Summer Fridays: How zombies, dragons, and superheroes could make you a better person (w/ Christopher Robichaud)

Roleplaying games and the Marvel universe may be fictional, but they can also teach us a lot about morality in the real world. Christopher Robichaud is a Lecturer in Ethics and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. In this episode, he shares ways we can explore important, everyday issues in fun, safe, and unexpected ways. Christopher has made a career out of teaching ethics and philosophy using pop culture, dissecting moral questions using anything from zombie apocalypse simulations to superhero narratives. He received his doctorate in philosophy from MIT. In 2015 he won the Innovation in Teaching Award at the Harvard Kennedy School for creating a day-long simulation--using design elements from old school tabletop roleplaying games like D&D--where policy students wielded their leadership skills and confronted ethical dilemmas to deal with a zombie pandemic. Vote for our show in the Signal Awards for Best Advice & How To https://vote.signalaward.com/PublicVoting#/2026/shows/genre/advice-how-to podcast! For the full text transcript, visit go.ted.com/BHTranscripts https://go.ted.com/BHTranscripts Fill out our survey at bit.ly/BHSurvey6 https://bit.ly/BHSurvey6 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Hi there, Better Human listeners. Really quick, before we get to our episode, you would be doing me a huge favor and really helping out our show if you could take a moment to fill out our listener survey at bit.ly/BHSurvey6. That's B-I-T dot L-Y slash B-H Survey 6. You can also find a link that you can just click directly on, which is in our show description. Wherever you're listening to this, look at the episode description and at the bottom, there's a link that you can click directly. Please tell us what is resonating with you, what you want more of, what you'd like to see changed, topics you would like to see covered. Your honest feedback means the world to us. It just takes a few seconds of your time, and it would really help us to improve the show and have future seasons be even better.

• 0:43Speaker 00

  Thank you. It means a lot to me and to the team that makes the show. Thanks for listening, and thanks for taking a few seconds to do the listener survey. Now, on to the episode. Hey, everyone. Thanks for listening to How to Be a Better Human. This summer, we're doing something special. We're calling it Better Human Summer Fridays, and every Friday this summer, we are going to be dropping a special episode on the feed, pulled straight from the How to Be a Better Human archive. These are conversations that I loved and that our team loved, and we think a lot of you may have never heard, and we think they deserve another moment in the sun. So we're giving them that literal moment in the sun here in the summertime. This show has grown a lot over the years, so this is our way of making sure that if you've found us recently, you're not missing out on one of the conversations that I am still thinking about, sometimes years later. And if you are a day one Better Human listener, well, first of all,

• 1:28Speaker 00

  thank you. Thanks for listening for all these years, and I hope that you will enjoy this trip back into our archive, back into some of the best conversations that we've had in the past. So let's get into it. Here's Better Human Summer Fridays. You are listening to How to Be a Better Human. I'm your host, Chris Duffy. Okay, so our show is called How to Be a Better Human. So one question that I've tried to ask every person that I've gotten to interview for this show is, what's something that's made you a better human? And the answers that I've gotten from them have been very varied, from a person in their life, to an idea, to a book, to a movie, to all sorts of other possibilities.

• 2:08Speaker 00

  Here is how today's guest, philosophy professor Christopher Robisho, here's how he answered.

• 2:14Speaker 01

  Oh, that's a, that's a really great question. Uh, I'm gonna say Dungeons and Dragons, which I don't know if you get a lot on this show, but the reason I'm gonna say this is because from a very early age Dungeons and Dragons socialized me. It socialized me and taught me how to, how to develop good friendships. It taught me how to play. It taught me how to imagine. It taught me how to take up different perspectives. It taught me how to problem solve. It taught me how to read in a lot of ways, and it taught me how to deal with uncertainty and to, and to deal with the consequences of my decision. And all of that was while having a blast and fighting trolls and dragons and all the rest of it. And so I think Dungeons and Dragons means different thing for a bit different people, but for me, it was an arena in which I developed certain traits that I've leaned on my entire life. So Dungeons and Dragons, playing Dungeons

• 2:58Speaker 01

  and Dragons with good friends has, has made me a better person.

• 3:01Speaker 00

  Christopher has taken that idea and that passion, and he's made a career out of teaching others ethics and philosophy using D and D and pop culture. He picks apart thorny moral questions using everything from zombie apocalypse simulations to superhero narratives. And what I find so fun and engaging about Christopher's work is that he is dealing with really big, important questions, the ways in which ethics intersects with our everyday lives, no matter who you are. But he's able to make those tough concepts accessible in this very unexpected way. So today on the show, we are gonna be talking zombies. We are gonna be talking superheroes, and we are gonna be talking about how we can learn lasting life lessons through play and imagination.

• 3:44Speaker 00

  And we're gonna get on that trolley in just a moment, but first, a quick ad break.

