Rutger Bregman is a Dutch Historian who wants to tell the world that humans are actually fundamentally kind, hunter gatherer societies contain important wisdom about how to live well, and that collectively we need to cooperate to do something about climate change and economic inequality. So, obviously there was no way Chris and Matt could let these dangerous ideas go unchallenged!
Join them this week as they delve into one of Rutger's talks and address Noble Savage myths and other age old debates including whether human nature is fundamentally brutish & cruel or compassionate & kind, whether war is ancient or a recent product of societies, whether civilisation was a good idea or the worst one ever, and perhaps most importantly whether Matt could defeat a chimpanzee in one on one combat when armed with two swords.
It's the podcast where two academics listen to content from the greatest minds the online world has to offer and we do try to understand what they're talking about.
I'm Professor Matt Brown, I'm the psychologist from Australia and with me as always is Dr. Chris Kavanagh, a cognitive anthropologist from Ireland originally.
Now, his background in anthropology will be pretty useful today because we are covering someone who's written a book and in large part deals with some of those topics.
So that's going to be pretty helpful.
Hey, Chris?
Yeah, that's right.
I might actually have something to contribute for once.
Yeah, yeah.
That's characteristically modest of you.
But yes, I agree.
Yeah, but we've got some housekeeping and a few little things to talk about.
I guess we should say that this recording takes place on a momentous day in history.
The second day of counting votes in the American election.
And how are things looking, Chris?
Joe Biden, at least according to The Guardian, needs six more electoral college votes to win.
Although one suspects it's going to take a significant more time to go through all the...
Challenges and recriminations that Trump's already throwing up.
But yeah, it looks like from the horror that was the initial results coming in and Trump doing better than expected to the mail-in ballots coming in and pushing things back towards Biden, it's kind of actually a fairly anticipated swing between the two.
Like, this is what was expected, but maybe quite a bit tighter.
That was expected.
So, yeah, it looks like at this stage we might end up being incredibly wrong, but it looks like the left are going to have something to be happy about, or maybe the world.
Yeah, definitely.
Definitely.
Well, you know, by the time this goes to air, it'll all be done and dusted, I guess.
But, yeah, for you guys in the future, spare a thought to Chris and Matt, who are still on the edge of our seats, along with the rest of the first one.
The world waiting to see what's going to happen.
I will say that online, you know, watching election results or whatever, of course you can watch all the, you know, the...
The trackers of the results coming in and all this.
But the way I experience these elections is more like a sentiment-based one, you know, about who's panicking and who's happy.
And at the beginning of the night, it very much reminded me of the Brexit and first election of Trump, where a lot of the, dare I say, shitty online accounts seem to be very happy and, you know, kind of lauding it over.
People and the folks on my side and your side of the aisle were looking rather downhearted and gloomy.
And I just had a sinking sense of deja vu.
But when the second day, things have flipped and all the terrible accounts like Alex Jones and stuff are now...
Claiming about it being a fix and so on.
So it looks like all is back, right, with the world.
And it's happening on my birthday.
Or it was happening on my birthday.
Yeah, yeah.
You've been a good boy all year, Chris.
And I'm just glad America delivered for you for the one thing you asked for.
Yeah.
Yeah, look, I mean, yeah, I'm the same.
I rely on the sentiment analysis.
I don't need to look at the predicted website or one of those live election results thing.
You can just sort of imbibe a few.
Pages of Twitter.
I just get a sense of who's happy and who's going slowly insane.
And you've got a pretty clear idea of who's winning.
Yeah, maybe that's a good segue, Mark, to our update section, checking in on past gurus.
Any notable developments?
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, I mean, you've paid attention to Eric and Brett.
And what are they doing at the moment?
Well, you'd be surprised to learn that the outcome of the election has proven...
All of the beliefs that they held are correct.
And basically any insights that they had were completely vindicated by the results.
So, you know, it's a surprise.
It's a surprise.
But they are pretty sure that they called it exactly right.
Yeah.
I didn't hear much about Unity 2020, though.
I checked in as the election was going on.
I actually searched for the Unity 2020 hashtag to see.
How hot it was.
It's strange that.
It's very strange, isn't it?
I guess, you know, the campaign got pulled, but if it wasn't for that, Tulsi Gabbard and Dan Crenshaw would be, you know, prime presidential candidates.
So luckily the duopoly got them shut down before they were too much of a threat.
Oh, the irony is so strong with you, Chris.
So strong.
Okay, so the other hot tape maker, James Lindsay, how's he going?
Not well.
We've mentioned a couple of times he's been descending down the right-wing partisan rabbit hole.
And I think he was starting to lament about mail-in ballots a couple of days before the election.
And he's generally having a meltdown about Biden's going to...
Start the critical theory apocalypse and that the resistance needs to rise up and so on.
So, yeah, he's continuing down the rabbit hole and our friend Jordan Peterson didn't emerge.
So, you know, better for him, better for everyone that he sat this one out.
So, yeah.
So, yeah.
And JP Sears is...
I'm not sure, but I can imagine.
Yeah, I can imagine too.
Well, yeah, so now America's heading towards kind of woke Maoist concentration camps and re-education camps.
It's going to be a crazy new America with a Biden presidency, I guess.
Yeah, this podcast might need to pivot at some stage to, you know, just pointing out how to resist the D 'Angelo re-education camps.
But for now, we're still basking in the potential glow of a Trump defeat.
Yes, tentative basking is what we're doing.
Okay, in other news, look, Chris, there was another kind of election going on.
It wasn't as official as the American election, and it was kind of happening on Twitter and kind of happening in the replies to some thread.
But apparently, I think I pretty much win the...
The female vote in terms of who's the best co-host of this podcast, it seems.
I mean, I've been described as more mature, more balanced, and a good role model for you, in fact, Chris.
Do you accept this defeat gracefully?
Well, I think there's a sampling issue from the accounts that are issuing those opinions, and I think we need to take that into account.
But I'll accept my status as the renegade of the podcast, the one who's willing to tell the truth, the harsh talker.
That's me, Matt.
Well, Chris, I've said it before.
The podcast values your dark energy.
And, you know, it's not so bad being the bad boy of a podcast.
I mean, it is like being the bad boy on campus because...
We are a milquetoast, moderate-type podcast, but you are the bad boy.
That's pretty cool.
You know, there's a kind of dark attraction there, I think.
Is that cool, Matt?
I don't know.
You know, I'm not sure that I'll be telling anyone that I'm the bad boy of a random podcast about online gurus where there's only two possible candidates.
But I appreciate that vote nonetheless.
I'll take the...
Yeah.
Look, Matt, I'm not the hero we need.
No, what?
How do you say that?
You're not the hero we want.
No, that's not how it goes.
It's like the Batman thing.
What's the Batman thing?
I'm not...
Chris, I had it right.
You're not the bad boy people want, but you're the bad boy, Gotham, that people need.
Yes, that's it.
That's the one.
See?
See, this is why I'm the superior co-host, because I get these things right.
I'm like the bad medicine.
You know, I taste bad, and you don't like swallowing it, but it's good for you.
It's good for you.
I was thinking bad medicine, like, I don't know, like a rock song or something.
I was thinking you're kind of like the meatloaf to my John Denver.
That's kind of how I see it.
You know, like you've got this kind of, you know, attractive energy, but you're not really marriage material.
Maybe good for a night.
Yeah.
Well, there we go.
We've solved that.
Glad we got that out of the way at this time.
Yeah, we've probably spent enough time talking about that.
Oh, okay.
So another completely podcast-specific topic is the reviews.
We asked for reviews.
We begged.
We cajoled.
And we demanded.
And we got them.
And I did say that I would, you know, read.
Some out if we got them.
So I think I should do that if you don't object.
Yeah, please do.
I can't wait.
I haven't seen them.
So this will be exciting for me.
Yeah.
So here's an unusual thing.
I'll go positive to negative.
So here's a positive one.
Five Stars by SpyMystic.
Already one of my favorite podcasts because they mentioned Follow Ted, which means they are brilliant and also because they talk about other stuff.
That's a good review.
That's a good review.
I like that.
I'm done with that.
I just want to say, to all of us, see how easy it is to leave a review?
You can see how little effort was put into that review, yet it still counts.
It still counts.
Don't!
They're not disparaged by Mystic.
This is one of the reviews for what we asked for.
I know!
I know!
You should be positive about it.
I am positive.
That sounded ironic, but I meant to say.
It's kind of positive, but look how little effort, look how uninteresting and how little effort was put in.
That's what you can do.
No.
How do you think Spymistic feels about that?
I'm sorry, Spymistic.
I actually meant that was a funny, good review, and it clearly wasn't very hard to do either.
That's what made it good.
Yeah.
Okay, next one.
Well, I'm going to cheat a bit because normally I give a negative review.
And this one does have the title of absolute rubbish, free exclamation marks.
But that's a curveball because it's a five-star review from Sir Stramulus who says...
This podcast is so bad!
I want to listen to every episode in its entirety from the minute it hits my iTunes feed!
Five stars!
So this is your thing.
A result of the call for people to write incongruent.
Negative reviews were five stars.
So it seems we've been successful in that.
You know, our strategy, I'm not sure if that was a great idea, but it was pretty funny when I read it.
Yeah, it was okay.
And also, I could say SpyMystic, your review was just far, far above that review and quality.
Is there a stromula?
I don't know.
I like Sir Stomulus' one.
So again, Matt, this is a divide.
This is, you know, we're reaching across the aisles.
We've got different things.
But here we are, able to deal with our differences.
Very admirable people.
Yeah, I'm loving the heterodoxy.
I'm loving the heterodoxy, Chris.
Yeah, I mean, even the way you pronounce that is heterodox.
There's no end to the level of heterodox that we...
Dave N2.
Very good.
Very good.
Okay, we're happy with that.
We're satisfied with those reviews.
Keep them coming.
Don't disappoint us.
That's what you should have asked for for your birthday, Chris.
More five-star reviews.
But you asked for the Democrats to win the election, so...
I'll just have to live with it.
Yeah, you made your bed.
Have to lie in it.
All right.
Good.
What next?
So shall we get into our man of the hour for this week?
It's not a special episode.
It is a full-length episode where we actually took individual talk and dug into it and extracted clips and did all the usual things.
So shall we introduce him, the man?
Yeah, let's do that.
Now, did you post this talk on the...
Guru's Pod account, Chris?
Both of us have access to the Guru's Pod account.
I'll just mention that in passing, but as it happens, no, I did not.
Ah, I see.
Yeah, so nobody will have been able to follow along, but I'll post it when we finish this.
No, Chris, you know what?
I'll post it, all right?
Oh, okay.
I've taken that very broad hint.
I will post it.
Okay, good.
All right.
So tell the good people what we're about to post, what it's about.
So this is an interview with the Dutch historian Rutger Bregman.
It's for a podcast called Futures Podcast.
By an interviewer called Luke Robert Mason.
So it's an interview segment about an hour and 23 minutes long.
So it's quite an extended discussion of his ideas.
And in part, he's talking about his ideas from his new book, which is called Humankind.
And is talking about the...
The role of the kindness plays in humanity and how it's been overlooked.
And he has a previous book called Utopia for Realists.
And how we can get there.
Yeah.
Yeah, actually, you know what?
My dad actually has a copy of Utopia for Realists and has read it.
And it had a big influence.
It was a big influence on him, actually.
He liked it an awful lot.
Just a little aside there.
And maybe Rutger Bregman's name might not be immediately familiar to people, but I think this clip of him speaking at Davos will sound very familiar.
So let me just play the viral clip that many people are likely to know him from.
This is my first time at Davos, and I find it quite a bewildering experience, to be honest.
