Luck rules our lives, so why don’t we teach more about it?

Danny Crichton:
Nick, thank you so much for joining us. I mean, you joined us last month at a Riskgaming session for our China EV game, Powering up. In that game... Why don't we just start at the top? What happened in that game? What was your experience? What player did you play and what took place?

Nick Smith:
The Risk game was the changing EV market in China, as you suggested. I played the chairman of the China branch of US General Motors. And basically, I did not do great.

Danny Crichton:
I'm looking at the scores right now. I was like, "One player did not do well." That one was you.

Nick Smith:
Yeah, exactly. Within, I think, two rounds I was down something like a billion dollars. Now, I will say that I did make a comeback by partnering with Shanghai Motors. But when you dig yourself a hole so deep to begin with, that mountain to climb out is going to be a very, very steep one. And I think I made it halfway up the mountain. And if we had seven more rounds, maybe I would've gotten to the top. But when we cut, I was in bad shape.

Danny Crichton:
It's interesting because I think one of the things that comes out of this game in particular is path dependency. Some of our games have a little bit more of a catch-up mechanism. There are structures in place that, if you really are falling behind, all of a sudden allies see you as like, okay, you're a little weak, maybe I can help you and get my own advantage out of you. In this game, because it's a little bit more of an economic simulation and you're competing in a very competitive market, once you're out of the market, no one wants to work with you because you are falling behind, there's no reason to invest in your plants, your factories, there's no need to work with.
And then, what's interesting is in that game, you played with me, as the game leader, and then Lawrence, who's also in the podcast, also had a game. And in both cases, US General did not play well. It was very odd because we really don't usually have that kind of symmetry between the two games. But both of you ended up with about $4 billion of capital, and that was about half of all the other players in the game. And so, I don't know what the path dependency... Obviously, it's been a month since we played.
But what was interesting to me is you, basically, as you mentioned, went down. So in scene three, you were negative 1.5 billion cumulative revenue in the whole. You had lost money in China, made investments, did not make return. But then, you had this surge. And I don't know what happened, but in scene five you went from $200 million of cumulative revenue to 5 billion. Was this the round in which you built the relationship with the Shanghai car comedy and turned things around, so to speak?

Nick Smith:
Yeah. Two things, I think, happened. One is early in the game I was still trying to figure out the scoring metrics. I dug this whole deep, in part because I looked at my win conditions and one of the win conditions for my particular company was to make an investment in China. And so, I thought, you know what? I'm going to try and knock this win condition out early and invested in one of the cities, which turned out to be a really bad strategy, in part because what I should have done is that... The most capital I could have amassed would've been to take all my prior existing capital and just dump it back into the US market because that would've been the highest revenue return.
So, that early mistake in miscalculating which of these win conditions I should prioritize early dug me in that hole. And that led, I think ultimately, to the path dependency you're talking about. Part of what the game brought up for me was just really how difficult the position the US automakers are in. A lot of the IPs... I remember saying at one point to my Shanghai partner, "Look, I'll give you all this IP." And he's like, "Well, what's the IP?" And I was like, "I'll help you make big SUVs. We love it in the United States." And his response was, "Nobody drives SUVs except Americans." I was like, "All right. Well, look, forget the quality of the IP. I've got these tokens and we don't have to specify what's in here. Let me just give them to you to help you win and let me back in."
But of course, if this had been a more realistic, at least in terms of what the foreign information provides, it would've been a really, really difficult position because, in fact, Shanghai... My incentives were not to get information from them, but really because at least my sense is that the Chinese car makers are so far advanced on EV technology, I actually probably should have tried to take some IP for them in the long run to build back into the US. But that didn't work with my particular win conditions. But for the long ongoing nature.

Laurence Pevsner:
Yeah, exactly. China gets an advantage when they get IP early from America, right? Earlier on when we had more advanced technology chips, et cetera. Now, the shoe is on the other foot. I mean, this is why Ford's CEO has been on the speaking circuit recently saying, "Why are we so concerned about Huawei and TikTok when we should be concerned about the Chinese car companies?"

