biology is likely to enter a phase of exponential growth. Already, leading U.S. practitioners have founded three private companies to commercialize the technology: Codon Devices of Cambridge, Massachusetts; Amyris Biotechnologies of Emeryville, California; and Synthetic Genomics of Rockville, Maryland.

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Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.). The organizers claimed to have “brought together, for the first time, researchers who are working to: (1) design and build biological parts, devices, and integrated biological systems, (2) develop technologies that enable such work, and (3) place this scientific and engineering research within its current and future social context” [4]. In addition to technical presentations, policy analysts addressed the security, safety, and ethical issues associated with synthetic biology. The second international conference, “Synthetic Biology 2.0,” is scheduled for May 20 – 22, 2006, at the University of California, Berkeley. Meanwhile, at M.I.T. and several other universities, synthetic biology has become a powerful catalyst for interdisciplinary research and teaching that bridges the life sciences and engineering, attracting the interest of undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty members from a wide variety of fields.

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likely to create new risks for society, including possible unintended harmful consequences for human health or the environment, or deliberate misuse for hostile purposes. To gauge and plan for those risks, we need to understand the current status of research and the possible directions of future developments in the field. Surveying Synthetic Biology Today, synthetic biology encompasses several different engineering strategies, including genome design and construction, applied protein design, natural product synthesis, and the construction of functional genetic circuits in cells and microorganisms. Each of these subfields is worth considering briefly. Genome Design and Construction. One goal of synthetic biology is to “redesign” the genomes of existing microbes to make them more efficient or program them to carry out new functions. In 2005, for example, Leon Y. Chan and his co-workers at M.I.T. simplified the genome of a bacteriophage (a virus that attacks bacteria but is harmless to humans) called T7 by separating overlapping genes and editing out redundant DNA sequences to facilitate future modifications. In addition, a group at the J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Maryland is currently redesigning the bacterium Mycoplasma genitalium, which has the smallest known bacterial genome (482 proteincoding genes, 43 RNA genes) yet possesses all of the biochemical machinery needed to metabolize, grow, and reproduce. The Venter Institute group is striving to develop a synthetic version of the M. genitalium genome that has been stripped down to the absolute minimum number of genes required to support independent life. The goal of this “minimum genome project” is to build a simplified microbial platform to which new genes can be added, creating synthetic organisms with known characteristics and functionality. “Synthetic genomics” refers to the set of technologies that makes it possible to construct any specified gene (or full genome) from short strands of synthetic DNA called “oligonucleotides,” which are produced chemically and are generally between 50 and 100 base-pairs in length. In August 2002, Eckard Wimmer, a virologist at the State University of New York at Stonybrook, announced that over a period of several months his research team had assembled live, infectious poliovirus from customized oligonucleotides mailordered from a commercial supplier, using a map of the viral genome available on the Internet. In 2003, Hamilton Smith and his colleagues at the Venter Institute developed a faster method for genome assembly, using synthetic oligonucleotides to construct a bacteriophage called φX174 (containing 5,386 DNA base-pairs) in only two weeks. Most recently, in 2005, scientists at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention synthesized the so-called Spanish influenza virus which was responsible for the 1918-19 flu pandemic

In the near future, synthetic genomics technology should make it possible to recreate any existing virus for which the complete DNA sequence is known. At the same time, the advent of high-throughput DNA synthesis machines will cause the associated costs to drop precipitously, continuing the existing trend. In the year 2000, the price of custom oligonucleotides was about $10 per DNA base-pair; by early 2005, Blue Heron Biotechnology of Bothell, Washington was charging only $2 per base-pair (discounted to $1.60 for new customers). Over the next five years, the cost of synthetic DNA is expected to drop to about 10 cents per base-pair or even less, according to a recent report from the National Research Council and the Institute of Medicine. In December 2004, George M. Church of Harvard Medical School and Xiaolian Gio of the University of Houston announced that they had invented a new “multiplex” DNA synthesis technique that Church claims will eventually reduce the cost of DNA synthesis to 20,000 base-pairs per dollar. If his prediction is borne out, it will transform the economics of genome synthesis.

Natural Product Synthesis. Recombinant-DNA technology has long permitted the replication of single genes in plasmids (small loops of bacterial DNA), a technique known as “molecular cloning,” followed by the expression of the encoded proteins in bacteria or yeast cells. Useful proteins such as human insulin can be produced cheaply with this technique. Now, with the advent of synthetic biology, scientists are engineering microbes to perform complex multi-step syntheses of natural products by assembling “cassettes” of

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Applied Protein Design. In the early 1980s, Kevin Ulmer of Genex Corporation conceived the idea of systematically altering the genes that code for certain proteins to achieve desired modifications in protein stability and function. Since then, protein-engineering technology has been applied to develop enzymes that have improved catalytic efficiency or altered substrate specificity, or that can tolerate high temperatures and acidity levels. Today, engineered enzymes are utilized in laundry detergents and in various industrial processes. Another approach to protein engineering involves going beyond the repertoire of the 20 amino-acid building blocks found in nature. For example, a team of chemists headed by Peter G. Schultz at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has expanded the genetic code to specify unnatural amino acids, which can be substituted into proteins to modify their stability as well as their catalytic and binding properties. This technique has made it possible to design protein-based drugs that can resist rapid degradation in the body.

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that killed between 50 million and 100 million people worldwide.

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animal or plant genes that code for all of the enzymes in a synthetic pathway. For example, Jay Keasling, a professor of chemical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, is using synthetic-biology techniques to program yeast cells to manufacture the immediate precursor of the drug artemisinin, a natural product that is highly effective in treating malaria. At present, this compound must be extracted chemically from the sweet wormwood plant, an annual indigenous to China and Vietnam. The extraction of artemisinin is difficult and expensive, however, reducing its availability and affordability in developing countries. Keasling’s group is trying to reduce the cost of the drug by engineering a metabolic pathway for the synthesis of its immediate precursor, artemisinic acid, in yeast. Thus far, the Berkeley researchers have assembled a cassette of several genes from sweet wormwood that code for the series of enzymes needed to make artemisinic acid, and inserted this cassette into baker’s yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae). The scientists are now “tuning” the expression levels of each gene so that the entire multi-enzyme pathway functions efficiently. This task is far more complex than traditional experiments involving the cloning and expression of individual genes. Once the engineered yeast cells have been coaxed into producing high yields of the artemisinin precursor, it should be possible to manufacture this compound cheaply and in large quantities by fermentation, a process similar to brewing beer. The same approach could be used to mass-produce other drugs that are currently available in limited quantities from natural sources, such as the anti-cancer drug taxol and the anti-HIV compound prostratin.

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Creation of Standardized Biological Parts and Circuits. Perhaps the most ambitious subfield of synthetic biology involves efforts to develop a “tool box” of standardized genetic parts with known performance characteristics— analogous to the transistors, capacitors, and resistors used in electronic circuits—from which bioengineers can build functional devices and, someday, synthetic microorganisms. The Synthetic Biology Working Group at M.I.T. is attempting to turn this concept into a reality by developing a comprehensive set of genetic building blocks, along with standards for characterizing their behavior and the conditions that support their use. In the summer of 2004, the group established a Registry of Standard Biological Parts. The registry is made up of components called “BioBricks,” short pieces of DNA that constitute or encode functional genetic elements. Examples of BioBricks are a “promoter” sequence that initiates the transcription of DNA into messenger RNA, a

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“terminator” sequence that halts RNA transcription, a “repressor” gene that encodes a protein that blocks the transcription of another gene, a ribosome-binding site that initiates protein synthesis, and a “reporter” gene that encodes a fluorescent jellyfish protein, causing cells to glow green when viewed through a fluorescence microscope. A BioBrick must have a genetic structure that enables it to send and receive standard biochemical signals and to be cut and pasted into a linear sequence of other BioBricks, in a manner analogous to the pieces in a Lego set. As of early April 2006, the BioBricks registry contained 167 basic parts, including sensors, actuators, input and output devices, and regulatory elements. Also included in the registry were 421 composite parts, and an additional 50 parts were being synthesized or assembled. Emulating the approach employed by open-source software developers, the M.I.T. group has placed the registry on a public website (http://parts.mit.edu/) and invited all interested researchers to comment on and contribute to it. The ultimate goal of this effort is to develop a methodology for the assembly of BioBricks into circuits with practical applications, while eliminating unintended or parasitic interactions that could compromise the characterized function of the parts.

Research Obstacles and Potential Risks Although synthetic biologists have accomplished a great deal in a short time, major obstacles remain to be overcome before the practical applications of the technology can be realized. One problem is that the behavior of bioengineered systems remains “noisy” and unpredictable. Genetic circuits also tend to mutate rapidly and become nonfunctional. Drew Endy of M.I.T., one of the pioneers in the field, believes that synthetic biology will not achieve its potential until scientists can predict accurately how a new genetic circuit

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To date, BioBricks have been assembled into a few simple genetic circuits. One such circuit renders a film of bacteria sensitive to light, so that it can capture an image like a photographic negative. In other experiments, BioBricks have been combined into devices that function as logic gates and perform simple Boolean operations, such as AND, OR, NOT, NAND, and NOR. For example, an AND operator generates an output signal when it gets a biochemical signal from both of its inputs; an OR operator generates a signal if it gets a signal from either input; and a NOT operator (or inverter) converts a weak signal into a strong one, and vice versa. The long-term goal of this work is to convert bioengineered cells into tiny programmable computers, so that it will be possible to direct their operation by means of chemical signals or light.

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will behave inside a living cell. He argues that the engineering of biological systems remains expensive, unreliable, and ad hoc because scientists do not understand the molecular processes of cells well enough to manipulate them reliably. Writing in Nature in late 2005, Endy suggested three strategies for overcoming these obstacles. The first, standardization, refers to the “promulgation of standards that support the definition, description and characterization of the basic biological parts, as well as standard conditions that support the use of parts in combination and overall system operation.” The M.I.T. Registry of Standard Biological Parts is a first step toward that end. The second, decoupling, is the effort to “separate a complicated problem into many simpler problems that can be worked on independently, such that the resulting work can eventually be combined to produce a functioning whole.” Finally, abstraction is a method for organizing information describing biological functions into “hierarchies” that operate at different levels of complexity. Following these strategies, Endy writes, “would help make routine the engineering of synthetic biological systems that behave as expected”. An assessment of the risks involved in synthetic biology research must begin with two obvious points. First, because engineered microorganisms are selfreplicating and capable of evolution, they belong in a different risk category than toxic chemicals or radioactive materials. Second, some of the risks of synthetic biology are simply indefinable at present — that is, there may be risks that we cannot anticipate with any degree of precision at this early stage in the development of the field.

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That said, we can use history as a guide—particularly the history of recombinant DNA technology—to discern three main areas of risk in synthetic biology. First, synthetic microorganisms might escape from a research laboratory or containment facility, proliferate out of control, and cause environmental damage or threaten public health. Second, a synthetic microorganism developed for some applied purpose might cause harmful side effects after being deliberately released into the open environment. Third, outlaw states, terrorist organizations, or individuals might exploit synthetic biology for hostile or malicious purposes. The Risk of Accidental Release The history of the risks and safeguards involved in recombinant DNA research, which involves the cutting and splicing of genes from different species, is instructive for understanding the risks associated with synthetic biology. The first people to voice concerns about the potential risks of

Read Nassim Taleb’s Article on The Black Swan and improbability.

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recombinant DNA research were the scientists doing the work. During the summer of 1975, the leading investigators in the field met at the Asilomar Conference Center in Pacific Grove, California, to discuss the hazards associated with the new technology. They concluded that although most gene transfers posed a low level of risk, a few types of experiments, such as the insertion of toxin genes and virulence factors into bacteria, could entail significant dangers. In response, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) established a Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee (RAC) to develop biosafety guidelines and a process for institutional oversight that would apply to all NIH-funded research projects. Under the NIH Guidelines, which were adopted in 1976, the most dangerous experiments were banned and others were subjected to a thorough risk assessment. The guidelines specify the level of laboratory biocontainment required for different types of gene-transfer experiments. Many scientists considered the NIH Guidelines overly restrictive when they were first introduced, but over the past thirty years, the guidelines have gradually evolved in response to experience: Because of the excellent safety record of gene-splicing research and development, the RAC has since downgraded the biosafety requirements for most types of recombinant DNA experiments.

The main lesson for synthetic biology from the regulation of recombinant DNA research concerns the extent of the researcherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s familiarity with the host microbe that is being genetically modified. Because the microorganisms used for genetic engineering, such as the bacterium E. coli and the yeast S. cerevisiae, are well understood by scientists, the transfer of one or two foreign genes is unlikely to change the characteristics of the host in a dramatic, unpredictable way.

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Despite the fact that no accidental release of a genetically-engineered microorganism (GEM) from a laboratory has been reported, it is possible that such releases have occurred but that the effects were so unremarkable that they remained undetected. GEMs generally appear to be less â&#x20AC;&#x153;fitâ&#x20AC;? than their natural counterparts and hence would probably die off rapidly in the environment. Nevertheless, given their potential to replicate and evolve, special precautions are warranted. To reduce the probability that GEMs could proliferate outside a containment facility, the NIH Guidelines require that scientists build safeguards into the host microbes that receive foreign DNA. For example, researchers have developed bacterial strains that are metabolically deficient and thus require special nutrients that are not available in nature, so that the bacteria can survive and propagate only under artificial laboratory conditions.

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To what extent would the risks associated with a synthetic microorganism differ from those of a genetically engineered one? At least for the near future, the vast majority of synthetic biological systems will be engineered by transferring small genetic circuits into a well-understood bacterial host, limiting the level of risk. A decade from now, however, synthetic genomes may be assembled from BioBricks that have been redesigned or are entirely artificial, having been created de novo. If a synthetic microorganism is built by combining these genetic elements in a new way, it will lack a clear genetic pedigree and could have “emergent properties” arising from the complex interactions of its constituent genes. Accordingly, the risks attending the accidental release of such an organism from the laboratory would be extremely difficult to assess in advance, including its possible spread into new ecological niches and the evolution of novel and potentially harmful characteristics. During the process of laboratory research, animal testing in a contained facility may suggest whether or not a synthetic microorganism is pathogenic. Nevertheless, no animal model can predict infallibly how a novel microbe will behave in a human host, and there is no reliable way to measure its possible impact on complex ecosystems. It is also unclear whether or not the standard techniques used to prevent GEMs from proliferating outside the laboratory will be effective for synthetic microbes [42]. As a result, future research involving the creation of synthetic microorganisms will pose major challenges for assessing and managing biosafety risks. It is not too early to begin thinking about this problem, which is likely to be quite difficult to solve. To the extent that synthetic microorganisms lack a natural genetic pedigree, regulators may insist on developing new biosafety guidelines or regulations to prevent their accidental release into the environment. At present, it is unclear if these rules would resemble the NIH Guidelines or would be specific to synthetic biology. One approach to reducing the possible risks associated with synthetic microorganisms would be to ensure that they are inherently incapable of surviving and replicating outside the laboratory. For example, synthetic bacteria might be endowed with a redesigned genetic code and unnatural amino acids so that even if the engineered genes were taken up by natural cells or viruses, they could not be expressed. Scientists may also build into a synthetic microbe a “self-destruct” mechanism that is triggered by a high density of microorganisms, a specified number of cell divisions, or an external chemical signal. Nevertheless, such built-in control mechanisms may not be foolproof. If, for example, a synthetic microorganism is accidentally released into the environment, it might conceivably mutate or

Given these uncertainties, it would be prudent to adopt the “precautionary principle” and treat synthetic microorganisms as dangerous until proven harmless. According to this approach, all organisms containing assemblies of BioBricks would have to be studied under a high level of biocontainment (Biosafety Level 3 or even 4) until their safety could be demonstrated in a definitive manner. As George Church argued in Nature in 2005, “Learning from gene therapy, we should imagine worst-case scenarios and protect against them. For example, full physical isolation and confined lab experiments on human and agricultural pathogens should continue until we have data on a greater number of potential consequences—ecological and medical—of engineering such systems”. The Risk of Testing in the Open Environment By definition, some of the proposed applications of synthetic biology, such as biosensing, agriculture, and bioremediation (for example, cleaning up soil contaminated with toxic chemicals), would involve the use of synthetic microorganisms in the open environment. To date, only a small number of GEMs have been developed for applications outside of the laboratory or containment facility. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, GEMs may be developed and used for agricultural purposes, such as enriching soil, without a permit if the “recipient microorganisms...are not plant pests and...result from the addition of genetic material containing only noncoding regulatory regions”.

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With respect to bioremediation, the Environmental Protection Agency requires a stringent risk assessment before it will approve the release into the environment of a GEM that can break down specific pollutants. Although few GEMs have been developed for this purpose, including genetically modified strains of the common soil bacterium Pseudomonas putida, they have been tested only in the laboratory and in one field test carried out in 1996 under tightly controlled conditions. In that experiment, Gary Sayler and his colleagues at the University of Tennessee’s Center for Environmental Biotechnology used soil lysimeters, steel-lined tanks measuring eight feet in diameter and filled with a large volume of soil, to monitor bioengineered bacteria as they degraded a toxic chemical. Because of the uncertain ecological impacts of conducting such experiments in the open environment, however, no GEMs developed for bioremediation are currently in the regulatory pipeline.

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exchange genetic material with indigenous natural microorganisms in a way that makes the built-in controls ineffectual.

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Theoretically, three types of negative effects could result from releasing a synthetic microorganism into the environment. First, the organism could disrupt local biota or fauna through competition or infection that, in the worst case, could lead to the extinction of one or more wild species. Second, once a synthetic organism has successfully colonized a locale, it might become endemic and thus impossible to eliminate. Third, the synthetic organism might damage or disrupt some aspect of the habitat into which it was introduced, upsetting the natural balance and leading to the degradation or destruction of the local environment. U.S. government agencies, foreign governments, and intergovernmental organizations all take different approaches to assessing the risks associated with the deliberate release of a GEM into the open environment. Generally speaking, though, an inventor seeking permission to release a GEM must answer five questions in detail: • • •

•

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•

Are you thoroughly familiar with the microorganism donating the genetic material? Are you thoroughly familiar with the microorganism receiving the genetic material? Are you thoroughly familiar with the environment of the site into which the genetically engineered microorganism will be introduced? Will you be able to contain the introduced organism to the designated site of introduction? Should containment fail, do you know the damage that the escaped microorganism would cause to human health and/or the environment?

Based on the answers to these five questions, a regulatory agency can perform an objective risk assessment of the proposed release of a GEM. It is by no means clear, however, that one could answer these questions for a synthetic microorganism. Because a microbe constructed from BioBricks would not contain genetic material transferred from another species, Questions 1 and 2 are not relevant as stated, although the “familiarity” criterion is key. Could the inventor of a synthetic microorganism be said to be truly “familiar” with it? On the one hand, the inventor would know every BioBrick making up the genetic circuitry of the organism. On the other hand, he or she would have little understanding of the organism’s emergent properties, including how the synthetic microbe will interact with other living entities after its release into the ecosystem. Assuming that the answer to Question 3 (familiarity with the environment) is “yes,” the answer to Question 4 must inevitably be “no” when dealing with self-replicating synthetic microorganisms. Thus, the answer to Question 5 is critical. Because of a lack of empirical evidence,

we run the risk of planetary ruin!

Given these uncertainties, scientists seeking to develop synthetic microorganisms for applications outside a containment facility will need to develop new ways to assess their impact on the environment. One approach is to perform systematic testing in an experimental ecosystem that has been designed and constructed by biologists to analyze ecological dynamics. There are two types of model ecosystems: a “microcosm,” which varies in size from a few milliliters to 15 cubic meters, and a “mesocosm,” which is larger than 15 cubic meters. These model systems consist of elements of a natural ecosystem, such as soil, vegetation, lake water, and sediment, which are brought together in a container such as an aquarium, an earthlined pond, or a PVC tank, and allowed to equilibrate. (The soil lysimeter described above is a type of mesocosm.) Ideally, a model ecosystem should be sufficiently realistic and reproducible to serve as a bridge between the laboratory and a field test in the open environment. Microcosm and mesocosm studies have been useful in several environmental applications, such as measuring the stress placed on various types of ecosystems by synthetic chemicals, natural microorganisms, and GEMs. In addition, model ecosystems have served to estimate the extent to which the foreign genetic material introduced into a GEM can be transferred to other organisms or can persist by itself in the environment. However, some scientists and regulatory agencies have rejected data from microcosm and mesocosm studies because of a lack of consistency in the way the experiments were performed and the results interpreted. With this problem in mind, it may be necessary for the synthetic biology community to develop a standardized methodology for testing the environmental impact of its inventions.

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One of the lessons from the history of recombinant DNA research is that the products made by genetically engineered microbes are no more hazardous than those manufactured by more traditional methods. Thus, for drugs and proteins made by synthetic microorganisms (such as the artemisinin precursor produced in yeast), U.S. regulators will probably focus on the safety of the final product rather than the method of production. In contrast, countries in Western Europe and other parts of the world have taken a more restrictive approach to genetically modified foods and may likewise be inclined to discriminate against drugs and other items manufactured by synthetic microorganisms.

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the inventor of a synthetic microorganism could not predict the effects of its release on human health and the environment with any degree of confidence.

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The Risk of Deliberate Misuse The 1972 Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BWC) bans the development, production, stockpiling, and transfer of “microbial or other biological agents, or toxins whatever their origin or method of production, of types and in quantities that have no justification for prophylactic, protective or other peaceful purposes” [50]. Thus, the BWC implicitly prohibits the synthesis of known or novel microorganisms for hostile purposes. Moreover, if synthetic organisms were designed to produce toxins, then the development and production of these poisons for weapons purposes would be prohibited by both the BWC and the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention. Nevertheless, because the BWC has not been signed and ratified by every country, lacks formal verification mechanisms, and does not bind non-state entities such as terrorist organizations, it does little to prevent the deliberate misuse of synthetic biology for hostile purposes. One potential misuse of synthetic biology would be to recreate known pathogens (such as the Ebola virus) in the laboratory as a means of circumventing the legal and physical controls on access to “select agents” that pose a bioterrorism risk. Indeed, the feasibility of assembling an entire, infectious viral genome from a set of synthetic oligonucleotides has already been demonstrated for poliovirus and the Spanish influenza virus. As DNA synthesis technology improves, the assembly of even larger viruses (such as variola, the causative agent of smallpox) may eventually become feasible. J. Craig Venter noted, in testimony before a Senate subcommittee in 2005, that although a bioterrorist could use synthetic genomics to make a pathogenic virus, “the number of pathogens that can be synthesized today is small and limited to those with sequenced genomes. And for many of these the DNA is not infective on its own and poses little actual threat. Our concern is what the technology might enable decades from now”. Indeed, projecting a decade or more into the future, some analysts have made dire predictions about the potential misuse of synthetic biology techniques for the development of more lethal or militarily effective biological warfare agents. In November 2003, for example, an expert panel set up by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency released a short white paper that concludes, “Growing understanding of the complex biochemical pathways that underlie life processes has the potential to enable a class of new, more virulent biological agents engineered to attack distinct biochemical pathways and elicit specific effects”. This unclassified report provides no details concerning the expertise, equipment, and facilities that would be required to develop such engineered biowarfare agents, nor a time estimate for how long the development process might take.

BIOWEAPONS!

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In a similar effort at prediction, Mark Wheelis, a microbiologist at the University of California, Davis, painted a frightening picture of synthetic biology twenty years or more into the future. Among his predictions in a 2004 Arms Control Today article: “Living synthetic cells will likely be made in the next decade; synthetic pathogens more effective than wild or genetically engineered natural pathogens will be possible sometime thereafter.... Such synthetic cellular pathogens could be designed to be contagious or noncontagious, lethal or disabling, acute or persistent”. How should one assess these predictions about the potential misuse of synthetic biology for hostile purposes? At present, the primary threat of misuse appears to come from state-level biological warfare programs, some of which probably exploit advanced molecular biology techniques. It is known that Soviet weapons scientists conducted genetic engineering research with dangerous pathogens, such as those that cause anthrax, plague, and tularemia [56]. Could scientists possessing this expertise employ synthetic biology to design and construct an entirely artificial pathogen that is significantly more deadly and robust than those that already exist in nature? In fact, such a scenario is extremely unlikely. To create such an artificial pathogen, a capable synthetic biologist would need to assemble complexes of genes that, working in unison, enable a microbe to infect a human host and cause illness and death. Designing the organism to be contagious, or capable of spreading from person to person, would be even more difficult. A synthetic pathogen would also have to be equipped with mechanisms to block the immunological defenses of the host, characteristics that natural pathogens have acquired over eons of evolution. Given these daunting technical obstacles, the threat of a synthetic “super-pathogen” appears exaggerated, at least for the foreseeable future.

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The most likely misapplication of synthetic biology for hostile purposes involves the recreation of known pathogenic viruses in the laboratory. Contrary to popular belief, however, a biological weapon is not merely an infectious agent but a complex system consisting of (1) a supply of pathogen, either produced in the form of a wet slurry or dried and milled into a dry powder; (2) a complex “formulation” of chemical additives that is mixed with the agent to stabilize it and preserve its infectivity and virulence during storage; (3) a container to store and transport the formulated agent; and (4) an efficient dispersal mechanism to disseminate the formulated agent as a fine-particle aerosol that can infect the targeted personnel through the lungs. Finally, the aerosol cloud must be released under optimal atmospheric and meteorological conditions if it is to inflict casualties over a large area. Given

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the major technical hurdles associated with weaponization and delivery, the advent of synthetic biology is unlikely to cause a dramatic increase in the threat of bioterrorism. Nevertheless, two possible scenarios for the deliberate misuse of synthetic biology provide some grounds for concern. The first involves a “lone operator,” such as a highly trained molecular biologist who develops an obsessive grudge against certain individuals or groups (or society as a whole). If Theodore Kaczynski, the “Unabomber,” had been a microbiologist instead of a mathematician, he might have fit this profile; perhaps the perpetrator of the 2001 anthrax-letter attacks does fit it. So-called “lone wolf” terrorists have proven very innovative and difficult to locate; if armed with a weapon of mass destruction, such a lone operator could cause as much damage as an organized group. How likely is this lone operator scenario? In any large population of professionals, a small minority may be prepared to use their skills for illicit purposes. Thus, the growing synthetic biology community can be expected to include a few individuals with access to laboratory equipment and supplies who are highly intelligent and well-trained but also deeply disgruntled, have sociopathic tendencies, or wish to prove something to the world. Such an individual might work alone to synthesize a natural pathogen or one incorporating foreign virulence factors. Possible motivations might include inflicting harm on a former or current employer, lover, or a hated ethnic group, profiting from blackmail, eliminating rivals, obtaining perverse pleasure from overcoming technical challenges, or demonstrating scientific and technical superiority.

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A lone operator with expertise in synthetic biology would also have a number of characteristics that would pose special difficulties for those seeking to prevent or defend against terrorist attacks. He would not be restricted in his actions by group decision-making and could purchase dual-use equipment and materials for a DNA synthesis laboratory, none of which would provide an obvious tip-off of illicit activity. And precisely because he would be working solo, a lone operator would be unlikely to be discovered by the intelligence community or the police before he strikes. The pool of people capable of misusing synthetic biology is currently limited to the small number of undergraduates, graduate students, and senior scientists who constitute the research community—probably fewer than 500 people in early 2006. In the future, however, the number of capable individuals will grow rapidly as researchers are drawn to this exciting and dynamic field.

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The second scenario of concern is that of a “biohacker,” an individual who does not necessarily have malicious intent but seeks to create bioengineered organisms out of curiosity or to demonstrate his technical prowess—a common motivation of many designers of computer viruses. The reagents and tools used in synthetic biology will eventually be converted into commercial kits, making it easier for biohackers to acquire them. Moreover, as syntheticbiology training becomes increasingly available to students at the college and possibly even high-school levels, a “hacker culture” may emerge, increasing the risk of reckless or malevolent experimentation. Mitigating the Risks The risks of inadvertent or deliberate harm from synthetic biology clearly warrant a policy response. Although some scientists consider it premature to consider ways of regulating the field at such an early stage in its development, prudence suggests that it is better to start addressing the problem early, rather than having to react after an unanticipated mishap or disaster has provoked a political backlash.

Yet it also seems likely that, given the difficulty of anticipating and assessing the risks associated with synthetic organisms, synthetic biology will require a new approach to regulation that differs significantly from the NIH Guidelines on recombinant DNA. Accordingly, it would be useful to bring several leading practitioners of synthetic biology together with biosafety experts, social scientists, ethicists, and legal scholars to brainstorm about reasonable approaches for the oversight and control of such research. The

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Returning to the historical record, more than three decades of experience have shown that the NIH Guidelines governing recombinant DNA research have functioned reasonably well to protect scientists and the public from potential hazards, while allowing science to advance relatively unhindered. The main concerns about the possible hazards from GEMs have shifted over the years from laboratory research to field testing and use. Nevertheless, public suspicions persist, particularly in Western Europe, about the safety of genetically engineered foods. It is therefore important to consider how the public will respond to the commercial applications of synthetic biology. Although the first such products will not appear for several years, one can imagine the impact of a news report that a team of scientists has created an entirely new life form that is busily replicating itself in a laboratory. Fear of the unknown, whether rational or irrational, might lead to a hasty or inappropriate response, one that unnecessarily impedes scientific progress or ineffectively protects the public good.

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following elements of a regulatory regime might be considered: Screening of oligonucleotide orders. At present, it is possible to place orders for oligonucleotides and genes over the Internet to custom supply houses, which synthesize any DNA sequence upon request and keep the transaction confidential. As University of Washington biotechnology analyst Rob Carlson has noted, oligonucleotide producers have emerged in several countries around the world, including nations such as China and Iran. A U.S. gene-synthesis company, Blue Heron Biotechnology, voluntarily uses special software to screen all oligonucleotide and gene orders for the presence of DNA sequences from “select agents” of bioterrorism concern. When such a sequence is detected, the request is denied, although there is currently no procedure for reporting such incidents to U.S. government authorities. Nevertheless, suppliers are currently under no legal obligation to screen their orders, and because many clients value confidentiality, companies might put themselves at a competitive disadvantage by doing so. There are two possible solutions to this problem. First, Congress could pass a law requiring U.S. suppliers to screen all oligonucleotide and gene orders for pathogenic DNA sequences. Alternatively, suppliers could agree among themselves to screen orders voluntarily, or legitimate researchers could choose to patronize only those companies that do so. Because the trade involves several countries, however, an effective regulatory regime would have to be international in scope.

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Ecological modeling of synthetic microorganisms. Given the difficulty of predicting the risks to public health and the environment posed by synthetic microorganisms, it will be essential to study the ecological behavior of such agents in enclosed microcosms or mesocosms that model as accurately as possible the ecosystem into which the organism will be released. Such studies should examine the extent to which the genetic material from a synthetic microorganism is transferred to other organisms or persists intact in the environment. In the event that the uncertainties associated with the liberation of synthetic microbes prove to be irreducible, it may be necessary to ban all uses in the open environment until a robust risk assessment can be conducted for each proposed application. Oversight of research. Research in synthetic biology may generate “dualuse” findings that could enable proliferators or terrorists to develop biological warfare agents that are more lethal, easier to manufacture, or of greater military utility than today’s bioweapons. In rare cases, it may be necessary to halt a proposed research project at the funding stage or, if unexpectedly sensitive results emerge that could threaten public health or national security,

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to place constraints on publication. Relevant guidelines for the oversight of “dual-use” research are currently being developed by the U.S. government’s National Scientific Advisory Board for Biosecurity and should eventually be “harmonized” internationally. Public outreach and education. Because of the potential for intense controversy surrounding synthetic biology, public outreach and education are needed even at this early stage in the field’s development. Although it is often difficult to persuade scientists to leave the laboratory for even a few hours to participate in a public discussion of their work and its implications for society, such efforts should be encouraged because they generate good will and may help to prevent a future political backlash that could cripple the emerging field of synthetic biology. Synthetic Biology and the Public Good At present, synthetic biology’s myriad implications can be glimpsed only dimly. The field clearly has the potential to bring about epochal changes in medicine, agriculture, industry, ethics, and politics, and a few decades from now it may have a profound influence on the definition of life, including what it means to be human. Some critics consider the idea of creating artificial organisms in the laboratory to be a frightening example of scientific hubris, evocative of Faust or Dr. Frankenstein. Yet given the momentum and international character of research in synthetic biology, it is already too late to impose a moratorium, if indeed one was ever contemplated.

ARTICLE BY THE NEW ATLANTIS

Instead, practitioners and policy analysts should begin a wide-ranging debate about how best to guide synthetic biology in a safe and socially useful direction without smothering it in the cradle. In so doing, it will be useful to hark back to the enlightened group of biologists who met at Asilomar in 1975 to discuss another exciting new technology—recombinant DNA—that appeared to offer great benefits and unknown dangers. Their deliberations led to the decision to proceed with caution, subjecting potentially dangerous experiments to careful risk assessment and oversight. That approach, which has since proven remarkably successful, bears emulating today. In the process, however, we may discover that synthetic biology poses novel regulatory and ethical challenges as scientists learn how to manipulate the most basic elements of living systems.

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Sachs On The Crisis, The Recovery, And The Future Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University and author of The Price of Civilization talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the state of the American economy. Sachs sees the current malaise as a chronic problem rather than a short-term challenge caused by the business cycle. He lists a whole host of issues he thinks policymakers need to deal with including the environment, inequality, and infrastructure. He disagrees with the Keynesian prescriptions for stimulating the economy and believes that the federal government budget deficits are a serious problem. The conversation closes with a discussion of the state of economics.

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Intro. [Recording date: April 4, 2013.] Russ: Topic is U.S. economy. I’m sure we’ll get into a lot of other areas as well. You argue that we face chronic problems, but our solutions that we’ve been trying are very temporary. What are the chronic problems that you think face the United States and what should we be doing about them? Guest: Really, since the early 1980s we’ve seen a pretty significant structural change in the U.S. economy. It’s been manifested in the changing labor markets, changing patterns of production, trade, finance. And a lot of ecological harms and disasters. And I think that it’s when you sum all of that up, one can see that the United States, like the whole world indeed, is experiencing a lot of disruption, a lot of very difficult changes in all aspects of our economic and social life, and we’ve got a lot of undesirable consequences from that. My point is that we’ve not been attending to those long-term changes. We have hardly recognized them in our politics or our policies. And as a result of that we’ve ended up, in recent years, in a pretty deep macroeconomic crisis—high joblessness—a pretty deep social crisis, with very high inequality of income; and a shockingly high amount of poverty in the United States. We’ve ended up with dysfunctional systems in our economy. The healthcare system is really, compared to most other places in the world, not working. Our energy sector, our infrastructure, really are way off course from what we need. So, my view is that by failing to understand the deeper dynamics that the world, the United States are

We have a corrupt political system that hinders and form of change or collaboration. How can we change that system? How do we create a system that even the corrupt will do the politically correct thing?

Russ: I want to stop you there. I want to get back to the economy, but you’ve emphasized a couple of times the ecological issue. And I want to get to that. On the food issue, it seems to me--and I’m happy to hear a different perspective—that the subsidies to the agricultural sector in the United States, particularly the increased encouragement of corn in the production of ethanol, has pushed up prices of many related commodities. That’s one side of the commodity price issue. The other side of course is the demand side from growth from China, India, and elsewhere, which has pushed up prices

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experiencing, the deeper trends of technology and globalization, and environmental change, we’ve just gotten farther and farther off track. And our political system seems only to understand the 24 hour news cycle or at best the 2-year election cycle. It doesn’t seem to want to focus on these longerterm issues at all. Russ: We only have an hour, so that list of problems that we have was quite lengthy. Let’s just take a few of them. What do you think are the most important ones that have been ignored, that you think are at least amenable to policy? Guest: I think the overriding change of the last 30 years has been globalization. But globalization has many different aspects to it. Of course, the world has really come together into one integrated, interconnected system of production, trade, finance, and technology. The introduction of China into the world economy has been probably the single most transformative aspect. But globalization has both enabled and been enabled by the information revolution. And so that has allowed jobs to shift across sectors and across type and across countries. We have a radically changed division of labor within and between economies. The growth of the world economy as a whole that’s been made possible by this and by the change of policies has also put huge strains not only on particular sectors of the economy and on income distribution but on the global environment, because China is so large and the rise of the emerging economies is so rapid and so significant, that we also have planetary scale ecological challenges as well. So, I would, in a way, try to maybe a little bit oversimplify it by saying that a fundamental driver is a world economy that at one level has done quite well over 30 years—quite significant economic growth. But the integration of the world economy has meant huge changes in the nature of jobs, technology, and environmental problems. And again, those are the ones that we need to attend to. What we’ve ended up with is an economy that no longer sustains a middle class, that has huge inequalities between rich and poor, and that hasn’t begun to face up to some very, very deep ecological challenges, which hit us the hard way in these superstorms, like Superstorm Sandy last November, or the massive drought that has been hitting the United States in the recent years and doing great damage to the U.S. food supply and the global food supply

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of oil alongside geopolitical events, so it’s very hard to disentangle those. But it seems to me that we don’t have any kind of food crisis in the United States other than the fact that we have privileged one product in such a distortionary way, with very little environment return. Do you disagree with that? Guest: Well, no, I agree with both your points. The ethanol subsidies are absolutely crazy—except from the political economy point of view. The rising world demand for feed grains and food grains, especially because of China’s growth, is a major factor. But on the supply side, globally, and in the United States, we have had an increasingly erratic supply of both the feed and the food grains. Not only the diversion into biofuels, which make no sense—as you rightly point out—but also more and more shocks. Last year because of this megadrought we lost something around a fifth of the soybean production, something comparable in our maize production. We’re a central part of the total world food grain and feed grain system. So that was a major shock. In recent years there have been significant droughts in China, which did great damage to their domestic production, forced them big time into the international markets. There were significant crop failures in Russia and Ukraine. So what we’re seeing is three phenomena, and I think you name two of them very well. One is a useless diversion of very valuable arable land into the wrong things, both in the United States and Europe, largely driven by lobbies. Second is a rising world demand for every variety of agricultural, and I would add fisheries, outputs. But third is an ecological constraint on the supply side, on the fishery side: we’ve really topped out the extraction from the oceans and done great damage to a lot of fisheries; on the terrestrial side we have tremendous instability of the feed and food grain supplies right now in a lot of the staple regions because of this phenomenon of the increasing variable, the heat waves, droughts, floods in a lot of places—Australia being increasingly destabilized as well. And so I think it’s a combination of all of these factors. But they are all significant. And they are all playing a role and the manifestation of it most directly is very high real prices of these commodities, and of course, high volatility as well. But I think both the mean and the variance—high average prices that we now face and this very high volatility in recent years are reflections of these phenomena. Russ: The only other point I would make—obviously we could spend the whole time on this--is that I’m not a deep student of climate change, but I have noticed that there is murmuring that the last 10 or 15 years have not shown much global warming. And this seems surprising in light of the incredible amount of carbon dioxide being pumped out of China, and elsewhere, as the world has gotten more developed. Guest: I think that’s not a right observation, Russ. Russ: Which part? Guest: The fact that the last 10 years have not been consistent with the modeling and with the expectations of climate change. There’s a lot of silliness in that oft-repeated observation. The last

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There is a huge lack of awareness in this area!

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Russ: I want to come to the issues you raised about the U.S. workforce and its relationship to the global economy. I want to challenge you and have you expand on a couple of statements you made earlier. You said the middle class—I forget the exact phrase that you used, it was not a cheerful phrase: dead, gone, dying, missing—Guest: Shrinking. I don’t know what word I used, but let’s go with ‘shrinking’ for our discussion for the moment. Russ: Shrinking What do you mean by that? I don’t know what that means. I look at the economy, and the reason I find your work so interesting is that it’s very difficult to disentangle the mediocre recovery we are in now from longer-term trends. And there is a temptation to say: We’re just having a bad recovery. You are saying: No, no, no; there’s something more serious underlying this problem. There’s a sea change that’s more than just the last couple of years. You are suggesting it goes back two to three decades. What’s that sea change that’s destroying the middle class? Because I don’t see it. I see a sea change for people who didn’t finish high school. I think a person who didn’t finish high school today has a very different economic path than 50 years ago or 40 years ago or even 30 years ago. But that’s a very specific kind of problem. You are saying something much more systemic. Guest: Well, at first a person who finishes high school but doesn’t get a bachelor’s degree is the median for a young man in our society, so we should keep track of what’s a small thing and what’s a modal phenomenon. For young people,

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One planet, one chance; no redemption.

decade has been the warmest decade in instrument history. What is true is that 1998 was exceptionally warm because it was a very strong El Niño year. So a lot of people that play up this—mainly for propaganda reasons, in my view—say, well look, 1998 was the peak and then if you draw the line from 1998, you just don’t see all that much. But what we do see is that if you strip away these seasonal and inter-annual phenomena of the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) cycle, if you take into account the decadal ocean temperature trends and so forth, what we face right now is very, very clear. And that is a greenhouse gas-driven warming of the planet that is both highly significant, very dangerous, continuing at a rapid rate; and the best of our ability, scientific inference, very frightening to the future, with a lot of instability likely to arise. Russ: Do you think we have any precision about what the average global temperature will be in, say, 50 years? Guest: I think we have enough reason to believe that the increases will be so significant and we’re running an experiment not on a small patch of the planet but on the only earth we have, that we have all the reason to take small measures now that are in conformity with the very strong knowledge and inferences that we have available. Russ: Maybe we’ll come back to that toward the end. I would rather focus our time, though, on the economy. Guest: But it is part of the economy. Russ: Oh, I understand.

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aged 25-29, bachelor’s degree holders constitute about a third of the total—I think it’s maybe 35, 36%. That share has not really changed very much for quite a long time. Most of our young people do not get a bachelor’s degree. Russ: They attend. More attend, but they don’t finish. Guest: More attend, and many, many drop out before they complete the degree. The labor market experience is that the degree is important. The premium on that degree has increased significantly. If you do have a bachelor’s degree or above, you are probably doing pretty well in this economy. But that is not the median, and it’s far from the norm in our society. If you have a high school diploma or less, well, life is tough. And in many measures, it’s gotten considerably tougher. Every measure that one could cite has its own school of debate of exactly what it means and compositional effects and other things to take away, but I would say that the highlights are that for men in particular, and I think there’s a reason for that because men have been more exposed to the forces of globalization than women in the economy, who work mainly in the service sector and more often than not in non-tradable sectors. But for men the peak, median, full-time annual earning was in 1973. And one has to acknowledge that by any standard of our business, if you look at that, because our economy has been growing since 1973, pretty significantly and pretty consistently, actually, to see a median earnings of full-time male workers peak 40 years ago is a structural shock, actually. I find it amazing. Very counterintuitive. And very striking. But that’s the case. And if you look at many other measures—every one of them flawed, so you have to take the aggregation of them to get a picture, whether it’s wage levels or levels of earnings in various occupations—basically, for the middle of the income distribution and on down there’s been very little measured progress. I think probably real progress is greater than what’s measured. But all of the measured gains are in the top quintile, more or less; and a huge proportion of those are in the top 1%, we know. So we’ve had a tremendous widening of income inequalities by many, many measures. Top 1%, Gini coefficients, top 10% over bottom 10%, top 20% over bottom 20%—we’ve seen a lot of evidence of stagnation of earnings for those with high school or less educational completion. We see that the number of jobs within the current recovery, for example, for those with high school and less—there’s been no recovery. There’s just been a net job loss that had no rebound. The jobs for college grads has continued to grow, and there was a rebound; it was quite significant. So, I think this widening of the income inequality is very real. Sometimes the middle class is measured by proportion of households or workers within some range of the median: plus-minus 50% of the median income, for example. And the share of households within that bound has also declined, pretty markedly. Russ: But those numbers are very distorted by demographic changes—due to divorce, as the number of households changed over the last 30 or 40 years.

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Russ: I think the question then is: It’s true that the top 1% has done very well. Do you believe there is a causal connection between, say, the top 1%’s success, which has many different components, as we’ve often remarked on this program—it includes Wall Street executives who I think have been grotesquely subsidized by taxpayer largesse in all kinds of subtle and notso-subtle ways; there’s athletes, entertainers, Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) of large companies that have been very successful and productive, entrepreneurs. A lot of those people have made the world a better place, and I’m thrilled that they are making a lot more money—doesn’t bother me at all. But there are others that I think have taken money from the rest of us. But do you think that change in the top 1% has something to do with the fate of those in the middle and below? And I ask that because, although we talked about how hard it is to disentangle trends from temporary changes, when you look at this last recession you see a massive drop in construction employment. Which punishes people with relatively low levels of education. So we see a very tough secular trend downward in manufacturing employment due to globalization and productivity change. Those to me are the things that

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Household structure has totally been revolutionized because of that increase in divorce rate; the delay in the age of marriage. So I think when you look at those data, you have to be very careful. Guest: Didn’t I say that? Russ: Uh, not exactly. Guest: Well, I did. And not only I said that every one of these was—they are a community that debates the fine points, but I also said you have to look at the totality of this evidence, which comes in many, many different directions and for many different kinds of surveys and many different kinds of evidence. And my conclusion, at least, is that the evidence is strong and consistent that we’ve had a significant structural change, a widening of income inequality, a very particular effect at the top, and a quite significant effect from the median on down. Russ: Well, the question then is: First of all, I don’t think the 1973 peak of male earnings is consistent with— as you point out—there is some growth. Maybe it’s not zero. Maybe that really wasn’t the peak. I think it’s grossly out of line with what we see through all kinds of consumption measures and other ways we can look at it, the way the data are collected. Guest: Russ, I would tend to add the following. By the way we actually measure consumption in the national accounts and by the traditional Consumer Price Index (CPI) deflated standards, there you see a peak. What I don’t think is right are these consumer price indices. I think inequality of goods, the advances of technology, the fact that we can do things now that literally were not possible 40 years ago don’t get into our equality of goods measurements adequately. So, I think there’s been progress. But as we actually measure things, no. Then it really did peak. Russ: Yeah, no doubt. Guest: So, that’s my point.

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matter. Do you think the inequality in and of itself is doing something to the middle and the lower groups and the distribution? Guest: Well, I think that you are right to point to globalization and technological change as the main drivers of actually I would say most of this, even the top. And I regard those as very significant structural factors that we’ve not been paying attention to. That’s really my point. So I’m in agreement with that. When it comes to the top, they’ve been big gainers in globalization; but for, actually, for an interesting variety of reasons. One is that globalization really has been kind to capital in general, whether human capital or financial capital. More outlets for investment, a larger globalization market, having high skills or a great brand or a great ability to sing or to put a ball in a hoop or in a cup has absolutely been aided by globalization. But so, too, has the political power by the top absolutely been enhanced by this as well. They can play governments off against each other. There is a race to the bottom in many ways of who you try to attract, who you appeal to in internationally mobile capital. Our own political system is skewed more to the interests, the views, the wellbeing of that group. And that has absolutely been played out in the way our tax system has evolved, in the absolutely grotesque and fulminant tax abuses that have been permitted. And in the fact that Wall Street has run the White House for the last 15, 20 years. And ended up, as Wall Street does when it’s allowed to run things, making a huge mess of things. So I think that there’s a political economy aspect to the wealth at the top that goes alongside the economic aspects. The economic aspects are that globalization really does favor mobile capital; it really does favor human capital. It has been very tough for those in the middle and at the bottom because of globalization and the competition in the open sector of our economy. And of course, as you and I both said: Technology has been an underlying driver of globalization itself, and it also a direct part of the income distribution shifts within the United States even aside from globalization. So the summary is: I view it as a pretty complicated morass of basic economic factors combined with political economy. But it’s added up to a political system which amplifies these differences rather than leans against the wind. Russ: On a cheerier note, you say it’s bad for people at the bottom, but of course, I assume you mean here in the United States. Certainly the average worker in China, India, and a few other places that all have a lot of people, have done extraordinarily well over the last 30 years. Guest: I agree with that. And I would add Brazil as another large economy with big gains. You know, the world economy has done quite well in a lot of ways, and I’m a big fan of globalization. I think it has raised living standards and improved wellbeing. What I’m not a fan of is closing our eyes to the challenges that it leads to as well. And that’s really my main point.

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Russ: Before we leave that, and I want to turn to some more macroeconomic

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policy issues, I want to go back to these sectoral issues in manufacturing and housing construction. When people say—it used to be that if you finished high school you led a middle class life, and that’s no longer true—I think that’s correct. But my response to that is: It used to be if in the late 19th century if you were a blacksmith, you made a good living. And by the early 20th century that was no longer true. Certainly by the middle of the 20th century. People understood that. They had to go get different skills. It’s certainly true that the manufacturing sector in the United States used to be a very good outlet for people with low levels of formal schooling. That’s a sector that’s diminishing. Housing has at least declined temporarily, maybe for a long time. What policy changes need to be put in place, or have to be put in place, if at all, to let the evolution of the job market deal with these technology changes? What do you recommend? Guest: I think you are making a great point and I agree with it. When you have underlying structural changes as we do expect, you expect changes in response. And then you really have to ask the question: Will these take care of themselves? And I think the complication fundamentally comes from the fact that the entire life cycle of human capital, from an early childhood which gives a chance to a young child, up through formal schooling, up through the costs of higher education, have massive breakdowns. And these are breakdowns that have been acknowledged for decades and decades. I think Milton Friedman was probably as eloquent as anybody about the breakdowns of normal market forces for human capital. What I see happening, Russ, is we have increasingly become a tracked society, where a child born into poverty today has a very, very different, very, very difficult mountain to climb if they are going to get out of poverty. The evidence is that most don’t make it. And there are many factors in that quote, “within family transmission” of human capital, our absolutely insane policy of locking up a whole generation of young minority men, which has led to this incarceration boom which is breaking our society, especially in African American communities. The great problems of broken schools, gangs, neighborhoods that don’t function, kids that by the age of 4 or 5 are not school-ready and never catch up. Jim Heckman’s evidence on that is extremely powerful in my view. And then the soaring costs of higher education, which maybe we’re going to see a technological breakthrough to get out of with online education—I dearly hope for that. But what we see is very large cohort of young people responding to the market, trying to get ahead and falling short. They go to college for a year or two, take on a lot of debt; and then can’t make it. And so now we’ve got a trillion dollars of student loans, a huge amount of that is going to go into default; it’s going to be very painful for a lot of young people who made a year or two of school but couldn’t continue. And we haven’t solved this whole lifecycle problem of human capital. It used to be easier. Of course, it used to be you weren’t

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aspiring to a $50,000, $100,000 a year job. You were aspiring to be a trained blacksmith, like you said. And that was an easier road to hoe. But now we have very profound challenges of human capital accumulation because we want to live in a sophisticated, high-income society that requires lots of skills and a healthy upbringing and labor-market-friendly capacities. And for a significant part of our population, our young people, it’s not happening. And I see that as a huge, probably the biggest investment failure of our time. And also as a social calamity. Russ: Yeah. It’s an infrastructure failure we can both agree on with both how tragic it is and how difficult it seems to be to do anything about it. Guest: I wish we talked about it more in a substantive, honest, evidence-based way than we do. And I wish we took the fact that because of technology and globalization we’ve had a problem that’s been growing for a long time, that we would actually face up to this. And it’s interesting, I take a view on one piece of what you said—maybe it’s a good segue to the macro—that is a little bit different from others. We had our housing bubble and collapse, and the housing bubble provided jobs, not huge numbers, but provided jobs—Russ: Millions—Guest: That went away. And I view that not as a business cycle but as the last hurrah of trying to do anything to employ people who otherwise weren’t going to get employed, through easy credit policy. So I view the boom in the housing market basically as the Fed’s fairly pathetic response to this deeper structural problem. In other words, we’ve had a weak labor market for quite a while. And the only way we’ve been able to address it is by pumping in a lot of money, into housing. And of course that leads to a bubble, and it leads to a collapse, and it’s a very short-sighted policy. But the Fed, which is a very short-sighted institution, has simply looked at the labor market, said it’s weak; and therefore it’s our mandate to lower interest rates, put the pedal to the floor, pump up liquidity. And so we get these housing bubbles not because of mere accidents or deranged regulation, though that’s part of it. We get them in part as a macro response, a policy response, to this underlying structural challenge. Which we didn’t want to discuss. And so the only way we end up discussing it is through monetary policy. Russ: Let’s stick with this education issue for another minute, because I think it is important. Let’s have a few minutes of substance on it. I would just add that the technology revolution in education, which I hope is coming, I hope, is going to create a lot of inequality in our profession. There are going to be some very successful people who can master that technology, who can reach a much larger group of people, make a lot more money; and there are going to be a lot of academics who are going to have trouble making a living. Which probably is for the best. Those of us who can’t reach large audiences will have to find something more productive to do. Guest: Well, we’re going to be like the music industry. Exactly what’s happened there as well. A few bands make it, and lots of others have their

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While these are important it only equates to a small part of a larger economy.

