#796 - Rob Kurzban - The Evolutionary Psychology Of Human Morality
01:47:06 Share

Hello friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Rob Kurzban. He's a psychologist and an author. What is morality? Why did it come about? Have humans always had it? Is it a universal or temporary phenomenon? Does it exist as a truth independent of humanity or is it entirely contingent on our culture?

Expect to learn the evolutionary psychology of abortion policy, where the evolution of morality came from, the best examples of modern moral rules that you might not think about, the biggest issues with being a moral hypocrite, the role that reputation plays in judging someone's morality, how wisdom can help us overcome our biological hardware, and much more.

This is so good. So much fun. Classic Modern Wisdom episode, deep into human nature, uncovering why things are the way they are. I absolutely adored this episode. Rob's great. Awesome insights. Really, really helps to kind of unpick and make visible the things that we assume about the way that the world and social groups and our own psychology works. It's just so great. I really, really enjoyed this one. And I hope that you do too.

Shopify is there to help you grow. Whether you're selling scented soap or offering outdoor outfits, Shopify helps you sell everywhere. From that all-in-one e-commerce platform to their in-person POS system, wherever and whatever you're selling, Shopify has got you covered. Shopify

Shopify helps you turn browsers into buyers with the internet's best converting checkout. 36% better on average compared to other leading commerce platforms. You would be amazed at how many massive brands you love use Shopify. Gymshark, perhaps one of the biggest independent sportswear companies in the world...

uses Shopify. And if it is good enough for them, it is good enough for you. So if you are looking to get started at selling something online, Shopify is the easiest, quickest, and most convenient way to do it. Plus, you can sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash modern wisdom, all lowercase. That's shopify.com slash modern wisdom to grow your business no matter what stage you're in.

I've been loving my cold plunge and sauna from the team over at Plunge. I literally use them every single week because the benefits of hot and cold contrast therapy make me feel fantastic. I have more energy during the day, sleep better at night, and recover faster after hard workouts. Plunge's Evolve collection includes four brand new offerings made to fit your lifestyle, space,

Thank you.

three minutes to feel amazing. That's how long I spend in it. And they offer a 30-day return policy. Head to plunge.com slash modernwisdom and use the code MW150 for $150 off any purchase. That's plunge.com slash modernwisdom and MW150 at checkout.

It's important to me that the supplements I take are of the highest quality, and that's why for over three years now I have been drinking AG1. Taking care of your health should not be complicated, and AG1 simplifies this by covering all of your nutritional bases and setting yourself up for success in just 60 seconds per day. Their ingredients are heavily researched for efficacy and quality, and I love that every single scoop also includes prebiotics, probiotics, and digestive enzymes for gut support.

I've partnered with AG1 for so long because they make the highest quality product that I genuinely look forward to drinking every day. So if you want to replace your multivitamin and more, it starts with AG1. Try AG1 and get a year's free supply of vitamin D3 and K2 plus five free AG1 travel packs with your first subscription at drinkag1.com slash modern wisdom. That's drinkag1.com slash modern wisdom.

But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Rob Kurzban. Talk to me about the evolutionary psychology of abortion policy. Yeah, so a lot of people think that where your abortions come from is like your philosophy in life. And I know you've sort of thought a lot about people's philosophies. And so we all live by these kind of, you know, really high level ethics and so on.

But what we've argued is that what you really want to do is look at where people's interests lie, right? So the evolutionary view points to genetic interests, fitness interests. And so we sort of had this idea, this is collaboration with my former colleague, Jason Whedon, that said, well, maybe what's really going on here is that if you think about abortion as a tool that people could use to have a relatively promiscuous lifestyle, right? So the cost of

you know, making a mistake, if you want to put it that way, is relatively low as long as there's abortion services. So maybe what's really going on is people who want to live a lifestyle in which they can have a sexual strategy, which is maybe a little bit more promiscuous and so on, that they're going to be in favor of it. And the other way too, right? So if you've got people who are living a monogamous lifestyle, what you really don't want is your partner to be tempted to stray. And one way that you could deter them is by making that behavior costly. So

I should say I was very skeptical of this explanation when I first heard it. So we gathered a lot of data and it was surprising to me. It turns out that people who have views, which kind of comport with that strategy, who are kind of monogamous...

they tend to be opposed to abortion services and the reverse. So what's really going on here is that people are sort of using favoring abortion as a way to get the policies in place that advances their reproductive interests. So it sounds very cynical. You know, it would be great if everyone just had a set of principles which they live by. I mean, if anything, you know, the last 10 years, if they've shown us anything is that, you know,

Why?

Well, so the argument is that over evolutionary time, people who advocated for those kinds of rules and norms that advanced their interests would have had greater reproductive success. So we're sort of designed to figure out, look, we live in a moral world. Like humans are weird. Like we have all these rules about what you can and can't do. You can eat this food, but you can't eat it if you're having this other one. There's all these rules about violence. There's all these rules about everything.

But what that means is that once you have moral communities, if you can influence what those rules are, you could use those rules to prevent the kinds of things that are going to be bad for your fitness interests and advance those sorts of things which are going to be good for your fitness interests. So we're descended from people who strategically played with the rules, like poking them here and there so that they and their family and their offspring did better than their competitors. I mean, once you start thinking about it that way, again, it's a little cynical, but it's also scary, right? So what we should be aware of

when people tell us what their positions are is to first ask this question, okay, well, where do their interests lie? And maybe that's- How could this benefit you? Exactly. And we should be pretty skeptical when it turns out that people really like the rules that benefit them. I mean, we're seeing this now, right? Like,

I don't want to get right into it, but certain people suddenly are in favor of free speech. You know, after being told for five years, there's one word that if you say it, it's literal genocide. So we have to stop people from saying, you know, a bad word. And then the next day they're out there like, I want to say all these words about, you know, pretty bad things. And they say, no, that's, you know, so once you see these sort of switches, you can sort of see that, well, people are just playing around with the rules to try to advance whatever their particular interests are.

Can you think of an example of something where a moral rule is being put forward, promoted by someone, and it doesn't personally benefit them, therefore it lends more credence? Could you give us, given that there's this slightly cynical view, perhaps, of where people are coming from with their motivation around abortion, what would be an example of the opposite? Yeah, that's a great question.

I think that when you think about history's heroes, oftentimes it's those guys. So for example, you know, the people in the civil rights movement who were advocating for equal rights for groups that they didn't belong to. I mean, that's pretty good, right? I mean, I think of cases like the old days, the ACLU, when they're advocating for people's rights to march in Skokie, you know, under the banner of a swastika. It was a very principled sort of thing. That's not in their interest. So, yeah.

I think there are cases where people really do sort of have a set of principles and they're willing to do things that really do work against their interests in the service of supporting those principles. I mean, I think in many ways this was sort of the vision of liberalism, which was to say it's the principle that matters.

you know, not your particular stakes. So I think those are sort of interesting examples. And I think every time we sort of think about someone as a hero, oftentimes what that is, is someone supporting a principle which is not particularly good for them comes at some cost. It would have been great for people who were living in, you know, a very asymmetrical society, if you're at the top of it, to keep that going. You know, you've got a good thing going. So fighting for civil rights and legislation which promoted them, I think, you know, that was pretty heroic.

