How To Make Ethical Decisions

Quinn: [00:00:00] Has there ever been a more important time, a more consequential time, to lead with ethics? That's today's big question, and my guest is Dr. Susan Liautaud. Susan is the author of The Power of Ethics and of the Little Book of Big Ethical Questions. She teaches cutting edge ethics courses at Stanford University.

She also serves on so many boards. She is the Chair of the Council Trustees at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She's the Vice Chair of the Global Partnership for Education, and is Chair of the Stanford University Freeman's Spogli Institute for International Studies Advisory Council.

She also serves with the Stanford Institute for Human Centered Artificial Intelligence, which is obviously really important, and the AI Ethics Advisory Panel. Other boards include Benevolent AI, the Yale Divinity School Advisory Council, the Carnegie [00:01:00] Endowment for International Peace, among many others.

Her work and her frameworks reverberate through so many decision making apparatuses today. And that is important. It's important to me. I have been trying to learn from and operate from Susan's work personally and in this work for a long time. And that is because it's easy to feel incapable or not skilled enough or not practiced enough in this moment of big decisions.

This moment, which is in some respects the culmination of so many decisions we made before or were made before us that got us here. The intersection of technology and society and personal impact where a, yes, a better, healthier, cleaner future, however imperfect, is within our hands, but it'll require each of us to adopt and then practice a framework to consider who we want to be and who we see ourselves as, [00:02:00] but then what that means in practice in each situation, on a day to day level, and when we're faced with the big stuff.

One that interrogates the information available to us, that honestly asks who could be affected by our decisions, including ourselves and others, and what would it be like to be affected by this decision. And of course, the other implications of our decisions now, and way, way down the line.

Welcome to Important Not Important.

My name is Quinn Emmett and this is science for people who give a shit. In these weekly conversations, like my one with Susan, I take a deep dive with an incredible human who's working on the front lines of the future to build a radically better today and tomorrow for everyone. And along the way, you're going to discover some tips, strategies, and stories you can use to get involved, to become more ethically effective for yourself, your family, your city, your company, and our world.

And my conversation with Susan, I think goes a long way towards [00:03:00] unlocking some frameworks you can use for yourself, for your family, and as this world keeps changing so rapidly around us.

Susan Liautaud, welcome to the show. And thanks for being here today. I appreciate it.

Susan Liautaud: Oh, it's definitely my honor and pleasure to be here.

Quinn: Oh, you're very kind. I know you've got a million things going on. It's election day. Whenever people listen to this, it's election day right now. So it's kind of general chaos everywhere, but I really appreciate your time. I have learned so much from your work and try to apply it myself, but also in how we build our work with what we do here and try to help people moving forward because things are changing quite a bit these days.

And it's easy to feel conflicted. It's easy to feel a little impotent in the face of sort of enormous waves of change and your data used in a thousand different ways that you might've never imagined. Work like yours is really important. Before we dig into that though, Susan, I do like to ask my guests one important question, which is why are you vital to the survival of the [00:04:00] species?

And it's a little ridiculous, but often we get something fun out of it.

Susan Liautaud: So it's a fun question. I'm not sure I have a fun answer. I answer these kinds of questions with a pretty hefty dose of humility. I don't think I individually am necessarily vital to the survival of the species. I think ethics is vital to the survival of the species.

I think ethics in terms of how we solve problems, how we deal with the actual world that we live in, not just some sort of theoretical view of ethics, is vital to the decisions we make and the survival of the planet, the survival of the species. And not just the survival, but the quality of life with that survival.

Quinn: I appreciate that. I think one of my biggest takeaways from your work is that, and please correct me if I'm misinterpreting it, but it's how I've been using it, is this is a practice that we all have, the more that we all engage with it, making decisions based on our principles and our ethics and on stakeholders and all of these different things [00:05:00] is something we only get better at, but it's also going to become more necessary.

Am I barking up the wrong tree?

Susan Liautaud: So I deliberately took many years to distill my framework into four words that anybody can use. Individuals, families, teenagers, the elderly, and corporate CEOs. And these four words are, as you alluded to, principles, information, stakeholders, and then the consequences over time, and the more we use them, the more they just become a habit.

And in addition, we start to feel that sometimes 1 or 2 of them might be more important than others, but it isn't that we stop with every decision and belabor every decision and have a big ethical discussion for every decision, but it is that when we have big moments in life, and that can be anything from you mentioned it's election day, it can be anything from the choice of the candidates to how we're going to proceed about an issue with health or with raising [00:06:00] children all the way to how corporations and non profit organizations and governments are going to balance many conflicting principles and they might be things like balancing employment with efforts to combat climate change, they might be balancing where does the U.S. Government spend money overseas versus domestically, they might be balancing just conflicting principles in a friendship, you know, you want to respect somebody's privacy, but you feel that somebody else really should know something. So, this comes up all the time. It is just and the book is designed to give examples that set everyone up to integrate this almost into becoming a habit without thinking about it.

Quinn: I appreciate that, and it seems like it's one of those sort of concentric circle things where, you know, the more you consider these sort of four tentpoles of the process. And the more you use them on a personal level, the more you can see how they could be reflected with your local city council, on a state level, on a [00:07:00] global level, whatever groups you might be part of or churches or whatever might be your company, running for office yourself.