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• 4:32Speaker 00

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• 5:20Speaker 00

  And we are back with zombie expert and moral philosopher Christopher Robisho.

• 5:25Speaker 01

  Hello, my name is Christopher Robisho. I'm a senior lecturer in Ethics and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.

• 5:30Speaker 00

  What is ethics?

• 5:32Speaker 01

  That's the basic most question.

• 5:35Speaker 00

  Hey, I know people spend their whole careers studying this exact question, but if someone's listening, hasn't, isn't really familiar with the term.

• 5:43Speaker 01

  Professionally, the study of ethics really looks at the way that thinkers across time and in the space have really wrestled with questions surrounding, how ought we live our lives? What's the right thing to do or the wrong thing to do? What does the good life look like? And I've tried to come up with answers to those questions, leaning on religious tradition, leaning on their own, their own rational faculties, just trying to argue and argue in the best of ways. Think about what we ought to do, what our obligations are. All of us during the course of our lives are trained in thinking about ethics from a very young age, at least I hope so. But at the professional level, what we try to do, at least what I try to do, is to look at all those, those spaces in which it's not exactly obvious what the right or wrong course

• 6:28Speaker 01

  of action is, where reasonable people can end up reasonably disagreeing about what ought to be done or what our obligations are.

• 6:35Speaker 00

  You know, it's funny, obviously, I just asked you, why is it important to teach ethics? But there's something, it's so fundamental to what it means to have a functioning society and what it means to be a good person, that there's something very funny to me about the idea that ethics is a, an elective course that students choose to take.

• 6:53Speaker 01

  I really want to emphasize here, I think, I think ethics at an adult level is not like a list of, it's not a laundry list. Here are the right things to do. Here are the wrong things to do. It's not a recipe. It's more an invitation to really think about, what are my values? What are my principles? What are other people's values and principles? And how do I settle on these, these hard questions where it's not, it's not obvious what to do? Right now, we are still dealing with a global pandemic. And so one of the issues that has arisen over the course of the past year has been this conversation around, what is it reasonable to ask people to do in terms of curtailing their liberties for the sake of public health? So here we have two things that we really value, public health and individual liberty. And it turns out that

• 7:34Speaker 01

  we can't have as much public health as we want and as much individual liberty as we want.

• 7:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's, it's so practical. It just, it really, again, highlights that this is not just a hypothetical that is for studying in a college course. It's something that we have to live with every single day and ask ourselves.

• 7:50Speaker 01

  And even the hypotheticals end up turning into real life scenarios. So philosophers, at least trained in the kind of thinking that I'm, that I've done, talked for many years about these trolley problems, and this shows up in, in television as well. You know, here's a runaway trolley. It's about to go over, you know, five people, but you can pull a lever and put it on a track, and it only runs over one person rather than five. Do you let it kill the five, or do you put it on the other track? This was entirely a hypothetical scenario, and many people for many years were like, okay, this is interesting, whatever I come up with, but this is never gonna happen. And then folks like Google started designing cars that are gonna drive themselves, and Tesla. And pretty soon, a lot of ethicists are being hired by these companies to be like, all right, well, what is the answer? Of course.

• 8:34Speaker 00

  We need an answer now, because the trolley is on the runway now.

• 8:37Speaker 01

  That's exactly right. So that's not gonna be the case in every hypothetical, but it does turn out sometimes that the hypotheticals end up bleeding into real life.

• 8:44Speaker 00

  I mean, this is probably going down, opening a whole can of worms, but I have to do it just because I'm curious. When you think about the trolley problem, do you pull the lever or not?

• 8:53Speaker 01

  I do, at least in the first case that I gave you. You know, it's gonna run over five people. You can put on track and, and have it kill one. And then, you know, you come up with scenario number two. Famously, you know, you're on a bridge, overlooking a bridge, trolley's about to run over five people. There's, there's a large person next to you, really tough and big. You can push them over onto the track and kills that person and saves five. What you get from a lot of people is, well, I'll pull the lever. Most people will say they'll pull lever, not all, but most. And then most people will then say, yeah, but I'm not gonna push the guy. I'm not gonna do that. So then you have to step back and ask, well, what's the difference between those? And I gave you that example because I myself am regularly challenged with, you know, here's my gut reaction, but I can't just stop with my gut reaction. I have to think about it. Like, what might be the differences here? What am I trying to track when I react

• 9:38Speaker 01

  differently to these different cases? That, to me, is where philosophy, good ethical reasoning starts. When you're, when you're presented with a challenge, even of yourself, like, I don't know how to make sense of myself here. I better do some thinking, and maybe I have to revise my beliefs. The importance of curiosity as a virtue, I can't emphasize enough. We should be curious towards others and how they think. We should equally be curious towards ourselves. And so looking inward at ourselves, not just to do important psychological work, but important philosophical work as well. Why do I think this? Should I be thinking this? Am I willing to follow an argument to a conclusion that, that I might find, you know, uncomfortable?

