"Mini" Decoding of Matthew Goodwin & Interview with Paul Bloom
Apologies everyone, we've been compelled to break our 'golden rule' of interspersing decoding episodes with interview episodes. However, the opportunity to talk to the well-known psychologist, Professor Paul Bloom. There are so many reasons to talk to Paul: first, he's a walking, talking cornucopia of knowledge across so fields in psychology that fascinate Chris and Matt. He's also a prolific author, most recently of "Psych- The Story of the Human Mind", and previously with "The Sweet Spot" about pleasure and pain, and the controversial "Against Empathy". He's also a great educator, having created a bunch of open learning resources in introductory and moral psychology. In addition to the new book "Psych", which offers a layperson's introduction to psychology he is ALSO producing a new podcast with friend of the cast and no slouch at psychology himself, Very Bad Wizard/Psychologist, Dave Pizarro. OK, that's enough reasons. There are probably more reasons, but we have provided enough. And anyway, who says we have to justify our guests and our interview to decoding schedule. We are free agents! We have agency... right?In any case, you cannot complain too much as we felt bad and have thus included in the short intro segment a "mini" (40min!) decoding of the recent appearance of academic/political pundit, Matthew Goodwin, on Triggernometry. And it's a spicy one...Next up Oprah! Coming soon...LinksPaul Bloom & Dave Pizarro's Psych PodcastPaul Bloom's New Book: Psych- The Story of the Human MindPaul's New Ted Talk on The surprising psychology behind your urge to break the rulesTriggernometry- Matt Goodwin: We're in the Post-Populist EraNew Statesman- Going native: How Matthew Goodwin became part of the right-populist movement he once sought to explain.Eliezer Yudkowsky's Tweet about bombing the WIV
Hello, welcome to Decoding the Gurus, the podcast where an anthropologist and a psychologist listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer and we try to understand what they're talking about.
I'm Professor Matt Brown.
With me is Associate Professor Chris Kavanagh.
It's the morning.
We've had coffee.
We are ready to decode, or more precisely, give the introduction to one of our decodings.
Hey, Chris.
Well, a little bit of both, Matt.
A little bit of ying, a little bit of yang.
We...
We are doing an interview episode.
We normally like to have a decoding episode and then an interview episode, like, you know, break them up.
We don't like having multiple interview episodes there because we know people are here primarily for the decodings to get antsy.
But we do have a very good guest, Paul Bloom, and we will have our next full length decoding, Oprah Winfrey, before very long.
So you won't have to wait the usual, you know, four months between Just a week or so.
So calm down.
It's coming.
It's coming.
We just want to get one episode in the editing bay and out the door before moving on to the next episode because otherwise we get confused as to which intro goes with what episode.
It all gets hard.
And the thing, though, Chris, that's good, is that at the time of recording the thing with Paul Bloom, I wasn't able to listen to the Psych podcast, which he has done with our friend Dave Pizarro because...
I don't know.
It wasn't showing up in my podcast player or something.
And I since have been able to listen to it.
And I know you've heard all the episodes.
And it's very good.
Those guys are great.
Highly recommended.
It's very good, isn't it?
It's excellent.
So you endorsed that site on scene for that endorsement.
Has come back looking gold.
That's good.
Thanks for not embarrassing me, guys.
It checks out.
It's up to my usual standards.
The reason I said yin and yang is because we actually will wedge in a mini decoding into the introduction space.
It's unlike us, Matt, not to just launch into content directly.
We rarely have long introduction segments, but this week...
There was something that caught my eye.
But before we get to that tangent, the other slight tangent, I know you could talk about this for a long time, but just want to say, Matt, that there's been a lot of hot takes flowing around about AI,
right?
It's the new hot topic.
If you were wondering what's after COVID, Ukraine, Brexit before that, is it going to be the next?
Is it going to be Trump's indictment?
Now, that seemed to go with a whimper, really, the predictable responses, but not really the mass attention that you might have expected.
But AI, ChatGPT, that is garnering a lot of attention.
And just to give an example, Alexandros...
Marinos, the Brett superfan who has been promoting Ivermectin, he had an interaction with Jordan Hall on Twitter, which I think exemplifies what Twitter has now become and also the whole tension ecosystem.
So Alexandra said, WTF, I've made a hard shift from tweeting about Ivermectin and the pandemic, the 24-7 AI stuff, and not losing followers, dot, dot, dot.
So it's kind of...
Verbalizing what we all know.
These discourse surfers, they just, you know, on to the next topic that gets them eyeballs.
But Jordan Hall helpfully comes in to say, Alex, look, you might be doing things a bit too directly here.
Let's mystify.
Let's sense me.
And he says, technically, you are tweeting about our current governance capacity being hubristically incapable of dealing with hyperobjects.
Oh.
Current governance capacity being hubristically incapable of dealing with hyperobjects.
Brilliant.
That's the most Jordan Hawley thing I've heard him say.
And I've heard him say a lot of Jordan Hawley things.
And Alexandra's response by saying, yes, of course, but I wasn't sure if anyone would get that.
So, you know, I know we're going to do an episode that's AI theme because...
Some of our lesser informed listeners are unaware, was involved in AI back before it was cool, years ago, in Japan.
He was in Japan doing stuff with AI.
And robots, Chris, and robots.
How cool is that?
Yeah, this is true.
It was one of the also rants.
Could have been a contender, and I didn't stick with it.
But it's been fun to see, like Jan LeCun, who's one of the big names in AI, like all over the place, because I was citing his paper on this sort of convolutional neural network, which had deep layers in it.
And my colleague, Saeed Shiri, and I coded that up in C++ for a little application and robot vision.
It was all very, very basic stuff, very primitive, especially by today's standards.
You're a bad guru, by the way, Matt.
You should simply assert that that was the foundations for the entire AI revolution.
Friends, it was not.
I was one of the cast of thousands who dangled their little toe in the AI waters and then went away to do other things.
But it definitely did give me a healthy interest in these things.
And also the neurophysiology of...
Cognition is another interest of mine.
I teach that class.
So yeah, it's true.
I've been watching the developments in AI with great interest.
And we won't get into it now.
We'll save it for another day.
But I will say that back with this OpenAI's GPT 3.5, I would have...
Used it as a bit of a slur to actually describe someone like Jordan Hall as a chatbot.
But now with 4.0, I would say that that would be doing a disservice to chatbots.
Because they've gotten pretty darn good.
Much less blathering, much less fantasizing, and a whole bunch of emergent capabilities, which is super interesting.
So we'll talk about it in detail another time.
I'm going to be...
Spending some time with Aaron Rabinowitz on Embracing the Void.
So yeah, watch out for that.
More and more AI hot takes inbound.
But well, you know, again, we'll see if the in-depth analysis for the specific episode.
We may cover Sam Altman, the CEO of Looped and OpenAI, or Eliezer Yudkowsky, rationalist, noted person who seemed to be suggesting maybe we should be calling a halt to everything.
potentially bombing data centers and whatnot.