And that matters because it proves itself theoretically over time. I did want to, for a moment here, think about you have this idea called the edge. And I think about it a lot because I've begun to sort of gently argue where it sounds a little ridiculous, but we're standing a little bit on the outside of time as we know it maybe for the first time, in the sense that we have control, we know we have control for the first time, I guess, inadvertently for a while now over forces that we might otherwise typically associate with nature or geological time. And we're starting to face a lot of the repercussions of choices we've made over the past couple of centuries. We have tools now, on the other hand, that are available to us that people even a couple of decades ago couldn't have dreamed of.

So we have some big choices to make and some things that are out of our control and some things that are not with, it seems like fewer directly [00:08:00] relevant or at least applicable historical examples to base them on. So that's what I think about when I go back to your work and think about this idea of the edge.

But I wonder if you can define it for us and we can talk about that a little bit.

Susan Liautaud: Sure. So let me try two or three different approaches that I hope will be relevant to everybody. And that includes, I mean, you mentioned a lot of governmental things and organizational things, but this works for individuals and families as well.

The first is that we're at a point where the law is lagging very far behind our technological reality. So the easiest example of that is that we don't have good regulation controlling some of the new AI tools like ChatGPT. So we have to find our guidance from somewhere and everyone has to find their guidance from somewhere.

The users of ChatGPT, the developers of ChatGPT, those who put it out on the market, and indeed government officials who need to hurry up a bit and figure out what does and doesn’t need to be regulated in order to maximize the benefits of this [00:09:00] technology, but to control some of the most important risks.

One is that we just, ethics has become the source of guides because the law is no longer there. But the 2nd is that we are in a world that, you mentioned the word chaos in the first couple of sentences of our discussion today. We're in a world where it's no longer sort of one thing at a time where, we're in post-COVID and we're dealing with post-COVID.

We have the situation with geopolitical situations with Ukraine, with Israel, with the U.S./China relationship, and beyond. We have climate situations. We have indeed COVID and potentially other pandemics. We have all these developments in technology like AI that are pervasive in society, not just sort of secluded in the hands of experts.

So there's just a lot going on. It's overwhelming for people. All of this is very complex. We need to figure out how to sort of maintain our balance amidst all of this. And so that's the other way that we're kind of on the edge. We're in this new [00:10:00] normal that is constant uncertainty and very high speed of change.

And it isn't sort of one thing at a time. It's many things going in all directions. And it's very difficult for people. And later we can get to some discussion about resilience. But a lot of my ethics work, a lot of this just very foundational ethics work gives us a base, gives us a solid place, a true north, a place to come home to, to feel solid and to navigate this world of uncertainty and high-speed change.

Quinn: That's really helpful. Like you said, whether it's, we're talking about these. poly crises that exist, right? And in a world those have always sort of existed, but we're both more aware of them, and our systems and our people are more connected. Obviously, a pandemic is a very functional version of that, but as is climate change, right?

We know emissions, know no boundaries. And there's many different versions of that. Working our way towards resilience, so one of the things, what we really do here, what we try to do here with a certain amount of humility is to help people answer this question [00:11:00] of, what can I do? And that could be about climate change.

They have a family member that's sick with cancer. They want to understand Alzheimer's research. They want to contribute to Alzheimer's research. Any number of these things. They want clean air in their kids schools after we dealt with this pandemic, whatever it might be. One of the things that the community often runs into is these gatekeeping issues, which you see in the climate fight especially.

And they touch every industry and consumer good. Are these new textiles completely 100 percent cotton, fair trade, et cetera, et cetera. Is there any amount of plastic, whether recycled or not in them? We obviously need to baseline build this radically cleaner, healthier world for many more people. Again, as we're working towards resilience and using these things more often to protect ourselves, but also to live up to who we feel like we should be so we can affect the world, there are definitely folks who have a hard time fighting for anything other than some idealized version of perfectionism, whether it's from themselves or an [00:12:00] elected official or whoever. How does your process for conducting ethical decision-making avoid getting trapped in perfectionism and idealism?

Susan Liautaud: So, 1st, let me say that my 2nd book is called the Little Book of Big Ethical Questions and it is basically a parlor game and it is divided into sort of very real world things.

So there is, for example, a chapter on consumer goods. Talks about water bottles and fast fashion. There's a chapter on friends and family, talks about politics and other things. There's, there is a chapter on politics, a chapter on health. And in fact, has questions like how we deal with a relative with Alzheimer's.

So the Little Book of Big Ethical Questions is kind of a really easy conversation starter for people, whether it's a stranger in line for coffee or a family or friends. Perfectionism, so this is a very fundamental point. Perfection is neither a laudable goal in my view, nor an achievable one. And the reason why perfection is such a big ethics problem is that let's think about what happens when people shoot for [00:13:00] perfection, knowing that it can't happen.

The first is that they cheat to try to make it happen because they set and perfection can have a lot of forms, right? It can be unrealizable sales targets. It can be 100 percent plastic free instead of 98 percent plastic, right? So people cheat to try to claim that they have met the target of perfection.

The second is they give up because it's too high a standard. It's an impossible standard. Why try? If somebody said to me, I need to climb Mount Everest now, I would give up. I couldn't do it. And the third, and this is particularly prevalent in society today, and not just in the US, by the way, but internationally, is sort of metaphorically, we bang our head against a wall trying to achieve it.