What are the most common pushbacks or criticisms that you get when you propose this personally motivated agenda rule for abortion policy?

Well, another, yeah, it's an interesting question. So I'll say a couple things. So, you know, I know that you hang out quite a bit with academics. And so there's sort of two kinds of ways that academics wind up dealing with ideas they don't like. The first one is to, you know, engage them. The second one is to ignore them.

And, you know, by and large, my experience and, you know, even to this day is that it hasn't really been engaged all that much. A little bit, you know, so you have some scholars who have talked about it and what they typically will do is they'll, you know, and they're not wrong about this. There is evidence that sort of does in some context support the sort of what's the matter with Kansas sort of thing. So this is the idea that, you know, people are voting against their self-interest.

And a lot of it does depend a little bit on how you parse out the data, right? So this, like so many areas, it's complicated. So if you look at this data set, you might find support for it, but if you attend to this other data set, you might not. But it's usually the people who say, no, there really are these principles here. People are clustering into left and right, for example, in the US, and they're going to vote that way. And if you know one kind of

issue, their stance on one issue, you're going to be able to guess their stance on another and say, no, there really is this kind of like overarching philosophy that's guiding people's choices. Again, I sort of believed that until we started running our own studies. I mean, you know, we ran this study where we asked people for their views on recreational drugs and, you know, you told me, is that going to predict people's views on abortion? I would have said, I don't know, probably not. I mean, it doesn't seem that related, but,

But yeah, so it turns out the recreational drug use is sort of related to this more promiscuous lifestyle, which then feeds into this view about abortion. And so there's a relationship there. And it's pretty hard to tell another story that kind of like allows you to make that prediction before you ran the study.

Was Jamie Krems involved in this at all? She wasn't. Jamie used to come to my lab meetings. She's a dear, close friend. She mostly has been focusing on some really interesting stuff on aggression within, you know, with both male and female styles of aggression and different kinds of styles. My guess is she'd be sympathetic to these styles of argument, but I wouldn't want to put words in her mouth. She was on the show last year and she was the first person that taught me about

What do you call this? What's the name for this particular theory of abortion motivation? You know, again, academics are so funny. You know, you really do the best when you get some branding in there. And we never branded it.

Oh, Rob, come and talk to me. I'm like a fucking marketing agent. I'm like a media agency for ideas. I can't really do very well with ideas, but I'll name the living shit out of them. Anyway, so that theory. Jamie said it. Lots of people, I imagine, will...

be unhappy to hear that. And this is both sides of the fence. This is one of those really like fascinating propositions that annoys both parties equally. It, um, kind of derogates both positions at the same time. So kind of to recap and tell me where I get this wrong, trying to work out why people would support or be, uh, against abortion policies, access to abortion, uh,

requires you to look at what is the incentive that they, what are the reasons and the benefits that they are afforded by holding that particular position. People who are in relationships, particularly monogamous relationships, particularly marriages, perhaps with kids,

are going to be more likely to want to restrict abortion because it imposes a higher cost on casual sex, which means that their committed partner, which they do not want to go anywhere else, is therefore going to be less inclined to potentially have casual sex because the externalities of doing that are going to be higher because maybe there's a child and maybe they can't get rid of it.

On the flip side, the people who are single are going to be more likely to be in favor of abortion or the people that are probably like high in sociosexuality, maybe polyamorous, consensual non-monogamy, stuff like that, because for them, they want to, there is no reason for them to increase the potential cost of an accidental pregnancy if they are having a lot more sex, if they're having sex with multiple partners that they don't intend on having a child with. And that is...

In contrast, I think, to what a lot of people believe as to be their reason for their stance on abortion, which is something highfalutin, moralistic. It's to do with values and virtues and ethics and purpose and human life. And is it six weeks or is it on conception? Is it a bundle of cells? Does it have moral worth? All of this stuff.

How close am I there? Well, honestly, you really are right that you're marketing because you just marketed it better than I did. Yes, you put it... We did it, baby. We did it. That's what I do. I take people who are way smarter than me and I make their ideas sound easier. So moving forward to the next step there, what this... Let's just say that this is true. Let's say that this is... We don't even need to say that it is true. Presumably there's layers going on here that you can have a...

moral imperative that allows you to adjust the way that you want the world to be and the things that you believe and what you...

I would be very interested to find someone who says, I in no way am influenced by my own incentives. They have absolutely 0% influence on my worldview. I think that that would be a very... I would like to meet that person. I think that that would be a very strong case to make. So what does that tell us about the...

position and the use of moral beliefs and of these sort of overarching philosophies, life design directions and stuff, and how that is used to excuse and disabuse us of our belief about why we do the things that we do? How does that kind of tie into the bigger picture? Yeah. I mean, the way I think about it is that

We're all sort of in this social world where we want to broadcast the most angelic version of ourselves. We can't. And that's why, of course, when people talk about their positions on, say, abortion, they're not going to refer to their lifestyles because, you know, you don't get any, you know, you don't get any moral points for saying, yeah, I want people not to have abortion so that, you know, my husband doesn't go off and, you know, have an affair. Right.

You get way more moral points for that by saying, I believe in the sanctity of life. And don't get me wrong, I also sort of believe, I mean, you know, I think that life is valuable and so on. And so a lot of it has to do with this idea that we're constantly sort of cultivating, again, going back to marketing, cultivating an image that's

that makes us look as good as possible. And a lot of that, you just can't say what your reasons are. And this is why I think it's so interesting. I mean, this goes all the way back to Freud, right? Like one way that you could avoid giving up the game is by not actually sort of consciously knowing what it is. That's why people don't, they don't really know, right? They see these contradictions. They say, well, you know, I think life begins at conception. And if you really push them,

on it, you know, you can show that they don't, I don't really think that. So for example, or that there should be an exception for rape and interest in incest, you know, like if you ask someone who had that view and said, well, let's suppose a 13 year old found out that it, they were, you know, the product of rape or incest, would it then be okay to kill them? They'd say, no, of course not. That's so what you could tell from that is,

you know, people, they don't sort of want to know the real reasons for why they have their positions because those reasons look, make them look selfish. So much better to kind of manufacture this image of yourself that makes reference to, you know, the,

the kinds of things that are going to make you look good in your environment. So for people who are pro-choice, that's talking about women's bodily autonomy. Again, I don't want to say that I don't respect women's bodily autonomy. Or if you're on the other side, respecting the sanctity of life, that's why these words get used is because you cultivate an image that's the most positive you can.

And a lot of times this is what, you know, this ties into this notion of self-deception. Whereas if I don't really know the selfish motivation for a position that I'm taking, that's actually kind of good because then I can't sort of give up the game.

