#796 - Rob Kurzban - The Evolutionary Psychology Of Human Morality

26:32I'm going to learn a fragility or a shallowness to what's actually going on here. Yeah, shallowness among, you know, college students, who would have thought? What a shocker. I totally agree with you. That's why I find the mask thing so interesting because that's a good way to keep the signal honest, right? Is to say, I'm here to face the consequences. And yeah, I haven't been watching much of this. A lot of the people that are at the protests masked up. Yeah. And is that COVID mask or like Balaklava mask? A little above. And so interesting. I mean, the only thing I would push back on there maybe is, is this part of some big suite of, well, you know, we are still concerned about the super spreader event.

27:12Is this like vestigial COVID bullshit or is this, we look hard and wear antifa type black lock type stuff? But your point is pretty interesting. If you're going to make the sacrifice, miss work, miss class, do the sleep in the tent, Why not capture all of the goodwill from the camera's seeing your fat? Look at me. I rob Am here. I Chris Am here in the tent doing the thing. Yeah, exactly. And I totally take your point. It's hard to know the motive here, right? Could be, could be leftover COVID, could be the look at tough thing. I don't really know. All I'm saying is like, yeah, with the signaling arguments, you sort of expect them to want to soak up all of the tension costs as long as they're not, you know, going past whatever it is the benefit that they're going to get, right?

27:56I mean, look, going back to the top of your question, people are constantly weighing these costs and benefits. So what's the benefit of it dancing this particular trying to advocate for this abortion policy? What's the, whatever. And so in this case, it just seems like it's kind of low -hanging fruit. It makes me think that what's really going on in those cases is that there's a cost they don't want to bear in the outside world, or they don't want to be sort of like criminally responsible. But they do want to bear the cost of, but you're saying, sleeping in a tent, because the guys next to them are good now.

28:25Right the person who might be their boyfriend Oh, right, right, so you see what you say like the cause they want the cost to be local not global and if so that's to me very Interesting like that's actually pretty subtle right so these these these these kids calm kids, but they're sweet Other than just not idiots what they're doing is they're saying low I'm happy to pay this cost with respect to what that person thinks about my time and about my effort about sleeping In a tent. I don't really want to pay the court the cost in a court of law Yeah, that's too big for just signaling that I'm on board right yeah because the benefits to the wider, the benefits that are afforded from the wider world to you are skewed toward costs and the benefits that are afforded toward you from inside of the encampment are skewed toward benefits.

29:09Exactly. And I think that accounts for what's going on here, which I find completely fascinating. I think what that does is it tells us something about these, again, you know, you could say, well, they're idiots, they don't know what, you know, what river it is. But you could also say, Mother not idiots, they're getting the cost benefit, can you computation write? Just write, they're there, but they're masked. Yeah, the geopolitics might be lacking, but the interpersonal signaling is 10 out of 10. Naomi. Yeah. Okay, so we're sort of dancing around the topic of morality. What are the evolutionary origins of where morality comes from and what's the function of something like morality?

29:48Well, this goes back to your prior question about, about my views and abortions. So I have a view on this, which people don't really engage very much, but I'll tell you my view. It's a little different from most. So we've pissed everyone off already. Let's keep going. Yeah, there's really no one left. So I might as well try and get the place back. So I'll start with what I don't think. A lot of people, when they talk about the human moral sense, and this goes all the way back to Darwin, they talk about cooperation. So we're moral because we're cooperative preachers. And then there's another line of argument that locates the origin of morality and trying to suppress violence and harm.

30:23So that's another line. So my view is a little bit different. So my view is that humans are weird. So we tend to cooperate in groups. But we do so in this very strange fashion where we switch sides from time to time. So like, you know, in nonhuman animals, you're always siding with your cat. That's the way it always happens. But in humans, sometimes you're siding with this person. Sometimes you're siding with that. And our argument is the nice thing about morality is that and what I say morality What I really means world judgment so when I say Chris it was wrong of you to take my mango or to take Fred's mango that was wrong of you What as long as I can persuade everyone else around me that you did the thing that was wrong Then when you're having this conflict with Fred so you're a Fred or in this fight and I'm like Here's what we should do we should gang up against Chris because he did the thing that was wrong And the nice thing about that is when fights break out, I'm always on the side that has everybody else on it.

31:23So the argument is that morality is what we call a side choosing mechanism. It says when fights broke out, find the person who did something that we called wrong and that could be took the mango or hit fried in the face or didn't wear a head scarf or had an abortion or had an abortion. And when that thing, when that happens, I could be on the side that everyone else is because we're all wagging our finger at the same person. So unlike it's not a cooperative strategy, it's not an anti -harm strategy. It's just a way to avoid being on the losing side of competence. The thing that's interesting about, I think about morality, is that even if you were my best friend, if you did a thing, if you did steal the mango, I'm still better off saying, And look, I'm your friend, but you know, you should pay a $3 fine or 10 pound fine or whatever it is because you did the wrong thing.

32:12So this is a view that locates morality and again, it's pretty cynical, but it's a very selfish kind of thing. It's a saying, I just don't want to stay next to the guy who's accused of doing something wrong. That's the main role of morality. I want to be on the side of the people doing the accusing, not the person who did who got accused. So that explains the function of morality and adaptively how it's advantageous. But I'm still struggling to understand where moral rules come from or why particular rules come about. That's a great question. So the idea there, I spent a lot of time with the politice.

32:54So when I was a grad student, I was trained as a psychologist, but then I had half of my advisor team was anthropologist, the late -grade John Tubi. And then I spent some more time with Rob Boyd. So what you're really asking a question about is cultural change. So the idea here is, you know, people are minting moral rules all the time, according to this view. So, you know, put the beads on the string or, you know, don't fish in the sacred lagoon or whatever. and some rules just get some support. So, and this comes from self interest. So, let's take rules against harm. Someone says, you know what we should do?

33:29We should have a rule that says, no one can punch someone else in the face for no reason. And like, I have a face that I don't want to get punched. I'm going to support this rule, right? And so, all cultures wind up with these anti -harm rules, anti -violence rules. And so, those are really stable in the sort of the cultural sense. Right, so like some ideas are just stable. They just goes all the way back to like the dockets idea of the mean. They're just like memes, right? So and some rules are just good and then someone will take a minute to figure out whether or not they're good or bad So you know, I like the example of charting interest which I know again your readers you can now take a little nap here, but I love Try the quick interest as an interesting thing because there were lots of cultures that said you can't charge interest It's bad as usually and then other cultures said yeah, give your money to someone if they can use it as capital Do something cool?

34:15Let them do it and then they'll give you a little bit more that you gave them back and it just turns out that's like such an amazingly good rule to have that says you may as opposed to must not charge interest. So this really explains why it is that Western cultures, why capitalism works so well, because it moves resources capital from less useful to more useful purposes. Is there a obvious selection criteria for the societies and civilizations that did versus did not permit interest? Was it societies that had fewer people but more money versus societies that had more people but less money or something?

34:56I mean once you get into these questions it's so hard that these cultural things are so difficult. I think it was you know just the west was sort of just ready for for whatever reason you know the foundations were laid for this idea that that sort of it's complicated right that this said I think the answer is I have who knows but but what happened was that when cultures had this idea, they were able to just get more stuff, right? Because then capitalism has all these nice benefits and they grew very fast. Some moral rules using interest is a pretty good example, right? I don't think many people in the West would consider, I mean, some people might not be happy about charging interest, but it's kind of part for the cost.

35:37It's like, look, if you're going to give me money for a while, I probably need to incur some kind of car, Storals, I can just take, I'm like free to be obliged to have your money at any point.

