How to confront your inner critic (w/ Anu Gupta)

How do you quieten the judgmental voice in your head? Educator and entrepreneur Anu Gupta suggests you actually listen to it. Anu joins Chris to discuss the effects of human biases on our psyche and how to combat self-destructive habits by swapping out harmful emotions with constructive thoughts. They also talk about how individuals, when they come together, can create a society that is anchored around a loving, not critical, culture. Featured guest Follow Anu Gupta on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/anuguptany, LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/anuguptany/, and at anuguptany.com/ https://www.anuguptany.com/ Connect with the team Follow Chris on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/chrisiduffy/?hl=en and at chrisduffycomedy.com https://chrisduffycomedy.com/Buy Chris’ book, Humor Me https://t.ted.com/ZGuYfcL Watch How to Be a Better Human videos on YouTube at TEDAudioCollective https://www.youtube.com/TEDAudioCollectiveFollow TED on X https://x.com/TEDTalks, Instagram https://www.instagram.com/ted, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/TED, LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/ted-conferences/, and TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@tedtoksFor the full text transcript, visit go.ted.com/BHTranscripts https://go.ted.com/BHTranscripts Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:30Chris Duffy?

  This episode is sponsored by the Natural Resources Defense Council. Here's a question this show asks a lot. What can one person actually do? Take protecting the environment. When the task feels so big, it's hard to know where to even begin. Turns out, the answer isn't doing it alone. It's teaming up with people who care as much as you do. With the help of 3 million supporters, the Natural Resources Defense Council is in court to defend ancient forests, pristine coasts, and the wildlife that depend on them. None of these places or species can be replaced. They're still here because people fought for them, in and out of court. And that fight needs your support today. Donate at nrdc.org/human and your gift will be matched five times.

• 1:19Chris Duffy?

  You're listening to How to Be a Better Human. I'm your host, Chris Duffy. February is a month where people are often thinking about love because of Valentine's Day. But love is so much more than just romantic love. And so today on the show, we're thinking about that broader understanding of love. What would it mean to approach the world with it? What would it mean to assume the best of the people that we interact with every day, rather than preparing for conflict and assuming the worst? I mean, even just saying this out loud, I can immediately start building arguments against it. Do I honestly believe, given everything that we know, that it's reasonable to think that care and love could ever be the default? And I'll tell you the truth, I don't know. But to me, the answer lies in thinking more critically about our preconceived notions

• 2:01Chris Duffy?

  of how things are going to go and what other people are going to be like. In my mind, there's a direct line from love to cultivating open-mindedness and pushing back on our biases. And I know that today's guest, Anu Gupta, deeply believes in this. Anu is the author of the book Breaking Bias: Where Stereotypes and Prejudices Come From and the Science-Backed Method to Unravel Them. Here's a clip from his 2017 TED Talk.

• 2:25Speaker 02

  When I was growing up in Delhi, my town was often under police lockdown. We couldn't leave our homes because of ethnic tensions. So at school, I'd ask my teachers, "Why is this happening?" They'd say, "Because those people are bad." "Wait, what's bad about them?" "They're not like us, they're different." After moving to New York, I became those people. Apparently, I worshipped cows. Apparently, I was stupid, dirty, ugly. These definitions were accepted as fact before I even said a word, all based on the way I looked. So I decided to assimilate and become American as quickly as possible. I changed my accent, I changed the way I dressed, I even went by the name Andy.

• 3:09Speaker 02

  Yet all too often, just walking down the street or riding the subway, I'd hear, "Hey, Osama, go back to where you came from." Every time I heard that, my heart sank. I'd already changed everything I could possibly change about myself. For years, I just ignored it. I took comfort in the science. When I was in high school, the Human Genome Project proved that race is a story, that people are 99.9% genetically identical, regardless of what we look like. But emotionally, I began to feel disconnected from my peers and the country I now called my own.

• 3:50Speaker 02

  Over time, I just couldn't imagine living this way. So eight years ago, I found myself on the ledge of my 18th-floor window, contemplating jumping off.

• 4:04Speaker 02

  As I stood there, looking at the teeny tiny cars below, I had a flash of insight. The stereotypes people reduce me to are just ideas. They're not true. I realized, people aren't seeing me. Anarag, entrepreneur, lawyer. People are seeing ideas of me. And it was those ideas that kept me depressed and paranoid all these years. And I realized I wasn't alone. But I don't want to live in a world where we live in ideas of one another. I want to live in a world where we live in the presence of one another. The real people. This is why I've committed my life to breaking bias.

• 4:49Chris Duffy?

