 Boom, what's up everyone? Welcome to Simulation. I'm your host Alan Sakyan. We are still on site in Manhattan in New York City, New York. We are now by Central Park. We are super excited for this episode and very grateful to be talking about all things authoring, being a New York Times bestseller, doing things like writing about your own human guinea pigging, your own quantifying self, doing things like gratitude, all different kinds of cool stuff. We are sitting down with AJ Jacobs. Hello. Hello, Alan. Thank you. Great to be here. Thanks a thousand, of course. Thanks a thousand, of course, yes. AJ Jacobs, for those that don't know, is a New York Times bestselling author. He's the author of six books, which are all very interesting. Highly recommend checking them out. The links are in the bio. Most recently, the author of Thanks A Thousand, which takes us through a really fun journey of thanking everyone that's involved in his morning cup of coffee, which ends up being pretty much thousands and even more people, which we'll get to. Really excited to talk about that. As you guys know, the importance of gratitude is huge. He's also contributing editor for Esquire and NPR and also a writer for the New York Times and other magazines. AJ, thanks a lot for coming on to the show. I'm super blessed for this episode. I am delighted to be here. I'm a fan. Yay. Okay. All right. Let's start with, we love starting with big history synthesises. So, okay, humans have now found themselves as stewards of earth. And here we are. And there's a complex civilization happening. How, what is your synthesis on what's going on in humanity? I love starting with a wide lens. Why not? Right? I think that's great. Well, a couple of thoughts. One is that despite the flood of negative news every day, you know, for 24 hours a day, in the long view, I do think our species has done some good. I'm in the Stephen Pinkercam that, that overall life is better. The good old days were not good. The good old days were the worst. They were violent, sexist, racist, dangerous, smelly. I mean, you just read about New York City a couple hundred years ago with the walls of horse manure on the side of the streets. So that when I get depressed about or annoyed about not getting wireless, I think I have a three word mantra, which is surgery without anesthesia. Because that's like, you know, 100, if I were born 150 years earlier, as one of the things I would have to undergo. So that's one side of it overall. I think the trend is in the good direction. But I do think that we face an inflection point right now where we've got the climate crisis and a couple other things like AI, where we we need to make sure that we continue in the right direction and we need to take some drastic steps. Otherwise, the direction is going to go right down. So we could, we're on the verge, I think, of either the most amazing time in human civilization or the darkest time. And so it's kind of up to us. Okay. Great, great synthesis. Yes, there is, we live in great times now. We've done a good job building this civilization. The standard of living has gone up a lot. At the same time, it's time for us to come together as one, this unity that we got to get to in order to help get to the next thousand years. Oh, great. Yeah, and that's a theme of a lot of my books we can talk about. Yes, yes. Tribalism is a dangerous, dangerous notion. Yeah, because the tribe is Earth. Yeah. The tribe is Earth. Or you could even say the tribe is sentient beings. Sentient beings. So we don't know who else there is. But yeah, we're all one tribe. And yeah, it's unfortunate. And evolution did some things right and some things not so good. So yeah, tribalism has obviously had survival value, but now it's kind of working against us. We can now manipulate people's emotions and neural prosthetics so we can just embed empathy and non-tribal instinct. I am all for it. Yeah, so we can figure out how to actually move forward. Okay, this is actually, this is a good segue into, you know, you were saying that this is part of what you write about in the books. Now, this is very interesting because AJ is one of those authors that his writing is all about, a lot about running experiments on its life. Right, that's exactly it. The human guinea pig. The human guinea pig, yeah. Yeah. And tell us about this human guinea pig angle. Yeah, in your most recent book you were just talking with your son and your son was like, well, if you were truly dedicated to that dad, you would actually go do it. Right? And then you were like, okay, I would do that for you. Doing it back to me is, yeah. I mean, just to back up, I love writing and I do love writing first part about my experience. My childhood, though, was not that interesting. It was, you know, some people like Frank McCourt can write about their wild childhoods in Ireland. Mine was, you know, not so I figure if I want to write about myself, I got to put myself into some interesting situations. And that's what I do. So I will do an experiment. If I'm interested in knowledge, I decided to read the Encyclopedia Britannica from A to Z and try to learn everything in the world. And what is the meaning of knowledge? Religion. I wanted to figure out about religion. So why not live it? Live by the rules of the Bible, like live as if you're Moses. So that and then the new one, as you mentioned, is is about gratitude. The origin of the new one was I had been reading all about how important gratitude is and how we are wired with a negative bias to note in a year 100 compliments and a single insult. What do you remember? The insult. So I wanted to fight that. So I would say these prayers of Thanksgiving before a meal, I started a ritual, a practice. But the trick is, I'm not religious, I'm agnostic. So instead of thanking God, I