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Russ: Let’s talk for a minute about that education issue, the world we are in now, these changes we hope are coming. The world we are stuck with at least for some time. Especially at the K-12 level. I live in a suburban Maryland town with phenomenal public schools. There’s a bunch of them out here: Bethesda, Potomac. Schools are great; public schools are great here. You go into the city, they are awful. And you asked for an evidence-based discussion of this issue. It’s hard to do. Because we have family issues, we have cultural issues. We have teacher-quality issues. Very hard to disentangle. And we have a system that’s unbelievably inflexible, on every dimension. It’s still 25 kids, 40 kids, 18 kids sitting at desks, doing stuff with a teacher in front of the room. We don’t have an apprentice system. We don’t have a technical training system. We have a fantasy that: Oh, if everybody could just learn science and math and engineering, technology, we could all be rich. But not everybody can do those things. How do you—my preference, of course, is to get the government out of the business of educating people and let the private sector and voluntary activity—I think we could do a better job. But I doubt you share that view. So, what would be your recommendation for how we evolve, or at least move forward, given these challenges? Guest: I think the first thing I would like us to do is to look at some of the international experience more closely. Because I think there are a lot of very interesting lessons of success stories that we could benefit from. I’ll mention two. One is Germany, of course, which is now rightly famous for standing out, not quite alone but as part of a Northern European distinctiveness of low youth unemployment. They have a tradition that goes back, actually to the Guild Age, of course, of apprenticeships. But they’ve thought very hard about the school-to-work transition. Starting from what should schools do, what kind of skills are needed, what is a true vocational skill track for skilled craftsmen, which is a skill very much a German tradition. And then they have public subsidies to enable companies to take on very raw, early apprentices. And many of those apprentices, which are part of a formal program, then turn into long-term jobs within that company itself. And others just have given the ground-level experience to young people to understand what the labor market is. So, to my mind that kind of active labor market policy is smart. It’s complicated, and it’s not what we have. We have kind of an industrial machine which probably worked in the industrial age, where you churn out kids to 10th grade or 12th grade and then there was a market for them. And that’s not working now. The second, I think, is very important, is Finland. A

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music heard but they don’t have much of an income. Russ: Yeah. But for people who love music or are intellectually curious, it’s a great time to be alive. Guest: I think that’s right. And I think for education we can have a boom of access. But it is going to be pretty disruptive.

ECONTALK (CIVILIZATION) FUTUROLOGY

wonderful book that I recommend is called Finnish Lessons, about Finland’s kind of self-realization that they were at the top of the world’s charts on these Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), international standards tests. And they don’t even test there. So they went into their own internal analysis: What did we do to get to the top of these standardized results when we don’t even have a culture of testing? The point there, which is almost at the other end of the extreme here—and I don’t want to oversimplify this but I think it is at the core—is that Finland as a homogeneous society with a tradition of social, socioeconomic, and religious homogeneity, has an incredibly strong ethic of equality. And the view—this educator, who was one of the lead education reformers in Finland, writes in this book, Finnish Lessons, is that the starting point is the idea that every kid in Finland needs a decent start and a decent education. They kind of worked backwards from that fundamental premise into the design of their schools, their school systems. They are strongly unionized, by the way; but their teachers are held in extremely high social repute. They are the esteemed members of society. But there was a real norm of equality. Now the United States has absolutely no such norm. We ran away from it, especially over the last 40 years. We have the most tracked differences, how rich families want their kids to be educated, and that’s largely in private schools; and how average families in the middle have their kids educated, are just completely different things. So we see that difference, but there’s a huge resource difference involved, and I think it’s really looking at how do kids of the top 1%, what kind of schools do they go to, how much does it cost to educate them, and so forth. What happens for the rest of society is completely different. But then I think there are obviously these very deep social realities in our country; but they are not just fate. They are partly our public response. The African-American community has been devastated, in my view, by the way we have engaged in the so-called ‘war on crime’, from the late 1960s onward. We’ve had an epidemic of incarceration unmatched in the entire world; and now we’re into the second and the third generation of kids growing up without fathers, and with 2 and a half million young people behind bars. It’s mind-bogglingly wrong headed, and it’s a big part of the problem that isn’t discussed. It’s also fueled by the worst incentives imaginable. We have privatized the prisons; and the prisons actually lobby for customers—customers that the state system gives them. And they are perfectly aware of what great business it is to lock up a kid because he’s been caught with a joint and to keep him behind bars for years. That’s business. And so every time we privatize something, we also create a lobby around it. That’s part of the political economy. And we also ought to think about that side of it as well. Russ: We did a podcast with Becky Pettit on many of those issues. I do think it’s more than that. I agree there’s some bad political economy there. We have a war on drugs that has

By privatizing prisons, it turns citizens into commodities; assets to be attained for wealth.

45:27

ECONTALK (CIVILIZATION)

Russ: Let’s move to the macroeconomics, because it’s an area that it would be nice to agree with you on. You’ve been very critical lately about an area you call ‘crude Keynesianism’—in particular the evaluation of stimulus spending of 2009 as well as the significance of deficits and the size of the national debt. And you’ve taken quite a bit of heat from some people who share your ideology overall but don’t like this. So, talk about what you mean by crude Keynesianism, why you think it’s wrong, and is there a Keynesianism you want to defend that’s not so crude. Guest: Well, since I start from the premise that we have deep, structural, long-term issues, my view of the role of government and public investment and the budget is about providing public goods as I understand them, and the things we’ve been talking about, whether it’s infrastructure or skills or research and development (R&D) for renewable energy to combat climate change. I want the government there to do the things that the private sector doesn’t do for all sorts of reasons. And view public economics as a benchmark for that. Now of course we could have a debate about every one of those things. We’ve discussed some of them. And I take, generally, a fairly expansive view of what I think government can and should do to address some of these deep structural issues. Where I part company with some, say, government-friendly advocates, is that, since I take a long-term and structural view of these problems, I don’t think that short term, aggregate demand management is really the point of most of what we face. And the 2008 financial crisis was for me kind of the epitome of this parting of the paths with a lot of people, because when the bubble burst, I said: Well, my view is that the housing bubble itself was a symptom, not a cause. Of course, it was a cause of the immediate cycle—Russ: A proximate cause. Guest: It was a proximate cause, but it was not a deep cause. I view Alan Greenspan as an endogenous politician, to a deeper set of issues; and I viewed the easy money policy of the Fed as an easy, unwise political response to soft labor markets in the early 2000s. Soft for deeper reasons that we’ve been discussing. So, pumping up the housing market I viewed as just an endogenous policy response, not a cause in and of itself. Not a prime mover

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been very expensive, with very little to show for it other than putting a lot of people in jail. Guest: Yeah, nothing to show for it, I would say. Russ: And enriching police bureaucracies and some other, as you say, profiteers, people who make money off the system, that’s not really accomplishing anything. But there’s also family structure issues that go beyond the African-American community that are correlated, I don’t know what the reason is, with low education. A lot of people growing up without two parents in the home, we have a culture that says that’s no big deal. At least a public culture. Whether that’s true or not I think is the great experiment we’ve embarked on over the last few decades, that’s tangled up with a lot of things we’re talking about.

ECONTALK (CIVILIZATION) FUTUROLOGY

of the crisis. But when President Obama came in and Larry Summers became his top adviser, and Paul Krugman, and others were rallying, they basically took the view, in my interpretation—which they don’t find very charitable—but I thought that they took the view: Let’s recreate the bubble. What do we know how to do? Well, we get people employed by construction. We get people employed by putting them back to work selling consumer products and so forth. I thought it was pretty unimaginative, because it didn’t ask the question: How did we get to 2008? They just said: Well, it’s a business cycle, and now that unemployment is high we have an aggregate demand problem and let’s stimulate the economy and put people back to work. And I was rather shocked actually, because Obama came in, of course with one of the great messes of modern times. And the budget deficit, because of the cyclical reasons, and the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) was already above a trillion dollars. And if I were in that position at that point, I would say: My God, I inherited more than a trillion dollar flow deficit, we’ve got huge challenges ahead; we’ve got to take some small steps to get this deficit down. We shouldn’t do large things because we do need a bit of automatic stabilizer right now, but let’s head in the direction of getting this deficit under control. But they did exactly the opposite. They doubled down on the deficit. We don’t know the counterfactuals, but maybe raising it from $1.2 trillion to $1.6 trillion, say, in 2009. I was shocked. Russ: And keeping it for a few years. Guest: And then every time there was an option to start moving it down, until recently—I know the White House view, because I was discussing it with them often, was: We need another year of stimulus. We need another temporary tax cut, another payroll tax cut, an extension of the Bush tax cuts, and so forth. None of which I agreed with because, you know, from my philosophy I wanted more revenues to fund public goods and at the same time to reduce the deficit because I think that this buildup of debt just builds up lots of problems in the future. Russ: Let’s talk about those. Because I think—well go ahead, you can finish. Guest: And the crude Keynesian part of it, in addition to what I regard as a misinterpretation of this crisis, just calling it an aggregate demand business cycle, basically, is two other things at least. One is the feeling that macroeconomics is just turning a dial, and fiscal policy has a multiplier on the spending side of 1.5 and on the tax side of 1, or whatever it is, and that’s good enough and those are reliable multipliers and we can count on them. And I just find that view wholly unpersuasive both on a theoretical and on an empirical basis. So I didn’t believe that those dials were there to turn. The second aspect of the crudeness of the Keynesianism was the constant dismissal of the harms of building up public debt. And of course that continues to this day. But this is part and parcel of Keynes’s famous quip, which I don’t think even he believed and it was just too good to pass up, probably—the one that ‘in the long run, we’re all dead.’ In

Guest: And I think Paul Krugman has really done a bit of a disservice by saying that the only test is whether we are going to have a financial market panic in the future. Russ: Right. I think that’s a bizarro standard for whether it’s a good idea or not. Guest: Exactly. Because the most basic

ECONTALK (CIVILIZATION)

55:57

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the not so distant future we are going to have a massive amount of debt on our books that is going to have to be serviced, and that’s going to create its own fiscal challenges; and since I’m so interested in public investment and public programs to solve problems, I just see that debt as crowding out things that are going to be important in the future. And for Paul Krugman to just blithely say, Don’t worry about it—as the public debt goes from 37% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 2007 to 75% of GDP today, and on his favorite trajectory would continue to grow into the 80-90% of GDP—I said: Come on, Paul! We’ve got things we need to do with government revenues other than servicing debt in the future. And that’s why I view that as quite odd and quite wrong-headed. Russ: Well, I think his response would be—he’d say two things. Well, he said two things. One would be: Well, look at Japan. They are way over that and they are not dying. And number two, interest rates—I hear this all the time, and it doesn’t make sense to me, but I’ll let you respond to it—are so low, it’s cheap, it’s almost free, it’s practically free; why are you worrying about it? Guest: Well, if we were financing a long term project at very low interest rates on a long term debt, I think there’s probably an argument there for certain kinds of investment programs. But if we are financing our general government budget deficit, taking pains by the way through public policy of the Fed to shorten the maturity of the public debt and at the same time with every reason to believe that interest rates will rise back to normal levels in the future when the Fed’s (Quantitative Easing) QE1, QE2, QE3, QEn policies finally stop, I think it’s just a matter of looking ahead a few years. And the Congressional Budget Office, (CBO) does look ahead a decade in its scenario and it says interest rates are likely to rise by the end of this decade from near zero today to maybe 4 or 5 percentage points on short term debt, on average high enough to drive the debt servicing from the current level of about 1.5% of GDP up to something like 3.3%, 3.4% of GDP early in the 2020s. Now, going up to 3.3, 3.4% of national income in debt servicing is not very attractive to me. Because that would mean on the current CBO baseline that we would be spending more on simply servicing the public debt than we’d be spending on the entire sum of civilian discretionary programs for jobs, for education, for infrastructure, for environment, for climate change, for science and technology. And I don’t want to do that. And since we all have Excel, we can make these calculations and say we don’t have to do that. We should be more restrained on our borrowing so that we don’t get into that trap ten years from now.

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point— Russ: It’s all free. Guest: Yes. The most basic point of intertemporal public economics is that you have to service your debt in the future. You don’t have a Bernie Madoff scheme at hand, you don’t have a Ponzi scheme at hand. You are going to have to service this stuff. And that’s going to require revenues and those revenues are going to face political resistance; they are going to crowd out other things; and they are going to be distortionary. So, just building up debt has a cost. If you are doing an optimal control to your budget, you have a shadow price to building up that debt, and if you do it in a more straightforward way, you have to pay for it. It’s not free. And a good metric is that you have to pay for it in present value and that means taking on a dollar of debt you are going to have to raise a dollar of revenues or cut a dollar of spending or do some combination of the two in the future. And you better think ahead about that and not be so blithe. Now, of course, there’s another voodoo side of this which is the voodoo left that in my view which is in my view no less or more meritorious than the voodoo right--which said, cut taxes; it pays for itself. Well, the voodoo left says: spend more money; it pays for itself. And to my mind these are both examples of profound wishful thinking that are naive, counter to experience, and invite abuse. And so I don’t like them on either side. Russ: They are both perpetual motion machines to an extent that promise something that is so deliciously seductive but doesn’t seem to materialize.

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58:03

Russ: One last comment on the Keynesian part and then we are going to have to close so I want to get some quick comments from you. You said that the stimulus story, the dials that you can’t turn because they are not there— I’m very sympathetic to that view, being a Hayekian. But you said also that the empirical evidence isn’t there. I’ve come to believe that it’s hard to assess the merits of these claims on either side, both the skeptics of these claims, like my own view, or the people who claim that they know what the multiplier is. The CBO can’t really measure what the effect of the stimulus is. They admit they can’t construct the counterfactual. We certainly are in a different regime of policy and financial sector stability. What’s your view on vulnerability? We can understand the connections between the dials, or the non-connections, and the rest of the economy. Guest: Well, first, we’re operating in a complex system so it’s not hard to see why we can’t understand these things with the precision that is sometimes pretended. Second, many people are confused by the frequent CBO reports that says the stimulus has created x million jobs. Russ: Those are lies. Guest: They don’t understand that what that is is simply running the CBO model. It’s not any outcomes at all. At all. But it gets quoted so frequently, and misunderstood. So I think it’s worth bearing in mind. Third, I would turn to the theory. The theory says that temporary tax cuts and transfers shouldn’t be expected to have much of an effect. And one

People need ot look beyond the surface.

1:02:34

ECONTALK (CIVILIZATION)

Russ: To close, how has this very dramatic economic set of events we are talking about, which have probably grown, and your appreciation and understanding of it has probably changed over time and gotten richer. But for many of us, myself particularly and I’d like to know if it’s true for you, this set of events forced us to think very differently about the way we think about economics. Has this changed for you? Are there lessons you’ve learned from the Crisis that you think are central, and do you think the profession has yet to learn? Guest: I don’t think the profession is in very good shape. And I think of course our profession is hard. In some ways, actually, although people will object to this, it’s harder than math and the natural sciences.

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of the things that I really disliked about the stimulus—and it’s many things that I disliked about it—was that it was overwhelmingly temporary tax cuts and transfer payments. Exactly the kind that even in theory you wouldn’t expect to have much of an effect. Because the theory says you should smooth that stuff. Getting a payroll tax cut for a year, it’s some kind of income, a tax cut for a year or two, that’s not going to do very much, and it shouldn’t do very much, for your spending decisions. So I think on a theoretical basis I was very skeptical. I thought the content of the stimulus was what you would expect to come out of a back room of a Congressional Committee, basically the Democratic side of a Congressional Committee, in six weeks. Which is nothing very sensible for the long term. So that was a third point of my skepticism. Fourth point was of course the forecast didn’t work. And as a Bayesian I take that as a sign that something is probably wrong in some of the linkages of this standard view. And what didn’t work was the idea that we would be back to low unemployment, small budget deficits, and rapid growth already by 2011, 2012. And so whatever the others say, their forecasts didn’t work. And they of course respond: Well, many other things intervened and if we hadn’t done this, of course the stimulus didn’t work exactly as we said it would but other things happened and that’s why we didn’t get the full effect. But I think that’s not a very persuasive argument, actually. Russ: It’s what Nassim Taleb calls the ‘narrative fallacy.’ He’s right. I just want to apologize—I said that the CBO estimates about the job creations were ‘lies.’ That’s not quite true. They are very honest about the fact that they just took their model and ran it again with the actual numbers of the stimulus amounts. They just took their forecast and re-ran it with the actual numbers and called that their estimate. Guest: What’s [?] though is how no news outlet—I shouldn’t say. The mainstream news just reported that straightforwardly. Russ: That’s the lie part. Guest: The stimulus created so many jobs. That’s shocking misunderstanding. Russ: That’s what I meant. When I said lies, it’s the pundits and news reports that took those as if they were something vaguely scientific.

ECONTALK (CIVILIZATION) FUTUROLOGY

Because we’re trying to take aim to understand not only a complex system, but a complex system that is changing over time. Whereas at least a cell biologist is basically looking at the same phenomenon year in, year out, decade in, decade out. And that cell, while it evolves very slowly, it doesn’t evolve at the same rate that the complex global economy does. So, my feeling is we’ve got a very hard job to do and we don’t do it well. And I think that this recent few years has exposed the shortcomings more and more. It’s led me to the view which I think I had, but I feel more strongly—that we really need to focus a lot more of our time and understanding on change: understanding long term, structural change. This is what makes our field hard, actually. If we were really in a stationary economy, meaning that the probability distributions were relatively unchanging over time, we’d figure this out. My view is that what makes this hard is not only the complexity, which makes statistical identification hard, counterfactuals hard; but what makes this especially hard is that the underpinning, the substrate of the economy is changing over time. So that our equations are never right. Because structure is the deepest part of our change over a period of ten or twenty years. And if we don’t understand that in a more substantive way, the idea that business cycles are just simply overlaid on this and we have a kind of stationary theory of business cycles is also wrong. At least since my interpretation is that we’re living in a mix of these two different temporal experiences—the longer term and the short term overlaid and interacting with each other. I love the field, this is my 41st year in economics, so that’s a lot, and I’ve not regretted one day of choosing this as my life’s work. But I wouldn’t say that we’re at a healthy moment as a profession right now, and we should take some lessons from this and figure out how to take a strong, theoretical set of ideas which are very, very good but don’t define the world because they define too many worlds, too many possibilities, and link them more adequately to evidence, and a richer set of evidence and a better way to do the empirical work. And I think that this latest episode in broad public view has really exposed a lot of the weaknesses of the profession as it is right now.

Kelly On The Future, Productivity, And The Quality Of Life

FUTUROLOGY

Kevin Kelly talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about measuring productivity in the internet age and recent claims that the U.S. economy has entered a prolonged period of stagnation. Then the conversation turns to the potential of robots to change the quality of our daily lives.

0:33:

ECONTALK (ROBOTS)

Intro. [Recording date: January 4, 2013.] Russ: Topic for today is a pair of recent essays you’ve written on productivity, technology in the future, and as always we’ll put links up to those essays, other topics. The first essay is called “The Post-Productive Economy.” You are reacting to an essay by Robert Gordon that’s titled “Is U.S. Economic Growth Over?” His answer is basically yes. He argues that the third industrial revolution hasn’t had much effect on productivity, or at least its effects are over. The first revolution was steam and railroads; the second, electricity and indoor plumbing and so on—they had huge effects. The third, computers, the web, cell phones, seems to be over, at least according to Gordon. Its heyday was the 1996-2004 period, and we should essentially settle in for stagnation. It’s a very interesting paper. He makes the point that growth is not the norm for humanity. Until about 1750 we were pretty stagnant. That stagnation seems to be the norm. He argues that many technology improvements have a one-time effect. Just to take one example, we can now travel 600 miles per hour in a steel tube called an airplane. Yes, it’s faster than a horse. But that number isn’t going to be increased much in the future, at least for a while. But you disagree with Gordon. You are more optimistic about the future. Why? Guest: For two reasons. I think Gordon underestimates the degree to which change has already happened. Secondly, by his own calculation, he says that it takes almost 100 years for these revolutions to play out their full effects, and we’re no where near 100 years into this third revolution—which, he describes it as being about computers and the internet. And thirdly, I think he is missing in his calculations the true nature of this third revolution which is far more about the communication aspect of it than it is about the computation aspect of it. And we are just at the beginning of that. And then

ECONTALK (ROBOTS) FUTUROLOGY

fourthly, I think his metric, or measuring the economic power is incorrect as applied to this new third revolution, because I think one of the things that is changing is actually how we measure our growth. So I think that the nature of the change, the nature of how we dictate our success, is changing. And he misses that, as well. Russ: Let’s start with the age effect. He, as you point out, starts his revolution of computers and technology of a recent sort in around 1960. Which I suppose is when the first computers start to come into the world. And your point is that that’s the wrong date. Why? Guest: Well, Gordon does not actually give a good reason or criterion for how he is deciding when these three revolutions start or even end. They seem to me to be kind of gut, intuitive, non-quantitatively determined. Russ: Well, they have to be. Guest: And so, he marks the third one as at the beginning of commercial computation. And my argument is that that’s probably not a very good place to begin for the third revolution. I agree with him that not much happened with computation alone. I think both the economic and particularly the cultural changes in these electronic gear began with the networking of these devices, from mainframe computers and personal computers and then mobile devices. And that all the kind of transformative effects that we’ve been seeing and feeling are really all due to what happens when you network them. And in a certain sense it’s the Networking Age, rather than the Computer Age, that we should be trying to look at. And if that’s so, then the real networking of things did not really begin in earnest until the 1990s. There was some—even internetting. But I know from having resided on the internets very early in the 1980s, it was pretty lonely. There was not much happening. So it was the 1990s really, when the Web began, that this stuff began to be felt. But even if you calculate it from the 1980s, that’s still 20 years later than when he was trying to calculate it, from the 1960s and the beginning of commercialization of computers. Russ: It’s been a classic measurement question in productivity numbers as to why—I don’t have the numbers at my finger tips but this is in the 1980s and 1990s, well before the networking part—why computing hadn’t had a large, measurable effect on the productivity numbers. Why we didn’t see a spike or at least some kind of large jump. There are a lot of different arguments about that; I’m not on top of that literature. But you are arguing that that maybe isn’t so surprising; that the real—and by the way, I should add, part of the reason I think that was raised is that a lot of corporations were spending a lot of money adding computing to their capital. And so people were saying: If they are spending all this money there must be some bang for the buck; Where is it? And of course, as you point out, some of that took a while. It took awhile to figure out how to use computers effectively in manufacturing and personnel management and other areas. Guest: Exactly. In fact, it was Robert Solow who made the quip that we see the effects of computers

Flexibility & adaptability!

9:50

ECONTALK (ROBOTS)

Russ: Just to take a personal example on this point on productivity—I’ve told this story before; forgive me, listeners, for retelling it. But I had my first personal computer in 1984, which was a Mac. And at the time, if my memory is right, it could only create a 12-page document. If you wanted to make a 20-page document, you had to combine two 10-page documents. Of course, it crashed; a little bomb would show up on the screen. You had to learn how to use it. And my Dad was a very happy user of a yellow pad and a pencil. And I’m sure he thought I was wasting my time learning to use this technology that really, you had to kind of talk yourself into that it was a time-saver. You had to say: well, if I want to do a second draft it’s easier. But it had all these huge costs. And my Dad—thank God he’s still alive at 83—is still using a yellow pad. He does have someone enter his essays and articles and letters into a computer. So he never got used to using a keyboard, even. And I know many people over the age of 75 who were in that world. They still use a pencil; they still use a yellow pad. Nothing wrong with it. It’s a very, very effective technology. And you could still argue that there are many time-wasting aspects to computers. But the productivity increases just for research alone have been so extraordinary. Obviously you can save time from traveling to the library, traveling out of your country—data, articles,

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everywhere but—Russ: in the data. And there was a fellow actually, a guy named Paul Strassman, who wrote a book called squandering computers. I don’t know if that was the name of the book—he was from Xerox and he was preaching, and I would say this was late 1980s, the fact that there was no economic case for all these companies spending huge amounts of money for computers, which were very expensive at the time. And it was hard to argue with his numbers. Because in fact there were large outlays for computers and it didn’t seem to really benefit the total economic case. And in fact I even remember doing an interview with Peter Drucker, who made the case in the early 1990s that from his perspective there had been no money made in the computer industry. He meant in terms of as being a net gain to the economy. And he made the point, too, that it would take a long time until there was a net gain in terms of the total amount of money spent and the total amount of difference made. So, I think that the facts are pretty clear that there wasn’t much to the gain in those years. And I see it more as kind of laying a foundation of change. And change not just in terms of having the hardware and the iron turned on, but a change in the way a company is structured. Just sort of preparing the way in which software would play a new role and communication would play a new role in the structure of an organization. So it was a type of investment if you want to think about it—Russ: Oh, for sure. Guest: in organizational change necessary; and it took a generation of economic or corporate lifespan to prepare for that.

ECONTALK (ROBOTS)

resources, references. So, that was a good investment by me, I think. Guest: Yeah. And there’s lots of these examples we can think of in real life and past life where you are required to invest into learning and during the learning curve you are not as efficient or graceful or accomplished. But at the other end of it—it’s like learning how to type or something. When you begin to learn to type you are going to be much slower than writing it out. But you can type faster than you can write, once you get good at it. Russ: I do have to concede to my Dad that the real reason I bought that computer was because I thought it was cool. It really wasn’t that I thought that in 2012 I’d be on the Internet. Guest: Right. But I’d like to come back to that, because I think that’s actually a very, very important point. And we can use different words for ‘cool.’ But I think that we often—a lot of our economy now is about cool things. Not just things that make you able to do things faster. 12:30

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Russ: Well, let’s turn to that, because that was one of your other criticisms of Gordon. I’ve forgotten 2 and 3, but 1 and 4, the last one being he doesn’t measure what necessarily we should be measuring. And one of those things—‘cool’ is I think the wrong word—‘exhilarating’, ‘inspiring.’ Talk about why you think productivity per se is the wrong measure to evaluate this revolution. Guest: Because—when I look at the long course of human endeavor and civilization, Gordon is correct that for a very long period of time, the growth in, say, living standards or progress, however we want to describe that, was actually very minimal for very long periods of time. Russ: Life was nasty, brutish, and short. Guest: Yeah. And for most of human history, for the bulk of it, people were starving. Or always hungry. This is the recurring theme throughout—Malthus was correct. The population would always kind of expand just to the point where people were on the edge, constantly. And it wasn’t until our greatest invention, the invention of science, the Enlightenment, and a whole network of other ideas, where we were able to actually solve that problem, of food, and in its surplus start to create new things. And we—beginning in the 1700s, 1600s, wherever you start to map that—there was a huge uptick in many things, including human population, which suddenly could really start to expand. And there was expansion of other things, and this kind of sense of accelerating change—in lifespan, education, literacy, economic wealth, all these kinds of things. And if we look at that on a centuries’ scale, it’s kind of peculiar, because there are things that are kind of coming out of nowhere. There is this generative, a generation of things that did not exist before. There’s huge amounts of money that now flow around. Where did that money come from? Basically it was created out of nothing. And so there is new things being created. And I think the purpose, in some sense, of what technology is for is to create new things. And by definition when we create something new, we don’t have very

18:45

What helped us prosper is also the thing that is creating a lot of problems for us, because of the incredible speed we growing at, our current infrastructure did not account for this rate of growth.

ECONTALK (ROBOTS)

Russ: The other way to think about it, that your example makes me think about, is entertainment. I was just re-watching Shakespeare in Love the other night, which is one of my favorite movies. And you think about England in Shakespeare’s time—what proportion of the population was involved in something called ‘giving other people a pleasant evening of just entertainment’? And the answer, I think, would be a few hundred. Those would be the actors, the people who worked on the stage. There wasn’t a lot of lighting, but whatever they did—curtain work and constructing and other

FUTUROLOGY

We have evolved into a commercial society where capital gain is prioritized over the common good.

good ways to measure those things—because they are new. And in a certain sense, if we want to just kind measure the newness of the economy, that’s also hard. Because if they are truly new, they may be served completely beyond anything of our experience, and we don’t have a good way to measure newness. So, what I’m suggesting is that being able to make things that we already know that we want with less time and less resources is part of the story. But it’s only part of the story. It’s not the whole story. It’s the basis of how we got started to begin with: we were able to grow more food with less time and less resources to make sure everybody had it. And that was the beginning of our prosperity. And it’s still the foundation of it. And new technology allows us to generate the things that we want using less time and less resources, and therefore less money. Leaving the surplus to do other things. What are those other things we want to do? In brief, it’s to invent new things. Russ: Yeah. Guest: So, inventing new things is really the real engine. And as productivity does continue, it means that the making of new things becomes a larger and larger part of what our civilization and economy is about. And yet, productivity, Gross Domestic Product (GDP), is only measuring the old part. Which is how to do things that we know how to do more efficiently. Well, as you say, we struggle to measure new things. The classic issue in GDP accounting is boring, equally important price indices, when we are trying to measure our standard of living and prices aren’t constant, is quality change. So, when quality improves we have trouble making comparable adjustments. For example, a TV today until recently is much cheaper than a TV of 60 years ago, where ‘cheap’ means: how long does the average person need to work—how many hours does the average person need to work—to earn one? But now a lot of TVs today, some of them are more expensive. And that’s because what they do is so extraordinarily different than what a 1960s black and white TV did. It’s not just, oh, it has more channels, it last longer, it takes fewer people to make it. It accesses things in your house and in the world that you couldn’t have imagined—literally couldn’t have imagined—in the 1960s. Guest: Another example would be a phone. What’s a phone now? It’s like not really a phone—it’s really different. Is a phone—are we being more productive in our making of a phone? Well, it’s a ridiculous question, actually.

ECONTALK (ROBOTS) FUTUROLOGY

things. There were a handful of people who could be playwrights in that time. And you compare it to how many people today. I mean, just look at the credits of a modern movie, and look at how many people worked, obscure to us and certainly people before modern times, but unless you are an expert or inside the industry you have no idea what these jobs are. The number of people who would be described in a perimeter of times as ‘unproductive.’ You call it, I think in your paper, as “wasteful.” But you put it in quotes. It’s not related to food, housing, and clothing. It’s just nice. It’s just cool, fun, exhilarating. It’s just beautiful. The proportion of people doing that in modern times is just enormous, vast. And I don’t think we are capturing that. Even though they are making a living. They are in GDP. As you point out: It’s hard to make that comparison when these are new things. Guest: Right, exactly. I’m a little hesitant to just talk about fun and beauty, but a term that’s maybe more in line with economics would be to use the words ‘to explore.’ And ‘to experiment.’ You can kind of recast art if you wanted to in terms of exploration and experiment, because those words also apply to both research and science. So, there’s a real typical dilemma in medicine which is that if you were rational you would only ever take the most perfected medicine that has been proven. But if everybody only ever accepted the proven methods, there would be no advance. So at some point you actually have to give an experimental drug or procedure to somebody, where there is no guarantee that this is going to work; there’s a very high risk; it’s not proven. And so that is inefficient in a certain sense. You are for sure going to lower your statistics on that one. Russ: Yep. Probably. Guest: But we pay that tax. We pay that penalty of decreasing the perfection, decreasing the optimization in order to have long term growth. And what I’m suggesting is that as we speed up, as we accelerate, that portion that we spend on the non-optimization is growing. And that in fact it is becoming more important to us. Because, optimization is really for machines. It really is something that mechanical things—it’s really not something that humans really want. We really don’t tend towards optimization. And I’m suggesting that whenever we have an optimization problem or something, we really send it to the machines and mechanical systems and leave us with this playfulness, experimental, exploration, art, beauty, all these other things that are non-optimizing. Russ: Well, let me ask you a difficult question, but I think it’s the right one. You may not be able to answer it but I’d like to hear what you think of it. Tyler Cowen, somewhat akin to Robert Gordon, has argued that we’re in the Great Stagnation, as he calls it; we’ve picked all the low-hanging fruit. And, similar to Gordon, we’ve dissipated and exhausted all the potential gains from this technology and now all we are doing is improving Flickr. Or allowing Flickr to give you a black background instead of just a white background. Those are the kind of technological improvements that we’re up to now. The smart phone is done.

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The internet is there. And all these gains have happened. So, my question is—again, somewhat unanswerable: What could we possibly imagine is yet to come in this revolution that will take it up another notch or two or three. Let’s forget whether it can be measured or not. One of the things that’s extraordinary to me about the world we live in is that it’s certainly true that 100 years ago people couldn’t imagine the things we’re doing now. And when you are talking about health—I imagine describing computer-driven laser surgery to someone 40, 50 years ago. It’s impossible. But what might happen in the next 50 years that we would think would be unimaginable? And that’s why it’s an unanswerable question. Where are we headed that might give us some of the amazing changes that we’ve seen in the past but yet are still to come? Guest: Let me address the stagnation question, which actually I have more sympathy for it in a certain sense than you might suspect. But maybe in a slightly different angle. I think it’s entirely—let me put it this way. I think if you calculate the number of hours, person-hours, hours worked, the number necessary to discover something new—that’s increasing. Like, if you go back in history it would be like Michael Faraday and Thomas Edison. These guys were going into the basement and discovering things every night. A lot of the kind of inventions and stuff done a couple hundred years ago were low-hanging fruits. Even things like discovering electrons and photo-voltaics, discovery was a low number of hours of investigation. If you look at a modern paper, the Higgs boson, something like that, the number of hours that has taken people to divine that mystery of the universe, it’s enormous. And I think, as we go forward, that we have in a certain sense reaped a lot of lowhanging fruit in terms of discovery, and it may be that the number of hours it will take to, say, understand gravity, discover the graviton or whatever, or anti-gravity, is going to be enormous. So there may be a sense in which what we are seeing is that the low hanging discoveries have been discovered and that it takes, like the credits on a movie film, it just takes an enormous number of hours and energy to discover the next thing. Russ: An army. Guest: Right. And I think it’s no coincidence if you look at the average number of authors in a science paper, it kind of continues to go up and up and up. And that’s in part also because we now have the tools, that allow that kind of cooperation, so they are working hand in hand. So, I’m sympathetic to the idea that there are low-hanging fruits. However, I haven’t read Tyler’s books, so I don’t know exactly what his arguments are. But responding again to Gordon’s paper and his arguments about the stagnation, and again come back to two reasons. Yes, we may have a temporary moment of stagnation as the next thing kicks into gear, and what is that next thing? What could possibly be greater than all the things we have already invented? I think, for myself, I think the answer is that we are making something at a global level that has not existed on this planet before, that is categorically different, that’s

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immense in power. And that is this, if you think of all the things in the world that are on the network, all the devices that are connected to each other, all the people in the world that are now part of a kind of a global culture and a global economy, and if we continue going in that direction we are making a planetary something that will have effects at the planetary scale. And global warming is sort of one bit of evidence—that already our technology is planetary. But it’s only one of many indices that will reveal themselves, that we are making this sort of planetary thing. With all the world economies interlocking, with information and processing all being kind of distributed in this cloud where we have kind of global citizens watching the same movies, listening to the same music, studying the same things in school, using the same devices. I think this is where we need to look for this amazing thing that’s going to start to emerge. 29:36

FUTUROLOGY

Russ: Well, I’m not as—I don’t know about that. That’s a hard sell. And of course it’s inherently speculative. I guess what I would think about is, we think of all the things that we enjoy day to day. We just did a recent episode with Esther Dyson on this issue of attention, and what we pay attention to. So many things that we pay attention to are not monetary. Again, a measure I think of our incredible wealth. But as that happens and as the tools for sharing change, I think the potential to create extraordinary things, it changes in a non-discrete way, in a quantum way. To take an example from my own life, I made this rap video about Keynes and Hayek with film-maker John Papola. And the two that have been made have been seen over 6 million times on Youtube. And I think about what it would have been to do that 20 years ago. Twenty years ago, 25 years ago, 15 years ago, we’d have made a video; we’d have put it on a DVD, and then we’d have tried to sell it in the back of magazines. Distribute it to schools. It just would have been— the scale of things has changed so dramatically and the ability of talented people, of which there are an almost infinite number, to bring their creativity to bear using technology to make videos, to make music—the things that move our souls—there’s never been a more creative time in human history. Guest: What’s interesting is that doesn’t even get counted in GDP, because you’re probably giving it away for free. Russ: Oh, absolutely. Guest: So that whole thing, the 6 million views, your creation of it, is not even registered. Russ: And just to give it a little bit of pretension—I mean, I don’t want to go too far—those two videos I hope don’t just add up to 17 and a half minutes of entertainment. They encourage people to learn about Keynes and Hayek and change what happened in some classrooms because kids watched it, talked to their teachers and fellow students about it. I think those changes, besides—again, I don’t want to downplay delight. I love delight. I think delight’s glorious and can be transcendent when it’s the right kind.

Hence, there is an increasing for us to be critical of our actions!

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Same applies for design!

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Russ: I want to shift gears here. I want to move to your second essay, which is related to the first. You wrote an essay for Wired called “Better than Human.” And you note that that’s not your title. One of the strange things about writing in print or for the web is often you don’t get to choose your own title. Everything else you get to write, but they write the title. For some reason. Evidently, you wouldn’t have chosen the phrase “Better than Human” to describe the future world of robots that are coming. But you start off in that essay by making an analogy to farming, an analogy

FUTUROLOGY

But I think the ability to get people to think and share ideas with others is just glorious. I’m not saying we’re going to cure cancer because of that, although I think we will. But there’s just a lot more stuff going on there that we can’t imagine. Guest: Right. And that was another point of my piece, in my argument against Gordon. I think often times those ideas that are generated through the use of technology will seep into the society at large and eventually will have an impact on the productivity of things, in a very indirect way, as they become established. Okay, you did a rap video about Keynes and Hayek. Well, that, sooner or later will flow down, be seen by millions and millions and have some impact on people’s approach to setting up policy in terms of funding. And it will eventually have some impact on productivity. Russ: Well, that’s a lovely thought. But I don’t know if that’s true, even a small effect. I think your other point is the more important point, which is: I don’t care if it has an impact on productivity. Right? Measured productivity, anyway. I think as economists we are not just accountants. Part of our job is accounting. But a lot of what you are talking about is intangible, non-measurable, and as you say, I think the key point is not just you get more from less. You get different. And different is the great thing we get because we can afford to get it. We don’t just want better food. We like it; we are going to get that; it’s already close to free. Poverty in the United States and in much of the world—unfortunately not all of it—the cost of food isn’t the problem. The problem is other things. And so, those revolutions, they have played out. It’s different, not just better or cheaper or more from less. Guest: Right. Exactly. And so measuring difference is extremely difficult because it’s new. I’m not an economists but what I would urge a young economist who is kind of interested in revolutionizing or understanding economics was to focus on how do you measure things that haven’t been measured before. How do you measure possibilities. How do you incorporate in that kind of infinite game of constantly heading into new territories as the measure of what you are aiming for. As the goal. That would be fabulous. Russ: Yeah. I encourage that as well. And I encourage equally, young economists out there to remember that not everything valuable can be quantified, and if you can’t ever measure it that doesn’t mean it’s not important.

ECONTALK (ROBOTS) Here it comes! Automation of labour!

FUTUROLOGY

I’ve also used. I think it’s a phenomenal analogy. You start off by saying: Imagine a world where 70% of us lose our jobs, and why is that relevant for farming? What’s the connection? Guest: In the first agricultural revolution in America, at the peak, 70% of Americans were living on farms. And now there’s less than 1%. So, all those farmers, over a long period of time, have lost their jobs. To talk to those farmers back then and try to console them, they would have found it very hard to believe that there was anything for them to do. Russ: They also would have presumed there would be mass starvation. If only 1%— Guest: Exactly. Right. How does this work? You are telling me a fantasy. They would be rolling their eyes and saying you are making this up. And you’d say: No, no, no; there’s less than a percent of you on the farms and we have more than enough food—we are too fat. And we are doing all these other things. So there would be great concern among themselves as to the improbability of having anything to do, of having work. And I’m saying: Well, 70% of everything that we’re doing now, all the jobs, people who are accountants and mortgage brokers and pharmacists and all these folks—those jobs are going to go away in the next whatever-it-is, the next 50, 90 years. Russ: And they are not just going to India and China. They are going away, period. Guest: Exactly. Right. In fact, there was a whole section of stuff I wrote that did not get in, but one of the points was outsourcing was just sort of the first step to robotization. So anything you could imagine being outsourced would eventually make it to the cheapest coolie labor, basically, that we could come up with. So, these jobs would be taken over by machines. Which, by the way, is exactly what happened to the farmers. It’s not that farming went to India and China. It’s that the farming went to robots. We mechanicasized it. We invented all these machines that are almost robotic and becoming more so every year, including ones that now self-drive. They go up and down the fields and there’s nobody driving them. I mean, they are robots, computers driving them. In fact some of the last remaining hand parts of those picking strawberries are also, there are now robots that are very close to being commercially placed, the pickers. So that metaphor, the parallel of the unthinkable happening to farmers is going to happen to us. And it’s just as unthinkable to people today as it would have been to the farmers of a century and a half ago. Russ: And so an example in my world would be teaching. It’s not obvious that 50 years or 10 years that there should be—there might be for political reasons—but there should be teachers. Maybe. I think there probably will be teachers. Guest: There will be teachers, but fewer in number. And again, farmers have not disappeared. The numbers have. There are people who call themselves farmers. There will be people who call themselves teachers. But there may not be as many of them. Russ: And they will be doing very different things than a teacher of today does. Because of the opportunity to learn online and share knowledge

How will graphic designers stay relevant and prevent their jobs from being replaced by machines?

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DIY culture is great but we need to understand the perils of DIY.

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Russ: But anyway, let’s talk more about robots. There were a lot of changes in robotics recently that give us a little taste of how that world could change in our lifetime. What’s happening? Guest: The main thing that’s happening is that a number of technological advances in perception, cameras, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and stepper motors and things like that, have converged to make a personal robot possible. And a personal robot is a robot basically that anybody can program and instruct. The situation in the world right now is that most of the robots are industrial robots. They are extremely expensive, and they require basically a Ph.D. to train and program. And so this is very akin to the mainframe computer of old, which was big, bulky, and you had to wait in line to give it your instructions in batch mode, and you couldn’t change it while it was running. Russ: And you had to be a specialist— Guest: You had to be a specialist to talk to it. And if you were someone who used it, this person was kind of a priest in between you and it. The personal robot is the equivalent of the personal computer, the PC, which is that it is affordable generally to anybody. You can do it. And also, like the PC, it will be considered a toy at first. It seems toy-like in terms of its capabilities. It’s not very precise. It’s very limited. And there is a sense to dismiss it, like the early PCs, as: What are you going to do with this? Russ: Yeah, like my 12-

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from the best teachers. Going back to my earlier point, it’s possible to imagine that a handful of the best teachers will do all the teaching. Just like, as Nassim Taleb pointed out in one of his books, a handful of singers sell all the albums. In the old days you could make a living as a singer because that’s how you got music. You had to go down to your local hall to hear the best music in your neighborhood. That’s not true any more. I hope that will happen in teaching. I hope that the world’s best teachers will teach millions rather than 30. Guest: But let me just stop there because I think the essence is a little bit incorrect. Yes, there is this head of the curve where a few people are selling lots of the hits. However, you go on Youtube, how many people are actually singing and have an audience? More than ever. Russ: True. Guest: And I think this is what will happen with teaching, is that yes, the kind of professional teachers become few and they do a lot of the head; but you have the long tail teaching in which we see this happening, again, in people doing Youtube tutorials. I am just astounded about what you can learn or see on how to learn something, how easy it is, and how quickly the next generation is going to the web and places like Youtube to be taught. Whether it’s something academic, like how to square a circle or something, or how to finger a piano piece. That’s where they are going to learn. And so in a sense, teacher duties are distributed widely to the long tail. Russ: Yeah, great point. Totally agree. I’m talking about the urge to hear the greatest voice. It can now be delivered via Youtube, for example.

ECONTALK (ROBOTS) FUTUROLOGY

page Mac. Guest: Exactly, right. And so, but, what happens is, like the PCs, yeah, they were kind of toy-like; but they were getting twice as good every year and half as cheap. And so in a decade you have this amazing thing. And this is what’s going to happen with the personal robot. At first, it will be the equivalent of putting your recipes on it, like you did the PC. There will be people who are mostly in small businesses who want to pack up boxes or fairly limited kinds of things like assembling parts. Doing very, very specified repetitious things. But they’ll be able to do them at a price that’s cheaper than hiring a person. And not just a person in the United States but even an outsourced person. And so, we have Foxconn which now makes all the Apple products. One of the largest employers in China, with a million plus employees. Who are becoming a little unhappy and restless with their jobs; and Foxconn says: We’re going to buy 1 million workbots in the next couple of years. And basically to do all the jobs that even the Chinese migrant workers don’t want to do. The reason why I mention that is that basically this means that these robots will be cheaper than even Chinese and Asian laborers. Russ: Well, just like they are now. There’s a lot of robotic assembly, mechanized assembly, in China relative to 25 years ago. I remember talking to someone who outsourced sweaters from China, and 25 years ago a factory in China was a bunch of women with knitting needles. That was a sweater factory. That’s not what Chinese sweater factories look like these days. Guest: No. Right now, all the manufacturing, it’s mostly assembling that’s being done. And one of the reasons that’s been slow to roboticize is that it changes. It’s flexibility. And this is what these personal robots are going to shine in—the way you program them is you either stand in front of them and show them what you want done, or you move their arms, showing them what you want done. It’s kind of a show-and-tell rather than programming language. And that makes it very fast to change what they are doing, to shift them around, to give them a small job where they work for a few hours and then you tell them something different. And that’s what humans—Russ: we’re good at that. Guest: We’re really great at that. Russ: Wash the dishes. Rake the leaves. Guest: Yeah, exactly. It’ll be a long time before you have household personal robots. But maybe not as long as we’re thinking. Just in the same sense as how long was it since the first Altair or Commodore to the iPhone. That was maybe a couple of decades. And that would not have even been perceived as possible back in the 1970s and 1980s. So, that, though, is— we think of physical things but what I want to emphasize in this revolution is—there are robots and there are bots, and bots are kind of software things that are AI-ish— Russ: Artificial Intelligence—Guest: that are going to be doing many of the jobs that people sitting in front of computers are doing today. And so it’s not just the factory workers or even the farm workers that are going to have their current jobs replaced by this, but even people who are

48:29

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Russ: So, I have to fight off the urge to think about Sleeper, Woody Allen’s movie. Put that movie to the side, mentally. And I want to ask a scary question which came up in a podcast I did with Robin Hanson, which is a reference to the singularity, the possibility that artificial intelligence will advance so far that essentially there will be nothing that we can do better than robots. Whatever that means—robots, it will be more than things we just think of as robots. That will be, as you say, there will be graphic design done by robots; it won’t just be robots sitting at a computer manipulating the mouse. It will be something unimaginable. And that therefore there’s going to be nothing left for us to do well. Except for the people who know how to design and improve robots, they’ll live well; but the rest of us will struggle and we’ll be a dime a dozen, or a dime a million. And as a result—his vision of the future is fairly bleak. Even worse than Robert Gordon’s, I would say. And he’s not alone. There are a number of people who are worried about machines, artificial intelligence, technology “taking over the world.” And my view--and I want to get yours--but I want to get mine down because when I talked to Robin Hanson he pushed the view that we are just chemicals and it’s just a matter of time before all the chemicals get figured out. And I just, having done some reading since then I don’t think that’s a universally held opinion. But I guess, to give his view its due, a robot, artificial intelligence, will eventually create a cleverer and more beautiful version of the Keynes-Hayek rap videos that I did with John Papola. And all these creative things that we think, that’s going to be our specialty--that’s going to be gone. So, are you worried about that? Guest: No, I’m not. My reasons may be a little complicated but let me see if I can state it briefly. Russ: Take your time. Guest: The basis of my non-worry comes from the fact that I think the idea of universal computation is a myth. And by universal computation is the belief that starting with the mathematical idea called Turing-Church hypothesis, which says any computation is equivalent to any other computation. The full version of that is: Any computation is equivalent to any other computation given infinite time and space. Russ: Slightly different. Guest: And the problem is in the real world all computation is finite. Bound by time and space. Which kind of comes to the point that the matrix, the substrate, the foundation that you do your computation on matters. And that means that the kind of intelligence that you’ll get when it’s based on silicon, even if you are trying to do an emulation of the kind of computation that happens on wetware— Russ: That’s you and me. Guest: That’s you and me. Because of the fact that you

FUTUROLOGY

sitting in front of computers. And things like Siri, we get the voice activation thing inside of an iPhone, or Google spoken software, these are kind of hints at how fast these are going to accelerate as these things get half as good and twice as cheap every year.

