How to let go of being a "good" person (with Dolly Chugh)
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TED Audio Collective. I'm your host, Chris Duffy, and this is how to be a better human. In today's episode, we're going to dive a little bit deeper into the whole premise of this show. If you've been listening for a while, you have probably heard me say before that I am not the better human of the title. Very clearly, I am not. I am just the guy who is talking to some people who seem to have it figured out.

So hopefully you and I can learn together. And over the course of so many episodes, I have heard about a plethora of ways that we can try and be better. And hopefully some of those topics that we've covered have resonated with your own efforts to be a little less terrible. But how do we know when we've achieved our target? How do we know when we are officially a good person? It seems like at some point we've got to be done, right? At some point we have to hit the finish line.

Well, today's guest, psychologist Dolly Chug, she thinks that not only are we never done, she thinks that the goal of being a good person is actually something we shouldn't be striving for at all. Here is a clip from her TED talk where she talks all about it. If you needed to learn accounting, you would take an accounting class or if you become a parent.

We pick up a book and we read about it. We talk to experts, we learn from our mistakes, we update our knowledge, we just keep getting better. But when it comes to being a good person, we think it's something we're just supposed to know, we're just supposed to do, without the benefit of effort or growth. So what I've been thinking about is, what if we were to just forget about being good people? Just let it go.

and instead set a higher standard, a higher standard of being a goodish person. We're going to hear a lot more about Dolly's research and how to avoid the trap of trying to be good when we get back. But first, a quick break.

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Find World Gone Wrong in all the regular places you find podcasts. I love you so much. I mean, you could like up the energy a little bit. You could up the energy. I actually don't take notes. That was good. I'm just kidding. You sounded great. So did you.

And we are back. On today's episode, we are getting to the core of our show's title, How to Be a Better Human. We are with a psychologist who studies exactly that. Hi, my name's Dolly Chug. I'm a professor at the Business School at New York University, where I'm a social psychologist. I teach courses in leadership and management, and I write books like The Person You Mean to Be and A More Just Future. How did you get started studying the psychology of good people?

There's a saying that all research is me-search. I was raised in a family, I think like a lot of people were, where, you know, there was this emphasis on be a good person and do good in the world. And that all sort of made sense as a kid. But as I got more into adulthood, things seemed more like nuanced and complicated. And I would...

care about being a good person, but then find myself having these assumptions about someone I hadn't met that proved to be completely wrong because I had stereotyped them, or I would sort of seem to always look at situations that were ambiguous in ways that favored me instead of the other person. Like, or if I'm late, there's always a good reason. But if other people are late, they're irresponsible and disrespectful. So the more you kind of

start examining your own behavior, the more you start to realize it's just not that cut and dry. So for you, this is your career. People must ask you this all the time, right? What does it actually mean to be good?

When I talk about studying the psychology of good people, I'm not trying to tell people what it means to be a good person. Everybody has their own definition of that. And what the data says is that we all think we're good people. We all care about being seen as good people and feeling like good people. Maybe not all, but the vast majority of us on average. What varies, though, is our definition of good person. I'm not trying to challenge people with my definition of good person. What I'm trying to do is

is say that whatever our definitions are, and for those of us where our definition is, I want to not behave in a biased way, I want to not be discriminatory against people. If that's your definition of good person, I'm trying to offer some insights into what's going to make that more challenging than it looks on the surface, where we're better off striving to be better,

than to be good in a very static, brittle way, which is why I love your title. It feels like, maybe this is revealing too much of my own psychology, but I'm surprised that most people think they're good as opposed to having some doubts of like, am I really good? Am I putting up a charade? How do I actually be a good person?

Yeah, yeah. Well, I think that's true too. So there's this dynamic nature and some of the work I've done is about exactly that. Our identities we care about, whatever those identities are, in this case, in this example, our good person identity, that there's times when we feel like really solid in that identity. And there's other times when it feels fragile or slippery and like, oh, maybe I'm not a good person. And what a lot of research shows is that when we're

not feeling solid in that identity, when it's feeling slippery, we do things, perhaps unconsciously, to kind of solidify that identity. So if we do something where we feel we haven't, we've treated someone poorly, we might in the next action, even with a different person, treat that person a little extra better. That's like a moral compensation that we would take.

