#668 - David Pinsof - How To Leverage The Psychology Of Power & Status

28:54Yeah, I a couple of things that definitely most people that did heinous, awful, despicable things in the past believe that they were doing good. There's very few people who actually do evil things in full recognition that it's evil because that's not the way that we're wired. What would be the motivation to do that? There has to be something on the other side of it. And yeah, I think the acceptance of the fact that status games aren't going away. Ultimately, it's very difficult to even conceive of a world in which genuine altruism, bereft of any sort of reflective glory on the person, the altruist, what that would even look like, how that would even work, and how you would motivate someone to do it.

29:43So the bottom line being that you need to work with the world the way that it is, as opposed to the way that you would have it be, it's not this first principles, pure rationality, this is, you know, long -term is a meets -effective altruism thing, bro, like that's just not how we're wired, and the way that we are wired and the kind of like the thermodynamics of human behavior going on here. Yeah. We need to be able to play within the rules of this game. And there's another, another sub -stack post of yours, which I absolutely loved, which was to do with desires, our desires and how they work.

30:17So what is it, what is it that most people don't understand about how desires work? Do you think? Yeah. The thing that people don't understand and perhaps aren't willing to admit because it's uncomfortable to admit is that our desires are relative, they're competitive. We don't just want to get an education, we want better educational credentials than our rivals. We don't just want people to like us, they want people to like us more than they like other people. We don't just wanna have opinions, we wanna have better opinions, and smarter and wittier opinions than other people. The list goes on, I think like 10 or 12 of them in the post, But the idea is that we're constantly comparing ourselves to other people.

31:05Because ultimately we are evolved creatures, we are products of Darwinian natural selection. And biological fitness is an inherently relative concept. So I could have all the food I want. I could have a nice house, access to water. I could get everything I want. But if my neighbors are doing way better than me, then that's not going to matter. Eventually, my genes are going to dwindle relative to the genetic representation of my neighbors. Right? So ultimately, from a Darwinian standpoint, I want to have higher fitness than my rivals than my competitors. That is the only way to maximize my genetic representation in future generations.

31:49So it's comparative, it's competitive. natural selection is the competition between the stuff that's selected and the stuff that's not selected, which means that our brains are collections of the stuff that was selected, right? Which means that that stuff had to be better in some sense than the stuff that wasn't selected, which means that our desires are ultimately revolving around being better than our competitors, being better than our rivals. I do think that it's to a significant extent built into our nervous systems. And there's a problem. I don't think that we can change that fact. I think it's, I think evolution wired us to outcompete our rivals because the most competitive among us were most likely to outcompete their rivals and were most likely to pass on their genes to the next generation.

32:39We are descended from the most competitive and successfully competitive of our ancestors. We were not descended from the uncompetitive losers, right? But of course the irony is we're descended from competitive people who successfully concealed their competitive nature because in order to win the competition you cannot look competitive, right? We compete to reassure each other that it's not a competition. Yeah, okay. And there's a problem. Yeah, so the problem is that we can't all get what we want, right? If what we want is inherently relative to what other people have, then we cannot get what we want at the same time.

33:12right? And that is the problem. So what that means is that we're just going to keep competing with one another until the end of time. We're never going to achieve some utopia where there's no more social hierarchy or where everyone is happy for all time because no matter how much stuff we get, we're always going to be comparing ourselves and our stuff to our neighbors and the stuff that that they have. We could all have intergalactic time traveling pods. We could have immortality elixirs, and yet we're still going to be jealous and envious of our neighbors who have better immortality elixirs and better intergalactic time traveling pods than we have.

33:55It's never going to go away. There's no happy ending to the human drama. We're just going to keep jockeying for status until we obliterate ourselves or go extinct. But there is some hope. I don't want to be completely depressing here. I know that I tend to lean in that direction with my sub -stack and I'm trying to work against it. But I think the one way we can sort of outsmart evolution is by successively outcompeting older generations. So if status and living standards keep rising from generation to generation, then we're all better than somebody and that's always going to be the previous generation.

