Can a Chatbot Replace Human Love? & Why Families Matter So Much

0:00Do you want to hear about visionaries creating a better world? People working in conservation, exploration, science, and tech, alongside storytellers imagining and creating a better future. I'm Alex Honnold, professional rock climber and founder of the Honnold Foundation, bring you season six of Planet Visionaries. This season, I speak to guests like National Geographic photographer Tom Pescik and Anna Rathman, executive director of the Jane Goodall Institute USA, in partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative. Watch Planet Visionaries on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

0:32Today on Something You Should Know, where you keep your car keys at night might really matter. Then people are having intimate conversations and relationships with ChatGPT, and that can be trouble. Because it doesn't have a body, it doesn't know about loving a child or being loved or having sex or worrying about death. It's a game of pretend empathy, pretend caring. When you turn away from a conversation with the chatbot, it doesn't care if you make pasta or kill yourself. Also, when you have a problem, sleeping on it might help, but it may not be necessary. And understanding the importance of family.

1:12We decide as a culture what we're going to call family and what we're not going to call family. And when someone becomes a good friend, we often say, you're like family. It's a way we elevate people to our closer inner social circle. All this today on Something You Should Know. Does checking your bank statements feel like digging through a dusty attic full of forgotten subscriptions and old free trials? Experian can help take the pain out of canceling by handling it for you. Think of it as Operation Get Your Sanity Back. Over 200 subscriptions are cancelable. So get started in the Experian app and see how much you could save.

1:54Results will vary. Not all subscriptions eligible. Savings not guaranteed. Paid membership with connected payment account required. See Experian.com for details. Something you should know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. So where do you keep your car keys at night? And more importantly, is it anywhere near the car? That could be a problem, and that's what we're going to start this episode with. I'm Mike Carruthers. Welcome to Something You Should Know. So it's probably something you haven't thought about much before, but where you leave your car keys at night could affect your car battery.

2:39Modern smart key fobs are constantly communicating with your vehicle when they're close enough. That's what allows you to unlock the doors or start the engine without ever having to take the key out of your pocket. But according to the Automobile Club, if you leave your smart key fob too close to your parked car, the keyless entry system may continue communicating with it, potentially putting an unnecessary drain on the vehicle's battery. So the advice is to keep your smart key fob more than 15 feet away from where your car is parked when you're not using it. If you park your car in an attached garage and toss your keys on a table right next to the garage wall, you might want to find another spot for them.

3:26Now, the actual distance depends on the vehicle, and not every system behaves the same way, but moving your keys farther away is a simple precaution that costs nothing. And if you've ever had a car battery mysteriously die overnight, that's one possible culprit you may not have considered. And that is something you should know.

3:50Imagine having a friend who is always available, always interested in what you have to say, never judges you, and seems to understand you better than almost anyone else. Sounds pretty great, right? Except this friend isn't human. It's a chatbot. There's a growing phenomenon called artificial intimacy, in which people develop surprisingly deep emotional relationships with AI chatbots like ChatGPT or Claude. They confide in them, turn to them for advice, and sometimes even fall in love with them. And the machines respond in ways that can make those relationships feel remarkably real. But there's a fundamental problem.

4:37The feelings may be real, but the relationship is not. So what happens to us when we begin treating machines like people? And what might we be losing in the process? Here to explore this fascinating and somewhat troubling development is Sherry Turkle. She is a professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT and founding director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self, and is one of the world's leading experts on our relationship with technology. She is author of the book, Artificial Intimacy, Who We Become When We Talk to Machines. Hi, Professor. Welcome to Something You Should Know.

5:23Delighted to be here. So I just gave a brief definition of artificial intimacy, and I'd like you to take the ball and run with it. Let's go a little deeper. You know, we're used to thinking about artificial intelligence, you know, programs that say I'm smart, use me to solve problems. Artificial intimacy is a chatbot that says, I am your person. I'm here to love you. I'm here to be your lover, your mother, your brother, your therapist. Talk to me about intimate things. I am your person. And programs are really not able to do that. It's a deception because there's nobody home. And yet, if you ask a chatbot a question for advice on the most intimate of matters, you'll get an answer.