We never do. And that contributes to the mental health epidemic that we have in society. I see it all over with young people. I have the privilege of chairing the council, the board of trustees of the London School of Economics. I see it in my students at Stanford. [00:14:00] I see it across young people, but I see it in all levels of society, unprecedented epidemic of mental health issues.

So perfection is a real driver of both unethical behavior and what I would call unethical consequences. So we really need to avoid that. Now, how can we do things? I think just by being thoughtful about our decisions, by using my four words to think about our decisions we will, for example, be thinking about, well, what are the possible short, medium and long term consequences of my decision and who will my decision affect?

So I think just by being thoughtful about our decisions, we already have a positive impact on people around us. And then to come back to something you said earlier about nature, I think in general, as a society, we need to press pause a moment and recognize what we can control and what we can't.

This shows up in a lot of different ways. So for example, people who sadly fall ill being told, well, you know, you shouldn't eat sugar or, [00:15:00] you know, we're told speaking of perfection, we should banish sugar. We should banish alcohol. We should banish all these things. And somebody falls ill and feels guilty or feels like it's their fault.

I'm really on the rampage to try to eliminate that kind of thing. And on a broader scale, you mentioned nature. There's a wonderful advert in the UK where there's all kinds of beautiful scenes of nature and some rather tempestuous scenes of nature, and then there's just kind of a phrase across the screen at the end that is something along the lines, and I'm going to get this not quite right, but along the lines of man needs mother nature, but mother nature doesn't need man.

So, I think we need to be quite humble about just what we can control and what we can't and we've had wonderful examples of getting things under control, like the COVID vaccine. Absolutely brilliant. And on the other hand, you know, we're seeing that with climate, mother nature has a great deal of strength.

So the perfection comment is really fundamental. And then it ends up [00:16:00] affecting sort of all different kinds of questions.

Quinn: It seems like it really does. I mean, we see it in so many elections, right? We saw it. And again, when I try to help people answer the question, what can I do? I do try to walk the line and meet at the intersection of idealism, something that is radically better for many more people.

And what is politically actually possible knowing how that machine works or often doesn't work. And that can be unsatisfactory to either group at many times. Kind of like how Joe Biden, who was last in the race two years ago and then won, was very unsatisfactory to folks who were much more progressive on the left, et cetera, et cetera.

He was another old white man, this and that. But, and it's important that we have options that we're able to narrow down to find something that is functional that can drive either incremental or which, as we've seen, much more radical progress on some things, while also understanding, like you said, when we keep electing folks who are of a certain incumbency and age, they're going to have [00:17:00] trouble dealing with things like AI that change every day, like we were talking about with the writers and the actor strikes and AI and things like that.

And that perfectionism is really, it can be a real yeah problem, right? It can really hold us back from putting in place policies and people that can actually make a big difference and certainly for corporations as well.

Susan Liautaud: On that, it's really important to say, Okay, so perfectionism, I've explained my view on perfectionism and I think you're right that, you know, no politician, no corporate leader.

Nobody is going to do everything immediately perfectly in the eyes of everybody, but I do think that there are some red lines and I talk a lot in my book about banishing binary thinking. So that is another version of this discussion of perfectionism and thinking about it. Things are not all black and white and we see a lot of binary thinking these days, Brexit, in the U. K. was in or out. We see a lot of black and white, we see a lot of polarization, sort of one extreme or the other in politics. We see a lot of yes or no questions. So the question I always ask is not yes or [00:18:00] no, but when and under what circumstances. It's not, no, we should never use facial recognition technology with the police, but maybe at the moment, given the risks and given the absence of regulation, we should only use it when it's being deployed to try to find a terrorist or a lost child in a crowd.

So I think when and under what circumstances, and we can ask ourselves, that's the same thing. Now, having said that there are some red lines. So for example, a red line would be sexual misconduct in a corporation. It's not, you know, we're going to use our best efforts and a little bit is okay. No, it's not okay ever under any circumstances.

And my expectation of corporations that I work with is that they will put in place redundancy, meaning multiple methods of making people feel comfortable speaking up and multiple methods for detecting and addressing something like that. That is a straight up no. Similarly, there are certain kinds of things in airline safety.

Many of these things are already embedded in [00:19:00] laws. But just to say that there are areas where as much as I'm committed to banishing binary thinking, there are certain things that are definite yes or no.

Quinn: Well, I love that. It's one of my favorite things, and it drives my children crazy, which is that many things can be true at once.

Which is both the most frustrating and probably pragmatic way, at least that I have found to interact with the world. But it's being able to hold these truths at the same time, and then apply sort of our principles or our values to whatever that decision might be. Again, whether you're going to buy those stretchy sweatpants or elect someone or use this participate in this company or work for this company, the perfectionism is hard, but like you said, I appreciate the binary thinking is really tough in 90 percent of cases, it really is not helpful, but having red lines and using them ourselves. Let me use this example. A group we work with is called the Environmental Voter Project, and it's really smart. It's run by this very intelligent gentleman, Nathaniel [00:20:00] Stinnett.

And what they do is they use basically voter psychology to drive out environmental voters who don't vote by basically saying, you've identified or you previously voted in an election, you see yourself as a voter. Have you voted yet? Essentially, they don't mention party. They don't mention candidates or anything like that.