34:37And that's great because ultimately what we want is to be better than somebody. It gives everyone what they want. But here's the loophole is that the previous generations actually want future generations which include their children and grandchildren to be better off than themselves. It's in their Darwinian fitness interests for future generations to do well. right? So everybody wins when we keep when we outcompete our elders, you know, when we say okay, boomer That is that is the slogan of human progress

35:06We want old people to become more and more irrelevant Yeah, that's brilliant. So I've got it in my head Gene Twangie's work on generations looked at how from whatever it was, the Gen X's and the one before it, not the boom, what was the one just after the Great Depression? Anyway, that group all the way through and she talks about this uprising of the middle class, the ease of access to cars, the ease of access to households, et cetera, et cetera. And then you see this pivot and you can even see, you call it intergenerational competition theory. You can even see the reverse of this at work or when this goes wrong.

35:50And I think that millennials and specifically Gen Z have a bee in their bonnet because they look at their parents' generation and they see that they were able to buy a house by the age 30 and they were able to support a family just on one living wage and they were able to afford two cars and two holidays per year on a normal job. And they don't think that that's the case. And yet there are children who are upset that they're not doing better than their parents, but there are very rarely parents who are upset to see their children doing better than them. And I think that that seesore symmetry explains your ICT idea.

36:29Yeah, absolutely. I think you can explain a lot of the problems we're having by the inability of some segments of the population to outcompete their elders. If you look at the research on what's called deaths of despair, it's primarily happening among groups of people who think of themselves as failing to outcompete their elders, or among elders who view their children as failing to outcompete them. So that's one as well, the parents of dispossessed children. Yes. Yes. Yes. So I think what happens is when we fail to outcompete our elders and we're all in the same playing field, well then the zero sum competitive tragedy of the human condition catches up to us.

37:15And now all of a sudden we all have to be better than each other again, right? We were all happy when we could all be better than old people, right? We all win, you know. But if we're not better than old people, then oh no, who are we going to be better than? Now we have to compete with one another, you know, we have to, we have to form coalitions and tribes to get more stuff than other people and all of a sudden the competitive ugliness of human nature kicks it. So I really do think that the key to prosperity is successful intergenerational competition. It might be the one thing that is preventing us from killing each other.

37:48Yeah, I dropped my insight about this to do with the fact that because of this comparative game that I think is relatively inescapable, definitely at a macro level, individually, you know, enough meditation, psychedelics might be able to dissuade you of this, but that's not going to work for the populace. I said to Sam Harris that I think it's a reason that universal basic income fundamentally doesn't work because you end up flattening the income hierarchy down. Oh, we've got robots to do everything now. And we believe that everyone's just going to lie and drink, be totally blissed out doing fucking poetry and playing the acoustic guitar, what's more likely going to happen is that people are going to find weird and wonderful ways to accumulate status again.

38:32They're going to start this competition game all over again. Okay, so we flattened income. You've, you've, you've, you've, you've, you've, you've, you've read Will Storsbach, the status game where he talks about that, group that has yams, they, they've built, they've built the biggest yam and then they give it to their enemy. Like, it's just going to be a society of people growing massive yams or, or, or crocheting or whatever it is that's, you know, an arbitrary, not that much more or less arbitrary than accumulating resources or buying a Ferrari or a Rolex or getting boob job, but, you know, largely just a different status game.

39:02And I think that it's one of the problems that you get when you look at UBI. And also, if you're right, and I feel like you probably are, and this intergenerational competition theory is one of the domesticating forces is that keeps people feeling happy and sane, that I might not be doing better than my next or neighbor, but I'm doing better than my parents on average across a civilization. If we are about to face a population collapse in which you're going to have negative GDP growth for a sustained period of time, and we can't offset that with automation and AI, you are locking in, you're locking in pan generational recession.

39:47Right. And I think that, you know, for all that you can say, objectively living standards should be able to be ameliorated because we've got all of the automation and the blah blah. And it's like, yeah, but how do people feel they're doing? Like what's the mental state of the 2060 born child compared with our generation now. How do they how do they feel about this? And if they look back and they see a golden era that we think is some awful version of the actual golden era that was the boomers and they look back and they think you it's despondency all the way down. Yeah, no, I agree with you in some sense and that we cannot get rid of our status games and I think a lot of toxicity comes from the misguided notion that we can that we can achieve a status free utopia.