Danny Crichton:
Well, it is a theme that I've brought up... I just had an op-ed in the last couple of weeks in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette focused on [inaudible 00:04:42] steel and its takeover of US steel. But in the same context, it's this idea of, look, in many cases the best technology for manufacturing is overseas. It's a totally different world. We're not used to this in the United States where there's a little bit of hubris, a little bit of arrogance from the post World War II era where we were the dominant manufacturing superpower of the world. Today, we increasingly need to take intellectual property from allies. And China's a much more complex example, but you can think Korea, Taiwan, Japan, countries that have actually maintained and sustained these industries over time in competition with China. And actually, bring it back and say, "look, you know how to make steel at a competitive rate globally. How do we do that here? How do we bracket it?"
Because Japan and the US are in similar demographic conditions, it has different wealth conditions. And so, being able to structure that politically I think is a key piece. And that is a lesson that we don't put in the game. And I think this gets into maybe our second topic, which is around the pedagogy and how we design these games. And the way we did it Powering Up, we really focused on the IC to EV transition, so going from internal combustion engines into electric vehicles. And the big game... As a story, it's basically the Americans have really had an ICE. Chinese car companies don't actually have any of the technology. And so, there's this unique IP you can leverage, you can get access to the market. And then, as electric vehicles kind of surge in, China is the one with the intellectual property. We don't really have EVs, [inaudible 00:05:58] with the notable and important exception to that both in China and in the United States.
And so, we don't actually... Project forward. We end after a couple scenes. You can think of it as ending in 2022, 2023 as the EVs are surging and the US car companies are getting kicked out of the country. But what happens next? And the answer is probably building up those joint partnerships going the other direction saying, if you're Ford, you need to go to BYD and say you have the best technology in the world around batteries, around longevity. One of their cars goes, I think, almost 1000 to a 1200 miles. The distance is greater than any other car that we actually sell in the United States. How do we start to backport that technology and what does that look like? Maybe they want market access in exchange for access to Ford. And in some ways, we almost need to copy the tactics that gave China its wealth over the last two decades back to the United States.

Nick Smith:
Well, two quick things on the structure of games and the relationship to pedagogy that, I think, builds off that and something that Laurence said earlier. One is that part of the challenge with games is precisely that you can't specify every single variable. But in a market, the same is also true. There's an inherent opacity to what the future projects. That's why businesses is an inherently risky thing. And so, one of the things I thought was fantastic about the way that you all set up the simulation was that, A, there were these external shocks that would come in that we couldn't predict. And then, B, keeping the precise scoring away from us. So, the tabulations that you all were doing on your computers as we were playing the game, I thought I knew what my win conditions were, but it was clear that there was some other calculation going on in the background that was opaque to us.
And that strikes me as actually a fairly good example of how a business leader would have to make sense of a rapidly changing market, is that you're just existing in these really opaque worlds where you're trying to calculate out and that becomes difficult. And the second thing is, I think, from a pedagogical point of view, that games are really useful for is the emotion that comes with them. And so, when I was playing Patty... I think his name was Patty. I forget his last name, but the US General-

Laurence Pevsner:
Patty Wong, I believe.

Nick Smith:
Patty Wong. Thank you. Who's running the China aspect of US General Motors. I felt pretty invested in Patty by the end of round one. I was reading his little bio, I was like, "Oh, man. This guy seems like he's got the future, but he's got this very difficult set of internal politics that he's going to be dealing with with Detroit." I was quite invested in how Patty, as an individual, was going to be doing within the broader US Motors world.
Anyways, the emotion that comes with that can be incredibly valuable because, while we often talk about games and rational strategies, the fact is is that our rational strategies are also affected by the emotions that we bring. And in fact, rationality and emotion are deeply connected with one another. And so, bringing this sort of emotional quality to, after round one, my realizing, I'm really doing a bad job, gave me an impetus to pull back both for the company generally, and then for Patty as an individual outside of my specific conditions. And frankly, led me to make decisions in rounds two, three, and four that I might not have otherwise made had it not been for the kind of emotional drivers.