35:49I think it's an interesting example of something that right now we really take for granted, but in the past might have been very contentious. What I'm thinking about is when a new rule gets introduced like you mentioned before much of our motivation it seems is to be on the side of most people right like and that is basically just don't be the one that's singled out. Don't be the punch the guy in the face guy be the person that says don't punch the guy in the face guy. This means a couple of things first off there's like this sort of mimetic cyclical nature presumably to when new rules get introduced and then there must be a kind of temperature checking thing that people do.

36:36And then there must be as well, I guess, finally, a reason why people go with or go against the crowd. So they must do people kind of observe what others do. Is this got implications for like crowd mentality and stuff like that? Yeah. And I think this is why people were so excited about advertising the more of us all the time. I mean, have you ever had difficulty trying to get someone to give they were a pinion about, you know, some potatoes, some world -contains, people, they follow over themselves, right? This is people's favorite pastime is to talk about what they think is bad and wrong and so on.

37:12So yeah, I think all of everything you just said is right. And I think the other thing about trapped interest years, exactly right, that we lose sight of the fact that there was this whole big process by which, you know, that will became common, but it wasn't always. I mean, even property rights, right? Like, it used to be that, you is where people say that you have a property over this, but you don't have a property right over that. And people argue about that. I like the example of Napster, right? Because again, I'm showing my age here, but for a minute, there's a whole bunch of people who sort of thought, you know what, information should just be free.

37:45And there's something nice about that. That sounds good. But like if you made the song, that doesn't sound so good. So there was a big fight about, you know, who has a property right over it? What does that property right look like? And then we got to the current sort of equilibrium, right? where we have the technology that sort of helps us allow people to sell their digital stuff, whatever they sell. But again, we don't notice it much because that fights over, the things that we do notice are where the fights are. So the portion one is a very good example. Anything that's at the center of modern political fights is basically we're trying to figure out a bunch of these different kinds of moral rules and where we're going to land.

38:24Okay. How does morality get used is a weapon then? Yeah, so I mean, I think the best examples of that are the classic examples. Like, think about Salem in this country, you know, the witchcraft trials where, you know, once you have this surrounding set of rules about what you can't do with better and worse criteria for deciding about whether or not someone did it, you know, these accusations can be wielded as weapons, you know, all you got to do is get enough other people to agree with the accusation or put the person in the context in which they can't, you know, are unable to deny it. So, I mean, this is why I think this is the big thing about morality that really separates my view from most of it.

39:06A lot of people think morality is this warm, fuzzy, you know, unicorns pooping gold bars of marshmallows. Whereas I don't view it that way. I view marshmallows, I view marshmallows. I view morality as, yeah, so it's this thing we're all living in this world, where at any moment someone can make a moral accusation. You know, Chris broke this rule. He did that thing, even thought crimes, right? So during the religious ages, right? So if you thought there were two sacraments, there's seven sacraments, right? You could be subjected to unholy torture for who does how long? So that's what I mean. Like these accusations that one has broken a moral rule.

39:44These really, I think of these accusations as a tax and morality as a weapon. This is the way that we can recruit other people. And again, history is replete with this, right? In this country, you might not know there has been some racial tension over our history. And there were places in the American South where you could say, that person from a group that I don't like looked at me or my partner in a funny way. And the next thing you know, that person is that. That's an attack. What do they do? They did this. They broke this rule about where they can look. So this is the way I view morality as this weapon that we can all use and have to be conscious of at any given moment, right?

40:24I mean does that make sense? It does. I understand why you would choose to use morality to not be the target of some accusation to not be in the eye of Sauron. There must be, it feels like there must be more benefits afforded as well though. Some, the ability for your sort of, um, ability and virtue to kind of stand on the shoulders of somebody else, I would never. Like, so there must be more than simply avoiding being the target. What are the actual benefits that are being afforded to the people who are sort of the moral judgment makers? Yeah, it's a good question. I don't know. Again, I sort of am compelled by Salem.

41:13And so one of the things about someone who keeps their powder dry, you know, manages to persuade people not to accuse them and so on. What does that, what does keep you a powder dry mean? That comes from. Yeah, I think it's because back in the day of Flintlocks, if your powder got any water in it, then when you tried to ignite it, you wouldn't get the spark. So what, what does that mean as an analogy? Yeah. So yeah, good question. The analogy is something like manages to keep free of tripping over or something that would cause someone to make an accusation. So just to add, yeah. Oh, okay, okay, yeah, yeah.

41:44Sorry, I didn't mean to make that. No, no, I did, I'm enjoying learning all different words. Yeah. One and, yep. Yeah. So I mean, the thing about anytime that big more conflicts emerge, the person who's not, as you put it in the eye of Sarah, which I also like, like other people benefit. Like during the, during the Salem Witch trials, you know, some of that stuff was about land rights. So once someone's, you know, burned at the stake or, you know, with it, whatever, in a jail cell for a long time, the stuff, the remaining stuff gets reassembled. And so there's more stuff to go around. So there are real benefits to being the moralistic person who manages to stay out, you know, again, as long as, as long as I just land on you, there's all these benefits to be had by sacrificing the people in your social world.

42:34You know, it's incredibly tempting. I had a conversation with Andrew Doyle who wrote a book called The New Puritans using the Salem Witch Tiles as a historical comparison to look at what's happening with a lot of cancellation and social justice at the moment. I found out about spectral evidence. If you learned about this. No, no, tell me. I'm pretty sure it's called spectral evidence. Yeah, spectral evidence. Yeah, spectral evidence was testimony in which witnesses claimed that the accused appeared to them or did harm in a dream or a vision. Contemporary witch law held that witches could project themselves spiritually, either directly or with the aid of Satan in order to harm their victims from afar.

43:16So spectral evidence is kind of like original sin in a way. And it's also the lineage that you can draw to modern social justice is probably pretty pretty straight, but there was like they'd been using during the witch trials, they'd been using spectral evidence for decades, fucking ages, like it was admissible in court, spectral evidence was something that was admissible in court. And there was this story where one day, whatever the equivalent of the Supreme Court or the ruling court or whatever of whatever version of America existed at the time, they sent this thing up and they were like, we're just going to check.

43:51You know that, We've been using this spectral evidence thing like quite a bit for quite a while now. That's okay, right? And this letter came back and was like, what the fuck are you talking about? No, it's not admissible. Like please, for the love of God, like no, don't do that's not. And that I think Andrew taught me was one of the undoing's of the witch trials was that this very sort of tenuous grasp on what did and did not justify or account for evidence bads doing. The bar was raised because this accusation was so loose and costless that anybody could have done. I didn't like the way it's robbed.

44:42He just sent the thing at me and Satan appeared or whatever. Anyone can do that at any time, which means that obviously the friction for you to be able to point the finger at your moral, tribal enemies is basically zero. Right. So interesting. Yeah, that's a great story. I think this sort of speaks to, this is when I get so puzzled when people, you know, when people get resist the idea that morality is scary, you know, I think about cases like the witch trials and what you just said, whereas like this license to just, you know, do whoever want would know what evidence to people. And I think there's an important piece here, which is that during various phases of human history, the people in power to go back to the American South, I was very affected by stories of that time.

45:28And the people in power could just use these accusations to do horrible things to their fellow man. And I think we talk a lot about, in this country, about the founders and the enlightenment so on, to tracing those ideas all the way back to the Martin Carna, and I think one way to think about the last many hundred years is sort of pointing the brakes on that kind of stuff. So you just mentioned you go up to the screen court. So this idea that do process, for example, is just a way of saying, look, if there's accusations, we're gonna put a brakes on it because we don't want people to be able to bring spectral evidence in and just say, no, no, I dreamed it.