Ah, yeah, that quote about the easiest way to tell a lie is to believe it and you are the easiest person to deceive type thing. Yeah, I don't know the quote, but yes, exactly. And that's why a lot of us walk around not really knowing the motives for our actions. That means it can't leak out as easy. Yeah. Yeah.

What would you say, just to kind of round this out, what would you say to the person that feels morally very insulted but potentially curious at investigating their deeper motives?

about this. Like this Rob guy telling me that actually my motives are coming from this very sort of selfish, self-interested place. I don't think that that's true. I think I've investigated this a lot. I've even had debates with my friends over dinner about whether or not I think that we should, you know, Roe versus Wade should be repealed or not, all the rest of it. How would you advise someone to...

equanimously investigate their intentions. And generally today, as we sort of go through this stuff, and also more generally, as you learn about evolutionary psychology, what is the frame that you take either personally or that you advise other people to be like personally, motivationally, intellectually curious and sort of open to learning about these mechanisms? Yeah, I think that's such a great question. And I wish there were more of that. I think

My view on this is that it's getting harder and harder because the best way to test to see your ideas is to have a discussion when someone disagrees with you. I feel like that's happening less and less in the world in general. It's definitely not happening where it was supposed to happen, which is in the corridors of academe. That was supposed to be the crucible where you say your thing and give your logic and I give my evidence and be like, oh.

that is a data point. I didn't know. Let me change my mind. That never happens, right? Because everyone in the halls of academia, they all think the same these days, right? So we've seen John Heights work on this and the homogeneity of use. But for that person, yeah, I think it's

But you've got to talk to somebody who has a different view. And the smarter, the better, right? Because you want to be able to back it up. And the real magic happens when you catch yourself in a contradiction, right? When you say, I want to believe this thing, but I want to believe this other thing. And those two things can't be true. So now I really have to go back.

That's why these, you know, when you're looking at these policy stuff and you do these hypotheticals and you go, well, you know, under this circumstance, that's right. Once you kind of figure out where you've got the contradiction, then you can kind of tunnel back out, kind of see where your principle has gone wrong. But that's hard, right? People don't want to really talk to people who don't agree with them anymore. What makes you think, or why do you think it is that this

attack on our identity

you know, this lack of openness to other ideas and this sort of very like personalization of our worldview. Has that always been the case? Was it that, you know, a Socratic dialogue 2000 years ago, someone really felt that their ego was being destroyed or is there something new about wearing moral beliefs as lapel pins that's that sort of occurred recently? Have you considered that? Yeah, that's a great question. I think there's I think

it would be great, right? Go back and kind of see if the same phenomena was, you know, among the Greeks and so on. I sort of feel like one piece of it is technology, which is that, you know, any deviation from, you know, your particular tribe's party line is now very visible because of social media. And so it's sort of the cost of diverging from the view we're different now from maybe what it would have been. I mean, heck, in the past, you make some remark and

later you could deny it now, you know, it's written in ink and the internet and you're going. So that might kind of squish people towards a certain kind of homogeneity because they don't even want to move into this space of divergence from their tribes view. You know what I mean? So, so that would be one possibility. And I think that's linked to another, you know, piece of technology, which is man, like, you know,

It used to be that the kinds of punishments that you get would be from the state or from your friends. Now, of course, social media has added a whole new piece, you know, and a new part of it. And so by, again, by sort of putting yourself out there, it's not just deviating from whatever the party line is, you know, you're exposing yourself to a lot of attacks from other people, particularly in the public sphere. So,

Yeah, my guess is technology's changed it quite a bit, and it has to do again with the fact that humans are these moral creatures who are just looking for people to wag their finger at and say, you're bad or your idea is bad. But I do think there's something modern about – there's something that does seem distinct about how –

you know, like, so when I started as an academic way back in the day, I don't think it would have been true that just asking questions about some of the third rail topics right now were kind of moralized in the way they were. I might just be misremembering cause I'm, I'm old and you know, in the past everything is, you know, bright and rosy and sunny and everything, whatever. But like, I remember people doing stuff on, you know, like the bell curve came out and sure there was some controversy, but it, I,

I don't know. I guess also people like to tell the story about how when sociobiology came out, there was a conference where Wilson got pitcher water thrown on him. You don't know that story? No. Oh, in my world, that's famous. Everyone knows that. What was he talking about? He had this idea that maybe evolution applies to humans too.

you know, back in 75. And so there was some pushback on that, right? So that's, as far as I know, that story is true, but for all I know, it could be apocryphal. But by the same token, like, I don't remember the kinds of

you know, experience things that you see now where you, again, you just ask questions about, I mean, even if you ask the question, what is a woman at some context that you, for some reason, now you get into this massive amount of trouble. I don't remember that. So it does seem like we've friends in kind of transitioned into a very moralistic cultural moment. I certainly, the technology thing is I've spoken about it a lot. Um,

One other contributing factor to this, our opinions and our deeds are very far apart from each other. You don't get to see what someone does, but you do get to see what someone says. And the cost of saying the right thing is so low that I think many low-truth, low-trust tribes would sooner have a false ally than a true adversary. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, totally.

Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And again, this connects both up to the academy in general, but again, some of these protests, which is on everyone's mind right now. One thing that's super interesting are these cases where you ask people about what's at stake when they're out there in a tent or whatever, and we don't have great data on it. We have anecdotes, but many of them have no idea.

And so what are they doing there? It doesn't have to do with advancing a particular policy or, you know, trying to influence a particular policy. It's I'm showing up here. I'm signaling my commitment to this ideological community. Okay. So, you know, we have these campus protests going on at the moment from a morality assessment, signaling incentive, evolutionary psychology lens. What do you make of them? What do you, what are you seeing when you look at these protests?

Yeah, I think a big part of it really is this signaling that you are committed to a particular set of ideas and therefore your particular tribe. The way that this is shaken out for whatever reason on college campuses among the sort of elites, if you want to call them that, is that the commitment is to this oppressor-oppressed dynamic. And so you're saying whoever's on the oppressor side, I'm against them.

And so I'm going to show up to this thing. I'm going to spend my time, my energy. It's interesting because the masks are an interesting feature of it because signaling theory says that you get the most bang for your buck if you can signal honestly. So one way to do that is to say, I'm going to stand up for this principle and I'll take the consequences, whereas it's not clear that that's what's going on here. But I think the main thing that we're seeing in these protests is this saying,

you know, I belong to this community in terms of the ideology that it endorses. A set of beliefs, a set of... Even if they don't actually know what those beliefs or that ideology is. Exactly. I mean, it's sort of

I don't want to be too cynical about it, but it's kind of irrelevant. Again, you see these great interviews where people go in and you can ask people basic facts about whatever it is they're protesting. You can ask them facts about what is it that these people want to bring about. It's very clear that many, maybe not all, but many have no idea.