ECONTALK (ROBOTS) FUTUROLOGY

want this in real time, is not going to be the same. And so what that means is that intelligence is not a single dimension. It’s multi-dimension. There are many, many different ways in which you can be smart. And not just you. Your calculator is smarter than you right now in arithmetic. It doesn’t freak you out just because it’s a different kind of intelligence. And so what we are going to do is, there is really almost no reason to make human-like intelligence because we can do it so easily in 9 months. Untrained workforce. Russ: Yeah. Guest: What we want—this comes back to differences. What we want is to think different. We want different kinds of thinking. And the whole point of the AIs that we are going to be making is they are going to be thinking differently. And that’s tremendously valuable, because lots of things also puzzles and mysteries we are going to figure out may not be solved with only human intelligence. We may need other kinds of thinking to get there. And so what will happen is we may fill the world with a million different species of intelligence, some of them vastly superior to us in that dimension. But humans will have an unimitable type of intelligence. And we, being humans, will really like that kind of stuff. So we will continue to amuse ourselves with this type of intelligence. And so I’m not worried about our place when there’s a million other kinds of intelligences. Because I think that we will still find our own kind valuable to ourselves. And reward it. And we’ll find the other ways of thinking to be extremely valuable and we’ll continue to make and invent new kinds of intelligences, including those that are super-intelligent in that direction. Russ: I suppose the pessimistic view is that—well it starts with chess. First, early computers couldn’t beat a person, and now it’s very hard. They are really good at it. They will soon, maybe they already have—not my specialty—but the best computer will easily beat the best human being in chess. And you could say: Well, chess is not important. It’s not; I don’t think it’s is. It’s nice but it’s not important. But soon then they’ll be better at poetry and symphonies and music and movies. And there’ll be nothing left for us. So, you don’t think that’s going to happen. Guest: Well, no, I think it is happening. I think we are constantly redefining what humans are good at. Well, humans play chess. Well now we saw humans don’t play chess. They play checkers. They play Jeopardy. Oh, well, that’s not really bad. So I think we are really onto a whole century of identity crisis at the species level, of well: What are we good at? But and so I think this is going to be a long-term, painful identity crisis, where we kind of keep saying: Well, what are we really good at? I’m not saying it’s necessarily going to be happy the whole way, because I think this is painful. I’m just saying that the robots are not going to take over and kill us all and turn us into slaves. Or batteries, like in The Matrix. I think that what we are going to be doing is like anybody else. When you are growing up you spend an awful lot of your 20s and your teenage years trying to figure out: What am I

There has never been a time more important than now to start differentiating ourselves from one another. What makes you unique?

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good at? What is truly mine and mine distinctively? And it usually takes your whole life to finally come to that. It’s not an easy journey. But I think you’ll get there. And I think the same thing is happening to us as a species. We are saying: Oh my gosh, we thought that we were a chess playing, Jeopardy playing, checkers playing species. But it turns out that actually that’s really not our movie. We’re something else and it’s going to take us maybe a century to maybe come up to a better idea of what humans are good for. Russ: Well, there’s one issue about what our standard of living is going to be in this world. The other issue is what is going to give our lives meaning. I think a lot of us find our meaning in our work. We find it in our family, in our religion, in our play. We find it in lots of ways. I think there are different dystopias that come out of this vision—utopias. But the dystopia is: We’ll be so rich that we’ll just sit around and surf the web all day. And that may be a very depressing existence. It may be a very fat existence, in terms of calories available and how much we have to work. But I think the other challenge will be where we get our meaning from. Guest: Well, actually I propose a place for that meaning in my book, What Technology Wants, and I am suggesting that the meaning will come from understanding that what technology is is an extension of the same self-organizing life force that runs through life and actually began at the Big Bang, at the beginning of the universe. And what it’s moving us towards in all things is towards increasing possibilities and options. And when we make stuff, invent new things, with technology, we are participating in that long arc that runs through the universe and out and beyond us of increasing options, freedoms, choices, and possibilities. And that that actually can give us some meaning in our lives.

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ECONTALK (FUTURE OF WORK) FUTUROLOGY

David Autor On The Future Of Work & Polanyi’s Paradox David Autor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the future of work and the role that automation and smart machines might play in the workforce. Autor stresses the importance of Michael Polanyi’s insight that many of the things we know and understand cannot be easily written down or communicated. Those kinds of tacit knowledge will be difficult for smart machines to access and use. In addition, Autor argues that fundamentally, the gains from machine productivity will accrue to humans. The conversation closes with a discussion of the distributional implications of a world with a vastly larger role for smart machines.

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Intro. [Recording date: September 18, 2014.] Russ: I want to start by saying this is an extremely interesting and provocative paper packed with ideas and analysis but still accessible for the most part to a nonspecialist. We’ll put a link up to it and I encourage listeners to check it out after listening to the conversation. I also want to say that this is one of many episodes of EconTalk where we look at the threat and opportunity posed by the increasing role of computers and smart machines in our economy. And I want to let people know that more are coming. So, enjoy. David, let’s start with Polanyi’s Paradox. What is that and why is it relevant? Guest: So, Michael Polanyi is a Hungarian philosopher and scientist. And he wrote a book—I believe it was published in 1961—called The Tacit Dimension, in which he sort of expressed or articulated the importance of tacit knowledge in human behavior. The quotation I give in the paper is “We know more than we can tell.” And then he goes on to give an example of the skill of a bicyclist or an automobile driver cannot be simply articulated in words. Or more concretely, I could give you a day-long lecture on how to ride a bicycle; at the end of the day you wouldn’t know how to ride a bicycle without having ridden one. And the point that Polanyi was making is that there are many things that we tacitly understand how to do or are capable of doing that we do not explicitly understand how to do and cannot articulate in terms of a procedure. So, riding a bicycle would be one example, but there are many, many others. We

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don’t know the procedure for coming up with a new hypothesis or for making a persuasive argument or for that matter for recognizing people from a distance or even recognizing someone as they grow up that you haven’t seen in 15 years and they’ve changed greatly—how do you know that’s the same person? Or how do you choose the sort of locomotive path to navigate along, up a steep hill, a rocky surface, and catch your falls in real time. These are all things that we do as onboard equipment. Or another great example would be interpreting the nuances of spoken language, more than just the words individually. All the things we know how to do, they are sort of built in, part of our hardware; but we don’t know how to accomplish them explicitly. We don’t know how to write procedures or describe the rules for doing those tasks. And so the point of this paper is, that makes an extreme challenge for computerization, for automation. That automation primarily works on taking the explicit procedure that we already do and codifying those steps so that a machine can do it in our place. So, when we have a computer program that does calculations or sorts through files or searches for words or helps us lay out a circuit board if you’re a CAD (Computer-aided design) user, it’s following a set of codified explicit procedures that we already understood and now we have laid out the steps. But hard to do that if we don’t actually know the procedure for the thing that we’re accomplishing. Russ: One of the things—I think I’ve probably told this story before, but one of the most beautiful and inspiring and moving videos I’ve ever seen is one that looks at Andrew Wiles’s attempt, and finally successful attempt, to solve Fermat’s Last Theorem. He had had this proof of the theorem that was knocked down. But for a while he was celebrated as one of the greatest mathematicians of all time. He must have been exhilarated for a while. And then it turned out: the proof’s not right. And then he spent a rather horrible set of time, as you might expect, trying to resurrect that proof. And he couldn’t. And to hear him talk about it, he says—and then one day, one day, I looked up or I put my head down and I looked up and he saw how to solve it again. And he can’t explain what happened there. He has no idea of that intuition, that aha, that eureka moment. To me it’s one of the most beautiful, mysterious parts of the human enterprise. Of course computer scientists wonder and philosophers wonder whether it’s just a matter of time before we understand that process. You want to weigh in on that? Guest: Yes, absolutely. First, that’s a great example you just gave. And let me emphasize that this paradox—the paradox being that we do things that we don’t know how to do—applies as much to the mundane as to the sublime. It applies as much to proving a century-old mathematical challenge—that’s one example. But something as simple as walking up a flight of stairs or looking at a garbled piece of text and figuring out what it says, which is of course what you do with these CAPTCHAs (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) all the

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time. Russ: Or empathy. When someone walks into a room who has had a bad day and you recognize they need a little affection or kindness or a cold drink. Guest: Right. That’s right. So, both of these things require, draw on a set of capabilities that we possess, but they are not in the kind of accessible, analytical, procedural set of steps that we would use to have a machine do the same thing. In terms of our ability to get those things, or to automate those things—clearly, we’ve made progress on automating many things that initially seemed extremely challenging. So, people actually initially thought, like, teaching a computer to play chess would be just an extremely hard problem because we know that chess masters are geniuses, etc. And as it turned out, actually, that problem was solved relatively quickly. And now, any inexpensive chess-playing computer piece of software can pretty much beat the world’s best chess players. And in fact this observation that many things that initially appeared hard turn out to be simple, and things that appear simple turn out to be hard, has a name. It’s called Moravec’s Paradox. And many things that—artificial intelligence thought it would be easy to have robotic servants that would, you know, empty your dishwasher— Russ: See Sleeper by Woody Allen. Guest: Exactly. That’s right. But it would be hard to get the computer to play chess. Actually the opposite has turned out to be true. And there are two reasons, or two—so, there are two reasons why we’ve gotten good at some of these things and not others. One is that it turns out that there’s a well-known procedure that you could use. So you could algorithmatize how to play chess and find the optimal solution for problems. You could write that out as a set of equations. Now that’s not true for chess, actually. Chess doesn’t have a sort of closed-form solution. There is no one dominant strategy in chess that anyone knows about. But instead what computers do is they use a lot of processing power to basically iterate through multiple steps, multiple levels of moves, and choose after calculating many thousands or hundreds of thousands of possible sequences of boards, they then choose what appears to be the best strategy, given that kind of forward looking search. And they may also do some kind of database lookup of prior games. What computers do when playing chess is probably pretty different from what Grand Masters do, in the sense that they are using the kind of comparative advantage of computation in doing lots and lots of quick calculations and storing the information accurately. Whereas chess Grand Masters are probably much more likely to be using a kind of mixture of intuition and recall of previous games—Russ: Pattern recognition. Guest: Exactly. Russ: Elegance. Guest: Yeah. So the question is: Will we get better at all these other things the same way we got better at chess? And I think the answer is: Probably in the long run. Very few people doubt that in the long run, over 10 years or 20 years or more likely 30 or 40 or 50 years, many of these problems will make substantial progress. It’s more a question of a). how

Some people call it “brute force.”

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Russ: Talk about the driverless car. Which we’ve talked about a number of times on the program. There’s a really beautiful de-romanticization of it in your paper. Guest: Okay, good. So I lay out two sort of central strategies for dealing with what I call in the paper nonroutine problems—problems that we don’t know the explicit procedures. One of those strategies is what I call environmental control. Environmental control means simplifying the environment so that something that is far less flexible than a human being can manage in that environment. So, you know, just a very literally concrete example: If you think about modern automobiles, they are reliable, they are fast, they are safe. They are extremely competent. And yet, actually they require smooth, even surfaces with shallow grades and turns that are not too tight. Something that would never occur in nature. And so, what do we do? We change the environment to make it car-compatible. So, it’s estimated that an area the size of Ohio in the United States is covered by impermeable surfaces, most of which are roads. So that’s why I said, a ‘concrete’ example. So, environmental adaptation is applied in lots of areas. Assembly lines, basically make things very predictable and consistent; that’s why it’s easier to use robotics, robots in an assembly line, where there’s a very narrow scope of activity, than in an uncontrolled home or work environment. Russ: [?] Guest: Exactly. So, I make the point in the paper that actually this environmental control is also applied very frequently to computerization problems—that you basically make the environment predictable in a way that allows machines to adapt to it. And the example I give, of the Google car, is: Many people think of the Google car as being flexible, like a human driver, right? Russ: Smart. Guest: It goes—yes, smart. And it is smart, in a way. But it’s not—if you were to put the Google car in a—just drop it down in the middle of a city, it had not been prepared for—and I’ll explain in a second what prepared means--it would have to stop. It cannot in real time recognize a road, figure out where the traffic lights are and the stop signs, determine what the routing is, determine what the speed limits are, and so on. It’s not that adaptable in real time. Instead, the Google engineers basically go through their mapping software and then hand-curate the maps on which the Google car, for the roads the Google car will navigate, identifying all the stop signs, all the traffic lights, all the routing and speed limits. The Google car still has to be adaptive in the sense it has to, you know, recognize objects in its way—other vehicles, pedestrians. It needs to tell whether a light is red

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long it will take, how hard the challenges, and b). how we’ll do it. Will we actually have machines that will do what we do, in terms of having intuition or figuring out problems in this kind of nonprocedural—as far as we know— way? Or will they in fact, will we recast the problems or recast the technologies so they do it very differently from what we do and yet still successfully.

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or green. Etc. But it doesn’t have to figure out the entire environment in real time; and in fact if it encounters a substantial deviation from the environment it’s anticipating, it needs to stop. So, if there’s a signal man in the road—so if there’s changing the traffic routing—at that point the Google car has to seek control to the human driver. It’s not that adaptive. So, what I think, the paper somewhat is a little unfair: Although the Google car appears as flexible as a human being, in some sense it’s more like a train driving on invisible tracks. Now, that’s a little bit of an overstatement, because of course a train doesn’t recognize pedestrians and cars and come to a stop. And a train can’t swerve out of the way. But nevertheless the Google car is, the tracks are sometimes laid out for it, and then it needs to only react to deviations from the tracks it hopes to be driving on—obstacles in it’s way. Russ: Yeah. It’s a fascinating example. I guess the question is: As our knowledge advances of the brain, are there going to be limits? Now most—Robin Hanson on this program, long, long time ago, basically said, ‘you know’—and a lot of people agree with him—’it’s just chemistry; just a matter of time before we figure it out.’ And that might be 10, it might be 20, as you said, might be 50 years. The real question is: Is it going to be possible to ever understand what that Grand Master is doing, what Andrew Wiles is doing, through a chemical analysis of what’s going on in the brain? I don’t know—it’s an unanswerable question— Guest: Yeah. I don’t think the answer will be through a chemical analysis. I mean, in the sense that, even if you thought, you said, I’m going to understand what a computer does through an analysis of silicon. Russ: Yeah, exactly. Guest: Right? That wouldn’t actually be informative. Because it’s actually about information. It’s about symbolic processing. Right? So, the physical structure is actually somewhat divorced from the kind of meta-informationprocessing structure. That doesn’t mean the brain can’t be understood. I just don’t think that a chemistry set is going to do it. It’s really understanding— yeah.

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Russ: No, I think that’s exactly right. And I think what’s fascinating about all these examples—and we’re going to get into this a little bit more and then we are going to turn actually to data rather than speculation, which is probably a good idea. But what’s fascinating to me is going back to a recent EconTalk episode with Paul Pfleiderer, where he talked about the tendency of economists to employ the Milton Friedman ‘as-if’ hypothesis. So, we don’t know what managers really do. Or we don’t pay attention, actually to what they really do. We posit something. And then we say, it’s as if they do it this way. And I think we’re doing this with this smart machine stuff. We are saying: Well, we don’t know what a Grand Master does playing chess. But I’m going to act as if it’s what the computer’s doing when it sifts through thousands and thousands of different opportunities. But that’s not what

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the Grand Master’s doing. It may be somewhat predictive of what a Grand Master might do most of the time. It’s not the same thing. You can’t then go the other way and say, So we could just develop a computer, then; since we can develop a computer that acts as if it’s a Grand Master, then we can develop a computer that is a Grand Master. They’re not the same thing. Guest: Yeah. There’s a big debate. You know. There have been many decades of setbacks and some successes in artificial intelligence (AI). And there’s a lot of debate among our artificial intelligence researchers about how you should go about trying to master human activities with machinery. So, one school of thought is we need to learn from biology itself. That basically, if you look at the way the human brain recognizes objects—visual recognition starts about two cells back in the eye. It’s not like it’s just a data receptor call and then it goes to a central processor. There’s a whole mechanism that’s sort of built in for pattern recognition that is sort of fundamental to the hardware itself. And so some people think we have to learn from the example of how biology does it. Others say: No, no; actually all we need to do is have a conceptual model of the world, and then the machinery, based on the conceptual models, can process the information it receives and figure out what’s what. It doesn’t have to look, doesn’t have to work—an airplane doesn’t have to flap its wings to fly. And then there’s a third school of thought--and there’s many variants in between--that says: We don’t need to do any of that stuff; we just need machines to learn to behave like us by basically learning from the world. So the idea of machine learning— Russ: Talk about that. Guest: So machine learning is the idea—so Polanyi’s Paradox is we know what we can tell; we do things but we don’t know how we do them so we can’t explain them. This gives rise to the idea of machine learning: instead of trying to write down the procedure that we don’t understand for doing something, why don’t we have the machine, a machine, that looks at examples, correct and incorrect answers, and then infers what is the procedure or a set of statistical connections that makes that the right answer. This is—a kind of iconic or at least highly discussed example was the Google cat recognition software, hardware thing—came from Google X Labs and it used 16,000 processors to parse through a database of millions of pictures of things that were cats and were not cats. And without any specific model except being told this has a picture of cat, this doesn’t, and circles the cat. It would then attempt to look at new pictures where the cat was not circled and say: Which of these photographs or drawings contains a cat? And it was—if you look at the pictures which it recognized—one example is included in my paper—it’s pretty good at mostly, it recognized a bunch of cats. One thing it viewed as very likely to be a cat turns out to be a pair of coffee cups next to one another. Russ: And coffee cups don’t need a litter box. Okay. Guest: That’s right. So, what is it doing? It’s basically—it has no model in mind of the world. It

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doesn’t say, a cat is a feline, is a biological organism with four legs, etc. It just says, here’s pictures of things that you’ve told me are a cat, and I’m going to look at their statistical properties and then try to predict or infer in other pictures what else might be a cat that fits that description in some sense. The description you haven’t given me but only just shown me examples. So, that’s what someone would call a scorcher or brute force approach to learning. Russ: Big data. Guest: It’s a big data approach. And it also has strengths and limitations. Strength of course is it requires only processing power. It doesn’t necessarily require a huge amount of analytical infrastructure to build a model to teach about thinking about a cat. Its disadvantage is it may be fairly brittle and not very general in the sense that without reasoning about what the object is or the thing you are trying to recognize, you could get things that would be statistically unlikely and yet clearly incorrect. So, like the coffee cups. And that no human, no 4-year old kid would make that error, would look at that picture and say—even a kid with 16,000 processors would look at that picture and say, oh, those coffee cups are cats. They would see the difference. Perhaps the reason they would see the difference is because their reasoning about what makes a cat is much more sophisticated than the simple statistical features. Someone who understood a cat as an animal would say, well, it has to be an organic creature. What would be [?] being organic? Well, it wouldn’t have a smooth ceramic surface. But of course that’s a step, many, many more steps down the line of reasoning than simple recognition. It requires some knowledge of what the object is in the world. Which is a much harder problem. So, I give the example in the paper—in fact I’m quoting from a paper in the computer science community called “What Is a Chair?” And it talks about the difficulty of teaching a machine to recognize a chair. Because chairs come in a huge variety of sizes—not just sizes, features. For example, does it have to have a back to be a chair? Well, no, of course not; we know there are backless chairs. But then how do you distinguish a chair from a table? Well, you’d have to sort of look at the dimensions and sort of thing about: does it look more table-like or chair-like? What does that mean? And then—the example given in this paper that I quote in my article is: If you looked at a traffic cone and a toilet seat, you would say, well, they both look somewhat chair-like. They have a base; they have a top. Russ: Height’s about right. Guest: Yeah, exactly. However, if you reasoned about human anatomy, you might think to yourself, well, a traffic cone wouldn’t be that comfortable to sit on. So probably that’s not a chair. That requires reasoning about what the object is for, not simply what physical features it has in a very basic sense. So that’s a harder problem. So there’s a divide in the computer science community--not a civil war, but a divide: Can we just do this by brute force—i.e., pattern recognition? Or does that in some sense, what I heard someone say, one of my MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

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Russ: So, let’s move into the less speculative part of this issue, which is: Regardless of where we are going to end up—which is an interesting question to discuss, and that’s what we’ve been discussing in this opening—regardless of where we end up, it’s clear that computers have done a lot of substituting for some human tasks, because computers do it well and do it cheaply. And this has people worried that even if all the jobs aren’t going to be eliminated, many or most of them will. We have computers diagnosing cancer, replacing potential high-paid doctors. We have computers doing all kinds of things they couldn’t do 5 years ago, 10 years ago, certainly 20 years ago. So let’s look at the impact of this so far. And you point out in the paper of course, this is very old worry, that technology is going to replace human employment. I just find it fascinating that the world right now kind of divides among pundits and even some economists: Well, people have always worried about it before, but they’ve always been wrong. Technology has been good for human beings; it’s created other kinds of jobs at the same time. And the second view that says: This time’s different, because this is going to get rid of all the jobs. Or almost all the jobs. So tell us what we know about what’s actually happened, because there’s some very interesting patterns. And you’re the only person I know of who has actually looked at what’s going on and at a more micro-granular level. Guest: Well, many people at Google have worked on this at this point. But, let me sort of make three points. One, there is a long history of concern about the impact of automation on employment. The most famous example that people give is the Luddites, who were 19th century weavers who rose up against the power frame, the power frame loom, because they were afraid that it would it would reduce employment and earnings. And they very well may have been right for themselves. Because it did take scarce artisanal skills and basically substitute them with basically machines and children doing those jobs. In the long run, of course it didn’t reduce employment. But it probably had significant distributional consequences. But more recently I don’t think most people are aware of this: This concern, again, arose in the early 1960s under the Johnson Administration. And there was a Commission set up to investigate the productivity problem. And the productivity problem was that productivity was growing too fast. And the concern was that would mean there wouldn’t be enough jobs. And in fact the U.S. Department of the

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colleagues is: Well, it gets it right on average and misses all the important cases. So, I think there is a great deal of uncertainty about what routes will prove most productive. I think all of them will, to some degree. So it’s more a question—I think a lot of the debate is how fast things will progress. How quick will this move? Will these challenges be quickly surmounted as some people believe? Are we still decades away from having, you know, domestic robots like Woody Allen’s Sleeper?

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Interior was in on this, talking about the potential ‘leisure crisis’—the crisis being there would be too much leisure. Department of the Interior, I think they—they run[?] the national parks. And so they would have to deal with all these leisure seekers. So, the concern—so, I think those concerns, obviously we had a bunch of good decades and we didn’t feel that we had any leisure crisis. But the concern has re-arisen. So, if you look at the Chicago Booth Poll of economists, the vast majority are saying in the long run there is no evidence that talent technology has reduced employment. But then if you ask about sort of stagnating wages over the last decade, and the role of information technology, a kind of plurality of economists think that there might be a direct connection there. So, my work—with many coauthors including Frank Levy, Richard Murnane, and Larry Katz, and David Dorn and Gordon Hanson and Daron Acemoglu—I could go on, a whole list of notables but people who have been extremely valuable and insightful as coauthors. We have sort of pointed out the role that computerization has played in changing the occupational structure. In particular in displaying routine codifiable tasks, going back to the beginning of our discussion, which would mainly mean jobs in clerical, administrative support, some degree sales, and also many production and operative positions. All of which are skilled work that use a lot of codifiable, procedural activities. And those things, even though they are educated tasks, increasingly are relatively automatable. And the one consequence of this is that you sort of see this what someone would call a polarization of employment, that, on the one hand we don’t have computers substituting for people who are doing professional, technical, and managerial tasks—you know, things that require intuition, creativity, expertise, and a kind of a mixture of fluid intelligence with technical knowledge. So, if I’m a scientist, I have lots of technical knowledge but I also need this kind of fluid intelligence for developing hypotheses. If I’m—same as if I’m in sales and marketing, if I’m an attorney, if I’m a medical doctor. So on the one hand, creating an increasing role for these very highly educated skill jobs that are not only not directly substituted, but substantially to an important degree complemented by information technology. Because information processing is kind of input into these occupations. On the other hand, it also leads to a relative growth in many in-person service jobs, like food service, cleaning, landscaping, personal care, home health aids, security guards. And these require tasks that have proved very difficult to automate, as per Polanyi’s Paradox. But the irony is that the supply of workers who can do them is quite abundant. Right? So, although it’s hard to develop a domestic or restaurantserving robot, it’s not hard for a person with their full physical faculties to have that job and do it productively, with very little training. Many people, it can be in the course of a couple of days. So we have a simultaneous growth of high-education, high-wage jobs, and relatively low-education, low-wage

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This is why artisanal craft is getting more expensive.

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Russ: So it raises a bit of a specter. And Tyler Cowen’s book, Average Is Over, and the episode we did with Tyler on it. It creates this vision of the future if these trends continue which seems a bit ominous. A lot of successful, highly paid, skilled people, and a much larger group of unskilled and poorly paid people. We’ve been talking about the employment data so far. Talk about what we’ve learned from the wage data. Guest: Well, so, the wage data are—it’s a great deal more complicated. Though, there are several mechanisms by which that changes—so there are changes in task demands, translate into changes in wages. The three of them that I outline in the paper, one is: are you directly substituted or are you more likely to be complemented? Right? So, if you are a person who is an accountant who can only add and subtract, and you are a bookkeeper, clearly automation devalues your skills. You can just do that more cheaply with a machine. On the other hand, if you are an accountant who understands sort of the conceptual basis of the business and spots problems and creates, you know, valuable kind of recordkeeping ideas or ways of organizing information to augment operation, then you are complemented by computerization, because of course you can accomplish more of the things you are good at in the same amount of time, because you have all this hardware to help you do it. Right? So in general I think it is vastly underappreciated in discussions of automation that automation generally complements us by substituting for the things that are time intensive and allowing us to focus on the things in which we have value added. Right? Russ: This goes back, by the way, to Adam Smith, when he talks about the division of labor being limited by the extent of the market, and he talks about the application of technology making people more productive. And it’s very important. It has a long history. Guest: That’s

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jobs. And those jobs are low-wage for a reason; and the reason being that the supply of workers who can do them is potentially extremely elastic. So it’s hard for wages to rise in those activities unless essentially there are better opportunities elsewhere in the economy that you have to bribe people not to take. That’s the sort of economic explanation: Why would barbers’ wages rise over time even though barbers don’t get any faster cutting hair? Well, the answer is because they need to be compensated for not doing something else in which, where they would have rising productivity. So people have to be willing to pay more and more over time for those type of jobs. So, we talk about this polarization phenomenon. And this has been documented across not only in the United States, but at least 16 European Union, EU, economies and the work, recent work by Alan Manning, Maarten Goos, and Anna Salomons. And it appears to be a pretty broad, widespread phenomenon, this decline of many of these middle-skill office and production jobs and relative growth of both high wage, high skill and low wage, low skill jobs.

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right. Adam Smith mostly invokes on the division of labor as sort of a way of increasing productivity. I don’t think he fully appreciated the role of capital augmenting labor. Russ: I think he did, actually. Well, I’ll send you an excerpt. We’ll put it up. He talks about the kid doing some mundane task thinking about a way to mechanize it and thereby not have to work as hard; and making the thing more productive. It was primitive. He wasn’t thinking about it. Guest: Okay, I stand corrected. That’s fully fine. Russ: It’s surprising. Guest: So, I think it’s easy to see the many ways in which machines substitute for the things we used to do. And then what’s harder to see, typically, is: how is that complementing us? But of course you sit back and say, could you and I actually be having this conversation, could you and I have a podcast? Could I actually do significant research as an economist without all this sort of hardware increasing my output per hour? The answer is: Not very well. So, on the one hand is the: Are you directly complemented, versus substituted? Second factor that affects how that automation affects your earnings in a given activity is sort of, the elasticity of final demand—so, in other words, if we get really productive at something but there’s a fixed amount of it that people want, then eventually they just buy less and less of it. So you see, for example in agriculture, the vast increases in productivity in agricultural stemming from the green revolution and so on, have eventually reduced employment dramatically in agriculture. And the reason is that, all evidence to the contrary, there seems to be a finite amount that we can eat. Russ: It’s a great example. So, food is incredibly cheap, which is a glorious thing; but it doesn’t lead, therefore, to: Oh, there will be more farmers. There are fewer. Guest: That’s right. That’s correct. And other places, that’s not the case. So, in medicine, for example, we get, we are much more productive at medicine than we were 50 years ago or 100 years ago where we mostly harmed people. Now we do lots and lots of useful procedures, and demand seems to be extremely elastic. So we spend more and more of our money on medical care because it becomes more and more valuable as it becomes more productive. Russ: Well, we’ve subsidized it also, so it’s a little complicated. Guest: Well, right. There are many factors. But—okay. Russ: But we do want it. Guest: Right. That’s right. And then—so, this again, many of the professions, people seem to demand more of them as they get better. Medical care or a lot of professional outputs. And then the third factor that I think is extremely important is kind of elasticity of labor supply. So if there’s an increase in labor demand for medical doctors, or they become more productive, so people are more willing to go to the doctor, I can’t just read about it in the newspaper and say, Oh, great, all this demand for doctors, I think I’ll start being a doctor tomorrow. Because it takes years and years to become one. So, productivity increases in those occupations generally will translate into wage gains, because you won’t have very rapid numerical

Russ: So, that’s kind of what we’d expect. Right? The idea would be—you

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increases in supply. Russ: But it’s not just the time. It’s the fact that not everybody is capable of doing it. Which is I think also very important. Guest: True. That’s right. Russ: Which I think means those wages will be [?] Guest: You could argue the supply is even less elastic because it’s not just how long you have to go to school, but who is suitable for that work. Now, let’s take these three points and bring them over the last side, the low-education side of the labor market. And say, we have, you know, automation, how is this affecting employment in, say, housekeeping? Well, gosh, there isn’t really that much substitution of machinery for housekeepers. But there isn’t that much complementarity, either. You could imagine that technology would somehow increase the productivity, the amount of housecleaning someone could do per hour. But it’s hard to see where that actually happens. Russ: The vacuum cleaner is already invented. So that was good. That was complementary. Guest: That’s right. That was complementary. Absolutely. Russ: But it’s over. Guest: Exactly. The second point: well, what about the elasticity of demand? Well, it turns out that actually, there’s not a lot of evidence that those personal services are very price-elastic. But they are elastic to overall societal wealth. So, when income goes up, people spend more on those types of those things. So economic growth can certainly be beneficial for those type of activities. But now let’s imagine, take the best case scenario: so we have, let’s say there’s some productivity increase, and then there’s economic growth so demand for these personal services rises. Well, what happens? Well, supply of labor to those activities is potentially very elastic because there’s almost no barrier to entry. People can do them and be productive really rapidly, and they don’t need specialized skills or training. That means that it’s hard for wages to rise in those activities quickly, because labor supply will tend to dampen that rapidly, especially when people are being kind of displaced from middle-skill jobs. So, we have seen growth in personal services, but only in the 1990s when labor markets were extremely tight. And otherwise, even though employment growth has been rather polarized with growth at the top and growth at the bottom, wage growth in the 2000s and in the 1980s was not polarized. It was rising more at the top and falling more at the bottom. So, the point I make in the paper is it’s easy to understand how these technological changes affect the shape of employment growth—what activities are demanding more and less labor. The actual implications for who earns what are mediated through other general equilibrium forces that, you know, tend to benefit the high skilled and don’t seem to be nearly as beneficial for low-skilled workers or low-skilled occupations—low-education occupations, low education workers, even as numerical employment in those activities rises.

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go back to earlier times of technological change. When the car comes along, blacksmiths don’t make so much money any more. Like, zero, all of a sudden. And they have to turn to something else. And for many of them it’s late in life; it’s hard to tool up. What we’d hope would happen, in the current scenario, and we’ve seen a little of it, is that it is the high-end jobs, the jobs that require more education are paying a lot more that would draw people into high end skill acquisition. It’s been somewhat surprising though, as you point out in the paper, that there hasn’t been more of that. And I want to add two things to that and then let you react. One is: there’s a sort of—it’s all well and good to say we need more STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics)-trained people. But maybe people have limits in how many people can do STEM stuff. And so, this problem is just perhaps going to “get worse.” It’s not obvious that—and then, people who do go on to college don’t always study those things. Either they can’t or they don’t like them or they are not thinking about it enough, or don’t want to think about it; maybe they shouldn’t. But it seems to me that this application—so, I’m trying to summarize what you are saying here and then I’ll let you react. That at the high end, we have a pretty healthy situation. And we see that high-end skills situation, we see that—the unemployment rate’s very low, the wage growth is healthier. The bottom 75%, or whatever the number is—maybe 25%—but somewhere in that 25-75% range, it’s not going so well. And it’s not obvious that that’s going to change through natural responses. That I think is the worry. Guest: Yeah. I think that it is the supply response to the rising return to education in the United States over the last 35 years, really. It started rising in 1980. And it’s basically risen almost continuously to the present day—it hasn’t grown as much in the last 5 or 8 years. But it’s applied to an extremely high level. The supply response has been surprisingly slow and weak. It’s been much, much stronger among women than among men. And you know, women vastly outnumber men in college education at this point. And also are outnumbering them in the professions. And this has been a big puzzle. I don’t think anyone knows the answer for why that is true. We did actually see, in the 2000s, we did see an increase in high school completion rates, the first time we’ve seen that in decades. And an increase in college attainment. So, it’s not that the message isn’t getting through, but it’s getting through very, very slowly. Now, I think part of the reason—this goes back to your question of why aren’t more people doing STEM—it’s now pretty clearly documented that your college major matters a huge amount for your subsequent earnings, and STEM workers do earn more. And sociology and clinical psychology majors earn a lot less. And that information is known: why aren’t people switching? And I think one reason—and partly it’s just taste; some people just really don’t like doing those things. Part of it also is poor preparation. The United States has a very weak STEM education in

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secondary, at the high school level, and even the middle school level. And so we’re way behind other countries. And so that makes it much, much harder for people to enter those activities. Even when you teach—we have Ph.D. students in economics, teaching my Ph.D. students in economics at MIT, but the people who go into the fields of theory, sort of extremely mathematically intensive, they are basically—many, most of them are from other countries, and they have very deep math backgrounds by the time they are through high school. And there are very few U.S. students. So, if we get a Liberal Arts student who enters MIT’s economics program, it’s very unlikely they are going to become an economics theorist. Now, I’m not saying that’s a great loss to the world or to them; but that road is already blocked to them because they didn’t have the foundational preparation when they were younger. So, they’ll do other things in economics, very useful things. I’m not a theorist; I’m not sad about that. My point simply being that the foundational skills in STEM, particularly in the mathematics and analytical training, need to come pretty early. So I think many U.S. students are not prepared to enter the fields that in fact would be more remunerative as a result of shortcomings in our primary and secondary education system. Russ: We’ve talked a lot about that recently, and we’ll continue to talk about it. That’s another issue, obviously. Russ: So, but is correct to say—I want to make sure people understand the underlying economics here. Is it correct to summarize what you’ve been saying as follows: At the upper ends of the skill distribution, technology complements—that means, enhances—one’s productivity. At the lower end, not so much. So that to some extent the wage effect is not going to be as large. And is, therefore, the middle being reduced dramatically, the employment opportunities of the so-called middle—and in the wage distribution? Is the wage distribution polarized? Is it bi-modal in any way? Guest: No, it’s not as bimodal because wage growth has been so weak at the bottom. So that was the point I was making earlier, that the sort of the decline to the middle, sort of cascade downward, because people who are in these middle skill activities can easily move into personal services. Right? So if they are displaced, they are going to put pressure on wages in lower wage activities as well. So, even though the employment is fairly polarized, wages were polarized in the 1990s but otherwise pretty much it’s been, looks like a downward escalator. But I guess—so, a couple of points on this that I want to emphasize. I think that one should not assume that polarization, even of employment, will go on forever—that the middle will just collapse to zero. I think that that’s—it’s always dangerous to just take the current trend and just forecast, extrapolate linearly to the vanishing point. That’s not likely to happen. A lot of the possibilities for that substitution may already have occurred. And when you look at what’s left, “in the middle,” actually the jobs become more skilled again. So, we have many fewer typists and filing clerks

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than we used to, but the people who are clerical workers have more skilled jobs than they used to. They are people who organize travel and work out logistics and deal with hard problems—like, how to get reimbursed. And, you can also—a nice place to look is in the medical world. So, there are lots of medical technician jobs, some of which don’t require a college degree. But they virtuously combine a set of technical skills, these sort of fluid intelligence skills, so being a nurse, being an x-ray tech, being a phlebotomist. And those things pay pretty well and arguably will be growing. I think partly because of the aging of the population. I think there will be—there certainly are going to be highly paid, good career jobs in medical, in medical technical jobs, in the skilled trades, like for example construction or electricity or plumbing; in skilled repair. And sometimes in this maniacal focus on college for all, we’ve sort of forgotten that there is a whole set of skilled vocations that again I think are complemented in the sense that they combine expertise and technical knowledge with these very-difficult-to-substitute human capacities. Right? The complementarity is there. 46:34

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Russ: So, let me bring us back to our earlier discussion. I can easily imagine a world where a robot—and I know people who literally work on this now— where a robot would give me—I’m in the hospital, God forbid, and I need post-op (post-operative); first of all the operation, clearly technology right now, has incredible complementarity with surgeons using robotic devices. But we could imagine a world where I don’t even have a surgeon. The robot takes up my kidney or whatever it is—it’s imaginable. But this is much more imaginable: in the post-op, an arm, a robot arm gives me my, dispenses the right amount of pill for me that I need. Maybe not just dispenses the right kind of pill but knows my history and does some diagnosis of me and knows I need a different dose than the person one bed over. It does a whole bunch of things that a human being could do. What it can’t do, at least right now, is make me feel better and show empathy. That ability remains a human, I think will remain, a human thing. But that skill—the question, those high paying nursing jobs--they might be gone in 20 years, most of them. Guest: Sure. So if those things are not complementary, then if we just have people who are paid empaths, who have no medical knowledge and don’t need any, those aren’t going to be highly paid jobs. There has to be a skill that they possess that is genuinely scarce. Russ: Well, I don’t know about that. Being empathetic is pretty scarce. Doing it well--doing it well. Guest: Perhaps. Okay. Look, there’s lots of people--okay, let’s leave that alone. I do not foresee a time anywhere in the near or even relatively distant future where all the skilled activities are done by machinery and what’s left for people to do is sit around and emote. I think there’s a lot—in medicine there’s a huge amount of skill in diagnosis and figuring out what someone’s actual problem is. And

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it’s more than just a chemical problem. It’s a sort of set of complementary activities that allow that person to recover. Actually, my sister-in-law is a person who goes and helps elderly and infirm to sort of figure out a workable life. Russ: That’s huge. Guest: She’s a highly, highly trained nurse. But she’s also a person who is a problem solver. I think there’s lots and lots—I think in general people are complemented much more than they recognize by the things that make us more productive. In a variety of ways. My sisterin-law is complemented by her modern automobile that gets her reliably from one person’s house to another. Even though, of course it means there’s in theory fewer people like her needed in the course of a day to reach a given number of people. Russ: Which is a good thing, because it means it’s cheaper and people can afford it; and there’s a very elastic demand for those services. Guest: Exactly. It’s difficult—I think the challenge is, though it’s a challenge for our imagination, maybe, because we’re being too optimistic, try to figure out: What will those new activities look like? So I give an example in the paper: at the turn of the 20th century something like 38% of all U.S. employment was in agriculture. A hundred years later, 2% of all employment was in agriculture. I think if you’d asked farmers at the turn of the 20th century, ‘What do you think everyone will be doing a hundred years from now?’ and especially if you told them, ‘And by the way, only 2% of the people will be in farming’—they would have known—they knew at that time that farming was declining. In fact that was the genesis of the high school movement in the United States, to send everyone to high school, because they recognized the future was off the farm. But they wouldn’t have been able to say, Oh, I think it will be software, health services, business services, entertainment, hotels, the movie industry, video games. That would have been impossible to predict. And similarly we find ourselves at a point where we’ve gotten a lot faster, a lot better at automating a lot of things that we thought were very readily automatable. I mean, just to give you one personal example, I remember some 25 years ago I was working as a temp at GTE[?] in their library, and I was working as a kind of librarian assistant. And a guy came up to me and he started telling me about this thing he was doing on his computer; and he was going to have the computer search, help you find articles that you needed. And I said, ‘How are you going to do that?’ And he said, ‘We’ll just read through the abstract.’ And I said, ‘But it doesn’t understand language.’ And he goes, ‘Oh, no, no, no. It’ll just recognize key words.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, yeah, good luck with that.’ So I couldn’t have been more wrong. But the point was, we have gotten good at things that we thought were exclusively human. We’ve learned how to automate them. So we’re at a period where all of a sudden we see the frontier advancing very quickly, what we can automate, but we don’t know what is going to replace it. And we sort of feel, is this time different? Is this the time in which all

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of a sudden we just run out of things for people to do? My own view is, no, we won’t. On the other hand, it certainly is disruptive, and certainly for people who don’t have some complementary skills, it’s bad news. So if you took the workforce of the turn of the 20th century and brought them to the 21st century, many of them would be unemployable, because they would be innumerate and a substantial fraction would be illiterate as well. So you have to have skills that are complemented by a sort of modern set of demands, and many of those skills are a combination of our onboard equipment—i.e., allow you to work as a housecleaner—plus a set of scarcer skills that we want to combine that allow us to add more value. 52:34

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Russ: Well, to take a recent episode that we have a lot of knowledge of, when outsourcing—that is, sending jobs overseas, sending tasks overseas—started to grow dramatically, a lot of really smart people said, ‘This is different from the usual gains from trade, and it’s going to have enormous impacts on U.S. wellbeing and workers’ wellbeing.’ And there were, as you point out, there were some workers who had a negative impact from it. But people grossly overestimated that trend. They extrapolated it way too quickly. They neglected the gains from keeping stuff close to home, that distance still matters. And I think the punditry and lots of well-trained economists overreacted, listening to them, overreacted to those fears. I think the issue here is, as you say, whether this is different. And I think what makes your— talk about this issue that your colleagues, Brynjolfsson and McAfee argue we should race with the machine. That is, as you’ve pointed out I think very elegantly in lots of analysis in our conversation and in the paper, there are a lot of ways that technology helps us, makes us more productive, and creates new opportunities that we can’t, as you say, imagine. The question is, other than that nice platitude, ‘race with the machine,’ which sounds nice, instead of racing against the machine like John Henry, what is it that actually mean? My suspicion is: There’s no way to forecast that. Obviously those 19th century, turn of the 20th century workers, wouldn’t be very useful now. We do need a better school system and we do need ways for people to be interactive with machines that only a small fraction right now can do. But having said that, I think there is grounds for optimism in just human creativity in coping with it. So, I’m not as worried as the pessimists, but I do think making our school system more flexible would help a lot. Guest: I agree. I don’t mean to be Pollyanna-ish here. I find myself in an ironic position, in that I’ve been arguing for the last 15 years that computerization has had a very large effect on the labor market, and I’ve sort of been in some ways out in front of that argument. I’m now telling people not to panic. Because I think they are missing, or—they have convinced: Computers are substituting for people. And they sort of have forgotten the second half of that: that that means they

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INCREDIBLY IMPORTANT!

Yes we need to know how to do the work but more importantly, we NEED to be able to articulate our ideas!

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Russ: I want to close with an example that I thought was a really interesting example, then I’ll give you one more chance to finish up. Talk about the company that you identify, which is Kiva, because it’s an interesting little case study of how technology and humans interact. And it’s not to be confused with kiva.org, which is a very interesting philanthropy opportunity that we’ve talked about on the program before. But this is a warehousing, inventory company. Talk about it. Guest: That’s right. So, Kiva, I think is a beautiful example, an iconic example, of environmental control—how do we deal with machines that are inflexible, and make the environment predictable so it doesn’t demand flexibility. So the basic problem is companies like Amazon, which now owns Kiva, although it was actually an MIT-based startup, and many other large warehouse companies do a lot of direct consumer sales. They have these massive warehouses—a warehouse will be multi-million square feet; it’s too expensive to air condition them. And you have stuff all over the place, a huge variety and number of objects. And so, traditionally, and it sounds sort of funny to say ‘traditionally’ when you are talking about Amazon—but historically, Amazon employed so-called pickers, basically people who were athletic young people who would run through the warehouses with little computers on their wrists that would tell them where

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are complementing us in other ways. But absolutely, I think the human skill that is most complemented by automation is flexibility. And the thing that makes us flexible isn’t just muscular flexibility. It’s problem solving, mental acuity, the ability to apply fluid intelligence to apply to unforeseen situations, whether they are personal interactions or math proofs or scientific hypothesis formation or persuasion. And so the thing that we—when people say, ‘Should my kids be spending all their time studying Java?’ I’m like, ‘No.’ I think they should learn very strong math foundations. They should also learn how to write. To speak effectively, and to work in a team. And those skills are very broadly applicable. And one of the great advantages of people is that they are adaptable, and they are able to reinvent themselves, because they have the foundational skills that allow them to do that. And so in a time of change, being adaptable is a valuable fundamental skill. Russ: Yeah. I used to argue that that’s why you should go to college and get a general set of skills. I now think college is overrated. But the parts of college that people ought to be focusing on are math, communication. It’s not all STEM. STEM helps, but then there’s communication; there’s, as you say, problem solving; creativity. These are all things that can be improved through thinking about them a little bit, anyway. Guest: Yeah. Well at MIT, we’re always telling people to learn how to write. Everybody can solve a differential equation, but they can’t write a paragraph telling you how they did it. Russ: Yeah. Neither could Andrew Wiles.

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to look for an object; and they would climb up over a shelf; they would grab, they would look at the object and make sure it was the one they wanted; they would grab it and they would bring it up to the front and it would be boxed up. Those people—it’s a difficult job, involves running or walking 10-15 miles a day. It’s hot and sweaty. And there’s no robotic substitute for those people. There’s no cost-effective machine that you could employ that would do that job. So what Kiva does—they’re idea is, let’s reorganize the warehouse in such a way that we vastly reduce the need for a human touch. In fact, Kiva talks about the idea of increasing the value of a human touch. The way this is done is, the warehouse is run basically by the Kiva software. And when goods come in the loading dock, the software is told: here are the objects that are coming in. There are then people who take those objects off the pallets and they put them onto shelves. But they are not ordinary shelves. They are shelves that are driven by little robotic drives. In fact the robots look like those old canister Hoover vacuum cleaners. They drive along the floor, they go under a set of shelves, and then they raise themselves up a few inches and then drive the shelves with them. That’s all they do. It’s not a very complicated robotic feat. The shelves come, and laser pointers controlled by the scheduling software tell the people, point and say, ‘Take this object; put it on this shelf.’ So now, the computer knows where the objects are, not because it can see them or recognize them, but because it’s told you where to put them. Then the robots whisk the shelves away into the warehouse—or, I should say, not the robots organize them—the controlling software optimizes the warehouse according to the flow of goods. So it’s going to put things that are used frequently near the front; things that are used infrequently near the back; things that are ordered together, they are going to put them together. Then as orders come in, the robot drives again go. Let’s say I order from Amazon a book, a box of diapers, and a video game. And the robots then go collect the shelves that contain those objects. And they line up for another human picker. And that person stands there, and the shelves drive up to the picker. A laser pointer on the ceiling points to the object that the picker is supposed to pick. The picker takes it off the shelf, puts it in a box, tapes[?] these three objects together, sticks a label on it and sends it off. And then the robots whisk the shelves back to the warehouse. So there are only two points in the system where people are involved in physically handling objects: when they are put on the shelf and when they are taken off the shelf. All the rest of the kind of transportation and sorting of objects is done by the robots. But the reason they are able to do this is because the need for all that dexterity, flexibility, visual recognition has all been pared down to these two points of contact. [more to come, 1:01:00]

FUTURE (IDEAS.TED)

26 Ideas From The Future At TED2014, we asked speakers and attendees to riff off the conference’s theme (“The Next Chapter”) and tell us what might radically change society, life, technology and so on in the next 30 years. From funny and wry to deeply insightful, the answers will surprise you.

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One of the things about learning how to read—we have been doing a lot of consuming of information through our eyes and so on—that may be a very inefficient channel. So my prediction is that we’re going to ingest information. You’re going to swallow a pill and know English. You’re going to swallow a pill and know Shakespeare. The way to do it is through the bloodstream; once it’s in your bloodstream, it basically goes through and gets into the brain and when it knows it’s in the brain it deposits the information in the right places. I’ve been hanging around with Ed Boyden and Hugh Herr and a number of people… This isn’t far-fetched. Nicholas Negroponte, founder, MIT Media Lab I hope it will be a rejection of technology that makes us more isolated from one another and more easily surveilled. I also hope we will have a sudden, dawning realization that we forgot to read books for a while and came to regret it. Laurel Braitman, writer, TED Fellow

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20 years from now, we’ll have nanobots—another exponential trend is the shrinking of technology—that go into our brain through the capillaries and basically connect our synthetic neocortex and the cloud, providing an extension of our neocortex. Now today, you have a computer in your phone, but if you need 10,000 computers for a few seconds to do a complex search, you can access that for a second or two in the cloud. In the 2030s you’ll be able to connect to that directly from your brain. I’m walking along, there’s Chris Anderson, he’s coming my way, I’d better think of something clever to say. I’ve got three seconds—my 300 million modules in my neocortex won’t cut it—I need a billion more. I’ll be able to access that in the cloud. Our thinking then will be a hybrid of biological and non-biological thinking. Ray Kurzweil, inventor, futurist, CEO, KurzweilAI The seamless integration of our physical and virtual worlds. This will bring richer experiences and connectivity to the global population. Phil Wiser, chief technology officer, Hearst Progress in medicine, global access to information and a global age pyramid that is already turning upside-down will increase the demand for good health care. This in turn will increase life expectancy and drive innovation. This reenforcing circle will change societies’ views on health care. Whereas today it is seen as a cost that needs to be controlled—which slows down progress—it might become the global driving force of innovation and humanity, replacing other areas of public investment focus. Harald Stock, president & CEO, ArjoHuntleigh

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What will blow my mind in the next 30 years is the ability to diagnose a disease before you know that something is wrong with you, treat it with medicines designed specifically for you and eradicate it so it never happens again. The concept of connected health, wearable technology and ingested medicines are all pointing us in that direction. The ability for someone to tie it all together, tailored for the individual is mindblowing. Doreen Lorenzo, president, Quirky

FUTURE (IDEAS.TED)

We will see the big picture with more clarity and resolution than ever before. Whether for good or ill (and surely it will be both), ever greater legibility of everything around us, between us, and even in us, and in every system from the physical to the social, financial, commercial, environmental and more is going to transform our relationship to the world, each other and to every system of which we are part. Andrew Blau, managing director, Deloitte.

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We will have the opportunity to have an approved chip implanted in ourselves that will be a sensor, grabbing health data for early detection of disease or sickness, show our location to those we wish and provide all kinds of new real-time data. This will roll out with early adopters, and over time gain general acceptance. As a society, we won’t really care if insurance companies have early access to our health data, as their costs will decline and they will be better at being fair, less litigious and more affordable. Thus we will grant several companies (such as tomorrow’s Google, Facebook, Twitter) access to even more personal data, and integrate their offerings into our day-to-day living. We won’t at first like it, but the Supreme Court will allow police and rescue officials a reasonable-basis standard for their grabbing our microchip data (DUI tests roadside, etc). Also, perhaps related, we will be able to listen to live music, at any hour, all around the world, wherever we are, through some inner-ear adapter not unlike what we have with today’s Google Glass. We will be able to hear street musicians from Ghana and live music in a bar from Reykjavik at lunchtime in San Francisco. Live music will bring the next generation closer together, with promises of global peace. Gregory Miller, co-founder, Spacebar, former managing director, Google.org We’ll understand what creates dreams—not just ‘it’s your brain cleaning up its cache for the day,’ but really understand why we dream in vivid detail, why the stories make perfect sense while we are dreaming, but are nonsensical upon awakened-review, and what occurrences in the day were selected to be dreamed about that evening. It will all be understood, and no longer will we think, ‘Wow, that was so bizarre that I dreamed about some man I’ve never seen before, playing golf, which I could care less about, and he asked me to marry him in front of a crowd of 50 people, in a place I’ve never been or seen.’ Geraldine Carter, co-founder, director, Climate Ride

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Humans face three choices in the exponential growth of information in the next 30 years: 1. To deny the power of technology to counter the feared effects of the information explosion (like certain religions today). 2. To delegate more to machines and live a more hedonistic lifestyle (chasing leisure makes us more lazy). 3. To see the power of new tools in the explosion of data to unlock the

Government appointed spy agencies to collect data on its citizens.