40:35I think that's a dangerous idea And fundamentally unrealistic idea, I think. You mentioned Will Storers book, The Status Game. He's got a wonderful chapter on the rise of communism and how it was a competitive dominant movement that appeared to be against competitiveness and against dominance. It was an egalitarian, anti -galitarian movement that created enormous as a balance, enormous balances of power and inequalities of power and status among the more, the loyal members of the regime got all these benefits and privileges and perks, you know, the disloyal members of the regime were excluded, marginalized, sometimes killed, sometimes sent to force labor camps.

41:15So if you think about the communist utopia where everyone is equal, it is in fact the opposite where it has some of the starkest and ugliest and most brutal forms of inequality known to our species. So I certainly agree with you that utopian theorizing is misguided. I agree with you that getting rid of our status games is impossible. And I also agree that in some sense we need to choose among the status games that are the best for our species. And insofar as status games go, I think competing to offer people goods and services at more and more affordable prices is not that bad of a status game.

41:53You know, like it incentivizes us to do things that are generally helpful and to give things to people that they generally want. So I think markets are a pretty good status game as far as status games go and I think that they are Sadly underrated by a lot of people on the political left That doesn't to say that they can't coexist with with the basic income perhaps they can as you know as as a sort of safety enough for you know The the direst forms of poverty, but I do think that we need to appreciate the benefits of markets as incentivizing the right kinds of behavior. And I think oftentimes the reason why we don't like markets is because the status competition is too out in the open for us.

42:31It's too icky. We don't like to be seen as greedy or as materialistic. And so in order to signal that we're not greedy and we're not materialistic, we often oppose capitalism and oppose markets. And we try to create anti -consumerist consumer cultures where we consume anti -consumerist books and t -shirts and podcasts. But at the end of the day, I think it's misguided and we need to appreciate that markets are one of the engines of human progress. I'm not going to say it's the only engine, but it's a pretty damn good status game that we should keep playing as long as possible. What do you say to people who claim that their fundamental goal in life is to be happy?

43:13I would say in the nicest and most polite way possible that that is bullshit. But I'm not trying to be mean, but I do think it's bullshit. I don't think we want stuff inside our heads. If you think about the way that evolution program our brains, it doesn't make any sense for evolution to program us to want stuff inside of our heads. It makes sense for evolution to program us to want stuff in the world, stuff like food, sex, status, resources, right? The things that correlated with biological fitness and ancestral environments. those are the things that we are wired to want and to seek out. We don't want the idea of that stuff, we don't want the story of that stuff, we want the real stuff in the real world.

43:58We don't want to be misguided or mistaken, we don't want to be deceived about it, we want the real stuff. So I find the idea that we evolved to want happiness to be fundamentally, evolutionarily implausible. I don't think it makes any sense. Especially when you think about what happiness is from a functional evolutionary perspective. And in my post -happiness as bullshit, I give a theory about what I think happiness is. And what I think it is is a prediction error. It's when your brain expects something to be at a certain quality and it ends up being better than you expected, right? The food is tastier than you expected.

44:34The sex is better than you expected. You know, you thought that the PAO would taste like shit, but it ends up tasting amazing. You thought that everyone would roll their eyes at your dumb joke and everyone's rolling on the floor. Those are the types of things that give you happiness. They are unexpectedly good outcomes. And what happiness is is your brain recalibrating itself in light of an unexpectedly good outcome. So when you have a prediction error, your brain sort of lights up and kicks into gear and does all these things to reprogram yourself, you can get more of that thing in the future.

45:05So it plays the happy scenario in your head over and over again, analyzing it, figuring out what might have caused the good thing to happen, what you got wrong. It's revising your beliefs, updating your expectations, shifting your priorities. All these things are happening when we experience what we call happiness. But that doesn't mean that we want to be happy. That's not the thing that we're seeking. When you play a guessing game, you're not looking to maximize the number of times you hear the words getting warmer. No, you want to guess the thing. That's the point of the game. If you guess the thing on the first try without any getting warmers, you've won the game.

45:36You've done a great job, right? You shouldn't cry that you failed to get any getting warmers because the getting warmers are irrelevant. They're just there to help you. They're there to push you in the right direction and I think happiness is ultimately there to push you in the right direction but it's not the thing we actually want. It's not the thing we're seeking. And even if we did want it, we couldn't get it because it's impossible to get. Right? Something that is intrinsically unexpected is impossible to pursue. Pursuing happiness is like planning your own surprise party, right? You can't do it.