And of course, the reason that that makes sense is that they don't care. That's not why they're there. They're there to say, you know, it's a shibboleth in some sense, right? As long as you- What's a shibboleth? It's that big biblical story. I'm going to mess, I hope I don't mangle this, but this is the idea that there was a,

two sets of people and one of them wasn't able to pronounce a particular cluster of, you know, letters. And so in order to make sure the person really was from that group, you had to say this word that included that syllable. And if they could say, it's like, you know, I took French. Americans are terrible at the other distinction, you know? Okay. Are you saying this is like a verbal lexical shit test? It is a shit test. Yeah. Wow.

It's a little bit of a shit test. And yeah, so by the way, I looked at your reading list and I, you know, I love the shit test terminology. I wish adopted, but, um,

Exactly. So it's saying, are you really a member of our tribe? Right. And so if you show up here and you, whatever, you're ready to face the consequences. I mean, it's hard to show loyalty, right? If I just said to you, oh, I'm, you know, I'm your best friend. You'd be like, whoa, okay. It's cheap for you to say that. This comes right out of your average signaling theory from evolutionary biology and economics. But you know, if I find out you need a kidney and I put my hand up right away and be like, yeah. So that's a costly signal. Yeah. It's interesting. Isn't it interesting that, um,

someone's time. They're living in tents. If they're students, they're missing class. If they're employed, they're missing work. Presumably, I mean, maybe they're having fun, but from the outside, it doesn't look that fun. So that's a high investment. That's like a costly signal. You can't be there and not actually be there. And the being there is pretty sucky, which makes it odd to think,

why not watch 30 minutes on YouTube to understand the ideology that you're that? So that when the guy with the microphone does come and say, hey, can you point to the River Jordan on a map? Or do you know what from the river to the sea is? Or what's the actual outcome that you're looking to do here? Or why are you here? Or whatever it might be. And obviously the on-street interviews are cherry-picked to make people look either really stupid or really smart. You never get to see... It's the same as...

uh one of my friends has a great piece of advice about looking at trip advisor reviews or booking.com reviews for hotels says disregard all of the one star and five star reviews he's like only ever look at the two three and fours because those are the ones that actually have taken time to really think about what it is that that they're doing and it's kind of the same as that but yeah look at how much um time you're investing effort missing class missing work sleeping in on a tent um

And yet, what would be more aligned, ideologically aligned investment of, I'm going to learn a bit about what we're doing, doesn't seem to, which suggests a...

like 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 yet lots of just I haven't been watching much of this. Lots of the people that are at the protests masked up. Yeah. And is that COVID mask or like balaclava mask?

A little of both. Okay. And it's so interesting. I mean, the only thing I would push back on that maybe is...

Is this part of some big suite of, well, you know, we are still concerned about super spreader event. Is this like vestigial COVID bullshit? Or is this, we look hard and wear Antifa type black lock type stuff. But your, 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 cameras seeing your face. 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 leftover COVID, could be the look and testing. I don't really know. All I'm saying is like, yeah, with these singling arguments, you sort of expect them to want to soak up all of the potential costs as long as they're not going past whatever it is, the benefit that they're going to get, right? I mean, look,

Going back to the top of your question, people are constantly weighing these costs and benefits, right? So what's the benefit of advancing this particular, trying to advocate for this abortion policy? And so in this case, it just seems like it's kind of low-hanging fruit, like stand up. 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, right? 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.

right? The person who might be their boyfriend or girlfriend, right? So you see them say like 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 kids, you call them kids, but they're not idiots. What they're doing is they're saying, look, 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 cost in a portable

blah that's too big for just signaling that i'm uh i'm on board right yeah because the uh 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 exactly 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 at least again you know the

You could say, well, they're idiots. They don't know what river it is. But you could also say, well, they're not idiots. They're getting the cost-benefit computation right just right. They're there, but they're masked. Yeah, their geopolitics might be lacking, but their interpersonal signaling is 10 out of 10. Nailed it. 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?

Well, this goes back to your prior question about my views on abortion. 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. 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 last bit. 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.

Um, and then there's, you know, another line of argument that locates the origin of morality and trying to suppress, uh, violence and harm. So that's another line. So my view is a little bit different. So the, 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, not human animals, you're always siding with your cat. That's, that's just the way it always happens.

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 when I say morality, what I really mean is 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. 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 and Fred are 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. So the argument is that morality is what we call a side choosing mechanism. It says when fights break out, find the person who did something that we called wrong. And that could be

took the mango or hit right in the face or didn't wear a headscarf 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, you know, even if you were my best friend, you know, if you did a thing, if you did steal the mango, I'm, you know, I'm still better off saying, 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. So this is a view that locates morality. And again, it's pretty cynical, but it's a very selfish view.

kind of thing. It's a saying, I just don't want to stand next to the guy who's accused of being, of doing something wrong. That's the main role of morality is I want to be on the side of the people doing the accusing, not the person who did, who got accused. So that, that explains the function of morality and adaptively how it's advantageous. But I, I'm still struggling to understand like where moral rules come from or why particular rules are

come about? That's a great question. Yeah. So the idea there, so I spent a lot of time with anthropologists. So when I was a grad student, I was trained as a psychologist, but then half of my advisor team was anthropologists, the late, great John Tooby. 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 people are minting moral rules all the time, according to this view. So you know,

Don't put the beads on the string or don't fish in the sacred lagoon or whatever. And some rules just get some support. And this comes from self-interest. So let's take rules against harm. Someone says, you know what we should do? We 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. It just goes all the way back to like the Dawkins idea of a meme. They're just like memes. Right. So, and some rules are just good. And then some rules, it takes a minute to figure out whether or not they're good or bad. So, you know, I like the example of charging interest, which I know, you know, again, your readers, you can now take a little nap here, but I love

the interest as an interesting thing because there were lots of cultures that said you can't charge interest it's bad it's usury and then other cultures said yeah give your money to someone if they can use it as capital to do something cool

Let them do it, and then they'll give you a little bit more than you gave them back. And it just turns out that's such an amazingly good rule to have that says you may as opposed to you must not charge interest. And so this really explains why it is that Western cultures, why capitalism works so well is because it moves resources, capital, from less useful to more useful purposes. Is there an 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 i mean once you get into these questions it's so hard like 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 um that that sort of it's complicated right that doesn't

I think the answer is who knows. But what happened was that when cultures had this idea, they were able to just get more stuff, right? Because then, you know, capitalism has all these nice benefits and they grew very fast. So moral rules, using interest is a pretty good example, right? Yeah.

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 par for the course. It's like, look, if you're going to give me money for a while, I probably need to incur some kind of cost or else I can just take, I'm like free to be obliged to have your money at any point. I think it's an interesting example of something that right now we really take for granted, but in the past might've 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. And 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 are so excited about advertising their worldviews all the time. I mean, have you ever had difficulty trying to get someone to give their opinion about, you know, some particular, some world context, like people, they, they fall all over themselves, right? This is people's favorite pastime is to talk about what they think is bad and wrong and so on. So yeah, I think all of everything you just said is right. Yeah.