• 10:14Speaker 00

  So how do you, though, in your day to day life, and obviously you are an ethics professor and a philosopher, but there are so many decisions that we make in each day. Certainly, we can't hold all of them up to this high level of scrutiny. So how do you even decide which decisions you're gonna scrutinize and which you aren't?

• 10:31Speaker 01

  So what I do, and this introduces something that we really haven't, haven't talked about yet, is I think that self-examination is really important. It can be exhausting. We all have lives. But sometimes it can be fun. And so I try to find spaces in which this examination is entertaining as well. So you sort of get entertained as you're doing this. And this is what I referring to is when I'm talking about pop culture. So I spent a lot of my time thinking about the moral lessons that we can extract from pop culture entertainment. One of my areas of focus is superhero stories. I wish there were just more superhero stories to interrogate. I think we're really, we're really lacking some good, I'm joking, by the way. I mean, I just finished, I just finished watching the buff and the, and the winter soldier. And I'm, I'm delighted with it and I won't give any spoilers away.

• 11:16Speaker 01

  But the point is we're, I'm a superhero geek. I've been reading the comics forever and watching television shows and movies. And there's just a sure fit of like superhero stories out there. So I will often look at them and while I'm being entertained, also ask myself questions like, what do I think about what the characters did here? Like, what's a different way to think about that? What are the ethics involved? That's a great way to train oneself to do this in a way that's, that's fun as well. Ethics is all around us. It's in the air that we breathe. Using popular entertainment as a way in, I find invaluable.

• 11:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's, it's so interesting to see in real life, we still have this version of the story that we want to tell about our society versus the practical part, right? Like the very beginning of the pandemic, the narrative, I feel like you, we kept hearing was we're all in this together. It affects everyone the same. And yet, of course, that wasn't true. That was never true because there's nothing in healthcare or in income or in, you know, a safety net that affects people equally in this country. And so many people wanted to believe that and then were forced to confront the reality that it actually was not the case. And, and like you said, that, that can also hypothetically, in a best case scenario,

• 12:29Speaker 00

  offer the possibility of addressing that and changing it. So it's not that way. You use pop culture to have people think about these big issues. Can you tell us about this moral simulation that you designed that uses the zombie apocalypse?

• 12:44Speaker 01

  Sure. So in this, in this simulation, individuals come together and they, they create a fictional country. And as they're creating this fictional country, they have to make some decisions like, is this a democracy? Right? Is it a monarchy? Is it something in between? You know, they make all these decisions. What are the values that the country stands for, et cetera, et cetera? So there's some buy-in early on about like, here we are, we're going to be working with this country rather than handing them one that already exists. They build it. So there's some commitment like what is, what is, what is this thing that we're going to be navigating through? And then they're put, put into roles of high ranking representatives, having to advise the leader of their country some really, really tough decisions about how to manage an unfolding zombie pandemic. The zombie part is fun, but still models real world pandemics in some eerie, in some eerie ways.

• 13:27Speaker 01

  The point of it is to give people a shared experience of what it is to have to make some very, very hard moral decisions. And then on the other side of it, to step back and to debrief it and to talk about, how did that group function? How did you work through those decisions? How did you absorb the consequences of that? And then to take those lessons and start and bring it back away from zombies into real life for those sorts of situations in which we do have to make high pressure ethical decisions. Maybe not, nothing, you know, with the fate of the world on the balance, but certainly all of us throughout the course of our professional lives that sometimes face really serious, you know, moral questions, both for ourselves and for others. And to give, give people a fun space in which to make those decisions, but then to take that learning and to apply it to their, their, their real lives.

• 14:10Speaker 01

  So the, the philosophy behind it is you can have fun and do serious work in moral reasoning at the same time. And that's one of the reasons why I did this. The other, which I'll just mention quickly is over the years, teaching a lot of ethics cases in a, in a policy school. And this is, this is not a criticism. I think this is quite understandable. When people read a case of other individuals, you know, having to make hard moral trade offs, they often will read them and say, oh, well, if I were in that situation, I would have done it completely differently. I would never have made these mistakes. To me, as, as lifelong Dungeons and Dragons player and just a role player, I'm like, all right, well, I, I can build something where you can make those decisions yourself. So let's see what decisions you actually end up making and, and then we'll, we'll start the learning there.

• 14:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's so true. It's so easy to be on a high horse judging someone. And then when you're in the scenario yourself, all of a sudden it's not so simple. I think that's sometimes where, you know, sometimes you read the, the Darwin awards of the people who died in the dumbest way each year. And then, you know, I'll be tying my shoes next to a stairwell and be like, wow, this is not safe. I'm really close to being one of those on that list. So part of the way that you were inspired to come up with this zombie scenario to get people interested in ethics, if I understand correctly, was through your past with Dungeons and Dragons. How did you first get interested in Dungeons and Dragons?