And it kind of allows us to kind of equalize that identity. We get back, okay, well, I did that one bad thing, but I did this good thing, so now I'm good. And there's research that says that sometimes we license, like if we do something really good, then the next thing we do might be bad. So we can go the other way as well because we've sort of licensed ourselves with our donation to then go take advantage of a situation, if you see what I mean.

Your intuition is backed up by the data. It's not that we're always feeling like, yeah, I got this as a good person. It's that it's something we care about. And sometimes we feel like we got it. And sometimes we feel like we don't. And then our behavior kind of floats around whatever that identity is in the moment. Well, tell me about this idea that you've come up with of bounded ethicality. Yeah. So the idea of bounded ethicality, it's a spinoff of a Nobel Prize winning idea, bounded rationality.

And bounded rationality says that we cannot assume that our brains have unlimited processing power and storage space and speed. There are bounds on it. And what that means is that we will sometimes make mistakes as decision makers. We won't make the most rational decision over what cereal to buy. We'll go with the one that's at eye level, even though we easily could have looked down or looked up. But bounded rationality, you just process what's right in front of you.

We took that idea and said, if there are these systematic constraints on how we make decisions in general, then wouldn't that also apply about decisions we make about people and issues that have some ethical importance? It's the same brain. It's not like I go borrow a different brain when I make those decisions.

Serial and people kind of is falling in the same mental processes. So we, Mazarin Banaji, Max Bazerman, and I called it bounded ethicality instead of bounded rationality, that being the spinoff where we're trying to understand what are the systematic ways in which we may not always be fully ethical, just like we're not always fully rational. Right.

Thinking about bounded ethicality, obviously it makes sense to me and I think to everyone that there are just so many choices you have to make every single day and every single moment. How is it possible to make the most just, the most ethical choice in every single second? You can't, right? It would just take too much research and processing. You've kind of talked about like when people do choose to

pick a battle, if for lack of a better word, to pick a battle, to pick a hill and to say, this is where I'm going to be ethical. When are those moments and what can we do to be more conscious and to be better about when we pick those moments? So what we know is that in any given moment, like if I were to snap my fingers, in that moment, my brain processed 11 million thoughts. And that's

Hard to imagine, except when you think about thoughts, it's like little t thoughts, like I can feel the fabric of my clothes on my skin. That's a thought, even though I'm not really consciously thinking about that tactile sensation. That volume of unconscious thoughts is

how much conscious thinking we're doing, you know, the 40 thoughts that are in that moment coming out consciously in our minds. So what doesn't work really well is to simply say, okay, I'm just going to let the 40 overwhelm the 11 million.

There's just not going to be enough instances where that's going to work in our favor in terms of trying to be fully ethical. So certainly we can aspire for that. But the other thing we can do is think about what are the systems or processes that we can, you know, like kind of turn the steering wheel in our favor. So an example might be that –

I teach classes of 40, 50, 60 students. There's a lot of discussion in these classes, a lot of hands in the air at the same time. And one day, my teaching assistant, I asked her, I'm right-handed. I think I might be missing one side of the room. Like I keep turning to write on the board. I come back, I turn, and I think I'm missing a lot of hands. So could you just track that, my calling patterns?

And she came back and she said, "You know what? I actually think you did okay with the, I think you're so conscious of it. You're getting the full room. You didn't miss many hands." And I was like, "Oh, great." You know, I was ready to celebrate. And she said, "But wait, I just want to share something else with you. I noticed you call on men disproportionately more than women. And when you do call on women, you tend to cut them off before they're finished speaking. And you don't do that as much with the men you call on."

whoa, like that was not what I thought I was doing. That was not what I ever aspired to do. It definitely goes against my sort of consciously or explicitly held beliefs, but I believe the data. And so I could say, okay, I'm just not going to do that anymore, but I'm up in front of 60 people. A million things are going through my head in that moment. Am I really every single time going to be able to

slow myself down enough to implement that? Or could I try a different system solution? And the system solution might be, I will never call on three men in a row, period. I just will always make sure I break it up. And by doing that, that in and of itself, it doesn't require me to sort of constantly be monitoring my biases as much as just implementing a system that that part of my brain that can just wants to do the bounded quick stuff, it can do that.

It's interesting. I feel like this hits on one of the issues that arises when people are in the real world, when people are like, I'm a good person or I'm an ally or I'm a feminist or any of these labels that people can put on themselves is that when it's challenged, it can be the kind of thing where instead of it being information that people act on, it is a threat to identity.