46:08So you gotta put them on, you gotta light the fire and then take his stuff and then whatever. And so, in many ways, I think one of the ways in which civilization advanced was exactly putting the bracelet we're talking about. And I think what I didn't read the new purges, but it sounds to be what he's pointing to, is we don't want to sacrifice those gains, right? You sort of don't want to get back into a world in which the people in power could point their finger and say, you know, that, you know, we're going to burn that guy today or that moment. Yeah, so we've probably presented a pretty unflattering view of morality.

46:45Surely morality in its best form is still quite nice though. You know, you mentioned earlier on harm or pushback against harming people. That seems to be I would put that down as a pretty universal good. What, like, isn't morality nice and what is morality at its best and also other any fundamental kind of like universal universal in that they appear a lot laws of morality. Like, what are the underpinnings of it and can't it be done well? I totally agree. I mean, don't get me wrong. I mean, morality can be a force that, you know, leads to great, I mean, I think harm and property rights are the two big ones.

47:25I mean, And we now have a whole bunch of ways that we can stop people from harming each other because we've encoded that morality into the legal system and we've given the state the use of force to enforce those rules. That's great. When it's working, that's really wonderful. Same thing about property rights, which goes, it's great to say, look, if you take my mango, then you're going to be punished because then I can either eat my mango or I could sell it to somebody who wants it more and then we've now increased the good of the world right because I have the money and you have the mango and that's pretty great.

48:00All the stuff about it, I think the other thing is just more generally, I mean, I don't hide it all that well but I'm a libertarian at heart. Not the big ale libertarian but the person who says look, as long as you're not hurting anybody and everything's conceptual and everyone's an adult, they would ever want and a lot some moral rules have moved in that direction, right? So like, you know, I remember before Obama came out and in favor of same sex marriage, you know, libertarians little L, we're ahead of that curve. Like, I don't care what sex you are if you want to enter into a contract. Like, I never wanted to have access to the contracts.

48:36And the sort of once you put those kinds of ideas into laws, which really, again, are just what that really was was saying, this is a moral principle we have now, which is that we're going to treat everybody the same. That's great. I think that is morality at its best. I say, look, if the rules are the sorts of rules that work in favor of people's choices and liberty and against, you know, harm, unprovoked harm, then morality is doing a great job. And we don't have much more than that. I'm thinking about the trajectory of human moral principles over time and thinking about how It seems to me like there's two buckets of moral principles.

49:20One being the protection two and the other being the prohibition of, like you, this is with gay marriage, you are a lot, it is protected for you to be able to do that. I mean, you could, yeah, and the other side being the prohibition, you cannot have sex under this age, you cannot do this particular thing before this time. As the arc of human civilization and morals and stuff continues to progress, does that not mean that there's like this ever increasing accumulation of a more complex system of morality, which makes being a human and dancing through that minefield ever more difficult? Oh my god, yeah, totally agree.

50:05I mean, as cultures become more complex and technology's changed, I mean, yeah, I mean, just think about the things that people run afoul of. I think just couldn't they run afoul of before. I mean, I just saw this thing yesterday, the day before, you know, getting into trouble because you didn't post the black square in some cultures. You're like, yeah, that was definitely not something my hunter gather ancestors had to worry about, right? It's just they didn't have to worry about omitting some particularly singular or whatever. And yes, totally complicated. And of course, as you get more people and they're living more densely, you know, the kinds of things that affect other people goes up.

50:39I'm playing my stereo and I'm in whatever in the place to sing. It doesn't really matter, right? But now, so you need to have all these different rules that weigh your benefits against my costs and so on. It's really complicated. And it's hard to keep up with it. This is an area where my friend Josh who works on little stuff that together, he's constantly trying to persuade me that we should just go back to like a hunter -gatherer lifestyle in part because it's just not so complicated. You just don't have to worry about all these things. And there's something to that. Dental care, something that, you know, it has a modern thing, a very, you know, very fond of.

51:20Don't want to have to go back to work. Very pro dental care. Pro dental care, yeah. But he's got a point which resonates with yours, which is just like, we have to deal with all of these, you know, people around us, but all of the complexities of the rules interactively. Yeah. I wonder how much of the sort of ambient stress that humans feel in the modern world is just downstream from a shit ton more rules and it's kind of more complex. And you know, if we do have an increase for whatever reason, we don't need to go down the rabbit hole of like autism, spectrum disorder, social isolation, social unganeliness, what that probably feels like for an increasing proportion of humans is more complex, nuanced world that I need to move through more depthly at a time where more people than ever before have a reduced capacity at dancing through that more complex world.

52:19Totally. And this I Become a little bit of closer and I wasn't for a while, but I'm close reading a bit more closely the adolescent literature on mental health Because that seems to be the area where at least by some reports You've got these tens who are just constantly in fear of tripping up against what they're whatever the current thing is whatever the current issue is and and I think I wonder if that helps to explain a little bit because you know There's this other evidence. You know, they're not going out and playing and and they're not you know whatever that maybe there's a little bit of a risk version, just the lessons to put yourself out there.

52:55And what that means is they're not having the challenges that, we did, I know, I know, I mold a new one. But we said and did all kinds of stuff when we were that age. None of it was captured on an iPhone, not a single thing. And so I wonder if that's playing into exactly your saying, you've got to tip toe around this stuff, you've got to hit it, you've got to just, or like get it just right. And then even then you're not safe, because tomorrow the rule might be the other way, right? Yeah, well, I got you because you go through the way that. What are some of your favorite examples of new modern moral rules, the posting of the Black Square, maybe a small one, but are there any that have come about relatively recently that might surprise people when they realize that these aren't instantiated in human history or whatever?

53:42Um, I mean, I would say anything, anything drawn from the kind of, you know, the identitarianism, this idea that you always have to back, um, the, you know, in any, in many little subcultured freaking that I say, you always have to back whatever it is, the person that that falls in the category of being the oppressed person. I mean, I get it, like there is, I sort of share the intuition that you should sort of root from the underdog, But the way that that has taken off, I mean, again, I'll wear my politics on my sleeve. I mean, I was shocked at, you know, going back to the protests. You know, you had this conflict of don't get me wrong.

54:19It's obviously complicated. But one side is intentionally trying to, you know, kill civilians. And the other side is intentionally trying not to do that. And yet, the, you know, the moral movement, many cultures, is to loudly back the, what I take to be the side that's, you know, doing this? I suppose the sort of degree of complexity to layer on top of all of this is the inability for people to agree on what is true, right? This multiplicity of sources of truth. Well, no, that's not that's not your truth. That's not the truth. That's just your interpretation of this thing. And this kind of comes back to the increasing complexity of rules and morality that people need to weave through, you know, I always think all the time about Barry Schwartz is the paradox of choice.

55:08And all the fucking time I think about this, it's like so fundamental. I even remember where I was when I first listened to that, the road, great north road in New Castle upon time driving north toward the A1 from the city center. I remember the first time I was listening to that YouTube video and I was like, oh my god. So for the people that don't know, 40 years ago, you would go to the jeans store and there would be one type of jeans. And you would, it would be in different waist sizes and you would go in and sure, maybe you didn't want these blue Levi's jeans or whatever, that's it, 60 years ago, I don't know, whenever.

55:45And sure, maybe they're not perfect for you, but you had very little decision for Teague and any suboptimal outcome in your gene choice did not feel like a personal deficiency in your decision -making criteria. It felt there was no other option, right? So like, what else could you have done? So you have this degree of sort of satisfaction and the satisfaction when it was from like an economics standpoint. Then you roll the clock forward to now and you go into the gene store and it's boot cut or skinny, it's ripped, it's bleached, it's cropped, it's black, it's high rise, it's low rise, it's all it.

