In this week’s episode, both of our storytellers are pushed out of their comfort zones—and challenged to see the world through someone else’s eyes.

Part 1: As someone who always likes to play it safe, psychologist Kenneth Carter sets out to understand what makes thrill-seekers tick.

Dr. Kenneth Carter is the Charles Howard Candler Professor of Psychology at Oxford College of Emory University and the founding director of the Emory University Center for Public Scholarship and Engagement. He served as the interim dean of Oxford College from 2022-2023. A graduate of Oxford College and Emory University, Carter received an MA and PhD in psychology from the University of Michigan. He is the author of several textbooks including Psychopathology: Understanding Psychological Disorders (Cambridge University Press) and the forthcoming Living Psychology (SAGE Publications). He has published in both academic and lay publications, translating psychology research into engaging everyday language. His articles have been published in magazines such as Psychology Today and Women’s Health, and he has appeared on news programs such as CNN Tonight, NPR’s: ShortWave, All Things Considered, and NBC’s Today show. The psychology of thrill-seeking is the current focus of Dr. Carter’s research. He has delivered TEDx talk on thrill-seekers and is the host of Mind of a Motorhead an NBC Sports web series that examines the personalities of motorsport athletes. His most recent book is Buzz!: Inside the Minds of Thrill-Seekers, Daredevils, and Adrenaline Junkies (Cambridge University Press). When not teaching, speaking, or writing, Dr. Carter prefers reading and relaxing on the beach rather than wingsuit flying or BASE jumping.

Part 2: Philosophy professor Rob Reich is frustrated that so many new Stanford students are headed straight into computer science.

Rob Reich, is the McGregor-Girand Professor of Social Ethics of Science and Technology, Associate Director of Stanford's Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI), Co-Director of the Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society (PACS), and the former Director of Stanford's Center for Ethics in Society. His scholarship in political theory engages with the work of social scientists and engineers. His current work is on ethics, policy, and technology. As a 2024-25 Scholar in Service, he will serve as Senior Advisor to the U.S. AI Safety Institute (AISI).

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

PART 1

It's 2008 and I'm taking my very first trip to a foreign country that's not Canada, Europe, or Texas. I decide to cobble together a lot of airline miles and hotel points for a 10‑day trip to Hong Kong.

I love experiencing other cultures from the really, really safe vantage point of hop‑on, hop‑off buses. I had everything prepared. I even went to the New York Times to find out the best restaurant to go to.

Ken Carter shares his story at Waller’s Coffee Shop in Atlanta, GA in October 2024. Photo by Rob Felt.

Then a couple of days before I left, I did what I always do when I go to a restaurant that I've never been to before. I go online to look at the menu. I'm one of those ready, aim, aim, aim, aim people. I kind of want to know what's going to be on the menu before I go so I don't subject anyone to my indecision. I like to be very organized on the outside, but I can be very indecisive on the inside. Especially true if there might not be something I want to eat or there might be multiple choices, so I want to make sure I get things right.

I'm searching the internet to find the menu for this restaurant. It's usually easy to find. I'm looking, I'm looking, I can't find anything. Then it dawns on me. There is no menu.

So the way this restaurant works is a five‑course meal. Everyone gets exactly the same thing and they don't tell you what you ate until the meal is over. So I'm supposed to put something into my mouth and have no idea what it is.

Took me back to a time when a bunch of my friends and I went to a sushi restaurant and I was enjoying my food. Then one of my friend says, "Eat this,” and popped something into my mouth. Then what happens next is a flood of entirely unpleasant sensations and deep, deep regret. I get the sensation of almost throwing up right there at the dining room table at the restaurant.

That was one bite, and I'm thinking, “I'm going to have to have a five‑course meal like this.” I cancel the reservation and instantly I feel relieved.

Now, this is not really a one‑time thing. This is kind of who I am. I like predictability. In fact, I was going to write a book called "The Chaos Junkies’ Guide to Life." I have a lot of friends who are chaos junkies. I'm not that chaotic and thought it would be really great to write a book for people to be more predictable like me.

Then I discovered that some people are chaotic and thrill‑seeking on purpose, so I decided to write a book about these thrill seekers.

Fast forward a couple of years later. I'm doing a talk in front of a lot of psychologists about the new diagnostic manual and I'm in Twin Falls, Idaho for the very first time. I'm telling the group that I'm writing this book about thrill seekers and one of them says, “Oh, if you're writing a book about thrill seekers, you're going to want to go to ‘The Bridge’.”