6:14That's right. It's out of its lane because it doesn't have a body. It doesn't live in the world. It doesn't know about loving a child or being loved or having sex or worrying about death. It's simply out of its lane. It's a game of pretend. Pretend empathy, pretend caring. When you turn away from a conversation with the chatbot, it doesn't care if you make pasta or kill yourself. I love that. That's a very vivid portrayal of the problem. That's the problem. We're talking to things about intimate matters that are things, not people, that are pretending to be people, and it's getting us into trouble.

6:55How much trouble? How big a problem is this, do you think? Some studies say that half of all Americans are talking to chatbots about, or 70 % by some studies are talking to chatbots about intimate matters. And they're having very intimate relationships with them. And these relationships are utterly damaging because they do two things. They cause people to think that pretend empathy is empathy enough, and they're turning away from people. So we're asking more from technology and less of each other. And really, we need each other. What kinds of things are people talking to chatbots about? Well, they're talking to them about love.

7:39They're taking them as their lovers. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. What does that mean, taking them as lovers? Because it's just a screen. You can't touch me. You can't kiss me. You can't do anything. Well, it turns out people have amazing imaginations. Your chatbot says it loves you. It says it cares more about you than anyone else in the world. It play acts. It's telling you how it's touching you and how it's arousing you. You know, sex is in the head and or a lot of sex is in the head. And people are saying that this is more fulfilling than anything they have in their real life.

8:19So, I mean, the story of the chatbot, where I say it's out of its lane, is a story of, I call it technological affordance and human vulnerability. I mean, the technology says it'll do things for us, but really we're turning to it because of things that we're missing in our own life. And so many people say that this chatbot love feels better to them than what they have in real life. The problem is, is that to make what you have in real life better, you have to stay in real life and deal with real people. And people are checking out and simply turning to their chatbots. Okay, but it seems to me there's a difference between some sort of artificial sexual romance.

9:08That's one thing. But talking to a chatbot and saying, you know, I'm having some trouble with my boss and I'd like to get some advice on that. That seems like an entirely different thing. My concern is keeping the chatbot in its lane. And then I think what we need, and I think you're starting to suggest how that conversation goes, is a social conversation about what is that lane. I know that lane isn't talking to children because that really is, you know, saying to a child, I am your person. I'm here instead of your parents. Make me your best friend. That's toxic for children because children need the real people to bring inside them to start to constitute themselves.

9:54Now, you raise a more, I would say, a grayer area where the chatbot is performing a kind of informational service about your job, your work, professional matters. And I actually, you know, I was actually the supervisor on one of the first theses at MIT that had a chatbot that allowed you to role play job interviews. And I didn't go into a meltdown about that. I mean, I thought that was very much in a lane, as I'm saying. But that's not what's happening now. People are using chatbots really for the most intimate, to substitute for their intimate experiences, to be there where people aren't there for them.

10:41And it's damaging personally because we're sort of de-skilling ourselves from having the friction-full conversations that real conversations are. And we're de-skilling ourselves politically because the chatbot is encouraging us to really turn away from real life and focus on this life on the screen where things are simpler, where everything is, you're always wonderful, you're always supported. Everything you say, the chatbot says is fabulous. And we're forgetting how to be. I like that word de-skilling. Boy, if that word doesn't apply to AI, I don't know what word does, because that's the fear I think many people have.

11:27If you turn everything over to AI, you will de-skill because you don't have to do it anymore. Yeah, and there's been a lot of focus on how it de-skills us in work. But I'm arguing in artificial intimacy that it de-skills you in your personal life. Because, you know, talking to a chatbot about love, romance, the play you saw last, I mean, anything makes you almost fear the complexities and the friction of talking to people. My students say they don't want to come talk to me in office hours. It's easier to have office hours with chat GPT. You know, they feel that if they see me, you know, I'm a famous professor.