56:24You know, that means that any, even though the total utility of one decision has increased because you can get precisely the exact pair of jeans that you wanted to get, you are now faced with this huge amount of decision fatigue and any suboptimal decision. If you put a pair of jeans on, you're like, I really don't like the way that my ass looks in these jeans. I wish I'd got the ones that were a bit darker, the grain instead of the black or whatever, that's your fault now. And it's kind of the same with all of the different options we have for information that, well, it's great. Like, I don't want to live in a world where I don't have answers to questions that I want to ask in chat GPT, Google Wikipedia stuff like that, I can fantastic, I can see everything.

57:08But I now have gone from having to be an information source to an information dissoner. I now have to use... And for almost all of human history, you had less information than you needed. So I think that within probably the last 50 years, humanity has gone from having less information than it wanted to weigh more than it needs. And the skill set from foraging for information versus discerning from an overwhelming amount of information, that's a very different skill set. And I don't think that we are particularly well adapted to do that. Totally. And I think that goes back to the top of our discussion where, you know, you think about where people get in their information and you've got the sort of the, in my, you know, in the US, you've got the MSME C crowd and then you've got the Fox News crowd.

57:57And then you ask this question, well, why do people seek the, you know, they get an economist would talk about a confirmation bias, right? Which is weird. It's actually weird that people have a, if I just want to maximize what I know about the world, I sort of don't want to limit the evidence to just whatever supports I actually want to look for counter examples, right? And then this question is why, you know, why is that there? And it's important, right? Because as you say, you wind up in this tiny little information ecosystem. I actually wonder if it goes back to what you were, you know, we were kind of talking about earlier, which is, do I really want to see the holes in my own argument?

58:31Or I really want to kind of lift the and curtain back behind. And if you're, you know, I think that for whatever reason, people experience that as this comfort. And I do think it has to do with the fact that once you sort of do have that experience, yeah, you kind of have to say, you know, maybe my motivations are not quite as pure. And then once I know that, maybe you'll find out because I'll say I don't out loud. And I think that's why it's so interesting to, you know, spend some time listening to people have these kinds of, you know, key conversion experiences, right? Like the liberal who's been loved and becomes a conservative or vice versa or whatever, because those are people who really do have this interesting experience of having like very firm beliefs, but both ways.

59:14And they could wrestle with, wait, how did I believe that? And, you know, my experience of those conversations is they almost always say the same thing, which is, well, everyone around me, that's what they do. And he wins. It's like, okay, but then that sort of pushes it back. Well, why How were you around those people all the time? Yeah, I mean, the peak version of that are these people that were brought up in cults, right? And you didn't know any other part of the world. I had, god damn it, who is the lady that did the witch trials of J .K. Ra? Megan Phelps -Roper, who was a part of the Westboro Baptist Church.

59:48And she came on the show, fascinating, just total indoctrination. It was the physics of her sort of social psychological system with all of these beliefs. And then she comes out of it and like sort of just, you know, this fugue fever dream state that she was in and kind of gets released into the world and there's all of these other things. I read this sentence from Nick Bossram a couple of weeks ago, I haven't been able to stop thinking about it. He refers to it as thinking in super positions. So super position from quantum physics, yeah, where you have sort of two particular positions at the same time and until you observe them sufficiently closely, they don't collapse, you don't collapse the superposition.

1:00:32And it's just a, I'm sure that the physics people have a problem with it because it's not that accurate. But it's basically holding two contradictory views in your mind at the same time and not choosing to collapse that superposition too quickly. It's like, all right, I'm just going to keep trying to hold these things. And the more that I spend time trying to think about that, like, I'm not gonna lock my sense of identity to one thing. And obviously I do it all the fucking time with everything, whether it's pickleball versus paddle or, like, he does some big geopolitics thing. But the more that I'm able to do that, the happier I feel.

1:01:11Like I just, my texture of daily experience seems to be way better because I'm just curious about the outcome as opposed to feeling like some sort of ego -death thing is gonna happen if whatever flag post I've pinned my colors to is abused in some way or damaged by maybe very valid alternate argument. There's this, I remember listening to Eckhart Tolle, forever ago when I was like first trying to read things and listen to things. And he says that one of the reasons that people cling onto their beliefs so much is that admitting that you're wrong is tantamount to death. But it's death to the ego.

1:01:56And death to the ego is almost the same as death to yourself. Like you are that ego, you are your positions. And yeah, it's one of the reasons why publicly admitting that you're wrong. or you like publicly saying, I've changed my mind, I used to believe this thing and I don't. The more that you can do that, I think you cultivate in yourself, I kind of like safety, you know, like how people learn to relationally or in terms of their attachment becomes safe. I go through a difficult thing and I come out the other side and I'm all right. And the more that you can kind of get out ahead of it yourself, I think is, I'm thinking about trying to do this a lot, personally, just like, I was wrong about that, and I was wrong about this, and I'm really not too sure about that.

1:02:37the more that you do that, I think the more open it engenders you to be to new ideas and changing your beliefs in future. Yeah, reminds me, there's this great, I know I'm probably going to get wrong, there's an economist, I think it was Kenneth Arrow, but might not have been and someone asked, said something like, I see that you change your mind a lot, you know, this guy revises views as publications and might be a powerful, but he says, yeah, that's what I do when I realize I'm wrong, what do you do? And it just says it's a great sort of moment, right? And I will say this man, like I think it's unusual for you to feel good about this ability to sort of keep two things to your head because there's I think there's some good psychological literature that you know people who have just one cause and just keep pushing on it that sort of fanatic types and you know like Westbrook but those people are pretty happy you know they have that's a little bit like the paradox of choice thing which is they've got rid of the power so see you're like I'm going to be this direction this is my thing I'm going to believe on this so I'm gonna be a fanatic about it, and I'm not gonna look for contrary information.

1:03:37I do think there's something to what you're saying, which says, yeah, I don't wanna get too woolly, but you do sort of feel like the world would be a better place with more of the Kenneth Arrow types or whatever you're describing, which is, I don't know. I mean, I think a lot about the difference between what the academy was when I envisioned what it was gonna be like, and then what I experienced, I grew up on Star Trek. So I assumed it was a bunch of Vulcans, like you know, sitting around the table and being like, I have this evidence. I believe this thing. And as other persons as well, I have this counter evidence.

1:04:09And the first person says, I have decided to revise my view. And then like, I'm just passionate. Yeah. And then it's, it's nothing like that. It's like I have this counter -nub data that undermines this thing you just said. And like, I still believe my thing. And I'm gonna get, I'm gonna write a book about it. Yeah, that's wrong. Oh, that's unethical. You're using motivated reasoning. Or you're a xenophobic racist homophobic, whatever it might be. Yeah. Okay. So yeah. So I didn't distract just to say like, I don't the people you would expect to be like you, which is to say, I've got the coupling, the our academics were you're just like, okay, but these couple ideas is just figured out that's not how's it might.

1:04:43Yeah, I mean, that's the gold standard. I'm usually probably pretty black and white basic bitch, bro signs most of the time. But a Corey Clarks being on the show and she brought up this study that she did recently, I think she actually sent the email to every psychology professor in the United States. Like it's like some ungodly, not like 5 ,000 academics. And it was how much do you self -sensor? What are the topics that you think that should never be spoken about? Split it up from male and female? How much did they prefer to have like kind of like a doing good or supporting versus truth seeking type thing?