Yes, that's so beautifully said. That's why I'm trying to get us to let go of that identity of being a good person because it's not serving us. What the research on growth and fixed mindset says is that when you're in a growth mindset, meaning you have a belief that you'll keep getting better at something, you're not stuck in one place.

versus a fixed person, a fixed mindset, where if I believe I'm a good person, I just believe I'm a good person. I was born a good person. I was raised a good person. I'm a good person. That static, brittle one. When I'm in that growth mindset, when a mistake is pointed out to me, like brain scanners show that my like, boop, boop,

There's all this activity paying attention to the mistake so that I can figure out what I did and not do it again. And that when I'm in a fixed mindset, when I was like, I just, it is what it is. We actually see brain activity fall because what's the point of paying attention to a mistake if it's not going to be utilized in any way. We're making it hard on ourselves. It's something we care a lot about, but we're making it hard to do it well. Like the teaching assistant gives me that data that,

I honestly, I want to do a bunch of things. I want to tell her she counted wrong. I want to tell her that, oh, this was just a one-off class. It was because so-and-so was talking too long. I want to get defensive and sort of explain myself and all the ways in which I have supported women in my life. You know, and I am a woman and I am a feminist. I'm raising feminists. Like all of that.

All those responses are the ones that take over. Those are all fixed mindset responses. So that growth mindset is the one that allows me to go, wow, I didn't know I was doing that. I guess I'm going to work on it and go into a space of actually being able to address it and feel good about addressing it, not mortified by what I've done. Yeah.

Yeah. A big part of your first book, The Person You Mean to Be, it really looks at how being open to the idea that we all need to improve and that none of us are fixed in our abilities or moral status. And you've already been touching on this, but can you talk more about like how being in a growth mindset can bring us closer to the idea of actually achieving goodness? A lot of what it means to be a good person is not just the values we hold, it's the skills we have.

So I talk about going from being a believer, which is believing in certain values, to being a builder. When you're a builder, you're actually building the skills, the knowledge, the courage to act on those values, to build the kinds of teams and communities and organizations and families where those values come to life in a dynamic way, in a changing world where we're constantly, I mean,

Things are topsy-turvy. We're constantly having to sort of challenge our assumptions of the world around us. And the key thing is thinking of this not just as values, but values and skills. One example of a skill might be me learning to update my vocabulary on a regular basis and sort of understanding that words have histories and meanings that I may not be aware of. Or a skill might be me asking a question that makes me uncomfortable to

to challenge what's happening in a meeting at work where I feel like something's, you know, not aligned with my values. Or a skill might be apologizing. Like, I've been called out on something. I've done harm. Now, how do I apologize for it with not the, I'm sorry if you were offended apology, which is just like handing it back to the other person, but the,

I'm sorry, period, apology. I'm sorry for the harm I did, period. I'm sorry, and I need to do better and we'll take ownership of doing so, period. - I think the idea of thinking of them as skills, that really speaks to me. And I will just admit for myself,

A lot of the moments where I feel like I have made progress towards being a better person have also been somewhat painful. And like in the moment, I think I did not handle it very well at all. There are maybe a few times that I can think of where someone –

pointed something out to me and I very like calmly and rationally was like, oh, thank you. I will make that change. But most of the time I did have the thing you're describing of like, I'm defensive. You're wrong. You just caught it in a bad moment. You don't understand all the context. And then I looked back and I was mortified and I was really embarrassed and I felt like I felt angry. And then it took me a while to process all of it. And then I thought like, you know what? Unfortunately, the worst case scenario is true. They were right.

And then I do change or I try to. I always feel like it's interesting to think about like those moments where you realize how not good you are and how you can like see that. And I rarely think it's a positive thing, which makes sense as to why people a positive thing in the sense it doesn't feel good, which is I get why people are hesitant to be in that growth mindset because it takes a lot of work.

I do think, though, and I bet this has happened based off of what you just described of how you get to that point of insight, that with practice, we get better at it and get more comfortable with it. I want to be clear. I don't mean comfortable with doing harm to others. I mean, comfortable with accepting that that's what we've done and just getting past that to the action part. My personal experience has been that

I just now kind of expect that I'm going to mess things up. And when I do, the key is to just sort of move into learning mode. Okay, we're going to take a quick break. But when we come back, Dolly talks to us about what skills we need to pick up to really get into that learning mode.

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Getting called out on a mistake and having to confront this notion of ourselves as good people can actually turn into a positive experience with an impact far beyond our own self-image. Here's another clip from Dolly's talk.