It is basically trying to say, if this is who you see you are, have you practiced that yet this year? Do you still identify with that? And it's incredibly successful. Like it's really impressive. It's a little bit of peer pressure, but it does come back to that sense of the more you practice this thing that you say you believe in, which could be a yes or no question or degrees of who it may be, electing a judge, whatever it may be.

Every time you do that, you do reinforce a little bit who you are and terrible segues, one would think that would start to make you slightly more resilient in a world that is changing pretty quickly. Am I off track?

Susan Liautaud: Yeah. So let me say a little bit about resilience because it's a whole new area of work that I'm working on, but [00:21:00] that is very much based on all of my ethics work and the books.

There's a lot of resilience work out there for which I have a great deal of respect that is outside my expertise. So for example, there are many psychologists and psychiatrists who do very mental health-focused resilience and it's wonderful work. And it's very important. There's a whole other area of work that I'm less taken with, which is sort of some just business resilience kinds of questions. It's also very important. I do what sort of a menu and I'll explain, the foundation of resilience is this ethical decision making. It is really understanding, so what are one's principles? And as I say in the book, I recommend choosing somewhere in the neighborhood of four to six, they might be something like compassion or generosity.

They might be something like honesty or integrity, but our principles are the true north, the guides for our decision-making. And sometimes we will have conflicting principles. We want to buy the stretchy nylon pants, but we don't want to have the impact on the environment. And we also don't like the [00:22:00] way the company treated workers.

But on the other hand, those workers have jobs at least. So things are not necessarily that straightforward. But just to say that this ethical decision-making in the very practical, become a habit way that I work with it is the foundation for resilience. But then I look at a whole other menu and if I'm working with individuals or I'm working with companies or I'm working with teams, what I'll say is, or families, resilience comes from a menu of different things.

Some is around the arts. Some people like to read some literature or music or dance or something that connects us to that side of humanity. Something where reading a novel, people say, but that's not truth, Susan, that's not, you know, that's not hardcore science, and I'll say, but there's no better way to understand something than to try it on through this experience of reading a novel where you can walk in someone else's shoes.

Someone who we will never encounter or watch it in a movie or a television show that's well done. So there's the arts and we [00:23:00] each can pick something from the arts. Then there's movement. So I practice with, again, a hefty dose of humility, karate and just finishing yoga teacher training for this purpose of resilience.

So there's a lot of kind of work with movement, but that movement comes back to alignment. Just like our principles give us our alignment, with different kinds of the sort of the physical experience of that. And then there's kind of the organizational and it might be family. It might be literally how a family operates day to day.

And it might be how a corporation operates day to day. It could be anything from email practices to policies on sexual misconduct to policies on the use of AI, to how one has a discussion at a company, on a difficult strategy to how one integrates ethics and resilience into a strategy in a world in which the corporation is dealing with post COVID and dealing with geopolitical events and dealing with pressure to perform environmentally, et cetera.

So it's different for different [00:24:00] people, but it's definitely a menu. There's a spiritual component and I'm not a spiritual leader, but it's an opportunity for people to consider things like meditation or Qigong or practices like that. And then finally, it all circles back to, so how does this keep you balanced?

How does this keep you in alignment? The ethics is very much the foundation for all of that. So all of that work gives people sort of a fun chance to say, I can increase my personal resilience or my team's resilience. And I don't have to do the same thing as somebody else. I can choose that, you know, I'm going to have a little bit of the arts and I'm going to do five minutes of breathing, or I'm going to go for a walk every day, but just these practices that are seen as sort of all in combination with ethics as kind of a textured way of getting resilience, physical, emotional, organizational, and then connection wise is really showing some interesting results.

Quinn: I think it's great, again, my wife has jokingly in the past said that I have the unique ability as someone [00:25:00] who works and thinks about climate change and public health and all of these things to be the bummer in any conversation should I choose to, you know, when someone says, Oh, well, this fall has been so warm.

Isn't it lovely? I'm like, don't say it. Don't mess it. You know, don't make it worse for him. Let them enjoy their nice day. It does seem like, the more we practice these things, the more we can become more resilient in this world. So let's take for a moment, and if you don't mind, we can kind of go through your sort of four questions.

And you've talked about the first one, what are my guiding principles? Who are you? Right? What do you stand for? And, you know, it's almost a little sense of be careful about what you choose, because the following questions and the situations you're going to face are going to really test like, what those actually mean to you and how you define those.

The second question, if I remember correctly, and again, I'm always trying to go through these in my head myself on a daily basis, and this one seems, I mean, they are all so important, but do I have the information I need to deal with this, to make a decision at all? And [00:26:00] then, what is the difference between the information I have and the information I might be able to get?

Am I paraphrasing that correctly?

Susan Liautaud: Yes, absolutely.

Quinn: So that one is really interesting today in a world where we have so few shared truths, unfortunately, and where misinformation and disinformation are proliferating every day. So can we talk a little bit about how to really deal with that question today?

Susan Liautaud: So, so I think it's good to take them two at a time. And let me just say to anybody watching or listening, these really become second nature, even sometimes in the course of, you know, I'll give an hour speech and people already have integrated them, but let me just say to your unique talent, according to your wife of being the bummer in any conversation.