would say, well, I'd like to thank the people who made this possible, the tomato farmer, the woman at the cashier, the grocer. And I would do this. And one of my sons rightly pointed out that this was kind of lame, because those people are not in the apartment, they can't hear, they're getting nothing out of it. If I were committed, I would go out and thank these people in person. And a little, you know, light bulb went off. And I was like, that is an interesting idea. That could be a project, a book. So that's when I spent the next six months going around the world, thanking everyone who had even the tiniest part in my cup of coffee, because you realize it is hundreds, thousands of people. It's, you know, the farmer, the barista, the, the biologist who worked on the coffee beans, the logo designer, the trucker, the guy who painted yellow lines in the road so that the truck didn't veer into traffic. You know, it is, it takes, it doesn't take a village to make a cup of coffee, it takes the globe. So it goes back to this theme of connecting and we are all, you know, this tribalism is dangerous. So that was, that was my most recent. I love how you come up with the ideas for this and it's so inspirational because yeah, you aim to make your own life so interesting that you can write about it and then show people how to really interestingly live quantifying experiments that they can learn from, learn really important wisdoms from. Right. I hope so. And I try, yeah, the point is I have, I do it so you don't have to, but you can come along on the journey. And as you and I have talked about, I am, I am a big believer and evangelist for people experimenting on their own lives and you don't need to go and grow a huge beard like Moses. They can be little tweaks. You can try a new toothpaste every month. You can take a new route on your walk to work. But, but I do think the more novelty you can introduce to your brain, the more supple the brain stays, the more creative, the better you are at solving problems, the more compassion you have when you can see the world through different points of view. So I am all for everyone experimenting with their own lives. Yeah, yeah, you heard that that that means change things up in your life more frequently, get new lenses of seeing the world. And that that's good. That's good. It's also like a test. Like, can you, can you do this for a year? A lot of it is like, that's true. You testing your own limits and like, can you do it? Yeah, I like that. Yeah, it's like a goal, goal setting and absolutely. Well, how did you even decide on writing being something that you were so passionate about in the first place? Well, I think I grew up. Yeah, I wasn't athletic. I wasn't like a social superstar. But the one positive trait that I think I did have was curiosity. I loved reading about the most random topics or going on field trips. I remember in high school, I went on a field trip to the Scientology Center. And I never believed in Scientology, but I just loved hearing them make their pitch. So I thought, is there a way I can continue this to be curious professionally and writing seemed one way to do it. Yeah, yeah, that's good. I like I like hearing the the origins of writing stories because we're we're we're quickly approaching on a big attention economy. And it's and it's important to find one's medium video, like the show, audio, maybe like a podcast, writing, like articles, books, etc. posts, and designing cool illustrations like we were talking about as well. These are it's important to find that medium because we want to capture people's attention to let them know, hey, we're saying important things. Yeah. And yeah, I hope so. But I mean, one thing that I like to is in the experimental phase that we were talking about, I do like to dabble in different media. So you've done so many TED Talks. I like yeah, I love giving. And this is not something that came naturally. I hated speaking. I mean, part of the reason I was drawn to writing is because it's a solitary pursuit. And, you know, I wasn't very good on stage. But I, I basically, and we can talk about this, the whole idea of acting as if so, I forced myself to be like, I you know what, I'm comfortable on stage, even though I totally wasn't. And I now, after years of doing this, I've come to love it. And I love speaking in public and doing interviews. My first interview on a radio show was so bad that they had to cut me off in the middle because I was stuttering. I just stuttered on one word and what I forget what it was like, I, I, I, I, and after 30 seconds, the DJ is like, Okay, thank you. That was AJJ. I was a boob in the mouth. And I was like, Oh, that was one of the worst, most humiliating experiences of my life. But I pledge, I'm going to get better. That is such an important story to share. I'm so happy that you're so comfortable with your story and vulnerability to, to share that because it, you went into a zone that was very uncomfortable for you. And you don't, you, and you didn't turn around and say, I can never do this again. You kept going. You persisted. And that persistence has now brought you to multiple Ted stages and whatnot. And you're so much more comfortable speaking, you're cracking jokes, you're making the audience laugh as you're teaching them. It's your content is super good now. And for people at home, wherever you're watching this, take those risks, even though we're not going to be good right away on the first three pointer over time, we become better. I love that you say that. Yes, that is a big theme in, in my life and in all of my work is failure. You know, there's a huge part of everything. And people ask me how I come up with my ideas. And partly it's a numbers game. You know, I do come up with a lot of ideas, but 98% of them suck. They're just