So most of the time, nobody's challenging our good person identity, and so we're not thinking too much about the ethical implications of our decisions, and our model shows that we're then spiraling towards less and less ethical behavior most of the time.

On the other hand, somebody might challenge our identity, or upon reflection, we may be challenging it ourselves. So the ethical implications of our decisions become really salient. And in those cases, we spiral towards more and more good person behavior, or to be more precise, towards more and more behavior that makes us feel like a good person, which isn't always the same, of course.

This might be an obvious question. So when it's something like cooking a dish, right? Like if I make an omelet and the omelet is bad and someone tells me, oh, yeah, you didn't whisk the eggs right. It doesn't feel that bad. I just think like, OK, I'll do it differently next time. But when someone says, oh, what you did is biased or sexist or racist or whatever.

You make other people feel bad in this way that's interpersonal and that kind of hits on something that is a little more charged. It feels so much worse than finding out that you're sawing a piece of wood wrong. Not that I've ever done that correctly either. I don't know why that was my example. But why is it that it's so much harder when it's these interpersonal dynamics? Yeah.

It's a brilliant question because it gets to the heart of the matter, which is identity. And the examples you gave, presumably how you make an omelet or saw a piece of wood is not central to your identity. Now, we can imagine that there's a different world where Chris's ability to make an omelet matters a lot to Chris. Like that is like somebody coming at you about that really does like evoke rage in you. That's a lot easier to imagine than the carpentry world.

I will say the omelet world is a lot closer to this world. The carpentry world is a distant. So many things had to change in our universe for carpentry to be important to me. So if this idea that we're all clinging so tightly to the idea that we're a good person and that that can actually prevent us from making positive growth and changing in a way that would be better for the world, what does it take to be a good person? And can you explain your idea of what it means to be good-ish? Yeah.

Yeah, so I think what we want to do is take that research, the growth mindset, fixed mindset research that Carol Dweck and other brilliant scholars have done, and just apply it here. How to get better at the skills of being a good person, first begin with the belief that these are skills that we can get better at, that we need to get better at. Now, that isn't the same as saying that we can just undo unconscious biases that we're not proud of.

Unfortunately, the research shows it's not as easy as just wanting to undo them. But a lot of these other things, like, for example, becoming better at noticing ways in which we impact others, getting better at tracking data that will show us what's happening in our organization, diversifying the content that our children are exposed to and consuming. Those are all skills that we can absolutely get better.

better at. And that's what the goodish part means is that once we decide we're going to actively work on getting better as opposed to just protecting what we sort of hold so dearly as a good person, then we will actually just start unlocking some of the learning processes that are built into our minds. Your new book is called A More Just Future, Psychological Tools for Reckoning with Our Past and Driving Social Change. So what's

It seems like there's kind of on the micro level, we have to be honest with ourselves about where we fall short so that we can change. But then, correct me if I'm wrong, but it feels like this book is opening that up to a bigger macro level of, okay, and if we don't all acknowledge the facts and the realities of our history, then as a society, we also can't change and get better. So what are some of the psychological tools that you write about that can affect both the macro and the micro here?

Well, the premise of the book is that I start the book with a story about, you know, there's a lot of things I don't do well as a parent, but the one thing I was super proud of is that I read to my kids every night until they were about 10 years old. Like, that was our thing. We read so many books together, and sometimes we would even go on vacations together, but

based off of those books. So I read the whole Little House on the Prairie series to them. And then my husband and I took our kids to Walnut Grove. We took them to South Dakota and Minnesota, and we drove around where the Ingalls used to live. And this was like amazing. I know, right? So like, pat on the back for the parenting. And it was only sort of later that it dawned on me that

Wait, I love these books. I love the Ingalls family. I think they have so many wonderful things that we can sort of offer our children in their values and their hard work. But whose land was that little house sitting on? That was Native American land that was taken from them. There's some like very like racist things that are said in the book. When we were there visiting, there was an opportunity to kind of contextualize that.

what this history was, that it wasn't simply this idyllic prairie narrative. And I never got to it. And my kids were old enough. They could have handled it. And I just wanted to sort of soak in the nostalgia in my own mind and

I wanted to dig into why was it so difficult for me, forget my kids, just me, to sort of unpack the reality of those stories and that American history and unlearn the nostalgia version that I had been taught. So that story opens the book and opens up the possibility that I've done my children a real disservice.