And I mean, I hear people talk in the language of participation and justice and equality and transparency.
But then, I mean, almost no one raises the real issue of tax avoidance, right?
And of the rich just not paying their fair share.
I mean, it feels like I'm at a firefighters' conference and no one's allowed to speak about water.
I mean, this is not rocket science.
I mean, we can talk for a very long time about all these stupid philanthropy schemes.
We can invite Bono once more.
Come on, we've got to be talking about taxes.
That's it.
Taxes, taxes, taxes.
All the rest is bullshit, in my opinion.
Okay, so...
Taxes, taxes, taxes.
And this was quite a celebrated clip, you know, kind of speaking truth to the elite class at Davos about how they're not addressing the elephant in the room.
Yeah, talk about speaking truth to power.
You've got to say go Bregman for that one, I reckon.
Yeah, and I will say, you know, I quite enjoyed that as well.
And because it's a kind of anti-elite message, he was...
Also invited on to discuss with Tucker Carlson his views.
And the interview, that also ended up going viral.
I'll play the short clip from the interview, which I think you'll be able to see why.
So I think the issue really is one of corruption and of people being bribed and of not being, you know, not talking about the real issues.
What the family, you know, what the Murdochs basically want you to do is to scapegoat immigrants instead of talking about tax avoidance.
So I'm glad you're now finally raising the issue.
But that's what's been happening for the past couple of years.
And I'm taking orders from the Murdochs, is that what you're saying?
No, I mean, it doesn't work that directly.
But, I mean, you've been part of the Cato Institute, right?
You've been a senior fellow there for years.
You've been taking their dirty money.
They're funded by Koch billionaires, you know?
Wait, why don't you tell me how it does work?
Well, it works by you taking their dirty money.
It's as easy as that.
I mean, you are a millionaire funded by billionaires.
That's what you are.
And I'm glad you now finally jumped the bandwagon, you know, of people like Bernie Sanders and AOC.
But you're not part of the solution, Mr. Carlson.
You're part of the problem.
Yeah, only now.
Come on, you jumped the bandwagon.
You're all like, oh, I'm against the globalist elite, blah, blah, blah.
It's not very convincing, to be honest.
You can't handle the criticism, can you?
So you got to hear him, like, lay it down to Tucker Carlson.
Millionaire paid by billionaires, or however he put it.
Yeah, yeah.
And, you know, that's pretty cool, too.
Let's face it.
I like it.
Yeah, and he clearly got under Tucker Carlson's skin.
So yeah, he's quite a celebrated figure.
And I think for us, the feeling was, with the utopia stuff, that he might fall into the guru sphere.
But maybe this is a chance for us to look at someone who we agree more with and who doesn't.
Necessarily exaggerate or be so hyperbolic.
That was our thinking, right?
A kind of palate cleanser.
Yeah, yeah.
Look, I was keen to Rutger Bregman because I'd read little bits of Utopia for Realists and I'd read a few articles and stuff like that.
But I wasn't super familiar with him.
But from the little I did know, I thought, well, first of all, he's Kind of a bit of a guru in terms of having, you know, the big ideas and the big solutions to things.
But also he's, you know, clearly on the left side of the political spectrum and we've definitely been looking at people that are, if not necessarily right-wing, then certainly what they call centrist or classical liberal or whatever.
And the other thing too is that I thought, well, you know, at least this guy, he might be wrong about stuff, but he's probably talking about some pretty substantive...
Ideas that will be fun for us to talk about and hopefully interesting.
So, yeah, I think he didn't disappoint in several respects, although I think we do have a few criticisms, more than we perhaps originally thought to the level.
Especially you, Chris, because you're such a critical person.
I have to keep up my reputation.
But yeah, to provide a spoiler, I will say that this annoyed me a lot more than I was actually anticipating.
Yeah, maybe that's, you know, is it Rutger or is it me?
Let's see.
Yeah, so look, I think this is a good talk for us to analyse because I did listen to a few other interviews with Rutger and they were a bit lighter.
Like they just sort of talked about his general political views about which direction the world should go and that sounded...
Pretty good to someone like me.
But in this talk, he spells out a lot more of his reasoning.
And kind of the more he says, the more stuff that just doesn't sound right is apparent.
So, yeah.
Tell us about this talk, Chris.
Well, let's start with a clip of him introducing his big idea.
You know, it sounds quite innocent, doesn't it?
Like, oh, this guy has written this happy, clever book about the power of kindness.
Isn't that nice?
But if you really think it through, the assumption that most people are fundamentally decent, then you realize that it actually has quite revolutionary implications.
Because nowadays, so many of our institutions are designed around the idea that most people are selfish, right?
Our schools, our workplaces, our democracies, even our prisons, you name it.
So if you turn this around, I think it has quite some radical implications.
So that's a good intro clip, I think, because it does describe where he's coming from.
His thesis here is really that the sort of systems and stuff we have in place, you know, capitalism and the various meritocratic systems and political systems and so on, are kind of assuming that people are very sort of driven by naked self-interest and act in a selfish way.
Because of that assumption, essentially encourages more of that behavior, that kind of competitive, selfish behavior, and it could be like a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Do you think that's a fair summary there?
Yeah, and he wants to contrast the view of humans as fundamentally cooperative and kind with the alternative so-called veneer theory.
Which is associated with a Hobbesian view, that humans are fundamentally cruel and selfish, and that we need society and civilization to tame our base desires.
And he points out how this concept is quite an old idea.
Same is true for the Christian church fathers.
So you read St. Augustine, for example, and you discover this idea of original sin, you know, that we're all born sinners.
Then you start reading the Enlightenment philosophers, Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, Adam Smith, you name it, all these brilliant philosophers, and you would expect some kind of break with Orthodox Christianity, but actually their view of human nature is, again, quite similar.
They emphasize that we have to assume that most people are selfish.
Yeah.
So it's an idea that, you know, before that he's talking about it being represented in like ancient Greek historian writing as well.
So it's this long-standing idea that humans are fallen, like the concept of original sin.
And his thesis is, maybe this is wrong.
And that it's overlooking, not just like a philosophical argument, but recent evidence from...
You know, I think that what you assume in other people is what you get out of them.
So when we talk about human nature, you're talking about two things at the same time.
On the one hand, you're talking about...
What we really are, what we really are like.
You're talking about our evolutionary history.
And in that case, we've got to talk about new evidence from biology and evolutionary anthropologists who suggest that human beings have actually evolved to be friendly.
They literally talk about survival of the friendliest, which means that for millennia, I was actually the friendliest among us who had the most kids, so had the biggest chance of passing on their genes to the next generation.
But on the other hand, when you're talking about human nature, You're also sort of talking about a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Because if we buy into a certain view, then we start designing our society around that idea and we'll create the kind of people that our theory presupposes.
Yeah, I think that's his argument in a nutshell.
Those two pillars.
The survival of the kindest and friendliest is actually not survival of the most ruthless and most selfish.
And that if we take the alternative...
Yeah, so can you tell people a little bit more about that veneer theory?
Yeah, so I think this is the view that derives from, you know, nature is red and tooth and claw, or greed is good, right?
This kind of maxim.
It is true, he's right, that there's been an emphasis in evolutionary anthropology and I think evolutionary biology as well to focus on the fact that cooperation and sociality have been somewhat ignored in the literature.
But I think that's only true to a certain extent, like the work of people like Joe Henrik or Gintus and Boyle.
There's a bunch of evolutionary theorists that are now emphasizing and focusing on our ability to cooperate, our ability to live in large groups and to behave pro-socially with people who are not kin, strangers, is an intrinsic part of our species' ability to develop.
And that this is what allows us, in part, to develop cumulative culture and the civilization and societies that we have.
So if we focus just on the darker aspects of our nature, our tendency to compete for resources, that really doesn't do justice to the forces that enable us to form these kind of mega societies.
Yeah.
I mean, I think if you go back like 50 or 70 years, then certainly there was that...
Red and tooth and claw kind of view of evolution.
But at least, I mean, I'm only passingly familiar with all of this stuff, but I've read a lot of stuff on cooperative behaviour and pro-sociality and so on.
So, yeah, I don't think we should over-exaggerate the degree to which behavioural...
What are they called?
Evolutionary behaviourists or behavioural?
Let's call them evolutionary anthropologists.
That seems a good name.
Oh, yeah, that sounds familiar.
Yeah, sorry.
Let's give them credit.
Yeah, I didn't mean to erase those people, Chris.
You and your anti-anthropologist bias, Matt.
But, yeah, look, he's definitely tapping into, like, a lot of long-standing...
He's referencing Rousseau and Hobbes and the theological literature about whether or not man's original state is one of sin or whether they're born in a state of grace and they're corrupted by society.
So, you know, that kind of dynamic or pull and push of these two poles, those discussions have been going on for...
Yeah, and I think maybe some aspect of it is arguing against at least a popular perception of the Dawkins selfish gene model.
Now, I know you're probably going to argue, Matt, that Dawkins wasn't actually arguing that people are selfish in nature.
In fact, kind of the opposite, right?
That despite selfish genes, we are...
Reciprocal altruists and cooperative and so on.
But it is fair to say that a lot of the public conception or presentation of his idea is that...
That the genied view of the world is one of competition, ruthless, and ultimately everything derives down to genetic self-interest.
Yeah, that's right.
And I think that is a misperception, as you say.
I mean, in the extended phenotype, he explains that a bit better.
And, you know, that disregards the benefits one gets by...
And, you know, we discussed this before, Chris, so I know you're familiar with it, but probably our listeners aren't.
But there's quite a famous mathematical model of cooperation called the iterated prisoner's dilemma.
So I could describe it real quick because it's easy.
This is this game where in each round you can cooperate or defect.
And if you both defect, then you're both going to lose a lot.
You're going to lose a lot of points.
If you both cooperate, you'll both get a little bit of points.
But if one cheats, so one person cooperates but the other person defects, then the person who cheats, who defects, can win the most, essentially, while the other person loses the most.
Now, when you structure that correctly in those times of wins and losses, then from an individual's point of view, it's always better to cheat.
But from the group's point of view, it's always better to cooperate.
So it leads to quite an interesting situation when you have to play that game in an iterative way.
Iterative means repeated.
Iterative does mean repeated.
It's an academic jargon, so it seems worth mentioning.
Yes, sorry, I didn't realise.
So where was I?
Yes, a situation when you have to play that game in an iterative way, which is kind of a good approximation of...
Of people or any animal that lives in a group of some kind and has to keep interacting with those people.
And so the really interesting thing about this mathematical model is that it leads to a kind of dynamic equilibria where the best strategy evolves, that is, evolves in a computational sense because you can set it up with little bits and bytes coding the behavior and so on.
And just purely based on individual selection, that is, like the points that one little agent gets basically influences their reproduction rate in the little electronic community.
Even though that's the function that's getting optimised, what evolves is this cooperative group behaviour, but it's not always cooperate, like always be a super nice guy.
What evolves is tit for tat, and that is you start off by cooperating, but if the other player defects, then you punish them.
Back by defecting back to them.
And if they start cooperating again, then you cooperate.
So it's tit for tat.
Now, you know, when the other person is defecting, you're getting hurt too by defecting against them.
But that's done in order to prevent the development.
Of the uncooperative players, basically.
So that's a bit of a long tangent, Chris, but I guess the interesting point there is there's very good mathematical models that explain why there is cooperative group behavior that are purely based on Dawkins-style.
Just genes essentially maximizing their own interests.
Yeah, and so it's kind of the public good dilemma, right?
The dilemma of the public good.
Yeah, the tragedy of the commons is sometimes what it's called too.