And I think the other, yeah, the thing about charging interest, you're exactly right, that we lose sight of the fact that there was this whole big process by which, you know, that rule became common, but it wasn't always. I mean, even property rights, right? Like,

It used to be that, you know, there's some, it's still places where people say that, you know, you have a property right over this, but you don't have a property right over that. And people argued about that. I like the example of Napster, right? Because again, I'm showing my age here, but for a minute, you know, there's a whole bunch of people who sort of thought, you know what, information should just be free. And there's something nice about that. It 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, you know, have the technology that sort of helps us

allow people to sell their digital stuff. I mean, whatever they sell. But again, we don't notice it much because that fight's over, right? The things that we do notice are where the fights are. So the abortion one is a very good example. Anything that's sort of at the center of modern political fights is basically where we're trying to figure out a bunch of these different kinds of moral rules and where we're going to land. Okay. How does morality get used as a weapon then?

Yeah.

as weapons, all you got to do is get enough other people to agree with the accusation or put the person in a context in which they can't or are unable to deny it. This is the big thing about morality that really separates my view from most others. A lot of people think morality is this warm, fuzzy unicorns pooping gold bars of marshmallows, whereas I don't view it that way. I view marshmallows very favorably.

But I think 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 instead of seven sacraments, right? You could be subjected to unholy torture for who knows how long. So that's what I mean. Like these accusations that one has broken a moral rule, these really, I think of a

These accusations as attacks 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 or 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 dead, you know, because that's an attack. What do they do? They did this. They broke this rule about, you know, 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. I 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. It feels like there must be more benefits afforded as well, though. The ability for your sort of...

nobility 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, 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. Um,

I don't know. Again, I sort of am compelled by Salem. And so one of the things about someone who keeps their powder dry, you know, manages to persuade people not to accuse them. What does keep your powder dry mean? 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 does that mean as an analogy?

Yeah, so good question. The analogy is something like manages to keep free of tripping over something that would cause someone to make an accusation. So just to add. Oh, okay. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So I didn't mean to make that. So no, no, I did. I'm enjoying learning all different words. That one. And yep.

Yeah. So, I mean, the thing about any time that big moral conflicts emerge, the person who's not, as you put it in The Eye of Saravac, which I also like, other people benefit. Like during the...

Salem witch trials, you know, some of that stuff was about land rights. And so once someone's, you know, burned at the stake or, you know, 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 that doesn't land on you, there's all these benefits to be had by sacrificing the people in your social world. Um,

you know, it's incredibly tempting. I had a conversation with Andrew Doyle who wrote a book called The New Puritans using the Salem Witch Trials 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. Have 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. So 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 straight. But they'd been using, during the witch trials, they'd been using spectral evidence for decades

decades, fucking ages. 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. You know that? We've been using this spectral evidence thing quite a bit for quite a while now. That's okay, right? And this letter came back. It 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. That's not. And that, I think, Andrew taught me was one of the undoings of the witch trials was that this very sort of tenuous grasp on what did and did not justify or account for

evidence, bad doing, the bar was raised because this accusation was so loose and costless that

that anybody could have done. I didn't like the way it's robbed. He 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 why I get so puzzled when people, you know, when people get

resist the idea that morality is scary. I think about cases like the witch trials and what you just said, where it's like this license to just do whatever we want with no 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. And the people in power could just use these accusations to

to, you know, do horrible things to their fellow man. And I think, you know, we talk a lot about in this country about, you know, the founders and the enlightenment, so on, tracing those ideas all the way back to the Magna Carta. 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 know, go up to the Supreme Court. So, you know, this idea that

you know due process for example is just a way of saying look if there's accusations we're going to 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 so you got to put them on you got to light the fire and then you know take his stuff and then whatever um and so you know in many ways i think the bit one of the ways in which civilization advanced was exactly putting the brakes on what you're talking about and i think what

you know, I didn't read the New Puritans, but it sounds to me 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 can point their finger and say, you know, that, you know, we're going to burn that guy today or that woman today. Yeah. So we've probably presented a

pretty unflattering view of morality. Surely morality in its best form is still quite nice though. You know, you mentioned earlier on harm or a 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 are there any fundamental kind of like universal values

universal in that they appear a lot, laws of morality. 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 leads to great... I mean, I think harm and property rights are the two big ones. I mean, 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, to, you know, enforce those rules. That's great. You know, when it's working, it's, you know, that's really wonderful. Same thing about property rights, which goes, you know, it's great to say, look, if you take my mango, then, you know, you're gonna get punished because then I can either eat my mango or I can sell it to somebody who wants it more. And then we've now increased the good of the world, right? Cause I have the money and you have the mango. Um, and that's pretty great.

All this stuff about – and 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 out libertarian, but the person who says, look, as long as you don't hurt anybody and everything's consensual and everyone's an adult, do whatever you want. And a lot – some moral rules have moved in that direction, right? So like –

I remember before Obama came out in favor of same-sex marriage, libertarians, little ill, were ahead of that curve. Like, I don't care what sex you are if you want to enter into a contract. Everyone should have access to

to the contracts. And 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. Like, I think that is morality at its best. That's saying, 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, uh, moral principles, one being, uh, the protection to, uh,

and the other being the prohibition of. With gay marriage, it is protected for you to be able to do that. 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. I mean, as, as cultures become more complex and technologies change, I mean,

Yeah. I mean, just think about the things that people run afoul of that they just couldn't have 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, like, yeah, that was definitely not something my hunter gatherer ancestors had to worry about. Right. It's just, they didn't have to worry about omitting some particular signal or whatever. Um,

And yeah, it's totally complicated. And of course, as you get more people and they're living more densely, the kinds of things that affect other people goes up. I'm playing my stereo and I'm in whatever in the Pleistocene.

It doesn't really matter, right? But like 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. I mean, you know, this is an area where, you know, my friend Josh

who works on our little substat 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 know you just don't have to worry about all these and he's you know there's something to that i mean dental care something that you know as a modern thing i'm very you know very fond of don't want to have to go back very pro dental care pro dental care yeah um

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 interacting with each other. 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, uh,

social isolation, just social ungainliness. What that probably feels like for an increasing proportion of humans is a more complex, nuanced world that I need to move through more deftly

at a time where more people than ever before have a reduced capacity at dancing through that more complex world. Totally. And this, I've become a little bit closer. 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 kids who are just constantly in fear of tripping up against whatever the current thing is, whatever the current issue is. And I wonder if that helps to explain a little bit because there's other evidence. They're not going out and playing and they're not whatever. Maybe there's a little bit of a risk aversion. 100%.

put yourself out there. And what that means is they're not having the challenges that, you know, I mean, we did...

more than you are, but we said and did all kinds of dumb 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 what you're saying, like you've got to tiptoe around this stuff, you've got to hit it, you've got to adjust or get it just right. And then even then you're not safe because tomorrow the moon might be the other way, right? And you're, oh, I got you because you go the other way. What are some of your favorite examples of

uh, new modern moral rules, the posting of the black square, maybe a small one, but are there any that, um, have come about relatively recently, uh, that might surprise people when they realize that these aren't instantiated in, you know, like human history or whatever? Um, 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,

um, the, you know, in many, in many little subcultures, particularly in the United States, you always have to back whatever it is, whoever 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, I'll wear my, my politics on my sleeve. I mean, I was shocked at,

Going back to the protests, you had this conflict. Don't get me wrong. It's obviously complicated. But one side is intentionally trying to kill civilians and the other side is intentionally trying not to do that.