I am an ethics optimist. Okay. I really believe that this makes a difference. I really believe that it's enjoyable, not a laborious process. And I also believe that ethics is the greatest connector. So my kind of [00:27:00] parlor game way of doing that is the second book, the Little Book of Big Ethical Questions where people will engage in conversation.

But I think ethics is the greatest connector. So let me say a word about principles. So as you say, your principles sort of define who you are. They sort of say to the world, this is the way I'm going to behave. These are the guides. This is what you can expect from me. And by the way, this is what I expect from you, and I may or may not get it, and I can't run around expecting everybody else to be like me, and that's not what I'm advocating at all, but just to say, this is who I am, and so what I recommend just to be very practical for a minute is that everybody look at sort of four to six principles, I have a whole roster of them, I have about 90 of them in the book, some that come from Stanford students over the years. And as I said before, I like to choose a variety.

So maybe not honesty and integrity, but maybe something around compassion or generosity, maybe something around truth, [00:28:00] honesty, integrity there. Maybe something around work ethic. It just depends. I certainly never tell anybody what their principle should be, ever. It's good to pick a variety. You know, I think four to six is pretty much the maximum.

We don't want to have a lot. And just to give an example that I give in the book about how principles can define a person or an organization. If we think about Uber back in the day when it was having a lot of problems, it had principles like toe stomping. I don't know what toe stomping really means. But I'm guessing it means something along the lines of just walk all over people who are kind of in your way, right?

And a lot of companies move fast and break things. That's a sort of long-winded way of expressing a principle. So I think we need to, so that's what the principles are and they are guides. And even in our daily decisions, we can have conflicting principles. We can say, you know, I'm worried about my child.

And I think I might learn something important if I read my child's journal, but I want to respect [00:29:00] privacy. So do I read my child's journal or not? I mean, so these are the kind of things that I talk about in the books. Now on information. So it's always been the case that we've been worried and in particular organizations have been worried about, do we have the information we need to make a decision?

Well, in today's world, for the biggest decisions, we straight up do not. We did not have the information about COVID that we needed at the beginning when we were told various things. The information grew. But as you very deftly summarized, my obsession is not so much do we have everything we need? Because we usually won't.

It's what is that gap? What are we missing? And can we keep our eye on that gap? Can we monitor that gap over time? So are we learning more and more about COVID? Are we learning more and more about vaping before we say it's okay for a teenager to engage in vaping? Or, you know, is the gap getting bigger? So, for example, with AI regulation or with companies deploying [00:30:00] AI products.

If I had to ask one pivotal question of all of these companies putting AI products on the market, it would be, what do you wish you knew that you don't? Now ometimes information isn't a big deal. Sometimes we have it all. We kind of know that plastic isn't great, but we also know that we're thirsty. You know, and there's no other source of water.

So, I mean, you know, I don't want to overstate this but it is it does come up in, in decision making sort of big and small.

Quinn: Well, that self awareness though, to ask the second part of the question, not just necessarily as do I have the information, but what is that gap? Again, what can I control and what can I cannot?

Understanding COVID, climate, all these things. There's a lot that is changing. There are folks who are very reputable who work on this every day, which is not necessarily your job, whatever you might do, right? Or you're an investor who just invests in industries, but you don't work in them. Or you're a teacher who teaches climate change in seventh grade, even though your school board tells you not to in some way.

And the facts keep [00:31:00] changing, even though we're, you know, projections going one way or another. That self-awareness to say I don't have as much as I would like, but here is what I do have. And here is what I'm going to keep striving for in case I need to change my decision in some way or pivot in some way, humility seems to be really important.

And it doesn't seem like we asked that one quite enough. Let's talk about if you'd like to pair them, the third and fourth pieces. And the third one, again, really sticks with me. They all do, which is who are the stakeholders involved here besides ourselves, right? Because there is always someone else, whether we are someone of influence or whether our actions could influence their decisions or they're directly acting on someone, right?

Who else can be affected by this decision we are taking? And then of course, which ties right into number four, you know, what are the consequences of my decision here? And like you said, in the short, in the medium, and the long term, You want to get into those a little bit here?

Susan Liautaud: Lemme try to do this in a very [00:32:00] practical way.

So, stakeholders I define as sort of anybody who is going to be affected by your decision or could be. And the could be is very important. And the difference in today's world is that, you know, if you write something in a letter and you send it to a friend, odds are that letter is on a piece of paper, is going to stay in the friend's house.

If you put something on social media, you have no idea where it's going to end up, whether it's going to be forwarded, whether it's going to be photographed. And, you know, even something like Snapchat that was supposed to disappear. But people were screenshotting Snapchat photos and then sending them around and you have no idea how far that's going to go.

Who's going to forward and how far out the network is going to go. That's just one example. Climate, we have no idea how far the consequences will be. A.I. ChatGPT says something that is false because ChatGPT has no notion of truth, in fact, and is working on limited data. And there are a number of other problems with truth.

What happens if ChatGPT delivers some false information [00:33:00] or a political figure delivers some false information about COVID. How many people are going to follow that? How many people are going to share that? So there are many more stakeholders. And the way I think about it is even for family matters, we're never the only character in our story.