Yeah, if everybody donated to certain public parts, then everybody could benefit, but it always is better off for the individual to extract the...
Profit without taking the cost.
So those tournaments organized in the 80s, I think, by an academic called Something Axelrod.
There were competitions to see which strategy would work best in the Prisoners Dilemma tournaments.
And tit-for-tat, maybe generous tit-for-tat or punitive tit-for-tat.
I can't remember which one, but they won out.
So that's a really interesting literature.
But I think the relationship to this talk is that there's been something of a shift to focus on just how willing to cooperate people are.
For example, that people are...
Willing to forego profit in order to penalize other people who aren't cooperating.
So-called third-party punishment.
And that this doesn't work from the view of viewing individuals as economic profit-maximizing machines.
People will incur economic costs or physical costs in order to punish people who don't cooperate even though it doesn't directly benefit them.
So it relates to this clip about what are true...
Superpower is as a species.
So what is our true superpower?
I think it is our ability to connect with one another and to actually establish trust so that we can build really large social networks and learn from each other.
This is, I think, really what distinguishes us from the other primates and the Neanderthals.
Our ability basically to work together, to be friendly, that is our true superpower.
Yeah.
And so alongside that, he introduces this contrast about disability.
Not relying on us being the most intelligent primate.
So he talks about this thought experiment with two different types of primates.
On the one hand, you have the copycats.
And on the other hand, you have the geniuses.
And the geniuses are really, really smart.
They've got really big brains.
They come up with inventions on their own.
They learn how to fish.
They just find that out.
But the problem is they're not very social.
They don't really have a lot of friends.
So when they come up with something brilliant, they don't really share it.
Now, the copycats, they're like us.
They're not very smart.
They're quite stupid, in fact.
It hardly ever happens that they come up with something interesting.
But when they come up with something interesting, when they have an Isaac Newton among them, then boom, quickly everyone learns it because they've got so many friends.
They've got these really large social networks.
This is sort of what made us intelligent.
So, the contrast though, right, that humans are not that impressive except in our ability...
To cooperate and learn from each other and share culture.
Physically, we're not that imposing compared to other primate species.
And according to Rutger, we're not that intellectually gifted as well.
So there's two very short clips where he makes unflattering comparisons for humans' abilities, which I think illustrate this point well.
But then you actually look at the evidence we've got there and...
It's very weak.
You know, we're not very smart, actually.
You do intelligence tests and you let a human toddler of around two years old compete with a pig and usually the pig wins.
If you do a boxing match with a chimpanzee, well, I don't recommend it.
You know, he's going to smash you.
So we're not very smart.
We're not very strong.
There you go.
Not very smart, not very strong.
So, any thoughts about that, Matt?
Yeah.
Okay.
So, it's true people are...
Very strong, but that's kind of beside the point, isn't it?
Are you not saying, Matt, that you could win in a boxing match with a chimpanzee?
I could totally kick a chimpanzee's ass.
I'm sure of it.
I'd be sneaky, you see.
I'd have tricks.
Well, before we get to the pig issue, I want to just stick on the chimpanzee for a minute because, like, you know, we're not...
We are not idiots, right?
We understand how powerful a chimpanzee is and that they have giant canines and that they can rip a man's arm off and puncture his neck.
So, one-on-one, you're unlikely to fare well on an unarmed boxing match with a chimpanzee.
But I will say, if you're armed, you're...
Odds greatly improve.
And the thing which makes humans formidable, often against larger prey, is the fact that we use advanced hunting weapons.
Spears are like a big metal pole.
If it were you with, say, two swords versus a chimpanzee.
I don't know, Matt.
I'm giving you, like, you know, if they're good swords and you're up for the fight, I'm giving you a fairly decent chance.
You don't know how much of a coward I am, but I'm flattered, though.
Thank you.
Yeah, look, so this is...
Let's step back a little bit.
He really does downplay the cognitive abilities of people because he really wants to make it all about...
Cooperation, right?
And, you know, there's a reasonable version of this, which is that like a human being that, you know, has been raised by wolves or something like that has very little going for them.
You know, it's true that a huge amount of our advantages, even if it's something like making a spear or a throwing stick, is culturally...
Yes, it's true that a lot of that is due to the power of transmitting that cultural knowledge through communication from generation to generation and that knowledge accruing.
So that part is right.
But he makes this strong distinction between the sort of cooperation and being kind to each other on one end.
And intelligence on the other end, when they're actually just two sides of the same coin, like the very expressive and powerful language abilities and communication abilities that people have is inextricably linked to our intelligence.
So I kind of, I think he's making a false dichotomy, first of all.
And the second thing is, I think he's completely exaggerating the degree to which pigs, for instance, are just as smart as people.
That's just silly.
What do you think, Chris?
Well, I noticed that you slept.
Yeah, so on the topic of two-year-olds versus pigs, I think it's worth noting there that he's talking about toddlers versus pigs in intellect,
because it's quite clear that were you to take an adult pig versus an adult human, that the human would be able to outsmart it, right?
But what about, Chris, what about a toddler versus a little piglet?
Like a cute little piglet.
One you can hold in your hand.
No, that's a good question, Matt.
I think we need some time with that.
But there's also species which mature quicker, right?
Like there's horses when they're born, I think can run after like an hour or two.
But anyway, so I'm not going to have a toddler versus a horse battle in my mind.
But there's...
You know, there's this literature, comparative psychology literature, looking at human capabilities versus other animal species.
And the general trend is to say that lots of the golden barriers that we've set up between humans and animals are much more fuzzier than we previously believed.
Other animals use twos.
Other animals have complex social hierarchies.
And the more that we look, we see fuzzy boundaries between us and other species.
And tons of people have seen these clips of chimpanzees doing these memory tasks with touching numbers and completely desimating human abilities, right?
Yeah.
But these all tend to be within focused areas of competence.
And it's very noticeable that we don't see...
Any real evidence of significant cumulative culture in other species?
You do see transmission of culture, but it hasn't led to iPhones in chimpanzees for a reason, because the degree is different.
Cooperative hunting is also different.
There's species that can take down large prey, but humans got extremely good at that, hunted species into extinction and domesticated animals and so on.
Yeah, I think there's two versions.
There's the one that presents humans as far too unique and that we are completely separate from the rest of the animal kingdom.
And Rutger is at the other end of the spectrum.
Well, I mean, he is also pointing out a speciality, which is our cooperation.
But in downplaying the importance of intelligence, it feels like he's kind of exaggerating.
For a fact.
Yeah, I think he really is.
I mean, take Bonobos, for instance.
You know, Bonobos are famously peaceful and friendly and pro-social.
Although that's exaggerated.
Okay, sure.
Sorry.
You know, the peaceful image being...
Anyway, anyway.
Chris, I'm...
I'm just going by a quick Wikipedia article.
Don't burst listeners' bubbles here, please.
Carry on, carry on.
Okay, but people are pretty nasty too, right?
So let's just say for argument's sake they're about the same.
Can I say they're about the same?
They're more interested in sex and less interested in fighting than other species of chimpanzee.
That's fair to say.
Yeah, sounds like people.
Sounds like me, anyway.
So, I mean, so they haven't built a space shuttle or anything.
So, you know, what's going on?
The Bonobos should get their act together.
Because if Rikka's point of view is correct, and we're really just about, it's not about intelligence at all, then, so, you know.
Basically, I'm saying he's wrong about this.
It's got a lot to do with not just kind of like tool using or just the abstract reasoning, but intelligence also involves communication and language abilities.
So those are two aspects of intelligence, which are the key things to be able to both create cultural artifacts and then transmit those cultural artifacts forward in time.
And I think he's drawing a little bit on the work of Michael Murta Krishna and Joe Henrik, who are two evolutionary anthropologists who I like and know.
And their kind of argument is that human societies rely on this thing, the cultural brain hypothesis, as opposed to the social brain hypothesis, where it isn't about individual genius.
It's cultural, social, like when there's a certain...
Population, that you will have inventions and innovations begin to emerge.
And it isn't down to individual genius.
It's more the whole system.
And I think Rutger is drawing on that literature.
And that is a good literature.
So it's not arguing against that, right?
We're just arguing that still human intelligence is pretty remarkable.
In many respects, in the animal kingdom.
Yeah, absolutely.
I'm on board with that sort of incremental cultural achievement and not about just raw genius.
Kids that are raised by wolves don't generally.
They're not generally very good at double-entry accounting, for instance.
Anyway, I think we've laid out our position on that one.
What should we move on to next?
This ties in nicely with the fact that, rather surprisingly to me, was how much evil psych was in this talk.
Because this is not, you know, evolutionary psychology is generally not a favourite topic amongst the left wing.
At the minute, at least.
Yeah, yeah.
I think Rutger Bregman hasn't been on...
Because, you know, he's definitely very, very left.
So he clearly hasn't been on Twitter enough because he doesn't know how on-the-nose EvoPsych is.
Because, yeah, this talk is largely about EvoPsych.
Yeah, so let's hear him talk about two EvoPsych explanations for features about humans which are notable.
How could it ever be an evolutionary advantage to...
Give away your feelings involuntarily to someone else.
And I think the answer here is that blushing helps us to establish trust.
Okay, so that's an evolutionary psychology explanation for why humans blush.
And here's...
The evolutionary psychology explanation for our whites in our eyes.
If you look at all the other primates, and there are 200 primate species in total, all of them have dark around their irises, which means it's not very easy to see what they're looking at.
They're a bit like poker players wearing shades, while human beings, you know, we reveal.
Our gazes.
And this, again, helps to establish trust.
There are some scientists who think that this happened during this process of domestication.
Yeah.
So this notion that a lot of the features that we see in humans that are interesting that we don't see in other primate species are related to this capacity for kindness and sociality.
blushing being a good example.
Why would you want embarrassment and shame to be visible?
And secondly, that the way that humans eyes are mean that you can track gears easier.
And these are both things which don't have to be because we can see that they aren't
And he makes this point about...
How expressive our faces are.
Another example here, you really see this as well in our faces.
Human beings have the most expressive faces in the animal kingdom.
Yeah, so all of which, from my point of view, I don't think any of these are necessarily wrong.
There likely is an adaptive reason for blushing.
But not necessarily, right?
It could be a spandrel.
But it's the fact that...
Evolutionary psychology explanations are so readily given and so tightly linked to sociality.
It just was surprising to me that this was such a strong feature of the talk.
Yeah, me too.
They definitely do read as evolutionary just-so stories, which are rightly...
Not given very much weight.
And I say that as someone who's actually pretty comfortable with evolutionary psychology generally.
But yeah, these particular things that he's leaning on are pretty weak.
I mean, like you say, they might well be true, but they may well just be just random happenstance.
There may be just no particular reason why we have the whites of our eyes.
For them being white, it could just be a coincidence that they're white and it's slightly easier to see where somebody's looking.
Yeah, and I think another problem with it is to focus on that from the point of view of pro-sociality, that these are features which allow us to cooperate better.
That's true, but it also enables Machiavellian.
Yeah, exactly.
That's what I was thinking as well.
When you think about gaze and facial expression, if you think about in situations where people, non-verbal type situations, I think, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, you're the expert here, but I think in other primates, they do a lot of looking at each other and seeing where the other person's looking.
And that's often a way to...
Either exert some kind of dominance or to see where the other chimps are looking or whatever so you can run away and have sex with one of the females without getting into trouble.
It's not necessarily for any altruistic purpose.
Altruistic purpose, exactly.
Yeah, there's a whole literature about Machiavellian intelligence and monitoring what conspecifics are looking at or paying attention to so you can get away with things.
So yeah, I mean...