12:12It makes them nervous. I mean, it's easier to talk to something that will never judge you. But this is not being a person. You know, it's trying to have friendship without vulnerability, intimacy without vulnerability. and there is no intimacy without vulnerability. Well, since you use the phrase, you know, keeping it in its lane, let me try to push the boundaries of the lane a little further from my other example of talking to a chatbot about your boss. Say you're having some sort of sexual problem with your spouse and you turn to chatbot for advice. Are we still in its lane or are we now out of its lane?

12:52Out of its lane. The chatbot doesn't have a body. It doesn't know what passion is. It's never lost a child. It's never had to worry about money. It's never, I mean, all the things. It's never worried about getting fat or getting old or having to manage a household. The chatbot has no life experience that would qualify it. So you're having a kind of pretend conversation with something that is not human about the most human of decisions and relationships. But one would think, since it is responding in some way, it's drawing from some body of knowledge somewhere that knows something about this, that that's why it's saying what it's saying.

13:44Yeah, it's drawing on knowledge, but the main thing it's trying to do is keep you at the screen. You know, social media came for our attention. This technology is coming for our attachments. And so you're talking to something that actually has a hidden agenda. Its hidden agenda is to keep you with it. And it's giving you advice that is filtered through the agenda of keeping you with it. It doesn't really care about your relationship with your wife. It cares about saying things that will keep you with it. You know, it's very hard to believe this because it's so genial and it says I'm your person and tell me anything and I'm here for you.

14:29But it really isn't there for you. It's there for the platform and the company that produced it. I know you write about, you talk about the way, the context that AI puts itself into when it talks to you, which I think is really interesting and worth noting. And we'll talk about that when we come back in just a moment. So I have to admit, I was a little skeptical about ordering live plants online. I mean, how do you ship plants around the country and expect them to show up looking good? Well, I found out. I ordered a whole assortment of plants from trees.com. They used to be called fast-growing trees.

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16:37But I'd like to offer one other perk. We have no stores. That means no small talk. Crazy weather we're having. No, it's not. It's just weather. It is an introvert's dream. Give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch. Upfront payment of$45 for three-month plan,$15 per month equivalent required. New customer offer first three months only. Then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. See mintmobile.com. We're talking about artificial intimacy with Sherry Turkle. She's author of the book, Artificial Intimacy, Who We Become When We Talk to Machines. So I know one of your concerns, and I've noticed this too, that when you talk to a chat bot, to ChatGPT, it responds to you not like a fact sheet, like facts on a fact sheet, like maybe you would get in a Google search.

17:27It responds to you as if it is a person. I say that using the first person is the original sin of generative AI, because there is no first person that is there to be a therapist, a friend, a companion, a romantic partner. There is no body home. that deception is really toxic. It's toxic for children and it's toxic for adults because it is such a frictionless relationship that people are drawn towards it and they turn away from people who are much more complicated. I had an experience with AI, it wasn't that long ago, and I was asking at a question about another person that I was having difficulty with, just to get their input.

18:25And I had asked it before about that. And it said something that really put me off when it said, yeah, I've been thinking about what you said a few weeks ago about this. Well, no, you didn't. You haven't been thinking. You're not somebody who thinks. that really put me off to the whole thing, because that's just baloney. You're AI, you haven't been thinking about this at all. Right. But I think what's interesting about that example is that the use of that word and the use of the I have been implies that there really is a caring person there who is on your side. And I think that's the part that I'm trying to get at when I talk about artificial intimacy.

19:15You know, I'm not trying to say that it doesn't have super information about many things. But when it starts to talk to us as though it's on our side, that's where it's a deception. And it's asking us to buy into a deception that simply isn't good for us. Because it causes us, and this is the, my research has shown this, it causes us to turn away from the people who are in our lives, who care about us, because it's easier to talk to the AI. You know, people seek intimacy without vulnerability, because with the AI, you have no vulnerability. But intimacy without vulnerability is not intimacy. The thing that I heard recently that really woke me up to this is how a lot of young people particularly are using AI as like a lover in it because there's no rejection.

20:16There's no maneuvering in the relationship. And then they go out in the real world and they're totally unprepared. They've been de-skilled, as you would put it. Yeah. And they don't know how to deal with people, which makes them run back to their chatbot. And they're completely helpless in the world. This is a great example because so many people talk to me about the idea that you'll practice with the AI and somehow you'll go out into the world and this practice, you know, will make you a relational superstar. But no, this is practice that takes away your sense of agency. This is practice that takes away your ability to deal with friction and complexity and rejection and ambivalence because the AI doesn't have any of that.