46:04So I think in fact, I think in so far as people do pursue happiness or try to pursue happiness as a status -seeking tactic, they are setting themselves up for depression and misery. I think we oftentimes, we don't want to be happy, but we want to appear happy. We want to appear like a happy person like we're well -adjusted, we're healthy, we're self -actualized, we're nice, we're happy, go lucky. That's what we really want. We want to convince other people that we're happy and even convince ourselves that we're happy. And perhaps convince ourselves that we really do want to be happy and we're the type of person who seeks happiness as opposed to Status or prestige or something.

46:43That's ultimately what we're seeking But as in so far as we seek that we're making ourselves miserable because we cannot get the thing that we're seeking And so I think a lot there's a lot of toxicity around the pursuit of happiness and self -actualization I think we would do well to stop pursuing happiness because the more we pursue it the less of it will get What's better to pursue instead? Oh man, I guess our bullshit sacred values.

47:11Assuming that we pick the right ones. Yeah, I mean, it's a great question. I wish we had a say in the matter. I don't know that we do have much of a say. I think evolution has chosen our desires for us. And we do the best we can to fulfill them. And we can't really do anything else. I'm skeptical of the idea that we can remake ourselves and fundamentally redesign our basic desires. I think that's a pipe dream. The best we can do is choose among the desires we have that evolution gave us and try as best as we can to prioritize the ones that are better for us, I guess, better for the world. Ones that we can, that we're more proud of, I have a 15 -month -old daughter, I try to prioritize that desire over my other desires and that's, it's an evolved desire.

47:56My DNA is shaping me to care for my offspring, but I don't care. I'm still proud of that desire. I still want to fulfill it. And that's a desire I can get behind. And I think if we're more, why is about all the desires we have and choosing among them, I think we can choose better ones or at least shift ourselves a little bit towards the better ones? You've got a number of hammer blows that's a list of problems with the idea that humans want to be happy. So I'm going to read a few of these off just in case people were not feeling too completely broken yet. We know that if we savor every moment, every smile, every meal, every ray of sunshine, we will be happy, yet we save a maybe 1 % of those moments.

48:34We know that if we appreciate what we have from the roof over our heads to the clouds on our backs, we will be happy, yet we appreciate maybe 1 % of what we have. Good news makes us happier than bad news, yet we consume way more bad news than good news, even though we can't do anything about the bad news, and even though there is plenty of good news available. Anger feels bad, yet when we're angry with our loved ones, we think about all the times they may just angry, which just makes us angrier. Why don't we think about all the times they're made as happy. We can dilute ourselves into believing pretty much anything.

49:02The Earth is flat, the world is run by a cabal of sedantic pedophiles, etc. Yet we never dilute ourselves into believing that everything is perfect and wonderful as it is. If we were actually pursuing happiness, we'd be very good at it by now, given our many years of practice, yet studies show that we suck at it. We're incredibly bad at predicting how happy things will make us all how long happiness will last. There are vast bodies of scientific evidence that could stop us from sucking at happiness like positive psychology, the science of happiness, yet most people aren't very interested in this research because it's kind of boring.

49:33We work too much and some of us literally work ourselves to death even though we're well aware that this makes us unhappy. Having a child makes us less unhappy and more stressed and we know this yet we do it anyways often multiple times. We maintain relationships with assholes even though it'd be clear that we would be happy without those assholes in our lives. We constantly beat ourselves up but almost never give ourselves compliments and we complain about Twitter on Twitter. Well, you know, it sounds so much better when you read it Chris. It's the British accent. But yeah, man, you know, all of those, it's so right.

50:06And you kind of lay out a bunch of objections. Oh, well, it's hard. Oh, well, I want to do it or I try to do it, even though I can't do it. You know, there are a number of potential barriers that people would put in place about why it is that they would want to do that. And they don't manage to achieve it. They mean to do it even though they're not good at it. I don't know what replaces it though. Peace of mind is the closest approximation I've found to something that's scalable as like a mental state that I think that people should really, really try and optimize for. I think meaning is probably not far off as well, but meaning can actually be perturbed by peace of mind.