because they've come to believe a very narrow perspective of history, a whitewashed version of history that doesn't help them understand the world they live in now and why we see so many racial disparities and why we see so many on every outcome possible, health, education, wealth,

go on and on, you see massive disparities by race in our country. How are they meant to understand that without the historical underpinnings that help explain it? And so what I wanted to explore is, are there ways we can reckon with our history with the shame, the guilt, the denial that I am feeling that made it hard for me to reckon with it, that allow us to unlearn some things that were partially true or maybe completely untrue? And

and learn the fuller history. And right now we've, of course, the 1619 Project and other important work has come out from historians and journalists that are making it intellectually easy to do, but emotionally it's still really hard. And so some of the tools I'm offering are research on, for example, paradox. Like it is true that the Ingalls family was incredible. It is also true that the Ingalls family was living on stolen land.

Both of those things can be true at the same time. And so research on paradox helps us understand how if we can adopt a paradox mindset, we can actually hold both of those things at the same time. I also share some work on rejecting fables. Like this fable is kind of like sitting at the kids table, you know, like you're hearing a very infantilized voice.

version of the story as opposed to the fuller story and we're adults we can handle the fuller story. So what does it mean to detect a fable and reject a fable? So those are some of the tools that I'm trying to use myself and offer others. Now that you've done some of the emotional work or at least made the choice that you want to complicate these stories, how do you find the stories that are told by communities that have been impacted by history rather than just the dominant narrative?

I mean, first of all, in the age of the internet, it's super easy to literally Google. But there's also now just a lot of great work coming out in the form of films, of podcasts. Even some books that are being used in classrooms are offering multiple perspectives.

that rely often on first-person perspectives from different groups that were alive at the time of an event. So you can hear or read not just the perspective of whatever the dominant voice was or whoever was writing the textbooks that sort of carried forward generation after generation. So it's actually become...

easy to access the stuff. It's just, I think, hard to, and we're seeing it in the sort of divisive conversations around how we teach history in this country. There's this assumption that if it's difficult to hear and it causes shame and guilt, that we should not then go there.

There's ways to deal with shame and guilt that allow us to go there and not be stuck in the shame or guilt. I mean, I certainly think that before this conversation, if you'd asked me, are shame and guilt good feelings, positive feelings, I would have said, no, those are negative feelings. But it sounds like one thing that I'm getting from you is that they're actually really necessary and we need to kind of seek them out when appropriate and sit in them so that we learn the lessons from them.

I think somewhat, and shame is different than guilt. Shame is where I feel that I'm a bad person, going back to our earlier discussion. Like, it's about me as a whole. Whereas guilt is like, I did a bad thing. It's not necessarily me as a whole I'm bad. It's like the thing I did is bad.

And it turns out that when we feel shame, we shut down, we withdraw, like we don't fix the thing that needs to be fixed. When we feel guilt, we actually get into action mode. We do more to fix the thing that needs to be fixed. And there's some research that says that basically that's the key is just do we see a way to do

do better that activates shame and guilt. And I think that's where we can really offer our children a lot. There are things we can do. Beginning with as children, they can just begin by learning the facts. And then as adults, there's many things they're going to be able to do to enact change. If we're not offering them that and offering ourselves that, we're

We're leaving everyone feeling kind of impotent on issues that we care deeply about. Again, our good person identity makes us want to see the world aligned with that. And the world is not aligned with a lot of the values we hold. That leaves us just with nowhere to go. So for me, as a white person, I have these moments as I read more

more nuanced history or I read books that were written by groups that have kind of been shut out of the narrative, I often am shocked. And I recognize that that is very much a reaction that is a product of who I am and my background and my privileges, right? Is that a lot of people would not be surprised by these things that I'm surprised by. But I learn things and I go, I cannot believe that. That's unbelievable. That's so bad. That's not what I learned about at all. Thanksgiving was that? That's the most obvious one. But

What are some steps that people can take, that I can take, that listeners can take to identify what our privileges are and where our blind spots are? Because there are so many types, right? It's not just race. It's gender, sexuality, physical ability, financial. Otherwise, what are the things that we can do to identify?

to learn where we are missing pieces. Well, one of the things I like to do is ask people to say, okay, real quick, what are all the identities you hold? Just real quick, just jot them down. And people jot down and I will model it and say, well, you know, I'm a professor, I'm a woman, I'm a mother, I'm an author, I'm Indian American. So I get a couple out, they get a couple out. And then I say, okay, now let's pause. What identities do

didn't I share about myself that I hold. It just didn't come to mind when I was quickly thinking. And one thing I didn't say is that I was straight. Honestly, it didn't come to mind because I don't have to think about it. I almost never think about being straight. And the reason I don't have to think about it being straight is because I have tailwinds in my favor. I don't have to navigate a world that makes it hard to be straight. The idea of headwinds and tailwinds comes from Debbie Irving's writings, and it's really shaped my thinking. It's a wonderful metaphor.