• 15:30Speaker 01

  I would love, I actually I wouldn't love, but it's not just the past.

• 15:34Speaker 00

  Okay. Yes, yes, yes. Of course. I meant the, the beginning of the relationship, not the end of the relationship.

• 15:39Speaker 01

  I am, I'm just so delighted that Dungeons and Dragons has, there's been a renaissance in Dungeons and Dragons now. We're even going to get more movies. Oh my goodness. But my story to Dungeons and Dragons is I'm basically the Stranger Things generation. That's how I describe it. If you look at those kids in Stranger Things, I was one of those kids, almost exactly their age. So that, that helps situate for folks who may not be of Gen X in that, that time. That's exactly where I was. And for me, you know, my uncle gave me the red box, the basic edition of Dungeons and Dragons way back in the day. I must've been 10 or 11 at the time. And that hooked me, just, you know, opened it up. And it was this whole promise that, you know, you can, you can participate in these adventures. You don't still have to read about them anymore.

• 16:21Speaker 01

  And this idea, this really attractive idea that a pencil, some paper, a dice in your imagination can go on forever. There's, there's no, there's no end to it. There's no board in Dungeons and Dragons when you reach the edge of the board. The story just goes on. It's one of the inside jokes for people who don't know about Dungeons and Dragons, always ask you who won? And then it's just, that's not, that's not the sort of game. It's, it's a game in which you just, you know, you play to keep on playing. And that, that to me was fertile territory for thinking about how to use some of those insights. Because in good Dungeons and Dragons games, and we see this now with Critical Role and others, you, you see people, I mean, they're playing other personalities, of course, but you see them wrestling with hard decisions, having to make trade offs, rolling dice to find out what happened, dealing with those consequences. It's a fictional arena.

• 17:05Speaker 01

  It's tons of fun, but, but the seeds are there for designing simulations for which you can extract some really important learn.

• 17:11Speaker 00

  It's so funny because I feel like my version of Dungeons and Dragons is improv, which is its own like, let's play in a make believe world and let's make things up together. And, uh, you know, one of the core things of improv comedy is to agree with the other person, then build on it. And so I often feel like, oh, this is how I kind of wish the world worked. Is that like every time someone said something, instead of rejecting them, you were like, I see that. I accept that and let me take that and grow it. And yet, let me be very clear. It is absolutely as nerdy, if not more than Dungeons and Dragons. Because this is just like, hey, we're grown adults pretending and being like, I'm in space. Yes, I am in space. It's, it is fully in this exact same world. Well, I think that a lot of times people don't realize

• 17:56Speaker 00

  in this, in the way that I think is so interesting about you and, and so fascinating about your talk and, and your podcast is, I think sometimes people don't realize that these games and the movies and the things that we consume are fun. They also inform the way that we think about the world and the way that we think about possible choices. And just the way in which we see the range of possibilities. How do you get people to start to see that they are in that world? That, that the things that they take in are affecting them and affecting their moral judgment?

• 18:29Speaker 01

  It takes very little effort, which is, which is good. A, a short conversation can do it. Partly it's just, you know, inviting people to see that many of the stories that we're consuming and enjoy are already reflecting some of our concerns, our anxieties. You know, speaking to, you know, the idea of polarization in this country. A few years ago in 2016, there was, there's ongoing polarization, but this is, this is when we were really starting to talk about it. While at the same time, two of the tent pole movies that were coming out was Marvel Civil War and Batman versus Superman. And here are two stories which now, I mean, I don't think that writers sat around and said like, let's, let's write a story about polarization. But I also don't think it's entirely accidental that two of the tent pole movies around the same time

• 19:14Speaker 01

  were about our heroes fighting each other. So who, who, who, who are the heroes fighting in this one? Themselves, they're tearing each other apart. We saw that in two different ways. I don't think it's an accident that movies like Marvel Civil War have in the backdrop, this question of, well, should, should people who are very powerful nevertheless, you know, acquiesce to some outside authority to tell them how to use it? Or should we just trust our own, our own guts and our own virtue and our own insights? That's a, that's a deep question that a lot of us think about in many, many places. So I, I mean, I point to that as just one example of many where, you know, these are larger than life stories with larger than life stakes. But behind them. Our ideas that I think many of us do think are quite relevant to what we're wrestling with

• 19:59Speaker 01

  as a community, what we're wrestling with as a public, what we're wrestling with in our in our own lives as well. And just to just to follow up on this, I think that Marvel in particulars is starting to do a really good job showing us that villains end up being villains, not because of their their goals, but because of the means to their goal. So they're starting to give us some villains who, you know, you can agree with, you know, you can agree with their sort of righteousness of their cause, but sort of a disaster in terms of the way that they pursue it. That's very real for all of us. I think that many of us think that if our goals are pristine enough, then anything that we do to get there is just fine. That's not what storytelling is telling us. And I would say that ethics should should remind us of that as well.