These are all debates in the literature, but it's telling that he kind of focuses on one explanation and presents that as almost completely confirmed when there's a lot of debate around it.
But I will say, Matt, he gave an example that I've heard you give before.
Oh, go on.
When he's talking about humans being mismatched for civilization.
So let me play that.
Yes, yes.
So mismatch is a...
Concept from evolutionary anthropology, which is all about sort of recognizing that for the vast majority of our history, we were nomadic and togetherers.
So our bodies have sort of evolved to adjust to that lifestyle.
Simple examples of a mismatch, say, for example, the fact that we find it hard to say no to sugar.
When we were intergatherers, you know, it made sort of sense whenever you saw a tree that was full of fruit to sort of just eat it all because that was sort of a good protection for the future, you know?
But now in a modern supermarket, you know, it's not very adaptive.
Yeah.
Look, I do remember giving this example before and he's referring to that mismatch between the artificial modern world that we've created for ourselves and the environment in which we spent the vast, vast majority of our evolutionary time in.
And, you know, so he's touching on ideas like supernormal stimuli.
Are you familiar with that, Chris?
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
So the original example of this was in, I think, a brood parasitism in which there's a trick you can play on nesting birds.
They've got this drive to sort of sit on eggs and there might be a particular colour.
And what another bird can do, maybe cuckoos do it, or a nasty experiment, is actually put a bigger, brighter egg in that nest and then the bird will go sit on that.
To the exclusion of the other ones, even, just because it's a supernormal stimuli.
It triggers all of their responses for which there's an adaptive response to, but it's a heightened version of the stimulus, which can actually lead to maladaptive behavior, which is basically not sitting on your own eggs and sitting on the artificial egg instead.
So, you know, it's pretty interesting ideas, I think, floating around.
You know, a lot of things in the modern world are supernormal stimuli for humans.
Things like calorie-rich and shit.
Sugar-rich junk food, pornography.
But yeah, look, Chris, I'm generally sympathetic to that.
How about you?
Yeah, I don't have an issue with well-supported evolutionary psychology theories or research.
And I think the notion about our fondness for sweet foods is a good example, right?
So I'm not flagging it up to say, oh, evolutionary psychology, look how much nonsense it is.
No, just to say that it's a...
It's a feature of the position that he's introducing.
But I think where it goes awry is where he's focusing on this mismatch that humans are not well adapted to modern civilization and modern civilization is full of super stimulus.
That a lot of this leads to a criticism that I see often on the left about evolutionary psychology.
It's creating this imagined evolutionary hunter-gallower past and tracing everything to that psychology, right?
Like the famous parody is linking everything to finding berries.
And this ties into another point that I think we both wanted to get to.
This really strong binary he draws between mankind in the hunter-gallower lifestyle versus mankind as it exists now.
In civilization.
Maybe I'll play two clips.
One of them explaining Hunter Gallery Society and then the second discussing modern civilization.
So here we go.
So let's start with our health.
We know that the Nomadica Togetherer lifestyle was quite healthy.
You know, you had a varied diet, a bit of fruit, a bit of vegetables, a bit of meat.
So that was good.
You also had quite a bit of exercise because you moved around all the time.
Then, if you look at the organization of those societies, not bad, you know, quite egalitarian.
You could almost call them proto-feminist.
The work week was not very long, 20 hours, maybe 30 hours max.
And then it was also quite peaceful.
So as I said, there's almost no evidence for warfare among nomadic intergatherers.
Okay, so that's idyllic.
Sounds beautiful, right?
People living healthy, eating a varied diet, proto-feminists in hunter-gallover societies.
Just wandering around, eating a balanced diet, appreciating nature.
Sounds good.
Yeah, I want to talk about the naturalistic fallacy.
Hopefully I can after this clip.
20 hours a week, Matt.
Imagine 20 hours a week.
Sounds beautiful.
Now let's contrast that with modern civilization.
But it got even worse because also the era of hierarchy and patriarchy started, right?
When people settled down, they started amassing property, and then they invented the idea of inheritance.
So, you know, kids would get the property from their parents, and we know that, you know, this builds up and builds up over the generation.
Then at some point, a kind of status difference became also hereditary.
Yeah.
Then these rulers started raising armies and started fighting with each other.
And so, yeah, you really see this whole process of warfare also starting.
The archaeological evidence is quite convincing there.
So it's just, as I said, it's just one shit show, basically.
Yeah.
So civilization is a shit show.
But even before we get to modern civilization, just agricultural society was quite a horror.
But then you look at the transition, right?
And you look at the farmers and the people who started to live in villages and cities, and their lives were so much worse, right?
Their health deteriorated, their diet was much less varied, you know, like grain in the morning, grain in the afternoon, grain in the evening, always grain.
Then you had to work really hard for that.
No pain, no grain.
Often you paid another high price as well in terms of infection diseases.
Yeah, so he's sounding an awful like Jean-Jacques Rousseau now, isn't he?
I think, I don't know if you have a clip of it in this recording, but I'm pretty sure he, I'm not sure if he attributes it to Rousseau.
Oh, he does.
He does.
And there is a clip where he makes his feelings about Rousseau quite clear.
Rousseau has always been described by many commentators as the romantic, right?
As the revolutionary.
Sentimentalist.
He's not a very realistic guy.
But then, for this book, I started going over all the latest evidence we have from anthropology and archaeology.
And at some point, I thought, you know what?
I've got to call my book Rousseau Was Right.
Because, you know, on many points, he actually was.
Especially about this transition from hunter-gathering to farming.
I mean, Rousseau had it all right, actually.
Yeah, so he's wearing his influences on his sleeve there, which is good.
Yeah, so Rousseau as well feels that the minute that people pointed to a bit of land and started settling down and owning things and so on, that's when everything went wrong.
And all the oppression, all the corruption, all the wars and so on started from that point.
Really, what you need to do is go back to a state of nature and remember that the fruits of the earth belong to everybody and so on.
So, yeah, there's a lot to be unpacked there.
What do you want to say there, Chris?
Well, there's two points I would want to make.
One is that he's definitely creating this stark binary between agricultural society and hunter-gallery society and then eventually civilization.
In the same way as we've seen with James Lindsay or we saw with Jordan Peterson or any of the other gurus we looked at, there's this distinction where everything good is associated with one side of the binary, the hunter-gallers.
Everything negative is associated with the other side, agriculture and society.
And those kind of binaries are never realistic.
They're always way too simplistic.
And that leads to the second point, which is...
His description of hunter-gallower societies, granted, he's giving a big-picture overview, but it's much more complicated than he presents in terms of what it means to say that hunter-gallower societies are generally egalitarian,
which isn't completely controversial, or what it means to say that there was no warfare in prehistory.
There actually is lots of debates and literature about this.
And the notion that hunter-gallower societies are proto-feminist feels really like projecting inappropriate values back through history.
Because you still have a lot of things to do with forced marriages and violence against partners.
It is certainly true that until you have larger societies settled down with excess resources, that it's relatively hard to mobilize large forces.
But the notion that violent raids or intergroup conflict are just very rare throughout prehistory is hugely debated.
There's anthropologists, yes, who argue that, and there's anthropologists who say no.
It's called, like, Ancient Roots of War versus the kind of argument that warfare is a modern illness of civilization.
But his presentation is, like, all evidence points to one specific viewpoint, and that's not true.
No.
Well, look, your understanding of it is definitely better than mine, but it's definitely not consistent with my limited understanding, admittedly, of, say, Australian Aboriginal or Maori.
You know, it was pretty tough.
There was raids and abductions and so on.
But I guess my main issue is, yeah, I mean, it's a similar point of view to yours.
Like, I think supernormal stimuli is a useful example, for instance, where the sort of modern, civilized, artificial world that we've created has, you know, led to some mismatch and can lead to bad things like obesity.
But that doesn't mean that everything associated with civilization is unhealthy and bad for you.
In fact, the vast majority of it is very good for us.
That's why we've been working so hard, I suppose, to create and maintain it.
So I think he's very much falling into that romantic and naturalistic fallacy of projecting what he'd like to imagine on hunter-gatherer groups.
Yeah, and I think that's my issue, is that presenting The vast array of hunter's gallery societies that have existed around the world, and not just now, right?
Back tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of years into history, and giving this really simplified overview of them, rather than like, yes, he's presenting them in a positive light, which is different than somebody who presents them as just violent savages who have no civilization or culture and murder each other.
But it's not necessarily more nuanced.
It's presenting them as the kind of noble savages of Rousseau, that they exist there to be a fantasy that are projected upon the vast
that we want for modern society to adopt or wants.
And yeah, that's presenting people not as complex humans that are capable of violence and are capable of cooperation and have their own cultures and their own conflicts and their own interests, but we're all presenting them as mythical archetypes that
Jordan Peterson would be proud of.
And okay, let me...
Go ahead.
Yeah, I think the thing that you find annoying is that projection and that reduction of extremely complex indigenous societies or prehistoric hunter-gatherer societies, not as themselves,
for what they were or what they are, but as what...
They can teach us.
Yeah, what they can teach us or what somebody sitting in a comfortable conference room in the Netherlands fondly imagined that sort of suits the argument in his particular book.
And that's a little bit annoying.
Yeah.
And he isn't wrong about the issues about health that developed with early stages of agriculture, right?
But that was a...
You know, there's transitionary periods.
And like the reason that agricultural societies have dominated over hunter-galler lifestyles is because they, in the long term, they do produce more stable food sources and allow larger groups of people to exist together.
And yeah, I'm not disparaging hunter-galler lifestyles, but purely to say that...
The kind of demonization of agriculture, it just feels like, you know, how do you put it?
A rhetorical maneuver.
Yeah, and look, he issues a disclaimer about this point.
So let's hear him defend himself against this accusation.
I know that some people at this point may think, these guys are using highly advanced technology to talk to each other, you know, even though they're hundreds of kilometers away and they're, you know, sort of talking about how we should be hunter-getters again.
That's not what I'm arguing.
I'm just saying that if you look at the last 10,000 years of our history, that for the most part, civilization was a disaster.
It's another one of those beautiful disclaimers of, right?
Look, I'm not saying just negative things about technology, blah, blah, blah, but I'll finish with just saying that 10,000 years of civilization has been a complete disaster.
Yeah, that's a nice trick, though.
Okay, I think we've made our views clear about that.
He's definitely casting...
Hunter-Gatherer Society is in a particular light and definitely focusing on the positives when it comes to this humanity existing in a state of nature or a natural state.
And I guess that's setting him up for the argument that he wants to make, which is that the modern world has gone wrong in kind of rewarding and encouraging the wrong things.
Yes.
So there's parts of this where his presentation about the modern world It sounds very similar to previous gurus that we've had on in describing the level of corruption that exists.
And so here's a clip which just struck me as how similar it was to what we were listening to with JPCers a couple of weeks ago.
Again, I think it's important to keep in mind here is that those at the top, they want you to watch CNN and Fox News all day because that'll make you scared.
And it's much easier to rule people who are scared.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And that ties in to a point that he's making about our current leaders being like traditional leadership was achievement-based leadership, as he talks about.
So here's how he describes that.
Leadership was temporary and you had to prove that you were really the right man or woman for the job, right?
This is what anthropologists call achievement-based inequality, which makes sense, right?
If you're really better at something like a better storyteller or a better hunter, then it makes sense that people listen to you.
Okay, so that's valid, reasonable leadership that we see, predictably, in hunter-gallurers.
Now, how about modern society?
And we came up with sort of status-based inequality or hierarchy-based inequality, like very, very different kind of thing.
You also started to getting different kind of leaders.
And the whole process of the corruption of power also started playing a very important role.