Danny Crichton:
Early on the podcast, it was also one of, I think, our top 10 or 12 hits of last year in our clip show, for those who listened in, was Kelly Clancy who wrote a book called Playing With Reality: How Games Have Shaped Our World. One of the things that she really emphasizes is dopamine loop. That the way we learn is by surprise. And the reason is if you think of, illusionarily, we're in the woods, something surprises us, something is dangerous, something is safer, something is... We're hungry, the food works or it doesn't work. We learn from that. We learned from that experience because surprised by something that was unexpected. And so, I think one of the things that when I look at international relations, international economics business, so much can be textbook or case studies. I'm reading this, I'm like, "Yeah. It makes sense. Okay. Yeah. Facts, everything's logical, everything." And you forget.
When you actually have to play this role and you have to play this character, and then someone backstabs you in scene four. Or, in your case, you got into a rut because you made a decision in the first scene or two and you're like, "Shit. I really screwed up. I needed to turn this boat around immediately." That's a dopamine hit. And not that it may a positive one, but it was an unexpected, I have learned something about this. You're not going to forget that you did this. You also aren't going to forget how you got out of that hump and how you caught up. And so, I think that there's a huge value here of adding that emotional tinge here, surprise, anger, betrayal. A lot of it is kind of negative, but it's also, I think, much more realistic to a competitive market, a competitive international scene where, look, most people are against you, so to speak. And obviously, there's a positive sum. And that's generally our mentality in a lot of these games, is there are positive sum ways of winning in these.
But the reality is everyone can also play negatively. And in some cases, we do have games less than this kind of China game where you are in a competitive market and you need the support of cities to grow. But in Hampton, the Crossroads, some of our other games, there are times when just everyone plays negatively. Everyone is attacking everyone else and everyone loses. It actually ends up in the worst possible area in the system. Whereas, others somehow magically cooperate. And I will say at least in Hampton, the Crossroads, our game focused on a hurricane hitting Virginia, the dynamic between Silicon Valley players, who generally add up into a positive sum and a positive world, versus people who play in Washington DC where everyone attacks each other in the first couple of scenes, and then they get in such a hole that there's actually no way for the group to come out of. It was one of the dynamics we've seen.

Laurence Pevsner:
Yeah. One of the other books that actually CEO of Osmo, a portfolio company, gave to us that's been really interesting was a theory of fun by Raph Koster, and he's a game designer. And he argues that the losers tend to learn a lot more than the winners. If you just win, then you're like, "I'm so great, I don't need to learn anything." But if you actually lose, then that's actually where the real learning comes in. You're like, "I got that jolt of dopamine. Something was wrong. I need to fix that. I need to figure out what I did wrong." And that's the whole point of a game simulation environment is, okay, this is a place where actually it's okay to lose, it's okay to be wrong and you're going to learn from it.
And one of the other arguments makes on the emotion point is this idea that, in game designer terms, it's called the skin of a game. What's the story around it versus the actual function and design and what do you actually have to do? And there's a lot of debate in game design about whether the skin matters. But one of the points he makes, that I found quite striking, is imagine a game where there's a well, and you as the player are trying to fit different sized people into the well. They're bodies, essentially, and you're trying to just make it so that they're perfectly neat so you can have a nice stack in the well. And it's a horrific concept, right? You're basically imagining a concentration camp burial or something. But it's also, from a game design perspective, Tetris. And this is one of these things where, okay, the skin matters so much, the emotional valence of playing Tetris would be completely different with that sort of skin on top of it.