But, you know, he also, when Rohit, another rationalist actor, was asking him about his views, he clarified that he may have supported bombing the Wuhan Institute of Virology because he's 50-50 on lab leg.
So, you know, a very reasonable person bombing a viral research center.
That would be a great idea.
Yeah, that's true.
Look, as well as being a genuinely interesting Topic in itself, a genuinely new thing that has come along.
The discourse around it is following the predictable pattern of all of the flies swarming to the next shiny steaming pile of whatever.
The psychological responses that people bias towards is kind of interesting in itself.
On one hand, I think there's an emotional impulse in us to deny That it's got that ineffable spark, that special something, the secret sauce that makes us special.
So people will call it a stochastic parrot or merely autocomplete.
And on the other hand, you have these either doomsayers or boosters who are saying, oh, you know, it's the super intelligence and it's going to be the singularity and, you know.
It's already conscious and it's in one sight.
Yeah, that's right.
It's NFTs and crypto and the singularity all whipped into one.
And, you know, the truth, as always, is somewhere in between.
But, yeah, it's just a hard thing.
Like, because on one hand, it produces such familiar output in terms of pros, right?
That we have a natural tendency to anthropomorphize that.
Even back in the day, the good old Eliza chatbot was surprisingly convincing and it was as dumb as a rock.
Yeah, so I think there's challenges in it and also in figuring out, well, how do you tell if something is really smart as opposed to, oh, it's just sort of memorized a whole bunch of stuff and it's smooshing it together and synthesizing.
But that's not really smart.
Not like humans.
No, that's right.
We don't do that.
We don't just blather away, just sort of mushing together the vaguely remembered things.
No, no, no, no, no.
So, yeah, no, it's sparking some good discourse and some stupid discourse, and it's an interesting thing in and of itself.
And I'll 100% say, Matt, that you said I've been paying attention to the discourse.
The person I know, apart from various AI programmers and whatnot, which you're commenting online.
The person I know who's making most use of ChatGPT, both to ask it annoying questions and to make it do useful things, is you.
So, you know, I think you are in a good position to talk about what its strengths and weaknesses and capacities and whatnot are.
But we won't do that now, so this is just a hint.
But none of that falls into our category of wins of the week.
I've got a good...
Whinge of the week for you, Matt.
This is an extended one.
It's also a mini-decoding.
I've wrapped a mini-decoding in a whinge of the week.
So, our good friends at Trigonometry.
You might not remember, Matt.
It's a very centrously liberal podcast.
They recently hosted this academic, Matthew Goodwin, a professor of politics at the University of Kent in the UK.
Matt, you may have heard...
His name in discourse world because he often comes out with these articles or polls that he's conducted saying, you know, people are in favor of Brexit.
People want more restrictive immigration.
Like basically arguing that it's all academics and elites lurking down on the masses and the people aren't going to take it anymore.
He's kind of like a, in a sense, like a pro-populist academic.
I think he started off supposedly in an objectively academic sense documenting the populist forces on the right, but he's ended up something of an academic cheerleader for those forces in his own right.
And we may cover him, but I listened for my sins to that discussion he had with Constantine and Francis, and they're very upset about a variety of things.
There were some things that got to me, Matt.
It reminded me of a conversation we listened to, and you discussed how Jordan Peterson seemed to be somewhat, seemingly through intuitive principles, advocating,
you know, it's overused, but essentially advocating for the groundwork of fascism, right?
like a kind of blood and soil appeal to real men and strong men and politics and the weak things holding stuff back and all this, which was particularly glaring because Jordan Peterson fancies himself a scholar of, you know,
the creeping authoritarianism and then goes to Hungary and accepts an award of academic freedom or whatever it is.
But yeah, so I got some shades of that from this conversation.
And I wonder if you'll pick up on them too.
I've got a clip that encapsulates the general thesis that's been And it goes back to what I talk about in the book.
I mean, we've never really had a political class that has been this dominated by people from particular groups.
I mean, university graduates and political careerists, people who have only ever worked in politics.
We've always had an elite in Britain, but, you know, in the old days, the elite also typically went into politics having done other things.
You know, different jobs, different things, you know, running companies, being out there.
Today, I think that's less the case.
And so the political class in my book has become much more homogenous, much more uniform, very narrow.
The range of voices in Parliament, the range of voices in the media, in our culture, has become much narrower.
So mad.
Indeed.
Never before have we had homogenous, out-of-touch ruling class.
And I blame...
I blame you for this annoyed me so much because you've been talking about the revolutions podcast endlessly.
And I ended up starting to listen to it.
It's very good, as you've recommended.
And I'm listening to it about the French Revolution now.
You'll be surprised to learn, Matt, that there are out-of-touch elites and even inherited monarchies that involve out-of-touch figures and accusations that we are being ruled.
By, you know, the accusations of who's the out-of-touch elite fling back and forth.
But it was surprising to learn that this is a new development.
That, you know, now, this era, the contemporary era, is when this has just emerged.
It just emerged, yes.
It's never been that the university-educated lawyers and such like have dominated parliament and political things.
No, and careerists, Matt.
Careerists.
Careerists.
They all had salt-of-the-earth jobs down at the mines, working on the fields before.
They went into their lordships and their inherited peerships.
That's always been the case, isn't it?
Yeah, it's interesting, isn't it?
They're totally out of step with reality, but it's a perennial trope, isn't it?
That elites, these people in the big cities with their fancy degrees and the corridors of power, out of touch with the Volk, with the people, the real people like you and me.
I mean, this is the populist battle cry that's been...
I mean, it's not that there's not some truth in it.
Of course, there's some truth in it, but that's been a trope for hundreds of years, ever since we had politicians.
Before then, we had, as you said, monarchies and aristocrats.
That was it.
I don't think they were people of the people either.
No, and so another part of this analysis is essentially it wants to paint all the political parties currently vying as essentially like a grey neoliberal blob.
Like, they've got, like, slight differences in emphasis.
Sure, one is pro-Brexit, one is against Brexit, but, you know, fundamentally, it's all neoliberal shills, however you color it.
And so this, I thought, was an interesting way that they tie together.
This is British politics-focused, Matt, but I think you'll know the figures that he mentions here.
Opportunity here for Boris Johnson and the Conservatives to reshape the country.
And they squandered that opportunity.
They lost that opportunity.
Why did they?
I would suggest, as I argue in the book, is that because Conservative elites basically are too culturally liberal and too economically liberal to connect with the voters who are looking for somebody to reassert.
And so all we've really had since Brexit is a continuation of what you might call the liberal consensus, which has basically dominated British politics for much of the last 30-40 years.
Margaret Thatcher was needed.
I accept the idea that Thatcher's reforms, in my mind, at the time they were needed.
But what she did is she injected this radical economic liberalism, deregulated...
The economy, liberalized finance.
Embrace globalization, or what Danny Roderick has called hyper-globalization, the routine prioritization of big business, of big corporates over the national community.
And that was followed by Blair.
And Blair then came along and he injected radical cultural liberalism.
He said, hey, we're going to strip away the borders of the national community.
We're going to have mass immigration.