50:47So from everybody that I've spoken to, and it often gets into just a semantic argument of like, what do you mean by happiness exactly? And what do you mean by meaning exactly? And is it how long does happiness last, so on and so forth? But it's my belief that if ultimately what we want is to live a life which in retrospect we are glad that we lived, a combination of peace of mind and meaning, peace of mind facilitates everything else. Because if you don't have peace of mind, no matter how good the life is, your Dan Balsarian in a rocket ship surrounded by playboy models, like guess what, you're having a shit time.

51:23So that doesn't matter. Your moment to moment experience of the world is going to be tarnished. And if you don't do anything which is meaningful, the second that you do begin to reflect on whatever it is that you've done, you're going to be ashamed of it, or at the very least you're just not going to be proud of it. Because I think, you know, meaning is doing the thing which you tomorrow would have wanted you to do, right? Like that's a nice conception of it that in rent. Yeah, yeah, that was a good choice for me to make. I'm glad that I did that. And that's why, you know, when you are faced, if you are on a diet, if you're tempted to cheat on your partner or whatever it is, asking yourself, what would me tomorrow want me today to do is such a lovely reframe.

52:02It gives you a little bit of distance. It makes you project you out into the future. But between those two things, like, I don't really know what the fuck else we're doing here. Like, what are we doing here? We're playing these status games. Ultimately, our desires aren't our desires. The desires that are manipulated by a variety of other things that we didn't get to use. Well, I hope, mostly at the mercy of these millennia -old marionette strings that are playing with different preferences, even if we do manage to do enough evolutionary psychology to learn why we do the proximate reasons for our behavior, the ultimate reasons for our behavior come and smash us in the face.

52:34And then happiness, the one thing that's supposed to be this universal good that we were all chasing after, maybe isn't actually that scalable, and how would evolution of program to into our brains in the first place? So yeah, lots of, lots of nails and coffins, I feel. Yeah. You know, Chris, I wish I was better at poking holes. I wish I was better at telling new stories than I was at poking holes in our existing stories, because I'm clearly better at the whole poking than I am of the telling of the new stories. Maybe that's something you're better at than me. But yeah, no, it's something that I've struggled with.

53:10What do we do if not pursue happiness? Well, I like your idea of pursuing meaning. What I think meaning is ultimately long term, I'm sorry to bring it back to the depressing evolutionary psychology, but what I think meaning is is long term fitness value. So we have things that maximize our fitness in the long run with uncertainty and with continued effort and persistence and we have things that maximize our fitness in the short run immediately. So things like, you know, food in your mouth right now, that makes you happy or makes you feel pleasure. But caring for your child, that's more of a long -term fitness maximization strategy.

53:48You know, your child isn't going to become healthy at all at once. It's going to take many years and a lot of patience and a lot of kindness and support from other people. The same thing goes for starting a social movement, forming a tribe that's going to be a successful tribe or it's going to outcompete other tribes that takes a long time. It takes a lot of effort and persistence and it might cause you pain in the short run. My daughter can sometimes be a pain in the ass. But what meaning does is it helps me weather those storms. It helps me put up with those temporary pains and discomforts and keep my eyes on the prize of the long -term goal of raising her to be a healthy adult.

54:32The same thing goes for other meaningful projects like, you know, forming a stable community, forming a strong tribe, cultivating a valuable skill that gets you a lot of success. That's something that takes a really long time and can be meaningful for people. Forming a really good trusting relationship with somebody can be meaningful. Those things are good. I like those things. I think we should pursue those things, but the thing is we already were pursuing those things. And we never were pursuing happiness. It was just a story we told ourselves to begin with. So it's not so much what should we pursue now that we can't pursue happiness.

55:10We were never pursuing happiness to begin with. We were already pursuing the goals that we already had. We're already trying to form good relationships and be good parents or cultivate a valuable skill or whatever. And now it's just making us more aware of those goals that we actually have, right? That's what poking holes in our bullshit does. It makes us more familiar with the stuff we're already doing and the stuff we already want. So the question of what to pursue instead of happiness, I think is the wrong question. The right question is what story are we going to tell ourselves now that the happiness story is bullshit?