Nick Smith:
No, totally. Well, and it's also interesting thinking about the difference between... Within games, the rule bound nature of a game, and then the unbounded playful nature of play. And we often think of games as, well, you play a game, but the reality is play a free-form activity that children do often without rules or, in fact, making up the rules as part of play, is slightly different from a game like chess where the rules are very strongly set. As you guys are bringing up books, David Graeber's Utopia of Rules have some really interesting reflections on this dynamic, this relationship between relationship rules and play. And he makes an argument that, on the one hand, play is beautifully freeing, right? We can play, it's often that we're at our most free when we play. But play also, at least we often fear has a kind of terrifying quality which leads us to want the rules.
So for example, imagine existing in a world of gods that are playful gods, right? There would be no worse... Yeah, exactly. There'd be no worse world than having a playful god sitting over top of us, precisely because it would be a god who's completely unfettered from controlling us. And frankly, one of the things that, as I was finishing up this book in the last couple of weeks, it made me think about in the EV simulation, was the way in which, Ian, your game designer, would bring in these random events a the end of every turn. He was a kind of godlike figure who was playing around with us, announcing out of the blue news that would fundamentally reshape with no control that we, as players, had the conditions under which we were playing this game. And frankly, it had that kind of terrifying god mentality to it. Every time after every rule, he would say, "All right, new news." And honestly, I would shrink in my chair. And a few times I said, "Oh, no." Visibly just, "Damn it. Can't we just keep no news for one round?"
Because my strategy was coming forward inevitably, and he had no control over this, or I don't know how he had stacked the deck. But at least in my game, all the bad news, it was all bad for US General Motors. All the news was bad for me. And so, to go back to the emotion point, part of what was so challenging here was that every new twist in this game, I had to figure out not only how do I adjust to this frankly playful and kind of vengeful god that I've got over here who seems to be uncontrolled by rules? And how do I tame down my emotions this seeming bad news is coming through and just figure out how do I continue to pursue these win conditions that I've got for better or for worse? And so, I thought the game really did a nice job of bringing together the uncontrolled nature of play with the rule bound structure of a game, and the emotional elements that those two things bring together.

Danny Crichton:
Well, I'll say, on Utopia Of Rules, as a side note, my favorite part about that book is the post office. I had no idea in the 1800s that the federal government was essentially the post office. It's something like 75, 80% of all federal jobs were the post office masters of all these small cities all across America. And I just had no... If you think about it, it makes sense. You got to get messages, you got to get communications. There's no system pre-telegraph. The post is the only way to get information from the west coast to the east coast. It's on horseback. It's literally the quote on the front of Moynihan train station here in New York. But I was blown away by that.
But I think what you're getting at is also what Kelly was getting at with her book, which is why do we care about games and chance and gods? And she actually has multiple chapters on that as well. And it's basically you are in this world that is unstructured, things happen randomly, you're trying to get some sort of metaphor for, what is happening to me? Why did I have all this bad luck? In your case... And by the way, it's actually intentional. The reason you're having bad luck is you probably under invested in China. And so, things that were going wrong for you, if you actually read the cards, what it is whoever is furthest behind this happens to. So, the clampdown on a company is whoever is least invested in the country. So, it is not actually random. And that is part, I think, of what's interesting about rules and this stochastic nature of what we try to do is... And this gets at maybe where we can go into with some of the stuff you do as the director of the MA program at City College.
But a lot of wargaming, traditional wargaming in the Pentagon, is actually not very dice driven. A lot of it is spreadsheets. A lot of it's actually very structured. There's not a lot of chance. There's not a lot of random events. Or if they are, they're really obnoxious or they're like, North Korea did something today. And does that change anything? It's less of this personality driven. And we try to have a little bit more of these stories where one of the events... I believe it's not US General, but Otto Bauer's spouse is actually in the nonprofit sector. It gets caught in a corruption scandal. And so, we actually personalize these in ways that aren't actually usually done in the Pentagon world, where it's usually much more abstract. Like your army lost 10% of its efficiency today and something like that.
And so, I always think of it as we, as story creators, are always looking for a way to understand what's happening to us. Chance, probability, dice rolls is one metaphor for saying, look, every day, sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. Laurence today coming into the office missed his train, was 15 minutes delayed. My train was delayed, so they expressed it so I caught up. That is just the luck of the dice in the MTA in New York City Transit System. But we try to provide those metaphors and I think that's a really interesting part of a lot of these experiences.

Nick Smith:
Well, totally. So, just really quickly on this point, the language of chance is itself a kind of story that we tell ourselves about the structure of the market. So, to build on both your points about narrative, part of what I told myself about these cards is, this is really bad luck. So, as you're both now explaining to me these were loaded dice, I was assuming that they were fair dice, in part because I had an opaque view of what the structure of this game was. And so, the narrative that this is bad luck helped me to get through this, but it also, in its own way, has the potential to deceive to multiple decisions.