We're going to have European integration.
We're going to take meaningful choice out of politics.
Left and right are essentially going to become the same.
Brexit, populism, the realignment were really an attempt by voters to break that consensus, to challenge that consensus.
And what we can now see is that actually those revolts have failed to do that.
And that the elite, the new graduate elite, socially liberal, if not radically progressive, has reasserted.
It's political and cultural power and push back that rebellion.
Yes.
So, Thatcher, you know, minor things in between, but basically a complete, consistent line up to Blair and the modern Tories, which is the hiccup of Brexit upsetting things in the way.
But now we're all back on the neoliberal train.
How does that...
Sound you, Mark?
Do you think there's any meaningful differences between Thatcherite politics and New Labour or, you know, pretty much the same game?
I feel like it's a leading question.
I also feel like you're better qualified to comment on former British PMs than me.
But before you do, I'll just point out an interesting thing, which is, so I guess I'm trying to understand where the, what are they called, the trigonometry guys and that.
Land politically.
And that's actually quite helpful because it spelled it out, and you explained it to me a bit before the other day, which is that they don't like economic liberalism and also social liberalism.
Like what they like is a more authoritarian type approach to the economy.
So you have like, you know, not perhaps a command economy, but one that is more sort of aligned with the national interests and things like that.
You know, things like stopping jobs from going abroad and building your own factories here because it's important we build chips or something like that.
And then also this social conservatism, like really.
You know, traditional family values, getting back to your traditional cultural roots.
And, well, yeah.
I mean, it's interesting.
It's a point of view.
We can say that, but it isn't.
It's not liberal.
It's not liberal, right?
Not even in the classical liberal sense, is it?
It's something else historically has appealed to those sorts of ideas.
Yeah, yeah.
Just to make that clear, Matt, so they spell out the differences where, you know, Johnson betrayed the promise that he offered the people, and here's Goodwin spelling that out.
If you're going to deliver Brexit, if you're going to reform immigration, if you're going to push back against the woke, we're going to give you a chance.
And what happened?
Johnson basically let them down.
Johnson did the reverse on a lot of that stuff.
I mean, one of the untold stories about British politics...
Today, which I don't think many people out there have yet realised, is the extent to which Boris Johnson and the Conservatives liberalised the immigration system in Britain to the point that we now have 504,000 as a net migration level,
the highest we've ever had.
And just to make the point, they promised that it would go down, David Cameron promised, to the tens of thousands.
So what's happened is British Conservatives, Boris Johnson, Dominic Cummings and others, have been gaslighting the British people.
Because what they've been saying is, we're going to control immigration, we're going to lower immigration.
And then when they ended up in power, they said, well, actually, we didn't mean lower, we just meant we're going to give you control.
So there, you hear, right?
The motifs there.
Portrayal of the common people by an elite which posed as delivering what the people wanted.
And what do the people want?
They want mass reductions to the rate of immigration.
They want anti-cosmopolitan policies.
They want local jobs for local people.
And it's his reading of that as well, Matt, that Johnson and the conservatives, like essentially the way he describes it, as you know, they're just really pro-immigration.
That's amazing, given the current debates in UK politics around conservative efforts to restrict immigration.
The problem is that they actually have succeeded in lowering immigration from the EU.
But the rates are high because, I don't know if you noticed, Matt, there's been a war on and there's been a pandemic which has started to ebb.
So people are traveling and there is a high...
Immigration rate this year, but it's due to a whole bunch of factors.
And overall, Britain's immigration is in line with other countries in Europe, you know, of similar sizes.
And when you take into account immigration and so on and so forth, it's not this huge influx of people that are completely changing the fabric of Britain.
It's living in a modern, interconnected...
Yeah, Chris, it really reminds me a lot of our take on Jordan Peterson, which is it's impossible to listen to all the stuff he says and not get the sense that he's this accidental fascist.
He certainly has no idea.
He's got zero self-awareness that he has sympathies that lie in that direction.
And that would be absolutely true of the people that we're just listening to there.
If you just look at the themes, the betrayal of the elites who've tricked the common people into policies that they don't want, that xenophobia, traditional family values, getting back to the fabric that holds our nation together,
even getting that anti...
The economic liberal idea of being against free trade and wanting to get big business and stuff sort of more under the thumb so it's in the service of the people rather than taking advantage of them.
I mean, these are all the things that was attractive about the Nazi Party.
I mean, in general, people did not vote for them because they thought, hey, let's have a world war and do the Holocaust.
That wasn't why they voted to them.
They voted for them because of these kinds of arguments.
You know, you talked about the lack of self-awareness.
So what Goodwin has suggested to this branch is national conservatives.
Someone else used a similar terminology once.
But here's him talking about what the features of that would be.
Just listen to see if you can pick up on any common motifs.
Some conservatives today have grasped the fact That they cannot simply offer an anti-state, low-tax, pro-business message that the world has moved on.
And so national conservatives are saying the time is now here to make the case for an active state that can intervene in the economy to make things fairer, that is sceptical of business, especially when business becomes political,
especially when business starts to promote values that are seen to be anti-conservative, and which is much more realistic about globalisation
I mean, this is one of the things I talk about in the book is how basically Thatcherites became so obsessed with free trade and globalization that they lost sight of the damage it was doing in communities.
I mean, globalization wasn't just negative for economic reasons.
I mean, the evidence is pretty clear.
It smashed communities in areas in Northern England that were subjected to higher imports from China or Eastern Europe.
The result was not just lower wages, was not just a lower share of the national income going to those areas.
It was also weaker relationships, higher rates of family breakdown, higher rates of alcoholism, drug addiction, people being pushed onto welfare benefits.
Now, Conservatives...
I thought, you know, care about community, care about family.
But too often I meet conservatives who routinely prioritize the market and globalization and free trade over these issues around community and family.
So what you need is a national conservative government that, you know, could intervene and take control of economics and, you know, not in a heavy handaway, but just kind of prioritize it towards the national interests and that would promote,
you know, healthy, traditional family values and communities, national, national communities and values.
You know, you could braid people's hair, you could...
Practice, fitness, you know, all these traditional values.
No warning.
Yeah, it's couched in some nice language about caring about communities and stuff, but yeah, it's the same basic idea.
It's also a concern with morality, moral behavior, family-oriented behavior, behavior that conforms with the community and supports and makes the social fabric of the nation stronger.
Yeah, it's interesting, isn't it?
I wonder if...
The trigonometry people certainly don't know what they're talking about.
I'm sure they think of themselves as some kind of classical, true liberal, wherein this is the exact opposite of that.
Well, you might be confused, Matt.
Sorry, Constantine has a point where he addresses this, so just in case you were getting confused from their lack of pushback on any of this.
Can we come back to the economics of this?
Because, I mean, as you know, I'm not conservative, but on the economic side of it, I'm always very, very persuaded by small state as an idea.
Because my concern is, and we've seen it with, you know, we're seeing these lockdown files coming out.
Yeah. The bigger the government, the more, you know, the government can, you know, they'll give
So, just to be clear, Konstantin's not conservative, Matt, so you might have got the wrong impression.