How will our minds be blown in the next 30 years? Well, that’s quite a long time, given the acceleration in history. Still, I’ll be brave and make six hypotheses. Blaise Agüera y Arcas, Google

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promise of humans (through augmenting human capability). Jim Hackett, Steelcase

Medical advances due to interdisciplinary research. For example: Bioengineering could become a hot new field of innovation, leading to great societal impact. Ram Shriram, managing partner, Sherpalo Ventures I just hope to BE here, as I will be nearing my 94th birthday 30 years from now! Ruth Ann Harnisch, president, The Harnisch Foundation

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What is next? Perhaps counterintuitively, I’m guessing it’s a visionary idea from the late 1930s that’s been revived every decade since: autonomous vehicles. Now you’re thinking, give me a break. How can a fancy version of cruise control be profound? Well, much of our world has been designed around roads and transportation. These were as essential to the success of the Roman Empire as the interstate highway to the prosperity and development of the US. Today, these roads that interconnect our world are dominated by cars and trucks that have largely unchanged for 100 years. Although perhaps not obvious today, autonomous vehicles will be the key technology that enables us to redesign our cities and by extension civilization. Here’s why. Once they become ubiquitous, each year vehicles will save tens of thousands of lives in the United States alone, and a million globally. Automotive energy consumption and air pollution will be cut dramatically. Much of the road congestion in and out of our cities will disappear. They will enable compelling new concepts in how we design cities, work and the way we live. We will get where we’re going faster and society will recapture vast amounts of lost productivity now spent sitting in traffic, basically polluting. But why now? Why do we think this is ready? Because over the last 30 years people from outside the automotive industry have spent countless billions creating the needed miracles, but for entirely different purposes. It took folks like DARPA, universities and companies completely outside of the automotive industry to notice if you were clever about it, autonomy could be done now. Bran Ferren, co-chairman, Applied Minds.

FUTURE (IDEAS.TED)

Over the next 30 years, humans will widely integrate technology into our bodies for recreational and informational purposes. A teenager in 2044 will marvel at how tech-free our bodies were in 2014, and wonder how we ever managed.” Ravin Agrawal, managing director, Corellian Capital People will live in a ‘bubble’ of personalized experience, where what each of us sees and hears of the world will be different from anyone else. This will result from a combination of factors, most notably personalized advertising and the gradual evolution of our personal electronic devices. By 2040, we will be surrounded by personalized advertisements/offerings being constantly pushed to us; many surfaces will become active and display content based on who is looking at them at a given moment. They may even be able to simultaneously steer a different image to each observer. We will also deliberately augment our experience of the world with our personal electronic devices. Google Glass-like devices thar project images into our eyes will be joined by unobtrusive audio and haptic feedback devices that we will use to inform, remind and connect ourselves.

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The net effect will be that each of us will fundamentally experience a different view of reality. In many ways that will be to our advantage, allowing us to live more informed and potentially more connected lives. But this individualized experience may also bring a risk of social fragmentation. The explosion of media choices over the past 30 years has led to narrowcasting that in turn allows us to consume media that reinforce our beliefs and interests, leading to the increased polarization of our society. We may find in the next 30 years, when each of us has a different experience of the augmented world, that we will further fragment and each only see that which reinforces our world view.

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This seems like an unavoidable future based on where technology is heading. I hope we can find a way to accentuate the positives, share experiences and viewpoints, and prevent us from being increasingly isolated from one another. Forrest Norrod, vice president and general manager, servers, Dell In 30 years, we could have our minds totally blown by what a high-energy planet would be like. If energy were clean, cheap and dense, we could lift everyone out of poverty, desalinate as much water as we need, incinerate trash completely so we’d have no waste and do many other amazing things limited only by our imaginations. We’d be able to leave large portions of the earth to nature and still live high quality, modern lives on an ecologically

Complete utter dystopia!

This isn’t inevitable. though. It will take breakthroughs in energy technologies and major investments in scaling them up. Government, civil society and business will have to prioritize innovation and be realistic about the energy needs of 9 billion people living modern lives. Rachel Pritzker, president, Pritzker Innovation Fund

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vibrant planet.

I’m so astonished by the last 30 years that it’s hard to imagine what might blow our minds in the next 30. That’s how pervasive technology has become for many of us. Nevertheless, if we agree that we (in the developed world) enjoy a richness of resources like: • ever-greater storage and compression power • ever tinier and more powerful chips • a growing Internet of things (energy, lighting, cars, medical devices, quantified self devices for health) • a proliferation of robotics applications Then what should happen in the next 30 years is that this richness evolves and extends to places that today stumble along on 2G, dialup, or nothing at all. I’m optimistic about broadband over power lines and by balloon.

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I know, though—shoulda, woulda, coulda, right? So I think that what will truly astonish me is if we humans bring ourselves to collectively care enough to *make technology pervasive and useful for everyone throughout the world in accordance with their needs and desires*. What would be astonishing is if we can put aside excessive margins and corporate amenities to the degree it takes to do the world as a whole good. I love what access to technology can do—I just want it to be evenly distributed. That would blow my mind, and I bet I’m not alone. Karen Wickre, editorial director, Twitter

How far can we go? Can we truly become an interplanetary species, as Elon Musk suggests we could be?

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If the past 30 years were about the internet and the World Wide Web, the next 30 years will for me be about testing the limits of the human body infused with technology.

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What happens to us physically when we get to Mars? Can we transform the way we learn? Will there be a need to spend 20 years studying when all knowledge is instantly available to all of us. What if to be is to know? How then do we apply what we know? Do our children stand a chance to live forever? How do we start relating to computers once they gain consciousness? Kelo Kubu, executive director, Gamatong In the next 30 years, the full Star Trek story will come true. Already, we’ve seen many of the show’s far-fetched ideas come to fruition. We’ve witnessed some jamming technological progress. But none of the vision of humanity’s future that Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry developed has materialized yet. His idea was that each person was able to contribute, that their differences were put to use, and that purpose aligned them to do better, together. That’s next. Nilofer Merchant, author.

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I think what will blow our minds in the next 30 years will be watching the maturation and contributions of Generation Z. This is the first generation to grow up with wide access to advanced technology since their birth. I have seen kids like my godson—born in 2011—be able to navigate a tablet computer from before he was able to form complete sentences. I think that this type of exposure to super-computers, tablets, smartphones and social media since infancy makes their brains different, and as this generation comes of age and begins to take their place as leaders in society over the next 30 years, I think we will see mind-blowing advancements in every aspect of life that technology can affect. Ryan Coogler, filmmaker

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A much needed fundamental change in transportation, which will allow people to travel from any major city to any major city in the world in a couple of hours or less. Payam Zamani, founder and CEO, reply.com We will discover ‘Earth twins’: planets around other stars that are roughly the same size and distance as Earth and we will be able to detect what’s on their surface and their atmospheres … and finally really start answering the question: ‘Is there life out there?’

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Back on Earth, quantum physics will lead us to new technologies that will transform communication security and change the conversation around privacy. Shohini Ghose, quantum physicist, educator and TED Fellow In the next 30 years, everyone in the world will be connected. Even the most remote communities that today can only be reached on foot will be in contact with the rest of the world thanks to mobile connections and delivery systems. Though I don’t expect that our traditional infrastructure (roads, landlines, postal services) will reach all corners of the earth, new modes of transportation will proliferate, allowing anyone to reach anyone else. Unmanned Ariel Vehicles (UAVs) or drones are just one such mode of transport. Recently, with the support of the Wasserman Foundation, IDEO. org explored how drones could play a role in last-mile health delivery. We see an astoundingly bright future for drones, one that recasts them from agents of war to agents of change. Jocelyn Wyatt, co-lead, executive director, IDEO.org A democratic China with a GDP that exceeds America’s.

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A geopolitical landscape that will see a return to inter-state warfare as dictators push back against the tide of democracy in a desperate attempt to hang on. Unfortunately, that won’t mean the end of intra-state warfare either. Those wars will continue, unabated. The disappearance of small island developing states like the Maldives due to climate change. Sitting in traffic, but not driving; instead working in one’s ‘car-office’ with a 100 gigabit wireless connection. Thinking it’s normal to speak to a machine; Siri is only the tip of the iceberg. “Her” is already here. FUTURE (IDEAS.TED)

And, since I’m Cambodian-American, the total transformation of Cambodia from a country where one political leader has been in charge for nearly a quarter of a century to a pluralistic society where good governance and human rights are the norm. Hope springs eternal. Sophal Ear, professor, author, speaker, US Naval postgrad school

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Five to ten years from now, search engines will be based not just on looking for combinations of words and links but actually on reading for understanding the billions of pages on the web and in books. So you’ll be walking along, Google will pop up, and say, ‘Mary, you expressed concern to me a month ago that your glutathione supplement wasn’t getting past the blood/brain barrier. Well, new research came out 13 seconds ago that shows a whole new approach to taking glutathione; let me summarize it for you.’ We are living on the verge of the greatest revolution in architecture since the invention of concrete, steel or of the elevator. And it’s a media revolution… We don’t need the Greeks any more to tell us what we think about architecture. We can tell each other what we think about architecture. Digital media hasn’t just changed the relationship between all of us, it’s changed the relationship between us and buildings. Marc Kushner, architect, partner HWKN

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Engineering the Perfect Baby Scientists are developing ways to edit the DNA of tomorrow’s children. Should they stop before it’s too late?

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If anyone had devised a way to create a genetically engineered baby, I figured George Church would know about it. At his labyrinthine laboratory on the Harvard Medical School campus, you can find researchers giving E. Coli a novel genetic code never seen in nature. Around another bend, others are carrying out a plan to use DNA engineering to resurrect the woolly mammoth. His lab, Church likes to say, is the center of a new technological genesis—one in which man rebuilds creation to suit himself.

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When I visited the lab last June, Church proposed that I speak to a young postdoctoral scientist named Luhan Yang, a Harvard recruit from Beijing who’d been a key player in developing a new, powerful technology for editing DNA, called CRISPR-Cas9. With Church, Yang had founded a small company to engineer the genomes of pigs and cattle, sliding in beneficial genes and editing away bad ones.

Here it was: a technical proposal to alter human heredity.

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As I listened to Yang, I waited for a chance to ask my real questions: Can any of this be done to human beings? Can we improve the human gene pool? The position of much of mainstream science has been that such meddling would be unsafe, irresponsible, and even impossible. But Yang didn’t hesitate. Yes, of course, she said. In fact, the Harvard laboratory had a project to determine how it could be achieved. She flipped open her laptop to a PowerPoint slide titled “Germline Editing Meeting.”

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“Germ line” is biologists’ jargon for the egg and sperm, which combine to form an embryo. By editing the DNA of these cells or the embryo itself, it could be possible to correct disease genes and to pass those genetic fixes on to future generations. Such a technology could be used to rid families of scourges like cystic fibrosis. It might also be possible to install genes that offer lifelong protection against infection, Alzheimer’s, and, Yang told me, maybe the effects of aging. These would be history-making medical advances that could be as important to this century as vaccines were to the last. That’s the promise. The fear is that germ-line engineering is a path toward a dystopia of superpeople and designer babies for those who can afford it. Want a child with blue eyes and blond hair? Why not design a highly intelligent group of people who could be tomorrow’s leaders and scientists?

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Just three years after its initial development, CRISPR technology is already widely used by biologists as a kind of search-and-replace tool to alter DNA, even down to the level of a single letter. It’s so precise that it’s widely expected to turn into a promising new approach for gene therapy treatment in people with devastating illnesses. The idea is that physicians could directly correct a faulty gene, say, in the blood cells of a patient with sickle-cell anemia (see “Genome Surgery”). But that kind of gene therapy wouldn’t affect germ cells, and the changes in the DNA wouldn’t get passed to future generations. In contrast, the genetic changes created by germ-line engineering would be passed on, and that’s what has always made the idea seem so objectionable. So far, caution and ethical concerns have had the upper hand. A dozen countries, not including the United States, have banned germ-line engineering, and scientific societies have unanimously concluded that it would be too risky to do. The European Union’s convention on human rights and biomedicine says tampering with the gene pool would be a crime against “human dignity” and human rights.

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But all these declarations were made before it was actually feasible to precisely engineer the germ line. Now, with CRISPR, it is possible. The experiment Yang described, though not simple, would go like this: The researchers hoped to obtain, from a hospital in New York, the ovaries of a woman undergoing surgery for ovarian cancer, caused by a mutation in a gene called BRCA1. Working with another Harvard laboratory, that of antiaging specialist David Sinclair, they would extract immature egg cells that could be coaxed to grow and divide in the laboratory. Yang would use CRISPR in these cells to correct the DNA of the BRCA1 gene. The objective

Like several other scientists whom I’d asked about human germ-line engineering, Yang stopped replying to my questions, so it’s hard to know if the experiment she described is occurring, canceled, or pending publication. Church, in a phone call, termed it a “non-project,” at least until it has generated a publishable result, though Sinclair said a collaboration between the labs is ongoing. (After this story was published, Yang called to say she had not worked on the experiment for several months.) Regardless of the fate of that particular experiment, human germ-line engineering has become a burgeoning research concept. At least one other center in Boston is working on it, as are scientists in China, in the U.K., and at a biotechnology company called OvaScience, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that boasts some of the world’s leading fertility doctors on its advisory board. The objective of these groups is to demonstrate that it’s possible to produce children free of specific genes that cause inherited disease. If it’s possible to correct the DNA in a woman’s egg, or a man’s sperm, those cells could be used in an in vitro fertilization (IVF) clinic to produce an embryo and then a child. It might also be possible to directly edit the DNA of an early-stage IVF embryo using CRISPR. Several people interviewed by MIT Technology Review said that such experiments had already been carried out in China and that results describing edited embryos were pending publication. These people didn’t wish to comment publicly because the papers are under review.

Editing Embryos How easy would it be to edit a human embryo using CRISPR? Very easy, experts say. “Any scientist with molecular biology skills and knowledge of

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All this means that germ-line engineering is much farther along than anyone imagined. “What you are talking about is a major issue for all humanity,” says Merle Berger, one of the founders of Boston IVF, a network of fertility clinics that is among the largest in the world and helps more than a thousand women get pregnant each year. “It would be the biggest thing that ever happened in our field,” he says. Berger predicts that repairing genes for serious inherited disease will win wide public acceptance, but beyond that, the technology would cause a public uproar because “everyone would want the perfect child” and it could lead to picking and choosing eye color and eventually intelligence. “These are things we talk about all the time,” he says. “But we have never had the opportunity to do it.”

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is to create a viable egg without the genetic error that caused the woman’s cancer.

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how to work with [embryos] is going to be able to do this,” says Jennifer Doudna, a biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who in 2012 codiscovered how to use CRISPR to edit genes. To find out how it could be done, I visited the lab of Guoping Feng, a neurobiologist at MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research, where a colony of marmoset monkeys is being established with the aim of using CRISPR to create accurate models of human brain diseases. To create the models, Feng will edit the DNA of embryos and then transfer them into female marmosets to produce live monkeys. One gene Feng hopes to alter is SHANK3. The gene is involved in how neurons communicate and, when it’s damaged in children, is known to cause autism. Feng said that before CRISPR, it was not possible to introduce precise changes into a primate’s DNA, but last year the first gene-edited monkeys were born in Kunming, China (see “Monkeys Modified with Genome Editing”). The CRISPR system includes a gene-snipping enzyme and a guide molecule that can be programmed to target unique combinations of the DNA letters, A, G, C, and T; get these ingredients into a cell and they will cut and modify the targeted letters.

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But CRISPR is not perfect—and it would be a very haphazard way to edit human embryos, as Feng’s efforts to create gene-edited marmosets show. To employ the CRISPR system in the monkeys, his students simply inject the chemicals into a fertilized egg, which is known as a zygote—the stage just before it starts dividing. Feng said the efficiency with which CRISPR can delete or disable a gene in a zygote is about 40 percent, whereas making specific edits, or swapping DNA letters, should work less frequently—more like 20 percent of the time. Like a person, a monkey has two copies of most genes, one from each parent. Sometimes both copies get edited, but sometimes just one does, or neither. Only about half the embryos will lead to live birth, and of those that do, many could contain a mixture of cells with edited DNA and cells without. If you add up the odds, you find you’d need to edit about 20 embryos to get a live monkey with the edit you want. That’s not an insurmountable problem for Feng, since the MIT breeding colony will give him access to many monkey eggs and he’ll be able to generate many embryos. However, it presents obvious problems for using the same process on humans. Putting the ingredients of CRISPR into a human embryo would be scientifically trivial. But it wouldn’t be practical for much just yet. This is

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one reason that many scientists view such an experiment with scorn (whether or not it has really occurred in China) and see it more as a provocative bid to grab attention than as real science. Rudolf Jaenisch, an MIT biologist who works across the street from Feng, and who in the 1970s created the first genemodified mice, called attempts to edit human embryos “totally premature.” He said he hoped these papers would be rejected and never published. “It’s just a sensational thing that will stir things up. We know it’s possible, but is it of practical use? I kind of doubt it,” said Jaenisch. But Feng told me he approves of the idea of germ-line engineering. Isn’t the goal of medicine to reduce suffering? Considering the state of the technology, however, he thinks actual gene-edited humans are “10 to 20 years away.” Among other problems, CRISPR can introduce off-target effects or change bits of the genome far from where scientists had intended. Any human embryo altered with CRISPR today would carry the risk that its genome had been changed in unexpected ways. But, Feng said, such problems may eventually be ironed out and edited people will be born. “To me, it’s possible in the long run to dramatically improve health, lower costs. It’s a kind of prevention,” he said. “It’s hard to predict the future, but correcting disease risks is definitely a possibility and should be supported. I think it will be a reality.” Editing Eggs

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Elsewhere in Boston, scientists are exploring a different approach to engineering the germ line, one that is technically more demanding but probably more powerful. This strategy combines CRISPR with unfolding discoveries related to stem cells. Scientists at several centers, including Church’s, think they will soon be able to use stem cells to produce eggs and sperm in the laboratory. Unlike an embryo, stem cells can be grown and multiplied. Thus they could offer a vastly improved way to create edited offspring with CRISPR. The recipe goes like this: First, edit the genes of the stem cells. Second, turn them into an egg or sperm. Third, produce an offspring. GENE EDITING (MIT PRESS)

Some investors got an early view of the technique on December 17 at the Benjamin Hotel in Manhattan during commercial presentations by OvaScience, a company that was founded four years ago to commercialize the scientific work of Harvard’s Sinclair and Jonathan Tilly, an expert on egg stem cells and the chairman of the biology department at Northeastern University (see “10 Breakthrough Technologies 2012: Egg Stem Cells”). The company’s presentations were part of its successful effort to raise $132 million in new capital in January.

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During the meeting, Sinclair, a velvet-voiced Australian whom Time last year named one of the “100 Most Influential People in the World,” took the podium and provided Wall Street with a peek at what he called “truly worldchanging” developments. These, he said, would cause people to look back at this moment in time and recognize it as a new chapter in “how humans control their bodies,” because it would let parents determine “when and how they have children and how healthy those children are actually going to be.” OvaScience has been collecting, and studying, what it believes are egg stem cells from the outer layer of women’s ovaries. The company has not yet perfected its stem-cell technology—it has not reported that the eggs it grows in the lab are viable—but Sinclair predicted that functional eggs were “a when, and not an if.” Once the technology works, he said, infertile women will be able to produce hundreds of eggs, and maybe hundreds of embryos. Using DNA sequencing to analyze their genes, they could pick among them for the healthiest ones. Genetically improved children may also be possible. Sinclair told the investors that he was trying to alter the DNA of these egg stem cells using gene editing, work he later told me he was doing with Church’s lab. “We think the new technologies with genome editing will allow it to be used on individuals who aren’t just interested in using IVF to have children but have healthier children as well, if there is a genetic disease in their family,” Sinclair told the investors. He gave the example of Huntington’s disease, caused by a gene that will trigger a fatal brain condition even in someone who inherits only one copy of it. Sinclair said gene editing could be used to remove the lethal gene defect from an egg cell. His goal, and that of OvaScience, is to “correct those mutations before we generate your child,” he said. “It’s still experimental, but there is no reason to expect it won’t be possible in coming years.” Sinclair spoke to me briefly on the phone as he travelled across a snowed-in Boston in a cab, but he later referred my questions to OvaScience. When I contacted OvaScience, Cara Mayfield, a spokeswoman, said its executives could not comment because of their travel schedules but confirmed that the company was working on treating inherited disorders with gene editing. What was surprising to me is that OvaScience’s research in “crossing the germ line,” as critics of human engineering sometimes put it, has generated scarcely any notice. In December 2013, OvaScience even announced it was putting $1.5 million into a joint venture with a synthetic-biology company called Intrexon, whose R&D objectives include gene-editing egg stem cells to “prevent the propagation” of human disease “in future generations.”

Tilly predicted that the whole end-to-end technology—cells to stem cells, stem cells to sperm or egg and then to offspring—would end up being worked out first in animals, such as cattle, either by his lab or by companies such as eGenesis, the spin-off from the Church lab working on livestock. But he isn’t sure what the next step should be with edited human eggs. You wouldn’t want to fertilize one “willy nilly,” he said. You’d be making a potential human being. And doing that would raise questions he’s not sure he can answer. He told me, “‘Can you do it?’ is one thing. If you can, then the most important questions come up. ‘Would you do it? Why would you want to do it? What is the purpose?’ As scientists we want to know if it’s feasible, but then we get into the bigger questions, and it’s not a science question, it’s a society question.”

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When I reached Tilly at Northeastern, he laughed when I told him what I was calling about. “It’s going to be a hot-button issue,” he said. Tilly also said his lab was trying to edit egg cells with CRISPR “right now” to rid them of an inherited genetic disease that he didn’t want to name. Tilly emphasized that there are “two pieces of the puzzle”—one being stem cells and the other gene editing. The ability to create large numbers of egg stem cells is critical, because only with sizable quantities can genetic changes be stably introduced using CRISPR, characterized using DNA sequencing, and carefully studied to check for mistakes before producing an egg.

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Improving Humans If germ-line engineering becomes part of medical practice, it could lead to transformative changes in human well-being, with consequences to people’s life span, identity, and economic output. But it would create ethical dilemmas and social challenges. What if these improvements were available only to the richest societies, or the richest people? An in vitro fertility procedure costs about $20,000 in the United States. Add genetic testing and egg donation or a surrogate mother and the price soars towards $100,000.

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Others believe the idea’s downfall is that medical reasons to follow through on it are lacking. Hank Greely, a law professor and ethicist at Stanford University, says proponents “can’t really say what it is good for.” The problem, says Greely, is that it’s already possible to test the DNA of IVF embryos and pick healthy ones, a process that adds about $4,000 to the cost of a fertility procedure. A man with Huntington’s, for instance, could have his sperm used to fertilize a dozen of his partner’s eggs. Half those embryos would not have the Huntington’s gene, and those could be used to begin a pregnancy.

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Others predict that hard-to-oppose medical uses will be identified. A couple might have several genetic diseases at once, and not find a suitable embryo. Treating infertility is another possibility. Some men don’t produce any sperm, a condition called azoospermia. One cause is a genetic defect in which a region of about one to six million DNA letters is missing from their Y chromosome. It might be possible to take a skin cell from such a man, turn it into a stem cell, repair the DNA, and then make sperm, says Werner Neuhausser, a young Austrian doctor who splits his time between Boston IVF, the fertilityclinic network, and Harvard’s Stem Cell Institute. “That will change medicine forever, right? You could cure infertility, that is for sure,” he says. I spoke with Church several times by telephone over the last few months, and he told me what’s driving everything is the “incredible specificity” of CRISPR. Although not all the details have been worked out, he thinks the technology could replace DNA letters essentially without side effects. He says this is what makes it “tempting to use.” Church says his laboratory is focused mostly on experiments in engineering animals. He added that his lab would not make or edit human embryos, calling such a step “not our style.”

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Indeed, some people are adamant that germ-line engineering is being pushed ahead with “false arguments.” That is the view of Edward Lanphier, CEO of Sangamo Biosciences, a California biotechnology company that is using another gene editing technique, called zinc finger nucleases, to try to treat HIV in adults by altering their blood cells. “We’ve looked at [germline engineering] for a disease rationale, and there is none,” he says. “You can do it. But there really isn’t a medical reason. People say, well, we don’t want children born with this, or born with that—but it’s a completely false argument and a slippery slope toward much more unacceptable uses.” Critics cite a host of fears. Children would be the subject of experiments. Parents would be influenced by genetic advertising from IVF clinics. Germline engineering would lead to “positive eugenics,” encouraging the spread of allegedly superior genes. And it would affect people not yet born, without their being able to agree to it. The American Medical Association, for instance, holds the position that germ-line engineering shouldn’t be done “at this time” because it “affects the welfare of future generations” and could cause “unpredictable and irreversible results.” But like a lot of official statements against germ-line engineering, the AMA’s, which was last updated in 1996, predates today’s technology. “A lot of people just agreed to these statements. It wasn’t hard to renounce something that you couldn’t do,” says Greely.

What is Church’s style is human enhancement. And he’s been making a broad case that CRISPR can do more than eliminate disease genes. It can lead to augmentation. At meetings of groups of people known as “transhumanists,”

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who are interested in next steps for human evolution, Church likes to show a slide on which he lists naturally occurring variants of around 10 genes that, when people are born with them, confer extraordinary qualities or resistance to disease. One makes your bones so hard they’ll break a surgical drill. Another drastically cuts the risk of heart attacks. And a variant of the gene for the amyloid precursor protein, or APP, was found by Icelandic researchers to protect against Alzheimer’s. People with it never get dementia and remain sharp into old age. Church thinks CRISPR could be used to provide people with favorable versions of genes, making DNA edits that would act as vaccines—not against viruses but against some of the most common diseases we face today. Although Church told me anything “edgy” should only be done to adults who can agree to it, it’s obvious to him that the earlier such interventions occur, the better. Church tends to dodge questions about genetically modified babies. The idea of improving the human species has always had “enormously bad press,” he wrote in the introduction to Regenesis, his 2012 book on synthetic biology— whose cover was a painting by Eustache Le Sueur of a bearded God creating the world. But that’s ultimately what he’s suggesting: enhancements in the form of protective genes. “An argument will be made that the ultimate prevention is that the earlier you go, the better the prevention,” he told an audience at MIT’s Media Lab last spring. “I do think it’s the ultimate preventive, if we get to the point where it’s very inexpensive, extremely safe, and very predictable.” Church, who has a less cautious side, proceeded to tell the audience that he thought changing genes “is going to get to the point where it’s like you are doing the equivalent of cosmetic surgery.”

Other observers say higher IQ is exactly what we should be considering. Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford University best known for his 2014 book Superintelligence, which raised alarms about the risks of artificial

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Some thinkers have concluded that we should not pass up the chance to make improvements to our species. “The human genome is not perfect,” says John Harris, a bioethicist at Manchester University, in the U.K. “It’s ethically imperative to positively support this technology.” By some measures, public opinion in the U.S. is not particularly negative toward the idea. A Pew Research survey carried out last August found that 46 percent of adults approved of genetic modification of babies to reduce the risk of serious diseases. (The same survey found that 83 percent said doing so to make a baby smarter would be “taking medical advances too far.”)

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intelligence in computers, has also looked at whether reproductive technology could be used to improve human intellect. Although the ways in which genes affect intelligence aren’t well understood and there are far too many relevant genes to permit easy engineering, such realities don’t dim speculation on the possibilities. What if everyone could be a little bit smarter? Or a few people could be a lot smarter? Even a small number of “super-enhanced” individuals, Bostrom wrote in a 2013 paper, could change the world through their creativity and discoveries, and through innovations that everyone else would use. In his view, genetic enhancement is an important long-range issue like climate change or financial planning by nations, “since human problem-solving ability is a factor in every challenge we face.” To some scientists, the explosive advance of genetics and biotech means germ-line engineering is inevitable. Of course, safety questions would be paramount. Before there’s a genetically edited baby saying “Mama,” there would have to be tests in rats, rabbits, and probably monkeys, to make sure they are normal. But ultimately, if the benefits seem to outweigh the risks, medicine would take the chance. “It was the same with IVF when it first happened,” says Neuhausser. “We never really knew if that baby was going to be healthy at 40 or 50 years. But someone had to take the plunge.” Wine Country On January 24, around 20 scientists, ethicists, and legal experts traveled to Napa Valley, California, for a retreat among the vineyards at the Carneros Inn. They had been convened by Doudna, the Berkeley scientist who codiscovered how to edit genes with CRISPR. She had become aware, and concerned, that scientists were intent on crossing the germ line. Now she wanted to know: could they be stopped?

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“We as scientists have come to appreciate that [CRISPR] is incredibly powerful. But that swings both ways. We need to make sure that it’s applied carefully,” Doudna told me. “The issue is especially human germ-line editing and the appreciation that this is now a capability in everyone’s hands.” At the meeting, along with ethicists like Greely, was Paul Berg, a Stanford biochemist known for having organized the Asilomar Conference, a historic 1975 forum at which biologists reached an agreement on how to safely proceed with recombinant DNA, the then newly discovered method of splicing DNA into bacteria.

Is this not the script of a cyberpunk dystopian movie? Won’t there be a divide in humanity, where the “elite” tries to rule the masses?

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Should there be an Asilomar for germ-line engineering? Doudna thinks so, but the prospects for reaching such a consensus these days seem unlikely. Biotechnology research is now global, employing millions of people. There’s no single authority that speaks for science and no easy way to put the genie back in the bottle. Doudna told me that she hoped at least American scientists might come to a consensus that germ-line research should be paused. Some people at the meeting said they would be signing a statement they would publish in a high-profile scientific journal, outlining their concerns. Doudna says she hopes that if U.S. scientists make a joint statement, it might influence researchers elsewhere in the world to cease their work. Doudna believes a self-imposed pause should apply not only to altering embryos but also to using CRISPR to alter human eggs or sperm—as researchers at Harvard, Northeastern, and OvaScience are doing. “I don’t feel that those experiments are appropriate to do right now in human cells that could turn into a person,” she told me. “I feel that the research that needs to be done right now is to understand safety, efficacy, and delivery. And I think those experiments can be done in nonhuman systems. I would like to see a lot more work done before it’s done for germ-line editing. I would favor a very cautious approach.”

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Not everyone agrees that germ-line engineering is such a big worry, or that experiments should be padlocked. Greely notes that in the United States, there are piles of regulations to keep lab science from morphing into a genetically modified baby anytime soon. “I would not want to use safety as an excuse for a non-safety-based ban,” says Greely, who says he pushed back against talk of a moratorium. But Greely also says he agreed to sign Doudna’s letter, which now reflects the consensus of the group. “Although I don’t view this as a crisis moment, I think it’s probably about time for us to have this discussion,” he says.

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As news has spread of germ-line experiments, some biotechnology companies working on CRISPR have realized they will have to take a stand. Nessan Bermingham is CEO of Intellia Therapeutics, a Boston startup, which raised $15 million last year to develop CRISPR into gene therapy treatments for adults or children. He says germ-line engineering “is not on our commercial radar,” and he suggests that his company could use its patents to prevent anyone from commercializing it. “The technology is in its infancy,” he says. “It is not appropriate for people to even be contemplating germ-line applications.”

Not everyone agrees global warming is an issue either...

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Bermingham told me he never imagined he’d have to be taking a position on genetically modified babies so soon. Rewriting human heredity has always been a theoretical possibility. Suddenly it’s a real one. But wasn’t the point always to understand and control our own biology—to become masters over the processes that created us? Doudna says she is also thinking about these issues. “It cuts to the core of who we are as people, and it makes you ask if humans should be exercising that kind of power,” Doudna told me. “There are moral and ethical issues, but one of the profound questions is just the appreciation that if germ-line editing is conducted in humans, that is changing human evolution.” One reason she feels the research should stop is to give scientists a chance to spend more time explaining what their next steps could be. “Most of the public,” she says, “does not appreciate what is coming.”

The Black Swan: The Impact Of The Highly Improbably Nassim Nicholas Taleb in The New York Times.

Before the discovery of Australia, people in the old world were convinced that all swans were white, an unassailable belief as it seemed completely confirmed by empirical evidence. The sighting of the first black swan might have been an interesting surprise for a few ornithologists (and others extremely concerned with the coloring of birds), but that is not where the significance of the story lies. It illustrates a severe limitation to our learning from observations or experience and the fragility of our knowledge. One single observation can invalidate a general statement derived from millennia of confirmatory sightings of millions of white swans. All you need is one single (and, I am told, quite ugly) black bird.

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I push one step beyond this philosophical-logical question into an empirical reality, and one that has obsessed me since childhood. What we call here a Black Swan (and capitalize it) is an event with the following three attributes.

I stop and summarize the triplet: rarity, extreme impact, and retrospective (though not prospective) predictability. A small number of Black Swans explain almost everything in our world, from the success of ideas and religions, to the dynamics of historical events, to elements of our own personal lives. Ever since we left the Pleistocene, some ten millennia ago, the effect of these

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First, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. Second, it carries an extreme impact. Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable.

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Black Swans has been increasing. It started accelerating during the industrial revolution, as the world started getting more complicated, while ordinary events, the ones we study and discuss and try to predict from reading the newspapers, have become increasingly inconsequential. Just imagine how little your understanding of the world on the eve of the events of 1914 would have helped you guess what was to happen next. (Don’t cheat by using the explanations drilled into your cranium by your dull high school teacher). How about the rise of Hitler and the subsequent war? How about the precipitous demise of the Soviet bloc? How about the rise of Islamic fundamentalism? How about the spread of the Internet? How about the market crash of 1987 (and the more unexpected recovery)? Fads, epidemics, fashion, ideas, the emergence of art genres and schools. All follow these Black Swan dynamics. Literally, just about everything of significance around you might qualify. This combination of low predictability and large impact makes the Black Swan a great puzzle; but that is not yet the core concern of this book. Add to this phenomenon the fact that we tend to act as if it does not exist! I don’t mean just you, your cousin Joey, and me, but almost all “social scientists” who, for over a century, have operated under the false belief that their tools could measure uncertainty. For the applications of the sciences of uncertainty to real-world problems has had ridiculous effects; I have been privileged to see it in finance and economics. Go ask your portfolio manager for his definition of “risk,” and odds are that he will supply you with a measure that excludes the possibility of the Black Swan-hence one that has no better predictive value for assessing the total risks than astrology (we will see how they dress up the intellectual fraud with mathematics). This problem is endemic in social matters.

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The central idea of this book concerns our blindness with respect to randomness, particularly the large deviations: Why do we, scientists or nonscientists, hotshots or regular Joes, tend to see the pennies instead of the dollars? Why do we keep focusing on the minutiae, not the possible significant large events, in spite of the obvious evidence of their huge influence? And, if you follow my argument, why does reading the newspaper actually decrease your knowledge of the world? It is easy to see that life is the cumulative effect of a handful of significant shocks. It is not so hard to identify the role of Black Swans, from your armchair (or bar stool). Go through the following exercise. Look into your own existence. Count the significant events, the technological changes, and

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the inventions that have taken place in our environment since you were born and compare them to what was expected before their advent. How many of them came on a schedule? Look into your own personal life, to your choice of profession, say, or meeting your mate, your exile from your country of origin, the betrayals you faced, your sudden enrichment or impoverishment. How often did these things occur according to plan? What You Do Not Know Black Swan logic makes what you don’t know far more relevant than what you do know. Consider that many Black Swans can be caused and exacerbated by their being unexpected. Think of the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001: had the risk been reasonably conceivable on September 10, it would not have happened. If such a possibility were deemed worthy of attention, fighter planes would have circled the sky above the twin towers, airplanes would have had locked bulletproof doors, and the attack would not have taken place, period. Something else might have taken place. What? I don’t know. Isn’t it strange to see an event happening precisely because it was not supposed to happen? What kind of defense do we have against that? Whatever you come to know (that New York is an easy terrorist target, for instance) may become inconsequential if your enemy knows that you know it. It may be odd to realize that, in such a strategic game, what you know can be truly inconsequential.

Consider the Pacific tsunami of December 2004. Had it been expected, it would not have caused the damage it did-the areas affected would have been less populated, an early warning system would have been put in place. What you know cannot really hurt you.

THE BLACK SWAN (NY TIMES)

This extends to all businesses. Think about the “secret recipe” to making a killing in the restaurant business. If it were known and obvious then someone next door would have already come up with the idea and it would have become generic. The next killing in the restaurant industry needs to be an idea that is not easily conceived of by the current population of restaurateurs. It has to be at some distance from expectations. The more unexpected the success of such a venture, the smaller the number of competitors, and the more successful the entrepreneur who implements the idea. The same applies to the shoe and the book businesses—or any kind of entrepreneurship. The same applies to scientific theories-nobody has interest in listening to trivialities. The payoff of a human venture is, in general, inversely proportional to what it is expected to be.

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Experts and “Empty Suits” The inability to predict outliers implies the inability to predict the course of history, given the share of these events in the dynamics of events. But we act as though we are able to predict historical events, or, even wore, as if we are able to change the course of history. We produce thirty year projections of social security deficits and oil prices without realizing that we cannot even predict these for next summer—our cumulative prediction errors for political and economic events are so monstrous that every time I look at the empirical record I have to pinch myself to verify that I am not dreaming. What is surprising is not the magnitude of our forecast errors, but our absence of awareness of it. This is all the more worrisome when we engage in deadly conflicts: wars are fundamentally unpredictable (and we do not know it). Owing to this misunderstanding of the casual chains between policy and actions, we can easily trigger Black Swans thanks to aggressive ignorance-like a child playing with a chemistry kit. Our inability to predict in environments subjected to the Black Swan, coupled with a general lack of the awareness of this state of affairs, means that certain professionals, while believing they are experts, are in fact not based on their empirical record, they do not know more about their subject matter than the general population, but they are much better at narrating—or, worse, at smoking you with complicated mathematical models. They are also more likely to wear a tie. Black Swans being unpredictable, we need to adjust to their existence (rather than naively try to predict them). There are so many things we can do if we focus on anti knowledge, or what we do not know. Among many other benefits, you can set yourself up to collect serendipitous Black Swans by maximizing your exposure to them. Learning To Learn

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Another related human impediment comes from excessive focus on what we do know: we tend to learn the precise, not the general. What did people learn from the 9/11 episode? Did they learn that some events, owing to their dynamics, stand largely outside the realm of the predictable? No. Did they learn the built-in defect of conventional wisdom? No. What did they figure out? They learned precise rules for avoiding

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Islamic prototerrorists and tall buildings. Many keep reminding me that it is important for us to be practical and take tangible steps rather than to “theorize” about knowledge. The story of the Maginot Line shows how we are conditioned to be specific. The French, after the Great War, built a wall along the previous German invasion route to prevent reinvasion-Hitler just (almost) effortlessly went around it. The French had been excellent students of history; they just learned with too much precision. They were too practical and exceedingly focused for their own safety. We do not spontaneously learn that we don’t learn that we don’t learn. The problem lies in the structure of our minds: we don’t learn rules, just facts, and only facts. Metarules (such as the rule that we have a tendency to not learn rules) we don’t seem to be good at getting. We scorn the abstract; we scorn it with passion. Why? It is necessary here, as it is my agenda in the rest of this book, both to stand conventional wisdom on its head and to show how inapplicable it is to our modern, complex, and increasingly recursive environment. But there is a deeper question: What are our minds made for? It looks as if we have the wrong user’s manual. Our minds do not seem made to think and introspect; if they were, things would be easier for us today, but then we would not be here today and I would not have been here to talk about it—my counterfactual, introspective, and hard-thinking ancestor would have been eaten by a tiger while his nonthinking, but faster-reacting cousin would have run for cover. Consider that thinking is time-consuming and generally a great waste of energy, that our predecessors spent more than a hundred million years as nonthinking mammals and that in the blip in our history during which we have used our brain we have used it on subjects too peripheral to matter. Evidence shows that we do much less thinking than we believe we do-except, of course, when we think about it.

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A New Kind Of Ingratitude THE BLACK SWAN (NY TIMES)

It is quite saddening to think of those people who have been mistreated by history. There were the poetes maudits, like Edgar Allan Poe or Arthur Rimbaud, scorned by society and later worshipped and force-fed to schoolchildren. (There are even schools named after high school dropouts). Alas, this recognition came a little too late for the poet to get a serotonin kick out of it, or to prop up his romantic life on earth. But there are even more mistreated heroes—the very sad category of those who we do not know were heroes, who saved our lives, who helped us avoid disasters. They left

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no traces and did not even know that they were making a contribution. We remember the martyrs who died for a cause that we knew about, never those no less effective in their contribution but whose cause we were never aware— precisely because they were successful. Our ingratitude towards the poetes maudits fades completely in front of this other type of thanklessness. This is a far more vicious kind of ingratitude: the feeling of uselessness on the part of the silent hero. I will illustrate with the following thought experiment. Assume that a legislator with courage, influence, intellect, vision, and perseverance manages to enact a law that goes into universal effect and employment on September 10, 2001; it imposes the continuously locked bulletproof doors in every cockpit (at high costs to the struggling airlines)— just in case terrorists decide to use planes to attack the World Trade Center in New York City. I know this is lunacy, but it is just a thought experiment (I am aware that there may be no such thing as a legislator with intellect, courage, vision, and perseverance; this is the point of the thought experiment). The legislation is not a popular measure among the airline personnel, as it complicates their lives. But it would certainly have prevented 9/11. The person who imposed locks on cockpit doors gets no statues in public squares, not so much as a quick mention of his contribution in his obituary. “Joe Smith, who helped avoid the disaster of 9/11, died of complications of liver disease.” Seeing how superfluous his measure was, and how it squandered resources, the public, with great help from airline pilots, might well boot him out of office. Vox clamantis in deserto. He will retire depressed, with a great sense of failure. He will die with the impression of having done nothing useful. I wish I could go attend his funeral, but, reader, I can’t find him. And yet, recognition can be quite a pump. Believe me, even those who genuinely claim that they do not believe in recognition, and that they separate labor from the fruits of labor, actually get a serotonin kick from it. See how the silent hero is rewarded: even his own hormonal system will conspire to offer no reward. Now consider again the events of 9/11. In their aftermath, who got the recognition? Those you saw in the media, on television performing heroic acts, and those whom you saw trying to give you the impression that they were performing heroic acts. The latter category includes someone like the New York Stock Exchange Chairman Richard Grasso, who “saved the stock exchange” and received a huge bonus for his contribution (the equivalent of several thousand average salaries). All he had to do was be there to ring the opening bell on television-the television that, we will see, is the carrier of unfairness and a major cause of Black Swan blindness.

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Who gets rewarded, the central banker who avoids a recession or the one who comes to “correct” his predecessors’ faults and happens to be there during some economic recovery? Who is more valuable, the politician who avoids a war or the one who starts a new one (and is lucky enough to win)? It is the same logic reversal we saw earlier with the value of what we don’t know; everybody knows that you need more prevention than treatment, but few reward acts of prevention. We glorify those who left their names in history books at the expense of those contributors about whom our books are silent. We humans are not just a superficial race (this may be curable to some extent); we are a very unfair one. Life Is Very Unusual This is a book about uncertainty; to this author, the rare event equals uncertainty. This may seem like a strong statement-that we need to principally study the rare and extreme events in order to figure out common ones—but I will make myself clear as follows. There are two possible ways to approach phenomena. The first is to rule out the extraordinary and focus on the “normal.” The examiner leaves aside “outliers” and studies ordinary cases. The second approach is to consider that in order to understand a phenomenon, one needs to first consider the extremes—particularly if, like the Black Swan, they carry an extraordinary cumulative effect.

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I don’t particularly care about the usual. If you want to get an idea of a friend’s temperament, ethics, and personal elegance, you need to look at him under the tests of severe circumstances, not under the regular rosy glow of daily life. Can you assess the danger a criminal poses by examining only what he does on an ordinary day? Can we understand health without considering wild diseases and epidemics? Indeed the normal is often irrelevant. Almost everything in social life is produced by rare but consequential shocks and jumps; all the while almost everything studied about social life focuses on the “normal,” particularly with “bell curve” methods of inference that tell you close to nothing. Why? Because the bell curve ignores large deviations, cannot handle them, yet makes us confident that we have tamed uncertainty. Its nickname in this book is GIF, Great Intellectual Fraud. . . .

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Understanding Ourselves. Undertanding Ourselves. Understandng Ourselves. Understanding Ourselves. Understanding Ourelves. Understanding Ourselves. Understanding Ourselves. Undertanding Ourselves. Understandng Ourselves. Understanding Ourselves. Understanding Ourelves. Understanding Ourselves. Understanding Ourselves. Undertanding Ourselves. Understandng Ourselves. Understanding Ourselves. Understanding Our-

Understanding Ourselves. Under standing Ourselves. Understand ing Ourselves. Understandin Ourselves. Understanding Our selves. Understanding Ourselves Understanding Ourselves. Under standing Ourselves. Understand ing Ourselves. Understandin Ourselves. Understanding Our selves. Understanding Ourselves Understanding Ourselves. Under standing Ourselves. Understand ing Ourselves. Understandin Ourselves. Understanding Our

PURPOSE (VICTOR CHENG)

The Purpose Of Purpose By Victor Cheng

In business, career, and life plans, one common factor exists that determines whether such a plan is strategic or not. What is this X factor? It is PURPOSE. Most plans of any type lack purpose. Purpose is the end game you are trying to achieve. It is the “WHY” behind any plan—at least it should be. The purpose of purpose is to provide direction. How can you tell if you have a clear purpose or not? Here’s a simple test:

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If you struggle to make a decision between two well-understood options, then most likely your purpose is unclear. If you can enter two different markets, but can’t decide between the two even after researching them thoroughly, most likely your purpose is unclear.

UNDERSTANDING OURSELVES

If you can’t decide between two job offers even after researching them thoroughly, then most likely your purpose is unclear. If you can’t decide between living in two different cities, even after understanding both options, then most likely your purpose is not clear. When you have purpose, decisions become surprisingly easy. You pick the option that gets you closer to your end game. When your end game is clear (extremely clear), the decision is usually obvious. In my work, I come across those just entering the work force, those in the work force for some time but who are unhappy, and veteran entrepreneurs in their 50s—all of whom are “stuck” in their careers for one reason or another.

“But, if you don’t know what your goal is, I can’t help you.” (Though I often refer such prospective clients to colleagues who can help them get clarity). In other words, if you are starting at Point A and you want to get to Point Z, I can map out a strategic plan and course of action to get you there. But, if you are at Point A and have no idea where you want to end up, then my expertise is pretty useless until that has been defined.

UNDERSTANDING OURSELVES

In my client work, I’ve told prospective clients for most of the last 10 years, “If you know what your goal is, I am quite good at helping you figure out an effective path to get there.

Here’s another test to determine someone has a clearly defined purpose: When someone states their goal, I ask them WHY that is their goal. Regardless of the answer I get, I ask them WHY their answer to my question is important to them. For example, someone might say, “I really want to work in management consulting.” 145

I say, “Okay. Why?” They say, “Because it sounds like interesting work.” I say, “Okay, why is that important to you?” I will basically say “why” all day long to try to uncover someone’s underlying reasoning behind their reasons. According to Adam Smith, when you question our core purpose, essentially it is boiled down to pleasure or pain.

I recently had a client tell me she had a goal of building a business with $X million in sales. I asked why? She said, “Because it’s the next level.” I said, “Why is achieving the next level important?”

PURPOSE (VICTOR CHENG)

What happens quite frequently is at some point in the process, most people can’t answer the deceptively simply (but in reality, quite profound) question of “Why?”

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“Because it is.” “I understand it is, but WHY is it?” Silence… “Do you need the money to buy something?” “No, I already earn enough to buy everything I need.” “So WHY is $X million so important to you? Silence… “If you built a business that earned $(X – 1) Million, would you consider that a failure?” She then responds, embarrassingly but honestly, “Yes…” “Okay, why?”

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More silence. In this case, what I suspected was the purpose of her purpose was not one financial or strategic in nature, but largely emotionally symbolic. For some reason, not yet clear to me or her, the $X million had some symbolic meaning beyond its financial or strategic value.

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A clear purpose helps enormously in identifying alternative and often unconventional ways to achieve your purpose. I once remember Tony Robbins talking about one of his exclusive retreats in Fiji. Tony was taking a walk on a nearby beach when he ran into an old man who lived nearby all his life. The old man asked why all of these foreigners were in Fiji learning from Tony. Tony responded that they were there to take control of their financial lives and to build wealth. And the local man asked, “Why?” “So they can accumulate assets, to generate income without having to work.” The old man responded, “And why do they want to do that?”

In response, the old man said, “Well I’m not rich, I’ve worked all my life, and I’ve spent at least part of every day at the beach for my entire life.” Isn’t that a thought provoking dialog? When it comes to careers, most people are wedded to “The Path”—common popular career paths such as consulting, investment banking, law, medicine, etc.

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“So someday they can stop working entirely, and retire, and spend every day at the beach.”

There’s nothing fundamentally right or wrong with these paths. Whether these paths are good choices depends in large part on each individual’s purpose. For some, management consulting is a phenomenal path. For others, it’s a completely disastrous idea. It all depends on your purpose. I routinely get emails from readers looking for help in deciding between career path A vs. B, or job offer A vs. B. Invariably, I’m sure they are disappointed in my reply. In nearly every case, I ask, “What is your goal?”

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What I find noteworthy is many people don’t know the answer to that question. So what do you do when you don’t have a sense of purpose that is all your own? How do you figure out what you want out of your life? Often this happens to people who have spent their whole lives based on what others (parents, siblings, peers) want for their lives. If this describes you, here are a few tools you might find helpful.

2) If you don’t know what you want, it helps enormously to invest time in exploring a wide range of options. Go visit people (alumni from your university are great for this) in different professions and see what a day in their lives looks like. You might not find out what you want, but you will most certainly figure out what you do not want.

PURPOSE (VICTOR CHENG)

1) If you don’t know what you want, then you damn well better know what you do not want (and at a minimum stop focusing there).

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3) Keep asking yourself what you want, even if each time you ask, you don’t get an answer. I’m using this latter approach with one of my daughters. A year ago, I would ask her what she wanted to eat for dinner. She would never give me an answer and would just say, “whatever everyone else wants.” When I would push her on the question, it eventually became clear to me that she literally had no idea what she wanted to eat for dinner. When I saw this pattern repeat several times, I immediately linked this to readers who have written to me about their careers and were unable to respond to the question of “what’s your career goal?” I extrapolated that if she couldn’t answer the question of “what do you want for dinner?” as a 6-year-old, as a 26-year-old she would probably have difficulty answering the question, “What do you want for your life or career?” What I’ve found helpful with her is to do the following.