Danny Crichton:
It's interesting because I think if you look at the political science literature and the philosophy literature, there's been a growing, in the last 10 years, a little subfield of luck studies, if you will, of people who get lucky in their careers. One of the counterpoints to, say, meritocracy is, well, some people get lucky early on for whatever reason, they have something that gets published that otherwise would not have the Matthew effect or social attachment kicks in. And so, they have a network effect that grows very, very early. And so, without that, they would never have succeeded. Therefore, there's so much stochastic calculus going on in everyone's lives that you have to have systems to undo that or level the playing field.
And then, there's often politics of people can just get a couple more votes, or we usually see elections where it goes one vote one way or the other, things happen, they get miscounted. And so, policies can change radically. I have not seen as much in the international relations field around luck, despite the fact that it feels like luck plays even a larger role just given the complexity of the international system where all these different aspects and actors are all... Think just as classic chaos theory. It seems like luck emerges from that system much more than even domestic politics. I haven't seen anything on that.

Nick Smith:
I think the term of art would be contingency that typically... My colleagues would use. Why use luck when you could use [inaudible 00:20:44]. Exactly. Yeah. Why use one syllable when you can use three? Contingency is certainly something that IR theorists generally have thought an awful lot about. And also the ways in which to go a little bit back towards narratives, the ways in which contingent events and the narratives we tell ourselves about those contingent events can shape outcomes in the future. One of my favorite books on this is a book by Christopher Clark on the origins of World War I', called Sleepwalkers I teach with my students in my theories of international relations class.
And one of the things that he argues quite explicitly is, look, you cannot understand the origins of a gigantic event like World War I without understanding both the contingent structure of events and the ways in which people, actors at the time were telling stories about what caused those events. As an example of this, he's got this extraordinary chapter on the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Which, I have to admit, prior to reading Clark's book, I didn't realize what a complicated event the actual assassination was.

Laurence Pevsner:
Yes.

Nick Smith:
Yeah. It was botched three times.

Laurence Pevsner:
And then, he got lucky because he came right by him, right?

Nick Smith:
Yeah, yeah. Exactly. Yeah. The Black Hand had stationed themselves, a couple of guys chickened out, a third had his bomb not go off. Ultimately, somebody shoots the Archduke, but he goes on anyways to give a speech nonetheless instead of going to the hospital. It's amazing. He basically goes and stands... He goes and gives a speech that says, "I come here to visit you, people, and this is how you repay me, by shooting at me while injured?" I mean, it's kind of unbelievable. And then, of course, he dies. And talk about contingency, I don't know if I'd quite call this luck. Because I mean, it is bad luck on a certain level, but it's also just a really bad decision to not go to the hospital, or after the second bomb has not gone off to say, "Hey, maybe we should abort this parade." This is a way in which somebody is making his own very bad luck.
But in the wider world of Europe at the time, this guy's bad contingent decisions very quickly, Clark shows, gets narrativized in this nationalistic framework that we really now, as Austro-Hungarians, et cetera, have to defend our empire. And so, prior to the assassination, obviously nobody thought there would be World War I. And within 10 days, about two weeks, people are arming themselves to the teeth. And so, to think back to the structure of the game, we as players had... It's amazing, in play, how quickly people come to adopt these habits, come to adopt these roles.
Like me as Patty, I very quickly am like, "All right. I'm going to be a mover and shaker here." The person who was playing the consultant was really aggressively consulting or trying to consult with all of us. And we start to build these kinds of narratives onto the action that's taking place. And again, that's a really great part of the learning, is that the emotion drives outcomes. Much as in World War I, emotions drove people onto... Emotions in this set of contingent events, drove people into this catastrophe in the same way that in the game we're driving ourselves into, in some people's cases, very good decisions, in my case, very, very bad decisions more often than not.