It actually was the way I came to understand what it means for something to be systemic. When someone says something is systemic, what does that mean? And the headwinds and tailwinds metaphor made that clear for me. Privilege is just an example of something systemic. And it's funny that people resist it so much because if anything, when something's systemic...

You can sort of legitimately say you weren't the one who caused it. You know, it's systemic. When someone says we have privilege, we have something systemically in our favor. We have a tailwind because all it's saying is that we've benefited for something. We didn't cause it. One of the things we can do is think about where we have those tailwinds, the identities we think about least. And those are probably the perspectives we're least aware of.

The people who don't have that identity. So people who are not straight are probably thinking about that identity more than me. And I probably am unaware of their history. I'm probably unaware of their perspectives. I'm probably unaware of how the present connects to things that have happened in the past. And how do you integrate that on...

in organizational level so that it's not just individual work to be done? Absolutely. Well, I think in organizations, it's actually where it's particularly powerful. I've written about ordinary privilege and that's when you're in an organization and you have the tailwind. The research says you're going to have more influence than somebody who has the headwind in those moments. And

The concrete example would be if I'm in an organization and there's a policy that makes it difficult for a disabled person to participate fully in the workforce. If a disabled person says something, the studies say that they will not be taken as seriously as if a non-disabled person were to speak up about that policy. So the idea isn't here to speak up in

instead of or centering ourselves over the people directly affected. But it's to use our ordinary privilege, the identities we think about least, where we have tailwinds, to use that as a sort of superhero influence in that moment. As you look back on how you have grown and opened your own mind throughout the years, how has all of this stuff that we've been talking about, how has that played out in your life? If I just sort of stick to my life as a professor, it shows up in...

I will bring in a guest speaker who will speak about law enforcement, someone from law enforcement as a guest speaker, and they'll talk about stop and frisk without acknowledging the civil rights implications of stop and frisk. And I won't bring it up in class. I won't balance that discussion.

I will, in class, credit people who volunteered to help out with something like a little extra outside of class that benefits all the students. I'll thank all the male students and I'll forget to thank the female student who offered her time.

Time and time again, I'm doing these things. And I think for me, the growth has been when it happens, I go, okay, let's work on that. As opposed to that can't possibly be true. There's no way I did that. I have to cover it up immediately. Like I've just become better at talking about it and making my learning visible to others. And this is something I've been trying to, when I do talk in organizations, is encourage leaders to do is make their learning visible to

to send everyone off to diversity training and then not yourself as the leader, make yourself a learner when you're asking everyone else to become a learner.

That's just never going to work, right? No one else is going to make themselves vulnerable in such a charged space if the person with all the power isn't making themselves vulnerable in that charged space. So one of the things I've been trying to do is model what it means to make your learning visible to others and talk about it. Normally, we end every interview by asking, what's one thing that you're doing to try and be a better human? But you've answered that question more perfectly than I never could have been answered if I just had asked it. So you're the dream guest for this show.

Well, thank you so much for being here and for making time to talk with us. I really, really appreciate it. Well, I thank you so much for doing this show. That is our show for today. Thank you so much for listening to How to Be a Better Human. I am your host, Chris Duffy. A big thank you to our guest, Dolly Chug. She's the author of The Person You Mean to Be, and her new book is called A More Just Future. From TED, our show is brought to you by the solidly good-ish Sammy Case, Anna Phelan, and Erica Yoon.

From Transmitter Media, we're brought to you by Greta Cohn, Farrah DeGrage, and Leila Doss, who are somehow even better every time I check in on them. And from PRX, two humans who I honestly believe teleported in from a more just version of the future. It's Jocelyn Gonzalez and Patrick Grant. Thanks as always to you, our listeners, for supporting the show and for listening to this episode. If you enjoyed it, please share it with a friend, help us spread the word, and we'll be back with more for you next week. PR.