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I would ask her what she wanted for dinner when everybody else in the family was not present. So when she would say, “whatever everyone else wants,” I’d say, “well nobody else is here, just you.” “What do you want?” The first 5 or 6 times I did this, all I ever got back in response was silence and a shrug of the shoulders.

UNDERSTANDING OURSELVES

Around the 6th or 7th time, I would (barely) get what I call a “non”-answer out of her. She would say, “I don’t know, but I do not want X.” Progress! “Okay, you do not want X. We’re not going to eat X tonight.” After many months of working with her on this, she now actually knows what she wants for dinner and can verbalize it. The takeaway I got from this experience was that the act of asking the question, “What do you want?”, even when there was no immediate answer,

Sometimes it takes weeks or months for someone unaccustomed to answering a particular question to develop their own thoughts and feelings about it. (I personally think the human mind abhors a vacuum, and tries to fill it.) I see this with my clients all the time. I will ask them a “why” question that they just can’t answer.

UNDERSTANDING OURSELVES

prompted her (and others) to continually think about the question and build up the self-awareness needed to answer the question in the future.

They will ponder the question, in some cases for months. Their inability to answer a very simple question bugs them a lot. So they start thinking about the question over several days, weeks, and months, until they eventually are able to answer it. (Though often the initial answers are “non”-answers–e.g., they figure out what they do not want, before they figure out what they do want.) If you sense the purpose of your career and life is unclear, I strongly urge you to not avoid the uncomfortable question.

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By keeping the difficult-to-answer question present in your mind, your mind will dislike the discomfort it causes and do one of two things: 1) It will try to avoid the discomfort by avoiding the question. or 2) Your mind will seek to resolve the discomfort by seeking an answer.

I’ll close today with a quote attributed to Socrates: “An unexamined life is one not worth living.” I’ll add my corollary that, “an unexamined life is existing, but it is not living (your life).”

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When you deliberately do not let yourself avoid the question, you force your mind to find the answer. You will definitely find the answer… eventually– though the path to do so might not be easily predictable in advance.

NPR INVISIBILIA (THOUGHTS)

The Secret History Of Thoughts Co-hosts Alix Spiegel and Lulu Miller ask the question, “Are my thoughts related to my inner wishes, do they reveal who I really am?” The answer can have profound consequences for your life.

Dark Thoughts What should we think about our thoughts? Invisibilia’s Alix Spiegel walks us through the secret history of thoughts, and introduces us to a man who is tormented by his own violent thoughts. 150

ALIX SPIEGEL, HOST: So we’re going to start with a very simple question - what were you just thinking? UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: Who the hell are you? (Laughter) I mean, that’s what I was just thinking.

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UNIDENTIFIED GIRL #1: A cheeseburger (laughter). I wanted a cheeseburger. UNIDENTIFIED BOY #1: Going out with my girlfriend. SPIEGEL: You have a girlfriend? UNIDENTIFIED BOY #1: Yep. SPIEGEL: Really? UNIDENTIFIED BOY #1: Yeah.

UNIDENTIFIED BOY #1: Eleven. UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #1: Whether or not this is a nice building. I’m looking to buy a condo here. SPIEGEL: Over the last couple of months, we’ve been asking this question of all kinds of people. You - you come over here.

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SPIEGEL: How old are you?

SPIEGEL: And who are we? Well, I am Alix Spiegel. LULU MILLER, HOST: And I am Lulu Miller. Can I possibly trouble you for about 30 seconds? SPIEGEL: And I have to say—on this little thought-finding mission... 151

MILLER: What were you just thinking about? SPIEGEL: ...We got just a shocking array of thoughts. We got big thoughts. UNIDENTIFIED BOY #2: What it would be like if there was no stars, just the sun and no moon. SPIEGEL: We got small thoughts. UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: How much I love this BlackBerry I’m typing on.

UNIDENTIFIED MAN #3: I had a song in my head - (singing) smile. Oh, when your heart is aching, smile. SPIEGEL: But also, sad thoughts. UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #2: I’m not good enough.

NPR INVISIBILIA (THOUGHTS)

SPIEGEL: Musical thoughts.

NPR INVISIBILIA (THOUGHTS)

SPIEGEL: Worried thoughts. UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #3: I was thinking about my sister. I was thinking how I could help her. SPIEGEL: Creepy thoughts. UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #4: This very vivid image of me hitting him with a hammer on his head. SPIEGEL: So we got all kinds of thoughts. UNIDENTIFIED GIRL #2: I’m thinking, why did you ask me what I was just thinking? What did that have to do with what you were putting on the radio? MILLER: That’s a great question, Alix. UNIDENTIFIED GIRL #2: Yes.

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SPIEGEL: Yes, it is. And the truth is that it’s not just thoughts in general that we’re interested in; really, it’s this subset of thoughts that we want to focus on. MILLER: Yeah, those last ones you just heard - the dark ones. UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #5: I’ll always be alone. No one will love me.

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SPIEGEL: You know these thoughts. UNIDENTIFIED MAN #4: I’m waiting for the train, and the train is coming. And there’s this moment right when the subway train’s coming out of the tunnel and the lights are coming, this flicker of an impulse to just throw myself down the tracks. SPIEGEL: They come into our heads at random moments. Sometimes, they’re kind of shocking. UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #6: All of a sudden, I had an image of myself strangling them. SPIEGEL: And the thing that we want to talk about today is how should

MILLER: And I’m Lulu Miller. SPIEGEL: And what we do on our show is we look at invisible things, stuff like ideas and emotions and beliefs and assumptions and try to understand how those invisible things are shaping our lives. MILLER: And today, thoughts are the invisible things we are looking at.

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we think about these dark thoughts? You know, do they tell us something deep about ourselves, about our desires and our wishes, or not? This is INVISIBILIA. I’m Alix Spiegel.

SPIEGEL: We are a product of NPR News. And this is our very first show. MILLER: And it is worth mentioning here that we know our voices kind of sound the same. SPIEGEL: Yeah. MILLER: But keep on listening, and you’ll learn to differentiate us. And until then, enjoy the wash. 153

SPIEGEL: Right. MILLER: Right. SPIEGEL: Right. MILLER: Yeah. SPIEGEL: Yeah.

SPIEGEL: Yeah. Guy number one is a surfer, and to meet him, we’re going to go out to the West Coast. But before we do, we should warn you that this story has some disturbing images in it. So it might not be appropriate for younger listeners. And also because some of the subject matter here is so

NPR INVISIBILIA (THOUGHTS)

MILLER: Anyway, to this question of what to think about our thoughts, we’ve got two stories of two men who, for different reasons, find themselves completely overrun by dark thoughts, desperate to know the answer to the question of what to make of them. All right, Alix. You’ve got guy number one, right?

NPR INVISIBILIA (THOUGHTS)

sensitive, we’re not going to use the man’s real name. We’re just going to use his first initial, which is S. S: Well, come on inside. SPIEGEL: OK. Thank you so much. The day I met S, he answered the door in these very colorful shorts, very cheerful, very friendly. His house is just steps from the ocean. S: The water’s right here, so it’s... SPIEGEL: Oh, it’s so nice. Are you, like, a surfer? S: Yeah. SPIEGEL: And that was the kind of life that he led - sunny, until one day, he sat down—I think it was a Friday night... S: Friday or Saturday evening.

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SPIEGEL: ...To watch a movie with his wife. S: Relaxing, having a beer. SPIEGEL: They were newly married. And the movie that they decided to watch was this movie called “City Of God.” S: “City Of God.” It’s a Brazilian movie involving the drug trafficking of Rio de Janeiro. Pretty violent movie.

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SPIEGEL: It’s a very violent movie. S: The gangs would go, and they’d fight amongst each other and kill each other. And there was a lot of pretty graphic violence. And about midway through the movie, I started getting just inundated with violent thoughts. What if I were to brutally stab someone or shoot someone or harm my wife? SPIEGEL: Now, S had never had violent thoughts like this before. And they were very disturbing—in particular, this thought about harming his new wife. But he couldn’t get it out of his mind.

SPIEGEL: Cutting down her torso. S: Blood and guts all over. SPIEGEL: The thoughts became so overpowering that after the movie ended, he went into his bedroom and just curled up in a ball. S: I put my hands over my eyes and my head and was just trying to get rid of the thoughts. But the more I tried to get rid of them, the more and more they’d come back. What if you were to murder your wife—murder your wife—murder your wife?

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S: Stabbing her.

SPIEGEL: Eventually his wife comes in - finds him huddled there in this ball. And he didn’t know what to say to her—how to put it exactly. So he just blurted out what was going through his mind. S: I just had an image of stabbing you in the back with a knife. UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #7: As a new bride it was, you know, the last thing that I really thought that I would be hearing from my husband. (Laughter).

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SPIEGEL: But here’s the thing, his wife was completely unfazed by all this, unfazed because she felt like she knew her husband. UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #7: He’s the coolest person I know. SPIEGEL: They had dated for five years. UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #7: Gentle, sensitive, open.

S: She said, just relax and go to sleep. SPIEGEL: And so he went to sleep. But in the morning when he woke up, the thoughts were still there. In fact, over the next weeks and months, they just grew. It was like the movie had somehow broken open something inside of him.

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SPIEGEL: So she knew what a good soul he was. He was a gentle man.

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S: So morning time, I would wake up and maybe the first thought in my mind was an image of stabbing an innocent person. From there, I would take a walk with my dog and, boom, there pops the thought—what if I brutally kill or rape someone and their family when their lights are on at their home? SPIEGEL: Maybe he’d be making dinner. S: My wife is cutting carrots for a salad. Boom—what if I grab the knife and I were to stab her? SPIEGEL: And though he never actually acted on any of these thoughts that he was having, he was convinced that one day he might. So he started to avoid things. He wouldn’t hold knives. He stopped going out with friends. But still the thoughts persisted. They were everywhere. S: You know a chair there—inappropriately humping a chair. A pencil— using that as a weapon to stab someone.

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SPIEGEL: Which meant he was having to split himself in two. For example, he works in retail, so he has to work with people all day long. So he’d have these experiences where on one level, he’d be smiling, chatting away with a customer. And on another level, he is cutting down her body with a carving knife. S: I have to go to the bathroom—splash water on my face a lot. SPIEGEL: That’s how you would deal with it?

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S: I was on the verge of just fainting. I’d go into the restroom and splash water on my face and just try to regroup. SPIEGEL: Standing there looking in the mirror, his only explanation is that he must be having some kind of psychological breakdown. S: Yeah, I mean, this was happening every single day. SPIEGEL: So he and his wife turn to the Internet, searching for answers. But the things that they find there... S: Bipolar or schizophrenic. SPIEGEL: ...None of them seem to fit.

SPIEGEL: Months passed and physically, it took an incredible toll. UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #7: His face changed. His shoulders weren’t as broad anymore. S: ‘Cause of the stress. SPIEGEL: ‘Cause he worried that if he wasn’t mentally ill, there was only one horrifying conclusion—that on some level, he must want to do these things in his head.

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UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #7: We were just so confused, so lost.

S: There were a series of nights where I had told my wife, maybe I’m just better off if you put me in, like, the psych ward. I mean, it was kind of like, at least there, someone’s there to monitor me. And I wouldn’t - there’s no chance of me hurting anyone. SPIEGEL: It was around this point that S actually started thinking about killing himself. He was that scared of what he might do. He was thinking, what if he was the next Newtown killer or the next Aurora killer? And to know whether he was or he wasn’t, the thing he had to understand was, what is the relationship between these thoughts and me? So finally, he decides he has to go to a therapist.

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S: A psychologist or psychiatrist to get help. SPIEGEL: But, Lulu? MILLER: Yeah?

MILLER: I certainly did not until you told me. SPIEGEL: Right. So now I need to explain the secret history of thoughts. We will return to S in good time. But I need you to come with me now on a brief tour of three phases in thought history, OK?

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SPIEGEL: Here I want to put the brakes on S’s story for a second because the world that S is about to encounter—the world of therapists and how they think about thoughts—it is in the middle of a huge revolution. And it’s one I don’t know if most people know about.

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MILLER: OK. SPIEGEL: And for each of these phases, we’re going to visit the office of a therapist. MILLER: All right. SPIEGEL: So phase one, door one. JONATHAN SHEDLER: Thoughts have meaning. SPIEGEL: Thoughts have meaning. SHEDLER: So every thought is the tip of an iceberg. SPIEGEL: This is Jonathan Shedler. Shedler is a psychologist in Colorado who sees thoughts the same way that Freud proposed that we see thoughts, and because Freud was so influential, very likely the way that you see your own thoughts today, which is that your thoughts are very intimately related to who you are.

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SHEDLER: And there can be a tremendous value—profound value - in understanding where they come from. SPIEGEL: To explain, Shedler gave me this example of this patient that he saw recently, a man who, like S, was overrun with violent thoughts, but his were all about water.

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SHEDLER: These gruesome images of people being waterboarded, choking and gasping for air and suffocating. And they seemed to come out of the blue. He had never had thoughts like this before. He couldn’t get them out of his mind. He didn’t know why they were there. SPIEGEL: So Shedler says to this man, tell me about your thoughts. Describe them vividly. Let’s explore why they are there. SHEDLER: Let’s see where your thoughts lead. SPIEGEL: So the guy starts talking, and eventually it came up that his sister had recently died. SHEDLER: What happened was that she was walking across a frozen lake -

SPIEGEL: But once he did... SHEDLER: His entire demeanor changed because all of a sudden what had been this unpleasant, inexplicable, frightening symptom all of a sudden made sense to him.

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across the ice—and she had fallen through the ice and got trapped under the ice and drowned. And where his thoughts led were to horrific images of what the last few minutes of her life must have been like, where she was trapped under water and gasping for air. And as he talked, it became obvious to both of us that what he was describing about his sister and these gruesome images of people being waterboarded were almost identical, except he had never made the connection.

SPIEGEL: So Shedler told the man to go home, to talk to his friends and his family about his sister’s death, that that would help him, and it did. The thoughts didn’t come back again. SHEDLER: So if I had told him that his thoughts had no meaning and could be ignored, I think it would have cost him down the road. SPIEGEL: All right, so that’s the traditional view of thoughts, probably how you think about your own thoughts.

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MILLER: Yeah, I believe they do have some significance. SPIEGEL: But now, my friend, it is time to mosey our way down to door number two... MILLER: OK.

Yeah. All right. All right. I just need to check your levels here. In 2004, when I was new to NPR - just a baby reporter... MILLER: I think I can hear your pigtails. SPIEGEL: Shut up. One of my first assignments was to go to Pennsylvania

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SPIEGEL: ...Because the tides have changed. And there’s now a new way of thinking about thoughts that started to become popular around 1980, largely because of this man, Aaron Beck.

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to talk to Dr. Beck. First, tell me what you had for breakfast. When I met him, Beck, I think, was around 80 - this kind of white-haired, old man in an Orville Redenbacher bow tie—who, like everyone else in his generation, had started his career practicing Freud’s therapy, psychoanalysis. AARON BECK: I then had a couple of experiences which made me shift gears. SPIEGEL: You see, one day, in the late ‘60s, Beck was in a session with a patient—a woman who was explaining to him that several days earlier, she’d been at a party where she’d been having a difficult time connecting to people and had found herself overcome by these thoughts. BECK: Nobody cares for me. I’m just a social outcast. Nobody will ever care for me. And she became quite sad, and she went home.

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SPIEGEL: And for some reason that day, Beck did not go down the traditional path. He didn’t ask the woman to follow her thought. He turned to the woman, and he asked, how do you know that those thoughts are true? Just realistically try to assess for me whether or not those thoughts bear any relationship to reality.

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BECK: Explore the evidence for nobody cares for me. And she, then, could list a dozen people who obviously did care for her. And then I asked her about her being socially inept. And she was able to come up with the idea that she had been very successful socially. SPIEGEL: Which made Beck think something—which in his world was revolutionary. Maybe people shouldn’t always take their thoughts so seriously, particularly a certain subset of their thoughts. UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #8: I’ll always be alone. No one will love me. SPIEGEL: You remember these thoughts, right? BECK: You are stupid. UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #8: I’m stupid.

UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #8: I’m a failure. BECK: And so on. SPIEGEL: Beck had a special name for them—automatic negative thoughts. BECK: What’s interesting about the automatic thought—and this is true of everybody—is that people tend to accept them at their face value. And they don’t look for alternative explanations or for what evidence is behind them.

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BECK: They’re going to dislike you.

SPIEGEL: So Beck started trying this with all of his patients. Don’t trust the thought. Challenge the thought. BECK: To test out to see whether they’re really true. SPIEGEL: And what he found was that when his patients contradicted their negative thoughts... BECK: The patient started to get better, sooner. 161

SPIEGEL: Instead of it taking years, as it often did with Freudian therapy, they were getting better in a couple of months. BECK: Oh, Dr. Beck, you’ve helped me a lot. And I don’t think I need any more therapy. SPIEGEL: And thus began what is now called cognitive behavioral therapy —or CBT—a new system of therapy that does not believe that the thoughts in your head are necessarily indicative of anything deep about you. And over the last 30 years, this kind of therapy has slowly but surely been displacing Freudian-based therapies. Like, Lulu...

SPIEGEL: ...If you walk into a therapist’s office today... MILLER: Not that I would ever need to go to therapy. SPIEGEL: Not that you would ever need to, but just if you did...

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MILLER: Mhm.

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MILLER: Mhm. SPIEGEL: ...Statistically speaking, you are likely walking through door number two... MILLER: Huh. SPIEGEL: ...Into the office of someone who does not think that your thoughts are all that important. MILLER: So it’s that popular? SPIEGEL: Yeah, in part because a series of studies showed that CBT therapy is more effective and leads more people more quickly to mental health. MILLER: Huh. SPIEGEL: But we are not done yet ‘cause remember—I said that there were three phases. So now allow me to open for you door number three. (SOUNDBITE OF WAVES CRASHING)

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SPIEGEL: This is the sound that greets patients in the waiting room of Miranda Morris, a therapist who practices outside Washington, D.C. And Morris practices a kind of therapy that is quietly beginning to displace CBT. It’s often called third wave therapy, but it goes by other names, too, like mindfulness therapy. The premise of the therapy is that when you think about a thought as something that needs to be countered or contradicted, as CBT does, you are taking that thought way too seriously ‘cause Morris believes that dark thoughts often have absolutely nothing to do with us. Our thoughts, she believes, often have no meaning at all. So instead of contradicting the negative thoughts so that they will go away, she teaches her patients, essentially, how to ignore them. MIRANDA MORRIS: We’re going to work not on getting rid of it, but on changing your relationship with it. SPIEGEL: So how do you change your relationship with your thoughts? MORRIS: I’ll start by asking you to bring your attention to the ticking of my clocks.

SPIEGEL: Basically, Morris teaches her patients a stripped-down form of meditation. MORRIS: See if you can bring your attention to the thoughts going through your mind right now. SPIEGEL: We actually did this together in her office so that I could learn a little bit about how it works. I sat with my hands in my lap, and Morris told me to bring my attention to my thoughts - simply watch them come and go. I noticed the sound of her clocks, and I noticed an itch on my left hand. And then I noticed the sound of her clocks again. Her clocks are really, really loud.

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(SOUNDBITE OF CLOCK TICKING)

OK, so how long would I have to do that before I started watching my thoughts? MORRIS: You were watching. That was watching your thoughts. That’s you watching your thoughts. SPIEGEL: And how does that help me? 163

MORRIS: Well, I’ve got a metaphor. (Laughter). SPIEGEL: OK. Morris pulled a book from her shelf and passed it to me. MORRIS: All right. So this book, right?

MORRIS: Take this and hold it on either side. Right, and I want you to hold it up to your face so that it’s just about touching your nose. SPIEGEL: And so I took the book, and I pressed it to my face—right in front of my eyes. And Morris explained that most of us walk around the world with

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SPIEGEL: This book, she told me, represented all of the painful thoughts that I had all day long. You remember those thoughts - that you are not thin enough, that you are not smart enough, that you are too old or too young, the thoughts that quietly tell you that the path between here and there is insurmountable, and you are weak and small and not good enough. Those are the thoughts, Morris told me, that this book represented.

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these thoughts right in front of our eyes, in this way. MORRIS: And how is that for you to have your painful thoughts and feelings be the primary focus of your attention? SPIEGEL: Not so good. MORRIS: Not so good. SPIEGEL: I mean, the view isn’t great. When you practice meditation, Morris tells me, you learn to control where you place your attention. And when a disturbing thought comes into your brain, you learn how to just let it float by without ever engaging it. She then takes the book and gently pushes it into my lap. MORRIS: It’s still right there, but now it’s not the focus of your attention. (SOUNDBITE OF PIANO MUSIC)

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SPIEGEL: That’s a new way of thinking about thoughts, which, in a way, is a very old way of thinking about thoughts. The idea is you don’t engage the bad ones. They don’t matter that much. Just find the thoughts that are helpful, that help you to live the life that you want to live. Keep those thoughts in front of you, and the rest, just let float away. They’re not you. There’s no good reason to focus on them, which finally brings us back to S and the problem he had with his thoughts.

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S: What if I hurt someone or kill someone? Maybe I’m just better off if you put me in, like, the psych ward. SPIEGEL: Now, when S set off to find himself a therapist, he obviously knew nothing about this strange evolution in thinking about thinking that’s gripped the world of psychotherapy. Few people do. He just made an appointment with a therapist he found online and walked through her door. S: That first psychologist was a very bad experience. SPIEGEL: Turned out that he had walked through door number one, into the office of a Freudian-type therapist who believed that S’s thoughts were connected to something very real inside of him.

SPIEGEL: Which, of course, made S even more scared and more anxious and more determined to understand what was behind his horrible thoughts so that he could resolve whatever was causing them. But he really never got the opportunity to test the Freudian process properly. S: After seeing her four or five times, I had requested another visit, and I never got a call back.

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S: I think, in a way, she was kind of scared of what I was seeing - you know, the images that I was having of, you know, the killing, the raping, the maiming. And I kind of got that she may think that I would be a danger.

SPIEGEL: And what did that make you think? S: That my condition was really serious and that, you know, if a therapist didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t want to see me - what, you know? Where do I go now? SPIEGEL: S took a nosedive - retreated from the world more and more until finally he decided he didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t have a choice. He had to find another therapist. So he turned to a man he found online. SPIEGEL: What was his name?

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S: Tom. TOM CORBOY: Tom Corboy. SPIEGEL: We actually went to visit Tom Corboy. CORBOY: Hello. SPIEGEL: Hi.

CORBOY: Make yourselves comfortable. SPIEGEL: All right. And Corboy explained to me that when someone like S walks through his door, he has a very specific therapy that he uses with them. On the third or

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He works out of a sunny, corner office in a modern, glass high-rise full of clean lines.

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fourth session, he hands them a knife. That’s right. You heard me—hands them a knife. That’s like the “Psycho” knife. CORBOY: It is like the “Psycho” knife. SPIEGEL: And he tells them to hold it to his throat. Are you kidding me? CORBOY: Not in the slightest. SPIEGEL: You see, Corboy is a third wave kind of guy. He runs the practice where S found a therapist, and that practice has a very strong position on thoughts, which is that most of our thoughts aren’t that important. CORBOY: Most thoughts we have are just nonsense. They’re just synapses popping off in our head, and we don’t need to take them all so seriously.

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SPIEGEL: And according to Tom, the problem with people like S is not that they have these dark thoughts. We all have them. CORBOY: You know, you stick me on the 405 at rush hour, it’s just a matter of time before I start thinking of killing somebody. SPIEGEL: It’s S’s reaction to his dark thoughts that’s the problem. See, according to Corboy, S has a subset of obsessive-compulsive disorder—OCD with harming obsessions.

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CORBOY: Harm OCD. SPIEGEL: Obsessive-compulsive disorder is a thinking problem. You focus obsessively on the things that most disgust you. If you hate germs, you think continuously about germs—how they’re crawling all over you. If you fear fire, you think about burning down your own house, day and night CORBOY: It’s really just a question of what they’re afraid of. SPIEGEL: So really, the real problem with S and many of the people like him - and there are plenty of them—isn’t that they are less moral than the rest of us. Corboy says their problem actually is that they’re more moral.

SPIEGEL: See, when most of us have these thoughts, we are unfazed by them. CORBOY: The average person just goes, huh, silly thought, and gets on with their day. But a person with OCD has these thoughts, and they become extremely distressed. SPIEGEL: It disgusts them that these thoughts are even in their brain.

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CORBOY: Their sense of moral identity is a strong part of it.

S: What if I hurt someone or kill someone? SPIEGEL: So when a thought like that comes into their head, they try as hard as they can to push it away, but that, it just makes the thoughts grow stronger. S: Murder your wife. Murder your wife. Murder your wife. SPIEGEL: That’s the terrible irony of this condition. It’s exactly a person’s conscientiousness that makes the horrible thoughts return again and again and again. That’s where the knife comes in. Slowly over time, Corboy encourages patients like us to take the knife, hold it to his throat. Together they’ll sit there for 10 minutes, for 15. Basically, it’s a form of evidence— really compelling evidence—that even though S has the opportunity to kill, he’s not going to do it. And therefore, he’s forced to confront the reality that his thoughts should not be taken seriously.

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CORBOY: They are not in any way, shape or form a reflection of that person’s character.

CORBOY: If somebody’s afraid of hammering someone to death, we can give them this—a mallet. SPIEGEL: There’s a screwdriver.

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SPIEGEL: This kind of therapy is called exposure therapy. You progressively expose people to exactly the thing that they fear most. And it should be incredibly effective for OCD. That’s why Corboy doesn’t just have knives in his office, he has a whole cabinet devoted to different implements of destruction.

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CORBOY: A meat cleaver. SPIEGEL: A razor. CORBOY: Hypodermic needles. SPIEGEL: Are these, like, poisons here? CORBOY: Mhm. SPIEGEL: And then he asks them to hold these things in their hands, to touch them... CORBOY: Bigger, sharper knives. SPIEGEL: ...And use them over and over again right there with him. CORBOY: I had them sharpened recently if you’d like to feel the edge. SPIEGEL: OK.

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So that ultimately, they can learn to see their thoughts in a new way. CORBOY: So you can feel that it’s... SPIEGEL: Now, Corboy actually had me do this myself - hold a knife to his throat in his office. So I just take this knife and I—where do you want me to put...

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CORBOY: Put it right to my neck, wherever you can find my jugular or any other vein. SPIEGEL: I took the blade right up to the skin on his throat. Is this OK? CORBOY: Yeah, you were fine the other way. SPIEGEL: And even for me—someone who doesn’t actually struggle with this stuff—it was frightening to be so close to someone’s jugular.

CORBOY: No. SPIEGEL: Are you sure? CORBOY: I can feel it, but it’s not hurting. SPIEGEL: OK. The skin there is so thin. S, at first, couldn’t even hold a knife. He had to work up to it slowly. First, he was told to just conjure up the worst images he could think of.

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Am I hurting you?

S: A face that was mutilated, harming a child, killing a dog. SPIEGEL: And he was told to just sit there thinking about them. S: I would try to hold that in my mind—that image, harming a child - until it lost its meaning, and I wasn’t scared of doing that. SPIEGEL: Then he was told to step it up a notch.

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S: Put my hands around the dog’s neck. SPIEGEL: He was told to go sit with his dog with his hands around his dog’s neck. S: And bring up the image of strangling my dog to death. SPIEGEL: He said at first it was scary.

SPIEGEL: But over time... S: A couple minutes, I realized that even with my hands around his neck, I wouldn’t do it. And so after that, that thought just—if it popped in my mind, I was able to laugh it off. SPIEGEL: (Laughter).

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S: You know, that slim chance—what if my hands clenched up, and I did strangle my dog?

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And finally, the biggie. S: My wife. MILLER: He had to take a knife to his wife. S: Yeah. UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #7: We were standing there in the kitchen. It was dusk. It was, you know, summertime, and I was about to prepare dinner. SPIEGEL: And he took out a knife from a butcher block. UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #7: You know, it was a big, long-bladed knife, yeah. And, you know, it took him a while to actually hold it and, you know, pick it up and hold it near me. SPIEGEL: But eventually he came up close to her. S: I held the knife in my hand, brought on the image of stabbing her.

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UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #7: I could tell he was nervous. S: Murder your wife. Murder your wife. Murder your wife. UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #7: He had the knife near my arm. SPIEGEL: And he’s trying as best he can to hold onto that thought. S: Murder your wife.

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And just face it head on. SPIEGEL: And after a few minutes, he noticed his heart wasn’t beating so fast. S: I realized that I was not capable or was not going to do it. UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #7: So that was it. SPIEGEL: He said, in time...

SPIEGEL: ...The more he sat with the thoughts... S: Thousands and thousands of different disturbing thoughts. SPIEGEL: ...The more they began to ease up. S: To where I felt a significant improvement and could actually live again, I would say.

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S: Four months.

SPIEGEL: And, like, when was the moment that you knew that you were free? S: I’ll never be free. UNIDENTIFIED GIRL #3: Daddy, Daddy. SPIEGEL: Do you want to go get it? Sure. He says he still has the thoughts. 171

S: I still have the thoughts. I still have the thoughts, you know, about my wife. Hey, you. Even my daughter. What are you doing? SPIEGEL: And is much as he hates them... S: Who would want to have that?

S: What are you watching - “Rella”? Watching “Cinderella”? I just let it be there, and then, you know, it eventually just dissipates and goes away.

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SPIEGEL: ...Now he trusts - really trusts—that he doesn’t have to listen to them.

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Daddy’s going to go back in the room, OK? Sound good? OK. SPIEGEL: He said, there was a moment when he knew that things were going to be OK. S: Want to go on the swings? SPIEGEL: But it didn’t look anything like what he thought peace might look like. He’s never been returned to that Eden from before the thoughts broke out. S: Yeah. I remember my wife and I going to the beach with our dog, and we were watching the sunset, sitting on the dunes, looking out on the water and the sunset. And boom—a stabbing thought popped through my mind. SPIEGEL: But then he noticed something strange. The thought floated away. S: It was just another thought. UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #8: I’ll always be alone. No one will love me.

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S: This flicker of an impulse to just throw myself down the tracks. UNIDENTIFIED GIRL #4: I’m thinking about colors. UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #3: I was thinking about my sister. I was thinking how I could help her. S: Throwing myself off things.

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UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #2: I’m stupid. UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #9: There’s going to be a phone call in the night. SPIEGEL: INVISIBILIA will return in a moment. Locked-In Man Invisibilia’s Lulu Miller tells the story of Martin Pistorius, whose body began to slowly shut down when he was 12 years old. For years, he was locked in his own body with nothing but his thoughts.

So from NPR News, this is INVISIBILIA. I am Lulu Miller. ALIX SPIEGEL, HOST: And I am Alix Spiegel. MILLER: And today, we are discussing thoughts. SPIEGEL: How to think about your thoughts. What we should think about our thoughts that we think.

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LULU MILLER, HOST:

MILLER: What do you think about your thoughts these days? SPIEGEL: I think that the new way of thinking about thoughts is deeply helpful to how I think about thoughts. MILLER: The new way being that you can just let them all go? SPIEGEL: The idea that I don’t have to take my thoughts seriously, I find deeply liberating and slightly disturbing when I think about all of the many, many hours that I and millions of people all over the country have spent trying to understand our thoughts and where they came from.

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MILLER: Like all that’s just time wasted? SPIEGEL: Yeah. How do you feel about it? MILLER: Well, I’m not sure if it’s always time wasted. Like, I wonder if you can get a deeper peace if you really... SPIEGEL: Dig in?

SPIEGEL: Yeah. MILLER: And to show you a pretty profound example of this... SPIEGEL: Mhm.

NPR INVISIBILIA (THOUGHTS)

MILLER: Dig in.

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MILLER: ...I want to tell you the story of Martin. SPIEGEL: OK. MILLER: So Martin Pistorius, in the late ‘70s, was a little boy growing up in South Africa. To tell his story, we’re going to have to leave the question of thoughts for two or three minutes. But it will circle right on back. OK. SPIEGEL: OK. MILLER: But it all begins when he was 3 years old. And he marches into his parents’ bedroom and tells them that when he grows up, he wants to be what he calls an electric man. JOAN PISTORIUS: He used to insist that we buy him all sorts of electronic equipment. RODNEY PISTORIUS: Resistors and transistors and you name it. MILLER: These are his parents—Joan and Rodney Pistorius.

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JOAN PISTORIUS: And he would build us things. MILLER: Things like a flashing star for their Christmas tree, an alarm system to keep his little brother out of his Legos. JOAN PISTORIUS: We had a broken plug. I thought nothing of it. I just said, Martin, please just fix the plug for me. And, I mean, here’s live electricity in the house. And I’m asking a child younger than 11 to fix it. And he did.

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MILLER: Where do you think he picked this up? JOAN PISTORIUS: I have no idea. He was always going to be an electric man as he told me when he grew up. And then... MILLER: Martin’s life took an unexpected turn. RODNEY PISTORIUS: He had just turned 12. MILLER: He came home one day, saying he was feeling very sick. JOAN PISTORIUS: And said, ma, I think I’m getting flu.

JOAN PISTORIUS: Like a baby, nearly all day. MILLER: And when he woke up, he’d refuse food. JOAN PISTORIUS: Rod used to sit there and force his mouth open. And I used to put the food in.

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MILLER: But this wasn’t a normal sickness. Martin began to sleep and sleep and sleep.

MILLER: He began getting nosebleeds. JOAN PISTORIUS: So they tested him for everything under the sun from TB, Parkinson’s disease, Wilson’s disease, deficiency in copper, measles, and everything was negative. MILLER: Still he got worse and worse. As the months wore on, everything about him slowly closed down. His ability to move by himself, his ability to make eye contact and finally, his ability to speak. JOAN PISTORIUS: And the last thing he ever said because he was still in hospital was, when home. And all he wanted to know was when is he coming home? And—sorry...

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RODNEY PISTORIUS: Hi, Lulu. MILLER: Hi. RODNEY PISTORIUS: He progressively got worse, probably in the second year of his illness. He was sleeping whenever we didn’t wake him up. He was permanently lying down in the fetal position.

RODNEY PISTORIUS: Cryptococcal meningitis. MILLER: The doctors told Joan and Rodney that Martin was beyond hope. RODNEY PISTORIUS: As good as not, they—you know, he’s a vegetable. He has zero intelligence.

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MILLER: And a test finally came back positive.

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MILLER: They were told to take him home. RODNEY PISTORIUS: Try and keep him comfortable until he died. MILLER: But one year passed, and two years passed. JOAN PISTORIUS: Martin just kept going, just kept going. MILLER: So Joan, Rodney and their two kids did their best to care for Martin’s body. RODNEY PISTORIUS: I’d get up at 5 o’clock in the morning, get him dressed, load him in the car, take him to the Special Care Center where I’d leave him. Eight hours later, I’d pick him up, bathe him, feed him, put him in bed, set my alarm for two hours so that I’d wake up to turn him so that he didn’t get bedsores. MILLER: All throughout the night?

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RODNEY PISTORIUS: Yeah. Every two hours, I’d get up and turn him over and then get a little bit of sleep. And at 5 o’clock the next morning, I’d start the same cycle. MILLER: That was their lives. RODNEY PISTORIUS: Load him in the car, drop him off, pick him up. MILLER: Three years turn to four. RODNEY PISTORIUS: Bathe him, feed him, put him in bed.

UNDERSTANDING OURSELVES

MILLER: Four years turn to five. RODNEY PISTORIUS: Five o’clock the next morning, I’d start the same cycle. MILLER: Six years. Seven years. RODNEY PISTORIUS: Load him in the car, drop him off, pick him up. MILLER: Eight.

MILLER: Nine. Ten. JOAN PISTORIUS: This was so horrific. MILLER: Joan remembers vividly going up to him one time and saying... JOAN POSTORIUS: I hope you die. I know that’s a horrible thing to say. I just wanted some sort of relief.

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RODNEY PISTORIUS: Load him in the car, drop him off, pick him up.

MILLER: Eleven years, 12. RODNEY PISTORIUS: Load him in the car, drop him off, pick him up. MILLER: Was there any life inside? RODNEY PISTORIUS: I was not certain. MILLER: It was impossible to know. JOAN PISTORIUS: In my mind, I’d decided he’d died.

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MARTIN PISTORIUS: Yes, I was there, not from the very beginning, but about two years into my vegetative state, I began to wake up. MILLER: This is Martin. MARTIN PISTORIUS: Yes, using the grid to speak. MILLER: The grid is just a computer keyboard that allows him to quickly choose words and then have the computer read them out loud.

MILLER: Now, I will get to how he regained consciousness and developed the ability to operate a keyboard and the wheelchair that he uses to get around. But what you need to know is that for about eight years, while all the world thought that Martin was gone, he was wide awake. MARTIN PISTORIUS: I was aware of everything, just like any normal person.

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MARTIN PISTORIUS: Yeah.

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MILLER: He thinks he woke up about four years after he first fell ill, so when he was about 16 years old. MARTIN PISTORIUS: I suppose a good way to describe it is like an out-offocus image. At first you have no idea what it is, but slowly it comes into focus until you can see it in crystal clarity. MILLER: And somewhere in this reawakening to the world, Martin realized, to his horror, that he couldn’t move his body. He couldn’t even speak. MARTIN PISTORIUS: I stared at my arm, willing it to move. Every bit of me condenses into this moment. MILLER: Martin would later write a book about this called “Ghost Boy: My Escape From A Life Locked Inside My Own Body.” And this is him reading a passage about one night when he tried as hard as he could to get his father’s attention.

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MARTIN PISTORIUS: (Reading) I am sitting in my bed. My heart is beating as my father undresses me. I want him to know, to understand that I’ve returned to him. MILLER: But nothing in his body would obey. MARTIN PISTORIUS: My father doesn’t recognize me. MILLER: It went like this again and again - attempt... MARTIN PISTORIUS: Dad, can’t you see?

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MILLER: ...And failure, attempt and failure. MARTIN PISTORIUS: Everyone was so used to me not being there that they didn’t notice when I began to be present again. MILLER: Though he could see and understand everything, it didn’t matter. MARTIN PISTORIUS: The stark reality hit me that I was going to spend the rest of my life like that - totally alone. MILLER: And when he finally accepts this, that he truly is trapped, he said

MARTIN PISTORIUS: I am totally alone. You are pathetic. You are powerless. You will be alone forever—alone forever—alone forever. MILLER: He said the thoughts literally battered him... MARTIN PISTORIUS: You are doomed. MILLER: ...Humiliated him.

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it was like something broke open in his mind. And it unleashed a fury of thoughts.

MARTIN PISTORIUS: Your family doesn’t see you anymore. You will never get out. MILLER: So here is another man overrun by thoughts. MARTIN PISTORIUS: You will never get out. You are pathetic, powerless, totally alone. MILLER: But unlike the rest of us, he can’t call a friend to talk about it. He can’t go on a run to clear his head. He can’t even move his position in his chair. He is trapped in his head. And so what does he do? Well, one day he just intuitively invents the very therapeutic technique that so helped the man in our last story, S. Martin just starts detaching from his thoughts.

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MARTIN PISTORIUS: No one will ever show me kindness. You can never get out. MILLER: He refuses to engage them and lets them all just float by. And he says he got really good at it.

MILLER: Can you describe what that feels like? I wonder, is it peaceful, or... MARTIN PISTORIUS: No, I wouldn’t say it is peaceful. It’s a very dark place to find yourself because, in a sense, you are allowing yourself to vanish. Days, if not weeks, can go by as I close myself down and become entirely black within—a nothingness that is washed and fed, lifted from wheel chair to bed.

NPR INVISIBILIA (THOUGHTS)

MARTIN PISTORIUS: You don’t really think about anything. You simply exist.

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MILLER: Sometimes the nurses were careless with him. They’d pour scalding hot tea down his throat or leave him in cold baths sitting all alone. One of the nurses even began to intentionally abuse him. MARTIN PISTORIUS: You are powerless. MILLER: But instead of allowing himself to feel the sting of these thoughts... MARTIN PISTORIUS: I sit for hours each day staring blankly into space. MILLER: Though there was one thought he’d allow himself to engage and savor. MARTIN PISTORIUS: I prayed and wished with all my might to die. MILLER: So that, my friend, was his experience of letting thoughts go. (SOUNDBITE OF CLOCK TICKING) MILLER: Though, occasionally there were these things...

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(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, “BARNEY AND FRIENDS”) UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: (As Barney) You can always count on having a fun day when you spend it with the people you love. MILLER: ...These things that provided a kind of motivation, like “Barney.” (SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, “BARNEY AND FRIENDS”)

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UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: (As Barney, singing) I love you. You love me. MARTIN PISTORIUS: I cannot even express to you how much I hated Barney. (SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, “BARNEY AND FRIENDS”) UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: (As Barney, singing) We’re a happy family. MILLER: See, since all the world thought that Martin was basically a vegetable, they would leave him propped up in front of the TV watching “Barney” reruns hour after hour, episode after episode, day after day.

UNIDENTIFIED CHILDREN: (Singing) John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt. MILLER: And one day, he decided he’d had enough. He needed to know what time it was because if he could know what time it was, he could know when it would end and, specifically, how much closer he was to his favorite moment in the day. MARTIN PISTORIUS: Simply to make it to when I was taken out of my wheelchair and that for a brief moment, the aches and pains in my body could subside.

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(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, “BARNEY AND FRIENDS”)

MILLER: Now, the problem was that Martin was rarely seated near a clock. So he calls upon these old allies—these thoughts—to help him carefully study the lengths of the shadows. MARTIN PISTORIUS: I would watch how the sun moved across the room or how a shadow moved throughout the day. MILLER: And he begins to match what he sees with little bits of information he’s able to collect—what he hears on the television, a radio report, a nurse mentioning the time. It was a puzzle to solve, and he did it. Within a few months, he could read the shadows like a clock.

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MARTIN PISTORIUS: Yes, I can still tell the time of day by the shadows. MILLER: It was his first semblance of control. Simply knowing where he was in the day gave him the sense of being able to climb through it. MARTIN PISTORIUS: Yes.

MARTIN PISTORIUS: I think your thoughts are integrated—connected and part of you. MILLER: He realized that they could help him, and so he starts listening to them again.

NPR INVISIBILIA (THOUGHTS)

MILLER: And this experience ultimately led him to start thinking about his thoughts differently.

NPR INVISIBILIA (THOUGHTS)

MARTIN PISTORIUS: I’d have conversations with myself and other people in my head. MILLER: And if a particularly dark thought came up... MARTIN PISTORIUS: You are pathetic, powerless. MILLER: ...He’d try to contend with it. Like one time, shortly after having the drool wiped from his chin by a nurse... MARTIN PISTORIUS: You are pathetic. MILLER: He happened to notice a song playing on the radio. MARTIN PISTORIUS: Whitney Houston was singing the “Greatest Love Of All.” In the song, she says, no matter what they take from me, they can’t take away my dignity. (SOUNDBITE OF SONG, “GREATEST LOVE OF ALL”) WHITNEY HOUSTON: (Singing) They can’t take away my dignity.

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MARTIN PISTORIUS: I sat there and thought, you want to bet? MILLER: (Laughter). (SOUNDBITE OF SONG, “GREATEST LOVE OF ALL”) HOUSTON: (Singing) Because the greatest...

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MILLER: The point is reengaging with his thoughts transformed his world. Life began to have purpose. MARTIN PISTORIUS: Oh, absolutely. I would literally live in my imagination, sometimes to such an extent that I became oblivious to my surroundings. MILLER: Which you know... RODNEY PISTORIUS: Load him in the car, drop him off, pick him up. MILLER: ...Could be rough.

MILLER: He was conscious when his mom told him that. JOAN PISTORIUS: Oh, that’s horrific when I think about it now. MILLER: He was staring right back at her. MARTIN PISTORIUS: The rest of the world felt so far away when she said those words.

UNDERSTANDING OURSELVES

JOAN PISTORIUS: I hope you die.

MILLER: But this time, when the dark thought came up... MARTIN PISTORIUS: No one will ever show me tenderness. MILLER: ...He leaned into it and began to wrestle with it. Why would a mother say that? Why would my mother say that? MARTIN PISTORIUS: As time passed, I gradually learned to understand my mother’s desperation. MILLER: He realized that it came from profound love for him.

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MARTIN PISTORIUS: Every time she looked at me, she could see only a cruel parody of the once-healthy child she had loved so much. MILLER: Which actually made him feel closer to her. And so onward he went, trying now to understand his dark thoughts instead of just ignoring them all, which brings me to the last act of his story—the way in which Martin is able to climb out. This is a long story involving inexplicable neurological developments, a painstaking battle to prove his existence in the face of doubt and...

MILLER: The short version is that over time, Martin slowly regained some control of his body. By the time he was in his mid-20s, he could squeeze your hand on occasion. And he was getting better and better at holding himself upright in his chair. Now, the doctors told his parents that he still had the intelligence level of a 3-month-old baby. But one nurse, one nurse named Verna, was convinced that there was something there. And so she eventually convinced his parents to get Martin reassessed at another medical

NPR INVISIBILIA (THOUGHTS)

MARTIN PISTORIUS: Anyway, the short version...

NPR INVISIBILIA (THOUGHTS)

center, where he was given a test where he had to identify different objects by pointing at them with his eyes. And he passed, not with flying colors, but he passed. JOAN PISTORIUS: I then gave up my job. MILLER: That’s his mom again, Joan, who came home to care for Martin, help him with his physical therapy and most important, purchase this kind of joystick for the computer. JOAN PISTORIUS: A proximity switch, which is just something that you knocked. MILLER: And though it took him about a year to get the hang of it... JOAN PISTORIUS: We had like school - if you want to call it - four hours in the morning every single day. MILLER: Once he did, everything changed because suddenly he had a way to select the words he wanted to say.

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MARTIN PISTORIUS: I am cold. I am hungry. I want toast. MILLER: And as words came back, gradually, so did other things. RODNEY PISTORIUS: He started moving his eyes and moving his head and almost nodding, asking for coffee by stirring his hands around and things like that.

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MILLER: They couldn’t really explain it, but... JOAN PISTORIUS: When he gets the tools to communicate, he forges ahead. MILLER: OK. So wherever you are standing in your life, prepare to be lapped. Within two years of passing that assessment test, Martin gets a job filing papers at a local government office. MARTIN PISTORIUS: I wanted to prove that I could do more than just speak words via a laptop. MILLER: Around this time, his nurse savior Verna mentioned she’s having

MARTIN PISTORIUS: Repairing a computer is a bit like going into a maze. You might go down dead ends. But eventually, you find your way through. JOAN PISTORIUS: It was absolutely flabbergasting. I couldn’t understand it. MILLER: Wow.

UNDERSTANDING OURSELVES

trouble with her computer. And Martin, who has not tinkered with electronics since he was 12 years old fixes it.

After that he scraps the government job... RODNEY PISTORIUS: Yeah. MILLER: ...Starts a web design company... JOAN PISTORIUS: Yeah. MILLER: ...Gets into college. JOAN PISTORIUS: In computer science.

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MILLER: He writes a book. JOAN PISTORIUS: He’s learning to drive. He always wanted to drive. MILLER: He’s learning to drive? JOAN PISTORIUS: He is. MILLER: Wow.

MILLER: So how is it that Martin has been able to achieve all this? Now, I don’t want it oversimplify it because it was many things - Martin’s naturally strong will, flukes of electricity in the brain, a really dedicated family. But I do think that his decision to lean back into those thoughts way back when, instead of just spending his life detaching, in some way helped him, in part because it probably kept his mind occupied and allowed him to emerge this kind of well-oiled machine of mental ability, but also because I think

NPR INVISIBILIA (THOUGHTS)

JOAN PISTORIUS: Martin achieves everything he wants to do.

NPR INVISIBILIA (THOUGHTS)

his leaning into those dark thoughts in particular gave him a kind of selfunderstanding and humor about the human condition that allowed him to snag the very best thing in his life. MARTIN PISTORIUS: My wife. MILLER: This is Martin’s wife. MARTIN PISTORIUS: Joanna. JOANNA PISTORIUS: When Martin talks about me or types about me, he always starts smiling. MILLER: Joanna was a friend of Martin’s sister. And the two of them first met over Skype. JOANNA PISTORIUS: I was a manager for the social work team for a hospital social work team. MILLER: Joanna says the thing that drew her to Martin...

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JOANNA PISTORIUS: I turned around, and it was just this guy with this big smile. And it’s such a warm personality. MILLER: ...Was the way he began to interact with her. JOANNA PISTORIUS: Unfortunately, I’m one of those people, I say something and then I, more often, need to say sorry I said it.

UNDERSTANDING OURSELVES

MILLER: But not with Martin. When she asked him how things work in the bathroom or what people do around you when they think you are not there... JOANNA PISTORIUS: If I ask him anything, he’ll give me an honest answer. MILLER: And that perked her ears. JOANNA PISTORIUS: There’s no pretend. MILLER: That first night, they talked for hours. MARTIN PISTORIUS: She would speak, and I would type my response.

JOANNA PISTORIUS: I just really liked him. MILLER: After that, she just kept wanting to Skype with him. JOANNA PISTORIUS: Yeah. OK, well, he’s in a wheelchair, and he doesn’t speak. But I love this guy. He’s amazing. It just so quickly turned into love. MILLER: As for Martin—after over a decade convinced that he would be alone forever, he was pretty happy.

UNDERSTANDING OURSELVES

MILLER: The sister and the other friends drifted away, and Joanna just stayed there in front of the screen.

MARTIN PISTORIUS: My face would hurt from smiling so much. JOANNA PISTORIUS: (Laughter). MILLER: They were married in 2009. Martin was 33 years old. SPIEGEL: So, Lulu... MILLER: Yeah.

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SPIEGEL: One story about this poor man trapped in his own body for 13 years, another about someone who is bombarded by horribly violent images —do you think maybe our first show is a little bit heavy? MILLER: This was a heavy show. (Laughter). SPIEGEL: Yeah. Let’s hit the dance music. (SOUNDBITE OF SONG, “SAN FRANCISCO”)

SPIEGEL: This is INVISIBILA. It’s a party, everybody. (SOUNDBITE OF THE MOWGLI’S SONG, “SAN FRANCISCO”) THE MOWGLI’S: (Singing) Something binding us together, you know that love is strong enough. And I’ve seen time-told tales about that...

NPR INVISIBILIA (THOUGHTS)

THE MOWGLI’S: (Singing) Well, I’ve been in love with love...

NPR INVISIBILIA (THOUGHTS)

SPIEGEL: INVISIBILIA from NPR News is me, Alix Spiegel. MILLER: And me, Lulu Miller. SPIEGEL: The show is edited by Anne Gudenkauf, the best editor in the world, with help from Eric Nuzum, Matt Martinez (ph) Porschia RobertsonMeegas (ph) and Natalie Kaseka (ph). Production help today from Brendan Baker (ph) and Brent Balmon (ph). MILLER: And now for our moment of nonsense. I’m not reading it. I was totally not reading it. SPIEGEL: You were. MILLER: No. SPIEGEL: OK. But I want to take it away. MILLER: (Laughter) To take it away.