Now, I had no idea what the bridge was, but, apparently, the bridge is the I. B. Perrine Bridge, which is the only bridge in North America where you can BASE dive from that bridge whenever you want to.

For me as not being a thrill‑seeker‑whenever‑you‑want‑to would be never, but I got in a cab and I went to the bridge. It's about maybe 500 feet from the top of the bridge to the water below. I see about four people folding these things that look like large kites on the ground and I walk up to them and I say, “Hey, I'm writing a book about thrill seekers. Can I watch you jump?” And they said, “Sure.”

One of them is named Nick. Nick is actually leading the group. He owns a parachute accessory company and he takes people to this bridge to BASE dive all the time.

Now, if you're not familiar with BASE diving, it's an acronym that describes the favorite jumping off points for people who'd like to do this. It's bridges, antennas, span and earth.

So I hold up my phone to take a picture of them doing this BASE jumping and they start waving at me. They said, “No, no, no, no. Come up on the bridge and watch us jump off of the bridge.”

I will tell you I have never felt so uncool in my entire life. I'm in a suit and I've got four people getting ready to jump off a bridge and traffic is whizzing by me. They're perfectly calm and cool. I'm feeling nervous because of the traffic.

One by one, they all jump off the bridge. One of them does a flip, one just sort of falls, and then, finally, Nick is last.

Nick does something a little bit different. In his backpack is an old rescue parachute that he told me that he bought from a friend for $20. The parachute is older than he is and he's getting ready to try it out for the very first time.

He crawls over the side of the bridge and then just sort of falls. I'm holding my camera, I'm watching him fall. I'm getting a little bit nervous. He's falling. I get more nervous. He continues to fall. And then at the very last moment, his parachute opens and he plunges into the water.

I think maybe his shoot opened a little bit later than he thought. He texted me afterwards and said, "Hey, my chute opened up a little bit late. Can you send me the video of my jump so I can find out what happened?”

I take this opportunity to talk to him and say, “So, how did you feel as you were falling and falling and falling and you noticed that your chute hadn't opened yet?”

And he said, “Well, It's kind of like an eerie surreal feeling. In a way, you're kind of scared, but in a way, you're really calm and you're just taking it all in. You're like, "I'm going along for the ride,” you know?"

I said, "No, Nick, I have no idea what you're talking about.” Because I would have been freaking out, as I felt I was freaking out just taking the picture of him.

But here's the thing. This is the difference between thrill seekers and the rest of us. Thrill seekers have this really interesting balance of chemicals when they are exposed to these chaotic experiences. When most of us are exposed to things that are frightening, we get this flood of cortisol. It's that stress hormone that gets you ready for that fight, flee, or freeze response.

But thrill seekers don’t really produce that much cortisol when they're in those chaotic experiences, but they do produce a lot more dopamine. That's a neurotransmitter that's associated with pleasure.

So while I might be freaking out in those circumstances, they're in this sort of nice flow state. And one of the things I discovered that you don't just get that thrill‑seeking experience in those physical things. There are other things that can lead to that thrill‑seeking experience as well.

Take Cy, who's a food blogger that I interviewed for my book. Cy, whenever he goes to the restaurant, he chooses the most unusual thing on the menu because he gets that thrill from those experiences. A bowl of chicken hearts, never had that before. He'll order that. Pig ear stew, that sounds new. I'll order it.

But when I asked Cy why he always chooses the strangest thing, his answer was, "Why not? What's the worst thing that's going happen?"

Then I sort of realized that maybe in my quest of being very predictable, that I was losing out on some experiences, that maybe I could try to stretch myself a little bit more than I could. But from studying thrill seekers, I really decided there are two things. Number one, I am not a thrill seeker. I don't really have the hardware to run the software that they do. I'm more of a calmer person. I'm going to get too disgusted, too frightened, too anxious in those experiences, so I shouldn't try to be like them.

But at the same time, that maybe there's some opportunities for me to stretch myself a little bit, to try some unusual experiences every now and then, to try to fill my mind with those artifacts, to collect that museum in my mind that we all try to do.

And so maybe I'll try to stretch myself a little bit, even though I might not end up being a thrill seeker. And maybe, just maybe, I'll go back to that restaurant in Hong Kong.

Well, no. Probably not.

Thanks.

PART 2

It's fall 2015 and I'm holding office hours in my fourth floor office in Encina Hall. Out the window on this fall afternoon, I can see across all of Stanford University up to the dish, and then just beyond to the sun beginning to set behind the mountains. It's one of those glorious Stanford afternoons and it brings to mind the fact that I've heard Stanford students refer to the architectural style of Stanford as Neo Taco Bell, and I love them for this.