• 20:35Speaker 00

  Well, first of all, I think that's really powerful. And it does, it makes me see the Marvel movies in a different light, even though I knew we were going to be talking about this, even now I'm seeing them in a different light. And also, just as a person who, you know, I am a TV writer, I write and I work on this kind of stuff. I do think that it's impossible to divorce the art that you make from the context that you make it in. It informs it, whether you push against it or embrace it, it informs it.

• 21:01Speaker 01

  I think that the reason that the Marvel movies took off around 2000, 2001, so this was 2001, obviously, a very, very heavy time for for us Americans. The movie that came out directly after that was Spider-Man, the first Sam Raimi Spider-Man movie. So and that is, it's a fun superhero movie. I mean, Spider-Man's fun. I love Spider-Man. It's my favorite, my favorite superhero. Early on, you get these movies Spider-Man, and it's a, it's a lighthearted movie. It's, it's, to speak to your point, I think that it's not accidental that it emerges at a time when we needed something, we needed heroes, and we need something to bring us together, and we needed something to help our morale. And Spider-Man, that movie just took off. And of course, there were many, many films after that. By

• 21:41Speaker 01

  the time we get to 2008, 2008, we started doing some self-reflection. We started asking, all right, what is, you know, we started, what would appear to be a never ending war on on terrorism? And, you know, we took some, some licks in terms of what we were able to accomplish. By 2008, we're starting to reflect more. That's when you get grittier movies like The Dark Knight, which is unapologetic. To me, it's the best superhero movie of all times. It's really, you know, dares to look at like our relationship with with power and with surveillance with all the rest of it. And even Iron Man, Iron Man is such a fun movie, but Iron Man is also a very complicated character. Tony Stark is not a great guy. He's personally morally problematic. And, you know, he deals with, he's head of a company that's morally problematic. And so I think I I'm just agreeing with you in the sense

• 22:26Speaker 01

  that it took us some time to get to the point where we were ready for those stories, but they came.

• 22:32Speaker 00

  Do you get into more arguments in your life by saying your true, genuine political beliefs, or by saying that you think The Dark Knight is the greatest superhero movie of all time definitively?

• 22:45Speaker 01

  That's such a funny question. No, because we all know that The Dark Knight is the greatest superhero movie of all time.

• 22:49Speaker 00

  Okay, wow. People are gonna come for you if they disagree.

• 22:53Speaker 01

  I, that one, believe it or not, I mean, there's always someone that disagrees. But, um, no, certainly my own political views are, are one, which, and one political view to tie together with comic books is my complete incredulity at the criticism that is sometimes leveled against superhero stories, that they're, they're bringing politics into into superhero stories. So this is where I will voice a strong opinion, which is, of course, superhero stories are bringing politics into them. They've always brought politics into them. From, from the, you know, inception of Superman, Superman's earliest adventures was fighting against domestic violence. I mean, Wonder Woman is wrapped in the Stars and Stripes. Captain America's conception of Captain America, number one, has him punching Hitler in the

• 23:38Speaker 01

  face, and on and on. And so, you know, to me, you may not agree with the politics of any one, you know, storyline. That's fine. We're allowed to disagree. You know, the idea that superhero stories aren't political shows a resistance. Let me put it to you this way, resistance to what's actually happening in these stories from from the get go. And I'll just conclude by saying I've recently been revisiting Superman's fighting of the Ku Klux Klan. I mean, Superman takes on the KKK. He wins, of course, because he's Superman. Black Panther did as well. This has always been going on. Nothing, nothing is new in contemporary attempts to turn some political questions into questions that superhero stories address.

• 24:19Speaker 00

  Which superhero do you think would be most likely to fall into online conspiracy theories and be posting some really disturbing things on Facebook?

• 24:27Speaker 01

  Well, he's not a superhero, but I have to lean on Rorschach from Watchmen, because Rorschach.

• 24:31Speaker 00

  Oh, that feels right. Yeah.

• 24:32Speaker 01

  More, more, but to me, Rorschach, I just can't, can't resist the idea that Rorschach would be the one creating some of those conspiracy theories.

• 24:42Speaker 00

  Hmm. Okay. Well, we are going to take a quick break, and we will be back with more in just a moment.