He's a small state guy.
Classical liberal guys, you know?
Yeah, I think he's still just figuring it out.
He's figuring it all out on first principles.
Look, so the other point that you mentioned was in terms of the response, there's also Francis' response, the other host, the lesser-mentioned host of trigonometry.
And I think it's worth getting to how he responds to this tale of woe of the people not being...
But just one more point, Matt, because Nigel Farage, given that he is championing these kind of things like economic isolationist policies and a strong anti-immigration message, why wasn't he able to seize the moment,
win the general election or that kind of thing?
Matt, we had Nigel Farage sitting in that very seat a few weeks back, and he actually said that the reason that...
Populism, not that it failed, but it didn't achieve what it could have achieved, and in particular UKIP, was because of the two-party system, which is impossible to break.
Do you think part of the reason that populism founded is because of that?
And if you look at our European friends, they all tend to have proportional representation.
That's part of the story, and I've spent a long time following Farage's movement, and I've written about it, one of the first books.
All I did was about it.
And, you know, the European Parliament elections under a proportional system were the springboard that he shrewdly used in 1999 to get visibility.
And then one of the ironies of Brexit is that a moment that was supposed to lead to the reform of our politics made our politics more elitist because it took away the European Parliament election.
So the only way you can change a system now is through first-pass-the-post-general elections, which is an impossible thing to do.
Just a couple of motifs I want to highlight.
First of all, there's the uncritical acceptance of his version of why he wasn't able to succeed.
It's because of the party system.
Otherwise, you know, the will of the people would treat him and others like him into the halls of power.
That couldn't be a self-serving framing of things from a populist who is not that popular.
Yeah, couldn't be that.
No, it's all to do with the two-party system.
Secondly, this emphasis on the will of the people, it's really selective because in 2011 in the UK, part of a coalition government, this thing which apparently never happens in the UK, it did happen.
The Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats formed a coalition government.
Part of that agreement was that the Conservatives would hold a referendum on an alternative voting system.
A change to the voting system which would not make it first past the post.
It would be proportional.
Now, you might notice that the UK doesn't have that system.
So that referendum, Matt, the landslide will of the people was expressed with a 70% vote against 68.2 or something like that.
But anyway, close to 70% vote against changing the voting system.
So presumably, given that Brexit was 52% of the vote in the referendum, and that was the clear will of the people, This 70% should be a landslide indication that the people are very happy with first-past-the-post voting systems.
But no, it seems like the will of the people only matters if it leads to right-wing populists getting more power.
And similarly, all of the indicators are that Labour are going to sweep the power in the next election.
And this is a problem for that narrative, right?
Because...
Why are people going to elect a liberal government if what they really want is a much harder right-wing government?
So here's why that square is circled.
You ask voters who do you want to be Prime Minister?
Keir Starmer is ahead of Rishi Sunak.
Who do you want to manage the economy?
Labour's ahead of Conservatives.
Who do you want to manage immigration?
Labour's ahead of Conservatives.
Who do you want to manage Brexit?
Labour's ahead of Conservatives.
But here's the thing.
Who's ahead of all of them?
None of them.
None of the above.
I mean, the level of disillusionment out there is palpable.
You see it, right?
We feel it.
The reservoir of disillusionment, the fact that everybody is sort of just out there saying, none of these people really represent me.
None of these people speak for me, speak for my values, represent my voice.
Except for Nigel Farage, of course, but yeah.
But people are unaccountably not voting for people like that.
Yeah, no, it's an interesting squaring of the circle, isn't it?
Like, these people have always existed, right?
Like, there's always fringe parties.
There's always discontent with the centre parties.
Everyone hates politicians.
Yeah, and we did have a populist movement, right?
They're talking about real dynamics.
Yeah, yeah, and we have them in Australia, too.
You know, every 10 years or so, you have this wave of disillusionment with the major parties.
The fringe parties get a bit more votes on the left.
Sometimes as well as the right, and people tend to move back to the centre parties.
But yeah, I mean, ultimately, the centre parties are the centre parties because they are the parties that people want.
That's why they vote for them.
It's odd to me that...
The trigonometry guys don't recognise what it is that they are.
The self-presentation is that they are like a median person, like a man in the street.
They represent common sense kind of views and they set themselves up against these elite ivory towers and fancy ideological type people.
But the people that are the people in the street...
The typical average median type person are voting for the major parties.
Whereas these guys are advocating for what is a fringe view.
A fringe right wing view.
I find it so frustrating when the politician that you feel most affinity with is Nigel Farage.
And the guys that get you exercised are Lawrence Fox.
And there's a part where Goodwin and Constantine are talking about how often they bump into each other.
And, you know, they're often reading each other's sub-stacks and they find each other so insightful.
Welcome to Trichonometry.
Thank you for having me.
Welcome back.
We have had you on the show a lot.
This is my third time.
Is it?
Yeah.
Yeah.
It feels like more because you always provide fantastic commentary on British and other politics.
And we always bump into each other at various events.
That we do.
It's actually your fourth time, Matt.
Sorry.
Maybe the one in the aftermath of the 2019 election was a bit of a blur, so maybe I forgot that one.
Yeah, so we've done a few, but my point is we're always really interested to hear your take on things in addition to your books.
You have a fantastic sub-stack that I read religiously, actually.
I read yours too.
Thank you.
I wonder, is it because they perhaps share some ideological presuppositions and interests?
You know, it's interesting the lack You won't meet many mainstream US Republicans today who are advocating a Reagan-type view.
of the world.
Conservatism is changing in big ways, in important ways.
I know you had Yoram Hazony on the show, and, you know, he's often made that
Matt, aren't we really just talking about the political system no longer being fit for purpose?
If it doesn't represent the people that it should, then quite frankly what's the point?
What's the point, Matt?
What's the point of the political system then?
Should we just chuck it in the bin?
I'm wondering what is the alternative system?
If only someone in the past hundred odd years, 50, 60 years had thought, or there'd been people who had tried that, you know, that had said, the people are not represented.
I, the strong anti-immigration, pro-nationalist person, represent the true will of the people.
I can't be bothered with your representative.
If only that had been tried and we could look back at history and see how it went.
Yeah, I mean, the thing is clear is that these guys who are speaking for the voice of the common people, like all of the people that have claimed to do so all through history, from flashback to the Jacobins and our episode with the sovereign nations type thing,
like, they've always been this kind of chattering class.
They've always...
Never tilled the fields or worked in a factory or whatever.
There have always been people like this these days in the infosphere, in the discourse land, writing books, you know, having podcasts, doing all this shit.
They always claim to be speaking for the common man.
And really, what they're trying to do is just get themselves into power.
I mean, it's the same old thing, isn't it?
Well, you know, so people will always take issue with this kind of thing.
They say, you shouldn't be comparing everyone to proto-fascists or that kind of thing.
But it's just the rhetorical parallels are so clear in this material.
Unless it got even more sinister, Goodwin just throws in this bit towards the end of the interview.
It's going to be cool.