1:05:21And yeah, man, There's a lot of forget even the students, which is Jonathan Height and a lot of other people will be looking at how much you self -sensoring when you're on campus, coddling of the American mind, shit like that. The professors of feeling this maybe in some way, especially if you are tenured, because there's the hard cancellation of you no longer have a job. But there's the soft cancellation of none of your teaching assistants or post -grad students or the people in your lab want to work with you or you don't get as many offers to be on papers or you don't get you're just not invited out for drinks after you know there's all of these sort of soft versions of social enforcement that say you kind of don't really seem to be on our side with X or Y or Z.

1:06:12Ricky Schlott tells this really interesting story when she first arrived at NYU, about talking about shit tests, apparently in groups of undergrads in the dorms or whatever, they would ask questions like, so what do you think about Jordan Peterson? And it would just someone would sort of just throw it out like that. And the eyes would immediately sort of look around the room to see if anyone didn't castigate him as being a, you know, a transfer or whatever. And yeah, okay, so we've got morality, we've got it to bases. what is interesting about studying hypocrisy and kind of adding that into this worldview?

1:06:49Yeah, so I mean to somebody said it hinges on that remark you just made. So like my, one of my passions was really understanding the basic design of the human mind. And so, you know, for me, I was very interested in this idea about modularity that there's different parts of your mind that are doing really specific jobs and they're kind of isolated from each other. So, you know, you've got to visual system that sees and whatever, a vocal system that talks. And when you build that all the way up, you get this possibility that you have one part of your mind that has a particular principle, don't steal music or whatever.

1:07:23And then another part of your mind is like, I kind of want to have music without paying for it. And so you kind of do that thing. And one question is, how can people be so inconsistent? And I think these kinds of inconsistencies tell us something about this really basic way and which humans are designed, which is where in parts, like the Walt Whitman, you know, I contain multitudes kind of thing. So for me, hypocrisy is kind of like a window into the very deep architecture where the brain isn't just one big mushy thing. It's actually a lot of different parts and you get a one bit that, you know, has a particular principle or a moral commitment and then you can have another system that acts completely contrary to that moral principle.

1:08:01So for me, I don't know, I think hypocrisy, it's sort of like one of the ways that you get a view of this fundamental part of human nature, which, you know, that's hard. It's hard for people to introspect and see themselves. And that's why psychology, I think it's such a hard topic, right, the brain trying to understand the brain. But for me, it's these inconsistencies that I think really reveal that there's got to be something in there that sort of, it's not homogeneous. genius, it's all these different bits and pieces. Because it's in conflict with itself. Exactly. So I think optimal illusions are like this, right?

1:08:37So like you see something and part of your brain knows those two circles are definitely the same size. But you're looking at those two things, look completely different or whatever the optical illusion is. And so what that's telling you is that you've got one, you've got two different parts of your brain with completely different beliefs or representations or whatever you want to say. That to me is interesting. And all I'm saying is that scales all the way up from low -level vision all the way up to morality. And that's cool because that means that we can use this idea about brain parts to study all of it, everything in the middle.

1:09:09Just give me your definition of hypocrisy so that we're all playing from the same hemisheet here. Yeah, people use it differently. So I feel like it's just me in cases where someone endorses a particular moral principle and then acts in a way that contradicts that principle. And people have different views about hypocrisy. But that's sort of what I think. So if you say, yeah, if you say that shut not murder and then you kill your neighbor or something, that makes you a hypocrite. Obviously, that's an extreme case, but there's all sorts of examples like that. I don't know. When I was writing the book on this, I did search for a while, and it's hard to resist these cases where you have, and they hear my college shout -out through a little bit, but you know, these pious, you know, anti -abortion people who then pay their mistress to get an abortion.

1:09:52You're like, So that would be for me like the quintessential kind of kind of thing. It's the it's the senator who's vehemently against gay marriage that's secretly going on grinder on his second phone that his wife doesn't know about on an evening. Exactly. Yeah. So if you're if you're saying out loud, here is my moral belief. And then in your spare time, you are doing the thing that you say is bad, bad, bad. For me, that sort of is the that's hypocrisy. Again, people can have different views on this. right? So people sometimes people use the word to mean something like, well, I apply this rule differently for this group as opposed to that group.

1:10:26And that's fine. I mean, I don't love to get too deep into the definition, but that's for me. I think the best way to sort of think about it. What is your problem with moral hypocrites then? Well, this goes back to our discussion about what morality is. So if you think of morality as kind of a weapon, what that means is that, you know, you're using these moral principles to advance your interests by saying, don't do this, and if you do that, I'm gonna attack you or whatever, I'm gonna get everyone at whatever. And in terms of your behavior, you're also doing this thing, right? So you're sort of trying to get double credit as a hypocrite.

1:11:03You have the moral principle to beat other people in the heaven, and you're gonna be able to do the action that no one else is allowed to do or gets punished for. So that's bad. So this goes back to your question about why is morality good? Well, it's supposed to stop people from being selfish, should take other people's stuff and doing harm. You know, hypocrisy is really, you know, the ultimate expression of selfishness. I'm going to be selfish in having this principle that I'm going to use to attack you. And I'm going to do the thing anyway. Yeah, so rules for the, but not for me. Do as I say, not as I do.

1:11:35You know, the cliches sort of speak for themselves. Talk to me about this sort of bullying equation. Bullying equals attack plus impunity. How does that fold in here? Yeah, so this goes back to, you know, that the point I was making about the American South. So like, there's lots of context and, you know, the Salem Bush trials as well. So there's lots of cases where people could level moral accusations and not really have to worry about themselves getting attacked for leveling them. So again, a white person in the American South, someone who is in the right political position during the Salon Witch trials.

1:12:14Today, I don't want to get too deep into this, but there are certain kinds of people who are protected. So I guess I might as well dive into it. So there are certain kinds of racism accusations that you could make. And whether they're true or false, you're not really going to suffer any penalty for leveling that accusation, but it's a deadly accusation, sometimes literally, I suppose, in certain kinds of context. For the reason you just said, soft cancellations, hard cancellations. And so if you're in the position, whether again, you're a white person in the south, or you're a whatever, a Puritan, or you're a protected class, then you can attack someone with a moral accusation, true or not, and basically not have to worry about the cost, right?

1:13:02In some contexts, you do. Right? So there's lots of context in which making an accusation to lead to a cost, maybe because the back before states because that person's relatives might take revenge on you for whatever or you could just get a trouble for making a false accusation. That's not their false witness against the neighbor. So when we create a world in which people are really not responsible for certain kinds of accusations even if they're false or even actions where there's no consequences, says, you sort of open it up. I mean, look, again, people just weigh their cost and benefits. Can I get a benefit from making some sort of accusation and whether that's in terms of the kind of approval for my group or maybe somehow I'm going to get their stuff or if you're in my company, maybe I go up and not if I take you down five.

1:13:55And again, the important part of bullying there is, yeah, I mean, to go back to just actual bullying, right? So the quintessential Nelson from the Simpsons, if he's on the playground, he's a big, he's the biggest kid. So, you know, he can push Barra and Alisa or Nelson or anybody, Millhouse, too much, since. And he's sort of invulnerable because he's the biggest kid. And so that's the way I think about bullying. So in the context of moral attacks, there's lots of people who put themselves in the position of being invulnerable. I like the example of the American South because it was so clear and as I said, I was very affected by some of those some of those stories.

1:14:33And if you know that the criminal system is not gonna, and your friends are not going to harm you in any way for accusing someone of X, Y, or Z, then you're kind of in a position where if you wanna take someone out, you kinda can't. And I think that's a reasonable way to talk about bullying. Those two things seem really similar to me. Like if I'm Nelson, I'm big, or if I'm white, I can't, I'm basically vulnerable. Both of those things are protected. it. So I can attack with protection. That's the key parallel. And I think people haven't talked about this a lot. There's, you know, there's, I can't remember who coined this term, Cribalties, which is the same sort of thing, which is, you know, I claim to be hurt in this particular way.