• 24:54Speaker 00

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• 27:07Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Planet Visionaries, a podcast in partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative. Planet Visionaries is the podcast celebrating the people creating practical, hopeful solutions for our planet's urgent conservation challenges. Season six launches this fall with bold, real solutions. Hear from Anna Rathman of the Jane Goodall Institute on protecting wildlife, Tom Pachak on his epic 396 day journey documenting the entire Amazon, and Lydia Oshie, a Guatemalan leader opening doors for indigenous girls to access global education. Hosted by legendary climber and advocate Alex Honnold, each episode goes beyond the headlines to show what's actually

• 27:48Speaker 00

  working and who's making it happen. In partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, this is Planet Visionaries. Listen or watch wherever you get your podcasts.

• 28:01Speaker 00

  And we are back. We're talking with Christopher Robichaud about how he has used lessons from his years playing Dungeons and Dragons in his work teaching ethics. Here's a clip from his talk where he's discussing when he was a kid, and he heard all the adults in his town worrying about what they saw as the moral dangers of D and D.

• 28:18Speaker 03

  All right. So at that moment, I stood up and said that I would devote my life to showing the goodness that Dungeons and Dragons brings into the world. That's absolutely not true, right? I mean, that's what was going on my head at the moment, but I was still really young and completely intimidated. But it turns out that I found myself decades later in a profession where I could demonstrate that this game gives us some interesting insights that can help us make people better moral agents. And that's what I want to turn to now. And my, my job is to help teach ethics in an impactful, meaningful way for professionals, to find ways to make ethics sticky. And so, um, common ethics pedagogy, when you take a look at it, is mostly some back and forth between, between theory and cases. So some

• 29:04Speaker 03

  courses lean pretty heavily on theory. You know, we're going to go through it all. We're going to go through consequentialism, deontology, John Rawls and so forth, and maybe just do a little bit of dabbling with cases. Others lean in hard on cases. Let's look at protagonists in these situations and seeing what they're doing. But it's typically this back and forth. However, I recognize that there was much merit in the movement to add more experiential learning into the classroom. Experiential learning, not just being generally active learning. I think classrooms and ethics can have active learning when you just have people, you know, engaging the Socratic method, back and forth, talking to each other in small groups about what's going on. But experiential learning, the kinds of things that you get with simulations. And so, you know, I wanted to add simulations into this cycle, where

• 29:48Speaker 03

  you can have students engage in some kind of an activity that's not just analyzing a case, or not just, you know, consuming theory, and come out of that with some really, really interesting insights about their own moral character and about how they want to navigate the world. I wanted to put students into situations where they got, we got to test that. We got to see, well, what, what would you actually do in some of these things without really putting them into a situation where there's high stakes ethics in play. So what I ended up doing is stepping back and thinking about some of the general design principles from Dungeons and Dragons, because it turns out that in a lot of Dungeons and Dragons gameplay, you end up thinking about ethical issues. You, you end up doing things that I thought would be extraordinarily useful to bring into the classroom.

• 30:31Speaker 00

  And, you know, bringing that into the classroom, Christopher, like you were just saying in that clip, that's kind of exactly what you've done. So in your talk, you say that playing and learning are complementary. I'd love to have you expand a little bit more on what you mean by that.

• 30:45Speaker 01

  What I mean is that Our parents and our elementary schools teachers knew this and we knew it when we were growing up. And then somehow we forgot it. Somehow, I think along the way, we decided that if it's serious learning, it can't, it can't involve play. And I don't, I don't know who, who decided that. Certainly, I don't think it all has to involve play. I mean, I, there's some serious learning that just has to happen on its own. But we are imaginative creatures. I mean, you're, you're in television. We don't, we don't stop imagining when we get older. As much as I love reason and, and, and argumentation from a philosophical standpoint, that's not always, or even most of the time, the way that we navigate the world. We navigate it through metaphor, through analogy, through allegory, through fiction. There's a reason why we learned so many moral lessons from stories. We can't, we can't

• 31:30Speaker 01

  forget that as adults.

• 31:31Speaker 00

  I was gonna ask you this question as how can parents integrate this and trying to have these conversations with their kids. But actually, how can we just use this with our friends, with our family, with, with anyone that we were talking about? How can we take this and implement it in our own lives?

• 31:46Speaker 01

  So, one of my favorite moments of the most recent Spider-Man movie, I'm gonna pick Spider-Man again, because he's, he's, he's my, my guy.

• 31:53Speaker 00

  He's your favorite?