To kind of call some of this stuff out.
And also, I think the evidence is going to undermine it.
You know, we are on the cusp of developments with genetic coding and science that are going to be complete game changers in how we understand health, medicine, life expectancy, all of that stuff.
So the idea that there are not
differences between groups is just going to be completely unsustainable.
I mean, it already is, if you look at the evidence.
But over the next five to ten years, it's just going to look...
utterly ridiculous as a lot of this research and evidence comes through.
Why?
Why?
Just popping that in.
That's a nice stinger, given the context of that discussion.
What prompted him to throw that one in?
Yeah.
Even the bit where he's talking about Health outcomes, right?
Like, you think that he's talking about, you know, genetic developments and personalized health, and then he's like, and of course, group differences are going to be undeniable.
You're like, what?
Like, where was that flurry in from?
So we're going to have right-wing populist movements that take greater control over the economy to orientate it towards state interests.
We need to stop immigration, obviously.
That's part of it.
And the genetic evidence is going to come out, which is going to show...
Group differences!
Who can say?
That will look so ridiculous in the glorious future of our nation.
So, yeah!
That was just...
I was like...
Why?
Oh my god, that smells so off.
That whole conversation, when you put all those pieces together, it's...
Yeah, it has a lot of it about, you know, the anti-woke stuff, the getting the diversity statements and all that.
We could look at that whole side of it, but I know we've spent...
A significant portion on it.
But it was so striking to me.
One, the superficiality and ahistorical nature of the political analysis.
There's components of it which, yes, are correct, like talking about these ebbs and flows and support for populist figures and various dynamics.
But fundamentally, it's presented as something of a dispassionate, scholarly examination of that phenomenon.
But Goodwin's preference is so...
Clear, so close to the surface that you have to be wearing blinders not to see it.
And the trigonometry fellows, I believe, have just the blinders.
Even to the extent that there's supposed to be people that are all worried about the creeping authoritarianism of the state.
And then Oliver...
Sorry, his name is Francis.
I've been calling him Oliver.
So anyway, Francis, he goes so far as to say...
What's the point of the democratic elections and that kind of thing?
So, yeah.
Yeah.
Well, that was ugly.
I didn't like that.
But it was a good...
I was on topic.
It was a good whinge of the week.
You heard them whinging about why...
I was whinging about them.
Yeah.
Double whinge.
Pretty good.
Triple whinge.
Quadruple whinge even.
But, yeah.
So, now...
We are going to move to somebody who doesn't whinge at all during the conversation.
No, actually, he didn't.
He's not like us.
He doesn't have that sort of bitter, sour streak.
Something about him.
Well, you know, it might be there.
It's just like he's good at hiding it.
I think that's the right idea.
Yeah, everyone has it.
So yeah, Paul Bloom, esteemed psychologist, guest that we really should have had on earlier, and very entertaining person to talk to.
We now pass you to Matt and Chris interacting with Paul.
Okay, so first off, it's just me at the minute.
Matt will emerge from the ether shortly, as he's wont to do, running late today, but I can't blame him because he's doing an errand for me.
But...
With me is eminent psychologist Paul Bloom.
Paul, in case you didn't know, you are Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Cognitive Science at Yale University and the Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto.
You might have to explain how that due location ability works.
It's like you have two professors here.
Yeah, the one from Toronto, the Mild Mound Canadian and the Firebrand American.
That's exactly it.
I'm totally thrilled to be on.
I'm a big fan of the podcast.
Like we were talking about before, I would have hoped to come on as a guru with his right to respond.
But I'm happy to come on just under whatever role.
You know, it has happened before.
Robert Wright was on as an interview person and then we covered him as a guru.
So it doesn't prevent it.
It's not impossible.
That's a hugely exciting possibility.
No, I don't envy the guru life.
Yeah, I do have to say as well, Paul, especially while Matt is not here to stop me from gushing, I have been a long-time consumer of your work just through being involved in psychology and also interested in developmental psychology.
And your videos of you in the research group and your wife, I believe as well, are a frequent...
Thing on my courses about moral psychology.
So your MOOC as well, the Coursera course.
I teach a moral psychology course in a university in Japan and I needed to bone up on moral psychology quite efficiently.
So you and David Pizarro were two sources that I mainlined and kind of consumed your entire MOOC in a matter of like two or three weeks.
So it was extremely good.
I highly...
Recommend it to anybody interested in it.
So, yeah, I'm a fan as well, I can say.
It really means a lot.
We have a lot of similar interests, not just in sort of the ecology of social media and the people and gurus and the like, but also in the cognitive science of religion.
Yes.
You more than me, but I've done a little bit in the cognitive science of religion.
We've been to the same conferences.
We know the same people.
Yeah, and I actually think I'd probably like to talk to you about some of the work that you did about people enjoying unpleasant things, which is an interest of mine.
This podcast, in some respects, is a demonstration of that.
You enjoying something unpleasant, yeah.
Not this interview.
I think you're getting a lot out of your system before your co-host comes in.
Yeah, Matt usually keeps me under control from these kind of things, but he's not here, so it can happen.
But another reason is, actually, it's quite surprising we haven't had you on already because you're kind of an obvious guest, you know, not just because of your guru nature, but because there are so many overlaps in interest.
But in particular, just recently, there's only three episodes currently released, but...
You and former guest Dave Pizarro, one half of the Very Bad Wizards, are in the process of releasing a podcast series called Psych.
Which is kind of an introductory course in psychology but in podcast format.
Is that an accurate description?
That's exactly an accurate description.
David Pizarro and I have been friends for a long time.
He was a graduate student at Yale when I was at Yale.
And sometimes I like to brag that he was my student, which is not technically true.
But we could pretend.
We wrote a paper together when we were there.
And we remained close friends.
And then I just finished off this book.
It came out.
A few weeks ago, Psych.
And it's supposed to be an entertaining and accessible and interesting overview of the whole field of psychology.
And David suggested, why don't we do a podcast on it?
Where the book has 15 chapters.
We'll have 16 episodes, including an introductory episode.
And for each one, we'll talk about what's about the contents of the chapter.
So we've already talked about the brain and consciousness coming out.
On Monday, we'll be Freud, then Skinner.
And we had a great time.
David is a podcast veteran.
He's one of the funniest people and smartest people I know.
And so we just have a really good discussion.
And it's a lot of fun.
Yeah, I have to say again to anybody listening that I'm a fan of you and Dave and together.
Discussing psychology is, you know, it's a genuine pleasure.
And I think that there's a lot of talk that kind of floats around the guru sphere about alternative ways to get a university education.
Like Peterson is, Jordan Peterson and family are currently preparing the Peterson Academy.
And I'm promising that it will provide, you know, an alternative to the indoctrination that we all go through in mainstream academia.
But I...
Have consistently been responding to those things saying, MOOCs exist.
Like you can audit a book right now for free on almost any topic.
And they're really good.
There are very, very good courses out there.
You're one of morality I mentioned.
But I also think this podcast that you and Dave are putting out, it is a way for people, you know, obviously, if you take like a full introductory course, you would be doing...