terrible and dumb. But there was that 2% that resonates that works. So yeah, I'm always, and I try to teach my kids, I try to tell them about failure. You know, I come home from work and I'm like, I pitched this idea and the editor practically hung up on me. And that's okay. Because I'll, you know, you got to just, as you say, keep going. See what works, what doesn't. Yeah, I'm glad you're taking that lesson to the kids. You also, you mentioned this, I'm happy you did that your, the ideas, we always have so many ideas, but I ideas are, you know, worth pennies, the execution of them is worth everything. And when you're right that we typically have lots and lots of them and then we only pick a couple to actually build on within our lives. You've specifically chosen the ideas that you build on that have some sort of a value for other people. So rather than doing things that may, that people may see as like, why, you know, someone writing about their childhood that may not have had that interesting of a childhood. Yeah, you decide to go, I'm going to go for a year of reading the encyclopedia from A to Z. And I'm going to, I'm going to write about what that's like to do that process. So I want to actually go through some, really happy your ideas are so interesting that other people can learn from what your experiences are with them. I want to actually go through the other books you've authored in short bursts, because I want people to get an idea of what it's like to come up with ideas that other people may find valuable that they can then potentially be inspired to come up with their own ideas and make videos or books about them. So let's love it. Let's go through them. So it's all relative. There's a deep ancestry of interconnection with everyone. Right. This one was about family and again tribalism. It's all relative. It was a book that started because I got an email out of the blue a few years ago from this guy who said, you don't know me, but I'm your 12th cousin. And I thought, of course, he was going to ask me to wire $10,000 to Nigeria. But it turned out he was legitimate. And he's part of this group of scientists and researchers who are helping to build a family tree. It's not a tree. It's a forest. And the goal is to connect every human being on earth in one big seven billion person family tree, which is crazy. It's a great like, you know, a moonshot. And right now they have not, they don't have, they have about 150 million, which is still an astounding amount. And you can go online and it's done through DNA testing, through sort of crowdsourcing. And you can go on these sites and figure out how you're related to someone you didn't think you. The one I remember, I memorized it, is Barack Obama is my fifth great-aunt's husband's brother's wife's seventh great-nephew. So we're very close. But I love the whole idea of Kevin Bacon. We're six degrees and everyone is Kevin Bacon. And that was why I was drawn to it as a book, as to explore this idea that we are all connected. And as we were talking about this idea of us versus them, that definitely made sense evolutionarily when you were a tribe. But now we've got these worldwide problems like climate change. We can't. We don't have that luxury of being tribal. We've got to all be the one tribe. So this was a nudge. Can we use this heuristic as a nudge to make us more open to working with others? And there is some evidence that it works. They did an experiment at Harvard where they told Israelis and Palestinians how closely they were related through DNA. And the ones who were told that were more willing to work and were more open-minded and willing to negotiate. So there is some evidence that this is a good sort of a good trick heuristic nudge in the right direction. So that was that was that book. And again this is such an important put nudge in the direction of unity of interconnectedness of all of us coming from a seed of life of a seed of evolution. And here we find ourselves. Why are we fighting? Yes. Yes. I'm great. Okay. That's that's that's a really cool one. I like that one. How about we talk about, you know, living biblically. This is all about living by the Bible for a year. Taking it at its word. And this came about because I grew up in a very secular home. As I say in the book, I'm Jewish but I'm Jewish in the same way the Olive Garden is Italian. No offense. Jewish. Emphasis on the ish. Exactly. But I was very interested in religion and what to teach my kids. You know, and why does half or two-thirds of the world believe in it? Why have they embraced rationality? So I wanted to A, see what I was missing and can parts of religion help with my life. And B, I wanted to, I think there's a very dangerous stream of fundamentalism people who say, let's take the Bible literally. Homosexuality is a sin because there it is in the Bible. And I wanted to show, well, you are taking parts of the Bible literally. But I'm going to show you what it's like to take all the Bible literally. Be the ultimate fundamentalist. You know, stone adulterers. I use pebble so I didn't get in jail. But the Bible says you cannot wear clothes of different fabrics woven together. So no poly cotton blends. You know, the Bible says you cannot say the names of pagan gods. So when you say something like Wednesday or which is named after Odin or the planet Venus, you are committing a really an abomination. So you can't shave. You can't shave the corners of your beard with the rule and I didn't know where the corners were. Where are the corners? It's a debatable. You got to ask your rabbi. But yes, that was the idea and I did. So I wanted to do both. I wanted an earnest exploration of what is what is good and unifying in religion and what and also expose that we should not be close-minded and literal about it. So and I do think