And yet the moral rumor in many cultures is to loudly back what I take to be the side that's 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. Um, and it, 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 all the fucking time. I think about this. It's like so fundamental. I even remember where I was, um,

when I first listened to that, the road, Great North Road in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 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, um,

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. Let's say it's 60 years ago. I don't know. Whenever. Um, and sure, maybe they're not perfect for you. Um, but you had very little decision fatigue and any, um,

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 satisficing when it's from like an economics perspective.

standpoint. Then you roll the clock forward to now and you go into the jeans store and it's bootcut or skinny, it's ripped, it's bleached, it's cropped, it's black, it's high rise, it's low rise. That means that 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 gray 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. I don't want to live in a world where I don't have

answers to questions that I want to ask in ChatGPT, Google, Wikipedia, stuff like that. Fucking fantastic. I can see everything. But I now have gone from having to be an information sourcer to an information discerner. 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 way 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 think about where people get in their information and you've got the MSNBC crowd and then you've got the Fox News crowd. And then you ask this question, well, why do people seek the – an economist would talk about a confirmation bias, right?

It's weird. It's actually weird that people have it. 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 –

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? Do I really want to kind of lift the curtain back behind? And, you know, if you're, you know, I think,

that for whatever reason people experience that as discomfort. And I do think it has to do with the fact that once you sort of do have that experience, um, 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 it out loud. And I think that's why it's so interesting to, to, you know, spend some time listening to people who have these kinds of expert, you know, keys conversion experiences, right? Like the, the liberal who's been mugged and becomes a conservative or, or,

or vice versa, or whatever, because those are people who really do have this interesting experience of having very firm beliefs both ways. And they can wrestle with, wait, how did I believe that? And my experience of those conversations is they almost always say the same thing, which is, well, everyone around me, that's what they thought. It's just like, okay, but then that sort of pushes it back. Well, why were you around those people all the time?

Yeah. I mean, you know, the, um, peak version of that are these people that were brought up in cults. Yeah. Right. Uh, and you didn't know any other part of the world. Uh, I had, God damn it. Who was the lady that did the witch trials of JK? Uh, Megan Phelps Roper, who was a part of the Westboro Baptist church. And, uh, she came on the show fascinating, you know, just total indoctrination. It was the physics of her sort of sociopathic,

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 Bostrom 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 a quantum physics,

Physics. Yeah, where you have sort of two particular positions at the same time, and until you observe them sufficiently closely, you don't collapse the superposition. And 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, no, I'm not going to like 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 some big geopolitics thing. Um, but the more that I'm able to do that, the happier I feel like 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 going to happen if whatever flag post I've pinned my colors to is abused in some way or damaged by a maybe very valid

alternate argument. There's this, I remember listening to Eckhart Tolle forever ago when I was like first starting 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. And death to the ego is almost the same as death to yourself. Like you are that ego, you are your positions and you're,

Yeah, it's one of the reasons why publicly admitting that you're wrong or 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 confidence.

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. The 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, it reminds me, there's this great, I'm probably going to get it wrong, there's an economist, I think it was Kenneth Arrow, but it might not have been, and someone said something like, I see that you change your mind a lot. This guy revised his views, his publications, and it might be apocryphal, but he says, yeah, that's what I do when I realize I'm wrong. What do you do?

And it's just this 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

the sort of fanatic types and you know like Westboro but those people are pretty happy you know they have it's a little bit like the paradox of choice thing which is they've gotten rid of the power so since you're like I'm going to be this direction this is my thing I'm going to believe on this I'm going to be a fanatic about it and I'm not going to look for contrary information I do think there's something to what you're saying which is yeah I don't want to 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 what 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 going to be like and then what I experienced. You know, like 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 this other person says, well, I have this counter evidence. And the first person says, I have decided to revise my view. Like dispassionate. Yeah.

And then it's nothing like that. It's like I have this mountain of data that undermines this thing you just said. And I'm like, I still believe my thing. And I'm going to write a book about it. Yeah, that's wrong or that's unethical or you're using motivated reasoning or you're a xenophobe, bigot, racist, homophobe, whatever it might be. Yeah. Okay, so. Yeah, sorry, I didn't mean to distract. Just to say like, I don't, the people you would expect to be like you, which is to say, oh, I've got the couple of things, our academics, where you're just like, okay, I've got these couple of ideas, let's just figure it out. That's not,

Hasn't been my experience. Yeah, I mean, that's the gold standard. I'm usually probably pretty black and white, basic bitch bro signs most of the time. But Corey Clark's been 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 saying,

like is like some ungodly, no, like 5,000 academics. And it was how much do you self-censor? What are the topics that you think that should never be spoken about? Split it up from male and female. How much do they prefer to have like kind of like a doing good or supporting versus truth seeking type thing. And yeah, man, there's a lot of, you know, forget even

the students, which is, you know, what Jonathan Haidt and a lot of other people will be looking at, how much are you self-censoring when you're on campus, coddling of the American mind, shit like that. The professors are feeling this, maybe in some way, especially if you're not, even if you are tenured, like, because, you know, there's a,

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

You're just not invited out for drinks after. 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. Rikki 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 was just someone would sort of just throw it out like that and

And the eyes would immediately sort of look around the room to see if anyone didn't castigate him as being a transphobe or whatever. Okay, so we've got morality, we've got its bases. What is interesting about studying hypocrisy and kind of adding that into this worldview?

Yeah. So, I mean, to some extent it, it, 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 a visual system that sees and whatever vocal system that talks and, and,

you know, when you build that all the way up, you get this possibility that you can have one part of your mind that has a particular principle, right? Like don't steal music or whatever. And 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, you know, how can people be so inconsistent? And I think these kinds of inconsistencies tell us something about this really basic way in which humans are designed, which is

We're 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 could have another system that acts completely contrary to that moral principle.

For me, I don't know. I think hypocrisy, it's 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, is such a hard topic, is 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's sort of not homogeneous. It's all these different bits and pieces. Because it's in conflict with itself. Exactly. So I think optical illusions are like this, right? So you see something and part of your brain knows something.

Those two circles are definitely the same size, but you're looking at it like, 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 know, 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, you know, all of it, everything in the middle. Just...

Give me your definition of hypocrisy so that we're all playing from the same hymn sheet here. Yeah, people use it differently. So I feel like it should just mean 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 should 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 here my colleagues shine through a little bit, but these pious anti-abortion people who then pay their mistress to get an abortion. So that would be, for me, the quintessential kind of thing.