1:15:14And when I'm making that claim, what I'm really saying is that person or those sort of persons hurt me. And by the way, I'm in this category that, you know, basically invulnerable. What you know, because you just, you know, you're, you I don't want to go too far on this, but there are certain classes that you can't really attack. You have to believe them or you have to protect them or whatever. And that creates very weird incentives. I think this is one thing that Doyle really put his finger on. It sounds like in that book, which is it's interesting. It's kind of the same, I think it's kind of the same phenomenon.

1:15:51It's not a coincidence that you have a community with people who are more or less able to make these attacks with no evidence, and you get the same result, which is a very moralistic culture. And that, I think, is what we've sort of signed up for, which is, you know, as you increase the extent to which people are, you know, invulnerable, you're going to increase the attacks that they make. I mean, history shows this. I also like the example for, I don't know why it is, but in Les Més, right, where the noblemen or whatever gets into it with, is it Fonteen or Cosette? Fonteen. And, you know, he sort of, he definitely was, you know, Acabib, but he's endobled, so he's completely protected.

1:16:29So he could bully her with impunity. Then this is the history, you know, this is, I think, is the darker part of one dark arc of humanity, which is there are certain kinds of identities that you could have during human history, which have held you more or less harmless. I mean, in the extreme, the king, right? King's like, off with his hand, and that's that, you know, It's not like, what do you do really? Do the, I'm like, yeah, you would see. So, and again, that's why I think you would progress and do process and courts and whatever. They're great when they work. But of course, outside the context of governments and just the different subcultures, it doesn't always work that way.

1:17:08I love your insight about how if you get punched or kicked on Nugget, you'll eventually heal. But in today's world with an internet that lasts forever, you might never recover from an attack on your reputation. Indeed, moral attacks can be fatal. And it's that, like sticks and stones can break my bones, but words will never hurt me. And it's like, words can kind of stick with you for the rest of time. If your OJ Simpson, every single thing comes with an asterisk after your name, right? Like the, actually, no, that's not right, because I guess that that would have come from because of something that you physically allegedly physically did.

1:17:41But certainly, whoever it is that carries some previous moral attack justified or not, it is way stickier. There's, you know, sort of analogies that people use where someone could have killed a guy in a car, in a hit and run incident, and got into jail, got now, and now be kind of getting on with their life. In the meantime, person B who had a moral attack on their character is still dealing with this huge fallout and maybe can't get a bank account or maybe is socially ostracized or whatever. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. I mean, I think about what was the original, the woman who made the joke about going to South Africa, Sacco, I think it was last year.

1:18:28So, that was the world's introduction to exactly what you're talking about, which is, one thing out there digitally. So, yeah, she's not a no -dissimption, she ain't telling anybody. You know, say what you want about the joke, maybe it wasn't funny, maybe it was a little bit racist, whatever you want to say. But like, as you're saying, I mean, you know, the story is about, you know, she goes hiding and you know, can't get into all this kind of stuff. It's like, yes, it's not, it's not what it was. You know, the world is not what it was. So, so, you know, people's, the, yeah, the technology has changed the cost that people can impose on you.

1:19:03So, yeah, so that kind of an attack, yeah. I mean, we all know the results of those kinds of attacks. Absolutely. They're brutal. And I think they can be fatal. People are driven suicide. I mean, these are, I don't love talking about it because there's evidence to talking about it increases, but humans are social creatures. When people ostracize others from their social world, you're taking away the most precious thing to associate. The reality TV show that I did in a previous life, three, sorry, two contestants, one of whom was a friend took their own lives after they'd been on it. And one that was the presenter, the main presenter did.

1:19:50Now, does reality TV attract people who have a psychological predisposition to maybe this kind of a princely, maybe does it catalyze it, almost certainly, Does it create it from grand zero, even maybe to some degree? But you know, those are all in one form or another, you know, social judgments by how the people are judgments on how you look or scrutiny over the way that you've conducted yourself in a relationship or the person that you're dating or not dating or, you know, this thing that you tweeted or whatever it might be. That's an awful lot of pressure. And yeah, you're right when you say that the social impetus can have real world consequences.

1:20:36So like the words that are supposed to never hurt, you can end up being sticks and stones that take your life. Oh, yeah, for sure. I think, you know, in my, you know, as an evolutionist, ecologist, we, I think a lot about the mismatch between ancestral environments and modern environments and one mismatch, which I don't think a lot of people have been talking about. I don't think about it a little bit is, you know, look, if you're in an area where you an essential environment and you've got a little rock versus a big rock. You sort of know what you're dealing with. You sort of know the capacity for harm.

1:21:04And you can use that to make judgments. If I hit that guy with a rock, then maybe this brother's going to come out with me with a bigger rock. I don't know, man. I think people don't realize what they have in their iPhones or their whatever androids, the weapons. The caliber of the rounds that they're able to throw. Yeah, it feels like I've got a tiny little phone, but no, you've got a nuclear bomb. And so we have this mind that's not really evolved to sort of be calibrated to the size of the harm that we do particularly in this world where you can multiply very fast. And so you've got I think that's a kind of mismatch, which as far as I know hasn't really been discussed much, which is how do we get people to sort of understand the technology in a kind of a very intuitive way.

1:21:47Like what they're, you know, what they're dealing with. I mean, I think the reality shows are an interesting case, right? Like, you know, at first it seems like a great idea. And then you sort of say, well, what do you think public humiliation is going to do? You know, and so I think, and I should say, like, I think it's easy to condemn people for, you know, using these weapons. But part of it is not they just, they're just bad at thinking about it. And we ought to have at least, we don't have the intuitions. Again, it's not like a rock. We're very detached from the impact of the things that we do online reputational attacks, stuff like that.

1:22:28The feedback loop isn't sufficiently tight. And the impact of what you do is also not felt, and there's this kind of like, to call it the witness effect or whatever it is. the sort of psychology of the crowd, where, was it your tweet that said that she looked fat in that dress that drove her to depression? Well, you know, 2 ,000 other people tweeted as saying that she looked fat in that dress. So how do you contribute, kind of hide behind that a little bit? There's less accountability. There was a really, like, this is God, 10, probably 10 years ago now. And one of my friends from Newcastle, Adam Dawkins, is a DJ, was just really good at finding shit on Twitter.

1:23:11And he found one of the best pieces of hypocrisy I think I've ever seen, which was a tweet from some account that was saying something similar about one of the people from Love Island that took their own life, one of the girls. Like she looked awful in that dress or like she's like a self -go or something like that. And then six months later, the day that the news came out that she'd taken her life is like, RIP Sophie, I thought so with your family, like what tragic news, how terrible blah blah blah. It's like, yeah. Come on. Yeah, I think the speaks to the prior point, right? Like each one of those things has to do with garnering a certain kind of reputation in a particular group.

1:23:52Right? So like, you want the points for being empathic and you also sort of want the points for being a little edgy. Dunking on someone, yeah, exactly. I mean, you know, I kind of try to, you know, be as positive about the future and human nature is like hand, but like, we're pretty nasty creatures. And then we're nasty creatures. We're all of us just kind of carrying around, you know, like a weapon of mass destruction or hand. What do you think is gonna happen? Not that I have great ideas for solving it. I mean, I think, you know, people as you mentioned, you know, gone high, coddling, and else.