there are parts that the idea of community and ethical behavior. I like that but in a secular context. Sort of like what's Alan Dibotane. Is that how you say his name? He's a writer who talks about sort of secular religion. Like you know every Sunday coming together to have a group of people and talk about ethical issues and stories but you don't need the the God component. Yep. That's a new big movement and again EJ is all about nuance as you can tell. So he's finding good in the Bible and applying it to his life and teaching people about it and he's also saying this is what happens if you follow it fundamentally and as a fundamentalist and then you have to you encounter all these kind of archaic esque rules and so yeah. I love that you say that. Well you evolve. This is how we evolve. Right? Yeah. And yeah nuance is very hard in this as we were talking but you know it doesn't it doesn't sell as much as like the radical black and white but as we talked about you know one of the few black and white issues for me is that the world is not black and white. You know the one of the only certainties I have is that certainty is dangerous and that you do have to look at the subtleties. Yes. The good and the bad. Yes. Yes. And then the know it all which is this is something that I also did in my youth not all the way A to Z but it was definitely lots of enjoying looking through all the different entries in the encyclopedia because this is a great way to learn about the world. I love that you're a fellow reader and I also love that you say in your youth because you are still in your youth. I am so impressed of what you've done at your like at your age. I was I think you know my greatest accomplishment was like eating three pizzas I don't know what it was but it was not this but yeah this one was again I wanted to try to imbibe all knowledge in the world and see how it changed me what wisdom I could come out with and it was a so I read the encyclopedia from A to Z and it was a crazy long book it took me a year and a half and it was I mean there were dangerous to it. I became a little too enthusiastic about my knowledge and my wife started to find me she penalized me one dollar for every irrelevant fact I inserted into conversation so I definitely it was hard on me and on the family but I do think there were some takeaways you know I've forgotten 99% of it but the bigger takeaways one is what we talked about earlier the good old days were horrible and another was the sense of humility epistemological humility that there's so much we don't know and you know even after reading the encyclopedia even if I could remember it there's still tons that's not in there and realizing that I think it's very important and not not and being open mind not being I know it all and then being in no acknowledging how little we know and that's you know all all these sages throughout history have said the same but it was astounding to me to read about things that I barely heard about or never heard about which are so important to realize like the Taiping rebellion in China which happened the same time as our civil war but our civil war killed about six or seven hundred thousand people in the Taiping rebellion which was China civil war 20 million people died and I had barely heard of it if at all I mean the only connection I had was general so was the the leader of the one of the Chinese armies and he is famous for his chicken dish like that was my only connection is general so's chicken but it is a remarkable story and 20 million 20 million people and we barely know about it so it is it is it was a wake-up call about how biased and uh our information is and and again instead of satiating my curiosity it just made me more curious to keep learning this fit into the one percent of things you retain because it was just like an awakening like I didn't know that 20 million people died in the civil war in China right yeah there was such mind blowing stuff in there and uh that I knew so little about yeah it's very humbling yeah yeah yeah I do think humility is uh and as I like to say I am the most humble man in the world I am the king of humility I'm really great at it okay how about um how about my life as an experiment that was an anthology a collection of about uh 10 different experiments I did on myself uh for a month each and one of them for instance was this movement called radical honesty where there's a psychologist in Virginia who believes that you should not you should never lie but he goes further he says whatever's on your mind should come out of your mouth no filter so like if you have a crush on your wife's sister you should tell your wife and tell the sister so I was like interesting so I tried it for a couple of months and yes it was the worst two months of my life and because it's just not a great way to go about for the marriage for for dealing with colleagues and bosses that said it was not a waste of time because there were some some there is a way to be radically honest that will enhance your life I do believe like I don't believe in saying everything like you know the the classic your your butt looks fat in that dress is not helping the world but I do think there's radical positive honesty yes and that we don't do that enough like acknowledging people or thanking them or or you know calling people a mentor that you haven't spoken to in 15 years and saying how much they meant to you so that was my takeaway on radical positive radical honesty I love how you jammed you were like I'm just going to jam 10 experiments into a here and right of all this yeah that was well it came about because I used to write for Esquire or I do still but I wrote a lot for Esquire and I thought that I had 10 articles that I could put together but when I went back and read them I only had like