Readings, and you hopefully would be digging into things deeper than just listening to a podcast.
But 16-plus episodes on psychology, I genuinely think it would give you a good overview of the field.
Judging from the first three, it could go off the rails as you go on.
Yeah, you want to lead with your best, and then who knows what's going to happen.
By the time we get to memory and social psychology, we'll just be all spent and spent time just making jokes and complaining about each other.
But we hope to keep up the energy.
It's meant as a possible companion of my book, and I think if you read the book and you listened to the podcast, you would definitely have it.
Easily the equivalent of an intro psych course.
But it's also meant people who don't want to buy the book.
They just want to listen to for free.
You know, just two guys talking about things.
And as we talk about it, we try to sort of, you know, we're going to do Freud.
And we say, you know, here's Freud's theory.
We talk about him back and forth.
We say what we think he got right.
We say what he got wrong.
We try our best to mark off, here's the sort of standard view in psychology.
Here's our opinion.
And I don't know, I gotta say, I can't put myself in the shoes of somebody who's never heard of psychology jumping in at us, but we had a great time doing it.
Yeah, and Matt has just emerged from the IFA, his important mission, posting various documents.
So, welcome, Matt.
Thanks, Chris.
Hi, Paul.
Good to see you.
Hey, Matt.
Nice to meet you.
Just to catch up, I've started talking about the podcast and book Psych that he's released and also his previous Morality of Everyday Life.
Is that it?
I can't remember the title of the course.
So I have two Coursera courses.
One is just Intro Psych, which is yet another way to learn Intro Psych from me.
Another one is called Moralities of Everyday Life.
Well, you will discover, Paul, that Matt has a problem that he cannot sit still.
So he roams around the mic, constantly changing.
For audio listeners, it's kind of like, you know, they've got Dolby surround sound where he'll be in your left ear one minute and then he moves over to your right.
So, yeah, that's not just for you.
He does that for everyone.
That's a podcast experience that is just hard to beat.
Your competition doesn't offer you that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, Paul, I do have a follow-up about that.
So you were early into the MOOC space, right?
That's right.
Your course, I remember being one of the early ones.
And it's clear, there's a lot of effort put into the course in terms of the structure, in terms of the different options that the students have.
And then with this book, you have a limited podcast series, which is also an unusual thing for people.
So, are you just like a cutting-edge techno wizard?
Why are you always involved in these things?
Well, no, I'm technologically deeply incompetent.
The MOOC was set up by my betters at Yale, who were setting up a program, and then they encouraged me to be part of it.
And, you know, you do these things and...
I would have thought that most of the response to what I do would be based on my research and my whatever discoveries I make.
It's a damn MOOC.
I still must get, you know, several emails a week from this thing which has been, you know, out of service for years and years ago.
Just ask me questions about psychology and often telling me that they appreciate it.
And in some way, it's something I'm very proud of because it's not like, I don't think many college students...
In the States or Canada or Europe, listen to it.
But I get a huge response from China, from Africa, from the Middle East.
They're the ones taking it, maybe because there aren't equivalent resources being offered.
And it's a lot of fun.
As for the podcast, this is all David Pizarro's motivation.
And I am the last man in North America to get a podcast.
Everyone else has a podcast.
There was a point where I thought you were going to become a permanent co-host with...
Sam, you were like on a bunch of his podcasts in a row.
We had something going and then a little thing called COVID started.
And then Sam decided he wanted to spend some time with people who knew about COVID.
And we remained friends.
I'm actually going to be talking to him in a couple of weeks.
But yeah, we did this sort of gig for a while, which was a lot of fun.
Yeah.
And then other things happened.
For my own vote, you know, I enjoy Sam's content sometimes more.
So than other times.
But when you were there, it was a little bit like having someone who would occasionally say the thing I wanted.
Someone to say, well, you know, but is that good to be like that?
I was like, yes, yes.
So I vote for you to return.
Well, thank you.
Thank you.
I've always had fun talking to Sam.
If he ever wants me back as a permanent co-host, I'm in.
So what's the aim with the Psych podcast?
Because I tried to listen to it, actually, but it must be too new.
My podcast player wasn't happy downloading it.
Is it like an educational experience that sort of mirrors the book or complements the book, or is it just inspired by the book?
It's meant to be a companion to the book.
So the book has 15 chapters, each going over some aspects of psychology, and we have 15 episodes planned.
In some way, you don't have to read a book to do the podcast.
It's meant to be entirely independent.
So we talk about mental illness and Skinner, Freud, memory, language development.
And we talk about it.
So David's also an introsite constructor at Cornell.
And we both have experience teaching.
And so what we do is we kind of lay, you know, who's this guy Freud?
What was he saying?
And what do we think of him now?
Most of the time we agree on things.
Sometimes we disagree.
Sometimes we disagree with the field.
But it's meant for somebody who has no real knowledge of psychology to just listen to the episodes and then get a sense in some way as if you're taking a course.
And at the end of it, they know something about the field of psychology and maybe more importantly know something about the mind to the extent that there are discoveries that our field has come up while we try to tell them about them.
Matt, this reminds me that, you know, off air, Matt and I were talking because we both teach courses and stuff about the kind of possibility to help incorporate into tutorials.
What you're discussing about, like, because, you know, listening to two people talk about an issue when they both have, you know, expertise or interest in it, usually, it can be illuminating because they raise points of objection or they, you know, can bounce off each other.
And it's more...
And Matt, you were talking about, wouldn't this be a good way, you know, if you need to explain a paper, if you're talking to a colleague, because sometimes it's hard to elicit responses from students.
But it sounds like, you know, Paul, what you're describing, and it's certainly my sense from listening to you and Dave talk, and I think it's just in podcasts in general, people like listening to people have conversations about topics and, you know, do so and have fun.
When it's people with expertise discussing their areas of expertise, it gives you a genuine fly-on-the-wall experience, I think, of being in a lab discussion or just two psychologists discussing psychology.
Yeah, I think there's something to that dynamic which is very appealing and probably speaks to a whole bunch of stuff.
I totally agree.
I like podcasts, and I like podcasts about things I don't know much about.
And the format I like isn't...
Sometimes you have these things where it's one person monologuing or getting asked questions.
Having two people who are roughly on the same page, maybe not perfectly in synchronic, just talk about something they know well is, when properly done, it's just exhilarating.
Yeah.
Yeah, I've been thinking about this a lot, Paul, because my...
It's a regional university.
A lot of our teaching happens.
A lot of the students are attending online and even more of them listen to the recording.
And so we're in this weird situation where the tutorial-type workshop set-ups is set up kind of for the very few students that are actually attending live in front of me.
And I'm in the awkward position of being up there by myself monologuing and trying to instigate student.
And it just struck me, because we're doing the podcast with Chris, that it's just so much easier when you have somebody else with you and you can go backwards and forth.
And I feel like, yeah, I'd like to take this further, I guess, merge podcasting with normal teaching.
Yeah, or have you ever had the chance to do a seminar with a friend or something where you're just doing it and it mingles with the students, but the two of you are going back and forth?