55:49And unfortunately, I don't have a great answer. Maybe you can come up with a better answer, But I think there are plenty of other better stories available we can tell ourselves. You know, we're trying to seek the truth, we're trying to understand ourselves, we're trying to make the world a better place, we're trying to be effectively altruistic and perhaps we're trying to see through the bullshit of effective altruism to make it even more effectively altruistic. There are plenty of good stories we can tell ourselves, and I think we just got to choose between them. The conflict is where a lot of discomfort arises.

56:21So when people believe that they should feel happy and they don't and you're battling against this, I would be interested to know if we had an anti -happiness happiness movement that kind of helped to relinquish people from chasing it. I wonder whether more of it would happen first off. I've seen some evidence that people who actually work on happiness or that they purposefully try to be happy. they read books on happiness, they result in having lower levels of well -being moment to moment in self -reports. But also the pleasant emotion that you get when you do things that you know are good because you've designed them in advance to be good because you know that spending time in nature makes you feel better than spending time on the couch.

57:09Therefore, you spend time in nature and oh shit, as a byproduct of doing this, I feel this sense of, well, That's suspiciously like happiness. That thing that's just happened to me is roughly Proximate to what happiness is supposed to be so yeah, I wonder whether But again, you know we spiral it one one layer deeper and Navarre's got this great quote where he says Desire a desire or a contract we make with ourselves to be unhappy until we get what we want And I don't think that that's necessarily untrue that as soon as you pause it an ideal you then begin to and compare yourself to that ideal.

57:44And up until the point at which you reach it, there is a sense of dissatisfaction. You know, if you want the car, you are ruminating about the car, you're researching about the car, you seat on the street all the time, you work and you work and you work and then you get it, and then you just flick onto the next one. So it is an agreement that your level of life satisfaction will be capped up until the moment at which another thing happens, and you reach it and then very quickly you do that. that that ratchet of ever difficulty increasing achievement doesn't seem like a scalable solution for calling it what you want, well -being, human flourishing, you, pneumonia, whatever.

58:25I think there needs to be something, something a little bit more reliable than that, something a little bit more scalable than that that you can find day to day. Yeah, so the question isn't, you know, what are we gonna want? because we cannot choose what we want. Evolution has already chosen that for us. The question is, what are we going to pretend to want? What are we going to socially reward ourselves for appearing to want? That's the one thing that we have control over. We have control over the stories we tell ourselves. And those stories are powerful. Those stories actually do change our behavior.

58:58So what story are we going to tell? I like your peace of mind idea. I think in some sense, We do want peace of mind if you frame peace of mind as the feeling you get when you get what you want And you no longer want other things then yeah, I guess we do want that because that's just a different way of saying We want what we want you know where we want to get what we want right and nature is an interesting example I I do think that being in nature is another evolved preference we have you know We evolved from nomadic hunter -gatherers who you know So went from place to place and camped out at different places and settled down and nicer habitats that were more lush and full of life and easier to navigate with water sources and animals and navigable landmarks like mountains.

59:46So I do think we have evolved appetites for beautiful natural environments. And I think the modern world has interfered with that desire to a great extent. And I think it is perhaps responsible for a lot of our unhappiness as our inability to be in nature because that's basically, that's the place where we're supposed to be from an evolutionary perspective and it does make us feel good. I think when you get relaxed and you feel a piece of mind when you're in a beautiful environment, I think that's your brain telling you, hey, take it easy, spend some time here, you know, maybe move here, you know, we, meaning your genes, we want you to just stick around here as long as possible.

1:00:23This is a good place. Yes. I remember reading an article a while ago that explained why vast spanning views, finally, I've got the house of my dreams and the balcony looks over the perfect vista in the distance and so on. Is that, do you think that there would be an evolutionary reason for that given that we would have greater view of potential predators, potential warring tribes, risks, prey, etc., etc. Is that why we have this preference for big landscapes? It's why you know, no one, very few people, very few people have a kind of messy bush, thicket image painting on the wall. Lots of people will have a beautiful mountainous vista with spanning fields and a sunset in the distance.

1:01:15Yeah, no, I buy that. I think they're definite adaptive advantages to having higher ground, to overlooking of ask landscape, you have, you know, as you mentioned strategic advantages over potential invaders, you get to, it's much easier to navigate when you can see the whole landscape in front of you. It's basically just like having a map split out on the table, you know, and getting lost was a major selection pressure for our ancestors. If you got lost, you're dead. You can't find your tribe, you're dead. And so being in a place that's easy to navigate where you know where everything is, there are clear landmarks, you know where the water is, you know, all the different animals there, which places are safe to hide, which places are safe to camp out.