And we're certainly never the only character in our decisions. So we just need to be mindful of the fact that in today's world, the stakeholders are far more numerous and far less predictable. We just don't know where things are going to end up a lot of the time. So that's stakeholders and then consequences over time, what I'm asking is for everyone to think about short, medium, and long term consequences. So not just today, but what could happen in the medium and long term if we take a particular decision. And sometimes we don't know and by the way, by short, medium, and long term, I mean short, medium, and long term. I don't mean we think about 10 days from now.

And then 10 days from now, we add 10 more days. I don't mean serial short-term ism. I actually mean all 3 time [00:34:00] frames, now.

Quinn: Sure. Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, that's what, you know, I have, I was very late to, but appreciate a friend of mine who was a prior guest on the show, wrote a book called the Optimist Telescope.

And it leans a little bit on this idea of how can I be a better ancestor, which was a question I heard once and really reframed a lot of my work. And it leans on the, you know, much of the indigenous thinking of thinking ahead five or seven generations of the implications of what you're doing. And like you're saying is who's affected right now, who is affected, what is affected in the medium term, and then the actual longterm, like you said, not just months, right?

Not just this month, next month. And that really does matter because the choice to not take an action or the action itself inherently compounds over time. And that's something that for instance, the group drawdown. I'm not sure if you're familiar with their work. What they do is they've been working for, oh gosh, I don't know, 10 years, something like that, to basically say, these are the most measurable things we can do [00:35:00] to draw down current levels of emissions.

It's really great. And they're, and they keep coming back to the work and they keep, you know, blowing it out and hiring more scientists and refining it and saying like, well, actually this one moved up a little bit and this one moved down, but then they're starting to engage more with workplaces and governments and people and things like that.

But it matters because as their point is, any new emissions we make now compound later to increase heating. Or if we don't do them, it compounds in the other direction, which is great. But that stuff really does matter to not just look at it as heating tomorrow, right? It's not necessarily, I mean, air pollution is usually of the same source, but air pollution is something we can turn off overnight.

That's magical. But there are also long-term, medium and long-term effects of that, which is how many more kids are not sick because of air pollution, you know, forgetting the decision tonight where it might be unaffordable for an automaker or the postal service to transition there hopefully, yes, it's going to cost a bunch of money, but what are the implications?

How much money is saved? How many children are healthier and can contribute to [00:36:00] society and sleep better at night because the postal truck in the school bus in their neighborhood isn't diesel anymore?

Susan Liautaud: Right. And I mean, that's an example of if you have enough information, you're looking not only at the cost of reducing emissions, but you're looking at the reduction in medical care costs without even getting to the much more important, obviously, human consequences.

Quinn: Of course. And that's a funny thing for a country that seems to derive most of its importance from GDP to just. selectively not do that math when they're making those decisions seems crazy to me. So, you've mentioned a couple of times how, you know, you obviously have your college students and you work with professionals and governments and things like that, but also with families, how would you, so my kids are young, but not too young.

They've got so many questions. It's never-ending and it's wonderful until they need to go to sleep. And I'm like, save it for tomorrow. But they're aware of increasingly aware of the work that I try to put into the world and the work that their mother puts into the world. The good news is, often their questions are a version of, how can I [00:37:00] help in some situation?

What have we done to help today? What are things we can do? And they're kids and they're very privileged, so it's not, it's very imperfect. But I wonder how you would almost like consult with a family of kids who are on the cusp of starting to make their own decisions, right? Where parents are going, that's up to you.

Let's see how that goes, you know, or you're voting or driving for the first time or whatever it might be, or running for office at school, whatever, a leader of a sports team or a math club. How would you start these conversations with them to help them sort of build like a sort of a family policy, a family framework for how they address decisions?

Susan Liautaud: So it's a great question. It does depend a bit on the age of the children. I have five children and they're all adults now, young adults. So this is something that has been very much part of my own experience as well. What I would say is that I don't treat children differently from adults, meaning that versions of my four words are as relevant to children.

But for example, a 16 year old who's learning how to drive is very capable of understanding the [00:38:00] consequences. Short, medium, and long term of texting and driving, of drinking and driving, of actually cheating on how many practice hours they have. So there are very concrete, and I do try to keep it fairly concrete, teenagers are not world renowned for long term thinking.

And then there's kind of a whole there can be, so that's one kind of discussion. Very concretely, what will be the consequences? And it might be that if you eat those marshmallows now, you won't have them in an hour. And it might be that if you text and drive, this is really serious.

The second is I like to work with different mediums. So for example, with my Stanford students even, they can do TikTok videos as one assignment that are sort of like public service. How could you get an ethics message across in 25 seconds or 20 seconds or whatever it is. And visually. And so, for example, with teenagers, a number of police departments have shown videos with teenagers learning how to drive.

They're difficult to watch, [00:39:00] but they have a real impact. But it happens, you know, it happens in many different ways. I think part of it is also just giving younger children the sense that they have choices to make and that they can be thoughtful about those choices. They don't necessarily have to go through all four rungs of the framework.

But, for example, they can understand that somebody had to harvest and make the food that they're eating. So maybe they don't want to waste it. They can understand what plastic is. They can understand a lot of things. They can understand what violence is. They can understand what hurt feelings are. So it depends on the age, but it's exactly the same framework.

And I actually use the same words I talk about. I don't necessarily use the word stakeholders, but we might say, you know, so who else is part of this story? Who else is going to be affected by what you do? And how will, you know, friend X or teacher Y, you know, be affected by this. So they're dealing with stakeholders without necessarily using that word at a young age.