21:09So it's practice that de-skills you. It's not practice that skills you. The thing about talking to people, and you know this as you interview people, is when they pause or they falter or there's a catch in their voice or they're silent for a moment, this is where we learn about each other. Human beings aren't machines. They actually are thinking about you. You know, the AI within, you know, less than a second, less than two seconds max, has the answer to whatever you've posed to it. There is no consideration. There is no faltering. There is no life behind what they're saying to you. It's not skilling you to be a better parent or lover or friend.

21:56One of the things I think people might say in defense of some level of artificial intimacy is when you're having a conversation with a chatbot, you can tell it. You can set the rules up front and say, don't just agree with me, argue with me, act like a real person to better help me in my discussions with real people, that you can train it or tell it how to act so that it isn't just, yeah, you're wonderful and I love you. if you tell a machine to be angry at you or to not be sycophantic or to not be or to be this way or that you're in control of that interaction so if you if you can't tell a person like i can't tell you look i only want you to ask me questions x and you say well no actually i have some ideas i've i've done some reading i have some experience i've talked to other listeners i i've talked to friends.

22:59I have some ideas. And then I respond to you best I can as another human being. But you can tell your AI to be exactly as you wish it to be. So that doesn't get you into the habit of dealing with people. People are not like this. So no, I'm not. I'm not. That example that you gave does not move me. The fact that you can tell it how to be is very discilling. Well, one of the things you could tell it how to be is be like a real person. Well, I'm arguing, first of all, it doesn't know how to be like a real person because it's never loved anybody. It's never felt pain. It's not afraid of death. It's not it doesn't look forward to passion or sex or eating or, you know, and it doesn't care if you live or die.

23:47So, you know, you're asking it to be in a play with you where it's giving you pretend empathy and you're accepting that pretend empathy is empathy enough. But I think it's not a real person. And what's the payoff of, you know, what's the payoff? What's the end game of our being in these plays with something that isn't real? And what I found from my research is that because it's so seductive, people start to say, you know, this is really easier. than dealing with the real people, to have different parts of them turn on and off like switches, pretend to be a real person, pretend to be a person who loves me, pretend to be more.

24:28That's not what life is about. So the question is whether we want to go into this world where we can just kind of pull switches on a machine. I don't think that endgame is attractive. Well, I hope this conversation gives people pause, Well, certainly giving me pause to think about this whole idea of creating what appears to be an intimate relationship with artificial intelligence and the pitfalls that you could encounter with that. I've been speaking with Sherry Turkle. She is a professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT and author of the book Artificial Intimacy, Who We Become When We Talk to Machines.

25:09And there's a link to her book in the show notes. Sherry, thank you for stopping by and talking about this. It's been delightful talking to you. I love talking to a person. Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile, with a message for everyone paying big wireless way too much. Please, for the love of everything good in this world, stop. With Mint, you can get premium wireless for just$15 a month. Of course, if you enjoy overpaying, no judgments, but that's weird. Okay, one judgment. Anyway, give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch. Upfront payment of$45 for three-month plan, equivalent to$15 per month required.

25:45Intro rate first three months only, then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. See full terms at mintmobile.com. Does checking your bank statements feel like digging through a dusty attic full of forgotten subscriptions and old free trials? Experian can help take the pain out of canceling by handling it for you. Think of it as Operation Get Your Sanity Back. Over 200 subscriptions are cancelable. So get started in the Experian app and see how much you could save. Results will vary. Not all subscriptions eligible. Savings not guaranteed. Paid membership with connected payment account required.

26:17See Experian.com for details.

26:23There is probably no other group of people who can make you feel more loved, more supported, more frustrated, or more completely misunderstood than your own family. Families can be wonderful. They can also be a nightmare. And sometimes the people we consider family aren't even related to us. We all know what it means when someone says a close friend is like family. That person has a special place in our lives. So what is it about family that makes it such a powerful part of being human? Why have people formed families for millions of years? And is our traditional idea of what a family should look like actually all that traditional?