  We're going to hear all about Anu's life and his work right after this quick break.

• 5:04Chris Duffy?

  Today, we are talking about what it would mean to approach the world with love and to try and see the full humanity of the people around us with Anu Gupta.

• 5:13Speaker 02

  Hi there. I'm Anu Gupta, author of Breaking Bias with a foreword by His Holiness the Dalai Lama. And I'm also the founder of Be More with Anu, a tech company that trains individuals and organizations in building belonging within workplaces and communities.

• 5:28Chris Duffy?

  I guess let's start with that, which is it's pretty unusual for a book to have a foreword by the Dalai Lama.

• 5:34Speaker 02

  Indeed.

• 5:35Chris Duffy?

  That must be a big honor. And also, how did that come about?

• 5:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, I feel like it's a spiritual shield for this work. You know, we're living in these quite uncertain times where there's just such rise of polarization and division, not just in the US, but around the world. And I think His Holiness, after he read the book, really felt that and the potential of this book. And he wanted to lend his name to this work. Because like him, I believe that the 21st century isn't just about technological innovation. It's really about inner development, particularly development of warm-heartedness and other tools that I talk a lot about in the book.

• 6:13Chris Duffy?

  It is not a moment in the world, especially politically, where it feels like warm-heartedness or diversity, equity, and inclusion are... They don't have, let's put it, the winds behind them.

• 6:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:27Chris Duffy?

  The wind is not in the sails of those concepts at the moment right now. So... How do you adjust to going from a time where there was kind of broad cultural support for these ideas to now broad cultural repression of these ideas?

• 6:43Speaker 02

  Yeah. I think what's been a real gift for me, particularly like using the mindfulness and the mind, the Buddhist mind sciences and the neuroscience is that the gift of time, this work of Breaking Bias, it's really about deep time and the evolution of human consciousness. And I look at it that way. I'm also really aware of history and where our species has been, not just 100 years ago, but 1,000 years ago, 10,000 years ago. So knowing that deep time really gives me comfort that this is really, this is how we become better humans. Breaking Bias is not just a path that's rooted in social justice or fairness. It's really a path to more profitability, to success, to belonging, to healing, and so many other things.

• 7:27Chris Duffy?

  So your book, Breaking Bias, one of the things that I think is so interesting about this is that instead of it just being, looking at bias and how to be more inclusive, instead of just looking at that in a kind of narrow framework of what do we do right now? I mean, you quite literally go back millions of years. We're talking about like the geological formation of the earth.

• 7:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:50Chris Duffy?

  Which is not what I expected from a book about bias.

• 7:51Speaker 02

  Yeah. It's interesting, right? Because when we think about bias, when we think about our relationships with each other as human beings, is that we have to also shift our relationship with nature, with the living earth, with what's known as more than human beings, you know, animals, birds, fish, insects, the whole ecology of things. And we're living through a time of the Anthropocene, right? Where human beings have become so powerful that we have caused so much destruction to ecology. So I think for me, when I think about bias, of course, we think about racism, sexism, antisemitism, Islamophobia, you know, transphobia, and the standard human-based biases. But I think we also have to include biophobia, like deep hatred of the earth, the need to dominate the earth, you know,

• 8:33Speaker 02

  specieism, you know, what about the other beings with whom we share this planet? And I think for me, going back into geological time and just... Seeing how we as a species have evolved has really been helpful to really think about all these other living beings as our kin and how breaking bias isn't just something that will enhance human relationships, but it's really the root cause or root solution to every single problem we face individually, locally and globally, whether it's climate change or ecological destructions or of course polarization, misinformation, breakdown of democracy, bias is really the building block of all these challenges.

• 9:12Chris Duffy?

  You said you've come to this work because of who you are and your background. Tell me about that. What is the the personal history that brings you to this?

• 9:19Speaker 02

  A lot of the slurs directed at me for being a heathen, being a pagan, being a terrorist. You know, after nine 11, I was in New York City and I would just have people call me Osama bin Laden on the street and ask me to go back to where I came from. As a young person, I didn't know how to deal with any of these things. These things weren't sexy to talk about, so I would just repress them. I would just be like, OK, well, I'll just ignore them. They're just ignorant and go about my way. And the way I thought I could really succeed in this new home of mine was to, you know, to, you know, excel academically, professionally, which I did, you know, went to college, went to grad school at Cambridge, you know, graduating top of my class, then went off to law school. And throughout this time, I was kind of following