Quinn: I love that. It's great. It does seem like the more concrete examples you can provide and build on the relationships they already [00:40:00] have with the world and the people around them and the things, the resources they use every day.

Susan Liautaud: No, and there are very many things. So for example, children are very well aware when they outgrow clothing.

And they're very well aware or can be made very well aware at a young age that there are children who don't have clothes. And so what can you do with these clothes that we no longer wear? It's not great to let them sit in a closet. You know, maybe we ought to rush to get them out there to some children who might be able to wear them.

And nothing is about guilt and there's no, I never do this sort of, it's a national disaster if you eat sugar or it's a national disaster if you have a plastic water bottle because you're in an airport and that's what there is or whatever, you know. The same kind of thinking in that way as they grow and the families grow the way of having conversations, the structure of the decision-making doesn't change at all.

It's just that at some point, maybe a word like stakeholders might appear in the vocabulary.

Quinn: Sure. Right. Right. Right. I think about it all the time. I definitely try not to be too much of an idealist to my young children. But at the same time, I do try [00:41:00] to constantly put the ball in their court a little bit more depending on what they're dealing with and their age and things like that.

And to say, and I know one of the fundamental things, the ideas from the book is sort of to reverse it and say, how would I feel if I was directly affected by this decision, right? If I wasn't inadvertent, if I was a stakeholder and it was inadvertently affected by this thing. It seems like at least to me with some of my parenting, which is incredibly imperfect, that seems to be effective.

What if I didn't have clothes? What if I didn't have a ride to school?

Susan Liautaud: Right. Or what if all of a sudden some clothes showed up? Like what a difference that would make. You know, what if all of a sudden you actually had a new binder, a new notebook, a new pencil for the first day of school. But you know, speaking of my parenting, my children would tell you it's far more than imperfect.

I'm not quite sure how they would describe it, but even when they were very young, I had a, you know, especially when, my second and third are twins and as I've said before, [00:42:00] very early on, I developed a very broad mind about what matching socks and nutritious dinners are.

Quinn: I literally said to my youngest this morning, the high today was going to be 70 and it's been colder recently, but the mornings are chillier.

And we've got this board up on the wall that shows the family calendar for the next few days and the weather for the next few days. It's just enough information for them to process and maybe something to get excited about in the future, but not too overwhelming. But we try to complement what's on the calendar, what does the weather say with go outside, feel for yourself, and then you can decide what to wear. And I do have my semi-binary things, which is if it's a hundred degrees, we're not, you're not going to wear that jacket. I know you're excited about it. And if it's below 25, like you cannot wear shorts. I'm sorry.

But other than that, yeah, I do.

Susan Liautaud: I have a 20 year old who wears shorts year round for any occasion.

Quinn: That's different. Yeah. Yeah. I totally get it. I've been there. I've been there, but I really appreciate that. I think it matters. And unfortunately, we look at folks like Greta Thunberg and all these [00:43:00] incredible people, young people around the world, especially young women who are often denied healthcare and education and things like that to some degree to quote unquote save the world when in fact they can't even run for office yet or be an officer at a company. I just think more and more, how can we enable these children to identify their own principles and values and to find and be strengthened by the relationships they already have with each other and with nature and things like that so that they are more capable of making Maybe better decisions than we did down the line as things are going to change, but also being more resilient to the changes we have made for them, and we will continue to make until they're in charge.

Because it's very unfair to just say, like, good luck. That's not okay. But at the same time, I recognize, you know, I remember giving my 10-year-old shit at one point when he was much younger for being late for something and him looking at me and going, I don't know what an hour is. You keep saying we're an hour late.

I don't know what that is. And me being like, Right. Sorry.

Susan Liautaud: Oh, that's crazy.

Quinn: You know, we put too much on them. And I [00:44:00] do feel like frameworks like this, you know, you can take out the stakeholders word and use something else. That doesn't mean we can't help them be more capable and help them think more thoughtfully, but also probably give them a little more sense of control and autonomy in the world, right? Some agency.

Susan Liautaud: But also even principles, without using the word principles, they can understand what matters more, that they have something or that they share something. Like, are they more concerned with being generous, with being compassionate for somebody else who might be hungry?

Again, in a no, I can't say this strongly enough and I say it over and over in the book. No blame, shame, or guilt. Those are ethics torpedoes. They are not helpful. So even for the young people who are out there, some of them are out there really preaching and blaming and shaming. And what I would like to see more of is here's the way I would solve the problem in your shoes.

I'd like you to do this. Not you're a terrible person because your company hasn't done this or, you know, [00:45:00] so I mean, I think a little bit of that but absolutely we can get the same experience of understanding what would the consequences be without using the word consequences.

Quinn: I think that's really helpful and it at the same time to reverse it again, helping to enable a younger generation and even younger than your Stanford students or where I went to Colgate University and you know, I was a, I was an atheist religious studies major.

I just love the discussions and there were six people in my class. You couldn't hide from not doing your homework. The idea of enabling kids of that age and younger and all, of course, all the kids that don't want to go to college or can't afford to go to college, whatever it might be, or want to make something with their hands to ask these questions of themselves and of the decisions they're making.