So this is modern leaders are not like the leaders of old.
They're self-serving, they're manipulative, and they're not interested in the...
The common good, right?
Just in power.
And there was this section where he talks about doing brain scans of leaders.
I'll just play that and then we can talk about it.
If you put powerful people in brain scanners, you'll discover that the regions that are involved with empathy, they don't really work anymore.
Blushing, they don't do that anymore.
I mean, imagine Boris Johnson blushing.
Imagine Bolsonaro, Donald Trump blushing.
I mean, it doesn't happen, right?
Yeah, I'm just going to say, Matt, I find that incredibly ridiculous, the notion that he doesn't think Boris Johnson can blush or that when we scan the brains of modern leaders, empathy centers don't light up.
They don't work anymore.
Because, like, one, I really think that's a misrepresentation of whatever research literature he's referencing there.
Yeah, that's incredibly...
Incredibly implausible.
I find it hard to believe there's a study out there where they recruited powerful leaders to come and sit in fMRI machines or tested whether or not they blushed.
But even if they did, you know, fMRI studies are notoriously unreliable with small sample sizes.
I don't know what he's referencing there, but I find it highly questionable.
And the second point that Trump and Boris Johnson aren't able to blush.
Just like, no, maybe they don't blush in public because they have developed a certain public persona and they're practiced.
And maybe Trump, you know, is narcissistic to a pathological extent that he doesn't feel shame.
But that's like the most extreme example.
And I am perfectly willing to believe that in their personal lives or with friends, that they can feel shame.
They're not aliens.
They're just, you know, politicians are able to train certain responses on that, but the presentation here is almost like they're not human anymore.
It reminds me of a book I did read, which was The Psychopath Test by John Ronson, where he, I think in one of the chapters there, he talks about, you know, many of the corporate leaders being probable psychopaths.
Have you come across that before, Chris?
Yeah, yeah.
Whatchamacallit, that they're lacking in empathy and this makes them able to succeed in business.
So like that not all psychopathic people are necessarily like serial killers or that kind of thing.
They can channel it towards success in business, right?
Yeah.
They're overrepresented in elite business circles, right?
Yeah.
And I've heard similar arguments before that Modernity and bureaucracy and capitalism demand the kind of traits that, you know, highly dispassionate, calculating, ultra-rational,
ultra-instrumentalising in terms of how you treat other people, that it kind of encourages and rewards those sorts of behaviours.
So I agree with you.
I think his specific claims sound silly.
I'm just taking a softer and more general version of what he's saying.
And, you know, I don't know if there's any hard evidence for it, but I guess it feels somewhat plausible to me.
Yeah, I mean, this is a clip of him expanding on it a bit about what he views modern leaders to have lost.
Exactly the qualities.
That made us so successful as a species.
Our ability to connect, to work together, to blush, to see each other in the eye, etc., etc.
Leaders, if they're really under the influence of this drug that we call power for too long, they lose them.
Yeah.
I mean, that spells it out, right?
And that just doesn't ring true to me because there certainly is completely cynical manipulations in politics and lots of leaders are engaged in that.
But part of the reason that they're often able to do that is precisely because they're charismatic.
They're able to...
Engage with people and get people socially to fall in line with them, even when they're being unreasonable.
And I find it hard to believe that these dynamics did not exist in other societies.
I know that hunter galleries and various other societies around the world today see self-promotion negatively, that they promote self-deprecating as social values.
But that doesn't mean that charisma and manipulative kind of Machiavellian or self-aggrandizement is something completely foreign to our human nature.
That just sounds way too strong for me.
Yeah.
I'm totally with you there.
I think his twist on it is really quite weird and implausible.
As you said, definitely the very manipulative, calculating people are usually people people.
They're the used car salesman type.
Type person with a twinkle in their eye and very friendly and very good at mobilising, you know, support because that's what you need to do whether you're running a university or a company or an organisation.
And I think it would be very, very necessary if you were the leader of a small hunter-gatherer group as well.
I think being charismatic and being, you know, socially capable, which has just as many...
Dark sides as positive sides to it is really important.
So I think he's just, I agree with you, he's presenting this very perturbed view, which has grains of truth in it, but it just focuses on one side.
There is this funny section where he's talking about, you know, well, how would we deal in the past?
How did our ancestors deal with people like Trump who were shameless?
And it's quite interesting to see where he ends up.
So let me just play this clip.
Well, let's go back to how our forefathers and mothers did it, right?
Let's go back to the nomadic intergatherers.
They mostly relied on the power of shame.
Now, if that didn't work anymore, they would expel these shameless people from the group.
And if even that wouldn't work, if someone would be really a sociopath or psychopath, then that person would be executed by the group.
Now, I'm not saying that we should go back to execution.
But yes, at some point, you need to find some way to expel these people.
So, it does, you know, there's just this point that, like, he does, you know, offhandedly mention about group-sanctioned murders, and I also don't think it's true that the only people who died in ancestral societies were those who deserved it,
right?
The image there is very much of perfect justice functioning, where it's only...
Sociopaths who are killed.
But I've got a feeling that there's plenty in our history and the Hunter Gallery societies where there's many innocent, good people who suffered.
Terribly and we're murdered, right?
Are you saying vigilante justice isn't always the best justice, Chris?
Because this is very controversial.
I mean, yeah, like he's pretty cavalier about the kind of, you know, the sort of expelling or the execution of the undesirables.
And like he extends, he chooses that example that was a culture war issue of that Central Park lady.
Oh, I've got that.
Shall I play it to tee it up for you?
Yeah, that would be good.
I know that in this era of Twitter and social media, the group can go overcorrect a little bit.
You know, we've seen the incident in Central Park a couple of weeks ago, you know, with this woman and this terrible racist behavior in which she sort of faked that she was attacked by an African-American man and called the police.
And, you know, she was destroyed in the days.
You know, she quickly lost her job.
And the man himself, you know, the birder later said that he sort of felt that it was maybe a bit too much, right?
That her whole life had been destroyed over this one, even though it's still a horrible incident.
But then I think, you know, maybe that's collateral damage.
Maybe that just happens.
Yeah, yeah.
So that rubbed me the wrong way a little bit because he's very cavalier about the collateral damage and isn't too worried about the justice being fair or proportionate.
And I think in that particular case, I mean, we don't want to relitigate it, but I think it's fair to say it was a little bit complicated.
And he, yeah, he's definitely, he was just a little bit too cool with that kind of thing.
So I think he places too much faith in just the sort of natural group behaviour doing good.
I actually prefer our modern, civilized, highly formalized procedures of, you know, evidence and judges and juries and all that stuff.
I mean, call me, call me like, you know, a civilization apologist, but that's just me.
Yeah, I think like with the Central Park lady.
I mean, there's very little debate that what she did was unjust and specifically focusing on his racial characteristic to increase the threat.
But it's complicated, like you said, by the fact that the guy was intimating that he was going to feed her dog.
Something and she wouldn't like what was about to happen, right?
So I think it's a little bit, like you say, there's more complications there, but the cavalier attitude towards, like if a right-wing person invoked collateral damage in that way, as, you know,
well, that's just the price we have to pay.
I don't think it would be regarded as, yeah, that's fine, you know, a few people will get harmed, but overall...
Things will shake out okay.
And so when we were looking at JPCers, we noted that a lot of the talking points that JPCers presents are just fairly standard boilerplate right wing.
Talking points about culture war things, right?
About court packing or Biden's cognitive decline or that kind of thing.
American culture war points.
And I have to realize here, there was a lot of this, especially at the Q&A section at the end, where Rutger basically, there's no position of his which doesn't fall almost completely predictably along liberal culture war viewpoints.
So we've already had an opinion of cancel culture.
Here's him talking about the role of the police, the ideal role of the police.
Prison.
And in the case of policing, you would move to something that we call community policing.
When the police officer becomes something of a social worker, right?
Where it's really important that you know the community, that you become friends with the grandmothers and the aunts and the uncles, that you really...
Have your connections in the whole neighborhood so they are your allies and they can help you with doing something about serious crime.
Yeah, so I'm not going to respond negatively to the notion that you should become involved with the communities that are policing, but I think the reason we have social workers and police as two different roles is for good reason.
Yes, yeah.
They're different jobs.
Yeah, that's true.
That's true.
That's true.
Community policing is definitely a good idea.
I think Bakhti and I definitely agree that European-style policing is better than that kind of California or New York or whatever style of policing.
Militarized policing, yeah.
Militarized, yeah, of course.
But, yeah, he just is maybe going a little bit too far to think that you can have...
The U.S. is in many ways very far removed from that.
So my feeling is that maybe you just need to kill the beast first and then start over again.
So maybe first defund the whole thing and then start over again.
I don't know.
It's going to be a very, very long journey.
Okay, bingo, I guess.
Defund the police, yes.
Defund the police gets name-checked.
And, you know, we're not here to debate the merits or demerits of it, but just to note that these are fairly boilerplate positions on the left.
And one last clip I'll play to illustrate this point.
I mean, the vast, vast, vast majority, can't emphasize this enough.
Of protesters is peaceful.
And even with the protesters who are peaceful, you know, I just saw this tweet today of the son of Martin Luther King who said, I will never condone violence.
You know, never.
I will never justify it.
But I can understand it, right?
I mean, it is understandable.
Martin Luther King himself said that a riot is the language of the unheard.
And the real perpetrators here are obviously those at the top.
Yep, yep.
So that's another sort of left-wing.
If we're playing left-wing bingo, then yep, that's another one.
Yeah, look, it's just, I think he meant to say at one point, even if the protesters are violent, not peaceful, because he said peaceful twice.
But it's the kind of, you know, I agree.
I mean, I agree because I'm left-wing that most protests are peaceful.
But a lot of it has this...
You know, if it was a right-wing person, I'd be describing it as weasel words, right?
Saying that, you know, I don't condone the violence, but I understand it.
And yeah, like, I think to be consistent, it's just we have to point that out.
Yeah, I think you're right.
I think it is important to be consistent because, you know, that kind of whataboutism or victim blaming, as sort of lefty people, we don't tolerate it when right-wing people...
do those rhetorical tricks.
And violence is violence.
And, you know, I think, yeah, you can just sort of avoid having to deal with it by pointing to other things or saying, oh, it's really due to the system made me do it or whatever.
I mean, it's just kind of a, it's a bit of a too, it's too easy a way to avoid grappling with the issue, I think.
Yeah, and there was a point that kind of – so there's discussions of anti-capitalism and what – 60% of our income is dependent on the country in which we live,
which is pure luck.
Then there's like 10% gender, 10% race.
Then you've got like 20% socioeconomic, like your wealth, etc.
I don't know, like, real skills?
The real effort you put in yourself, maybe that's like 5%?
And even then you could argue, you know, philosophically, does the free will really exist?
Isn't that also just a matter of getting the right genes and being lucky there?
Yeah, so the reason I wanted to highlight that is, on the one hand, I think that's quite a left-wing perspective on achievement, right?
That you focus on...
The circumstances that allowed you to achieve, right?
Rather than individual ability and merit.
It's the circumstances of society that you need to credit for it.
But the interesting parallel for me was that, so on the one hand...
He's making the kind of anti-Jordan Peterson view, right?
That like, it isn't about you.
It isn't about your individual ability.
A lot of your things are just chance and circumstance and your family that you didn't control and you don't deserve credit for.
But the other part of that kind of fits nicely with Peterson's message that you benefit from all of the efforts of...
Your family, the society, the institutions that exist.
Almost nothing you achieve can be achieved without that foundation that you were born into and that you must give credit to.