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SPIEGEL: No. Just try it. MILLER: I can’t do it without you. I wasn’t even looking at it.

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SPIEGEL: Join us next week for more INVISIBILIA.

The Power Of Categories Alix and Lulu examine how categories define us—how, if given a chance, humans will jump into one category or another. People need them, want them. This show looks at what categories provide for us.

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Paige’s Story Alix has the story of Paige Abendroth. For many years, she switched between two of the most powerful categories assigned at birth: boy and girl. Paige talks about her journey, and where she is now. ALIX SPIEGEL, HOST: From NPR News, this is INVISIBILIA. And today, we’re going to start with a question that was recently asked of the customers of the Rize coffee shop in Midtown Manhattan. Lulu, what’s the question? 189

LULU MILLER, HOST: It’s a very hard-hitting question. SPIEGEL: It is. MILLER: Do you like puppies or kittens? UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: Puppies are cute. Doesn’t everybody like puppies?

UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #1: Oh, for sure puppies. UNIDENTIFIED MAN #3: Puppies. The dog is always happy to see you. It just - he wags its tail. Cats man - they won’t - come here, come here, come here - nothing. (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

NPR INVISIBILIA (CATEGORIES)

UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: Kittens. I like kittens. I think they’re cuter.

NPR INVISIBILIA (CATEGORIES)

MILLER: Now, the reason these people are talking about this is because up at the register at this place Rize, they always put out two tip jars, two big glass jars with little chalkboards in front. And every day, they write on the little chalkboards two different categories to choose from. So one day it might be cassette tape versus vinyl. SPIEGEL: Another day it might be Samsung versus Apple. MILLER: Or... SPIEGEL: ...Kittens MILLER: ...Versus SPIEGEL: Puppies. MILLER: Puppies. UNIDENTIFIED MAN #4: Puppies all the way. UNIDENTIFIED MAN #5: I’m a kitten person.

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UNIDENTIFIED MAN #6: I am definitely a cat person. UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #2: For sure puppies. I hate cats. There’s been one cat that’s like more of a dog than a cat, I enjoyed that cat. MILLER: Rize started doing this about two years ago. And Danielle Cloutier (ph), one of the baristas there, said it completely changed the amount of tips people were giving.

UNDERSTANDING OURSELVES

DANIELLE CLOUTIER: Oh definitely. It’s definitely getting us more tips. MILLER: Inadvertently they seemed to have stumbled on this powerful impulse which is written into people. This urge to want to clearly differentiate themselves, declare their category. UNIDENTIFIED MAN #6: I am definitely a cat person. UNIDENTIFIED MAN #7: I’m a dog person. MILLER: Yeah, and the categories themselves were so clearly defined. It

UNIDENTIFIED MAN #5: Dog people are chatty. They like to talk to people on the street. UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #3: A cat person likes to stay at home. Maybe they don’t want to go out as much. UNIDENTIFIED MAN #8: Dog lovers are also, like, fun-loving and loyal.

UNDERSTANDING OURSELVES

was like there, right below the surface, was this whole world of qualities associated with what it means to be a cat person or a dog person.

UNIDENTIFIED MAN #9: Most people who are more in touch to cats, from my experience more—only think about themselves. MILLER: So what is that? The seemingly irresistible drive we all have to cast the quarter and define a category. What is that impulse all about? (SOUNDBITE OF BABY CRYING) MILLER: Which brings us to babies. LISA OAKES: Look at this. Look at this.

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SPIEGEL: This is sound from a study of 4-month-old babies done by a psychologist named Lisa Oakes. It’s one of a handful of studies that Oakes has done which looks at categorization in young babies, the most famous of which looked specifically at how babies think about cats and dogs. MILLER: We actually first heard about this work from another developmental psychologist—Fei Xu at Berkeley.

FEI XU: First picture, young babies will look for a long time. When you show the next picture—so a picture of a cat—they will still be pretty interested. But over time, you show them five, six, seven pictures of cats, they get bored over time. MILLER: Just another cat?

NPR INVISIBILIA (CATEGORIES)

SPIEGEL: Yeah, Xu told us about this cat and dog study Oakes did where babies were shown cat and dog pictures, beginning with a series of pictures of only cats—all different kinds of cats in all different kinds of positions.

NPR INVISIBILIA (CATEGORIES)

XU: Exactly. Who cares? MILLER: And it’s at that point that subtly, without fanfare, a picture of a dog is slipped in. SPIEGEL: So let’s pause for a moment and think about the dog. A dog—it’s a lot like a cat. XU: It’s still a four-legged animal. It still has two eyes, furry etc. SPIEGEL: And remember, you’re a 4-month-old baby. Like, a little while ago, you probably could not tell the difference between your toe and a chew toy. You came out and everything was awash. But there you are, and there is this cute, furry thing with four legs. So how do the babies respond? XU: They say oh, this is new and interesting and they look longer at the dog. So that tells us they’re distinguishing between the categories, say, cats and dogs, at a fairly young age. (MUSIC)

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MILLER: The ability to form categories, it doesn’t get a huge amount of respect in the parenting world. It’s not like your first step or your first tooth. Nobody is taking a picture. But as Fei Xu and any self-respecting developmental researcher will tell you, if you want to be a human being and you want to make it through your day, you need it.

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XU: To categorize objects around us is extremely important. MILLER: Because when you’re able to recognize an object as a member of a particular category, all your knowledge about that category guides your response to that thing, which means you don’t have to figure out everything from scratch every time you encounter something new. XU: So it will really save us a lot of time and energy because then we can say oh, I know about cups. I know how to use them. I know what they’re made out of. MILLER: But imagine if you couldn’t make categories. And there are people with brain damage who can’t. Then suddenly even the most basic things in life are a challenge. You walk into a new room and there’s a couch you’ve never seen before, and you don’t have the category couch.

MILLER: It could be a bomb, could be a sinkhole. XU: Because, you know, we do tend to be a little bit scared of things that we don’t know anything about. MILLER: So if you didn’t have categories organizing the world around you, everything you encountered would be like that.

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XU: You might think oh, gee, the couch looks very strange. It’s a shape I don’t recognize. And you might start to think OK, maybe something I should avoid.

XU: Kind of like stepping off onto a new planet. Look at their clock - what’s that? Coffee pot—what do I do with it? MILLER: Microphone—do I eat you? SPIEGEL: Lulu. This is INVISIBILIA, a show from NPR News that looks at the invisible forces that shape human behavior. MILLER: And today the invisible thing we are looking at is categories and how they shape our lives.

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SPIEGEL: And now is the time that we do the we-sound-a-lot-alike disclaimer. We do sound a lot alike. But, you know... MILLER: You know, feel free to enjoy the wash until eventually over time you’ll learn to differentiate our voices. SPIEGEL: Anyway, today we’ve decided to think about categories. We’re looking at social categories, racial categories, personality type categories.

SPIEGEL: OK, Lulu, so I’m going to get us started off with a story about the most basic, primary category, the very first category we are ever placed in. Lulu, what is the first question that people ask when they hear that someone has just had a baby? MILLER: What is it, a boy or a girl?

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MILLER: Because the odd thing about categories is once they are set out there in the world, boy do we obey them.

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SPIEGEL: Yeah, those are your options. You can be a boy or you can be a girl. And so much of our lives is shaped by that first distinction. You know, from that category flow radically different lives. So this is a story about someone who has changed dramatically over the last couple of years. But who, when I first started talking to them two years ago, found themselves kind of slipping between those two categories, boy and girl, really in a way that I had never heard of before. PAIGE ABENDROTH: Oh, hey, how’s it going? Come on in. SPIEGEL: This is a person I met named Paige Abendroth. ABENDROTH: Abendroth means the color of the sky when it’s that deep red right before the sun sets. SPIEGEL: Paige had bright blue eyes, long, black hair in a ponytail. ABENDROTH: Come in. Make yourself comfortable. SPIEGEL: Thanks.

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We were in San Diego, by the way, setting ourselves up to talk. I’m going to make you scoot - scoot, scoot, scoot, scoot, scoot, scoot, scoot, scoot. So after we sat down, I asked Paige to show me some pictures of herself from about a decade before.

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ABENDROTH: So there aren’t many. SPIEGEL: In the pictures was a man, a man in a Naval uniform. He was very buff, strapping. ABENDROTH: Yeah, very military. I had a high and tight haircut. SPIEGEL: And there they were—those bright blue eyes. You look pretty conservative here, too. ABENDROTH: Yes, I do.

ABENDROTH: I flipped back and forth multiple times a day. I’ll say maybe spend 20 percent of my time in guy mode and the rest of it in female mode.

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SPIEGEL: Photos from a time in Paige’s life when Paige was male. Paige spent the first three decades of her life as a man. But let me be clear from the top. Paige’s story is not the transgender story that you typically hear. Typically, people who are transgender feel like they are one gender trapped in the body of the other gender. Their internal gender identity is misaligned with their biological sex, but it’s static. It stays the same. But when I was talking to Paige, that didn’t capture her experience at all. Because when I met her, Paige was flipping, flipping between the category male and the category female.

SPIEGEL: One morning, Paige would wake up feeling strongly that the gender at the core of her being was female. But then suddenly... ABENDROTH: It’s just kind of like (snapping). SPIEGEL: There was a change. And Paige was in guy mode. When that happened, all kinds of things about Paige changed. Her posture changed. ABENDROTH: And my weight kind of moves up to my shoulders. Like my center of gravity is kind of up here.

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SPIEGEL: More significantly, she told me, there was a real psychological shift. ABENDROTH: The way I see the world and the way I interpret the world is different. SPIEGEL: When Paige was in male mode, Paige was less interested in people - in talking to them, in making eye contact with them.

SPIEGEL: But in female mode, she was much more expansive. And sights, sounds, smells, likes, dislikes, they were all different. ABENDROTH: When I’m female, all my emotions are like just really vivid, like colors. SPIEGEL: Basically, Paige was constantly and very abruptly bounced

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ABENDROTH: I’m a lot more introverted. I’m a lot more—I’m quieter.

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between two starkly different ways of being in and filtering the world. Paige wasn’t able to dictate when or where this happened. ABENDROTH: I really have no control over it. SPIEGEL: She’d be sitting in her office, talking to her boss and bam, she’d be walking down the street—bam. Now, when this happened, it wasn’t like Paige was an entirely different person. ABENDROTH: I’m always the same person. I experience the world differently. But I’m still me. I still am in control of myself. I still have my same wants and desires. SPIEGEL: There was just this profound difference beneath everything. ABENDROTH: It’s just a sense of knowing, like the way that you know you’re a female right now without having to be told, it’s the same way that I know that I’m a female. And when I’m a guy, it’s the same way I know I’m a guy. It’s just this instinctual knowing of what I am. SPIEGEL: By the way, right now are you male or female?

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ABENDROTH: Definitely in girl mode, yeah. SPIEGEL: And how long have you been in girl mode right now? ABENDROTH: About an hour, I’d say. SPIEGEL: So maybe you’re thinking that Paige seems nuts. Paige herself has had that thought.

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ABENDROTH: I thought that I was going crazy. LAURA CASE: Yeah, I mean, some people first hear about this. You know, they may wonder if it’s dissociative identity disorder, which is formerly known as multiple personality disorder, or a form of psychosis. SPIEGEL: This is Laura Case, a researcher who has worked in the lab of a very famous neurologist—a man named V. S. Ramachandran. CASE: At UCSD.

CASE: Someone who experiences the switching back and forth. SPIEGEL: And while on the one hand, they were dubious. CASE: We get a lot of interesting emails in our lab—emails from people claiming all kinds of wild sounding experiences. SPIEGEL: On the other hand, they study the brain. And they have seen brains do all kinds of things. They’ve seen brains that suddenly stop recognizing faces, brains that think their owner has a mysterious limb. So they were curious.

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SPIEGEL: And a couple years ago, they got an email from a woman describing exactly the same kind of experience that Paige describes.

CASE: Here’s a person who goes back and forth in terms of what their brain seems to be telling them about whether they’re male or female. How fascinating would that be to look and see what could be changing in the brain or in their environment to be causing that shift and identity. SPIEGEL: So they decided to look into it. Over the past couple years, Case has found dozens of people with this experience. And Case has started testing them in different ways, including giving them psychological screenings. And what she found was that as a group, these people are not mentally unstable.

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CASE: They simply don’t have dissociative identity disorder. None of them had any form of psychosis or anything like that. SPIEGEL: They ruled out bipolar, schizophrenia and saw some other interesting things.

SPIEGEL: Basically, they found enough to suggest that there might be something neurological going on. So they published a very, very small study. CASE: A preliminary sort of report in a journal called Medical Hypotheses. SPIEGEL: And then started on another study. CASE: But we’re not ready to talk about the data from that study.

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CASE: They were actually a little bit more ambidextrous than the general population.

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SPIEGEL: I did, though, get one tidbit about this from Case. And again, this is very, very, very, very preliminary. But she found that the same person will perform differently on certain tests depending on whether they are in male or female mode. For example, she gave the same person these mental puzzles. CASE: That test spatial and language abilities. SPIEGEL: And, Lulu, you know how men are really good at - supposedly men are really good at kind of spatial... MILLER: Directions? SPIEGEL: No, like, spatial manipulation. MILLER: What does that mean? SPIEGEL: I don’t know how to explain it exactly, but like... MILLER: You’re a woman, so you wouldn’t understand it very well.

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SPIEGEL: I’m a woman, so I wouldn’t understand it very well. Right. Like, take a geometric shape, rotate it in your mind - stuff like that. MILLER: OK.

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SPIEGEL: They found when they gave these tests to these people when they were in their different states, they had different abilities. So, like, when they were men, they performed more as men, and when they were women, they performed more as women. CASE: Yeah. We did see some differences between gender states that were intriguing but not conclusive. SPIEGEL: Anyway, here’s the point. There’s some evidence that the shifts these people say that they are experiencing could be real, which brings us back to Paige. ABENDROTH: You know, I wake up in the morning, I’m like, am I male? Am I female? SPIEGEL: I wanted to talk to her about what it was like to move in this way

So let’s just start with, like, your childhood. Now, Paige didn’t start off this way. She started off as a he, and really didn’t even have that experience that you sometimes hear about where people describe feeling, from a very early age, like they’re trapped in the wrong body. That wasn’t Paige’s experience. ABENDROTH: I mean, loved playing with G.I. Joes.

UNDERSTANDING OURSELVES

between categories.

SPIEGEL: And as teen, too, he was a boy obsessed with the things that most boys are obsessed with. ABENDROTH: I always thought about women. SPIEGEL: You never thought you were gay? ABENDROTH: Uh-uh. SPIEGEL: Still, Paige says, there were these strange momentary flashes that were disturbing.

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ABENDROTH: I remember looking at girls and not just being attracted to them, but thinking that I was supposed to be them and wishing that I could kind of go over to the girl group and be accepted because that’s where I felt I should be. But these thoughts were really inconsistent. It’s not - I didn’t always feel that way.

ABENDROTH: I love the discipline of it, the structure of it. SPIEGEL: First of all, for some reason, those flashes go way down. Why? ABENDROTH: I don’t know. I saw myself as being more of a guy than I ever did before.

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SPIEGEL: So Paige grows up, graduates from high school, goes to college and then really starts to struggle. The flashes are still there. College is hard. Paige drops out and begins to feel really, really lost. And then, in a somewhat odd place, Paige finds relief in the Navy.

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SPIEGEL: But really, it was while stationed at a naval base in Japan that Paige found relief in a way that will be familiar to many of you. ABENDROTH: I walked around the corner and I saw her. And she was just kind of bouncing around, and she was very energetic. And... SPIEGEL: It was love at first sight. ABENDROTH: Immediately, I knew that there was something, like, special about her. SPIEGEL: And even though Paige had never been a very aggressive person, Paige completely went after this girl. ABENDROTH: I was smitten. I was immediately smitten. SPIEGEL: And it worked. ABENDROTH: We were just like this. We were so in tune with one another. I mean, we knew each other so good we could communicate, like, with a series of clicks.

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SPIEGEL: Like, what do you mean? ABENDROTH: We just - (clicking) - and like, the other person would answer back, and we’d know what we were, like - (clicking) - getting at. SPIEGEL: And sometimes, it would mean, like...

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ABENDROTH: It could mean, like, how are you? Or it could just be acknowledging that, you know, you’re there. (Clicking). SPIEGEL: So began the best chapter in Paige’s life. ABENDROTH: (Clicking) I can’t believe you’re recording this. SPIEGEL: They get married. They move to California. ABENDROTH: Got a home, had a car, had a steady job. I had everything that I ever wanted (clicking). SPIEGEL: OK, what does that mean?

SPIEGEL: And then Paige turns 30, and all of a sudden, starts feeling really, really tired. ABENDROTH: I’d - I mean, just coming up the steps, I would run out of breath. SPIEGEL: So Paige goes to see the doctor. ABENDROTH: And eventually, what they finally figured out was that my body thought it’d be a really fun joke on me to stop producing testosterone. Basically, at 30 years old, I had the testosterone level of an 80-plus-year-old man.

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ABENDROTH: It depends on the context (laughter).

SPIEGEL: So the doctors put Paige on testosterone replacement therapy, and very quickly, the exhaustion went away. ABENDROTH: Physically, I felt like I had before. SPIEGEL: But the flashes—they’re back with a vengeance. 201

ABENDROTH: I would have those feelings again where I thought I was supposed to be female, except there wasn’t anything subtle about it. It was a very strong feeling that something had gone terribly wrong and that I was not supposed to be male. (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) SPIEGEL: In these moments, Paige would look down at her body—this hard torso, covered in hair—and feel utter disgust.

SPIEGEL: Did you - so did you start talking to your wife about it? ABENDROTH: No, I was terrified. I thought I was going crazy. I didn’t want her to think less of me, and it was something that I kept inside. (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

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ABENDROTH: Imagine you woke up and your body was a cockroach. It was really unsettling.

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SPIEGEL: Paige started telling me that occasionally during this period, to ease this feeling of disgust that came over her when she flipped into female mode but had a male body, she would secretly put on women’s clothing. She felt a need to cover this body that felt so wrong with clothes from the right sex. ABENDROTH: I was just trying to do anything I could to make myself feel more female. SPIEGEL: So I started asking questions about this. Do you remember the first time you decided to do that? ABENDROTH: Mhm. SPIEGEL: But suddenly, the whole tone of the conversation changed. ABENDROTH: I don’t want to talk about it. SPIEGEL: OK, all right. So when was—so after that, what happened? So like, you - do need to take a break?

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ABENDROTH: Yeah, I’m cool. SPIEGEL: Yes, you’re cool, you want to take a break (laughter), or yes, you’re not cool. ABENDROTH: Yeah, I (inaudible).

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SPIEGEL: OK, sure. Paige got up and disappeared around the corner. I could hear the faucet running in the bathroom. And when she came back, she wanted me to know something. ABENDROTH: If it matters, I flipped back into guy mode. SPIEGEL: OK, so is that why you don’t want to talk? ABENDROTH: It’s just kind of like (snapping). It’s just different now. SPIEGEL: You flipped into guy mode. Was it when your eyes closed that you

ABENDROTH: I don’t know. SPIEGEL: So are you in guy mode right this second? ABENDROTH: Mhm. SPIEGEL: So is it hard to answer questions? ABENDROTH: Mhm.

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flipped into guy mode?

SPIEGEL: OK. ABENDROTH: I can—I’ll be OK. I just need, like, a little bit. SPIEGEL: We sat awkwardly for a while, neither of us quite sure what to do. It did feel like there was a difference in Paige, even in the way that she talked. So how are you doing? ABENDROTH: I’m good.

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SPIEGEL: Are you male or female? ABENDROTH: Male. SPIEGEL: OK, is that OK? ABENDROTH: Yeah, let’s do this.

ABENDROTH: The way I felt was—other people felt that way, and it was real. It wasn’t, you know, just some weird psychological construct. SPIEGEL: But with this validation, came a horrible realization. Paige had to tell her wife.

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SPIEGEL: Paige explained that the next chapter of her life involved finding a name for what was going on with her—bi-gender, people who consider themselves both female and male at the same time. She found it on a bigender website and though only a small portion of the people on the website described flipping like Paige, it felt like this could be an explanation.

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ABENDROTH: I told her that we needed to talk, and so we sat down in separate chairs. I think I was on the couch and she was on her recliner. SPIEGEL: Paige was terrified. She was certain that her marriage would be over. ABENDROTH: She was very visibly upset. I’m sorry. I was just - God - I was just begging her to not leave and to accept me for who I was. I couldn’t - I had lived for her for so long, and I didn’t know how I could live without her. SPIEGEL: But to Paige’s surprise, her wife said it’s OK. ABENDROTH: She told me that everything was going to be OK and that, you know, we’re going to make this work and she wasn’t going to give up on me. (Clicking). SPIEGEL: Paige couldn’t believe how lucky she was. ABENDROTH: (Clicking). SPIEGEL: Together, they walked into the space between categories.

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ABENDROTH: (Clicking). SPIEGEL: Some mornings, Paige would wake up male, the husband her wife had married. That man would put on male clothes, go to work. Other mornings, Paige would wake up female, a woman trapped in this strange body. And they were doing it - helping each other through life in this odd space.

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ABENDROTH: (Clicking). SPIEGEL: But one problem remained. As much as the two of them could get used to the idea of flipping, Paige couldn’t get used to the physical experience of it. ABENDROTH: I came out of the shower one day and I’d gone in in guy mode and I came out in female mode. SPIEGEL: She was standing there, beginning to dry off. ABENDROTH: And I saw myself in the mirror and I was so disgusted that

SPIEGEL: These kinds of feelings happened all the time. Now, Paige had come across a potential cure for this, a sort of homespun remedy that some of the bi-gender folks had written about online. It involved hormones. Paige would go on estrogen to make her body more androgynous. ABENDROTH: Bring my body to an androgynous point where I could present both as either male or female. SPIEGEL: Apparently, it would reduce the shock of being thrown between categories so violently if her body was in a permanent state of in-between. So Paige decided to try it. She began estrogen treatments, and it worked.

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I threw up.

ABENDROTH: The first time I got my first injection I just felt this immense relief like I was finally on the right track. SPIEGEL: There was no longer the same physical discomfort. But as Paige finally was becoming comfortable in her own body, Paige’s wife started to turn away. They began sleeping in different bedrooms. ABENDROTH: It was almost like we were becoming strangers. And one —there came a point where I realized that, you know, she wasn’t suddenly going to—I don’t know.

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SPIEGEL: Accept you? ABENDROTH: She tried really hard.

ABENDROTH: I felt like a monster. And I felt like this terrible, like, alien creature that had come down and taken over her husband’s life and taken him away from her. One night I heard her crying in the bathroom, and I asked her if everything was OK and she said no. And she said, it’s over, isn’t it? And I think the next day she told me to move out. I mourn for my marriage the same way I would mourn for, like, you know, the death of, you know, my mother or someone who I was really, really close with. You can

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SPIEGEL: But it’s really difficult. Think about what developmental researcher Fay Hsu said at the beginning of the program—when things don’t have a clear category, that’s scary for us all. They’re a shape we don’t recognize. Is the lump in the middle of the living room a couch or is the lump a bomb?

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kind of see (laughter) right now. It’s really hard to talk about still. SPIEGEL: Sitting there in Paige’s apartment, the afternoon light fading in the window behind her, I was just struck by how hard her situation was. It’s not just the fact that Paige wasn’t in one clear gender category. She was stuck between categories in other ways as well. In the weeks before and after our visit, I had called around, trying to get a handle on how to make sense of this experience that people like Paige describe. I had spoken to all kinds of people - therapists, historians, gender researchers. But it seemed like a lot of the people that I spoke to were convinced that the experience I was describing didn’t really exist. There’s no way they’re actually flipping between genders, I was told by two different gender researchers in two different European countries. These people are just psychotic. Both of the men who told me this had worked in gender research for their entire professional careers, and they sounded extremely confident. A gender therapist in San Francisco was also skeptical, but she had a different reason. These people are actually just normal transgendered people, she explained, in the sense that they are experiencing the same things that any transgender person experiences. They’ve just developed a different way of describing it. Same experience, different label seemed to be her argument. In other words, it’s not just that Paige was existing between genders. The problem was even more profound. Most of the people that I talked to didn’t seem to believe that the experience that Paige was saying that she had was real. Like why do you think this happened to you? Like where does this come from in you?

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ABENDROTH: I don’t know. I have stopped asking myself that because it doesn’t matter anymore where it came from. I just kind of am what I am. SPIEGEL: When we talked, Paige seemed as mystified by what was happening to her as anyone else. But her experience, she concluded, was her experience. There wasn’t that much she could do about it. ABENDROTH: Like my biggest worry is that I’m never going to really fit in to, like, female spaces or male spaces. I’m afraid that I’m going to be living the rest of my life in some kind of weird gender twilight zone. SPIEGEL: And what will you do then?

SPIEGEL: More than a year after we first met, I called Paige up on the phone. I wanted to check in and see how she was doing. And it was clear from the very first moment she answered that something was different. Her voice sounded different - higher. ABENDROTH: Hello? SPIEGEL: Hi, can you hear me?

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ABENDROTH: I don’t know. I’ll keep on doing my best.

ABENDROTH: Yeah, I can. SPIEGEL: Turns out, about six months after I went to San Diego, the flipping started to fade. And eventually, Paige had settled full-time into being a woman. The last time Paige had flipped into being psychologically male was in the fast-food restaurant Five Guys, and she said it took her completely by surprise. ABENDROTH: I had gotten so used to constantly staying like I am now, as a woman, that I thought it had stopped. And I remember I flipped really hard. It was really bizarre. I felt like I was wearing a really uncomfortable sweater or something like that.

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SPIEGEL: Now, Paige couldn’t really explain why the flipping had stopped any better than she could explain why it had started. She said she thought the estrogen hormones she’d taken to make her body more androgynous probably had affected her.

ABENDROTH: Oh, my goodness, yes. It’s so much easier. It’s so much more manageable. The world, to me, just—it makes so much more sense. SPIEGEL: Now Paige knew what she was supposed to do, where she could place her foot. She didn’t have a wife, but she had that. INVISIBILIA will be back in a moment.

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And Laura Case, the researcher who’s been studying people like Paige, agrees that hormones do affect the brain. But still, there was no way to be absolutely certain. But there was one thing that Paige seemed absolutely clear about - living in one category, even if it’s a category that’s often discriminated against, like transgendered women, is way better than having no category.

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Iggy + Children Of The Dirt Lulu takes a trip to Florida to visit a retirement community built for a specific category of people. She also talks with writer Simon Rich about a category that brings joy to the lonely. LULU MILLER, HOST: From NPR News, this is INVISIBILIA. I’m Lulu Miller. ALIX SPIEGEL, HOST: And I am Alix Spiegel. And today, we’re talking about categories. MILLER: And we just heard a story about how hard life becomes when there is no category for you. And so now we want to ask what’s with that? Like, why are categories so important to us? You know, when you dive deep into your own category and surround yourself with people who are like you in some crucial way, what are you actually getting from that? SPIEGEL: Right.

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MILLER: That’s the question. And to help us answer it, Alix, I am now pleased to introduce you to a man who happens to have the best name ever. IGNATIUS: I go by Iggy—Iggy Ignatius. MILLER: That sounds like a rock star. IGNATIUS: Yes. Iggy and Julio Iglesias.

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MILLER: So Iggy Ignatius is an older Indian gentleman born and raised in India. IGNATIUS: I was born and brought up in Madras, came here for my MBA at the University of Illinois. MILLER: He was 25. IGNATIUS: When I left, I swore to myself that I’ll go get my degree, and I’ll come back to my country. MILLER: Yeah.

MILLER: Cut forward 26 years. IGNATIUS: 2006. MILLER: Iggy’s still here. IGNATIUS: Living in Lansing, MI. MILLER: Not so much like India.

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IGNATIUS: So...

SPIEGEL: Not so much. IGNATIUS: Tons of snow. MILLER: And he wants to go back to India more than ever. It’s all he wants, in a way - what his whole life has been driving toward. IGNATIUS: Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. MILLER: But with retirement approaching, these seven pesky faces kept coming up in his mind.

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IGNATIUS: My daughters, my son, my grandchildren. MILLER: He didn’t want to be far from them. IGNATIUS: Right. And then the health care. MILLER: He worried about the infrastructure.

MILLER: And also. IGNATIUS: You know, most of Indians get cremated when they die. And one of our cultural things is that usually the oldest son has to light the funeral pyre because they believe the soul goes to heaven only if it is lighted by the son. So those things... MILLER: Kids, health care, a safe entry into the next life for your soul...

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IGNATIUS: There is no guarantee you could reach the hospital on time.

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IGNATIUS: Are all like chains that does not allow you to go back to India. MILLER: And he says this is not a thing that’s just going on with him. He thinks that this—this is, like—this is the dilemma. This is the dilemma for immigrants. IGNATIUS: Yes. MILLER: So anyway, one day in the cold, slushy environment of Lansing, it hits him. Oh my gosh, what if I just created... IGNATIUS: An Indian retirement community in Florida. SPIEGEL: Oh, that is kind of brilliant. MILLER: Yep. He would build it to look like an Indian village, low buildings... IGNATIUS: Big courtyard. MILLER: There’d be palm trees...

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IGNATIUS: Greeneries MILLER. He’d serve Indian food. IGNATIUS: Curry, rice, homemade yogurt. MILLER: There’d be Indian music.

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IGNATIUS: Tabla, harmonium. MILLER: Yoga. IGNATIUS: Meditation. MILLER: A prayer room. IGNATIUS: A small temple. MILLER: Indian table cloths.

MILLER: And of course, the most important detail. IGNATIUS: Other Indians. MILLER: Everyone there would be Indian. IGNATIUS: (Laughter). MILLER: His problem would be solved.

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IGNATIUS: Bollywood movies.

IGNATIUS: Right. MILLER: So he comes up with a name for this place he dreams of building. IGNATIUS: Shantiniketan. Shanti means peace, and niketan means house. So itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s peace house. MILLER: And he goes around the country, meeting with other Indians, to see if anyone would be interested. 211

IGNATIUS: And in every town I went, as I was halfway through my presentation, one of them would raise their hand and say, but you stole our idea. (LAUGHTER) MILLER: Because everyone was like, wait, we were thinking of doing this. IGNATIUS: Well, nobody had done it.

IGNATIUS: People were rushing to me. What do I need to do to sign up? MILLER: He immediately finds 10 investors dying to fund this all-Indian retirement community. And in August of 2008, they all meet down in Florida, right near the site where he plans to build. IGNATIUS: I still remember the date - August 2, 2008. Everybody handed me down their check.

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MILLER: The point is, the response was overwhelmingly positive.

NPR INVISIBILIA (CATEGORIES)

MILLER: And then... (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #1: This is CNN breaking news. UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #2: Lehman Brothers has filed for bankruptcy. MILLER: You may recall, September, 2008, the stock market crashes. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #3: Breaking news here. Stocks all around the world are tanking because of the crisis on Wall Street. MILLER: And we enter into the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

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UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #4: It is the largest single drop ever. MILLER: And so Iggy, after regrouping with his wife, just starts trying to hawk his condos. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) IGNATIUS: Hi, welcome to Shantiniketan. I’m Iggy Ignatius, the CEO of Shantiniketan.

UNDERSTANDING OURSELVES

MILLER: Here he is in a YouTube tour he made, trying to sound upbeat. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) IGNATIUS: So let us go out now, and we’ll take a tour of the place. MILLER: While all around him, literally across the street, houses are being foreclosed and residents are deserting the area. IGNATIUS: My biggest challenge was, across the street, you could buy a four-bedroom, single-family home for $100,000, and I was selling here, for

MILLER: But it turned out the fact that Florida was in the worst housing crisis in the history of the state was not a problem at all. Instantly, he sold out an entire wing of condos. IGNATIUS: I had enough money to build two wings, sold the two wings, had enough money for two more wings and a clubhouse. We were building this like a domino effect.

UNDERSTANDING OURSELVES

$130,000, a two-bedroom condo, half the size of what you could get across the street for $100,000.

MILLER: And he was able to sell out all 54 units. IGNATIUS: And it was still the worst market in the real estate going on in Florida. MILLER: Thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s amazing. IGNATIUS: Yeah. That was the biggest miracle. That was the biggest miracle. MILLER: Which starts to raise the question, what had Iggy tapped into?

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(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) IGNATIUS: It is a gated community where you will be living with people of your own cultural background. MILLER: Like, why on earth were these selling out during the time of our worst - like, the worst real estate market ever? (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

MILLER: Is it this desire to be among your own, to be in your own category? Test, test. So I went down to Florida.

NPR INVISIBILIA (CATEGORIES)

IGNATIUS: And there will be hates here and here. And the whole property will be fenced.

NPR INVISIBILIA (CATEGORIES)

Big palm trees in the entrance, a waterfall. To ask Iggy and the people who had actually bought homes in ShantiNiketan. Had they purchased that primal desire to stick with your own? (SOUNDBITE OF KNOCKING ON DOOR) IGNATIUS: Hello. MILLER: Hi. IGNATIUS: Oh my goodness. MILLER: Do you guys still have time? And before I get to what they said, I just have to mention here how successfully Iggy had done it. He had created India. There was Hindu prayer. (SOUNDBITE OF HINDU PRAYER SERVICE) UNIDENTIFIED WORSHIPPERS: (Chanting in foreign language).

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MILLER: There was yoga. UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: Bend your elbows. MILLER: Customs I didn’t realize I was supposed to observe. UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: (Inaudible).

UNDERSTANDING OURSELVES

MILLER: Oh, should I take off my shoes? UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: Yeah. MILLER: Sorry about that. It was surreal—a real microcosm. So different from the world just outside its gates that as I walked around the property, it suddenly made me think about another perfectly insulated microcosm - the Augusta National Golf Club. So Alix, you know about this place, right? SPIEGEL: It’s like the place where they only let in white people? MILLER: Right. It’s a golf club down in Georgia, which, in 1990, did let in

SPIEGEL: All right. MILLER: But they, over the years, have always been surrounded by controversy because they only wanted to admit people of one category. MILLER: And so if anyone doesn’t want me to record, just... UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: They won’t talk.

UNDERSTANDING OURSELVES

their first black members, and they let in their first woman in 2012.

MILLER: ...You can just swat me away. And so once I returned from my stroll, I approached a big group of people sitting around at a table after lunch and asked them... What if you flipped this? You know, like, what if this was one of these country clubs in Georgia that only lets in white men? Is there something a little bit racist about what is happening here? UNIDENTIFIED MAN #3: No. Not at all. Your comparison to Georgia country club is not fair.

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MILLER: Everybody pointed out that they are not excluding anyone. UNIDENTIFIED MAN #3: We would let anybody in. MILLER: Which is obviously a crucial difference. But no one was shy about admitting that part of what they were paying for was being around people like them.

MILLER: Really? GARMELLA: Life goes better here. MILLER: This one woman, Vijaya Garmella (ph), said just think about how exhausting it can be to live life as an outsider to a culture. GARMELLA: It’s very hard.

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VIJAYA GARMELLA: My God, Lulu, the happiness it gives me.

NPR INVISIBILIA (CATEGORIES)

IGNATIUS: For example, you know, I would dread to go through a drivethrough to even buy a cup of coffee... MILLER: That’s Iggy again. IGNATIUS: ...Because when I ask her for a coffee, she just wouldn’t understand what I want. What do you want? MILLER: And language wasn’t the only challenge that people brought up. GARMELLA: There is this hesitancy here. MILLER: The emotional chill that particularly northeastern Americans can have... GARMELLA: You cannot just knock at their door. MILLER: ...Came up a lot. GARMELLA: They look at you - oh, why didn’t you phone me? Why didn’t you do this thing?

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MILLER: And having grown up in the land of pursed lips, I, at least say, this is a totally fair assessment of our people. No, it’s true. I’m always afraid of bothering... GARMELLA: See? They think - it’s not bothering. See, that’s where it is. Why do you even say that word?

UNDERSTANDING OURSELVES

MILLER: And so the return to a community of people just like you - it’s a relief. IGNATIUS: Here I can knock at her door and say I’m here and she’ll welcome me. GARMELLA: It’s so comforting. MILLER: So is there a dark side to this homogenous heaven? GARMELLA: Very, very nice people out here. Very, very nice people.

IGNATIUS: Unfortunately, yes. MILLER: ...There is—a little. IGNATIUS: I don’t want my children or grandchildren to live in a community like this. MILLER: He thinks it’s too insular.

UNDERSTANDING OURSELVES

MILLER: Iggy admits that...

IGNATIUS: But retirement communities are places where people go waiting to die. MILLER: And according to Iggy, at that time, it is beyond your control. Whether you be a majority or minority, you will experience a deep, primal desire to withdraw. IGNATIUS: Look at the salmon. The salmon always swims upstream to the place of its birth to spawn and then die there. And I think that is an animal instinct, which we as human beings seem to have that aspect of us in it. 217

MILLER: So is that true? Is it just animal nature to get a little racist as death approaches? JEFF GREENBERG: Yes. MILLER: This is a scientist named Jeff Greenberg. GREENBERG: I am a professor of psychology at the University of Arizona.

GREENBERG: That realization that, someday, we’re not going to exist. MILLER: And Iggy is absolutely right. If you raise the specter of death in a person’s mind, which you can do experimentally, by the way, by simply asking a question like... GREENBERG: ...What do you think happens to you as you physically die and once you’re dead?

NPR INVISIBILIA (CATEGORIES)

MILLER: And for the last 30 years, he’s been studying how we behave when death is on the mind.

NPR INVISIBILIA (CATEGORIES)

MILLER: People like people in their own group way better than they do when they’re not thinking about death. GREENBERG: So we had them rate them on, you know, traits like, you know, honesty, kindness, intelligence. MILLER: Christians like Christians better. Italians like Italians better. And Germans, who most of the time are actually pretty lukewarm on other Germans... GREENBERG: I think it’s still - it’s lingering, you know, guilt. MILLER: ...If you get them to contemplate their own mortality, suddenly they really like Germans. GREENBERG: So if you interview Germans near funeral home, they’re much more nationalistic. (LAUGHTER)

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MILLER: But it’s not just that we like our own more. Its reverse imprint is also true. We like people outside of our group much, much less. GREENBERG: People become more negative toward other cultures. MILLER: So why? Why might we do this?

UNDERSTANDING OURSELVES

GREENBERG: Well, because death haunts us as it does. We have to do something about it. MILLER: Greenberg thinks it’s this strange way that we try to fend off death. His thinking goes that people who are not like you, who do not share your language or your values or your beliefs, well, in some very primal way, it’s like they can’t see you. IGNATIUS: I will dread to go through a drive-through to even buy a cup of coffee. MILLER: Which is unpleasant at any stage of your life, but particularly, Jeff says, at the end, when the threat of disappearing is becoming so visceral. UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #1: My artery was 97 percent blocked when

MILLER: Person after person at Shantiniketan pulled me aside to tell me about their ailments. UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #2: They took the hip bone and they fuse it in the back and they put the titanium rods and screws. GREENBERG: And so to manage the terror that we’re just these transient creatures...

UNDERSTANDING OURSELVES

we found out. I practically died.

MILLER: ...We shoo those people who make us disappear away. GREENBERG: Right. MILLER: That is, when you dive deep into your own category, what you’re actually getting is the illusion... GREENBERG: ...That we’re significant and we’re enduringly significant. MILLER: Have you had deaths? 219

IGNATIUS: Yes. We had a couple of people pass away. MILLER: One of whom was his wife. IGNATIUS: She had suffered for a year with leukemia, and when she passed away she had wished that she would be cremated. MILLER: And Iggy worked out a deal with the local crematorium so that his son was able to come in and light the cremation fire.

MILLER: Iggy sang this song at her funeral. IGNATIUS: (Singing in Hindi) Which literally - (speaking Hindi) literally says never say goodbye. MILLER: All right. So before we say goodbye for real, do you want to do a little interactive radio?

NPR INVISIBILIA (CATEGORIES)

IGNATIUS: Yes. (Singing in Hindi) That’s very important you know? The soul rests in peace if that is done. (Singing in Hindi).

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SPIEGEL: I think it’s time for some interactive radio. MILLER: OK. You - everybody out there, and you, Alix, are going to hear a story. And the way you respond to that story is going to tell you what category you fall into. But it’s not a category of race or religion or gender. No - it’s a different kind of category. SPIEGEL: OK. MILLER: The story is by Simon Rich and it’s called “The Children Of The Dirt.” SIMON RICH: According to Aristophanes, there were originally three sexes —the children of the moon who were half-male and half-female, the children of the sun who were fully male, and the children of the earth, who were fully female. Everyone had four legs, four arms and two heads, and spent their days in blissful contentment. Zeus became jealous of the humans’ joy so he decided to split them all in two. Aristophanes called this punishment the origin of love because ever since, the children of the earth, moon and sun have been searching the globe in a desperate bid to find their other halves. Aristophanes’ story though is incomplete because there was also a fourth sex—the children of the dirt. Unlike the other three sexes, the children of the dirt consisted of just one half. Some were male and some were female and each had just two arms, two legs and one head. The children of the dirt found the children of the earth, moon and sun to be completely insufferable. Whenever they saw a two-headed creature walking by, talking to itself in baby-talk voices, it made them want to vomit. They hated going to parties and when there was no way to get out of one, they sat in the corner, too bitter and depressed to talk to anybody. The children of the dirt were so miserable that they invented wine and art to dull their pain. It helped a little, but not really. When Zeus went on his rampage he decided to leave the children of the dirt alone. They’re already [bleep], he explained. Happy gay couples descend from the children of the sun. Happy lesbian couples descend from the children of the earth. And happy straight couples descend from the children of the moon. But the vast majority of humans are descendants of the children of the dirt. And no matter how long they search the earth, they’ll never find what they’re looking for because there’s nobody for them, not anybody in the world. MILLER: Interactive radio test—which category do you fall into? Test subject number one, Alix Spiegel.

SPIEGEL: Medium. MILLER: That’s like you, being nice. SPIEGEL: Yeah. It does nothing for me. MILLER: So that reaction... SPIEGEL: Just crickets.

UNDERSTANDING OURSELVES

MILLER: Does that do anything for you?

MILLER: ...Is what gave me the idea that this story may be some kind of categories test because when I first read this story I was in a little bit of a darker moment of my life, and I literally threw the book down with joy. So when Alix got crickets, I picked the book back up to figure out what was so great about it, and I discovered that I think the source of its power comes from two words—vast majority. RICH: The vast majority of humans are descendants of the children of the dirt. 221

MILLER: With those two words, Simon Rich does a very kind thing. If you are someone who is alone and thinks yourself a little off in your aloneness, you are suddenly scooped into a box with a whole pile of other lonely people, and you feel better. And that is the strange power of categories because nothing about you is actually changing, but by simply getting a line drawn around you, you get some real relief. SPIEGEL: Yeah, it does nothing for me. MILLER: Unless of course, you aren’t a member of this particular category.

MILLER: But for the people in the group? SEAN COLE: (Laughter). MILLER: This is Sean Cole, radio producer, who happened to be stopping by during a rougher patch in his love life, and I forced him to read the story.

NPR INVISIBILIA (CATEGORIES)

SPIEGEL: Crickets.

NPR INVISIBILIA (CATEGORIES)

The effect is real. COLE: Oh, God. I think I’m a child of the dirt. And I like how they invent art and wine to dull their pain. MILLER: High-five. Welcome to the club. So if you laughed, if this story lifted your spirits in some tiny way, you are probably lonely. But here’s the kind of frustrating thing—the founder of our most wonderful club, Simon Rich... RICH: I mean, you know I’m sort of shocked that you asked me to read that one. I’m usually not that bleak. MILLER: The story doesn’t work for him anymore. RICH: I actually now am in a really happy relationship. MILLER: He had me look at the dedication page in his book. (Reading) For Kathleen.

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RICH: Yeah. MILLER: How did you meet Kathleen? RICH: We met - actually, we met at a gay and lesbian fiction class. I assumed that she was a lesbian. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a picture of me, but she thought that I was a trans-gendered female-to-male person.

UNDERSTANDING OURSELVES

MILLER: I guess you’re sprightly? RICH: Yeah. I get a lot of thank you ma’am’s when I shop. We went on a date, and... MILLER: Fast-forward over half a decade. RICH: We’re going strong. I just sort of feel like a guy who won the lottery. MILLER: Its charms are lost on him. RICH: It feels like it was written by a different person.

RICH: Because there’s nobody for them, not anybody in the world. MILLER: ...Totally inert, but deeply soothing. Enjoy. RICH: Because there’s nobody for them, not anybody in the world. Because there’s nobody for them, not anybody in the world. Because there’s nobody for them, not anybody in the world...

UNDERSTANDING OURSELVES

MILLER: (Sighing). Well, for the rest of us, who find its last two lines like a kind of worry stone...

COLE: I’m Sean Cole and I’m a child of the dirt. JENNIFER CANTON: I’m Jennifer Canton (ph) and I am a child of the dirt. MEGAN ECKMAN: I am Megan Eckman (ph). MILLER: I’m Lulu Miller. AUSTIN SMITH: I am Austin Smith (ph). 223

BEN PAYJACK: I am Ben Payjack (ph). UNIDENTIFIED GROUP: And I am a child of the dirt. MILLER: Children of the dirt, we’ll be back next week. SPIEGEL: Lulu, it’s INVISIBILIA. MILLER: OK. Dance party?

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, “WAVIN’ FLAG”) K’NAAN: (Singing) When I get older I will be stronger, they’ll call me freedom... SPIEGEL: INVISIBILIA is me, Alix Spiegel... MILLER: And me, Lulu Miller.

NPR INVISIBILIA (CATEGORIES)

SPIEGEL: Yeah.

NPR INVISIBILIA (CATEGORIES)

SPIEGEL: Our editor is Anne Gudenkauf, with help from Eric Nuzum, Matt Martinez, Portia Robertson Migas and Madhulika Sikka. Production help by Brent Bachman and Brenden Baker. MILLER: Special thanks to Simon Rich. His story collection, “The Last Girlfriend On Earth,” is truly hilarious, whether you are lonely or not. And now for our moment of nonsense. SPIEGEL: I think the top. MILLER: All right. Fine, I’ll do it at the top. SPIEGEL: OK. MILLER: (Singing) You fished me, you brought me here. I am the one that you chose. OK. Oh—we’re recording? SPIEGEL: (Laughter). MILLER: OK. I just want to use that, of me being a [bleep].

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SPIEGEL: Join us next time for more INVISIBILIA.

How To Become Batman Alix and Lulu examine the surprising effect our expectations can have on the people around us. Plus, the story of a blind man who says expectations have helped him see. Yes, see.

UNDERSTANDING OURSELVES

Batman Pt.1 Can your private thoughts and expectations influence how well a rat runs a maze? The answer may surprise you. You’ll also meet Daniel Kish, who is blind and uses echolocation to get around. ALIX SPIEGEL, HOST: From NPR News, this is Invisibilia. I’m Alix Spiegel. LULU MILLER, HOST: And I’m Lulu Miller.

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SPIEGEL: And today we’re going to tell you a story that we think is going to make you believe something that you do not currently believe. MILLER: Right. SPIEGEL: And to begin to explain this story, we want to introduce you to something—a rat. MILLER: (Laughter) Hi, buddy.

MILLER: So can you just describe what we got here? UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: It’s a rat. UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #1: Pinkish ears. UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: Red eyes.

NPR INVISIBILIA (EXPECTATIONS)

SPIEGEL: Recently, Lulu and I got a rat, and we brought it to NPR.

NPR INVISIBILIA (EXPECTATIONS)

UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: Long nose. SPIEGEL: And we invited people into this room, one by one, to sit in front of the rat, look it in the eye and answer one question. Do you think that the thoughts that you have in your head—OK?—the private thoughts that you have in your head could influence how that rat moves through space? UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: No. UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #1: No. UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: No. SPIEGEL: And it was almost unanimous. UNIDENTIFIED PEOPLE: No. SPIEGEL: People did not believe that their personal thoughts about the rat would have any effect on the rat at all.

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BOB ROSENTHAL: Because that would suggest some sort of telepathy. SPIEGEL: Now, maybe this is your belief as well. And if it is, you’re wrong.

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ROSENTHAL: (Laughter) Yes. SPIEGEL: This is a man named Bob Rosenthal. And early in his career as a research psychologist, he did something very devious. Late one night, Bob secretly crept into his lab, and he hung signs on all of the rat cages. Some of the signs said that the rat in the cage was incredibly smart and some of the signs said that the rat in the cage was incredibly dumb, even though neither of these things was true. ROSENTHAL: They were very average rats that you would buy from a research institute that sells rats for a living. SPIEGEL: So then Bob brings this group of experimenters into his lab and says for the next week, some of you are going to get these very smart rats and some these very dumb rats. And your job is to run your rat through a maze and record how well it does.

SPIEGEL: So off the experimenters went. Can you just pick up the rat? We actually did a very lo-fi unscientific version of Bob’s experiment here at NPR. UNIDENTIFIED MAN #3: Is that OK to do?

UNDERSTANDING OURSELVES

ROSENTHAL: That’s right.

SPIEGEL: Yeah. MILLER: Yeah. SPIEGEL: In Bob’s real study, the experimenters did just as Bob told them to do. They ran the rats that they had been told were smart... UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #2: She has sort of an intelligent-looking face. SPIEGEL: ...And the rats that they had been told were dumb... 227

UNIDENTIFIED MAN #4: Yeah, he seems kind of lazy. SPIEGEL: ...Through these mazes. UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #2: There he goes. SPIEGEL: So what did they find? It was not even close. ROSENTHAL: The results were so dramatic.

MILLER: Even though they weren’t... SPIEGEL: ...Even though the smart rats were not smart and the stupid rats were not stupid. They were just all the same kind of average North Dakotan rat (laughter). MILLER: So, Alix?

NPR INVISIBILIA (EXPECTATIONS)

SPIEGEL: The smart rats did almost twice as well as the dumb rats...

NPR INVISIBILIA (EXPECTATIONS)

SPIEGEL: Yeah, Lulu? MILLER: Let me just break in here and represent all the people who are just hearing about that study and thinking, like, what would what I think a rat is—in terms of dumb or smart—what on Earth would that have to do with what a rat actually does? Like, that almost to me sounds like the stuff of science fiction, like telekinesis, like... ROSENTHAL: Got you, got you. SPIEGEL: Yeah, no one really believed him at first. ROSENTHAL: I was having trouble publishing any of this. SPIEGEL: But what Bob eventually figured out was that the expectations that the experimenters had in their head actually translated into a whole set of tiny behavior changes. That is, the expectation subtly changed the way that the experimenters touched the rats and then, in turn, the way that the rats behaved. So when the experimenters thought that the rats were really smart, they felt more warmly towards the rats and touched them more carefully.