• 9:59Speaker 02

  the thread of what is this thing called bias? Why are people cruel to one another just for no other reason than their being? You know, I went to law school to study human rights law, civil rights law and for studying like all of the case law that has made us who we are, civil rights legislation, international human rights norms. But whenever I would talk about my own experiences with bias, you know, I would just meet, you know, dead silence, awkward pauses and oftentimes gaslighting, basically denial of my own emotions. So I was a young, you know, 20 something year old person and never been to therapy, had never done any kind of healing work. I was just in my head. And I started believing that, oh, maybe everything what people are saying about me is true. You know, so it

• 10:43Speaker 02

  wasn't just the societal narratives about my humanity because of my intersectional identities, but it was actually my own understanding of who I was because I was trying to go away from being brown, being an immigrant, being gay. I was still closeted. And it was actually right before the second year of my law school, I found myself on the ledge of my 18th floor window about to jump off. And the interesting thing about that night is I did jump.

• 11:10Speaker 02

  But I have no explanation for this, but for the grace of God, I'm alive. Because instead of falling forward, I fell backwards into my apartment. And within that moment, I just thought to call a friend, another queer Asian American person, and who lived quite far away from me. If you all know New York, I was in Midtown and she lived in Harlem. But she happened to be walking on my block that very moment. She just took the elevator up to the 18th floor, sat in my apartment for hours. And the next day, I began my own breaking bias journey. I was like, whoa, I can't believe I was almost not going to exist. And I think it was for me, the journey really began with my own self.

• 11:50Speaker 02

  My nervous system, my body, my brain, my emotions were the, they were the lab. And I basically went after so many different technologies, ancient technologies, modern technologies, talk therapies, somatic-based therapies, just to see, what is this thing? Why do I believe all these stories about myself? And I wanted to understand where these stories came from. Stories about being wrong because I'm gay, stories about, you know, being inferior because I'm Indian or I'm brown, or my family is Hindu or Buddhist and not Christian. Stories about being wealthy or poor. Where did these stories come from? And that's where I think my journey really began. I knew a lot of those stories already from the media, from education.

• 12:34Speaker 02

  You know, I was working as a lawyer after law school, working on issues of racial and gender equity. Really passionate about trying to use root cause analysis to understand a lot of these systemic problems. You know, oftentimes you think about systemic racism or patriarchy or misogyny. What is the cause of that? And you get really cerebral answers. And I wanted to get to the root of it, but how do I explain this to my six-year-old niece? You know, who's experiencing this herself? And that's how I came to understand that, oh, this work is really about inner development.

• 13:07Chris Duffy?

  There's so much that's really important there. One thing that I want to start with is, well, first of all, I'm really, I'm very glad that you are here.

• 13:18Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 13:19Chris Duffy?

  And that, and that you survived. And that I think that's not, that is not a given. And one thing that I've learned in my, in my personal experience with. Having loved ones who, you know, have been in similar moments of suicidality is that two of the kind of biggest myths around suicidal thinking or suicidal actions are that talking about it makes it more likely.

• 13:44Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 13:45Chris Duffy?

  We think that if we talk about it, they're gonna get the idea, but

• 13:47Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 13:48Chris Duffy?

  People already have the idea. And then the other one is that you need to fix it right away.

• 13:53Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 13:54Chris Duffy?

  And I think the idea that really what you need to do is hang on for one more hour.

• 14:00Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 14:01Chris Duffy?

  And then one more hour becomes another hour and that there's the possibility of big change by very, very tiny changes, by just making it one more hour. And then also this idea that we, if we talk about the big horrible thing, that it doesn't make it more likely, it makes it less likely. And I wonder if you do, a very direct parallel between that individual dealing with of pain and of wanting to not be alive.

• 14:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:29Chris Duffy?

  And also the societal level of

• 14:31Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 14:32Chris Duffy?

  Judgment and cruelty and the kind of horrors that we can inflict on other people.

• 14:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, and oftentimes those horrors that we inflict on others, we inflict on ourselves. That's what I've come to realize. I think for me, it was really interesting because I also came from a relatively conservative Asian Indian family where it's not just okay, I mean, it's not just about being gay, but it was also like mental health is just not talked about. It's something that's deeply, deeply repressed. So I think for me, it was just not having a space to be for a very long time. But, you know, I just, I think I, at that moment, I just took a leap of faith. And I think every moment, like you said, every hour has been that leap of faith. And so it's been 16 years and I still remember that day, you know, so fresh in my mind. And I know that I'm here for a reason.