• 31:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. And Spider-Man Homecoming, I hope I'm not spoiling this for folks. I mean, it's been around for a while now, so I'm just gonna say it. But there's this moment towards the end where the vulture played by Michael, Michael Keaton, who I love this character. I loved what he did. He temporarily best Spider-Man. He outsmarts him and he collapses a, a building on Spider-Man. Our Peter Parker is like crushed under all this weight. His face is in a puddle. And he's trying to push up and he, he can't. And he panics and he cries out. He's like, help, help, help. And he's like, come on. And then you see him and you see his reflection in the puddle. And half of him is Peter Parker and half of him is Spider-Man. His mask is torn off. And he starts pushing. He's like, come on, Peter, come on, Peter. And then that quickly transitions to, come on, Spider-Man, come

• 32:36Speaker 01

  on, Spider-Man. And as he's saying, come on, Spider-Man, like he starts to lift, you know, to lift the, the, the building and he, and he escapes. Why am I sharing this story? First of all, I just love it. I think it's very, very powerful. But the point is, what, what happened to the character Peter Parker in that moment is he found his inner power. He found the source of his power. And it, it was just the belief that he can do this. That was the change from Peter Parker to Spider-Man. So sometimes I'll just say, especially with parents with their children, take that and run with it. Cultivate for your children a space in which they feel comfortable exploring where their power is, and then helping them bring it out. Because we all have it and we all need it. Because, you know, children and adults are often crushed. We're often crushed under the weight of the world and

• 33:20Speaker 01

  the weight of our circumstances. But we can, we, we should help each other too. Let's not make this entirely individualistic. But we sometimes need to do some of these things on our own. We just know that.

• 33:29Speaker 00

  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 N R D

• 34:11Speaker 00

  C dot org slash human, and your gift will be matched five times.

• 34:16Speaker 04

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• 35:14Speaker 00

  This episode is sponsored by Kohler Smart Toilets. The objects we interact with most are often the ones we notice least. Kohler Smart Toilet challenges that assumption. What if the most overlooked space in your home could become the most considered? Their Vale Smart Toilet is a sculptural silhouette that isn't just intentional. It's a philosophy that design changes everything. The Kohler Vale Smart Toilet is sleek, with a rounded shape that's more like architecture than just plumbing. And it goes beyond looks. The touchscreen controls and customizable cleansing features offer a level of comfort and cleanliness

• 35:54Speaker 00

  that exceed expectations. It's all about elevating those ordinary daily rituals into something extraordinary through thoughtful design. Kohler has been pushing these boundaries for over 150 years, mastering that balance of stunning form and high-performance function. That's a long time to get it right, and it shows in every detail. Experience the difference of Kohler Smart Toilets. Find out more at Kohler.com. So I'm totally bought in on everything you've said. You've convinced me. But, but what if you're someone who just is really averse to sci-fi and fantasy and superheroes?

• 36:39Speaker 00

  How can you still make use of these great lessons?

• 36:41Speaker 01

  To me, it's a, it's a wonderful question. And I do think it's important to emphasize that you don't have to be on board with some of the, the more geeky stuff. The thing you need, do need to be on board with is the role of the arts in helping us think. So if it's, if it's not going to be popular culture, have it be what some people call, I'm a little bit, I, I always shiver a little bit with this, but highbrow culture, you know, have, have it be, have it be Shakespeare. Fine. Have it be, read Thomas Mann. I mean, you know, do what thou wilt when it comes to like engaging these stories that you think are important. Read through the, the classic mythologies across the world, not just the Greek mythologies. But don't abandon the idea that the arts can't help us reflect in a different way about matters that, that are really important to us. So maybe it's

• 37:25Speaker 01

  music that's more, more the arena. Maybe it's, maybe it's theater. Maybe it's highbrow literature. But whatever it is, find the space to, to do that. And if someone says, well, I don't believe in any of that, then I don't know what to say, except give it a shot and, and you might surprise yourself.

• 37:41Speaker 00

  Popular culture right now, there's been a lot more focus on moral philosophy and ethics being more explicitly tied in. Why do you think that is, that all of a sudden people are looking to moral philosophy more explicitly?

• 37:53Speaker 01

  I think we all crave it. And here I'm, I'm being speculative. I think that, thank goodness, we're evolving into a culture that is more comfortable. I mean, gradually being more vulnerable, more open, more accepting of emotions. And that, that provides fertile terrain for starting to be more comfortable talking with ourselves about our ethical beliefs as well. I also think that we're recognizing that we are hyperpolarizing. And if we don't spend some time in spaces that aren't, you know, entirely within our own homes, talking to other people about their values, we're gonna just stop talking altogether. We're just gonna end up yelling at each other on Twitter or something like that. And, you know, I, I'm not a person that thinks that if we all just, you know, held hands and shook hands and smiled, the world's gonna be a better place. It's hard. I mean, some people's

• 38:36Speaker 01

  values are repugnant and we're never gonna see eye to eye on some things. But I am an old school believer in the democratic liberal project. Liberal, I'm not using in a conservative versus liberal. I'm talking about like, the use of reason and conversation and discussion as a means of coming together as a community to face the challenges that we all face together, even if we're not gonna see eye to eye on it. If I have to abandon that, I, I don't know what to do. And I hope others are willing to at least keep that practice up. So to me, sometimes coming together over superhero story to work out some of our differences is just a, a safer and more productive way to do it than if we just started off with, so are you team Trump or are you team Biden? You're not gonna get anywhere there. But

• 39:18Speaker 01

  you can get somewhere with, are you team Iron Man or team Captain America? And, and that can sometimes lead, lead to a conversation that can be very productive.