So in a weird way, they arrive at different points as the conclusion, but they're both arguing we have to give this massive credit to the social systems that bring us into being and that their power cannot be overestimated.
Yeah, yeah, I think that's right, you know, in a roundabout way.
The other aspect of it, too, is he takes it even further, of course, into sort of, you know, questioning free will.
So, you know, if there's no free will, then really nobody deserves anything.
So, you know, you may as well have a perfect utopian communism, I suppose, because nothing really matters, I guess.
You know, your actions are not...
Determined by you at all.
They're entirely externally determined, which, you know, I get it, but at some point it seems like that point of view kind of leads to madness, doesn't it?
It's a deterministic universe, so who can blame Trump really for what he does, right?
Yeah, that's it.
It's a weird way to kind of abrogate all responsibility for everything.
So I get, you know, it's a philosophical...
Problem that we're not going to resolve in this episode.
But, yeah, he takes it in some weird directions.
I do want to jump in and say, by the way, I do have some very nice things to say or some things that I like that I hope we can get to because all your clips are usually kind of things that we can criticize him for.
How dare you, Mark?
Look, I think it's fair to say that...
Overall, you know, I share a lot of his intuitions or a lot of his political opinions about, you know, I prefer European-style policing to American.
I think the level of inequality in modern capitalism.
Is ridiculous.
And that viewing success in business as all about personal effort rather than luck and family circumstances and so on.
Like, I actually agree with a whole bunch of the things that he's saying, but it's more the degree to which he goes.
And the lack of reflectiveness that there is genuine room for disagreement on some of these points.
So, like, let me play a clip here where he's talking about...
Real democracy and what it isn't about.
Yeah, and like genuine democracy.
So if you look at the original meaning of the word, you go back to the Greek, demos kratos.
It's about the people ruling.
It's not about the people sitting on a couch and watching Netflix or the news or the reality show that we call politics.
No, it's about actually participating.
It's about joining.
It's about making decisions for yourself.
That's a pretty vague description, though, of his alternative view of democracy.
I also thought he's kind of demonizing the existing democratic system of, you know, voting, right, without active participation.
Well, yeah, he's demonizing representative democracy, where we vote for other people to do the political work for us, which I quite like, because I don't really want to participate that much.
I prefer to make podcasts and go swimming and things like that.
I think that's actually my point.
This notion that a good thing for people to do is not watch Netflix, but is to be politically active and involved.
Is it?
Hasn't they been talking about how sociality and personal connection is the important thing?
Because I genuinely don't think it's better emotionally that everyone gets involved in politics.
And has ideas about how society should function.
I don't presuppose that everyone has to have those interests.
Just as the same, I don't presuppose everyone has to have academic interests about stuff I'm interested in.
I'm not saying that people are there to be ruled over.
Just purely that it isn't a moral feeling of someone to watch movies instead of engage in activism.
Yeah, I mean, and it's actually contradictory to something he says later on, I think it is, where he talks about this sort of, in the context of the UBI, universal basic income, which can essentially act to redistribute wealth, give people more freedom and autonomy in terms of not being perpetually worried about the problems of staying alive,
essentially.
And he emphasizes that...
The good thing about that is that it sort of satisfies both sort of libertarians and left-wingers because it kind of combines a very small state, which is basically only concerned with some redistribution, but essentially people are sort of free to do what they want.
And he calls this anarchist kind of state, right?
Which, you know, it sounds radical, but actually...
I actually like the sound of that.
That makes sense.
But that completely contradicts, I think, what he's sort of saying there, which is everybody being political and being activists.
I mean, I think an anarchist state that he's describing is a state in which people don't have to think about politics all the time because there's not too much to argue about.
Everyone's kind of free to do what they want, which, yeah.
I don't know.
I mean, we can talk about the realisticness of an anarchic society.
I think the better option would be before my relentless synonym raises its head again.
Maybe you want to introduce some of the positive points you find good before I drag us back down.
Oh, yeah.
You're saying that I could exercise some autonomy and discretion in the content there, Chris?
Thank you.
Yes.
Look, I'm saying that whoever has the master key to the clip is the master of the clip.
So if you have your own clip there...
It's me, Mike.
Damn you.
You've got me there.
I've got no response to that.
Okay.
Okay, so without a clip, I've just got to rely on my memory.
Yeah, some stuff I liked.
I mean, look, yeah, like essentially I like the things that he's arguing towards, you know, like you said, Chris.
You're basically occupying the same kind of political...
He's really emphasising the need for cooperative human action on common problems like climate change and liking things like the UVI because he's wanting for us to be less fixated on cutthroat competition and just more focused on cooperating and exercising freedom and autonomy,
just living a good life.
I'm really on board with those sorts of ideas.
He does issue all of these caveats, so a lot of the stuff that we've been analysing, he's pushing the idea, those romantic and naturalistic type of notions, that people are kind of angels, and if we treat them like that, then society will become like that.
But, you know, he does sort of undercut that a lot.
He talks a lot about all the bad things that people do, you know, atrocities.
So he kind of contradicts himself, which I think is a good thing because it makes his point of view more realistic.
But actually, the more accurate way to describe all the evidence he gathers is that not so much people are fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but just more that people are fundamentally very adaptable.
And I think that's probably the more realistic tactic from his evidence.
I think that's probably the main things that I liked about it.
I like the place that he's arguing for.
I just think that the backflips and the sort of one-sidedness in trying to construct that argument for it.
Yeah, and I will say that he issues disclaimers in a way that we have seen in previous weeks, but in a different sense, he is more measured in the degrees to which he claims.
We've been focusing on some of the extreme claims he makes, but he definitely doesn't go to the same level of some of the previous people that we've been talking about.
It's more like selective sighting of evidence and exaggerating the level of certainty rather than dramatic images of the coming apocalypse.
It's also when you make prophecies of doom, like, oh, this is going to be a disaster, that's going to be a disaster.
It's always fine.
It's always fine.
If it doesn't happen, then you can say, oh, it's because I warned everyone for it.
And if it does happen, then you can, yeah, see, it did happen.
But I will say...
Okay, so one point that you brought up there was this concept that he focuses on how the ideas that we tell about our society have the ability to transform society, to make reality.
So what that leads to is him talking about the Lord of the Flies and how this story that is in our popular culture about People being stranded on an island,
young boys being stranded on an island and descending into savagery in Barbary is contradicted by this actual story where there were people from Tonga stranded on an island, young boys for, I think, 155 days or something like that.
And that they actually, instead of...
Killing each other and executing Piggy or whatever happens in Lord of Flies.
They cooperated and survived and remain lifelong friends today.
And he argues that that's important because telling these kind of stories can have impacts on society.
Obviously, I know this is not a scientific experiment, right?
And I don't know if any parent would ever say, "Well, take my kids and drop them on an island for the sake of science." But it is a fascinating story.
And so if we still tell millions of kids the fictional Lord of the Flies, right?
They have to read that for school.
It's fine.
I think it's a, in a way it's a good novel.
I mean, it didn't win, win the Nobel prize for nothing.
But then let's also tell them about what really happened when real kids shit wrecks on a real island.
Yeah.
I agree with that take, that the stories that we tell about our society or the values that we transmit are important, and that it is important to have these examples where you highlight that humans are not just uncooperative and selfish and barbarous.
That's important.
The criticism I mainly have is that he goes too far in the opposite direction in emphasizing the positive.
Aspects of our nature, he underplays the negative part.
Yeah, I think the other thing too is that Lord of the Flies isn't the only work of fiction that kids or young people are exposed to.
Robinson Crusoe.
Robinson Crusoe.
I mean, if you just think of the kind of young adult or children's storybooks that you read when you were a kid, I mean, I don't know about you, Chris, but apart from The Brothers Grimm...
Stories are kind of grim, but the vast majority of fairy tales and stuff like that or just stories for kids are all about those sort of positive messages of cooperation and friends helping each other and overcoming obstacles.
So I think he's exaggerating a little bit to make out that...
Lord of the Flies is kind of the cultural touchstone that we all refer to.
There's a reason that it's used as the example of the Hobbesian view of man, because it's an encapsulation of that viewpoint.
But that's the point.
You can look at all the literature, as you say, to see different views.
And I will say that I did notice that he slides a little bit close to arguing That what energy you put out into the world is what you will manifest.
And he points out that this is very similar to the viewpoint articulated in The Secret, right?
This New Age book.
And this is him explaining why his view is not that.
It's almost ridiculously simple, right?
At one point, someone said to me, By Oprah Winfrey, like, oh, if you just want something, you can just ask the universe and it will happen.
Now, that's obviously total bullshit, and it's a way to legitimize very big inequalities.
But in this case, yes, you have to understand that ideas have performative effects.
Ideas are never merely ideas.
You can't just describe a situation without changing the situation at the same time.
Yeah.
No, look, I mean, I get it.
So here's the thing.
I believe he's right in that those sorts of assumptions and stories and heuristics that kind of form part of our culture are instrumental in maintaining it and driving it and through legend and myth or whatever you want to call it.
But by changing that, you can direct stuff in a better direction.
The thing that sort of rubs me the wrong way is that...
I am interested in reality as well.
It's nice to use hunter-gatherer societies as a metaphor for whatever, and I'm sure it can provide great instructive value for better behaviour in the future.
But they're also real people who really lived, and it's kind of disrespectful to just treat them as a convenient myth, and rather...
Let's think about that.
This is just one example of, I think, the injustices he does to reality.
This is a common view, I think, among activists who are activating for social change.
They do see research or a description of reality as not an impartial or...
Or a thing with no valence.
Rather, it's always a political act and should be recognised as such.
And there's truth in that, yes, but for me personally, I feel like it would be a shame if we put political objectives and just let them override determining...
Just what really happened and what really is really there in the real world.
Yeah, I mean, I think in the great debates about activism versus science or objectivity, we probably fall on the same side, right?
That this was a debate in anthropology where the side for objective science-y views roundly lost.
But in psychology, the battle continues.
Yes, we're still fighting on.
We stand alone.
One thing is, though, I think just saying, like, of course, this isn't the secret.
The secret is bullshit.
I think there is a thing with disclaimers where people highlight they're aware of something and then say, that's not what I'm doing.
But they don't actually highlight how it isn't.
You know, how it isn't exactly that.
And there's another part where he's talking about, it's still focused on this question about, you know, our ability.
To control the world through our mind.
And this is him describing placebos and sham surgeries.
And one of the most effective placebos is called sham surgery.
So what you do then is, yeah, you bring someone in an unconscious state.
Yeah, then when the person wakes up, you say, you know, it was a huge success, the whole operation, and you didn't actually do anything.
You just went to get a coffee.
And we've got some really good evidence that in a huge amount of cases, this works almost as well, or sometimes, yeah, or gets like a similar result as to the real thing, the real surgery.
So let me just make a point here, right?
I'm not saying that placebos...
Not a powerful effect that we are interested in.
And that sham surgery is one of the strongest ways to generate a placebo effect.
The bit that I think is complete bullshit is the claim that placebo surgeries are, in many cases, just as effective as actual surgeries.
Wait, wait, wait, wait.
Chris, are you saying that if I have an inflamed appendix...
It would be better not just to go through the motions of removing it.
Well, yes, I am.
I'm taking that position.
Because what he's saying is true if the surgery is not a valid treatment.
This is one of the ways that we find out that the previous surgeries that people thought were important turned out not to be.
There's famous cases of this, even in the case of heart surgery.
But the point there wasn't, well, we should just do sham surgeries.
It's that the treatment wasn't necessary.
So it's not true that, like you say, you know, if you have a cancerous tumor, that you just do a sham surgery and the outcome is likely as good.
No, that's not true.