Rob Reich shares his story at The Cantor Arts Center in Palo Alto, CA in April 2025. Photo by Saul Bromberger for Stanford Impact Labs.

I've been teaching political philosophy at Stanford for about 15 years. When I first joined the university in the early 2000s, the most popular majors on campus were history and economics and psychology. But the campus had been changing since the time I had arrived. By 2015, the most popular major was computer science, which it remains still to this day.

I had watched the students begin to vote with their feet, emptying out the main part of campus where I taught and going over to the engineering quad in order to get all these new‑fangled technical skills that were so in vogue.

Of course, the digital revolution here in Silicon Valley had transformed the world, and Stanford was the white hot center of it all.

Now, I was a little worried about not having as many people interested in philosophy and political science as it used to be true, but I understood the basic story. I was annoyed, however, by the fact that it seemed that there had been constructed at Stanford a kind of conveyor belt in which students showed up already at Stanford in their earliest days, ready to hop on the computer science bandwagon, work really hard, and then get deposited, unthinkingly, at the end of it all at a startup company or a big tech company.

I remember I went over to the computer science department and hung out with the engineers for a little while. I left the Gates Computer Science Building one afternoon and there were a whole bunch of tables set up on the outside. A bunch of companies that sent young recruiters to campus and they were passing out bucket hats and boba tea to passing students in return for a resume. That would get them an interview and so the pipeline worked.

I remember thinking I didn't see any bucket hats or boba teas outside the philosophy department.

It sort of bothered me that this conveyor belt existed. In the best of circumstances, it bothered me that students were sort of unthinkingly just joining the bandwagon, sort of pulled along by the force of gravity and then deposited at the end of their studies into a nice tech job.

In the worst of all cases, it seemed to me that Stanford was sort of on the verge of becoming a new‑fangled vocational school, this time with a bunch of technical skills, that really didn't deserve the title of a liberal arts university. It brought to mind that line from Steve Jobs that I kept hearing at the time, “Don't you want to put a dent in the universe?” I remember thinking, “Can we stop putting dents in the universe?”

So, it's fall 2015, office hours. I'm teaching a class for first year students. And on this fall afternoon, a student comes into my office, bushy‑eyed, very eager.

I do my best to put him at ease and say, "Well, welcome to campus. It's so great that you're here. Thanks for taking this class that I'm teaching about justice. What are you thinking of majoring in?"

He looks at me and he says, “Oh, Professor, I am so excited to be at Stanford. I am 100% for sure a computer science major. I can't wait to take the classes on AI. I'm so pumped to meet the venture capitalists who come down here to campus. This place is amazing.”

I say, “That's great. But, you know, you've just shown up. You should really try to take some other classes, other things that you might be interested in.”

“No, no, no, you don't understand, Professor. I had startup ideas when I was in high school. I have startup ideas now. I want to be a founder. I want to be an entrepreneur. I want to change the world through technology.”

Now, I say sort of a little dispirited, “All right, I'll play along. Why don't you tell me about your startup ideas?”

This kid looks me dead in the eye and with total sincerity, he says, "I'd be happy to tell you about them, Professor, but, first, I'd have to ask you to sign a nondisclosure agreement."

I was not merely irritated. I was offended.

First of all, since when did the 18‑year‑olds arrive on campus already so socialized into what it meant to be a Stanford student that they were asking me, a philosophy professor, to sign an NDA? Second of all, what did he think that I was going to do with his pathetic ideas? I mean, was I going to tell them to another student, use them on my own? I'm a professor. I direct the ethics center.

Anyway, that night I go home and I decide something needs to change. There needs to be a cultural intervention on this campus to try to change this conveyor belt orientation. Some type of broadening is necessary.

I go home and I'm trying to think about what I might do and I remind myself I'm a philosophy professor. When I teach philosophy to students, including this kid who came to my office, I tell them, when you make arguments and you have criticisms, you can't just make the arguments and make the criticisms. You have to offer the best possible counter argument. You have to be the maximally charitable interpreter of your opponent's ideas.

So I reflect to myself, how can I make the most sense of this kid and what's happening at Stanford?