• 15:20Speaker 02

  Because I am a living, breathing, walking, dancing, singing example of what's possible. Because the technologies that are going to help us to overcome that self-loathing, that depression, that chronic stress, that anxiety, the loneliness, it's just so pervasive in our society right now. They've been with us for thousands of years. Our neuroscientists in the last couple of decades have given it new names. They have given us evidence that they work at the neural level, at the somatic level, at the emotional level. So for me now, it's really like, how do we apply all this information that we have? You know, I feel like we've moved past the information age. We have so much information. Uh, what we really lack is wisdom.

• 16:03Speaker 02

  And I think for me, it's now applying all that wisdom to imagine what's possible. You know, if we can imagine colonizing Mars, why can't we imagine living on Earth without bias? You know, what's happened to our moral imagination? I feel like that's what the century is really calling for us to do.

• 16:19Chris Duffy?

  When you say technologies, these technologies that we've had, what are some examples of those technologies that you're talking about?

• 16:24Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, I think for me, one of the things about the modalities that help break bias, I call it Prism. And Prism is an acronym for these five tools. And we start at M and move our way up to P. And it's really a mindfulness-based, somatically-informed practice. So we start with mindfulness, which is just present moment awareness. You know, just noticing what happens, one after another, whether it's our breath, whether it's our thought, whether it's our emotions, but especially our body sensations. Bias really lives in the body. And we can't really begin to belong in the body until we heal that in our bodies. You know, every ancient technology, which is basically wisdom traditions, whether it's Christianity, or Judaism, or Hinduism, or Islam,

• 17:06Speaker 02

  they've all said, awareness, be still and know that I am. You know, that's what's written in the Bible. I didn't make that up. And that's where we begin. That's mindfulness, the foundation. Then we move to stereotype replacement for us, which is really when stereotypes arise. You know, so socially, we've been like conditioned to think that, oh my God, I'm bad. And then kind of, then you feel shame, you feel guilt, you feel blame. But actually, all we have to do is shine a light on it. Oh, that's a stereotype. Okay. But instead of letting that just stay there, we replace it with a counter example. A positive example. For me, this was a really powerful tool. Like every time I had that critic come in and still does.

• 17:49Speaker 02

  You know, you're silly, you're stupid, you're dumb, like whatever. I take a moment, okay? I listen, I hear you. And I'm also the exact opposite. I'm also kind, I'm also sweet, I'm also charismatic. And constantly doing that, that's how we're rewiring the brain. That's how we're rewiring the nervous system. That's been wired with all these biases. And then we move to I, which is really about individuation. Curiosity, interest. Being with the person, being with ourselves, just as we are in this moment. Because there's a broader wisdom that we are going to evolve. We've been evolving since we were born and also others too. And lastly, we move to prosocial behaviors and perspective taking, the R and the P. And these are really heart-based practices.

• 18:34Speaker 02

  This is active cultivation of empathy, compassion, joy, altruism, imagination. This is what the Dalai Lama calls warm-heartedness. And oftentimes, again, in our society, we've been conditioned to feel that we're just born with these tools. Actually, no. Just as biases are learned, belonging can also be learned. All of these tools can also be learned. We can actually rewire ourselves through these practices. And that's basically what I teach in the book and what I've been teaching to thousands of professionals the last 10 years. Is how do we really rewire our nervous system? How do we rewire our brain to really build a healthier relationship with ourselves, with one another, with nature? As well as with our imagination to see what's possible.

• 19:22Chris Duffy?

  We're going to take a quick break, but if you can imagine it, we are going to be right back with more from Anu in just a moment.

• 19:39Chris Duffy?

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• 20:22Chris Duffy?

  In partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, this is Planet Visionaries. Listen or watch wherever you get your podcasts.

• 20:32Speaker 03

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• 21:30Chris Duffy?

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• 22:30Chris Duffy?

  And we are back. We're talking with a new Gupta, author of Breaking Bias: Where Stereotypes and Prejudices Come From and the Science-Backed Method to Unravel Them. A way that you talk about this in the book is that bias is a habit. So can you tell us a little bit more about that?

• 22:46Speaker 02

  You know, when I started my own breaking bias journey, I was like, well, what is bias? And I would go to the literature, the sociological literature and a lot of the common trainers on this topic and they would say that, oh, we're just born with it. It's the survival instinct in us. You know, our amygdala brain is fearful and we kind of divide ourselves into in groups and out groups. But I was, I was like, wait, wait a minute. When my niece was born or my nephews were born, they didn't think that, you know, boys are better than girls. They didn't think that light skin is more beautiful than dark skin. This was taught to them. And the more I went into the neural mechanisms of how bias is learned, I was like, whoa, bias isn't inherent. Because yes, we have the survival instinct.