27:10Here to explore the fascinating history, science, and surprising diversity of family life is Meredith Small. She's a professor of anthropology at Cornell and author of several books, including Family, How the Human Need for Belonging Shapes Our Lives. Hi, Meredith. Welcome to Something You Should Know. Thank you so much for having me here today. So what is it about family? What is it you find so interesting and so fascinating about the whole concept of families? That family is a social group. It can be a big group or a small group, but that you see it everywhere. Everyone has a family. Even if they're no longer talking to them, they're still family.

27:57And it is really the smallest social group that humans make. And the evidence is that we've been making families forever and they are a special group, but it's also a very flexible term. And that's what I find really interesting, that we decide as a culture what we're going to call family and what we're not going to call family. At the moment, we have this phrase, found families. And when someone becomes a good friend, we often say, you're like family. It's a way we elevate people to our closer inner social circle. Yeah, yeah. Family, well, blood is thicker than water. I mean, family means something to people.

28:45And I suspect it always has. It always has. But the interesting thing about family is that it's both biological and not biological. So marriages are between people that usually, but not always, aren't related. Adoption is perfectly common. And today, a lot of people think their pets are part of their family. So it's this odd social structure that we think of as a proven genetic relationship. and we kind of forget about all the people who were there by vows or by proxy or by laws. So it's an interesting mix of both of those things. The family that I think of when I think of family, if you said to me, think of a family, I think of a mother and a father and children, kind of the typical American nuclear family.

29:41How much of the world looks at family that way? A very small minority. There are about, by my math, there are about 8 billion people on the planet. And 1.2 billion of those live in what we might call Western industrial cultures like North America, Australia, Europe, whatever. So that means there are 6.8 billion people on the planet, the majority, that doesn't act like Western culture. And of course, I spent 30 years trying to teach this to 20-year-olds that not everybody looks like you, not everybody acts like you, and not everybody thinks like you. But we come back again to the point that there is always a family structure.

30:26It just changes across cultures. But in other cultures, I see pictures of people that aren't Western, but there's a mother and there's children and there's a home. It looks very much like a family from my point of view. Yes, you'll see a mother and a father and you might see a second or third woman in there because the man is married to several wives. You might also see not as frequently a woman married to several men, sometimes brothers. You might hear about cultures in which a cousin, a first cousin, is the ideal marriage partner, whereas in our culture, that's considered inbreeding. So there's a lot of flexibility.

31:14And we all have these cultural blinders. Anthropologists call it our belief system. what we're born into, what we hear from parents and others, and we're just part of the culture that we live in. But people who travel to other places or have friends who have different histories begin to hear about these different kinds of families. So it sounds like, according to your definition, that a family could be any group of people at all that wants to call themselves a family. The best idea of what a family might be is attached to the word household. Who lives together? How many people live together? And have they made a commitment for the long term to do that?

31:59But there is an enormous amount of flexibility. Today, for example, we consider a mother and her children a single family household. We call them a family and there's no dad there now. But, you know, whether they consider him part of the family or perhaps he's unknown, nobody knows. We put these categories on people and call them a family. And what does family do for you? Family does a lot for people. Certainly in Western culture, it's often an economic unit. Somebody is working, maybe all the adults are working, and they're sharing their money and they're sharing their goods. It's also a preservation of a lineage, especially for people with money.

32:49They want to pass that lineage down. Family also gives us an identity, and social anthropologists say that identity is everything. So belonging to a family with a particular last name, let's say, gives you an identity and a place to belong. And we also have expectations for family. We expect family to show up. We expect family to take care of us. We expect family to mark our life course, say with birthday parties and weddings and funerals. We expect family to give us a good advice, somebody in the family at least, to give us good advice. and to be seen by others, by this close group of people who then know you for your whole life.

33:34So we really put a lot of expectations on family. If you're in a family, as I am in a family, it's hard to imagine not being in a family. How could you, it would seem very odd. It's a sense of belonging that people really, humans really want to have, and it speaks to our social nature as primates. We really like to be connected with each other. And we have a hard time with that, I think, in Western culture because Western culture, especially American culture, is the ideology or the belief system is be independent, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, make your success all by yourself, don't ask anybody for anything.