Danny Crichton:
Well, I think you're getting at something that we are really focused on, which is we really have complex systems. There's a lot of chaos in these. There are a lot of actors. When you think of... I mean, climate change is a perfect example where there's theoretically thousands of actors, depending on how you want to count, even if you aggregate large groups, you have small islands, large nations, you have farmers, you have migrants, you have all these different factors, all these different factions are going into that. And all that has all this emergent behavior. And so, part of me feels like even to start to grapple with the complexity of these decisions, you need a lot of frames to get your head around that. You need to understand the economics for a lot of people, the sociological connections in these networks and communities, you have to understand the politics and who's actually winning, who's losing, how that aggregates. In some countries, I'm thinking of Japan or Canada, you have a large farming contingent who has a lot of power over national politics, and there are other countries where that's not the case.
And so understanding all those different lenses, all those different frames is the basis just to even understand the lay of the land. You can't even predict what's necessarily going to go forward from there. But just to get the basis in context to me starts there. But the question, I think, going forward is, look, we've tried to get play into more rooms. We've done that with the US Capitol and the Senate. We've done this with generals, the Pentagon, et cetera, et cetera. We've done this at city governments. There's still this notion that play is fanciful. There's still this notion that, well, a text black on white Times New Roman 12 font memo is the only way to learn about a subject. And when I play, so to speak, play is for children, play is for people who aren't serious and aren't multi-star generals running whole commands. And I feel like that's still the case. Do you think there's a new generation coming in that understands, actually improvisation, dealing with ambiguity, is actually only teachable with play, and there's no way to do that in a three-page memo?

Nick Smith:
Yeah. Sadly, part of how we also have to teach is to do things like, hey, let's play at writing a three-page memo. Because you have to do that. When you get to the UN, you're going to have to do that. And so, a little bit of the play that we have to do is also related to the very structure of these highly bureaucratic institutions. I'm very fortunate to run a program where many of our students, historically, or many of our alums, I should say, have gone on to work at the UN and we're very proud of that. But the UN, like the US military, for example, is a highly bureaucratic institution. And there's very good reasons for that, but there are certain institutional patterns and behaviors. But that doesn't mean that you can't teach these bureaucratic patterns and behaviors through play-based forms of learning.
The example that Laurence mentions about, hey, combine all these ideas into writing a speech to convince me to invest in your charity, is a wonderful example of how to do that. I, in my most recent global justice class with my students, every week had them write three-page memos where they play acted, say, somebody writing from a utilitarian point of view, somebody writing from a Rawlsian justice point of view. It's a three-page memo, which is not the world's most exciting thing, but I was like, imagine that you're trying to convince the President of the United States, and you're a member of the National Security Council, that they should solve the climate crisis in the following way from this following perspective and give it to me in a format that is recognizable to that individual.
And so, even then, I think you can take the formalized aspects of the institutions into which many people, like my students, end up going. But help them to learn it in a kind of more playful manner so it doesn't, frankly, also just seem like a painful exercise of having to write a three-page memo.

Laurence Pevsner:
I mean, having worked at the UN myself in the US mission to the UN's office, there is a game that's afoot. There are certain words that mean different things to different people, and you have to know what they are. You have to know what the rules of the institution are in order to operate within them. You have to know who the right people are that you need to talk to. And all of that is... It's a game in some senses. You understand, okay, there's a certain way that things go here. We have these meetings every so often, and what are people going to do?
And by the way, what people do, they show up at the security council, what do the members do? They play act a little bit. They all play up a little bit what their views are. They try to dramatize it somewhat. And then, behind the scenes, they have to actually deal with each other and negotiate. And that's a totally different thing than what they do out in public.

Danny Crichton:
I think if you think about The Sims, we simulate daily living, people have to go to the bathroom, they have to eat, they have to sleep. No one has ever simulated the UN where there's thousands of people, you have to talk to them, they're lying to you sometimes, they're your friend and they're your enemy. I'm actually really curious about the future of large language models and the ability to do thousands of agents in this way. Because in most large bureaucracies, as you point out, and by the way, definitionally, most people work at a large bureaucracy because that's who employs the most people, and the Pentagon's hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people. How do you navigate these large institutions? That's something that we can't do right now with a six to eight person game.
But I am very, very curious to say like, hey, how do you find out who your allies? In a world in which you actually don't know who any of these people are. Who's your friend, but is really backstabbing you and you didn't realize that behind the scenes? Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I think there's a real opportunity for artificial intelligence because they're the substitute there to roleplay, play act these sorts of characters and give you that sense of, wow, there's thousands of people, they all have different positions, roles, duties. How do I navigate that sort of space?