Yeah, and via the tag teaming, one of you gets the chance to just rest and think about what you're going to say next, and it ends up being just better in so many ways.
What Ma is saying is he wants to bring me into all aspects of his life.
Professional, at the dinner table, having a sidekick broadcaster constantly there.
It's like the right hemisphere and the left hemisphere.
I'm suddenly suggesting to Paul that he adopts me as his partner, Chris.
That's what I'm doing here.
You're already in too many aspects of my life, Chris.
We're already in too deep.
This is probably true.
But, you know, Paul has already...
Broke up one podcast marriage with Tamar.
No, I did not.
I did not.
The rumors are entirely false.
They had an open podcast relationship.
I saw someone online.
Commenting on the, you know, Tamler saying that he wishes you well, but this is true compersion at last.
Yes, yes.
Tamler is very happy seeing David take his pleasure from another co-podcaster.
Yes, he came out here without Tamler initially as well.
He had to coax him.
You know, Tamler's kind of like a groundhog.
He sniffs the air and then when Dave shows him it's okay, he'll come try to eat a little.
You have to, you know, coax him out.
But enough, Tamler, Schiedfreude.
So, Paul, there's literally a whole bunch of topics that I'd be interested to talk to you about.
But the one that I mentioned, Matt, before you were here, was that, Paul, I've seen a talk that you gave at a conference, which was very entertaining, about the paradox of people seeking out painful experiences and enjoying it.
And this is...
Like a research interest of mine, mainly for the area of like painful rituals or people engaging in like painful martial arts ceremonies or these kind of things.
And I do have a way to tie it to the gurus, but I'm just curious initially, like your big picture takeaways from looking at the paradoxical nature of pain.
Is everybody like secretly a masochist or is there something else at play?
Yeah, this was the focus of my last book, The Sweet Spot.
And at this conference we were at in Sicily, I was trying out ideas, I think for the first time, which was a lot of fun.
I do think we seek out pain and struggle and effort and misery in the right doses, all of us, in both religious and non-religious contexts.
I don't think there's going to be a single story behind it.
So some of it, and this will be ideas familiar to both of you, some of it I think is signaling.
You might want to, you know, stick needles for your body or something to show others how tough you are or how pious you are.
Some of it has a sort of, I'm conscious here, but a kind of group selectionist idea, which is that communities of people who suffer together kind of stick together.
And there's a real power to that, everything from a fraternity to a cult.
I think that there's a pleasure sometimes to be taken in pain.
From the sort of contrast, you know, you eat really spicy curry and then you wash down some cool beer and it's just transcendent.
But mostly, I try to tie suffering and effort and struggle to meaning.
And I try to argue that, you know, there's many things we want out of life.
And one thing we want is to have meaningful, rich lives.
And we recognize that that involves struggle and difficulty.
Sometimes real physical pain, you know.
I know guys who decide, oh, there's a marathon coming up.
I'm just going to run it.
And then they run it, and it's just fine because they're in such great shape.
But for them, it's not going to be that satisfying.
When I ran a marathon, I was in terrible shape.
It took me months and months of training.
It was agony.
And because of that, many years later, I'm talking about it to you two because it was really meaningful to me.
So those are some of the stories behind suffering.
Yeah, that resonates a lot because, you know, I've done a bit of work on similar things and about people enduring rights of initiation, but also just traumatic experiences which they then reflect on, right?
And some people end up with post-traumatic stress disorder or kind of, you know, lingering mental issues around trauma.
But other people reframe it as like the catalyst for growth that they were able to get through whatever it was.
In the gurus that we cover, one of the things that we've noticed as a recurrent theme, and it probably is gurus that lean a bit more towards the heterodox or right side, but they'll often be referencing a cancellation, a public trauma that they've gone through.
And Brett Weinstein has discussed this explicitly, where he says that once you see that somebody else has undergone the public trial by fire and they've come through, The other side.
One, you can trust them.
So it's automatically a kind of signaling thing.
But also, just that there's an empathy because you both have experienced the same thing.
And I've been critical of Sam in this direction because I suggest that his experiences in those regards might make him overly sympathetic to any figure who has gone through a kind of public denunciation.
I'm wondering, do you think that stretching things, you know, a cancellation is not necessarily the kind of trauma that people are usually talking about when they're talking about bonding?
That's super interesting.
The sort of suffering I'm most interested in, I've done the most thinking about, is voluntary suffering.
And these are cases you're talking about involuntary suffering, where really bad things happen to you.
And I guess I'll say two things.
One thing is that...
I think being cancelled, in a strong sense, is horrible.
It's social death.
I think if you really ask people, would you want to have your friends, your family reject you, be roundly mocked by thousands of strangers, public humiliation, or would you rather lose an arm?
I think people would prefer to lose an arm.
I think that...
And those who don't actually may not be fully appreciating how social...
Pain feels like.
This is why, you know, when I'm on social media, I try to do my little bit and not pounce on people, even if they seem deserving, because whatever taste I've had of it, I know it is worse than you may think.
And so that I agree with.
I agree with people who talk about how awful it is.
Whether it's deserved or undeserved is a separate question.
There's all sorts of cases where people might, you know, cry, oh, I'm being canceled when they're just undergoing perfectly normal criticism.
But the full heavy-duty stuff.
Is the worst.
The second thing I'd say, and I'll push it back to you two, tell them what you think.
I think that this stuff often does not make you a better person on the other side.
A lot of it messes you up.
I think something post-traumatic growth may be a little bit of a myth.
A story we tell ourselves.
And often people come out, this cancellation, come out fairly damaged.
And, you know, and...
Damage and not better people in a lot of ways.
I have a lot of respect for people who go through this, and I know a few, and they come out and they're generous and they're kind and they're warm and they're loving and their politics hasn't gone crazy and they're not simmering with rage.
But I know a few people, one or two personally, who have been really messed up by this.
Yeah, I agree with you there, Paul.
I think if I cast my mind back to my life and the really dysphoric experiences are not really associated with physical suffering of various kinds or even sort of internal emotional stuff, but it's more to do with those social emotions.
And, you know, Chris and I are from Catholic backgrounds and, you know, shame.
It's an important part of what motivates us.
And guilt.
And obviously, ostracism is one of the worst things you can have.
But, I mean, you were saying earlier that suffering is kind of an important part of pleasure, in a way, if you want it, for happiness.
And that made me think of how, like, you know, if you were just...
Paradoxically, if you're just focused on maximizing your comfort and your pleasure, then you would never get off the couch.
You would be fed grapes or eating chocolates or something, taking the least path of resistance.
But then I compare that to someone like my dad, for instance, who until very recently was a very keen sailor.
He sailed around Australia and took many months.
I was with him for a little while of that.
It's really unpleasant.
It's really boring.
It's really hard.
In many ways, it's unpleasant.
But for him...
Probably he was suffering too, but you could tell that that suffering that made the adventure made the good parts really good and it was an intrinsic part of the whole experience.
That's right.
And that's a deep truth.