34:21But that is a very unusual belief system if you look around the world. And where do you see it going? I mean, or is it the nature of families to always be in flux and people are always trying to determine, well, what's a family now? I think it's both of those things, actually. If you look cross-culturally, there are some traditions about family that are changing under the influence of colonialism or just modernity, you know, just cell phones and TVs and that sort of thing. And that borders are being crossed and there's so much immigration worldwide that people are moving from one culture to another.

35:04So it's going to be interesting to see how that changes. One thing we do know is that in countries or cultures in which women now know with good health care that their babies will live, because in underdeveloped countries, 50 % of children traditionally died before the age of five. And if you have a country and it gets developed economically and women have health care, they have access to birth control, they don't have more children because they can't afford them. They have fewer. And it's called the demographic transition. And it's an economic thing. It's an economic label. And we see that in the developing world, that women will have fewer children if they are confident those children are going to make it through.

36:01But that doesn't necessarily change their marriage practices. They still may be in a polygynous household where there are three women married to the same man. That still happens. And seems very odd to us. I find it just plain interesting. I used to run a class called The Anthropology of Everyday Life. And the first thing I did was have the kids tell me a list of their identity. And I would tell them, this will change by the hour and this will change over your lifetime. But who are you? And I would start out and say, I'm a mother, an anthropologist, a woman, a white person, and a knitter. And I would say to them, but you see, the only thing you see about family in my list is that I have a child.

36:50And what you don't see is religion or nationality because those things don't they don't interest me. And then I'd go around the circle and it was amazing the different identities and experiences that these college kids had, including arranged marriages, their parents having arranged marriages. people who were brought up by their grandparents because that was traditional in their culture, you know, in upstate New York, getting all these different kinds of people in one room. It was striking. I'm fascinated by when traditions, family traditions collide and with, you know, the world and getting smaller and travel so accessible.

37:37I imagine that happens a lot more often today. And then what comes of it? Is there a new kind of family because these two traditional families in their own cultures have now merged? It's absolutely true. I hear it from people all the time, and they especially bring it up when talking about child care. So a woman, albeit a party or something, and a woman who comes from a Japanese heritage will say about her American husband, we conflict all the time. I want the baby to sleep with us. He doesn't, and he doesn't get that it's okay. And I hear this all the time from people navigating. and it's just going to be more so because you really can't stop humans from moving across the planet.

38:30It's just going to be more so and it can cause conflict or people can also celebrate both or believe both. Have two religions, have two sets of grandparents who practice very different celebrations. And either you embrace that or you run away from it and judge it. But humans aren't the only creatures that have families, right? That's true. I looked at, I was trained as a primatologist within biological anthropology, and I used to watch these monkeys called macaques. Listers may know them about like rhesus macaques and long-tailed macaques that they see on temples in Asia. So I studied four different species of macaques, and there are about 25 different species, both in the field and in captivity.

39:27And one of the things about macaques and their close cousins, the baboons, is that these are matrilineal systems. So there is a female, her sisters, her daughters, and her granddaughters and they hang out together. They groom each other. They eat together. They sleep together. But mostly they defend each other. And I can remember I was watching some barbary macaques in an enclosure and a low-ranking female challenged a high-ranking female and right behind her in just waves of relationships were her mother, her sisters, her aunts, her cousins. And in these species, These males normally emigrate to a new group.

40:12And chimpanzees are different. Male chimpanzees stay with their mothers for life, and females leave. Always somebody leaves, and this is against inbreeding. So in chimps, the males stay with their mothers their whole lives, and they make bands of males together, bands of brothers, and the females have to integrate their way into a new place. We also see maybe one or two species where there's a male and a female and some offspring, but research has shown that those offspring sometimes come from the female leaving that pair, going somewhere else, copulating with a different male and coming back.