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ROSENTHAL: We do know that handling rats and handling them more gently can actually increase the performance of rats. (MUSIC)

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SPIEGEL: And in people? Because it turns out that this kind of dynamic happens in people, too. CAROL DWECK: You may be standing farther away from someone you have lower expectations for. You may not be making as much eye contact. And it’s not something you can put your finger on. We’re not usually aware of how we are conveying our expectations to other people, but it’s there. SPIEGEL: That’s Carol Dweck, a psychologist at Stanford. She was one of several researchers who explained all kinds of surprising things that expectations can influence. Like teacher expectations can raise or lower a student’s IQ score. A mother’s expectations can affect the drinking behavior of her middle-schooler. Military trainers’ expectations can literally make a soldier faster or slower.

SPIEGEL: Yeah, so my question was, how far does this go? So, Carol, clearly these expectation effects exist on a continuum. So, for example, if I expect that if, you know, somebody jumps off a building, they will be able to fly. That’s not going to work out so well, right? DWECK: Right.

we are slaves to expectations.

UNDERSTANDING OURSELVES

MILLER: Think about that. As you go through the world, the expectations of other people are constantly acting on you, literally making you stronger or weaker, smarter or dumber, faster or slower.

SPIEGEL: So what does science know about where we should draw the line? Does it have a clear sense of that? DWECK: No. That line is moving. As we come to understand things that are possible and mechanisms through which a belief affects an outcome or one person affects another person, that line can move. SPIEGEL: This is INVISIBILIA. I’m Alix Spiegel. MILLER: And I’m Lulu Miller.

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SPIEGEL: And what we do on our show is look at these invisible things like emotions, beliefs and assumptions and we try to understand how they affect our lives. MILLER: And today the invisible thing we are talking about is expectations. We’re going to poke at that line Carol talked about, see if we can get it to move over a little bit. And to that end, I had one question for Bob.

MILLER: Could my expectations make a blind person, who literally has no eyeballs, see? ROSENTHAL: No way. Expectations will not make them see. MILLER: How sure are you about that one? ROSENTHAL: Positive.

NPR INVISIBILIA (EXPECTATIONS)

ROSENTHAL: OK.

NPR INVISIBILIA (EXPECTATIONS)

SPIEGEL: We’re not. So stay with us and at the end of the program, you can decide who you believe. OK Lulu, so you’re going to lead us through this story. So, where does it start? MILLER: Well, it starts deep in the woods in Southern California with me and a man named Daniel Kish. We’ve been hiking for hours and we are just sitting down in the dirt to take a break. Could we look at your eyes? DANIEL KISH: In terms of them being out? MILLER: Yeah. KISH: Yeah. MILLER: And then in a somewhat surreal gesture, Daniel pulls down his lower eyelids and removes his eyes. KISH: OK.

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MILLER: They’re prosthetic, of course, and they clink a little bit as he hands them over to me. That’s so cool. Two of the most beautiful hazel-blue eyes I’ve ever seen, in the palm of his hand. Can I hold them?

UNDERSTANDING OURSELVES

KISH: Yeah. MILLER: OK. Wow, they are so lifelike. Does it feel odd to not have them in? KISH: Yes. MILLER: Oh, it does? KISH: Oh, yes.

Daniel’s eyes had to be removed when he was just a toddler because of cancer. KISH: Retinoblastoma, which is basically eye cancer. MILLER: And yet he’s the one who’s led me on this hike deep into the woods. So how does he do it? KISH: I think we’ve passed what I was looking for.

UNDERSTANDING OURSELVES

MILLER: OK.

MILLER: Well, he’s got a cane and a hiking stick. But mainly, he clicks. KISH: You press the tongue on the roof of the mouth. MILLER: Is it kind of like (clicking)? KISH: You’re creating a vacuum. MILLER: He clicks with his tongue as a way of understanding where he is in space. This is basically what bats do, echolocation, as the scientists call it. It’s like sonar. From the way those clicks bounce off the things in the environment, Daniel gets a sort of sonic representation of what’s around him.

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KISH: So here (clicking) I can sense trees poking up. MILLER: Now, Daniel just happened to intuitively invent this when he was a toddler. No one taught him or trained him, he just made it up. And since he’s been doing it his whole life, he’s now so good at it that he can tell all sorts of things about what’s in front of him - if there’s a sudden drop-off in front of him or a wall, if the vegetation is dense or sparse.

MILLER: Yes. KISH: Garbage bins. MILLER: Ding, ding, ding. KISH: Outhouse.

NPR INVISIBILIA (EXPECTATIONS)

KISH: So here’s a bench.

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MILLER: Wow. And not only does this allow him to hike, navigate foreign cities alone, rock climb, horseback ride, but the one that gets all the attention is that he can ride a bicycle. (SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW) UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: Meet Daniel Kish. He’s blind, but that doesn’t stop him from riding his bike. (APPLAUSE) MILLER: You may have heard of Daniel Kish before. (SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW) UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #1: Daniel Kish is completely blind. MILLER: He is usually called the Bat Man.

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(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW) UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: This real-life Batman. MILLER: Because he is the man who clicks like a bat. (SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW)

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UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #2: His remarkable, bat-like abilities. MILLER: And he has made the media rounds to demonstrate what is usually described as this most amazing... (SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW) UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #3: Extraordinary. (SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW) UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #2: Phenomenal.

UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: Remarkable. MILLER: ...Nearly superhuman ability of being able to ride a bicycle even though he’s blind. (SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW) UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: As you watch, remember - he can’t see a thing.

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(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW)

MILLER: A narrative Daniel thinks is all wrong. BRIAN BUSHWAY: Step right up, step right up. The amazing Daniel Kish will demonstrate one of his greatest tricks to date. MILLER: This is Daniel’s buddy Brian Bushway (ph) who has had to watch his poor friend wheel out the old bicycle so many times for the media that he couldn’t help but mock the whole setup when asked him to do it for me. BUSHWAY: And then he will proceed to mount himself on a bike and ride. 233

MILLER: And though Daniel indulged, pulling figure-eights and riding beautifully as I ran beside him with my microphone, the two of them made it clear that my amazement was kind of offensive. BUSHWAY: So step right up, step right up and see the amazing Daniel Kish do something that everybody can but most people don’t.

KISH: I definitely think that most blind people could move around with fluidity and confidence if that were the expectation. MILLER: See, he thinks the reason that more blind people don’t isn’t just because they haven’t learned to click, but is because the expectations that you, or I, or all of us are carrying around in our own heads about what blind people can do are simply way too low. KISH: They wouldn’t be able to hike, they would be able to run, they

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MILLER: And here is where we get back to expectations. See, Daniel thinks there is nothing amazing about him. He thinks most blind people who don’t have other disabilities could do things like ride bikes.

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wouldn’t be able to engage in manual labor. MILLER: Daniel, like Bob, thinks that those expectations, those private thoughts in our heads, are extremely powerful things because over time they have the ability to change the blind person we are thinking about. KISH: That psychology becomes inculcated in the blind person. Absorbed and translated into physical reality. MILLER: And so, Daniel has a theory that if by some miracle we could all change our expectations of what blind people are capable of, then not only would you see lots more blind people on bikes, but... KISH: More blind people could... MILLER: In a very real way... KISH: See. MILLER: Yeah, he just said see.

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KISH: It’s actually pretty simple and straightforward. MILLER: And it turns out, neuroscientists are looking into this very idea and seeing some pretty shocking results. And we will get there. But first, to understand what Daniel means how expectations could give a blind person vision, we need to first see how Daniel himself shot through this force field of low expectations, a story which starts back in 1967 when Daniel was just 13 months old and that second eyeball had just been removed.

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PAULETTE KISH: Oh, my gosh. MILLER: This is Daniel’s mother, Paulette Kish. And a few days after taking her son home from the hospital, Paulette realized she was facing a really difficult choice. PAULETTE KISH: My mom thought that I should put him in cotton. MILLER: Cotton? PAULETTE KISH: Wrap him in cotton so that he didn’t get hurt, so that he was so protected. That’s really how she felt.

PAULETTE KISH: He started climbing when he was 6 months old, before he even walked. MILLER: And that didn’t change when he went blind. PAULETTE KISH: We had bookshelves he would climb, so I’d have to move everything off the bookshelves because he’d get into them. MILLER: So Paulette needed to decide - was her mom right? Was it time to start putting some restrictions on him, or was she going to raise him like a seeing child, allow him to explore his world with very few restrictions on him for blindness? And for reasons that will become clear shortly, Paulette went with option two. She was going to banish her fear.

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MILLER: See, Daniel was a very rambunctious little guy.

PAULETTE KISH: Just put it away. In the beginning, I think that’s what I did. I just put it away. MILLER: And so when two police officers showed up at her door... PAULETTE KISH: Two big huge police officers holding my child.

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MILLER: Having picked up Daniel for climbing the fence into their neighbor’s yard. PAULETTE KISH: You can’t let him do that - he could fall. MILLER: Paulette felt their same worries... PAULETTE KISH: It’s very scary.

KISH: I just climbed everything I could find. MILLER: And when the elementary school called and asked her to make Daniel stop clicking? PAULETTE KISH: It’s not socially acceptable, is what they would say. MILLER: Paulette said, too bad.

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MILLER: But didn’t make Daniel stop.

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PAULETTE KISH: He needs to know what’s around him and that’s how he does it. MILLER: And so Daniel clicked, past people doing double-takes on the street, occasionally bumping into things. KISH: (Laughter). Yup. PAULETTE KISH: And then pretty soon... MILLER: Your blind kid is not only scaling trees and fences by himself, but walking to school on his own, crossing busy streets, exploring his way into neighbors’ driveways. KISH: A friend of the family had an undersized bike and I started riding alongside this retainer wall until I realized, I didn’t really need the wall and I could roll alongside the wall without having to touch the wall. And then... PAULETTE KISH: Oh, goodness. KISH: I just could ride it.

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MILLER: He’d have to click way more than usual. KISH: Peppering the environment with a barrage of clicks. MILLER: But by 6 years old, he could do it - ride completely comfortably on the bike. Look ma - no eyes. And when neighbors would pop their heads out the door?

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PAULETTE KISH: How can you let him do that? MILLER: Were their concerns. COMPUTER GENERATED VOICE: How can you let him do that? How can you let him do that... MILLER: She’d look at his smiling face and think... PAULETTE KISH: How can I not? MILLER: So did anything bad ever happen to Daniel? I mean, did he ever

PAULETTE KISH: Well... KISH: I used to have this game—get to the top of our road and yell dive bomb and I would ride insanely fast down the road and everyone would have to scatter. Well, one day I did the dive bomb thing and as I was screaming down this road - bang. I just collided into a metal light pole—blood everywhere. MILLER: And this was not the only pole in Daniel’s life. On the schoolyard, he ran into a pole and knocked out his front teeth. A few years after that he ran straight into a soccer shed

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get really hurt?

KISH: And it just destroyed my whole mouth. MILLER: I mean, his childhood was punctuated by some pretty grisly injuries. And the way in which Paulette reacted to all of these injuries was that she always let him keep going. I mean, shortly after the bike thing a bicycle appeared under the Christmas tree. SPIEGEL: And why—like, I am a mother and I think that if my kid kept showing up with his front teeth knocked out, I would begin to wonder if I had made the right choice.

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PAULETTE KISH: Yeah. MILLER: Paulette knows it seems extreme, which brings me to that reason she decided to banish her fear. PAULETTE KISH: It was my first marriage. It was not a good marriage.

MILLER: Daniel’s biological father, who’s now deceased, was extremely abusive with Paulette. KISH: Sort of a barroom brawler type. MILLER: And he could be tough with Daniel and Daniel’s little brother. KISH: We had to learn to sort of take physical punishment, as it were, and be able to dish it back.

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KISH: My father was an alcoholic and he was abusive.

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MILLER: And Paulette says this is why she ended up being so hands-off with Daniel. PAULETTE KISH: Everything that happens in your life has its effect—has its effect. MILLER: She said that after spending so many years feeling small and powerless in that marriage, when she finally made it out she vowed never to be ruled by fear again. PAULETTE KISH: I mean, there’s life and then there is living your life. There is a difference. MILLER: In the same would go for Daniel. She refused to let those scary thoughts of what could happen make her keep Daniel too close. But what if Daniel ended up being hit a car and killed? I asked her. Like, what if? What if a car just hits and just plows him down, you know?

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PAULETTE KISH: But that can happen to anyone. It can happen to anyone. There was a group of four kids on the corner up about a block. A car went up the curb and hit them—killed two of them. It can happen to anyone. MILLER: And so bikes were bought for Christmas and tree climbing was permitted.

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PAULETTE KISH: OK, I’ll just close my eyes. MILLER: And this blind as a bat little boy was allowed to wander the world as freely as any sighted child. KISH: From the fifth grade on, I walked to school almost every day. I had to cross major streets. I participated in extracurricular activities. I made my own breakfast. I made my own lunch. SPIEGEL: I mean, were they considered outside the norm? Did they consider themselves outside the norm? MILLER: I don’t think they noticed it much. I don’t think they thought

KISH: Until Adam. ADAM SHAIBLE: My name is Adam Shaible. Excuse me for a second. MILLER: So, Alix? SPIEGEL: Yeah.

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about it much. Particularly Daniel didn’t know that there was anything odd about the way he got around the world.

MILLER: This is where the story takes a kind of complicated turn because Adam is basically the first other blind person Daniel ever encounters. They met in the fifth grade when Adam suddenly enrolled in Daniel’s elementary school. SHAIBLE: I will say I was a rather small fellow at the time. When I was 11–12, I was under 60 pounds. MILLER: Wow. KISH: Yeah.

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MILLER: And Daniel was not exactly welcoming. SHAIBLE: He just wasn’t a nice - nice fellow. MILLER: Daniel said that Adam completely unnerved him because of how incapable he was of getting around on his own.

MILLER: Is that true? Was it like—was it that bad? SHAIBLE: Yeah. MILLER: Adam says he had simply never needed to get around on his own before. SHAIBLE: I went to the School for the Blind from age 5 to age 7.

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KISH: Literally just running into walls. I mean, he would just walk along and his forehead would connect with a wall and we’d be on the other side of that wall and we would say, OK, that’s Adam, he’s coming, kind thing.

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MILLER: And there he was taken around on someone’s arm almost all the time. In the lunch room, people brought him his food. They helped him carry his books. SHAIBLE: I don’t know why people did things for me. They just did. MILLER: And Daniel was baffled by Adam. KISH: At the time, I had not really conceptualized blindness in that way for myself, and I just didn’t understand it. MILLER: He’d come home to his mom mystified. PAULETTE KISH: He’d say Adam can’t do anything on his own. SHAIBLE: If I got lost I used to get terrified. KISH: Why? SHAIBLE: I just—I didn’t feel safe.

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KISH: Why? MILLER: And then what happened is that the kids at school started to mix up Daniel and Adam. KISH: People started just lumping us together as, you know, the blind kids. We were the same age. MILLER: You were the blind boys.

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KISH: Yeah. They’d mix up our names, and I didn’t like that at all. MILLER: And so almost to prove his distinction from Adam... KISH: I did the things that kids will do in situations like that. MILLER: What did you do? PAULETTE KISH: He made fun of Adam. SHAIBLE: He just, like—he put up a wall around him.

MILLER: He’d tease him in front of other kids. SHAIBLE: I used to try to walk away from him. MILLER: And he even beat him up a few times. SHAIBLE: I wondered if there was something I had done. KISH: And that, in my aggressive little mind, was the thing that set me apart.

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KISH: I was pretty brutal.

SPIEGEL: So then what happened? KISH: Time moved on. MILLER: Adam and Daniel went off to different schools and Daniel just tried his best to forget this vision of a kid so like him who couldn’t get around the world. KISH: And we just lost track of each other. 241

SHAIBLE: We just lost track of each other. MILLER: Daniel goes off to college, doesn’t really associate himself with the blind community. His plan was to work with abused kids and at-risk kids. And then one day he happens to pick up this book. ROBERT SCOTT: The title is “The Making Of Blind Men.” KISH: “The Making Of Blind Men” by Robert Scott.

MILLER: (Laughter) All right. This is the book’s author, Bob Scott, a former professor of sociology at Princeton. And inside this book was the idea that would change Daniel’s life, an idea that when you first hear it sounds kind of out there—that blindness is a social construction. SPIEGEL: Wait, was Bob saying that people are not physically bind?

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SCOTT: I go by Bob. You can spell that either way.

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MILLER: Kind of, but let me just tell you how he gets there. SPIEGEL: OK. MILLER: OK. SPIEGEL: OK. MILLER: So fresh out of grad school, Bob got this job to conduct a huge multi-year long survey to see how effective blindness organizations were at helping the blind. SCOTT: Yep. MILLER: And so he begins interviewing hundreds of blind people, goes out on hundreds of site visits. SCOTT: Basically gathering information in any way I could imagine that I could get it. MILLER: And then one day, many months into the process, he had...

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SCOTT: What might be called an aha moment. MILLER: He was out walking in a snowstorm in New York City when he happened to see... SCOTT: A blind beggar. MILLER: Asking for money.

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SCOTT: Standing on the corner at Bloomingdale’s. MILLER: And he thought, hey, someone else to interview for my survey. SCOTT: I said would you allow me to buy some of your time and I gave him, I don’t know, $25 or something like that. We went in and sat down at a restaurant and I said tell me your story. MILLER: Turns out the man had worked at a paint factory until a few years before, when an accident there left him blind. And the people at the factory really liked the guy, so they said, look, why don’t you go to an organization

SCOTT: Oh, no. You can’t do that. Blind people can’t do those things. What we’re going to do is put you through a program of rehabilitation and then move you along to our sheltered workshop that manufactures mops and brooms. MILLER: And Bob said there was one sentence in that response that jumped out at him.

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for the blind, get some training and then come back and work for us? So the guy said, great. He went to an organization for the blind. He said, I’ve got this job all lined up. Can you just help me with a few basic things? And the blindness organization said, no.

SCOTT: Blind people can’t do those things. MILLER: And he began to wonder, wait, is that true? Could this guy really not work in a paint factory? Because over the course of his research, he’s seen blind people that could do all sorts of things. SCOTT: This is sort of starting to open up in my own thinking a much more complicated world than I ever imagined I was walking into when I began the study.

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MILLER: The more that Bob looked around, the more he started to see that message. SCOTT: Blind people can’t do those things. MILLER: Being communicated to the blind people by the blind organizations that serve them - not necessarily always as explicitly as in the case of the paint guy.

MILLER: Well, take the fact that, at that time, of the nearly 20,000 blind kids who were in public schools, two-thirds of them were being kept on the sidelines during gym class—play tag, run around on your own. SCOTT: Blind people can’t do those things. MILLER: And then there was the organization’s insistence that adult blind people get help getting around.

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SPIEGEL: Like, how else, then?

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SCOTT: They are picked up at their homes. They’re driven there. They’re met at the sidewalk, walked into the agency, escorted to wherever they’re going. Everything is being done for them. MILLER: And even though all of this was intended to help, Bob began to wonder if maybe—just maybe—the organization’s low expectations for what blind people could do was in some way actually limiting the blind people that those organizations sought to help. SCOTT: What I came to realize is that how they function was a process of learning. It was not imposed on them entirely by the fact that they couldn’t see. MILLER: So is Bob saying that blindness isn’t a real thing? SPIEGEL: Like it exists mostly in your head? Because my father is blind, and he is very, very limited in what he can do. And I have to say, like, I don’t feel like the obstacles that he faces are obstacles that he wouldn’t face if he’d just thought about his blindness differently.

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MILLER: Well, Bob would say that, of course, loss of vision is an absolute and real limitation. But it is not the complete wiping away of vision we so often think it is. It’s more like a wiping away of long-distance vision. SCOTT: Exactly—anything that I can’t reach out and touch. MILLER: And Alix...

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SPIEGEL: Uh-huh. MILLER: Bob wasn’t actually the first person to come up with this idea. Blind people were. A group called the National Federation of the Blind has, for a long time, advocated this kind of idea. This is a group formed by blind people for blind people. And they think that the physical condition of blindness... SCOTT: It doesn’t explain nearly as much as people believe it explains. SPIEGEL: So if you buy this logic, people who are blind, like, the only thing that’s standing between them and walking around the world, like Daniel does, is our beliefs. MILLER: Yeah. You know, that sounds totally crazy. And that is exactly

KISH: If I got lost, I used to get terrified. MILLER: You know, maybe it wasn’t that Adam was this weirdo, tentative kid but that he was a very typical product of a system. SPIEGEL: You mean, like, the system taught Adam that he would have trouble moving around?

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what he’s saying, which brings us back to Daniel. Daniel reads this book, and he starts thinking about Adam.

MILLER: Yeah. I mean, he was led around school. He was - people brought him his food. KISH: I don’t know why people did things for me. They just did. MILLER: And when Daniel looked at the world around him, he thought, you know, a lot has changed, but a lot is frighteningly similar. SPIEGEL: From then until today, things are similar? KISH: Yeah.

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MILLER: Yeah. I called around to dozens of blindness organizations all over the country. DANIEL NORRIS: Name is Daniel Norris, supervisor of adult services for the Vermont Association for the Blind and Visually Impaired. MILLER: And supervisor after supervisor told me that what Bob Scott saw is still very much alive today.

MILLER: So most children who are blind in America don’t actually go to schools for the blind anymore. NORRIS: Right. MILLER: Thanks to the Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1975, most blind kids stay in their local public schools, which is great. But on those public school grounds, says Norris...

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SPIEGEL: In what way?

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NORRIS: There is a lot of pressure to keep a child safe and especially in a litigious society. MILLER: So many of the blind students are still placed with a paraeducator, which can be good, but sometimes... NORRIS: Those paraeducators can end up doing the work for the kid and... MILLER: Like Adam. NORRIS: ..When you lighten someone’s load, you don’t allow them to expand. (MUSIC) MILLER: I talked to mothers whose blind kids were pulled off of playground equipment. And perhaps the most chilling thing is the fact that most blind kids will intuitively start clicking or snapping or stamping to test out their environment with sound, but they are so often discouraged... PAULETTE KISH: It’s not socially acceptable is what they would say.

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MILLER: ...That they never get the chance to develop their skill to the level Daniel did. NORRIS: So how are we doing as a nation? We have not taught independence.

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We live in a nanny state as mentioned in the econtalk podcast.

MILLER: You can see this most clearly, says Norris, in the numbers. NORRIS: When you look at the statistics among the academic scores for those who have impairments of any kind, the visually impaired score very high. But when you look at the statistics on how many visually impaired people are unemployed, I think it’s around 75–80 percent. MILLER: The number we found was 64 percent. NORRIS: And that’s sad. MILLER: Because, Norris says, that’s on us, from the teacher to the parent to the bystander on a subway platform who looks at a blind person and assumes they need our help.

The growth of the individual requires one to move out of their comfort zone. Comfort is the bane of growth.

MILLER: That’s Daniel Kish again. KISH: ...Slaves to others’ perception, slaves to what others think they should be doing. And somehow we’re comfortable with that. MILLER: And so, though he had never wanted to work in the profession of blindness - in fact, he had wanted to get as far away from it as he could— Daniel Kish decided he sort of had no choice.

SLAVES OF EXPECTATIONS!! CAN WE EVER BREAK FREE FROM THESE SHACKLES?

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KISH: What we are doing is we are creating slaves to others’ thinking...

KISH: It sucked me in kind of kicking and screaming. MILLER: He could see what was happening, and he held in his tongue (clicking) a way out. So he decided that he would dedicate his life to trying to liberate blind children. SPIEGEL: Kind of like Batman? MILLER: Exactamundo, fighting for good in the world in a kind of vigilante way because actually the way that you go about liberating a blind child from the constraining forces of culture is a little bit grizzly.

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SPIEGEL: All right, well, I guess we’ll hear about that when we get back. MILLER: Yes, bring your Band-Aids and ice packs. Batman Pt. 2 Daniel Kish’s story continues. You’ll hear how scientists found that when he clicks his tongue to get around, the part of the brain that processes vision “lights up” much like in a sighted person.

From NPR News, this is INVISIBILIA. I’m Lulu Miller. ALIX SPIEGEL, HOST: And I’m Alix Spiegel. What we do on our show is we try to look at human behavior, particularly how invisible stuff like emotions and beliefs and ideas shape our lives. And today, we are using the story of a blind man named Daniel Kish to look at how profoundly expectations can affect us. And when

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LULU MILLER, HOST:

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last we met Daniel, he had decided that he was going to become kind of a real-life Batman who saved people who were blind from the low expectations of their culture. Though, I have to say, we talked to plenty of people who are blind who said that they didn’t really need saving through echolocation. They got along just fine with a cane or a guide dog. But Daniel had a mission. So, Lulu, what did he do? MILLER: Well, he starts up a nonprofit. (LAUGHTER) MILLER: As you do - a nonprofit that will teach people how to echolocate. This is one of his early instructional videos. It’s now 2001. And since his aim is nothing short of liberation, he calls it World Access for the Blind. (SOUNDBITE OF VIDEO) UNIDENTIFIED NARRATOR: World Access for the Blind.

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MILLER: Now, the only little problem that he runs into is that at that time, a blind person teaching another blind person how to get around is basically unheard of. DANIEL KISH: The blind cannot lead the blind is right out of the Bible. It’s fundamental to our culture. MILLER: In fact, until the mid-’90s...

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KISH: There was no certification for blind people to train other blind people. SPIEGEL: Wow. ROBERT SCOTT: Blind people can’t do those things. MILLER: So this is actually when the bike trick became big. Like, though he sort of hates, look at the blind man ride a bike, he realized that could get him attention. So he starts going on all these TV shows with his trick. KISH: You know, and my segment was between something about vampires

MILLER: And on these TV appearances, he tried to send some sort of signal to blind kids who might be watching who might be able to contact him. (SOUNDBITE OF UNKNOWN TV SHOW) UNIDENTIFIED HOST: Dan, can anyone learn this? KISH: Echolocation is a skill—piano playing, for example. Some people may be more talented than others, but I think that anyone could learn it.

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and something about faith healing or whatever.

MILLER: And... (SOUNDBITE OF APPLAUSE) MILLER: ...it worked. KISH: Yep. MILLER: Slowly but surely, families started contacting him, which meant Daniel was now faced with a question—could he actually undo the damage of low expectations? And this is where things began to get a little morally complicated.

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KISH: The example I’m about to give is an example that took place about 10 years ago. MILLER: Daniel told me about going out to teach one of his first students ever, a little 10-year-old boy...

MILLER: ...Out in Washington State. KISH: I come out and basically what I see is a boy who won’t leave his house. MILLER: And so Daniel’s idea was to get him to climb a tree. KISH: They live on an orchard full of trees, for goodness’ sakes. MILLER: But the kid won’t budge. So to get him out the door, Daniel takes

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KISH: He lives on an apple orchard.

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away all his toys. KISH: Our purpose was to kind of simulate the world that he was choosing for himself. So this is what life will have in store for you—basically nothing, OK? Nothing. MILLER: And after about a week the kid finally agrees to go climb a fricking tree. And he gets up onto the first branch, and the second branch and then says, OK... KISH: I give up, I give up. Yeah, but you know what? Giving up isn’t an option. You can decide never to climb a tree for the rest of your life, but we are going to climb this one. And I said you can go up, you cannot go down. And he just had a fit, literally screaming himself hoarse. I mean, he actually jumped at one point. Like, he actually leapt off the tree he was in such a frenzy. MILLER: Oh, my God. SPIEGEL: And what does Daniel do?

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MILLER: Well, he catches him. He’s right below him and he just says, no... KISH: You can go up. You cannot go down. MILLER: And they stay in this tree battling it out. KISH: Inch by inch, it took three hours to get up a 60-foot tree.

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MILLER: But by the end, the kid was doing it himself. KISH: Doing it himself. He started finding his own footholds, finding his old handholds. MILLER: And Daniel thinks this training, and how the parents then took it on too, changed the boy’s life. KISH: By the age of 13 he was out of his shell. He had joined Boy Scouts. That is, in no way, where he was headed. SPIEGEL: That is just crazy though, that story, on some level. I don’t know if that kind of bullying is even allowed in America anymore, you know?

SPIEGEL: I bet. MILLER: But see, Daniel would say that attitude, Alix, is part of the problem. So what are a few tears, a few scratches? He has this line he always says. KISH: Running into a pole is a drag, but never being allowed to run into a pole is a disaster.

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MILLER: Yeah, and he has been called reckless by other blindness organizations.

MILLER: He worries that when you prevent a kid from say, running into a pole, what you end up preventing them from is the kind of experience that allow for—and this gets me back to that crazy-sounding claim he made at the beginning of the show—actual sight. KISH: If our culture recognized the capacity of blind people to see, then more blind people would learn to see. It’s actually—it’s pretty simple and straightforward. MILLER: Daniel thinks this because well, he says he sees. 251

KISH: I definitely would say that I experience images, that I have images. MILLER: And he isn’t talking metaphorically here. KISH: They are images of spatial character and depth that have a lot of the same qualities that a person who sees would see. LORE THALER: Hello?

THALER: Hi. MILLER: This is Lore Thaler, a German neuroscientist at Durham University in the U.K., and Lore knows a lot about sight. She studies vision in the brain, literally how the images we see are constructed. THALER: It sounds simple, but an image is actually a complex construct. MILLER: Several years ago Lore happened across a video of Daniel and as

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MILLER: Hi.

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she watched the way that he so easily moves through space, she found herself wondering, was there any way that Daniel’s brain was indeed constructing images? THALER: It was so akin to vision, really. MILLER: OK. So, now you may know this already, but Lore reminded me that an image, even though it feels like it’s out there in the world in front of your eyes, actually exists behind the eyes. THALER: In the end, the image, it’s something that your mind constructs. MILLER: So Lore brought Daniel and a few other people who can echolocate into her lab and she took recordings of them while they clicked at different objects in space. A car, a lamppost—these are her actual recordings. (SOUNDBITE OF CLICKING) MILLER: A salad bowl, a salad bowl in motion. (SOUNDBITE OF CLICKING)

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SPIEGEL: How do you get a salad bowl in motion? MILLER: You stand behind the person with a salad bowl on a fishing pole and you slowly wave it. SPIEGEL: And the microphones are actually in their ears? THALER: So we recorded what they heard exactly.

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SPIEGEL: Oh, that’s neat. MILLER: And then she played the recordings back to them, one object at a time while they were lying down in fMRI machines so she could watch how their brains responded. Salad bowl, salad bowl in motion. And then she compared those readings to what happens in the brains of sighted people looking at the same kinds of things - Salad bowl. Salad bowl in motion. SPIEGEL: Very clever. Very clever. MILLER: Yep. And what she found is that even though for decades scientists

THALER: Yeah, so that was really very impressive. MILLER: And the way in which it was lighting up—this is really cool - so it turns out that there are all these different parts of the brain involved in vision. So there’s an area that’s specifically dedicated to processing motion, and that’s way over here behind the ears. And then there’s a completely different area for texture...

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assumed that the visual cortex goes dark when you’re blind, Daniel’s was lighting up like a disco ball.

THALER: ...Lightness, so how bright is something. MILLER: ...Orientation, shape. And in Daniel’s brain, many of these areas were lighting up. Color and brightness, no action there. But motion, when they did that salad bowl and motion test, the motion area behind the ears started pumping with blood flow. THALER: Very vigorously. MILLER: And orientation, turns out there’s sort of a grid for orientation in the brain, like a whole bunch of little pixels in a grid. And she could watch as the salad bowl moved across it.

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THALER: It was really robust, highly significant. MILLER: All right, Ms. Spiegel, so I know that sometimes neurology and neuroscience... SPIEGEL: ...Goes over my head?

SPIEGEL: Just land the plane for me. MILLER: OK. SPIEGEL: What does this mean? MILLER: What this work suggests is that you may not actually need eyes to see.

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MILLER: Or just sounds like a foreign language that you’re not particularly interested in speaking, but...

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I kind of feel like we got to shout it from the rooftops (laughter). Come on. SPIEGEL: (Laughter) Oh, my god. MILLER: OK. You might not need eyes to see. Now, Lore is by no means the only person seeing this result. The idea first started coming up in the mid-’90s, when a lab at Harvard saw that visual areas of the brain can be activated by sound and touch. SPIEGEL: Do I have to do it? MILLER: Uh-huh. SPIEGEL: You might not need eyes to see.

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MILLER: And since then, dozens of labs have been looking into just how nuanced and rich that visual imagery may be. So there’s a guy at Berkeley, Santani Teng, who’s been trying to determine the acuity of these images, you know, like an eye test, how close to 20–20 are they? And what he’s found is that there’s 75 percent localization thresholds indicated spatial acuity as fine as 1.5 degrees of the subtended angle. SPIEGEL: No?

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MILLER: It’s true. I’ll put it another way. He thinks their world looks a lot like your peripheral vision. So imagine that you’re texting on your cell phone walking down the street. OK, you’re looking at that screen. Now, what does the street look like to you? You know, you can see people coming at you. You can see cars. You can see trees. But you couldn’t read a sign. That, he thinks, is their world. KISH: I can honestly, honestly say that I do not feel blind. SPIEGEL: So what does Lore say about this? Does she think that the echolocators are actually seeing? MILLER: Well... THALER: That’s almost philosophical, isn’t it? MILLER: Lore asks the only people on Earth who can know—people who

BRIAN BUSHWAY: Yeah, oh, yeah. MILLER: This is Brian Bushway, who you met briefly at the top of the show. BUSHWAY: So step right up. I became totally blind at the age of 14. MILLER: But once he learned echolocation... BUSHWAY: Just (snaps) like that.

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used to see. You know, is what they’re experiencing comparable?

MILLER: ...The world around him, although blurrier and colorless, appeared again. BUSHWAY: Things are real. I mean, it’s as real as looking at it. MILLER: Let’s get, like, over to the edge so the whole world can hear it. You might not need eyes to see. SPIEGEL: But wait, so, Lulu, does every blind person have this? 255

MILLER: No, and that’s the thing. Lore has looked at the brains of people who do not echolocate, and although there is definitely some activity in the visual cortex, it’s simply not as active—which brings me back to Daniel’s teaching methods. The thing about echolocation is yes, you can learn it when you get older, but it gets so much harder with age, which is why Daniel doesn’t give a damn about making a little kid cry. Because he thinks at the other end of those tears is sight. KISH: OK, off we go.

KISH: OK, so what we’ll do then is we’ll ask Nathan’s mom about parks or someplace that he doesn’t know. MILLER: Brian’s with us, too, actually. He’s now one of Daniel’s deputy teachers. KISH: He can click.

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MILLER: So I finally got to see one of these training sessions in action. We went to see a 5-year-old boy named Nathan Nip.

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MILLER: And part of the goal that day was to get Nathan out of his comfort zone. But the bigger part—and really, what is often this other, major part of what Daniel is trying to teach—is to get the people around Nathan to back off. KISH: Hello. GODMOTHER: Hi. MILLER: So we go into the house. NATHAN: I am 5 and a half, and Ashton’s 2. MILLER: Daniel asks to hear Nathan’s clicks. NATHAN: (Clicking). KISH: You have a nice smiley click. MILLER: And then, we head out to a far-away park. BUSHWAY: What do you—where are we? Where do you think we’re at?

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NATHAN: At the field. BUSHWAY: At the field. MILLER: Ding, ding ding, it’s a sports field, flanked by really busy road. BUSHWAY: Nathan? (Clicking), Nathan?

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MILLER: And the idea is to make Nathan find his way around this park by himself. BUSHWAY: So we want to use our - (clicking) - our clicks. And we’re going to explore what’s around here in this spark. Let’s see if we can find anything, OK? NATHAN: Yeah. BUSHWAY: OK. MILLER: So he finds a soccer net.

MILLER: He tries to find a fence at one side of the park... BUSHWAY: Well, you’re—yeah, we’re in the bushes. MILLER: ...But gets a little turned around. BUSHWAY: Come back toward me. GODMOTHER: Nathan, stop.

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BUSHWAY: Yeah.

BUSHWAY: Nathan, come back toward me. MILLER: And then, it’s time to find the edge of the road. BUSHWAY: What noises do we hear, right now? NATHAN: Cars. BUSHWAY: Cars. 257

MILLER: So Brian tells Nathan to walk toward those cars. BUSHWAY: And we’ll all follow behind you. MILLER: At this point, it’s just me and the godmother and Brian. NATHAN: Where’s Ashton? BUSHWAY: He’s over there.

BUSHWAY: Can I hear you click? NATHAN: (Clicking). MILLER: And picture this. I mean, this is, like, a little 5-year-old-boy with a tiny, white cane... SPIEGEL: Kind of tapping his way towards oncoming traffic (laughter)?

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MILLER: Everyone else is on the other side of the park. Nathan is leading.

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MILLER: ...Tapping his way toward oncoming traffic, which is a jarring site. And the person closest to him is Brian, who is also blind. BUSHWAY: Listen out in front of you. Listen into the distance. NATHAN: (Clicking). MILLER: And he’s getting closer and closer to the edge of the road. Four feet, three feet, and then, his godmother just shoots out and grabs him back. And Brian kind of noticeably flinched. BUSHWAY: Let’s all try to stay, like, more or less behind him. MILLER: Because while he completely understands why the godmother would reach out for Nathan, he said it is precisely that kind of moment that does the damage.

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BUSHWAY: Often, sighted people will jump in half a second too soon, and they rob the blind student from that learning moment. And that just keeps happening over and over again in, I think, so many blind people’s lives, that they never get that moment of what it is to really have that self-confidence— to trust your senses to know, oh, if I do use my cane properly and I am listening attentively to information around me, I’ll be OK. MILLER: I think part of the problem is that, you know, when we have eyes, we can see things coming from further away. The whole point is, like, when it’s your cane and you’re clicking, like, you catch edges at what appears like the last moment, but you catch it.

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BUSHWAY: We don’t need to go any farther. Why? Why don’t we need to go any further? NATHAN: Because there’s cars. BUSHWAY: Yeah, so that means the street’s here. SPIEGEL: Can I ask you a question? What if you’re a half-second too late? MILLER: Right. SPIEGEL: Because I think that, probably, a lot of parents—I mean, the thing that keeps them reaching out well before the half-second before is kind

MILLER: So you—I think you grabbed him, there. GODMOTHER: Yeah, yeah, yeah. MILLER: And what was that moment like? Well, this is exactly what Nathan’s godmother brought up. GODMOTHER: It is hard.

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of the specter of the half-second after.

MILLER: You know, she understands the dangers of a half-second too early. GODMOTHER: He has to learn to—how to make that judgment. MILLER: But at the end of the day, she is far more concerned about the dangers of a half second too late. GODMOTHER: You don’t really want to risk that. MILLER: Which brings me to possibly the biggest thing that Daniel is up against in his quest to change expectations—love.

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DANIEL NORRIS: You can’t blame mom and dad for struggling and wanting to keep their child safe. MILLER: This is Dan Norris again from the blindness organization in Vermont. And when we asked him if a change like the one Daniel’s hoping for could actually take place, one of the main obstacles he brought up was love.

MILLER: Even when the expectations for that kid are high, he said love can get in the way. NORRIS: Those parents, they want to keep their child safe. They want their child to not suffer, and that’s very noble, but holds the kids back. MILLER: So in 10 years in the field, how many kids on bikes have you seen - blind kids on bikes?

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NORRIS: It’s very hard as a parent with a child who’s visually impaired to let go.

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NORRIS: Blind kids on bikes—I have seen about five. SPIEGEL: That’s actually pretty good. MILLER: Yeah. NORRIS: Yeah, I think that we are seeing society begin to change and people like Daniel are a major impact. MILLER: But when he thinks about the sheer volume of love brimming in every household, on every schoolyard, and every street corner... NORRIS: Are we going to get there anytime soon as a nation? No, I don’t think so. MILLER: And this gets us finally to what may have been Daniel’s one true superpower. KISH: What most people find to be the meaning of life absolutely creeps me out.

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MILLER: Daniel is 49 and has never been with a partner. And he finds the whole idea of physical intimacy... KISH: Unsettling. MILLER: We had finally reached the end of our hike, the place Daniel wanted to take me. KISH: Isn’t this, like, awesome?

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MILLER: Yeah. It was a huge old oak tree, miles from civilization, that Daniel said was one of his favorite spots on earth. KISH: OK. MILLER: And so we climbed up it together. KISH: Let’s see where I would go.

You’re very high. And it was there in the branches that he told me he’s never really been one for love. KISH: I was never that interested in closeness as a kid. I wasn’t really a lap sitter. I didn’t like holding hands. I didn’t really like hugs. MILLER: He even used to have nightmares about it.

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MILLER: Twenty feet, 30 feet, maybe 40 feet.

KISH: You know, a child’s mind will turn things into very ghoulish, ghastly, deeply unsettling, spooky things. MILLER: Like, what—like, what would be a nightmare about? KISH: There were two. MILLER: In one, a hand chased after him. KISH: And then the other thing were the plastic arms that want to sort of engulf and enfold and just kind of take you in to themselves.

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MILLER: He’s not sure where this comes from. He wonders if it could have been the surgeries he had as a tiny boy or from the way his parents raised him or maybe he just always was that way. KISH: Who knows?

PAULETTE KISH: Everything that happens in your life has its effect. MILLER: That’s his mom again, Paulette. PAULETTE KISH: Has its effect.

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MILLER: And while he is not suggesting that you need this quality to become independent, when he looks back he wonders if this may have been the very thing that protected him from the debilitating effects of low expectations because unlike the rest of us, when those arms reached out for him, he never once had any desire to fall back into them.

NPR INVISIBILIA (EXPECTATIONS)

MILLER: And you don’t think it’s that Daniel became this way because he was in some way neglected or ‘cause it was too hard? Is there any part of you that thinks you went too far in terms of letting him be? PAULETTE KISH: No, no, he’s happy. KISH: Totally happy. MILLER: We sat there for a while, watching the afternoon slip away. KISH: Listen to how quiet it is. MILLER: And suddenly I got that pang you get when you realize it’s getting dark and you are far, far away from civilization. And that was followed by another pang that it literally didn’t matter because he’d be the one leading us out. (MUSIC) (SOUNDBITE OF TONGUE CLICKING)

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(SOUNDBITE OF TONGUE CLICKING) MILLER: The end.

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(MUSIC) SPIEGEL: OK, everybody. Spiegel here again. So you have just spent the last hour of your life listening to Daniel Kish make the argument that if we all just changed our expectations, the blind could come to see. And at the beginning of this program, we said to you, you know, at the end we wanted you to decide, so now is the moment of truth. If Daniel has convinced you and you think the blind could come to see, wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, dance. (SOUNDBITE OF SONG, “REBEL”) G-EAZY: (Rapping) I’m a rebel to the system ‘cause the system sucks. MILLER: All right, skeptical NPR employees, who formerly doubted that expectations could make a rat run a race through a maze, do you think if we changed our expectations blind people could come to see?

UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: Yes. UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #2: Absolutely. UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: Yeah. MILLER: Dance. King of expectancy research, Bob Rosenthal, do you believe that if we changed our expectations blind people could come to see?

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UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #1: Yes.

BOB ROSENTHAL: Yes (laughter) now I do. MILLER: Dance. SPIEGEL: Dad, your blind, what do you think? UNIDENTIFIED MAN #3: No. SPIEGEL: Well, INVISIBILIA is me, Alix Spiegel.

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MILLER: And me, Lulu Miller.

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Fearless What would happen if you could disappear fear? We’ll hear about the striking (and rare) case of a woman with no fear. The second half of the show explores how the rest of us might “turn off ” fear.

World With No Fear Alix explains how nature imbued us with the need to feel fear, and how the modern world sends it into unnecessary overdrive. We’ll also hear about the striking (and rare) case of a woman with no fear. 264

ALIX SPIEGEL, HOST: This is INVISIBILIA, stories about the invisible forces that shape human behavior. LULU MILLER, HOST: I’m Lulu Miller.

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SPIEGEL: And I’m Alix Spiegel. And today we are talking about fear, and like many stories that involve fear, this one begins in the woods. (SOUNDBITE OF ROGER HART FILM) SPIEGEL: This is tape from a film which shows two little children, ages 4 and 5, together in a clearing in the forest. They’re alone, two tiny bodies dwarfed by tall, dark trees. Close by in the brush, a man is watching them. By his side, there’s a camera. But really, the children don’t even seem to notice the man. They’re too busy, absorbed in one of the most central, sacred activities of human childhood...

UNIDENTIFIED CHILD: (Imitating fart noises). SPIEGEL: ...The production of fart noises. Now, this film is all about the fart noises, in a way. The man filming them from the trees was an environmental psychologist who was interested in what children do when they’re alone because at that time - this film was taken in the 1970s—that work had literally never been done before. ROGER HART: They just hadn’t been studying children in natural settings.

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(SOUNDBITE OF ROGER HART FILM)

SPIEGEL: This is Roger Hart, the environmental psychologist in the trees. HART: Almost nothing was known about how children even explored the world, and then I came across a book on baboons. And I realized that we knew more about baboons’ everyday behavior than we did about children’s behavior outside of school. SPIEGEL: And so you wanted to study children the way Jane Goodall studied baboons? 265

HART: Precisely. SPIEGEL: So Roger found himself a small town in Vermont, set himself up there and started tracking all of the children in the town. HART: There were 86 children between 3 and 12 years of age, and I worked with all of them, all of the waking hours for two and a half years, I was with them. They were my life, these kids. SPIEGEL: Roger would follow the kids throughout the day, documenting everywhere the children went by themselves.

SPIEGEL: He then took that information and literally made maps... HART: OK. Let me just find the chapter.

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HART: Show me the places that are dangerous. Show me the places that are scary. Take me to where you’re not supposed to go, and show me where that is.

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SPIEGEL: ...Physical maps that measured the distance each child was allowed to go by themselves and what the average was for every age group. And what Roger discovered was that these kids had remarkable freedom. Even 4- or 5-year-olds, like the ones in the woods, traveled unsupervised throughout their neighborhoods, and by the time they were 10, most of the kids had the run of the entire town. HART: They had more than the run of the town. Some of them would go to the lake, which would be on the edge of town, and the lake, you’d think, would be a place that would be out of bounds. SPIEGEL: But the parents weren’t worried about the lake or their kids being abducted. HART: Abduction wasn’t something I ever heard anybody talk about then. SPIEGEL: So there was no stranger danger? HART: No.

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SPIEGEL: The point is that these parents weren’t particularly motivated by fear. HART: No. SPIEGEL: Which brings us to today. See, several years ago, Roger went back to the exact same town to document the children of the children that he had originally tracked in the ‘70s, and when he asked the new generation of kids to show him where they played alone, what he found floored him.

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HART: They just didn’t have very far to take me, just walking around their property, really. SPIEGEL: The huge circle of freedom on the maps had grown tiny. HART: There is no free range outdoors. Even when they’re much, much older, parents now say, I need to know where you are. I need to know where you are at all times. SPIEGEL: What’s odd about all of this, Roger says, is that the town is not more dangerous than it was before. There’s literally no more crime today than there was 40 years ago.

SPIEGEL: Same physically? HART: Same physically and demographically, in terms of living in the town, very similar. SPIEGEL: So why has the invisible leash between parent and child tightened so much? Roger says it was absolutely clear from his interviews. The reason was fear.

UNDERSTANDING OURSELVES

HART: You know, 35 years later, it’s remarkably the same.

ANDREW COLE: You know, you just never know who’s out there and what these crazy people are doing. MILLER: Now, this frightened parent is actually somebody you’ve already met before. (SOUNDBITE OF ROGER HART FILM) UNIDENTIFIED CHILD #1: (Imitating fart noises). MILLER: Andrew Cole, the very little boy playing unattended in the woods at age 4, all grown up. Even he told Roger he was too afraid to let his kids roam free.

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COLE: I think when we were children, you know, my parents wouldn’t worry if I was gone for an hour, you know, or up in the woods. But here, if my girls are gone for five minutes, I start to, you know, think, OK somebody could be turning around at the end of the road and—or, you know, whatever. So that makes a big difference.

RALPH ADOLPHS: Are you rolling? Yeah. He’s rolling. So I guess we’re ready. SPIEGEL: This is Ralph Adolphs, a professor at Caltech who spent decades studying fear in the human brain. And when we were talking, he said something that really struck me. He said our overall fear threshold - that is

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SPIEGEL: And what Roger found in this small town, you see it again and again across America. Crime is at its lowest levels nationally since the 1950s, but everywhere you look, fear of the world outside our door narrows the circle of our lives. Why?

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what triggers our fear—is something that evolution has set and set at a high level for a very good reason. ADOLPHS: You know, if I just hear a slight creak in my house at night, I feel fear, and 99.9 percent of the time, there’s no burglar in the house. And it’s all safe. But nonetheless, I felt fear. So you have a lot of false positives. But that’s as it should be because you don’t want to miss any. SPIEGEL: The problem, Adolphs says, is just that modern life - it’s constantly triggering our fear in all kinds of ways that our natural world didn’t. (SOUNDBITE OF GUNSHOTS) SPIEGEL: This is the sound of the first mass murder captured on film in American history. It was recorded in Austin, Texas, in 1966 after a lone shooter named Charles Whitman stormed the balcony of the clock tower in the middle of the University of Texas campus and started firing at random. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

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UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: There must have been a hit that last time. We hear people outside of our building in an area where we can’t now look safely saying, let’s help that boy. Does he need help? Someone must be down. (SOUNDBITE OF GUNSHOTS) UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: Ricochet bullets bouncing off the top of the...

UNDERSTANDING OURSELVES

(SOUNDBITE OF GUNSHOTS) SPIEGEL: It is chilling to see this footage - the puffs of gun smoke floating from the deck of the clock tower, the people falling to the sidewalk in the hot Texas sun and not getting up. It’s terrible. But today, of course, it’s not exactly novel. (SOUNDBITE OF NEWS REPORT) UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #1: This morning in Michigan, police have arrested a man who’s suspected of chopping off up his wife. (SOUNDBITE OF NEWS REPORT)

(SOUNDBITE OF NEWS REPORT) UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #3: Three men accused of abducting and holding the women hostage. SPIEGEL: Horror inflicted on other people surrounds us. And Adolphs argues that because of our wiring, we are just not set up to ignore it. (SOUNDBITE OF NEWS REPORT)

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UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #2: A stranger seized a child.

UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #4: A serial killer... SPIEGEL: And so it distorts our experience of the world, activating our fear when we don’t need it. (SOUNDBITE OF NEWS REPORT) UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #4: And police say it’s only a matter of time before he strikes again. 269

SPIEGEL: Essentially, Adolphs is saying that a lot of our modern First World fear is totally unnecessary. ADOLPHS: I think not being able to experience fear is mostly lethal if you’re in the wild. But in today’s world, I mean, I’m sitting here in my office, and, you know, other than a microphone in my face, there’s not a particular threat going on. So our environment, which of course isn’t the environment in which we evolved, you know, there just aren’t that many hazards around. SPIEGEL: Which got Lulu and I thinking. What would happen to us if we somehow disappeared our fear?

MILLER: I’m Lulu Miller. SPIEGEL: And I’m Alix Spiegel. MILLER: And what we do on our show is look at invisible things, like emotions, assumptions, beliefs and ideas, that control human behavior. And

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This is INVISIBILIA.

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today, that thing we are looking at is fear... (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #1: Oh, my God. MILLER: ...That ancient chemical reaction that’s shaped us and allowed us to survive as a species. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #1: Jesus Christ. SPIEGEL: How would our lives be different if we were able to short-circuit fear? MILLER: So bring your bear whistles and arm your home security alarm systems because... SPIEGEL: It’s fear hour.