four that I felt held up so then I had to go do six more so it was more work than I anticipated but it turned out okay and then drop dead healthy so this was also quite the like it was quite awakening because it also exposes how unhealthy we really are in our exercising habits in our eating habits even in our in our stress habits things like noise pollution you pointed out being something that is you were on on the streets here in New York when you're standing there across the street from the the construction into the ground and cabs are honking and it's just there's a big difference between that and tranquilly sitting in a quiet space for sure yeah that was interesting I did not know about the dangers of noise pollution that on the physical that is bad for your heart there is some research on it I wouldn't put it at 100% but there's very interesting research but that one started just because I was in terrible shape getting sick a lot and I I decided my wife has said I don't want to be a widow when I'm 40 years old you got to do something so that's when I decided like with the Bible I'm going to dive in and try to follow every piece of health advice in the world which is of course thousands and many of them contradict each other but I decided to try everything try every diet exercise regimen and what I liked is that as you had mentioned health is much wider than just diet and exercise not about getting that six-pack abs it's about a life well lived and things like stress is so important sleep is so important and one of the big takeaways was friends and a social circle is so key that like you know people who have a tight knit social circle or family or friends are much healthier live longer and so that was part of the lesson that there is you can't you can be unhealthily obsessed with your health like if you are all about spending all your time exercising and finding just the right organic stalk of asparagus that might not be the best for your health because you might be ignoring chances to go out with friends and bond and talk about deeper issues so there was a bit of liberation in that being healthy partially means not being obsessed with being healthy yeah yeah there's there were so many crazy ones in there everything from you know wiping the remotes and the iPhones in that because they're just they're just a city of germs that are going on there there's there's the amount of like a walking helmet because yeah some people who adopt that for a statistical reason I have not and the germs are interesting because I think there's a middle ground I think you know there is the danger of an epidemic or pandemic and germs can be very dangerous but on the other hand you can go overboard and got to build the immune system up yeah there is some theories about that and and I've actually moved away from germophobia partly yeah because our current president is a germophobe and I thought about it and I think it reflects an irrational strain of thinking a fear of the different and the outside and there are some really interesting studies linking like fear of immigration to germophobia like seeing that as like an invasion from the outside so that I've moved away from the being obsessed about germs although we should wash our hands and and that's also one of the reasons of Hitler's sort of ideology as well as the that there was inferior sort of germs of other people that were not as yeah exactly he's very biological all about like pure blood and things like that yeah so this is another sort of of an important like treat each other humanize each other union of with evolution with each other as as we move forward and figuring out how to best do that with the great yeah yeah thank goodness we have some decentralization I'm a big fan of decentralization technologies which I think are going to be a big player in this unity okay let's get to let's get to thanks a thousand so this gratitude journey is so crucial because there's actually physiological effects that occur with gratitude which after over time actually become part you just you you you vibe with you vibe with it it starts changing your essence and you leave like a more positive wake behind you yeah well yeah I love the science behind it was which is what originally was like oh my god I gotta be more grateful because it does it affects there are studies that show you recover more quickly from illnesses and surgery when you keep a gratitude journal or you know you're more likely you're to stave off depression you sleep better you eat better it's ridiculous how much it affects every part of your life and I was like uh-oh because again I have the negative bias and I still do I still battle it every day all of us are just so attracted to that one negative versus the hundred positive and I think if you believe the evolutionary psychologists which I do in this case it had value you know you wanted to really notice that lion you wanted to notice the one poison mushroom out of a hundred so but unfortunately now that we don't live on the savanna it can be a real impediment to happiness yeah yeah and so this this journey in I think another crucial part so like I think the two main for me for takeaways for thanks a thousand the sheer importance of leaving a positive wake behind you with gratitude everywhere you go on a daily basis and what that does to your physiology and the world around you and the other one is this just deep profound understanding of the interconnectedness of everything in terms of globalization and how commodities move around the world and so this is this is so important because it's not only the you know the farmer and the beans at the location but then it's the trucks that take that to the actual store and then it's this thanking everyone in the store thinking the people that laid the asphalt for the