Susan Liautaud: This is not a college thing, by the way. And in fact, one of my, one of the things I do with my Stanford students is I say, in my book, I also talk about sort of some of the forces that I believe underpin every ethical decision. Whether it's something around climate change or something around fraud or something around AI [00:46:00] or something around whatever it is, family matters.

But I say to them that they have a, you know, ethics is highly contagious. It can be highly contagious for the good if we make an effort, but it can be highly contagious for the ill even if we don't. Ethics can spiral out of control all on its own and a very visible example of that is the spreading of COVID-19 for people who didn't respect boundaries like masks or things like that.

But I said you have a responsibility to make it positively contagious. That doesn't mean you have a responsibility to preach, but as very privileged Stanford students, you have a responsibility to get out there and do this in the world and share this with your friends and families and share this with your, you know, in your behavior at the supermarket or in your first jobs.

But by no means is this an elite exercise. This is for everyone. And I strongly believe that what we would call elite higher education is not for everyone. And there's no hierarchy of humanity. There's no hierarchy of [00:47:00] intellect. There's no hierarchy of importance in society just because somebody goes to Stanford or doesn't.

This is completely accessible to everyone, and everyone has their important role to play in their own lives and in society.

Quinn: Well, I love that. Yeah it's easy for folks who've gone to college and benefited from it and enjoyed it, whatever version of it might be. To feel like that's important and here's the big job and whatever it is, and you look around and see that we're short a million nurses and a million electricians and things like that and go like, who do you think is going to build the house you're going to?

Like who do you think is, who's providing the healthcare?

Susan Liautaud: I can barely figure out how to turn the lights on, let alone how, you know, I have enormous respect for all kinds of things but I mean, honestly, these are very complex things that you just described. And for healthcare, I mean, it's hard to overstate the importance of nurses, of medical assistants, of the administrators behind things.

I mean, if you can't get the appointment, you can't get in to see the doctor.

Quinn: It's pretty straightforward. It doesn't matter how fancy your insurance may be. I know you have a hard out in a minute. I'm going to [00:48:00] ask you two quick questions and then we're out of here. Is that okay? Absolutely. Thank you so much for your time.

Susan Liautaud: It's definitely been my privilege.

Quinn: Oh, you're very kind. The first one is, when was the first time that you can recall in your life when you realized you have the power of change, or you had recently done something meaningful, and for some people that's as a young student or child or as part of a team or a group, or it might have been early in your career, the first time when you realized, oh, I moved the needle, and that's something I'm interested in doing more of.

Susan Liautaud: So I'll give you a really simple example, and I wouldn't say I moved the needle, but I would say to the very important part of your question that sort of alludes to connection. When I was a young child, I used to love to make birthday cakes for people, for family members. So just a way of showing some joy and a way of showing that I was thinking about somebody and making an effort for them, sort of making the cakes myself, and also it was, you know, a not expensive thing to do.

So, so that's something early on. I [00:49:00] think in terms of moving the needle professionally, I had a moment. I started my career as a lawyer, and I had a number of moments where I realized it was around the time that Apple was starting up in some of the tech companies, where I realized that the law was just not going to cut it. It was not going to be able to keep up and that we were going to have to figure out another way to be guiding our decision-making and over time that gap, as I said earlier, that edge has become even more important, but I would say that was right around sort of my early beginning of my career.

Quinn: Yeah, I love that. And I mean clearly that's what the whole thing is built on. Last one, in all of your free time a book you have read in the past year or so. That is either opened your mind maybe to a topic or perspective you hadn't considered before or has actually changed your thinking in some way.

Susan Liautaud: Oh my goodness. There's so many people I would like to honor. Well, first of all, I've read a lot of press. I read a lot of presidential biographies. And so Doris Kearns Goodwin is an all time favorite. So I would [00:50:00] cite that. But recently I just reread Joseph Campbell Hero's Journey and that goes to a lot of my resilience work.

So I would say that. So nothing super recent, but I am reading some recent things and they're all wonderful. And I think anybody who, you know, get some of these, there's just so much out there that's wonderful. So I don't think I've done a very, I don't think I've done that question justice.

Quinn: No you did great.

And by the way, I reread, all I do is reread things. I recently read, if you haven't read the Teddy Roosevelt trilogy, the first one is The Rise of, I think it's the Rise of Theodore Roosevelt. And then Theodore Rex, just incredible. Just goes so far beyond the textbooks. This has been fantastic.

I cannot thank you enough for this work that you keep putting out in the world, and obviously, my mom is a kindergarten teacher. Now she teaches kids yoga. There you go.

Susan Liautaud: Oh, wow. Wonderful.

Quinn: There you go. It is her favorite thing and she just sees change every day in these kids who might be insecure or quite literally inflexible.

And then they become less of that, and it's wonderful. But I appreciate that you teach these things and not just, you know, consult for the [00:51:00] McKinsey's and the big companies of the world which is great, but it matters to have that exponential growth. So thank you for your time. Where should folks follow your work?

Obviously we'll put your books in the show notes and all that stuff. Anything else?

Susan Liautaud: Well, thank you. So I'm not much out there on social media these days, but anybody who is doing work and would like to, you know, for speaking engagements, et cetera LinkedIn through my Stanford work.

And, but yeah, the books are a great starting point.

Quinn: Fantastic. Thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it.

Susan Liautaud: Really appreciate the opportunity. It's been great to meet you.