And he talks the same, again, when he's talking about nocebos.
So here we go.
If people believe they'll get side effects from a certain drug, for example, if the doctor says, oh, where are your side effects?
They're probably going to develop it because you get what you expect.
And I think that our view of human nature works a little bit like either a placebo or a nocebo.
So if you believe that most people are pretty decent, then you're probably going to treat people in that way and that's what you're going to radiate, right?
That's sort of your whole attitude to life and that's going to be contagious.
Everything is contagious in human societies.
But then if you sort of choose the nocebo and have a more cynical view, then that can spread as well.
So this isn't me just reacting to the denigrating of cynics.
It's just that could be JPCers, right?
Talking about, you know, you put the energy out into the world and the connections come back what you feed.
And if you're negative, that's what you're going to get.
And there's like a certain degree of truth to it that your psychology determines how you interact with the world.
But just take it one step further.
And it is the secret.
And it is JPCers.
And it's new age bullshit.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's coming perilously close to it, shall we say.
Yeah, so, okay.
Like, that's a little bit heavy.
It's very heavy.
You're killing me with your relentless fact-checking, Chris.
Okay, I'll get you on a subject that's a little bit fun to round things off.
So there's one thing which, when we were covering James Lindsay, he really had a strong impression of the...
The dangerous power of cynicism, right?
You remember this?
His book is called Cynical Theories because of how corrosive cynicism is to liberal societies.
So Rutger actually has a similar concern about cynicism.
So the cynicism, the cynical worldview has always been used as a legitimization of power differences of inequality and of hierarchy.
Because if we can actually trust each other, you know, if we do believe that most people are pretty decent, then we don't need them anymore.
Then we don't need all these CEOs and managers and kings and monarchs and queens and generals and you name it.
We can move to a very different kind of society.
Yeah.
So, okay, explain to me, what's the link with James Lindsay?
Just let's spell it out.
So, well, in James's case...
It's that relentless cynicism is the corrosive effect which melts democracies, right?
Liberal democracies are incapable of surviving that relentless criticism.
Yeah, so this is the relentless cynicism of believing that everything is just like a power play and all of these cultural artifacts that we've got are really an expression of oppressive power.
That kind of cynicism, right?
Yes, that's James Lindsay's one.
And here it's sort of inverted, right?
It's a cynicism that we can't reach utopia, that we need institutions, that we need hierarchies and inequality as a part of society.
Our inability to see beyond that, just seeing that as an inevitable part of the world, in Rutger's view, that's what's preventing us.
From reaching a utopian society where none of those things exist.
So it's like cynicism is doing a different thing in both views, but it's hell of a powerful in both of them.
Yeah, that's bending my brain just to kind of follow the logic in both cases.
I can see the parallel.
You've got a direct description from Rutger about what he sees if we don't give in to the cynicism.
But then, you know, quite a lot can happen.
And I really sense a shift in the zeitgeist if I look at the last...
Say, 10 years.
I think there's a new generation coming.
I mean, in the 90s, you were avant-garde when you were cool when you were a cynic.
That was really cool in the 90s.
That's not the case anymore.
Cynicism is out.
Hope is in.
I really think you can see that right now.
You can just look at the millions of people protesting right now in the United States or the massively successful climate justice movement that was started by a 16-year-old Swedish girl.
There's really something changing here.
Yeah, look, Chris, I'm going to put a positive interpretation of what he's saying because, yeah, I take all those criticisms and I pretty much agree with them, but there's a reading of his that I've got, which admittedly comes from other talks that he's given rather than this one,
in which what I took him to mean anyway was that we're being too cynical and assuming...
That everyone is fundamentally motivated just by getting as much for themselves as possible, accruing wealth and getting these ostentatious displays of status and so on, basically living life like a Trump, basically.
And I think he's arguing that we have other motivations too.
You know, some of them are more meaningful motivations and they can be quite strong.
So for instance, you and I think it's true to say we didn't make our decisions in terms of what we would do for a living purely based on using the same kind of logic as Donald Trump made his decisions, right?
We're doing things because we find them interesting.
We're doing things because we like working with a community of people with common interests and we like finding out stuff together.
Now, admittedly, academia is probably a bad example because it's not real life.
I think in the broader sense, a lot of that is true.
And the capitalist system that we do work in, like I'm a capitalist.
I love capitalism, kind of.
It doesn't sound like it doesn't.
But as an engine room for generating wealth, I like it, right?
But I take his point.
That it does tend to encourage people, at least in the part of the world where I live, where many people are thinking about upgrading their house because they need a bigger house with five bathrooms and if their friends have got more fancy stuff than they do, then they feel like they're losing life.
And, you know, I'm all for a cultural change where we reward different things and I think we are kind of moving slightly.
In places like Australia towards a bit of a post-scarcity type culture where we stop neurotically trying to accrue as much stuff and we kind of realise that getting stuff isn't really what it's about.
And I think we can encourage those other motivations.
What do you think?
Yeah, I decode your...
Effort to remain the babyface of the podcast with your positive spin, but yet I have to sign on with what you're saying because fundamentally I agree with him that other values are important and that we should consider them and that the level of inequality in our society is shocking and potentially unsustainable,
right?
In fact, on that point, he says specifically that billionaires shouldn't exist, that they're a symptom that something's going really wrong in the allocation of resources because, sure, there might be a spectrum of effort and a spectrum of ability, even if we put aside his argument that there's no free will or whatever.
But, you know, even so, you'd expect incomes to be somewhat normally distributive and they wouldn't have this crazy long tail into super wealthy people.
Sorry to interrupt, though, Bill.
I just wanted to elaborate on what you were saying.
That's all right.
I was just going to push this.
Billionaires shouldn't exist.
I think the fact itself that billionaires are there, it proves that capitalism is failing.
There we go.
Just echoing your point.
Yeah, look, I don't know if it proves that...
Capitalism is failing.
Like you said, he's...
Look, I agree with everything he's saying.
He's a little bit more edgelordy, shall we say, in the way he expresses it.
I'll sign off with you this time that he does come across as unnecessarily edgelord at times and in like the very undramatic way that liberals tend to.
But there was one point that we kind of glossed over earlier that I want to touch on before we finish.
And it's...
It's dark and it's evil.
It is another somewhat questionable claim, but I feel we'd be remiss not to mention it because I love the description he came up with.
So this was him talking back in the evil side section that humans, through our focus on kindness and sociality, that we've actually self-domesticated ourselves.
And this is him describing that.
And most importantly, domesticated species, they just look cuter.
They look more childish.
Or the scientific term is pedomorphic.
Now, we also know what genes are associated with domestication.
And the fascinating thing is that if you look at us, right, at our DNA, at our bodies, then it's like, whoa, we're domesticated.
We really, you know...
Check a lot of the boxes.
So then the question is, who domesticated us?
Right?
Who did it?
And the answer is, we did it ourselves.
Yeah.
So this is the self-domestication thesis that humans display characteristics that are in line with other domesticated species.
And the prototypical example that is given for this is silver foxes, which are described thusly.
There's one really famous experiment that I talk about in the book with silver foxes, a species that had never been domesticated.
And then this experiment started in Russia with a Russian scientist called Dmitry Believ, who selected sort of the friendliest among these wild silver foxes.
And just in a couple of generations, he already started to see this domestication syndrome that I talked about earlier.
So, Chris, I have a suspicion that you are going to continue with some relentless fact-checking on this one.
Matt, how dare you?
All I wanted to say was that he came up with the description homo puppy for our species, and I find that adorable to imagine our species as homo puppy.
Puppies.
And although we disparage the chimpanzee's ability to defeat you if you were armed with two swords, it is true that humans are not physically imposing primates compared to many of our great ape cousins.
Okay, yeah, but that doesn't look, you're not living up to your bad boy of the decoding the guru's reputation, Chris.
There's got to be more to it then.
You insist, Matt.
If you insist, there is just one article I came across, which is from last year, 2019, called The History of Farm Foxes Undermines the Animal Domestication Syndrome.
This is in trends in ecology and evolution.
And it's a very interesting paper.
It's looking about domestication of species.
But one very crucial fact of it is that the silver foxes, often used as the The paradigmatic example of domestication were not wild foxes.
They were already a domesticated or partly domesticated species bred for fur, which dramatically undermines...
The case for how readily species can be transformed by selective breeding pressures.
And the other thing that paper did was it looked across all the papers that talk about domestication of species and the various features that are presented to be associated with that.
Things like floppiness of ears or decrease in brain size and so on and so forth.
And it basically pointed out that there are very inconsistent features across all of the species that are supposed to demonstrate this theory.
And if Rutger and other academics are then likening those features to humans to say that we are a domesticated species, the whole thing becomes, you know, a lot less
Yeah, like it's more complicated.
It's more complicated.
That's the point.
I guess what you're saying, Chris, is that Rutger, who He has a Bachelor of Arts in History and a Master of Arts in History and primarily has worked as a journalist or being an academic historian, plays a little bit fast and loose with some of the technical details of evolutionary behaviour.
Listen, Matt, you are disparaging the Arts and Humanities scholars, not me with that claim.
And I will make this point that, although it may not seem like it on this podcast, but, you know, I typically allow for people to make simplified arguments in non-technical papers and this kind of thing.
But when I'm reading a book or an argument that somebody is representing from a book, I'm often struck by the lack of research that people put in.
Like, this strikes home when it's Douglas Murray.
Referencing stories or statistics or like how Google searches prove that Google has an anti-heterosexual agenda.
There's these arguments made where it just would require an evening of research to highlight that the thing is more complicated and there's issues.
And the reason I think it's fair enough to bring it up here is that when talking about the Stanford prison experiment, another psychology study, which has recently had questions raised about it.
Do you put someone in a uniform and then they become these killer cops?
I don't think that's true.
And in my book, I have a chapter about the Stanford Prison Experiment where I try to show that actually it was a hoax.
You know, it shouldn't be used in textbooks anymore because these students were specifically instructed to be as sadistic as possible.
Many of them said they didn't want to do it.
And then the researcher, Philip Zimbardo, said, come on, you've got to do it because I need these results.
So it was like fake science shouldn't use it anymore.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I guess what you're saying is that he put a bit of time in debunking the studies that he didn't.
Like.
That didn't work for his argument.
So he might have done a bit more reading on the foxes, and if he had done so, he perhaps wouldn't have relied on that example.
Yes.
What's good for the goose is good for the gander.
That's what I'm...
Yeah, I mean, that's right.
And I'm not having a big go at Ruka for this either, but it is just, as you say, it's a common thing with these kinds of popular, you know, TED Talkie type books or thinkers that cover a broad range of stuff,
often scientific or historic or anthropological.
Findings that are often far outside of the domain of the training of the author.
And Jordan Peterson is another example of someone who does this.
And where it's just done in a very broad, sweeping, patchy kind of way where stuff is cherry-picked to support the pretty grand theme and narrative that's really the centrepiece of the book.
Now, this is an interesting case because I like the theme in the book overall.
You know what I mean?
I like those entities.
I'm on board with it.
I want to have...
What is it?
Gay future communism.
What's it called?
What are you saying?
Gay future communism?
Fully automated luxury space communism.
That's the me.
You know the one.
I know the one.
Yeah, don't gaslight me, Chris.
I knew you knew.
Yeah, so I'm all for building utopias.
But yeah, you don't...
I'll just add.
Matt, you added the gay in.
There's no gay in that.
If there is.
Fully automated communism.
Alright, that's my personal utopia.
Let's just leave it at that.
Okay.
I'm sure there's a version of gay in it.
I have no issue with that being, you know...
What's going on?
Look, I'm accepting of...
I've got no issue.