trucker to drive thinking the cashiers thinking there's so many people and this is where you said that it can be an infinite oh yeah I could have written you know an 18,000 page book and taken the next 60 years of my life to thank all the people because yeah once you go to the people who paint the yellow lines in the row you know what about who made the paint and who made the buckets for the paint and you know you could just go on and on forever and I love that this idea of interconnectedness and and I also think it's important because I think one fear is that being too grateful will make you complacent you'll be like oh everything's so wonderful I'm so grateful for everything but actually the evidence shows the opposite the evidence shows when people are more grateful they're more pro-social they're more willing to go out and pay it forward try to help others and I found that because when I'm in a depressed state you know I am focused on how do I get out of this how do I you know I'm not thinking about other people I'm thinking about myself but the beautiful paradox is that one of the best ways to get out of this is to help other people and by helping other people you it triggers some happiness in yourself so anyway that that's just a thought like that happiness I mean that gratitude is a spark for action it's not just all about yourself it's all it's a two-way street yeah yeah and there's you mentioned the complete fear of being complacent but then there's also another one which you of course gave this really good understanding of how it's it's not but then there's also this this this sort of fear of being taken advantage of potentially and whatnot but I think if if we can get to a point where enough of a avalanche effect is going on in the world of everyone dosing up on love and gratitude there will be no room for people to try and take advantage because everyone will have avalanche effect into that love that's a very nice thought I hope for that I mean I I hope so too I read an interesting article about this notion of the opposite of paranoia is called pro-noia and paranoia is the feeling everyone's out to get you and pro-noia is the feeling that everyone is out secretly trying to help you and I don't I don't know empirically it's probably not true that everyone is out to help you but I think there are people some people who are out to help you like who are so um pro-noia pro-noia you know what's interesting about that is that if you do believe that you are a character in this in a in a in a game in a simulation you're leveling up that you could potentially pro-noia with the creator of the simulation and work your way to level up more easily with the with these little experiences around you let's hope the the creator of the simulation is a nice person and not a psych psycho yeah that's interesting yeah that's a little pro-noia yeah that's I also want to I want to talk about some of the very basic ways of bringing this into into into our lives and and how it sort of humanizes us on a deeper scale when we we frequently we very infrequently look at each other in the eyes with this passion to understand how the person became who they are right and have a deep sense of of humanizing each other I love that yeah I mean the first person I thanked and my for my coffee was the barista who works at the local cafe and uh so I said you know thank you for my coffee and she said thank you for thanking me and I had to cut it off there I didn't want to go into this infinite loop but one of the thing I asked her about what it's like to be a barista and she said it's not easy because you're encountering people in a dangerous state pre-caffeination and that a lot of people don't even look up from their iPhones they just like hand the credit card they treat her like a robot and you know eventually maybe there will be a robot barista but for now we have humans and so she talked about the importance of just that two seconds of eye contact to remind both of you that you're human it's important for both of you and it's such a small thing tiny you know you're not going to win a Nobel for it but it's it has such a big impact making eye contact with people you deal with every day yep yep and there was another I believe it's the Dalai Lama that also has expressed a deep amount of of uh when people come into this sphere around him he can't just not ask them about their lives I love that yeah so then that's how you when you're walking yeah but otherwise if you're walking down the street you'd have to stop and ask every single person so there's gotta be some sort of a yeah of distinctions that you gotta make between who you want to talk to but like when you do sit down and potentially you're Uber or Lyft or when you're sit in the front seat and actually strike up a conversation with where the person's from what their life is like when you're passing over the card for a transaction say you know thank you very much you know right I love that I actually just heard about a an Uber alternative called I think it's called the blah blah car where you can when you order a car you can mark down whether you want to talk or you just want to say hi or you want silence silence yeah I thought I love that because some people you know may not be in the mood to talk and there's some drivers that don't want to talk too and there's drivers that do want to talk so that's interesting and there's the future of automation you were mentioning on a barista that is robotics that already that already exists we already have that in places like San Francisco and whatnot but also there's the an autonomous vehicles the mood sensing capabilities of oh AJ is in a non-talkative mood he is in a talkative mood he'd like this type of music he'd like this type of et cetera I love that yes and equally I want to touch