That brings me back then to think about when I was graduating college a couple generations earlier. When I graduated college in the early 1990s, I remember talking to all of my friends senior year and discovering, kind of to my surprise, that more than half of them were applying to just one of two kinds of jobs. They were applying to go work at a management consulting firm or to go work on Wall Street. That wasn't too surprising. It was high status. You made a bunch of money.

But it did occur to me, I never remember anybody freshman year saying, “I am so pumped to be here because I can't wait to get a job at McKinsey.” What magic alchemy happened between first year and senior year that more than half of the students applied for jobs in those places?

So there's this criticism of my generation of college students. Remember, this was the years right after 1989, the end of the Cold War, before 9/11, the sort of peaceful years with democracy on the rise. The criticism was that we were a kind of sad, conformist bunch of students. We were perky conformists. We were lovably dull. We were really good at jumping through hoops. We were good at coloring in the lines. We were really excellent sheep.

And this one criticism I heard from the Dean of Religious Life really cut to me. He said, “Your generation, I'm worried about you. You guys are gentle cowards who think that your gentleness excuses your cowardice.”

As I remembered this about my generation, I thought to myself, I have a kind of different story to tell about the computer science students here at Stanford. No one went off to McKinsey or to Goldman Sachs and thought that they were going to make the world a better place. They just thought it was a good payday, socially high status, a nice thing to do.

But the computer science students, they think they're going to make a bunch of money and make the world a better place. And they actually have a pretty decent story to tell. I mean, as a management consultant, you can't work as a 23‑year‑old and then suddenly have your spreadsheet go out to the world and affect millions of people.

But it was a Stanford undergraduate who created Instagram, and 18 months later it had a billion users, a piece of software, and sold the company for a billion dollars. It's possible to code away in your pajamas over the weekend and release your code as an app on Monday, and maybe thousands, possibly millions, maybe even a billion people use it. You really can change the world as a software engineer, as a coder. That, I thought, partly explained what the Stanford students were doing.

So, my cultural intervention. I thought to myself, maybe I'll teach a course on the ethics of technology. But if I teach my class from the Philosophy Department or Political Science Department, I kind of understand already how the students are going to respond to me. It's the usual philosopher wagging his finger from the sidelines saying, "Please slow down. Use a stop sign. Maybe think first before you build something," and I could sort of tell how that would go.

I decided, instead, to go join with people in the engineering quad. I made a partnership with the most popular professor on campus, a guy named Mehran Sahami, who still remains one of the most popular professors here, teaches the Introduction to Computer Science class, and with Jeremy Weinstein, a public policy and social science expert who had just come out of the Obama administration and served at the highest levels of the U.S. government.

We designed a course that integrated ethics, public policy, and technical skills all in the same class. The goal was to try to create something that forced technical students to take on board philosophy and public policy, and forced public policy students to learn some technical skills, and forced philosophers, the few of them that I encountered on campus, in order to come down and experience this great energy of building things through software.

I was pretty excited because when we launched the class, we thought maybe we'd get 100 people, but year one we had 300. Then people in Silicon Valley heard about the class and came to visit it sometimes. And people wanted us to come bring the class into Silicon Valley companies.

We ended up writing a book together called System Error. And this intervention was beginning to snowball a little bit. I thought maybe I wasn't going to change the conveyor belt but I was going to broaden the kinds of experiences that students had on it, so that it wasn't just these technical skills you were getting.

But unexpectedly, I found that the experience was also transforming me. Mehran, the computer scientist, would say to me, "Rob, you're really good with the kind of provocative questions, but don't you really want to get inside a company and build something?"

And then Jeremy, the social scientist, would tell me, “Yeah, the kind of irritation that you bring to the classroom is all well and good, but don't you want to see how the policy sausage gets made?”

So I thought, maybe I would like to try to go out and do something else outside of the campus, outside of my comfortable lane as a philosopher. And, as you heard in my introduction, I joined the United States AI Safety Institute in Washington, DC for the past year. I got a chance to work in the highest levels of government on steering this extraordinary new technology towards social benefit.

I just left the job and I'm back on campus now for the first time. And being here reminded me of that kid who visited me during office hours. I wonder now, 10 years later, is he an AI overlord? Is he a venture capitalist now, crawling around campus looking for the next big thing? Would he have ever predicted that I would have gone into the US government at the US AI Safety Institute?

The lesson that I took away from working in government is that 100% for sure AI is going to transform so much of our world, it already has begun to. But if we leave that job of transformation to the technologists alone, we’ll be much worse off. We need to do it with all of the skills of a liberal arts university and all of the voices of people who are users as well as the designers of the technology.

Thank you very much.