1:24:22You know, the first thing is get out of the, you know, maybe you start young, you sort of get out of the hands of the young people and so on, but, you know, this is when you see where you start taking this mismatched idea seriously, They were like, oh, this really matters because we're these barely, you know, we barely came down from the trees. And now I've got this thing in my hand that can just rehab on multiple people's lives. You know, we're just barely past throwing feces at each other, you know? What are the things that motivate an attack? Why do people tend to morally attack? I think there's, you know, in the case of sale, I do think part of that was driven by just pure instrumental.

1:25:02I want to get the rights to the grazing, you know, these are very physical things. I think, you know, my sense is that under in many kinds of subcultures and the West right now, there's, you know, there's call -up culture, right? There's a reputational benefit to being the person who makes this accusation sometimes true sometimes not and you sort of score points. I mean, I would think that many people actually rise to prominence and virtue of, I mean, I don't want, again, I don't want to get too deep into the politics of it, but, you know, here in the United States, you might know that we had a person nominating for the spring court and someone made an accusation about that person and you know I hesitate but yeah now they have you know some figure book deal and you know they're very welcome and all sorts of talk circuits and look maybe it was true and you know under the circumstances then it's a virtuous act to say look this is a thing that happened and we should rethink but it's it's foolish to think that these accusations don't carry benefits right and so again you have to tie up the cost and the benefits and so maybe in that case it's true, but in how many cases is it not where someone gets some huge reputational bump from being the person who makes these accusations?

1:26:19Yeah, what role does reputation play here? Well, I mean, I think that's one case, right? So, you know, it has really tangible effects. Your reputation can be translated into income, certainly. I think this does go back a little bit towards fresh about the protests and so on. So there's a reputation, you know, it can expose, you know, you get these sort of points for endorsing the right principles and so on. And that can be valuable on the mating market. It can be valuable on the job market, a talk circuit. And the current world, you know, reputation translates really directly. Right? When you, you know, I don't know, I'm guessing you've tweeted from time to time about how many followers you have, right?

1:26:57Like that, that already reputation, it matters. Like it matters how many people are interested in what you have to say. Goes right to your bottom line. Like in the modern world because of the digital age that we live in, and cultivating a reputation for X, Y, or Z if it's valued, that goes a long way. The fact that we even have a profession called Influencer sort of tells you. Right? Yeah. You've got this really nice sort of taxonomy thing of sincerely held moral principles and bully motives. It's like different kinds of motives. Can you just explain that? But yeah, because I, so what I would, what I try to do in this, you know, I do think we should give people the benefit of the doubt when there's, you know, accusations, you know, people make accusations like there's lots of reasons that people might make them.

1:27:48So for example, so it might have done a bad thing. And again, in the case of Ford, I don't want to take a position on that. That's one possibility. What I would say is if you get rid of all the other possible modus for leveling and accusations, sort of what we would call the the virtuous ones like for example that the you know I think the most obvious one is that you know Person did something bad and you know needs to be excluded from society or whatever Then you sort of are left with you know There's some other reason that there that they're you know making this accusation again I think that's the Salem with shraazor and keep coming back to it But you know we know for sure now that the reason that they were making the accusation is not that they literally had the you know experience of seeing the person having sex with the devil or whatever, there must have been some other motive.

1:28:36And so once you can eliminate all the actual motives and you can start to say, what is this person really up to? What are they really doing? So, and don't get me wrong again, I think that your first pass should be to give the person the benefit of the down. Say, okay, well, they're, you know, maybe in the case of our friend who tweeted the tweet about South Africa, You think it's really important that people know that it's not okay to make jokes along those lines And I want to stop that from happening the future to make the world a better place. Okay, that's possible But there's certain cases where you can sort of eliminate those possibilities Then you're left with well, maybe their intentions weren't quite as benevolent Why is it the case then that accusations of hypocrisy are so relatively toothless?

1:29:23Oh, man. I have wrestled with that question I, yeah, that, you know, I always like to, before I have these, you know, interviews, I'd like to, sometimes, you know, to play the, I don't have no freaking clue card. That's sort of in this area. I don't really understand it. It seems to me that it should be, you know, it should really damage one's reputation if you can, you know, show this kind of hypocrisy. But as you say, it seems pretty toothless. The only thing I can think of is that it's just so common. it. You know, it's sort of like dog bites man. You're like, ah, a person was a hypocrite. Okay.

1:30:01You know, what else is new? Um, I wonder if I wonder if, uh, one of the things that people are doing is almost kind of adjusting their sights a little bit to know that we're more transparent and frictionless in toilet tweeting, whatever's come to our brain. And that because of that we kind of need to give an additional amount of leeway to people that, all right, like, you know, he said this thing and then he said this other thing. The problem being, and I think every news story has sort of picked up on this, that the stickiness of the hypocrisy accusation often tends to flow in one direction more than the other, that, you know, there's a lot of accusations of hypocrisy that do really stick about for quite a long time.

1:30:53And then if there's someone else, you know, the, I'm not convinced if this is quite hypocrisy. This is more just people being thoughtless, but it's a pet peeve of mine. There was a photo of a single squaddy, um, British army guy walking down the streets of London that went super viral during COVID in the UK on WhatsApp. And it was one of these things. WhatsApp even limits how many people you can forward messages to to stop precisely this. And it even gives a little tag at the top that says forwarded many times. And this was forwarded with a supposed text message or something from someone's son that was in the army basically saying, martial law's going to come in next week and people are going to be held in their homes at gunpoint because this is the new policy that the government's going to bring in.

1:31:40And that never happened. That never happened in every person that when bananas on the internet talking about why it was gonna happen. No one ever came out and said, ah, that thing that I posted turns out that it didn't end up happening, I was wrong. Same thing got like, hey, where's the global health passport thing and the social credit system that we were adamant, people were so fucking convinced. And the reason I've got a pet peeve about it is that that took up some of my mind share. Like that took up a non insignificant portion of my life, hearing you fought out some half -baked, cod psychology opinion that I was subjected to that wasn't true, and then you just proceeded through life as if nothing had happened, as if you hadn't wasted precious brain cycles on Bollocks.

1:32:37Yeah, and then the way yes, there's a lot there and one piece is and yet it's gonna happen again I think this is the weirdest thing and I'll do it. I will do it I will be that guy. I will be the Bullock's guy as well Yeah, it's a weirdest one of the weirdest things with the modern moment is that you know We keep having these incidents and there's this big less that we all take from now That's not tweet whatever and then and they should try a minute later So I mean the example you know There's a bit more than just come out on the COVID for me the the lab leak stuff was for some reason that kind of got stuck in my crawl, right?

1:33:06Because I think it was because it was nature or it was the landscape, right? So these institutions where they just say, yeah, it's when it's unsigned to, and by the way, I take no position on this. I don't have any, you know, whatever. But like we're told, if you think that's a conspiracy theory and don't even entertain it, and the people that we're talking about it, we're, you know, bad, bad, bad, and then here we are now, where it's like, whatever. But exactly your point, like no one says, oh man, like I should have just I should be misunderstood. And then this introspective moment was like, who do I have to be?

1:33:39So that doesn't happen. Not about COVID, but about my life. Like, how do I stop and take a moment and ask myself, okay, who am I? Why did I put my name on the thing? You love the opportunity. We all have the opportunity to shape the world in a tiny, tiny fragment of a way of whatever our influence is. We nudge human civilization and the current sort of milieu in the direction that we want it to go in. Like, you don't not matter in that regard, I think. Yeah, and I think the piece is just the temptation. We all sort of understand the cost, which are not borne by the person who pushes it forward to think or what's up.

1:34:21But what we don't think enough about, I think, is kind of what you're saying, which is, yeah, this temptation, right? So for people who are potentially going to get a reputational bonus or more followers and virtue of breaking the story or have you, and we just haven't really, as a culture, about you and me, but how do we tamp that down? If anything, it's worse or worse, right? Because we've got this very kind of like L -shaped world where all the benefits are for a few people capture the big accounts. And then everyone else wants to be one of the big accounts. Well, how do you do that? Well, I could forward this thing about the soldier who is mucket around on some random street lunch.