It's the senator who's vehemently against gay marriage that's secretly going on Grindr on his second phone that his wife doesn't know about on an evening. Exactly. Yeah. So 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 hypocrisy. Again, people can have different.

views on this, right? So sometimes people use the word to mean something like, well, I apply this rule differently for this group as opposed to that group. And 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, you know, saying, don't do this. And if you do that, I'm going to attack you or whatever. I'm going to 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. You have the moral principle to beat other people in the head in, and you're going to be able to do the action that, you know, no one else is allowed to do or gets punished for.

So that's bad. This goes back to your question about why is morality good? Well, it's supposed to stop people from being selfish, taking other people's stuff and doing harm. Hypocrisy is really 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 thee but not for me uh do as i say not as i do you 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 um

The point I was making about the American South. There's lots of contexts and the Salem Bush trials as well. There's lots of cases where people could level moral accusations and not really have to worry about

getting attacked for leveling them. So again, a white person in the American South, uh, someone who is in the right political position during, uh, the Salem witch trials today. And I don't want to get too deep into this, but there are certain kinds of people who are protected, uh,

So I guess I might as well dive into it. So there's 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 contexts. 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 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. In some contexts, you do. There's lots of contexts in which making an accusation to lead to a cost may be because back before states, because that person's relatives might take revenge on you for whatever. Or you could just get in trouble for making a false accusation. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy 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, you sort of open it up. I mean, look, again...

people just weigh their costs and benefits. Can I get a benefit from making some sort of accusation? And whether that's in terms of the kind of like approval from my group, or maybe somehow I'm going to get their stuff, or if you're in my company, maybe I go up a notch if I take you down five. And 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 guy. He's the biggest kid. So, you know, he can push Bart or Lisa or Nelson or, um, you know, anybody millhouse too much Simpsons. Um, and he's sort of invulnerable cause 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 stories. And if you know that the criminal system is not going to – 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 want to take someone out, you kind of can't. And I think that's a reasonable way to talk about bullying. Those two things seem really similar to me. If I'm Nelson, I'm big, or if I'm white, I'm basically invulnerable. Both of those things, I'm protected. So I can attack with protection. That's the key parallel. And I think people haven't talked about this a lot. I can't remember who coined this term, cry bullies.

which is the same sort of thing, which is, you know, I, I claim to be hurt in this particular way. And when I'm making that claim, what I'm really saying is that that person or those sort of persons hurt me. And by the way, I'm in this category that, you know, you're basically invulnerable with, you know, because you just, you know, you're, you know, I don't want to say, I don't want to go too far on this, but there's certain classes that, you know, you just can't,

You can't really attack. You have to believe them or you have to protect them or whatever. And that creates very weird incentives, right? I mean, it's not... I think this is one thing that Doyle really put his finger on, it sounds like, in that book, which is...

It's interesting, right? I think it's kind of the same phenomenon. It'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 as you increase the extent to which people are 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 Mis, right, where the nobleman or whatever gets into it with, is it Fantine or Cosette? Fantine. And, you know, he's sort of the, he definitely was, you know, aggravated, but he's a noble and so he's completely protected. So 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 can have during human history, which have held you more or less harmless. I mean, at the, in the, in the extreme, the King, right. The King's like off with his head and that's that, you know, it's not like, but he didn't really, you know, do that. Like, I'm a king. So, and again, that's where I think, you know, human progress due process and, you know, courts and, you know, whatever. They're great when they work.

But of course, outside of the context of governments and just the different subcultures, you know, it doesn't always work that way. I love your insight about how if you get punched or kicked or nugged, 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 you're OJ Simpson, right?

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 about because of something that you physically uh allegedly physically did um but certainly whoever it is that carries some previous moral attack justified or not uh it is way stickier there's you know sort of analogies that people use where um

someone could have killed a guy in a car in a hit and run incident and got into jail, gotten out, 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 was her last name. Right. So like,

That was the world's introduction to exactly what you're talking about, which is you just put one thing out there digitally. So yeah, she's not an Odie Simpson. She didn't kill anybody.

you know, say what you want about the joke. Maybe it wasn't funny. Maybe it was a little bit, you know, racist, whatever you want to say. But like, as you're saying, I mean, you know, you read the stories about, you know, she goes hiding and, you know, can't get into all this kind of stuff. It's like, yeah, 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, the, yeah, the, the technology has changed the costs that people can impose on you. So, yeah. So that kind of an attack is,

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 to suicide. I mean, I don't love talking about it because there's evidence that 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 a social creature. 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. Now,

does reality TV attract people who have a psychological predisposition to maybe this kind of a propensity? Maybe does it catalyze it? Almost certainly. Uh, does it create it from ground zero even maybe to some degree? Uh, but you know, those are all in one form or another, uh, you know, social judgments by other people. Uh,

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 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...

can have real-world consequences. So the words that are supposed to never hurt you can end up being sticks and stones that take your life. Yeah, for sure. I think, as an evolutionary psychologist, 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've been thinking about it a little bit, is, look, if you're in an ancestral 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 hope.

harm. And you can use that to make judgments. If I hit that guy with a rock, then maybe his 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? Like 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? And so I think – and I should say I think it's easy to condemn people for using these weapons. But part of it is that they're just bad at thinking about it. And we ought to have at least a – I just think we don't have the intuitions. Again, it's not like a rocker.

We're very detached from the impact of the things that we do online, reputational attacks, stuff like that. You know, the feedback loop isn't sufficiently tight and the impact of what you do is also...

not felt and and there's the then there's this kind of like um it's called like the witness effect or whatever it is the correct like the sort of psychology of the crowd where well was it your tweet that said that she looked fat in that dress that drove that drove her to depression well you know 2 000 other people tweeted her 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 um like this is

God, 10, probably 10 years ago now. And one of my friends from Newcastle, Adam Dawkins, who's a DJ, was just really good at finding shit on Twitter. And 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 looks awful in that dress or like she's let herself 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, our thoughts are with your family. Like what, what tragic news, how terrible, blah, blah, blah. It's like, yeah, come on.

Yeah, I think this 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, right? 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 try to, you know, be as positive about the future and human nature as I can, but like,

We're pretty nasty creatures. And then we're nasty creatures where all of us are sort of carrying around a weapon of mass destruction in our hand. What do you think is going to happen? Not that I have great ideas for solving it. I mean, I think people, as you mentioned, gone high, coddling and all this. The first thing is get it out of the hands. Maybe you start young and sort of get it out of the hands of the young people and so on. But

You know, this is one of these things where you start taking this mismatch idea seriously. We're 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 wreak havoc 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 Salem, I do think part of that was driven by just pure instrumental. I want to get the rights to the grazing, you know, these very physical things. I think, you know, my sense is that under...

in many kinds of subcultures in the West right now, there's, you know, there's call out 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, I would think that many people actually rise to prominence, um, in 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, um,

Here in the United States, you might know that we had a person nominated for the Supreme Court and someone made an accusation about that person. I hesitate, but

Yeah, now they have a seven-figure book deal, and they're very welcome in all sorts of talk circuits. Now, look, maybe it was true. Under those circumstances, then it's a virtuous act to say, look, this is a thing that happened, and we should rethink. But it's foolish to think that these accusations don't carry benefits, right? And so, again, you have to tot up the costs 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? Yeah, 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 to our discussion 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 in the job market, a talk circuit.

in the current world, you know, reputation translates really directly, right? When you,

I don't know. I'm guessing you've tweeted from time to time about how many followers you have, right? That part of your reputation, it matters. It matters how many people are interested in what you have to say. It goes right to your bottom line. In the modern world, because of the digital age that we live in, 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 that.