• 39:26Speaker 00

  It also seems like now, because of technological advances, we are more able to see the consequences of an individual action. So like you said, right, the trolley problem is no longer a hypothetical problem, because we can see how one person programming the software that makes the decisions in a self-driving vehicle has huge impacts on the actual, actual trolley problem in real life. Or I think with like, with police violence, we can see how because of, you know, cameras and video being everywhere now, the actual effects of police violence are no longer just anecdotal. We, there's video, there's photos, there's the stories

• 40:07Speaker 00

  that are, you know, shown. It feels like now people are starting to see that these decisions, and this kind of circling back to something you said at the beginning, but that moral philosophy and that ethics, they're not hypothetical. They're practical and they have huge rippling impacts throughout our society, what each individual person chooses to do.

• 40:27Speaker 01

  Yes. We can't escape it. For, for better or worse, as you say, it's in our face all the time. We are a more open society. You have to go out of your way to be closed down.

• 40:36Speaker 00

  Okay. So I, I know we're coming right to the end of our time here. And I still have so many things I want to ask you. I, I will just never get to all of them. So we always ask our guests, what is one way in which you personally are trying to be a better human right now?

• 40:50Speaker 01

  Ah, I'm trying to be a better human right now by practicing forgiveness of myself and others during this time. And by that, I just mean that we are all in such extraordinary circumstances that sometimes easy to forget how extraordinary these circumstances are. When I came back to my home here during the pandemic, I had a list of all these amazing things that I was gonna do during this, you know, this time off. I haven't done any of them. And I know a lot of my friends and colleagues and students are all dealing with their own personal struggles. But I think that just giving ourselves a little bit of space to forgive each other for, you know, the failings that we've had during this time and elsewhere. But there's a grace to that, that I think is really, really important. I'm not always good at it. I'm an impatient person. I'm impatient with myself, first

• 41:34Speaker 01

  and foremost, and I'm impatient with others. So forgiveness and the, the grace that I hope to, to have in doing that is really, really something that I'm working on. And it's a work in progress.

• 41:45Speaker 00

  Beautiful answer. It has been so much fun to talk to you. And you've also given me so much to think about and, and helped me to see movies and culture in a new way, which I'm really excited about. So thank you so much for being on the show. It's been an absolute pleasure.

• 41:56Speaker 01

  Oh, thanks so much for having me. This was awesome. Thank you.

• 42:04Speaker 00

  That is it for today's episode. This has been How to Be a Better Human. I am your host, Chris Duffy. Thank you so much to our guest, Christopher Robishow, for being on the podcast. On the TED side, this show is produced by Dungeon Master Abi Manu Das, 15th Level Paladin Daniela Bolarezzo, undead zombie Frederica Elizabeth Yosevoff, and trolley operator Kara Newman. And from PRX Productions, How to Be a Better Human is brought to you by reformed supervillain Jocelyn Gonzalez and current Wonder Woman Sandra Lopez Mansalve. Thank you for listening, and please, make good choices. We'll be back with a new episode for you next week.

• 42:47Speaker 00

  This episode is sponsored by Kohler Smart Toilets. The objects we interact with most are often the ones we notice least. Kohler Smart Toilet challenges that assumption. What if the most overlooked space in your home could become the most considered? Their Vale Smart Toilet is a sculptural silhouette that isn't just intentional, it's a philosophy that design changes everything. The Kohler Vale Smart Toilet is sleek, with a rounded shape that's more like architecture than just plumbing. And it goes beyond looks. The touchscreen controls and customizable cleansing features offer a level of comfort and cleanliness that

• 43:25Speaker 00

  exceed expectations. It's all about elevating those ordinary daily rituals into something extraordinary through thoughtful design. Kohler has been pushing these boundaries for over 150 years, mastering that balance of stunning form and high-performance function. That's a long time to get it right, and it shows in every detail. Experience the difference of Kohler Smart Toilets. Find out more at kohler.com.

• 44:00Speaker 05

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• 44:23Speaker 06

  Hi there. It's Adam Grant from TED's Rethinking Podcast, and this episode is brought to you by ServiceNow. I get to spend my days studying how people think and what it actually takes to change our minds. It's work I find deeply meaningful. But even in meaningful work, there's still busy work. The admin, the repetitive processes, the invisible load that pulls attention away from what really matters. That's where ServiceNow's AI specialists come in. They don't just tell you what you should do about your busy work, they actually do it. Start to finish, cases closed, requests handled, no extra work for you. To learn how to put AI to work for people, visit servicenow.com.

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