okay on as we as we as we exit on thanks a thousand I want to mention the importance of globalization because we have now and this is kind of also writing on that pinker argument the better angels of our nature here we are we are so much better off thanks to the ability for us to be so deeply interconnected for us to be able to move things around the world with ease to call each other around the world with ease and I think this is a also a big testament to that is that you were able to take commercial aircraft places it's amazing it's amazing use google translate if you need yeah yeah well I as we talked about earlier you know everything is graze so globalization does have downsides no doubt I mean especially the American lower middle class has been devastated by globalization but I think as you say the upsides historically outweigh it and will continue to which is billions of people lifted out of extreme poverty in the last 50 years just this amazing ability to sample other cultures and and and go to other cultures so I am yeah I am pro globalization I realize it's got downsides and we can work on making it better but overall I'm like yeah let's you know let's not react by closing off and trying to stay in our little containers which is a big movement now of nationalism and xenophobia but overall not good for the human race we've done a lot of moving too quickly I think in the last century especially where our population on the planet has exploded so much from a billion to almost eight and here we find ourselves not really taking the time to slow down and think about how we're how we're moving resources around the world and how we're how we're educating children to have at least a bare basis of language and fundamental skills that enable them to to prosper through the artificial intelligence age all this different kind of stuff we're just we kind of went through that hockey stick and we're riding it without really slowing down to a great point to think about and there's only one experiment on this earth happening and that's the human experiment in the sense and and there's no pausing or rewinding there's right yeah yeah so really focus on getting our shit together in the next okay okay I want to couple things on the way out the first thing is I want you to teach people why it's so important you've already mentioned this several times but why is it so important to run these quantified experiments on yourself and what sort of and when doing it with a and with an intention of experiments that can bring good insight to you and other people when you share it with them right well yeah I'll just tell my experience and I just find that it makes my life so much better to try things out and see what works because even a failed experiment you're going to learn something from it and it could be small for instance and in the bible it says no no gossiping and so I tried that and that is not easy you know that is that is built into us and there is some arguments to be made that some forms of gossip are actually helpful to humanity but I think that the tendency to go immediately to the negative and get this shot and froida out of other people's misery is just terrible but um but spend a week trying not to gossip at all just saying positive things about people and I guarantee you it'll be so hard but so rewarding so as we talked about in the brain neuroscientists their catchphrase is when it when it fires together it wires together so when you do the same thing over and over then you build these pathways these ruts in the brain and sometimes it's good because it's a shortcut but other times you get stuck in one way of thinking so that's why I feel it's important to try different things and I feel just on a global level trying out more policies or you know the environment I was just listening to Dylan Matthews great podcast future perfect about bioengineering and are we going to have to start experimenting with you know creating fake volcanoes to cool down the earth and I think we got to be open to it because we are we can't we can't dismiss it just because it's not natural that's like a naturalistic policy we've got to experiment you urge people to push themselves into experimentation which then gives them a again a sort of you're kind of playing with life in a way in a new and more interesting way you're getting yourself out of a routine and you're being more creative and yeah there's a lot of good here I agree so much good okay couple these are questions we usually ask on the way out of every show and and I'm interested to hear your thoughts so your answers on these questions all right I'll do my best okay what is a core driving principle of yours I would say don't be a jerk and my big fan of I would say when I make decisions I try to think in four quadrants so the first is how will it affect me now how will it affect me in the future how will it affect others happiness now how will it affect others in the future and I think for the first when I was your age it was all about the first two but as I've gotten older I try and it's hard to focus on the other quadrants about other people so yeah you know I am basically I do try to think what is the greatest good for the greatest number and it's not an easy it's not an easy but it's a good goal well-being is a good goal and nihilism is not that great nihilism will get you literally nothing you even have a breakdown of slowing down and thinking which is great it's so great oh yeah I'm a fan of that's good yeah the idea of savoring is another big part of my my core principle like that seeing yourself in your life as a collector of experiences and a curator like you have a museum in your mind and you try to collect experiences yeah yeah and you also talk about how doing things like retaining a sense of gratitude over a