• 23:29Speaker 02

  We need to know the difference between a cute little puppy and a lion because of danger. But if we have two human beings who are exactly part of the same species, why is it that we treat them differently? That's the learned part.

• 23:42Chris Duffy?

  But sometimes these kind of immediate frameworks, they're helpful because it's easier and quicker to have a connection with someone.

• 23:50Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 23:50Chris Duffy?

  So like, I see a person and I sort them into a box. And then we can connect based on that box. I don't have to do all of the mental labor of exactly who is this person? And exactly who am I? We can connect.

• 24:02Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 24:03Chris Duffy?

  So there is a piece that's efficient.

• 24:06Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 24:07Chris Duffy?

  I guess what I'm saying is, if you were to walk down the street and truly see every individual you passed as an individual, I don't think you would ever be able to move from point A to point B. And yet, what we don't want to do is go so far the other way that we don't see the humanness of the people who we're walking past on the street. So how do you find the balance between those two?

• 24:28Speaker 02

  You know, so the way I define bias is it's a learned habit that distorts how we perceive, reason, remember, and make decisions. So I think that last portion about making decisions is really essential and important. Most people who walk down the street, of course, you know, we have our own preferences. But it's not really bias. It's just like, oh yeah, judgments will arise. We just noticed the judgments or were aware of them. But we're not making any decisions toward them. For me, it becomes nefarious when you're a doctor and you're making decisions around the types of medications you're going to prescribe or diagnosing a treatment and creating a treatment plan for them. If you're a teacher disciplining students, if you're a hiring manager, hiring certain people,

• 25:12Speaker 02

  you're making decisions that affect other people's livelihoods. And those micro decisions then aggregate at an institutional level, at a systemic level into disparities, into inequities, inequalities, and so much human suffering. You know, we've seen it with police violence in the US, for example, or other countries around the world, whether it's France or Germany. What's happening in the nervous system of those police officers? You know, why is it that they see the phenotype of a certain person, black or brown skin, and then suddenly they feel fear? That fear is stored in the body and they haven't been trained. So that's what I'm really talking about when it comes to breaking bias. It's really a disconnection from ourselves and one another. And we're basically unregulated in our nervous systems.

• 25:57Speaker 02

  And what the Prism tools really help us do is really regulate our bodies.

• 26:00Chris Duffy?

  You and I share that we both taught English in South Korea.

• 26:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:06Chris Duffy?

  Which is wonderful. It was a great experience. I loved being there. I know you loved being there, too. I mean, you talk about how you recognized in yourself that often if you encountered someone who was of Korean ancestry or was South Korean, that you would try and find a way to immediately talk to them about this experience.

• 26:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:24Chris Duffy?

  And, and what I like about how you did it in the book is you said, like, there's nothing inherently wrong with this. But what you realize is that you're not really seeing the wholeness of this person. You're just like, oh, here's an opportunity for me to connect on their Koreanness.

• 26:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:40Chris Duffy?

  And as soon as I read that, I was like, wow, that is 100% like, not even the kind of thing I've done, but like, exactly the thing where I'm like, oh, you're from Korea. I lived in Suwon. Let's talk about that. And I wonder if you can talk a little bit more about the nuance of this.

• 26:55Speaker 02

  There's so much to unpack there, but I do think that the cultural narratives around, you know, branding people and canceling people are incredibly unskillful. They're incredibly unwholesome because they keep us in a cycle of shame. You know, one of my favorite scholars, Brene Brown, says, shame is a deeply, deeply painful feeling rooted in this belief that we're unworthy of love, belonging, connection, that we're flawed, there's something wrong with us. And that's what's happened in the last 10 years in our cultural zeitgeist. We have basically said some people are just bad. People aren't bad. Bias is just part of our neural circuitry. And, you know, as I talk about, we've learned these biases from five causes, all of us, regardless of who we are, how many dominant identities we have, how many subordinate identities we have, we all have them.

• 27:40Speaker 02

  So I think for me, that began to give me a lot of leeway into being like, oh, like, of course I have thoughts that are biased towards people because of their skin color or their sexuality or their gender, but they're just thoughts and I can become aware of them and I can begin to switch them. Now, the question around the South Korean is because I've done this for years and it was only until actually I started reading the, writing the book four years ago that I was like, wait, this is kind of problematic because what I began to realize is that my desire to connect with someone of Korean ancestry was rooted in me and my experience and had nothing to do with the other person. And it's actually quite harmless. I'm like, oh, I just want to share with people that, hey, you know, I lived in Korea.