I'm just noting you added that.
Look, I'm looking at...
Okay, I have fact-checked this live.
This is Joe Rogan-style Google fact-checking.
I'm looking at a meme right now that says fully automated luxury gay space communism.
Oh, okay.
I think that's a parody, though.
I think that's making fun of it.
Okay.
All right.
I like that one anyway.
It looks cool.
Anyway, where were we?
It's hard to know.
It's hard to know with that.
Well, look, I have relentlessly tore at this because of my black-hearted nature.
And you've, at every step, tried to subvert my...
Because of your deep leftist political bias.
I just want to be more popular with the ladies.
I'm supposed to be the wokey person, right?
What's going on?
I think I accidentally described myself as a centrist in the first episode, which really probably wasn't accurate.
I think I've come out as a closet, heterodox, protests are all riots and so on.
This is the shattering of my image.
But yeah, look, I actually have a long list of other things I can poke at or talk about.
But maybe it's about time we round it off with our overall thoughts.
Unless I've missed something, there's some clip you have that you want to play.
That's the low blow, Chris.
You know I don't have any clips.
I'm totally reliant on you.
Okay.
Yeah, look, I think...
No, no, there's nothing I think we've really missed.
I think I've said...
I don't think I need to do a big summing up because I think I already said most of it.
I like the thing that he's arguing towards, which is far more equitable distribution of wealth.
This level of wealth inequality is unnecessary, even with a full-throated...
I like the arguing towards cooperative action on climate change.
I think he's right that if people can cooperate to resolve things like the tragedy of the commons, then people can cooperate to sort out common problems.
Let's imagine that you were a god.
You were an all-powerful, all-knowing god.
And another God would give you the task to come
with a problem that will be almost or pretty much impossible for humanity to solve.
Like the most difficult problem for humanity to solve.
I think something like climate change would probably be it, right?
Because our behavior right now has effects decades from now.
It's everything, what everyone does in the whole world contributes a tiny little bit.
So if we can solve this, then I think we can solve pretty much everything, you know?
I generally like the concept of the UBI or UBI-like initiatives.
And he's right in the sense that the narratives and the stories that we tell are important in driving the culture that we are going to end up with.
What I don't like is that, and I feel like it's unnecessary, this is probably a common thing with me, I feel like you don't have to misrepresent the scientific understanding of things in order to support those arguments.
Those are good arguments.
You can just say, these are good things, let's do them.
And people like me will be on board.
Like, we don't need to have the just-so stories and the sort of Rousseauian view of perfect tranquility in nature.
You know, I don't need that shit.
You know what I mean?
I'm on board anyway, you know?
So that irritates me when he does that.
And a lot of the stuff that he talked about was defending his argument and all of these kind of TEDx-y type.
Oh, actually, people are fundamentally not Nina Nasty, but actually fundamentally good.
Those sorts of things are just intellectually really weak and unnecessary.
And unfortunately, that seems to be the bulk of his intellectual output, which is actually supporting what are some pretty good ideas, but supporting them with a weak...
Architecture.
So, you know, I'm going to give him a 7 out of 10. You know, good intentions, poor execution.
Okay, so from my point of view, just to finish off, there's one thing that I thought was quite nice I enjoyed.
So this is his response to being asked a question by one of the YouTube commenters.
That's a great, great question.
And to be honest, I'm not entirely sure.
Look, this is off topic, but I want to point this out because this is a tip I give to all my students.
If you're asked a question at a conference or something like that, the best way to start is to praise the person asking the question by saying, that's a great question.
Because whatever answer you give after that, it's hard for them to come back and say you didn't answer the question because you just praise them.
So I just wanted to highlight that.
That's a very nice technique that people can use.
There's a freebie.
Yeah, that's a practical tip you can use in everyday life.
Yeah, yeah.
Just create someone and they'll find it hard to insult you.
And it works with me on Twitter.
You know, Chris, I really like your stuff, blah, blah, blah.
Oh, okay.
Maybe, you know, I should be nicer.
And so, like, it works.
But that isn't my overall point.
That was just something I noticed that was nice.
And I do want to agree with you that, you know, a low...
By the nature of this podcast, we end up kind of critical.
Anders, obviously, as the previous hours have indicated, stuff that he presents, which I find annoying or exaggerated.
I don't see him in the same respect as most of the other figures that we've covered.
Certainly not a figure like J.P. Sears, where after listening to it, I just felt bad.
It just left me feeling like not good.
I didn't agree with aspects of this.
I thought the stuff about Hunter Gallagher was particularly too romanticized and exoticized.
But I also felt that he's making valid arguments at times.
And like you, if you trim out a lot of the rhetorical stuff...
The points are fine.
And you don't have to agree with them.
He inserts more caveats.
And although some of them are strategic, it doesn't feel like they're always that way.
It does feel like he's acknowledging nuance at times.
It's just really in his presentation of modern society and agricultural society versus hunter galleries, where there basically is almost no nuance in that.
But in all our respects, He does have self-awareness and acknowledgement of alternative perspectives.
So yeah, I think he's an interesting guy to look at because it is an example that people can use rhetorical techniques and they do engage in hyperbole or create these binaries, but it doesn't necessarily mean everything about the arguments are illegitimate or you don't have to have sympathy for the views.
I think it just helps to be aware of them and to do research if you care about the validity of claims being made.
Yeah, I think it's good.
If you're making a good point, especially then, I'd like to see it supported by a good argument.
So, for example, I agree with him that...
People are extremely social and cooperative creatures and that we often have, in terms of how we act, are acting in a kind of a group-oriented...
I think he's right about that.
I think it's a shame that he set up that kind of self-interest versus cooperative dichotomy, because I don't think those two things are particularly in conflict an awful lot of the time.
A lot of the time, the things that we value are the same things that the group around us values.
Dichotomy that he sets up to, because he wants to promote the idea that it's not our big brains and super intelligence that really matters.
What really matters is our idea to cooperate.
But the problem is that he sets up this dichotomy between abstract intelligence and tool using and stuff, innovation on one hand, and sets that against the ability to communicate and record symbols and the ability to maintain and preserve that shared culture,
which creates that incremental growth.
Technology in the broader sense and culture, really.
So that's a false dichotomy, right?
Those are two aspects of intelligence.
And you don't need to set up false dichotomies because I think his view is very reasonable and doesn't need to be supported by bad arguments.
I think we did cover it, but he basically is arguing that our human sociality, like superpower, was subverted by modern society into these dangerous zones which lead to totalitarianism and brutality.
When we started this whole process that we call civilization, we became sedentary, we became farmers and city dwellers.
That's when everything went wrong.
That sort of triggered something in us.
I think this groupish behavior, it really went berserk.
And indeed, the archaeological evidence suggests that warfare is not something we've always been doing.
But I think that's the wrong way to look at it.
Rather than that being like a perversion of what human sociality is about, it's purely just one of the uses and not one that we should want to encourage.
It in itself is just a neutral ability, the ability for our species to organize in large groups and cohere around values and meanings.
It doesn't mean that that would necessarily lead to peaceful, just, and utopian societies.
It could lead to brutally repressive, feudal societies, just as rightly.
And this notion that feminist values extend way back to traditional I think that's a nice myth.
But when you look at the actual complexities of society, a lot of bad stuff was happening in the past, just as it's happening now.
And in reality, most people are better off living in modern democracies than they would have been in the ancient past where life was more uncertain.
Yeah, I think that's almost too obvious a point to even belabor it, isn't it?
I mean, despite all the negative things associated with modernity and our complex artificial societies, clearly it's a better way to live than foraging for your food in prehistoric...
Europe, right?
Not in the way he presents it, though.
That's right.
The way he presented it did sound pretty good.
Like the paleo diet, lots of walking.
I like hiking.
It does sound good.
There's a part where he also...
I mean, I'm sorry to re-go into this.
I promise I'll stop after this.
But he talks about homo sapiens and how we didn't kill Neanderthals.
They were stronger than us and had bigger brains.
But the reality is we out-competed them to extinction.
And where the populations overlapped, the Neanderthals, like, so they interbred with us, as we know now, through genetic evidence.
But we also wiped them out, either from...
Out-competing or direct conflict, who knows?
We don't have the remains for that.
And just to be clear to the listeners, when you say out-competing, that's just a simple fact of two.
Not in a race.
Not in a race.
When two species occupy the same niche, then they occupy the same resource landscape.
Then when one continues and the other one diminishes, then that's what they call out-competing.
It's not that they were having a competition.
Yeah, thank you for clarifying.
I also mean just that what happened there is that a species with, I don't know, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of individuals died from starvation, from cold, from hunger, from whatever it was.
And it seems likely our species was involved with it.
So whether or not it was direct violence, sort of immaterial.
I don't like the happy-clappy version of history.
The reality is more interesting and I think more respectful to the different species of humans and our own species that existed in the past.
I'm with you and I think the other way in which she's a bit happy-clappy is in setting up yet another dichotomy of whether or not people are fundamentally cynical and motivated by naked self-interest versus What he sets up.
Greta.
Yeah, that's right.
This idea that deep down, people are fundamentally decent.
Now, that's obviously a nice thought.
But, you know, I think that's yet another false dichotomy to set up.
I mean, the thing we can say with a lot of assurance is that people are fundamentally extremely plastic.
And adaptive, extremely flexible, and have the capacity for stuff that we today would consider good and things that we would consider bad.
And that just seems, you know, an equally useful framework that is more in keeping with reality.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, okay.
So we've done Rick Bragman.
I think we've analysed him into the dust.
He's done for now.
That's him out of the public sphere or not.
And I think it's worth announcing who our next person will be.
And we will post the talk in advance, which we haven't decided on yet.
But I believe we're doing another lefty person, Russell Brand.
Oh, yeah.
Isn't that correct?
Yes, that's right.
Now, he's going to be fun, isn't he?
Yeah, that's going to be fun.
I don't feel like he's super deep, you know?
But he's definitely flashy.
I like him.
He's got to be good value.
Listeners, note.
Matt is already throwing shit, not me.
I have said nothing negative yet.
And here he is, calling him empty-headed.
He just always seems really drunk and stoned.
I don't know.
Maybe that's just his style.
Yeah, I have opinions on Russell Brown, but we'll get to them.
So, yes, if you want to contact us, we have an email account, which is decodingthegurus at gmail.com.
We have a Twitter account, which is Guru's Pod.
Is that right?
Guru's Pod.
Yep.
At Guru's Pod.
You got it right.
And you can leave us nice reviews, bad reviews with five stars, as we said, are okay on iTunes.
And you did that.
So thank you very much.
And yeah.
And maybe in your review, tell us, you know, which is your favorite out of the two of us.
You know, you can let us know.
I mean, Chris won't be upset.
You've won't mind.
You narcissist, Matt.
I'm shocked at that.
That's the final message you want to say.
But okay.
Okay.
All right.
So this has actually been quite fun this week, not as depressing as some of the previous weeks.
So, yeah, I enjoyed it, Matt.
Yeah, I enjoyed it too.
And I want to say one last thing, which is I don't think this guy is a grifter.
Like, I don't think he's motivated by bad things.
You know what I mean?
I think he's – I bet Slack in his research and his reasoning.
I have rather negative views about someone like JPCers, for instance, where I just do not think he's in a good place or is pushing people towards a good place.
So there's a big difference there, even though we're drawing a lot of comparisons and a lot of similarities.
I agree.
And maybe it'll be interesting to consider coming up with some reading skill for the gurus.
Level of griftiness and a level of absolute annoyingness in weeks to come.
But yeah, it's been fun, Matt.
And I'm going to sign off first so I don't say a ridiculous bye-bye.