Yeah. You've got this really nice, uh, like sort of taxonomy thing of, um, sincerely held moral principles and bully motives. It's like different kinds of, of motives. Can you just explain that? Yeah. Cause I, 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, when people make accusations, like there's lots of reasons that people might make them. So for example, someone might've done,

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 motives for leveling an accusation, sort of what we would call the virtuous ones, like, for example, I think the most obvious one is that the person did something bad and needs to be excluded from society or whatever.

then you sort of are left with, you know, there's some other reason that they're making this accusation. Again, I think that's the Salem witch trials. I don't want to 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.

And so once you can eliminate all the actual motives, then you can start to say, well, what is this person really up to? What are they really doing? And don't get me wrong. Again, I think that your first pass should be to give the person the benefit of the doubt and say, okay, well, 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 in the future to make the world a better place. Okay.

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? Oh man, I have wrestled with that question. I...

Yeah, I always like to, before I have these interviews, I'd like to sometimes be able to play the I 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 really damage one's reputation if you can 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's sort of like dog bites man. You're like, ah, a person was a hypocrite? Okay. What else is new? I wonder if 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 our

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. And then if there's someone else, you know, like 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 squaddie, um, uh,

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 is 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.

And that never happened. That never happened. And every person that went bananas on the internet talking about why it was going to 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, 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 mindshare. That took up a non-insignificant portion of my life, hearing you fart 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 yeah and then the yes there's a lot there and one pieces and yet it's gonna happen again like this is the weirdest thing and i'll do it i will do it i will be that guy i will be the bollocks guy as well yeah yeah it's the weirdest one of the weirdest things about the modern moment is that you know we we keep having these incidents and there's this big list that we all take from now let's not tweet whatever and that and then 20 minutes later so i mean the example i you know there's a bit more that just come out on the covet for me the the lab leak stuff was just

For some reason, that kind of got stuck in my craw, right? Because I think it was because it was nature or it was the landscape, right? So these institutions where they just say, you know, it's when it's unscientific. 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 this is a conspiracy theory and don't even entertain it, and the people who were talking about it were, you know, bad, bad, bad. And then here we are now where it's like, whatever.

But exactly your point, no one says, oh man, I should have definitely... We messed up. And then this introspective moment where it's like, who do I have to be so that that doesn't happen? Not about COVID, but about my life. How do I stop and take a moment and ask myself, okay, who am I? Why did I put my name on the page? 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, you don't not matter in that regard, I think. Yeah.

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, who forwards the thing or what's up. But 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, you know,

We're potentially going to get a reputational bonus or more followers in virtue of breaking the story or what have you. And we just haven't really, as a culture, you and me, but how do we tamp that down? If anything, it's worse and worse, right? Because we've got this very 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 bigger cows. Well, how do you do that? Well, I could forward this thing about the soldier who's mucking around on some random street lunch. Do 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. Whatever happened to that? Yeah, exactly. Just, just, it just, they, these things just disappear, you know? Yeah. And I just, I don't know that it kind of goes back to, and again, like, you know, I, I will continue to make this error 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, okay,

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. Is this really worthy of that? Or maybe should I, I don't know. I just think, um, 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 going to pull you up for it, uh, you're fine. And then we see this very odd, uh,

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, you know,

When I was a kid, you know, we had three networks and we got the news from ABC, CBS and NBC or whatever. And you really got the sense that they were trying to do as much as possible, more or less, to get you the truth. Right. And that's that's how they were sort of making their buck was they were a little better at getting the actual news into the living rooms.

these days it doesn't really feel that way, right? Like for the reason you're talking about, right? So the people who are tuning in to MSNBC, 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, this problem that you're sort of pointing to, which is, you know, pieces of history that get memory hold and no one talks to again or pieces of history that get amplified which turn out not to be true. Like, I sort of thought the media, you know, 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 studies guy. But like, it doesn't seem that way anymore. And part of it is the

the fraction, the, you know, 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. So people are just going. So it's not so bad if there's only three directions to go. Because if you've 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 just keep eating the same information, and I've got this buffet over here, this buffet, I'm going to find the perfect buffet.

And then those guys are incentivized to keep feeding me whatever it is I want to see. That, I think, is the danger, is the sort of the media interacting with the human capacity to want to confirm our biases. That, 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 it's true anymore. Maybe I'm not even here. Yeah, no, this is all a simulation. Yeah, we may have presented a pretty unrosy apocalyptic story.

vision of sort of humans' ability to operate well in the world. What do you think about the role of wisdom in overcoming this sort of biological hardware and our predispositions? Yeah, I love that question. So the third guy who I work with on our Substack Living Fossils, he founded an institute, the Wisdom Therapy Institute. He's all about wisdom. And I really think

I think he's onto 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. That's the cool thing. Again, Rob Boyd at UCLA, his one thing he always used to say, the trick about humans is that we're social learners. And that gives me some kind of

because wisdom comes hard, but it does come. And there's a little bit of 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 we're not doomed exactly because 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 what people, many people who are lucky enough to have that in their curriculum experience.

So I don't think it's crazy that people like you and Robert Wright and Shawnee are going to be able to change the world in such a way that people acquire these wisdom skills. And part of wisdom, I think, speaks to this question about morality and being moralistic because I think if you could step back and

you know, asked herself, 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, um,

Are my choices here that I have in front of me, which of them are going to make the world a better place? Which one is going to make the world? So, you know, a little bit of cognitive 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. I don't, you know, that'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 what are your effects on other people? And then there, I think comes a little bit of, of wisdom. I mean, you know,

One way to think about it is, yeah, we're these evolved creatures and we've got these ancient mechanisms and someone cuts us off on the highway and we get angry. But it doesn't take that much wisdom to say, is it going to help me to ride his bumper for the next three miles? Is it going to make my life and his life better or their life better? So that's my hope. My hope is located in the fact that humans can learn new stuff. I mean, we've done amazing things technologically before.

there's work to be done inside ourselves. Um, and I also believe kind of like the point about to take it all the way back to charging interest, like good ideas really do by and large tend to spread by and large, not all the time. Like there's some terrible ideas that have done a great, you know, have done 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. Prohibition gets murder. Great idea. Um, you know, they, they prospered and they, you know, whatever, um,

Technological inventions, wheel, that was good. And so I think a lot of wisdom, there's some 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, you know, 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. It 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 articles you're writing for Aporia, 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. It's been a super interesting chance to talk to you. I really appreciate it. I appreciate you too. Thanks, man. Yeah. Cheers.