long moment right and yeah can make that time feel like it's extended for sure slowing down time yeah yeah you have a that breakdown is both for your own short term versus long term and then others as well I like that a lot okay how about if you could rebuild civilization from scratch how would you design it I love that question I was just thinking about this yesterday about language so I could focus on a million things but let me just focus on language for one thing because I think one strategy I would use is to redesign language so that there is no word for I believe it would be everything would be probabilistic there would be one word for I believe 10 percent and another for I believe I'm 80 percent sure of this I'm 40 percent sure of this because I think that would be so huge in acknowledging that we are not like if we can just put in the word probably into if we can use that word or instead of certainty then we've got room to negotiate and figure out solutions so I would change language so that is it has built-in probability and also I would de-emphasize nouns because like when you say that guy's such an asshole that's like saying he's he was national he is national he will be an asshole it's very essentialist whereas I would try to change it to that guy right now is acting in an asshole like manner and that gives you the opening like maybe he's not always maybe we can help change him and he will be and I think that's very important so fewer nouns more probability that's good that's good thanks yeah I like how you took it from the language and probability perspective that's good I like that it's great okay how about this wouldn't be simulation if we didn't ask you are we in a simulation it's a good question I don't know the I mean sometimes I see the Elon Musk argument that the probability is that we are I mean I if we are I really would have some words for the guy doing the simulation and it's like you can do better than this like it's like some of the stuff that's happened in the last year is like a second rate screenwriter you know like having I will tell you this when Donald Trump was elected it's for me was some evidence that of the multiple world theory multiple universe because I was always thinking if we live in infinite universes why is our universe not weirder like why don't I have like a purple elephant crashing through that bookcase right now because it could happen and then like this reality show host who is like a caricature of everything became president and I'm like that's weird like that that there are other universes looking at us like you you're the universe where Donald Trump became president so anyway those are my random thoughts I like that that many world's interpretation of the multiverses and we're we have that weird the weird line of code that was executed in ours which ended up being yeah yeah yeah last question AJ yes what's the most beautiful thing in the world oh well that's a lovely question I would say well I do think about beauty I mean one thing is I do think that the beauty bias of treating attractive people better is a terrible thing so and that's like everything has its graves blacks and whites I do think beauty in that sense is a bad thing because you know like it's not something you can control and I think like ugly people the discrimination against them is just horrible so I would say that in general about beauty but in terms if you think about beauty in terms of more conceptual like not physical beauty but conceptual beauty I would say one of the most beautiful things to be is when people have a conversation and come to an understanding that is pretty amazing to me and that we can do that and we need a lot more of that discourse that ends with people's connection between people and a changed mind which is very hard to do we are really bad at changing our minds so that is one of my goals as like for the next couple of decades I'm going to try to change my mind when the evidence shows that's a great way to wrap this has been such an honor and a pleasure AJ my pleasure I loved it you are a huge role model for so many of us oh thanks we got to learn how to better run these experiments in our lives and gain positive learn more about ourselves in the world that we live in by running these experiments and this most recent one is so crucial thanks a thousand this is so so important of course thank you because how else can we build up these behaviors of gratitude around our world and also realize the interconnectedness of our world there's so much good to take away from AJ's books go and check out the link in the bio to AJ's work also we would love to hear from you let us know your thoughts in the comments below build up the community build up the dialogue amongst each other about some of the things we talked about also go and build go and run these experiments tell yourself you're going to do something for a week and go do it for a week and see how it is and then go write about it or do a video about it and share it with your friends and yeah build the future manifest your destiny into the world everyone and help join simulation also below we would love your help in helping us scale everything that we're doing so we can continue coming on-site to great places like this to talk to amazing people like AJ thanks again everyone much love and we will see you soon peace thank you for watching thank you I'm very grateful for you I'm very grateful for this interview I'm very grateful for the people that made this equipment for us to be able to use it me too we could do that for like six or seven hours that's the danger it's an infinite loop yeah I love it I love it the year you're doing the thanks at the beginning of dinner and then it it goes into it's never eats roots yeah never eats okay all right all right all right