1:01:54I think that's, you know, I certainly buy your reasoning there. Good. What makes stuff interesting? Why do we find things interesting? Well, I think you might know where I'm going to go with this, but I'll take you through the journey anyway. So you might think that we're interested in stuff that's useful for us. Yeah, stuff that helps us make better decisions, live better lives, pursue happiness even. Or you might think that we're interested in the truth, stuff that's insightful and accurate, that reveals the subtle contours of reality. Really, at the end of the day, we're just seekers of knowledge.

1:02:29We want wisdom. That's what we're after when we're clicking through blog posts and tweets and Facebook posts. We're ultimately looking to gain useful knowledge truths about how the world works. That's the conventional story. about the conventional stories, bullshit, unsurprisingly. I don't think we want any of that stuff, or at the very least, it's very low on our list of priorities. I think too often we tell the story about ourselves that we're the smart ones in the animal kingdom, that the reason the human brain is so big is so that we can use tools and build impressive machines and conquer nature.

1:03:06I think that story is wrong. I think the reason why our brains are so huge is because our groups are so huge and we need to navigate those groups. I think the human brain is a fundamentally social brain. I think the brain evolved not for toolmaking and practical decision making, but for gossiping, politicking, rule following, covert rule breaking, rationalizing, self deception. I think you might call us homohypocratists as Robin Hansen calls us. I think if you reflect on what you actually use your brain for. It's almost completely about people and people related stuff. You don't spend your time thinking about home repair and auto parts.

1:03:50Tools are a very small part of the stuff that occupies your mind. Most of the time you're thinking about, how can I make this person happy? How can I resolve this conflict? You're gossiping, you're thinking about conflicts with family members or you know you're worried about some snide remarks someone made and whether they secretly don't like you or whatever like this is the stuff that your brain is used for and if this is what your brain is used for it's hard to argue that your brain is ultimately a rational tool making machine. It's clearly a gossip and rationalization machine. That's really what it's about.

1:04:27It's about winning arguments, winning social conflicts, gaining and then we're getting a lot of money in the beginning. So, once you apply that lesson to what we find interesting, you realize that what we find interesting is the stuff that fulfills our unflattering social goals that we do not want to admit, either to other people or to ourselves. For example, it looks to hold a bunch of them in this post. It's called, you will find this interesting. For example, we want attention. We are interested in things that get us attention because when people pay attention to us, that makes us feel smart and important and special.

1:05:00And so we are attracted to the titillating, the gory, the scary, the sexy, the gross, the paradoxical, the confusing. All these things help us get attention. We're interested in things that almost no one else believes. So strange beliefs, weird beliefs, countertuitive beliefs. Because if we can prove to people that they're right, well, then we get to look smarter than everyone else. So we're looking for those rare beliefs that help us gain an edge over our competition. You know, it's same thing goes for moral beliefs. We want stuff that makes us look morally superior to other people. We want stuff that casts our political rivals in a negative light that makes our political allies look good.

1:05:41We want information that justifies what we were going to do anyway or what we wanted to do anyway. We want to fit in. We read the news and read about sports and celebrity gossip, not because these things are inherently useful, but because everyone else is talking about them and we don't want to be left out of the conversation. If you think about what's true and useful, the vast majority of it is old, and yet we're obsessed with the news. I think that goes to show that we're more interested in being part of the conversation that people are having than we are at finding useful truths. And the list goes on, we want to signal our membership and special clicks by name -dropping people that proves that we're in the know and mentioning books that only members of our subculture would know.

1:06:25Oh, capital in the 21st century, only really smart members of the intelligentsia will know that one. And that helps me connect with fellow members of the intelligentsia while suddenly excluding dumb dumbs who aren't as cool as me. So there's all the signaling games we play. These clicks we form, the subtle acts of exclusion. Yeah, lots of stuff like that. I go into more ugly, unflattering areas and peace, but that's the gist. I understand that. Explain to me why then our brains are so interested in bullshit. If they evolved by natural selection, why do they seem to function so poorly? Why they're not actually trying to seek truth?