Laurence Pevsner:
Yes. Speaking of artificial intelligence, I am really curious, with your students going into the UI and going into other systems, going out into the world of international relations, how are they perceiving emerging tech? By the way, are they all using ChatGPT at this point? Are they not? Are they not allowed to? How do they think about issues like AI? Think about issues like social media? How has that changed over the course of your teaching career?

Nick Smith:
Yeah. Let me say two things on that. First is from the pedagogical point of view, as somebody who's directing a program, I have to constantly think about precisely the changing dynamics of the world and what then will my students need. And so, for example, we brought online, this past year, a class on AI and governance, precisely because not only is there student demand for it, but it is going to radically, or is radically, reshaping all sorts of different industries. We were very fortunate to have a wonderful instructor who's expert in the relationship between AI and governance, and he teaches it across multiple domains, not only in the international relations sphere, but also ethical issues around using AI in court and bail decisions, for example, here in the United States, AI and policing.
And so, students from multiple different programs... It's housed within my international affairs program, but students in econ and our US focused public administration program can also take this class. And so, emerging tech, emerging threats, things like, for example, pandemics might not have been something that we would've had as a focus six years ago. But we're now launching a global health class that will in part deal with pandemics. So frankly, part of the joy of running an MA program, but part of the challenge, is you're constantly having to update the roster of what you're teaching. That's one thing.
The second is on your question about emerging tech and what role that plays in the classroom. This is, you probably won't be surprised to hear, a radically controversial thing in the academy. Can students or should they be able to use ChatGPT or not? I will say that the quality of grammar I've seen in the papers I've received has gone up dramatically in the last year, which I can't definitively say where that comes from. But frankly, a little part of me as an instructor is very happy that I'm not correcting a bunch of misplaced apostrophes anymore. That saves me time and allows, frankly, me to focus more on the actual substantive stuff that my students are doing.
The challenge. However, is thinking about what that then means for students as they go forward, say, to work at the UN, right? Where they may be able to use these kinds of technologies, but it may not always work, right? And you'll have to get an email out that's cogent and coherent and effective to your boss. And so, frankly, while, in the short term, I'm glad for fewer wrong apostrophes, in the long term, I'm just a big believer, and Laurence, you would know this better than anybody as essentially a professional writer, writing you learn by doing. And I'm a big believer that you just got to practice, practice, practice with that skill. And my understanding is, or my sense is, that the tech is not up-to-date in terms of policing students. And so, I choose not to police personally very heavily on this. But on the other hand, I do worry a little bit about what the long run consequences are for students themselves.

Laurence Pevsner:
Well, it sounds like you've also incorporated a lot of live aspects of the class to compensate for that, right? You can't ChatGPT a debate, right? They're going to have to speak for themselves at some point, and that seems like it's becoming more and more of an important pedagogical tool.

Nick Smith:
No, 100%. And in fact, one of the things we're bringing online in my particular program, it's a communications class, in fact, it's going to become a new required course for our students precisely because I just firmly believe that, regardless of the industry you end up in, if you're at the UN or if you're at a VC like Lux, you have to be able to communicate effectively with people, whether that's writing a well-structured email to your boss about an important issue, whether it's a pithy email about, hey, I'll see you in 10 minutes. You have to be able to communicate effectively with people. And so, as part of the professionalization skills, which we're very big on in my program, we're basically going to force students to have to take on these skills in ways that we've been doing informally.

Danny Crichton:
Well, on that positive note, Nick, thank you so much for joining us.

Nick Smith:
All right. Thank you, guys. Really appreciate it. Thanks so much for having me to the game, and thanks for having me here today. Really, really a pleasure.

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