• 28:25Speaker 02

  But how would I feel if, you know, someone walking down the street came up to me like, oh, I went to India last year and I loved it. And this has actually happened to me a lot of times and I always feel like, I mean, it doesn't bother me that much, but I'm also like, I'm so much more than my skin color and ethnicity. So that's where I was like, oh, I think there's some nuance here. We often just connect with one another based on like race and gender, primarily those two like very clear markers. And I think for me, if we want to imagine building a world where all beings belong in the fullness of our diversity, we actually have to practice that within ourselves.

• 29:03Chris Duffy?

  So in, in an attempt to do that with you, rather than asking you about something that I think would be reductive and not be a part of your identity that you like to talk about, from reading the book and from doing some research about you, I believe that something that you really enjoy is learning languages and being a polyglot. I know you've studied Japanese. Actually, how many languages do you speak and which languages?

• 29:24Speaker 02

  Fluently, I speak three, I would say, you know, Hindi, Urdu and English. But I have studied like a dozen others over the span of my, you know, lifetime, you know, I've studied Persian, Arabic, Korean, Japanese, French and a few others. Learning languages has been really beautiful because it's given me access to different cosmologies, different ways of imagining the world. And one of the things, you know, I talked a little bit about how we're breaking bias is really the root cause of every challenge we face in the world. And we're living through a time where we're losing a human language every 14 days.

• 30:03Speaker 02

  So basically with that library of wisdom of imagining what it's like to be in relationship with ourselves and the elements around us. And that's why I feel like, you know, this is why it's so important for us to begin to really retain languages and begin to... Language is a way to communicate, to commune with ideas.

• 30:25Chris Duffy?

  I also love learning languages.

• 30:28Speaker 02

  Oh yeah, what do you speak?

• 30:29Chris Duffy?

  I'm similar to you in that I don't really speak many fluently. I can speak English and French pretty, pretty well.

• 30:35Speaker 02

  Oh, good.

• 30:36Chris Duffy?

  And Spanish also pretty well, but then I've studied Korean and Greek and Senegalese Wolof.

• 30:41Speaker 02

  Oh, beautiful.

• 30:42Chris Duffy?

  And one of the reasons I love it is because there's always conceptual framework in a new language.

• 30:50Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 30:51Chris Duffy?

  Where either there's a specific word that you can't translate literally.

• 30:53Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 30:54Chris Duffy?

  Or there's a way of framing things that's different than how I frame it in my native language, English.

• 31:00Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 31:01Chris Duffy?

  And it just makes me realize that the world is not in one set way.

• 31:07Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 31:08Chris Duffy?

  To me, I think that's at the heart of so much of what you write about in Breaking Bias.

• 31:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'll give you an example that I found so fascinating. You know, studying, again, how gender and binary gender in particular came around, and I discovered a tribe in Indonesia, the Boogies people. In their language, they have five genders. So like, everything that they conjugate is based on those five genders. You know, basically what in our language would be basically a cis man, a cis woman, a trans man, a trans woman, and an androgynous person, generally intersex people. And, you know, despite colonization, despite Islamization, that's still part of their language, their conception of humanity, and there's nothing wrong with the is-ness of these five genders of humans. And it's just so beautiful, right? And it's because of language.

• 31:56Speaker 02

  Language gave them permission to imagine that. And I feel like in the English language and other Romance languages, we're beginning to innovate. You know, in the English language for non-binary identities, we've been using they/them. It's an experiment, we'll see what it's going to be, right? But it's allowed so many humans, finally, to feel like they belong. In the way they communicate and conceptualize their existence. And that's really the beauty of language.

• 32:21Chris Duffy?

  Okay, so with this idea that there's language and nuance. A moment that really struck me is you talk a lot about your your personal story. You also talk about your family. And you have this nuance even within the same person.

• 32:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:35Chris Duffy?

  And so you have these two interactions that you write about very movingly with your grandmother. One is where she's kind of very quite aggressively tells you to not dance like a girl.

• 32:45Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 32:45Chris Duffy?

  And you feel really shut down. But then there's this other time where she explains to you the culture. The cultural idea that there's a vastness of gender.

• 32:56Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 32:56Chris Duffy?

  That there's just one spirit that puts on many different.

• 32:59Speaker 02

  Clothes.

• 33:00Chris Duffy?

  Clothes.

• 33:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:01Chris Duffy?

  And I think the fact that it's the same person who gave you both of those interactions.

• 33:05Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 33:06Chris Duffy?

  Is quite revealing about like the nature of people in in the ways that we have these biases too.