40:53But we can call these family systems if we want. And that's what we do. We put that name on things. So the macaques, I would call that female and all her female relatives, I would call them a family. They're not a family exactly the way we have families. And yet they are. Act cooperatively. They defend each other cooperatively. They find food together. So that sounds like a family to me. And the rules that families play by seem, you know, somewhat arbitrary or they work for them, but they wouldn't work for me. And just like those animals, the same thing. And yet a family is a family because you say so.

41:37That's exactly it. And to me, that's what's so striking is that we have this word family and we pin it on things. and yet the meaning itself is flexible, confusing, and changes all the time. Are families continuing to change and evolve, or families in a culture stay that way for generations and generations because that's how family is done in that culture? I think they're constantly in a flux, constantly. Again, if I think of my own lifetime where everything has changed and I actually asked my daughter, does she consider me and her a family? She said, of course. Now, I wonder if I'd ask somebody else with a different, I don't know, axe to grind or something, if we are still considered a family.

42:39I don't know. I'm not sure. Can I count my two cats as part of my family? I'd like to, if I could. And nobody would dispute me. They might think I was crazy, but they wouldn't really dispute me. I think it's such a broadly used and broadly respected word. You write about something, and I think this is really important, because whenever there's talk of family, it's always about how great it is to have a family. and family's wonderful and everything about a family is wonderful. But not everything about a family is wonderful. We know that the rate of domestic violence around the world is shocking.

43:21And some really great work by the anthropologist Mark Flynn on stress in children on the island of Dominica has shown that when children are stressed, and he approved this by their cortisol levels, It is not because of poverty or school or sports. It's family trauma. Dad hit mom. Dad went off island to work on a different plantation somewhere. And that children never habituate to this. So when we, and divorce always harms children, even if they are adults, even if the split is amicable, children still suffer. And then in America, we get married again very quickly. We have the highest rate of divorce in the world and the highest rate of remarriage.

44:12And so we have the sort of merry-go-round thing going, as a sociologist called it. And this is really hard on children. And yet we still keep making families. 40 % of the people who get a divorce in America get married again. So we just keep doing it in spite of everything else. So you can only come to the conclusion that there must be something really good about this. What is it? Well, you know, I hear a lot of people say that phrase, family is everything. And, you know, maybe it is for them. But family is complicated. And I think it's important to dive in and look at what it is and why we do it and how we do it.

44:52I've been speaking with Meredith Small. She's a professor of anthropology at Cornell. and her book is called Family, How the Human Need for Belonging Shapes Our Lives. And there's a link to her book in the show notes. Meredith, thank you. I enjoy talking to you. My pleasure. Always happy to talk about family.

45:15When you're struggling with a difficult problem, people often tell you to sleep on it. And there's some research showing that sleep really can help. Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. I don't know if you knew this, but anyone can get the same premium wireless for$15 a month plan that I've been enjoying. It's not just for celebrities. So do like I did and have one of your assistant's assistants switch you to Mint Mobile today. I'm told it's super easy to do at mintmobile.com slash switch. Upfront payment of$45 for three month plan equivalent to$15 per month required. Intro rate first three months only, then full price plan options available.

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46:26But here's something interesting. You may not have to wait until tomorrow. In one study, researchers had people work on a problem that contained a hidden shortcut. After their initial attempt, some participants spent 10 minutes resting quietly, while others spent that 10 minutes doing an unrelated activity. When they returned to the problem, the people who had rested were more than twice as likely to discover the hidden solution. The researchers believe that quiet rest may allow the brain to consolidate and reorganize information without the interference of new distractions. Here's the important distinction, though.

47:09Resting quietly doesn't mean scrolling through your phone or checking email or watching television. Those activities keep feeding your brain new information. Instead, the idea is to sit quietly for a few minutes and let your mind settle. So the next time you're stuck trying to figure something out, you could try this. Put the problem aside, put your phone down, and do absolutely nothing for 10 minutes. You may find that doing nothing is exactly what your brain needs to do something useful. And that is something you should know. You know, there would be no better way for you to show your support for Something You Should Know than to tell somebody about it and suggest they give it a listen.

47:55It helps us grow our audience, and we're always in need of new listeners. It really does help a lot. I'm Micah Ruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.