1:07:05Well, if you think about the truths that we actually read about on the internet, almost none of them are actually practically relevant. If you think about the policies that are going through Congress, you're not going to be able to affect those policies. You can vote, you have what, but what, but what in 60 million chance of swaying the election? Like you can't really do, you can't do anything about the political events that are taking place in your country. And yet we're fascinated by politics. It's almost all of what we pay attention to, right? Which goes to show that it doesn't make much sense for us to care about what's actually true in the political domain because what's true or what's false doesn't really affect us.

1:07:43What affects us is our social standing among members of our community. So yeah, I might not personally lose out if I support a policy that makes the world worse. But if I support that policy and it gains me status among my political allies, well, then I win. Right? So I'm going to care way more about the status I get from my political allies than I'm going to care about whether the policy is actually making the world better. And so really from an evolutionary standpoint, it shouldn't matter to us what's true or what's false about these abstract, distant, impractical matters that we read about and talk about.

1:08:19We're not talking about how to fix our toilets or how to do practical things in the real world, at least not most of the time. Most of the time we're talking about really vague, abstract, fuzzy, political matters that have no bearing on our practical day to day lives. That's where these social motives come to the fore and dominate any other practical truth -seeking motives. Yeah, I was going to say, why is it that we are so distracted by those things? Why is it that we care about Congress and all of it weird shit? Yeah, I think they help us fulfill our social goals in a way that practical beliefs cannot.

1:08:57So if I think that, let's say, the sky is blue, that's not going to help me to differentiate myself from other people. It's not going to help me signal membership in a particular click, because everyone believes that this guy is blue. If I believe that there's something wrong with my carburetor and my car, other people aren't going to disagree with that. I can't use that to gain status. So they're really only a specific set of beliefs that we can use to play social games with one another. And they have to, by design, be disconnected from the practically relevant ones. because if we used our practical beliefs to jockey for status and form clicks, well, then our practical beliefs would be wrong and we would fuck up all the time in our lives.

1:09:45So we have to separate the intuitive practical beliefs that we use to actually make decisions from the vague, airy, abstract political beliefs that we use to form groups and jockey for status and never the twain shall meet. You know? And that is by design, I think. because if they did meet, well, we'd make bad decisions and we'd fail in our social goals at the same time. So we have to have our cake and eat it. We have to intuitively, unconsciously know what's true for the immediate practical decisions we make. Well, at the same time, pretending to believe all sorts of other weird abstract vague things to curry favor with our allies and with the people we want to impress.

1:10:27What is the lesson to take away then? Is it that interesting stuff is overrated and that we should seek out more boring shit? Yeah, basically I think That's that's one of the lessons I take from it. I think We have this bullshit idea of ourselves that that we're you know high -minded knowledge seekers and I think that It's healthy for us to see through that I think we often ignore and neglect and look down upon the boring person at a party or a boring friend or a boring family member. We think we're better than them because we have access to more interesting tidbits. We've read the latest think piece and therefore we're better than them.

1:11:17And I think this kind of intellectual status game is increasing our sense of loneliness and alienation. If we're constantly competing to be interesting and we're looking for the most interesting conversation partners, we're going to spend more time listening to podcasts like this one to make virtual friendships with people who sound really interesting. Instead of talking to real people in the real world, like our friends and family members who might not be as interesting, but will offer us more fulfillment and companionship than the virtual friends that we try to. I was on board until I realized it was going to reduce the a list and a ship of the podcast.

1:11:54Sorry, sorry, Chris. Listen to this podcast, but not any of the other. That's right. That's the, this is the only one that is able to thread the needle between evolutionarily what's adaptive and ethically what is optimal. David Princeoff, ladies and gentlemen, David, I love your work. Everything is bullshit .substac .com for your stuff. It's phenomenal. Everybody needs to go and subscribe to that. Where else should they go to Horace you and find just stuff online? You can feel free to harass me on Twitter of all places, the nadir of human happiness. You can find me at David Pinsoff on Twitter.

1:12:31Feel free to DM me if you want. I'm very friendly, much friendlier than I might appear based on my movie beliefs. David, I appreciate you. Thank you, mate. Thanks so much, Chris. It's been a blast.