• 33:12Speaker 02

  And it's kind of drove, you know, for me, making sense of that was really because I began to look at her and her humanity and how bias was drilled into her, particularly biased toward herself as a woman. She's no longer with us, but she was married off when she was in the fourth grade. I think she was 13 years old. And then she started having children at 15. And a lifetime of being othered, someone who was so wise, so smart, but just wasn't given any opportunity for no other reason than her body parts. Right? Because she was born a girl, because she was born a woman in a conservative Indian society. Again, she went back to her ancient wisdom, right?

• 33:53Speaker 02

  Her spiritual wisdom, which basically says that Shiva Shakti, that's her idea of yin yang. That all human beings have these two energies, you know, masculine and the feminine. And for me, that really came up when I was a young boy. I started noticing that there are gender in Indian society, but are known as kinners or hijras. These are generally intersex people or, you know, people who are born as men, but feel like they're women. So trans women and they dress, they live as women. And I was like, wait, how is it that men can dress like women? And this was, I think, coming from a deep curiosity within myself because I couldn't explain my sexuality at that time. And I was like, is it okay for them to dress like a woman?

• 34:34Speaker 02

  And she was like, yeah, of course, because that's the energy that's predominant in them. But that same woman also, like you said, you know, I remember dancing to a Bollywood song as like a six or seven year old in front of some of her guests. And she took me aside and really like told me that I will never dance like that over her dead body until she dies. And I never did. She was really attached to a story that was drilled into her through a lifetime of experiences of a binary gender. Men must, boys must be men and girls must be women and they have very, very specific roles that they play in society and in policies. And that's what she taught me, samajgi niyamhan, which basically means the rules in society.

• 35:19Speaker 02

  And these rules are really about our bodies and our identities. And that's how she kind of justified everything. And then again, it gets, the way each of us learns these biases is through social contact, the environments that we're in, whether it's built environments or virtual environments, our trusted spheres of influence, you know, education, what we learn in school, what we don't learn in school, a lot of misinformation there, and then media. Same for me, it was like, whoa, like it was just in front of me all this time.

• 35:49Chris Duffy?

  I wonder, for people who are listening right now, let's start with the people who are listening who are inclined towards this.

• 35:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:57Chris Duffy?

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• 37:52Chris Duffy?

  What can they do to create more of this kind of breaking of bias in the world and in themselves?

• 37:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think it's really, it's a beautiful question. And I feel like, for me, you know, systems don't change until people do. And people don't change until our consciousness does. So it's really about shifting our mindsets. And what I found really helpful is a contemplative practice. And it's really, again, taking the attention from external stimuli inward, to begin to notice our own bodies, to notice our minds, notice what's happening in our minds, how we're treating ourselves and others in our own, the intimacy of our homes. And I think folks for whom this resonates are those people. They're contemplatives, they're mystics, they feel like they're connected, not just to one another as humans, to themselves, but also with nature, with the living earth, with the elements.

• 38:42Speaker 02

  And they're living more holistically, you know, in their body, what I call neck down as well.

• 38:48Chris Duffy?

  What about people who, they hear what you're saying? And maybe, what do you say to the people who are like, I'm inclined against this? I feel strongly against this?

• 38:59Speaker 02

  Certainly for me, it's kind of finding a middle ground. So certainly, people who are craving this are going to be readers. So it's like the 20/60/20 rule. And then I'm really going after the 60% in the middle, who are indifferent, who are, who just don't know, but they can be persuaded. And for me, those of them who are more inclined to rational thinking, who like the sciences, I'm just extending an invitation. Hey, let's just try this, you know, be a scientist of your own experience. Try these tools, try doing loving kindness every day for a week toward yourself. See how you feel and then make a decision. Right now, I'm not inclined to go after the people that are opposed to this because, you know,

• 39:41Speaker 02

  I feel, again, being rooted in my own ancient lineages, that our goal right now is to really build critical mass. For me, I'm building critical mass to get to that tipping point. And once we've reached that tipping point, the people that are, you know, they're just don't find this appealing at all, or they're averse to it, they'll begin to notice things around them shifting. Their partners are acting a certain way, their kids are acting a certain way, their coworkers are acting a certain way, they're hearing different messages in their church. They're like, whoa, okay, there must be something to this. You think of them as like Luddites who like finally give in, right? People that were like, oh, I don't want a phone, but eventually they got a phone. Oh, I don't want to get any apps. Oh, eventually they got apps. And we're seeing this right now. I don't want to get on ChatGPT.