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MILLER: All right, Alix. So you’re going to get us started, right? SPIEGEL: Yeah. So the question is, what happens when you disappear fear? And to answer it, I went to one of the only people who can, like, objectively try to answer that question, a neuroscientist at the University of Southern California named Antonio Damasio. ANTONIO DAMASIO: I always like to say that I have a perfect face for radio.

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SPIEGEL: No. No, no, no. I know—the same for me. See, one day in the early ‘90s, a young woman came to see Damasio. We’re going to call her SM for reasons that I’ll get to shortly. DAMASIO: She looked like a pleasant woman. She had a very open face and looked like a perfectly normal person. SPIEGEL: SM had originally come to the hospital because she had these unexplained blackouts. But Damasio says that, sitting there, everything about her seemed quite normal, except for one small thing—her physical

DAMASIO: It struck me a little bit out of the ordinary she was very close to you. And that of course came to have an interpretable meaning after we knew more about her. But at that point, I would say that she looked like a perfectly normal person. And she is a perfectly normal person, except for one particular problem. SPIEGEL: The problem? The woman couldn’t feel fear—literally could not experience that emotion.

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proximity.

DAMASIO: Fearless—that’s the best way of describing it. SPIEGEL: Now, fearlessness like this, that is a biological inability to feel fear, is incredibly rare. Fear is one of the most basic emotions that we have, so it’s next to impossible to find someone without it. DAMASIO: Fear, it’s a very towering emotion. SPIEGEL: In fact scientists have identified only about 400 people on earth with the condition that was causing fearlessness in SM. 271

DAMASIO: A very unusual disease called Urbach-Wiethe disease. SPIEGEL: Urbach-Wiethe has three main symptoms. People with disease have an externally hoarse voice, small bumps around their eyes, but also the disease leads to these deposits in the brain. DAMASIO: Deposits of calcium, little stones in certain parts of the brain. And one part in particular is a favorite for those deposits, and that is the amygdala.

DAMASIO: It’s a little bit as if you would go to this region and literally scoop it out. MILLER: Which is why biologically, SM couldn’t feel fear. That bit of brain couldn’t signal to the rest of her body that it was time for her heart to start racing and her palms to sweat. It’s also why SM was so profoundly valuable

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SPIEGEL: The amygdala are two almond-shaped structures deep in the brain critical for the processing of the emotional of fear. And in SM’s brain, her amygdala were completely calcified.

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to the scientists who studied her, like Damasio, and the fear researcher Ralph Adolphs that you heard earlier because fear seems critical to survival. But here was SM, alive and also completely normal in other ways. She had normal intelligence and no problem with any other emotion. DAMASIO: You know, joy, sadness, anger—she was perfectly normal with those. Fear was really an isolated defect. SPIEGEL: In a sea of emotions, her brain had subtracted just one, which brings me to the reason why we are using SM instead of the woman’s real name because, as you might imagine, being without fear is dangerous. DAMASIO: To make the point very clearly, if she would be threatened —and she has in her life—she would not register the fear that that would immediately cause in you or me. SPIEGEL: And so for the last three decades, the scientists researching SM have been very, very careful about guarding her identity. Though people have written about her, no reporter has ever been allowed to contact her or anyone connected to her. No one has heard from her directly in any way until now.

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(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) DANIEL TRANEL: Hello? SM: Hello. TRANEL: Hello.

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SM: Hey. SPIEGEL: This is SM. TRANEL: You’re on there? SM: I’m on here, yes, sir. SPIEGEL: Like every other journalist, I was not allowed to meet or even email SM. I don’t know her name or where she lives or how old she is— nothing I could use to identify her because if her identity leaked, people could very easily take advantage of her. But I was able to give a short list of

TRANEL: Dr. Daniel Tranel at the University of Iowa. SPIEGEL: And he called SM on the phone and recorded as he read to her from my list. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) TRANEL: Tell me what fear is.

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questions to one of the neuroscientists who’s been studying her for the last 20 or so years, a man named Daniel Tranel.

SM: Well, that’s what I’m trying to—to be honest, I truly have no clue. TRANEL: Do you have a sense of what it would feel like to be afraid and feel fear? SM: No, not really. SPIEGEL: When SM first met the scientists who’ve been studying her, she was in her early 20s, a wife and mother of young boys. By that time, her amygdala was already completely calcified, so she couldn’t feel fear. But apparently before the complete calcification, when she was very young, she had experienced fright.

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(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) TRANEL: Tell me this, when do you remember feeling fear in your life? SM: I believe when I was just a little girl. SPIEGEL: SM had been out fishing with her dad, and they caught a great, big catfish.

SM: And I didn’t wanted touch the doggone fish. TRANEL: You were afraid to take the fish off the hook. SM: Yes, because I didn’t want to get bit. And that’s the only time when I can really remember, being afraid of the doggone fish when I was small.

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(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

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SPIEGEL: Somewhere in her teens, somewhere between the catfish and walking into Damasio’s office, SM’s ability to experience fear just slowly faded out and the world around her became benign, a place populated by people and things that only seemed to wish her well. Damasio and the other scientists who have studied SM know this because they’ve done all kinds of tests that prove it’s true. They’ve exposed her to the most terrifying animals that they could find, snakes. DAMASIO: She had to be restrained from playing with the ones that would actually be quite dangerous to her. SPIEGEL: They’ve tried to condition a fear response into her by randomly assaulting her with the sound of a loud, jarring horn—nothing. She just seems emotionally blind to the experience of fear. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) SM: I wonder what it’s like, you know, to actually be afraid of something.

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SPIEGEL: For example, in one of the studies that Damasio did, he asked SM to draw for him a picture of a face with a fearful expression, but she couldn’t do it. DAMASIO: She would be puzzled and would be—pencil in hand and paper, and she would not be able to draw a face of fear, not even able to conjure up the image.

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SPIEGEL: Which brings us back to the big question of the show; what would it be like to walk through the modern world with no fear? Are you OK? What I can tell from looking at the case of SM - and it is one case—is that her inability to feel fear, it makes her much more open and friendly than most people... (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) SM: Nice to meet you. SPIEGEL: ...Which in many ways is a great thing. But it also has its downsides because SM is often open even with people who mean her harm. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

TRANEL: OK. Don’t say their names. SM: OK. I was walking to the store, and I saw this man on a park bench. He said, come here please. So I went over to him. I said, what do you need? He grabbed me by the shirt, and he held a knife to my throat and told me he was going to cut me. I told him—I said, go ahead and cut me. And I said, I’ll be coming back, and I’ll hunt your ass. Oops. Am I supposed to say that? I’m sorry.

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SM: Years ago, when my three sons were small...

TRANEL: That’s OK. It’s an intense situation. How did you feel when that happened? SM: I wasn’t afraid. And for some reason, he let me go. And I went home. TRANEL: Call the police? SM: No. SPIEGEL: In her life, SM has been held at knifepoint at least once besides this and held at gunpoint twice. Also her first husband nearly beat her to death. So clearly, a life without biological fear exposes you to dangers that are easier to avoid if you do have fear. But talking to Damasio, I never got the sense that he saw a lack of fear as a death sentence at all.

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How do you make it through the world if you’re not physically capable of fear?

SPIEGEL: One thing that SM might be showing us, Damasio is suggesting, is that we might not need our ready-made of fear as much as we have assumed. There are other variable paths to the correct behavior, like logic.

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DAMASIO: Oh, you can make it perfectly well, obviously, if you are smart enough. The big difference here is having a true emotive reaction or having to think through it, which may be more or less accurate and certainly longer in time, in terms of the response. The beauty of emotions is that they’re ready-mades. What an emotion is—same way that an instinct or drive—is that you don’t need to think about it in order to do it. It’s a natural, readymade way of leading you to the correct behavior.

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TRANEL: If you were crossing the street, and you looked up and saw a car racing toward you, how do you think you would feel? SM: I would try to get out of the way. TRANEL: You don’t feel your heart race or skip a beat? SM: I don’t know. But I would try to jump out of its way. SPIEGEL: Which finally brings me to the absolutely crazy thing about not having fear that I feel like I learned from looking at the case of SM, which is this; without fear, trauma is not traumatizing. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) SM: Instead of running away, I faced it. I said, I’ll be coming back, and I’ll hunt your ass (laughter). DAMASIO: If she cannot conceptualize the threat, she hasn’t had the bad events happen to her.

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SPIEGEL: Can you just say that again? DAMASIO: Sorry. The bad events appear to us because we know that she was threatened, but she herself did not see herself as threatened. So as a result, she is lacking the bad stuff in her life.

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SPIEGEL: To me, this is incredible, like, metaphysical. DAMASIO: It’s not metaphysical. It’s very objective. It’s because the situation was indeed not threatening in the sense that it would be for us. Then she didn’t have a bad episode to register in the history of her life. In other words, if she looks at her autobiography, her autobiography does not have that written in big letters as this was a bad thing because it was not a bad thing in terms of her experience. It’s not that she is masking it. It’s that she didn’t have it to begin with. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) TRANEL: Well, let me ask you this. Would you consider yourself a happy person?

TRANEL: Yeah. OK. SPIEGEL: It seems like such an odd bargain. If you have no fear, more terrible things will happen to you, but you don’t personally experience them as terrible. If you have a lot of fear, fewer bad things are likely to happen, but it’s very probable that your life is more painful to you. So is it better to be fearful or fearless? Which side of the continuum do you choose?

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SM: You know, there’s some days that I could be on top of the world, and there’s some days that, you know, I can be—got the blues. But 9 out of 10, I’d say happy.

When we come back, we experiment with two different ways of reducing fear. And because this is not just high-class journalism but also cheesy, secret self-help made by two women who have unironically watched all of Jennifer Aniston’s romantic comedies, we will offer you at the very end of the program an actual formula that you can break down that will help you to face your fear, whatever your fear is. MILLER: I think I just heard the soul of an NPR founder scream out and die. 277

SPIEGEL: Yeah, I think I just heard that, too. INVISIBILIA will be back in a minute.

Disappearing Fear Is it possible to disappear fear? Lulu tries to find out by confronting one of her biggest fears. Then, the story of a man who tried something bizarre to eliminate his debilitating fear of rejection. ALIX SPIEGEL, HOST:

OK, so can you please say your whole name? LULU MILLER, HOST:

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This is INVISIBILIA. I’m Alix Spiegel. Today, we are looking at fear, asking, can we disappear fear? And we have two experiments coming up with people who have tried to get rid of their fear. So let me introduce you to our first test subject.

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Louisa Elizabeth Miller SPIEGEL: And what’s the name you go by? MILLER: Lulu. SPIEGEL: Lulu. Lulu Miller. Perhaps, you’ve heard of her. She is our test subject today because, you see, Lulu has what seems like a completely intractable, utterly unmanageable and really, if you’ve seen it in action, surprisingly floridly expressed fear of snakes. MILLER: Yes. I have had a lifelong fear of snakes, the kind that is so basic and huge. SPIEGEL: Paralyzing? MILLER: Paralyzing. That I just always assumed it was innate. GREG DOWNEY: I’m afraid it probably isn’t. You know, this is what’s so interesting about it.

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MILLER: This is Greg Downey, a scientist at Macquarie University in Australia who revealed to me the unsettling truth. DOWNEY: You know, kids are not instinctually afraid of snakes. You do have to turn it on.

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MILLER: So I wondered, if it’s not actually written into my genes, could I just stop being afraid of the snake? DOWNEY: Absolutely. Absolutely, we can change our level of fear. I mean, that’s—it’s kind of one of the things that makes humans so different from other animals. The first human who picked up a spear and actually didn’t run away panicked when dinner came calling was overriding fear. You know, our ancestors, when they hunted - that’s amazing that they did that. I don’t know if there’s too many other species who—I don’t know if there’s any— who’ve moved from being prey to predator. MILLER: Now, how do we actually do this? Greg says it’s thanks to a special human gift. DOWNEY: The fact that you can talk to yourself in your own head.

DOWNEY: This is incredibly powerful. MILLER: Because, suddenly, if your body’s telling you to flee, you can use that little executive in your head to ignore it. DOWNEY: And I think, as a species, our evolution depended upon our ancestors not being afraid of things that were perfectly reasonable to be afraid of.

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MILLER: What’s often called executive function.

MILLER: And so I decided that, like the ancestors that came before me, I was going to see if I could use my little executive brain to overcome my snake fear. That’s right, Alix. It was going to be a battle of new brain versus old brain, thinker verse fearer, me versus me. Tonight it’s her versus her. OK. So first stop was I needed to deduce the precise source of the snake fear. What exactly is causing it? And when I started asking around about this, I found that most people had the same feeling about snakes as I did, that it’s not the bite that is scary.

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UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: It’s the movement of it actually. I don’t know why, but it’s the movement. It is definitely the movement. MILLER: It’s the slither. UNIDENTIFIED MAN #3: It’s just looks like it’s pushing off nothing. MILLER: So I dug deeper. Why is the slither so disturbing? UNIDENTIFIED MAN #4: It’s unnatural, like it’s...

MILLER: And the best that people could articulate was just that the movement didn’t make sense. UNIDENTIFIED MAN #6: I have no idea how they do it, you know? MILLER: Which is a strange property of fear, if you think about it, that a

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UNIDENTIFIED MAN #5: Uncanny. Maybe that—the word is uncanny.

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simple lack of understanding can make fear chemicals spurt through our bodies. But, hey, there you go. So, Alix, here is the question; if the fear derives from the unknow-ability of the snake’s slither, if we simply learn how they worked, could we make the fear go away? SPIEGEL: So essentially, was your question could I cure myself if on a rational level, I understood... MILLER: Yep. SPIEGEL: ...How this was possible? MILLER: Yes. DAVID HU: I think it’s even in the Bible that snakes—I’m going to paraphrase this. How in the world does this thing work? MILLER: This is David Hu, a mechanical engineer at Georgia Tech. You know? I almost—I remember reading that...

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The Bible says the slither defies comprehension. HU: It’s a mysterious thing. So I think if they say something’s unknowable in the Bible, it just kind of draws you in. MILLER: Draws you in, especially if you do what David Hu does for a living, which is basically to put numbers to the living world.

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HU: That’s about right. This field is the physics of living systems. MILLER: So fresh out of grad school, David Hu made it his mission to decode the slither... HU: When I first started this problem, I was actually in a place where there are very few snakes, New York City. And there’s these secret snake expos where basically people raise snakes in their basement and then they bring them to this expo and then sell them for $10 each. And so I basically had to take the New York subway and get a pile of snakes. And I didn’t have anything to transport them, so I put them in my shirt. MILLER: What? No.

MILLER: What? And you had just had—got on the subway with snakes in your shirt? HU: It seemed like a good idea at the time. MILLER: No, (laughter) that does not seem like a good idea. So after bringing to life a nightmare too terrifying for us snake-ophobes to even dream up—that the man sitting next to you on the subway has a wriggling colony of snakes concealed under his jacket...

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HU: Well, I didn’t have a car.

HU: Three corn snakes and one boa constrictor. MILLER: ...David Hu goes back to his lab. HU: And the first thing we do is film them. MILLER: He lets them out, one at a time, onto a smooth board. HU: I still remember watching the first snake move. It’s really a magical thing when a snake—you see a snake move on a featureless surface, on a completely flat surface, your heart starts beating faster.

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MILLER: So with his camera rigged up directly over the snake, he starts measuring every single part of the snake he can think of. HU: Every single curve on its body, the way the curves are shaped, how often the curves are placed on the ground. MILLER: Trying to figure out how the snakes are moving so darn fast.

MILLER: Was it something in the trigonometry of their muscles, or was it something more surface level? HU: How they use their belly scales. MILLER: Friction, essentially.

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HU: How they get enough force to move them forward so effortlessly.

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So the first thing Hu figured out is that the snakes had this special kind of friction, what’s called anisotropic friction... HU: Anisotropic friction. MILLER: ...Where the friction works more intensely in one direction. And so to see how much of a role this plays in their speed, all he would have to do is see how the snake moves without scales. HU: So best thing to do was put a snake into a sock. UNIDENTIFIED SINGER: (Singing) It’s a snake in a sock. HU: And the amazing thing is, once the snake’s in the sock, it’s terrible at moving. It can’t move anywhere. You’ve seen those movies when these kidnappers catch you, and you have your hands and feet bound... MILLER: Right. HU: ...And you kind of, like, crawl towards the door.

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MILLER: Yeah. HU: It looks about as un-elegant as that.

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MILLER: So you’re at this moment, I’m just imagining, like, suddenly you’ve taken—with the sock - you’ve taken away the creepy from the snake. And so it’s like - so is the answer, oh, the thing so many people are terrified the world over about in snakes is just anisotropic friction? HU: (Laughter) No, no, no. What we found actually troubled us. Our computer snakes, our mathematical snakes, using these friction measurements that we measured, it was only moving half as fast as the real snake. MILLER: Really? HU: Yeah. So... MILLER: Oh, so the snakes, the real snakes still had something special... HU: Yeah.

HU: Yeah. In my field, I think a factor of 10 percent is considered maybe that’s experimental error. MILLER: Yeah. HU: But a factor of 2 means that we’re really missing something important. MILLER: Yeah.

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MILLER: ...Making them go forward that you couldn’t find yet?

In other words, with all the fanciest instrumentation in the world, David Hu could not make this unknowable snake knowable. HU: So we had to figure out what else the snake was doing. MILLER: Can I—can I take 90 seconds to tell you my crazy theory before you tell me what the answer is? HU: Definitely. MILLER: OK.

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HU: Go ahead. (MUSIC) MILLER: All right, Alix, so this music signals that we are going to leave the land of strict reporting and journey to the land of fact-based, wild speculation. SPIEGEL: Your natural habitat.

David Hu, have you ever heard of schreckstoff ? HU: Schreckstoff ? MILLER: Mhmm.

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MILLER: My natural place to be. The thing that I think could be accounting for the snake’s mysterious speed is an invisible chemical out there—a real one —that influences how animals move.

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HU: No. Is that German or something? MILLER: It is German for scary stuff. HU: OK. MILLER: It was an idea first proposed in the 1930s by this scientist named Karl von Frisch when he noticed that when one minnow gets alarmed, minnows fairly far away from it will dart away. And he wondered, huh, could there be some sort of chemical fear passing between them? HU: Schreckstoff. MILLER: Today, scientists use a different name—alarm pheromones—and they’ve been shown to exist in all kinds of animals. LILIANNE MUJICA-PARODI: Oh, there are so many, it’s actually—it’s really standard, so you see it certainly in insects. You see it in fish. You see it in mammals like rodents.

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MILLER: This is Dr. Lilianne Mujica-Parodi, a neuroscientist at Stony Brook. MUJICA-PARODI: Sheep and deer. MILLER: All of these animals have been shown to either move faster or freeze or get more aggressive, all an automatic response to another animal’s chemical fear. OK, so you’re seeing this, and you’re thinking..

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MUJICA-PARODI: Why not in humans? MILLER: Do humans emit some sort of chemical fear that could change the humans around them? MUJICA-PARODI: And that led to a whole series of experiments where, unfortunately, we had to make people afraid. (SOUNDBITE OF SCREAM) MUJICA-PARODI: And skydiving was the way to do that.

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MILLER: She collected the sweat of very terrified people as they jumped out of an airplane for the first time ever. And then she took this fear sweat and wafted it into the noses of other people lying down in fMRIs... MUJICA-PARODI: And what we saw is that the fear center of the brain lit up. MILLER: And their cognitive abilities changed, too. She showed the fMRI people really fast images of faces. MUJICA-PARODI: Then it turns out that the alarm pheromone increases the accuracy with which you’re able to determine whether someone is aggressive or not. MILLER: And by the way, none of these brain changes occurred when she instead wafted in harmless exercise sweat collected from those same skydivers. MUJICA-PARODI: It activated in response to the fear sweat, but not the exercise sweat.

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(SOUNDBITE OF JOHN CARPENTER SONG, “HALLOWEEN THEME”) MILLER: That is so spooky. MUJICA-PARODI: It’s profound. MILLER: Your brain responds to disembodied particles of fear, meaning, you know when you get a kind of bad feelign about a person or a place? (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

MILLER: That could be real information you are detecting at the chemical level. MILLER: Which makes me sort of start to picture the world differently, as though there’s this sort of mist of emotions waiting out there that can change you depending on where you happen to step.

Is that why “haunted” areas creep us out?

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UNIDENTIFIED CHILD #2: Mommy, I want to go home.

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MUJICA-PARODI: I think that is the part that bothers people. That makes people nervous about the whole concept of free will. MILLER: So, Alix? SPIEGEL: Yeah. MILLER: Do you see how this is all about to account for the mysterious speed of the snake’s slither? SPIEGEL: No. Not even a little bit. MILLER: No? Well, what have we learned? That there is a chemical component to fear that can change the way other creatures behave. SPIEGEL: We did learn that. MILLER: That happens in bugs and mice and likely between humans. And guess what? SPIEGEL: What?

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MILLER: It has recently been shown that it can also happen across species. SPIEGEL: Damn. MILLER: Yeah, see where this is going? So is it so wild to say that a whiff of human fear... (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

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UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #1: Oh, my God. MILLER: ...Could be in some way detectable to a snake... HU: Your heart starts beating faster when you’re around snakes. MILLER: ...And trigger some sort of automatic reaction like, say, a rush of calcium to the blood causing a contraction in muscle, that accounts for that missing last burst of speed? Yes, that is my wild speculation, that snakes are sailing around on currents of our fear.

MUJICA-PARODI: No, no, I don’t. MILLER: I actually went to four different scientists asking specifically if human fear could make a snake move faster, and they all said. UNIDENTIFIED SCIENTIST #1: That’s plausible. UNIDENTIFIED SCIENTIST #2: Why not?

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I mean, do you think that is totally ludicrous?

UNIDENTIFIED SCIENTIST #3: Sure. HU: That’s really—that’s really interesting, this interaction between the snake and the observer. I mean, it would be a terrible world if snakes would move faster the more afraid you were of them. (Laughter). MILLER: Back to David Hu. Sorry that took more than 90 seconds. I sort of lost myself. But there he is with his camera poised over the snake. Maybe that’s the missing 50 percent? HU: We thought...

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MILLER: Though Hu said he did briefly consider a chemical explanation, his thinking changed when he lowered his camera angle and started filming the snakes from right alongside them on the ground. HU: You know, surprisingly, that’s not something people had done. No one—very few people had, you know, lay on the floor and look at a snake while it’s moving. And when you do that, you can see they actually—this idea that they keep their whole bodies on the ground is actually not true. You can actually see little cracks of light underneath the snake. It happens very quickly, but if you slow it down with a camera, you can see that...

HU: ...They just lifted a couple millimeters, and that’s enough to push the body forward. MILLER: In other words, the snake, which for millennia has seemed so unknowable, if you look real close...

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MILLER: The curves lift into the air.

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HU: It’s like it’s walking. SPIEGEL: So is that it? Like... MILLER: That’s the punch line. Snakes are not in fact slithering; they are walking. SPIEGEL: Walking, OK, so they’re... MILLER: Snakes are walking. SPIEGEL: They’re walking. All right, I got you. MILLER: There’s nothing mysterious. SPIEGEL: I got you. I got you. HU: The snakes are a lot more like us. SPIEGEL: OK, so does that mean that you’re cured?

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MILLER: Oh, my [bleep] God. Oh. SPIEGEL: To test, listeners, I have just brought in a python. And it’s not in a cage either.

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Come here. Come here. So, listeners, remember how I said at the beginning that Lulu’s fear was quite floridly expressed? I want you to conjure a look of sheer terror in a woman cowering on top of a table in the corner. Now make that woman sweat so profusely that you begin to wonder if what you are doing actually conforms to the guidelines laid out in NPR’s reporting ethics handbook. You’re fine. You’re fine. MILLER: OK, Lulu from the future here, no longer frozen on her desk. Alix made me spend the whole day with that snake. She put it in a glass cage next to my computer. And every time it would slither, I would use my executive brain to think... HU: It’s like it’s walking. It’s like it’s walking. It’s like it’s walking.

SPIEGEL: So you think that you’re defeated? MILLER: Yeah. Though in the spirit of full disclosure, I do need to tell you that snake movement is not 100 percent solved. SPIEGEL: It isn’t? MILLER: No. When David Hu put in those numbers that account for the weight distribution of the walking snake, he still came up 10 percent short.

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MILLER: And it didn’t really help. Snakes still terrify me. As much as I know about them, knowledge hasn’t helped.

HU: So there might be some room for this fear—what would you call it? MILLER: Oh, Schreckstoff. HU: Schreckstoff. I think that Schreckstoff might be there in the last 10 percent. MILLER: (Laughter). So maybe the snake truly is unknowable. And that’s permanently terrifying. But far more likely is that of all the wild things I have asked you to believe on this journey, the only truly ludicrous one is that humans could ever do away with their fear. Fear, I think, is as basic as blood. You can’t take it out of the human.

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ANDREW COLE: And if my girls are gone for five minutes, I start to, you know, think, OK somebody could be turning around at the end of the road. UNIDENTIFIED MAN #7: When I go out running, I make sure that there’s no one following me over long distances.

UNIDENTIFIED MAN #8: I’m very afraid of small places. UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #3: Traffic accidents. UNIDENTIFIED MAN #9: I have to just stand there telling myself that there is enough oxygen for everyone.

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UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #2: I just—like I hope my children get to school fine. I’m scared for them every day.

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UNIDENTIFIED MAN #10: If somebody passes me, I have this—this is going to sound bizarre—I look over my should to make sure they aren’t turning around coming at me to hit me on my head. UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #4: I’m afraid of my kids getting hurt. (CROSSTALK) MILLER: Cowardice, I think is our genetic destiny. SPIEGEL: Lulu Miller. MILLER: Yes? SPIEGEL: You’re a bummer—also in addition to being a bummer, you’re wrong. And to prove it, I need to introduce you to our second test subject, Jason Comely. Hi, Jason? JASON COMELY: Yes.

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SPIEGEL: I’m here with Lulu Miller. MILLER: Hi. COMELY: Hi, Lulu.

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SPIEGEL: Jason’s a freelance IT guy from Cambridge, Ontario, whose story starts one sad night several years ago. COMELY: That Friday evening that I was in front of the computer in my, you know, one-bedroom apartment trying to be busy. SPIEGEL: Jason was pretending to work. He fed his four cats. COMELY: But really I knew that I was avoiding things. SPIEGEL: See, nine months earlier, Jason’s wife had left him. COMELY: She found someone that was taller than I was, had more money than I had and was better-looking than I was. So, yeah, it was—yeah.

COMELY: Yeah, I was extremely self-conscious, you know, just completely weird around people and like—almost out-of-body experience just trying to talk to somebody. SPIEGEL: For instance, Jason told me and Lulu about this time at church when he saw this very attractive woman looking at him in an interested way. COMELY: She was at the other end of the hallway. And the traffic is I’m moving towards her and she’s moving towards me kind of thing, and I was just going to shake her hand and say hi or something.

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SPIEGEL: And since that time, Jason had found himself struggling, really struggling to be around people, particularly women.

SPIEGEL: But then it happened. COMELY: This icy cold feeling. And it’s kind of, like, gripping me as I start walking towards her. SPIEGEL: And this was not your normal buzz-in-the-stomach type fear. This was a whole different animal of fear. 291

COMELY: All’s I can think is, I have to get air, I have to get air. SPIEGEL: So Jason, you know, sticks out his hand for a handshake. COMELY: Well, my head felt, like, completely numb and cold, and I couldn’t feel it. SPIEGEL: But on he goes. COMELY: And I’m walking toward her, my hand extended to shake her hand, and I walk right past her and right toward the door to get out.

Sadly, this was not an isolated experience. COMELY: I have hundreds of those kinds of stories. SPIEGEL: Which is why, to go back, Jason was at home alone that Friday night with no one but his four cats for company.

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SPIEGEL: (Laughter).

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COMELY: Realizing that I had nowhere to go and no one to hang out with. And so I just broke down and started crying. It was just something that made me realize that I’m afraid and then I just - I asked myself, afraid of what? And—yeah, I remember it now. I just remember - sorry, just a second. SPIEGEL: No, no, no, it’s OK. He says that sitting there, it just suddenly hit him why he was so afraid. COMELY: It was rejection. I thought, I’m afraid of rejection. SPIEGEL: This realization was actually news to Jason. He had never thought of himself as a fearful person. COMELY: And the thing was I didn’t know how to get out. I didn’t know how to get out of this fear. And so this is going to sound a little bit weird, but when I realized that it was rejection, I thought - I was kind of thinking about the Spetsnaz. SPIEGEL: The who?

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COMELY: Do you know about the... SPIEGEL: No. COMELY: ...The Spetsnaz? SPIEGEL: No. The Spetsnaz apparently are this elite Russian military unit.

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COMELY: They’re sort of like Navy SEALs, but Russian. SPIEGEL: And like Navy SEALs, they have this really, really intense training regime. COMELY: You know, I heard of one situation where they were locked in a room—a windowless room—with a very angry dog. And they’d only be armed with a spade. And only one person’s going to get out, either the dog or the Spetsnaz. SPIEGEL: So there’s Jason thinking about the Spetsnaz, and he’s thinking

COMELY: I don’t know. Maybe it was like, oh, Spetsnaz wouldn’t be scared of rejection. SPIEGEL: And then it hits him. He should use their approach to fight his own fear. COMELY: Apply their training methodology to this situation. SPIEGEL: So if you’re a freelance IT guy living in a one-bedroom apartment in Cambridge, Ontario, what is the modern equivalent of being trapped in a windowless room with a rabid dog and nothing to protect you but a single, handheld spade?

UNDERSTANDING OURSELVES

about his own situation.

COMELY: I had to get rejected at least once every single day by someone. SPIEGEL: And so begins Jason’s experiment with what he comes to call rejection therapy. It starts small in the parking lot of his local grocery store. COMELY: And I asked someone who was cleaning their windshield if I could get a ride with them to Preston.

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SPIEGEL: Preston is a town about 20 minutes away. COMELY: And he looked at me, like, and just said, I’m not going that way, buddy. (LAUGHTER) COMELY: You know, just like—and I was like, thank you. SPIEGEL: And in that moment...

COMELY: There was something incredibly liberating about it. And just—I felt like anything was possible now. SPIEGEL: Because in that moment, Jason totally inverts the rules of life. He takes rejection, and he makes it something that he wants, something he

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COMELY: It was, like, got it. I got my rejection. SPIEGEL: It felt great.

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actively seeks so that he feels good when he gets it. COMELY: You know, it’s sort of like walking on my hands or living underwater or something. It’s just, like, a different reality. SPIEGEL: So off he sets, goes to the local Wal-Mart with a stack of passalong-cards from his church, walks up to this very, very nice-looking woman and offers her one. COMELY: And she looked me squarely in the eye and sort of spoke very slowly and articulately so that I would completely understand, you know, and she just went, no. (LAUGHTER) SPIEGEL: Over the next couple of months, Jason does this game he’s invented, this rejection therapy, pretty much every day. So every morning he comes up with a plan, a plan for how he will get rejected that day. COMELY: Ask a friend to drive you out of town and back.

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SPIEGEL: And when they said... COMELY: No. SPIEGEL: He just said... COMELY: Thank you.

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SPIEGEL: He asked all kinds of people all kinds of things that he had never asked before. COMELY: Request lunch with a Facebook friend you’ve never met in person before. SPIEGEL: And they’d say... COMELY: No. SPIEGEL: But he’d still say... COMELY: Thank you.

Thank you. No. Thank you. SPIEGEL: And slowly Jason began to feel more at ease around people. So he starts, you know, telling them about this little game that he’s invented. And every time he does that, he gets a really positive response.

UNDERSTANDING OURSELVES

No.

COMELY: The response is really great. Like, well, this is brilliant. It was just, like, whoa. SPIEGEL: And then one day it occurred him he should turn rejection therapy into something more official. OK. Can you just read through your cards? COMELY: OK. So ask for a ride from a stranger, even if you don’t need one. 295

SPIEGEL: So he took his real-life rejection attempts... COMELY: Ask a friend to do your laundry. SPIEGEL: ...Had them printed up... COMELY: Ask to cut in front of a queue. SPIEGEL: ...On a deck of cards...

MATT RAMIS: Hi, sir. Do you have any chewing gum by chance? No? All right. SPIEGEL: Today all kinds of people play Jason’s rejection therapy, like this guy, a student in California named Matt Ramis.

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COMELY: Offer a stranger your food. Ask for a stranger’s email address. Knock on a neighbor’s door, request something. SPIEGEL: ...And he began to sell these cards online. And slowly rejection therapy, it became a kind of small, cult phenomenon.

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RAMIS: Excuse me, do you guys have chewing gum by any chance? No, all right. It’s all right. SPIEGEL: Or this guy, Joey Chandler, from San Francisco. JOEY CHANDLER: You want to come play golf with us? UNIDENTIFIED MAN #11: When? CHANDLER: Tomorrow night. It’s a fundraiser for the Sun Valley School. UNIDENTIFIED MAN #11: I would love to. I don’t know if I can. SPIEGEL: Jason knows a teacher in Colorado, a massage therapist in Budapest, a computer programmer in Japan—all of them using rejection therapy to overcome their everyday fears. He even has a letter from a widowed Russian grandmother. She was using rejection therapy to meet men. COMELY: It was really cool. So there’s an 80-year-old babushka playing rejection therapy.

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MILLER: So this is Lulu again. I’ve been sitting here wondering, OK, so what’s the ending to our story here? Like, did you invent the game and play it and you landed a sweetie?

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COMELY: No, no, no nothing like that. SPIEGEL: Jason doesn’t really have a Hollywood ending to his story. It didn’t lead him to the girl of his dreams. In fact he now has six cats instead of four, but what he has gotten is less fear—a life with less fear, in part because rejection therapy taught him that even for a socially awkward IT guy from Cambridge, Ontario, there just aren’t as many no’s out there as you might think. COMELY: It was harder to get rejected than I thought. And that was really amazing for me, that people were actually saying yes. I had asked for a discount at a store, and they’d go, well, yeah, OK. I’ll sell it to you for this. And I was just like—what?—really? SPIEGEL: Fear, he’s concluded, comes mostly from the stories that we tell ourselves. COMELY: We’re always, always, always telling stories to ourselves about the

SPIEGEL: And we don’t need these stories, he believes, not half as much as we think we do. COMELY: Don’t even bother trying to be cool. Just get out there and get rejected, and sometimes it’s going to get dirty. But that’s OK because you’re going to feel great after. You’re going to feel like, wow, I disobeyed my fear. I disobeyed fear.

UNDERSTANDING OURSELVES

situation we’re in and about other people. And that story becomes a reality for us. And that’s the problem.

(MUSIC) COMELY: Offer to pay for someone’s order. Before purchasing something, ask for a discount. Make yourself look radically different today. Say hello to three people at the grocery store. Request an in-person visit with a local personality. Ask a stranger for a breath mint. Get someone’s opinion on a recent news investment. Smile at every person you walk past today. (MUSIC) MILLER: INVISIBILIA is me, Lulu Miller.

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SPIEGEL: And me, Alix Spiegel. Our senior editor is Anne Gudenkauf MILLER: With help from Eric Newsom (ph). SPIEGEL: Portia Robertson Migas. MILLER: Brenden Baker.

MILLER: Jason Comely’s fool-proof formula is Fear = Thinking + Time. Take either one of those things away, thinking or time, you cannot get fear. SPIEGEL: You’re welcome. MILLER: And now.

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SPIEGEL: Brent Bachman (ph), Hanna Rosin, Matt Martinez, Natalie Kaseka (ph). And now to reveal the secret formula to overcome all fear, I give you Lulu Miller.

NPR INVISIBILIA (FEARLESS)

SPIEGEL: For a moment of nonsense. Do you know what was on my to-do list today? Get challah, get python. (LAUGHTER) SPIEGEL: Seriously. Join us next week for more INVISIBILIA.

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3 Clues To Understanding Your Brain Vilayanur Ramachandran tells us what brain damage can reveal about the connection between celebral tissue and the mind, using three startling delusions as examples.

0:11

Well, as Chris pointed out, I study the human brain, the functions and structure of the human brain. And I just want you to think for a minute about what this entails. Here is this mass of jelly, three-pound mass of jelly you can hold in the palm of your hand, and it can contemplate the vastness of interstellar space. It can contemplate the meaning of infinity and it can contemplate itself contemplating on the meaning of infinity. And this peculiar recursive quality that we call self-awareness, which I think is the holy grail of neuroscience, of neurology, and hopefully, someday, we’ll understand how that happens. OK, so how do you study this mysterious organ? I mean, you have 100 billion nerve cells, little wisps of protoplasm, interacting with each other, and from this activity emerges the whole spectrum of abilities that we call human nature and human consciousness. How does this happen? Well, there are many ways of approaching the functions of the human brain. One approach, the one we use mainly, is to look at patients with sustained damage to a small region of the brain, where there’s been a genetic change in a small region of the brain. What then happens is not an across-the-board reduction in all your mental capacities, a sort of blunting of your cognitive ability. What you get is a highly selective loss of one function, with other functions being preserved intact, and this gives you some confidence in asserting that that part of the brain is somehow involved in mediating that function. So you can then map function onto structure, and then find out what the circuitry’s doing to generate that particular function. So that’s what we’re trying to do.

1:51

So let me give you a few striking examples of this. In fact, I’m giving you

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three examples, six minutes each, during this talk. The first example is an extraordinary syndrome called Capgras syndrome. If you look at the first slide there, that’s the temporal lobes, frontal lobes, parietal lobes, OK -- the lobes that constitute the brain. And if you look, tucked away inside the inner surface of the temporal lobes—you can’t see it there—is a little structure called the fusiform gyrus. And that’s been called the face area in the brain, because when it’s damaged, you can no longer recognize people’s faces. You can still recognize them from their voice and say, “Oh yeah, that’s Joe,” but you can’t look at their face and know who it is, right? You can’t even recognize yourself in the mirror. I mean, you know it’s you because you wink and it winks, and you know it’s a mirror, but you don’t really recognize yourself as yourself. 2:42

OK. Now that syndrome is well known as caused by damage to the fusiform gyrus. But there’s another rare syndrome, so rare, in fact, that very few physicians have heard about it, not even neurologists. This is called the Capgras delusion, and that is a patient, who’s otherwise completely normal, has had a head injury, comes out of coma, otherwise completely normal, he looks at his mother and says, “This looks exactly like my mother, this woman, but she’s an impostor. She’s some other woman pretending to be my mother.” Now, why does this happen? Why would somebody—and this person is perfectly lucid and intelligent in all other respects, but when he sees his mother, his delusion kicks in and says, it’s not mother.

3:21

Now, the most common interpretation of this, which you find in all the psychiatry textbooks, is a Freudian view, and that is that this chap—and the same argument applies to women, by the way, but I’ll just talk about guys. When you’re a little baby, a young baby, you had a strong sexual attraction to your mother. This is the so-called Oedipus complex of Freud. I’m not saying I believe this, but this is the standard Freudian view. And then, as you grow up, the cortex develops, and inhibits these latent sexual urges towards your mother. Thank God, or you would all be sexually aroused when you saw your mother. And then what happens is, there’s a blow to your head, damaging the cortex, allowing these latent sexual urges to emerge, flaming to the surface, and suddenly and inexplicably you find yourself being sexually aroused by your mother. And you say, “My God, if this is my mom, how come I’m being sexually turned on? She’s some other woman. She’s an impostor.” It’s the only interpretation that makes sense to your damaged brain.

4:19

This has never made much sense to me, this argument. It’s very ingenious, as all Freudian arguments are—(Laughter)—but didn’t make much sense because I have seen the same delusion, a patient having the same delusion,

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4:52

Now, what’s really going on? So, to explain this curious disorder, we look at the structure and functions of the normal visual pathways in the brain. Normally, visual signals come in, into the eyeballs, go to the visual areas in the brain. There are, in fact, 30 areas in the back of your brain concerned with just vision, and after processing all that, the message goes to a small structure called the fusiform gyrus, where you perceive faces. There are neurons there that are sensitive to faces. You can call it the face area of the brain, right? I talked about that earlier. Now, when that area’s damaged, you lose the ability to see faces, right?

5:27

But from that area, the message cascades into a structure called the amygdala in the limbic system, the emotional core of the brain, and that structure, called the amygdala, gauges the emotional significance of what you’re looking at. Is it prey? Is it predator? Is it mate? Or is it something absolutely trivial, like a piece of lint, or a piece of chalk, or a—I don’t want to point to that, but—or a shoe, or something like that? OK? Which you can completely ignore. So if the amygdala is excited, and this is something important, the messages then cascade into the autonomic nervous system. Your heart starts beating faster. You start sweating to dissipate the heat that you’re going to create from muscular exertion. And that’s fortunate, because we can put two electrodes on your palm and measure the change in skin resistance produced by sweating. So I can determine, when you’re looking at something, whether you’re excited or whether you’re aroused, or not, OK? And I’ll get to that in a minute.

6:22

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So my idea was, when this chap looks at an object, when he looks at his— any object for that matter, it goes to the visual areas and, however, and it’s processed in the fusiform gyrus, and you recognize it as a pea plant, or a table, or your mother, for that matter, OK? And then the message cascades into the amygdala, and then goes down the autonomic nervous system. But maybe, in this chap, that wire that goes from the amygdala to the limbic system, the emotional core of the brain, is cut by the accident. So because the fusiform is intact, the chap can still recognize his mother, and says, “Oh yeah, this looks like my mother.” But because the wire is cut to the emotional centers, he says, “But how come, if it’s my mother, I don’t experience a warmth?” Or terror, as the case may be? Right? (Laughter) And therefore, he says, “How do I account for this inexplicable lack of emotions? This can’t be my mother.

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about his pet poodle. (Laughter) He’ll say, “Doctor, this is not Fifi. It looks exactly like Fifi, but it’s some other dog.” Right? Now, you try using the Freudian explanation there. (Laughter) You’ll start talking about the latent bestiality in all humans, or some such thing, which is quite absurd, of course.

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It’s some strange woman pretending to be my mother.” 7:18

How do you test this? Well, what you do is, if you take any one of you here, and put you in front of a screen, and measure your galvanic skin response, and show pictures on the screen, I can measure how you sweat when you see an object, like a table or an umbrella. Of course, you don’t sweat. If I show you a picture of a lion, or a tiger, or a pinup, you start sweating, right? And, believe it or not, if I show you a picture of your mother—I’m talking about normal people—you start sweating. You don’t even have to be Jewish. (Laughter)

7:47

Now, what happens if you show this patient? You take the patient and show him pictures on the screen and measure his galvanic skin response. Tables and chairs and lint, nothing happens, as in normal people, but when you show him a picture of his mother, the galvanic skin response is flat. There’s no emotional reaction to his mother, because that wire going from the visual areas to the emotional centers is cut. So his vision is normal because the visual areas are normal, his emotions are normal—he’ll laugh, he’ll cry, so on and so forth—but the wire from vision to emotions is cut and therefore he has this delusion that his mother is an impostor. It’s a lovely example of the sort of thing we do: take a bizarre, seemingly incomprehensible, neural psychiatric syndrome and say that the standard Freudian view is wrong, that, in fact, you can come up with a precise explanation in terms of the known neural anatomy of the brain.

8:40

By the way, if this patient then goes, and mother phones from an adjacent room—phones him—and he picks up the phone, and he says, “Wow, mom, how are you? Where are you?” There’s no delusion through the phone. Then, she approaches him after an hour, he says, “Who are you? You look just like my mother.” OK? The reason is there’s a separate pathway going from the hearing centers in the brain to the emotional centers, and that’s not been cut by the accident. So this explains why through the phone he recognizes his mother, no problem. When he sees her in person, he says it’s an impostor.

9:13

OK, how is all this complex circuitry set up in the brain? Is it nature, genes, or is it nurture? And we approach this problem by considering another curious syndrome called phantom limb. And you all know what a phantom limb is. When an arm is amputated, or a leg is amputated, for gangrene, or you lose it in war—for example, in the Iraq war, it’s now a serious problem— you continue to vividly feel the presence of that missing arm, and that’s called a phantom arm or a phantom leg. In fact, you can get a phantom with almost any part of the body. Believe it or not, even with internal viscera.

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10:07

OK, now the next question is, what can you learn about phantom limbs by doing experiments? One of the things we’ve found was, about half the patients with phantom limbs claim that they can move the phantom. It’ll pat his brother on the shoulder, it’ll answer the phone when it rings, it’ll wave goodbye. These are very compelling, vivid sensations. The patient’s not delusional. He knows that the arm is not there, but, nevertheless, it’s a compelling sensory experience for the patient. But however, about half the patients, this doesn’t happen. The phantom limb—they’ll say, “But doctor, the phantom limb is paralyzed. It’s fixed in a clenched spasm and it’s excruciatingly painful. If only I could move it, maybe the pain will be relieved.”

10:46

Now, why would a phantom limb be paralyzed? It sounds like an oxymoron. But when we were looking at the case sheets, what we found was, these people with the paralyzed phantom limbs, the original arm was paralyzed because of the peripheral nerve injury. The actual nerve supplying the arm was severed, was cut, by say, a motorcycle accident. So the patient had an actual arm, which is painful, in a sling for a few months or a year, and then, in a misguided attempt to get rid of the pain in the arm, the surgeon amputates the arm, and then you get a phantom arm with the same pains, right? And this is a serious clinical problem. Patients become depressed. Some of them are driven to suicide, OK? So, how do you treat this syndrome? Now, why do you get a paralyzed phantom limb? When I looked at the case sheet, I found that they had an actual arm, and the nerves supplying the arm had been cut, and the actual arm had been paralyzed, and lying in a sling for several months before the amputation, and this pain then gets carried over into the phantom itself.

11:51

Why does this happen? When the arm was intact, but paralyzed, the brain sends commands to the arm, the front of the brain, saying, “Move,” but it’s getting visual feedback saying, “No.” Move. No. Move. No. Move. No. And this gets wired into the circuitry of the brain, and we call this learned paralysis, OK? The brain learns, because of this Hebbian, associative link, that the mere command to move the arm creates a sensation of a paralyzed arm. And then, when you’ve amputated the arm, this learned paralysis

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11:27

UNDERSTANDING OURSELVES

I’ve had patients with the uterus removed—hysterectomy—who have a phantom uterus, including phantom menstrual cramps at the appropriate time of the month. And in fact, one student asked me the other day, “Do they get phantom PMS?” (Laughter) A subject ripe for scientific enquiry, but we haven’t pursued that.

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carries over into your body image and into your phantom, OK? 12:28

Now, how do you help these patients? How do you unlearn the learned paralysis, so you can relieve him of this excruciating, clenching spasm of the phantom arm? Well, we said, what if you now send the command to the phantom, but give him visual feedback that it’s obeying his command, right? Maybe you can relieve the phantom pain, the phantom cramp. How do you do that? Well, virtual reality. But that costs millions of dollars. So, I hit on a way of doing this for three dollars, but don’t tell my funding agencies. (Laughter)

13:00

OK? What you do is you create what I call a mirror box. You have a cardboard box with a mirror in the middle, and then you put the phantom— so my first patient, Derek, came in. He had his arm amputated 10 years ago. He had a brachial avulsion, so the nerves were cut and the arm was paralyzed, lying in a sling for a year, and then the arm was amputated. He had a phantom arm, excruciatingly painful, and he couldn’t move it. It was a paralyzed phantom arm.

13:24

So he came there, and I gave him a mirror like that, in a box, which I call a mirror box, right? And the patient puts his phantom left arm, which is clenched and in spasm, on the left side of the mirror, and the normal hand on the right side of the mirror, and makes the same posture, the clenched posture, and looks inside the mirror. And what does he experience? He looks at the phantom being resurrected, because he’s looking at the reflection of the normal arm in the mirror, and it looks like this phantom has been resurrected. “Now,” I said, “now, look, wiggle your phantom—your real fingers, or move your real fingers while looking in the mirror.” He’s going to get the visual impression that the phantom is moving, right? That’s obvious, but the astonishing thing is, the patient then says, “Oh my God, my phantom is moving again, and the pain, the clenching spasm, is relieved.”

14:12

And remember, my first patient who came in—(Applause)—thank you. (Applause) My first patient came in, and he looked in the mirror, and I said, “Look at your reflection of your phantom.” And he started giggling, he says, “I can see my phantom.” But he’s not stupid. He knows it’s not real. He knows it’s a mirror reflection, but it’s a vivid sensory experience. Now, I said, “Move your normal hand and phantom.” He said, “Oh, I can’t move my phantom. You know that. It’s painful.” I said, “Move your normal hand.” And he says, “Oh my God, my phantom is moving again. I don’t believe this! And my pain is being relieved.” OK? And then I said, “Close your eyes.” He closes his eyes. “And move your normal hand.” “Oh, nothing. It’s clenched again.”

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14:56

So, I said, OK, this proves my theory about learned paralysis and the critical role of visual input, but I’m not going to get a Nobel Prize for getting somebody to move his phantom limb. (Laughter) (Applause) It’s a completely useless ability, if you think about it. (Laughter) But then I started realizing, maybe other kinds of paralysis that you see in neurology, like stroke, focal dystonias—there may be a learned component to this, which you can overcome with the simple device of using a mirror.

15:27

So, I said, “Look, Derek”—well, first of all, the guy can’t just go around carrying a mirror to alleviate his pain—I said, “Look, Derek, take it home and practice with it for a week or two. Maybe, after a period of practice, you can dispense with the mirror, unlearn the paralysis, and start moving your paralyzed arm, and then, relieve yourself of pain.” So he said OK, and he took it home. I said, “Look, it’s, after all, two dollars. Take it home.”

15:48

So, he took it home, and after two weeks, he phones me, and he said, “Doctor, you’re not going to believe this.” I said, “What?” He said, “It’s gone.” I said, “What’s gone?” I thought maybe the mirror box was gone. (Laughter) He said, “No, no, no, you know this phantom I’ve had for the last 10 years? It’s disappeared.” And I said—I got worried, I said, my God, I mean I’ve changed this guy’s body image, what about human subjects, ethics and all of that? And I said, “Derek, does this bother you?” He said, “No, last three days, I’ve not had a phantom arm and therefore no phantom elbow pain, no clenching, no phantom forearm pain, all those pains are gone away. But the problem is I still have my phantom fingers dangling from the shoulder, and your box doesn’t reach.” (Laughter) “So, can you change the design and put it on my forehead, so I can, you know, do this and eliminate my phantom fingers?” He thought I was some kind of magician.

16:38

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Now, why does this happen? It’s because the brain is faced with tremendous sensory conflict. It’s getting messages from vision saying the phantom is back. On the other hand, there’s no proprioception, muscle signals saying that there is no arm, right? And your motor command saying there is an arm, and, because of this conflict, the brain says, to hell with it, there is no phantom, there is no arm, right? It goes into a sort of denial—it gates the signals. And when the arm disappears, the bonus is, the pain disappears because you can’t have disembodied pain floating out there, in space. So, that’s the bonus.

UNDERSTANDING OURSELVES

“OK, open your eyes.” “Oh my God, oh my God, it’s moving again!” So, he was like a kid in a candy store.

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