1:34:55Do you remember when those, I think it was like tanks or military humvees were going through Miami Beach? Yeah. Do you remember those videos? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. What ever happened to that? Yeah, exactly. Just, just, just, they, these things just disappear, you know? Yeah. And I just, I don't know, it kind of goes back to, and again, like, you know, I, I will continue to make this era regularly and, and, and say things that later I cringe and want to curl up into a ball and die because I said, but just really trying hard to say with the appropriate level of certainty. I isn't this interesting that I've seen this image, but let's look at it with a little bit of skepticism and go, well, you know, it's one bloke on the street and a WhatsApp message.

1:35:42Is this really worthy of that? Or maybe should I, I don't know, I just think, and the ultimate problem is frictionless communication with no repercussions. If you can just spurt out anything into the ether and no one's really gonna pull you up for it, you're fine. And then we see this very odd sort of puritanism when someone breaches this weird arbitrary waterline of being sufficiently big that they're worthy of intense scrutiny and something Kevin Hart tweeted in 2009 gets pulled up and now he's an evil dude. Yeah, yeah, again, we've created this sort of technological ecosystem which has all of these really weird kinds of properties to it and Yeah, we don't really know that we don't really have good defenses against it I mean as you say yeah the repercussions for like you know retweeting something which turns out to be false I'll tell you where I also worry and other people have written quite a lot about this is um you know When I was a kid, you know, we had three networks and we got the news where maybe CCBS and NBC or whatever and you really got the sense that they were trying to do as much as possible more alas to get either truth, right?

1:36:52And that's how they were sort of making their butt was. They were a little better at getting the actual news into the living rooms. These days, it doesn't really feel like, right? Like, for the reason you're talking about, right? So the people who are tuning in to MSWC, yeah, they want to know the truth to some extent, but they also sort of have this other motive, which has to do with reinforcing their worldview. And so, you know, it, you know, there's this problem that you're sort of pointing to, which is pieces of history that get memory hold and no one talks to me again or pieces of history that get amplified with turn out not to be true.

1:37:22Like I sort of thought the media, the fourth estate was supposed to be the backstop against all this and maybe I'm wrong. It's not my area. I'm a psychologist, not a media study guy, but like doesn't seem that way anymore. Part of it is the fraction, the fractionated media landscape. But I think the piece that makes me most concerned is the interaction between the the there's all this you know All of these people moving into lots of different directions coupled with confirmation bias the psychological piece right so people are just Go it so it's not so bad There's only three directions to go because right if you got confirmation bias, but there's only three things Okay, you get a little bit of whatever but now if you've got an animal like us and all we do want to do is is keep eating the same information.

1:38:06And I've got this buffet over here, this buffet. I'm gonna find the perfect buffet. And then those guys are incentivized to keep feeding me whatever it is I wanna see. That I think is the danger, is the sort of the media interacting with the human capacity to wanna confirm our biases. That's to me is scary. And it goes back to your point, which is we don't, and then add an AI, and now no one knows what's true anymore. Many of them are even here. Yeah, no, this is all a simulation. Yeah, we may have presented a pretty unrosy, apocalyptic vision of human's ability to operate well in the world. What do you think about the role of wisdom in overcoming this biological hardware and predispositions?

1:38:52Yeah, I love that question. So the third guy who I work with on our sub -stack, letting fossils, He founded an institute, the Wisdom Therapy Institute. Like he's all about wisdom, and I really think he's on to something. And what he reminds me of, which I think is really important, is that, yeah, we're terrible, moralistic creatures, and we have confirmation bias. But if you want to talk about the one trick that humans have in our sleeve is that we're capable of learning. We just, that's the cool thing. you know, again, Rob Boyd at UCLA, you know, his one thing, you always just say, the trick about humans is that we're social learners.

1:39:30And that gives me some kind of optimism because, you know, wisdom comes hard, but it does come. And you know, there's a little bit of, you know, you got to be ready to kind of go through some tough stuff to earn the wisdom. And sometimes you just have to get older. But I think what that tells me is that, you know, we're not doomed exactly because, you know, 50 years ago or whatever it is 200 years ago, people didn't learn calculus or whatever it is. And now we do, and it's just part of, you know, what people, many people who are lucky enough to, you know, have that in their curriculum. So I don't think it's crazy that, you know, people like you and Robert Wright and Shawnee are going to be able to, you know, change the world in such a way that people acquire these wisdom skills.

1:40:16And you know, part of wisdom I think speaks to this question about morality and moralistic being moralistic because you know, I think if you could step back and You know, ask yourself, yeah, what do I know about this and you know, Emma? Is this a stick a stone or a nuclear bomb or how big a deal is this and Are my choices here that I have in front of me? Which of them are gonna make the world a better place? So, you know, a little bit of condom behavioral therapy, a little bit of wisdom. You know, I don't think it's crazy to think that down the road we're going to be in a world in which people learn those skills as a regular part of growing up.

1:40:56I don't, you know, it's not huge right now, but you can see part of it, right? Like mindfulness, you know, you look at the influence of Sam Harris. I mean, how many people are, you know, engaged in mindfulness practice because, because of, you know, Sam's influence. And I think those things are related, right? So like if you have a little moment to think about yourself and you know some some some time to Kind of center you start asking these questions about one of your effects on other people and in there I think comes a little bit of of wisdom. I mean One way to think about it is you have were these evolved creatures and we've got these like you know ancient mechanisms and You know someone cuts us off on the highway and we get angry But it doesn't take that much wisdom to say They're going to help me to write his bumper for the next three miles.

1:41:43They're going to make my life better or their life better. So that's my hope. My hope is is located in the fact that humans can learn new stuff. I mean, we've done amazing things technologically. There's work to be done inside ourselves. And I also believe kind of like the point about to take it all the way back to charging. It's just like good ideas really do buy in large tend to spread Buy in large not all the time like there's some terrible ideas that have done a great, you know I've got a good job of propagating themselves. I won't name any but but good ideas tend to spread like property rights Was a good idea?

1:42:20Prohibition gets murdered great idea You know, they they prospered and they you know whatever Teclonical inventions wheel that was good um and and so I think a lot of wisdom. There's a pretty good ideas in there about some humility about how much I know about what's going on in your head and some humility about my intuitions and about what I think I know and some humility about just not how can I be the best person I can be and that's constantly changing. So I do think that we have, like I see a little, there's hope in there. Yeah, I mean, yeah, again, we're monkeys who just, again, barely started using tools.

1:43:02It wasn't that long ago. There. But we also do have some people who are guiding us towards thinking about ways where I think we all could be a lot better. Rob, let's bring this one home. You're great. I really appreciate you. Where should people go? They want to keep up to date with your writing. I'm in love with the right, the articles you're writing for a poor year, but you've got your own stuff as well. That's right. The living fossils on Substack. Everyone's got a Substack. Come find us there. Josh and Shawnee. We talk about wisdom. Mostly evolution, some clinical psychology. I just want to say thanks to Ben super interesting.

1:43:33Uh, Chancellor Talk to you, really appreciate it. I appreciate you too. Thanks, Ben. And Doug, here we have the Lemo Emu in its natural habitat, helping people customize their core insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual. Fascinating. It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug. Uh, Lemo, is that guy with the binoculars watching us? Cut the camera. They see us. Only pay for what you need at LibertyMutual .com. Liberty Liberty Liberty Liberty Liberty Savings very underwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates Excludes Massachusetts.