• 40:26Speaker 02

  And slowly, you know, they'll adopt on to it. Of course, there are people that will persist for the, until their last breath, which is okay, that's their choice. But for me, I think folks that are not willing to even try it are, I would just say that they're living from a very limited sense of who they are.

• 40:47Chris Duffy?

  Look, I know this sounds like the most patronizing, condescending thing I could possibly say, but, but I do genuinely feel like it makes me sad to think about it because often the people who are, who reject love and kindness the most are the ones who also need it the most.

• 41:05Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 41:06Chris Duffy?

  And so I think that the way you just framed it of if we create a world where

• 41:13Chris Duffy?

  Love and kindness are not rare luxury commodities.

• 41:17Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 41:17Chris Duffy?

  Where they are more common.

• 41:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:20Chris Duffy?

  Everyone benefits and even the people who are most, who believe themselves to be the most actively opposed to it will, will benefit as well and they'll see that slowly over time.

• 41:29Speaker 02

  Yeah. It's like I think about, there was this one time when I was teaching actually, and I used to call my students, dear ones, to what's up, dear? And one angsty teenager is like, I am not your dear, don't call me dear. I'm like, great, you don't feel like my dear right now and that's okay. You know, you're allowed to have your feelings, but to me, you'll always be dear, regardless of what you do.

• 41:50Chris Duffy?

  For me personally, unlearning some of these ideas about what is natural has been really helpful. I was interviewing a scientist who studies bonobos. And something that this scientist told me, she said, bonobos are a society run by females and the way that they solve conflict is by physical pleasure and connection. And chimpanzees have a society that is much more anger and violence based. We have always learned in school and in the West, we're told like chimpanzees are our closest relatives. And most people have really not heard about bonobos.

• 42:23Speaker 02

  Bonobos, yeah.

• 42:24Chris Duffy?

  And her point was like, the idea that that is natural, that to hurt people and cause pain is natural. It's actually no more natural than it is to cause pleasure and to have physical connection and to be inclusive. But there's the narrative and the cultural history of what we're told about that. And I just cannot stop thinking about that since I learned that. This idea that like, there's no reason why we wouldn't learn that it's actually just as natural to be a bonobo as to be a chimpanzee. I think that goes to some of the assumptions that I think come out through Prism.

• 42:54Speaker 02

  That's right. And you know, the science is showing that actually it's more natural to be compassionate, to be kind, to be forgiving. But again, we've been socialized to be averse to those emotions. And as a result, we block them in our own bodies, which is causing us anxiety, stress, you know, depression, suicidality, because we haven't been trained on how to really work with these emotions. And you know, one of the beautiful quotes that I love is, you know, nature permits, culture forbids. So our nature allows us to be in love with whomever we want. It allows us to try new things, but it's a culture that we build around it that forbids it. And these are the narratives of stories that we buy into that limit our own potential. So if you think about bias, it really operates at four levels, at the internal level, the interpersonal

• 43:39Speaker 02

  level, the institutional level, and then systemic levels. And this is our work for the century, to really break these biases.

• 43:47Chris Duffy?

  Well, Anu, thank you so much for being here. This was an absolute pleasure talking to you.

• 43:51Speaker 02

  Thank you. It's been an honor to be here.

• 43:55Chris Duffy?

  That is it for today's episode of How to Be a Better Human. Thank you so much to Anu Gupta. His book is called Breaking Bias. I am your host, Chris Duffy, and my new nonfiction book, Humor Me: How Laughing More Can Make You Present, Creative, Connected, and Happy, is out now. You can find out about me and the book at chrisduffycomedy.com. How to Be a Better Human is put together by a team of extremely kind and thoughtful people. On the TED side, we've got the full humanity of Daniela Balarezzo, Van Van Chang, Michelle Quint, Chloe Shasha-Brooks, Valentina Bohanini, Lainey Lott, Tansuka Sunmanivong, Antonio Lay, and Joseph DeBryne. This episode was fact-checked by Mateus Salas, who not only breaks bias, he also breaks misinformation. On the PRX side, we've got the Dalai Lamas of disk drives and microphones, Morgan Flannery,

• 44:38Chris Duffy?

  Norgil, Patrick Grant, and Jocelyn Gonzalez. Thanks to you, that's right, you, for listening. We really appreciate you so much. Without you, this would not be a podcast. Please share this episode with anyone you think would enjoy it, or anyone who desperately needs to hear it. We will be back next week with even more How to Be a Better Human. Until then, take care and thanks again.

• 45:05Chris Duffy?

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• 45:50Chris Duffy?

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• 46:35Speaker 05

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