It's a truth some people don't know.
Some people, mainly adolescents, think the good life is Netflix and pot and casual sex.
And there's a lot to be said for that.
But it does not make a life.
And what you need is struggle and difficulty.
But the distinction I really push for is there's a difference between chosen and unchosen.
You know, your dad went through a lot.
If this was against his will, you know, he's taken aboard as a prisoner or something, against his will, it would not be positive.
We feel hopeless.
And it's true, too, for social suffering.
So sometimes people choose loneliness.
They choose estrangement, maybe as a test, maybe as a rite of passage.
And that can make you a better person.
It's when, you know, it's when it happens against your will that I think does not tend to have good effects.
I have a possible kind of example that I think speaks to that, but it might be like a kind of specific subject here.
So like one of the things I'm thinking about is that the guru figures occasionally position it as they did choose the They could have chosen to be silent, but they had the strength of will to stand up and they are the man in the arena that is refusing to salute or that kind of thing.
So I think whether or not that is an accurate representation of what they did, I think it is true that a lot of them are the types.
That don't mind everybody else looking at them and saying you're wrong.
That's one thing that would be interesting to talk about.
And the other is I'm thinking about like from my background in Belfast and growing up in the Troubles.
I know a lot of people, a lot of friends, a lot of family that had various very bad experiences during the Troubles.
People whose followers were executed or had family members shot or A whole host of negative experiences that they went through.
And I'm not saying that everybody comes out of that feeling like their life is much better that they underwent that.
But there is an element that nobody chose that.
It was just a situation of being born there.
But people do have a certain pride of having endured it.
Me would be like, oh, whenever people are telling me sometimes about things, I'm comparing it to the context of, you know, my childhood and then feel like, and related to that, when I meet other people from Belfast who went through the same childhood,
even if we're very different in a whole bunch of different ways, there's kind of a feeling that, okay, but you understand what that...
You know, what that particular period of struggle was like.
So, yeah, I'm curious what you think about those cases.
I think that's a good qualification.
So, we're talking now about Unchosen Suffering, the stuff that, you know, you didn't sign up for, but you get.
And I think you're right that it comes in different flavors.
And I think it was, I forget her name, Solnit or something.
She wrote a book called A Paradise Built in Hell.
It was about group traumas.
And there's some sort of suffering that you experience.
If you experience that as a group, you could actually take something positive away from it.
It increases solidarity.
It increases connection, empathy, a sort of connectedness.
It's probably not good for you.
Probably in the end, you know, watching your father being shot is saying you'd be better off without it.
But there are some of these things, like, I don't know.
For Americans, 9-11, where it was, you know, for many other period of great meaning and significance, even though they were afraid, they suffered various deprivations.
Some people look back on natural disasters, typhoons, hurricanes, droughts, and so on, with great, having great significance.
But I think for those, the ingredient you have to have is you have to sort of face it together as a group.
It's like...
Like, a case we talked about the Troubles would be London during the Blitz, where from what I've heard, everybody expected mass trauma, and there was like none of it.
People were just totally intact because they stood it together for a just cause.
Now, you compare it to somebody who is bullied, whose child dies, who's, you know, there's all sorts of bad things that happen you don't face as a group, and I think those enact the worst costs.
Yeah, that definitely gels with me.
We, many years ago now, but in this area, we were hit by tornadoes, actually.
Very rare in Australia to hit tornadoes and floods, you name it.
And we were cut off in our little town here by the coast for almost a week with no power and little food, frankly.
It was no problem, really, in real practical terms, but it was extremely disruptive and uncomfortable.
Our kids look back on that and the things we were doing, like lighting the candles and cooking outside on our little...
I actually made a fire and stuff, and, like, they loved it.
I mean, it was a bit uncomfortable, a bit difficult, but, yeah, it was a good experience for us.
So that's the kind of mild, I guess, calamity.
And let me just jump into this.
Somebody's going to hear this and wonder about COVID, and COVID's very funny because COVID's an intermediate case.
On the one hand, I was, like, in lockdown, and I said to myself, oh, my God, just about everybody else in the world right now is experiencing what I'm experiencing.
I've never had anything like that, this degree of sharedness.
But because of isolation, so many of us faced it alone.
And so in some way, it was the best sort of suffering combined with the worst sort of suffering.
Sorry, I didn't mean to cut you off.
Yeah, no, no, that's a good point.
So I wanted to ask you a question about, I guess, the science-y aspect of this in terms of...
So a couple of things seem to be definitely true, like suffering and feelings of pleasure and accomplishment and all of that stuff are two sides of the same coin.
And obviously doing things together and overcoming adversity in a group has those social aspects as well.
Basic understanding of this is that the reasons for this is, I guess, sort of evolutionary in terms of our affect, how we feel about things.
We're not optimized to be happy, but it's optimized to get us to do things, function effectively in the world.
And you have the homeostasis effect, which if you just try to maximize pleasure full stop, it's not really going to work too well.
Is that your understanding as to the why, like why people are like this?
I think it's an important first step to recognize that we haven't evolved to be happy.
Happiness, like any sort of emotion or feeling or state, exists for a reason.
So happiness is like an evolutionary pat on the back.
You've done well.
Keep it up.
Apparently you're well-fed and you're in a loving relationship.
You have a roof over your head.
Way to go.
Be happy.
And this is sort of psychology 101.
The happiness quickly fades.
It's the hedonic treadmill.
And that's basically a natural selection, giving you a kick in the pants, saying, you know, now do better than everybody else.
Improve your status.
Go kill somebody.
Make love.
Hurry up.
And then you feel sad.
And so there's a lot going on, which I think is explained by an evolutionary framework.
I think some of it is, in a sense, more general, which is that...
Sometimes suffering is like a hack you figure out to enhance your pleasure.
You say, hey, you know, if I spend a lot of time in this real hot bath and then step that off, it feels so good.
And then we invent the sauna.
Sometimes I think it's a hack just for signaling.
How do I show everybody here how tough I am?
Well, you know, I'm sitting in my teenage son.
I'm going to stick as much wasabi in my mouth as I can.
If you see individuals willingly stick, I love God so much that I obey the dietary laws 100%.
I love God so much that I want to have myself crucified in honor of Christ's suffering.
I'm really interested in teenage boys and young men.
That sounds odd, but...
That's a good clip.
But, you know, my day job is mainly looking at addiction and behavioral problems and risky status signaling, rash impulsivity, and how it's so exaggerated in young men is just a really interesting effect to me.
Yeah.
So the thing I was going to say, Paul, which I think...
Reflects badly on me and illustrates your thesis is that quite a long time ago, during one of my first trips to Japan, I ended up in an onsen with a friend's follower.
He was Japanese and he took me to a local onsen.
I've been to onsen before, but I was...
I'm sorry, I don't know what an onsen is.
It's like the hot bath.
Oh, got it.
Okay.
Everybody's naked, and it's extremely hot.
But it wasn't one of the beautiful ones that you see out in nature.
This was like a local sento, so it was quite functional, small, hot bathtubs, but still nice.
And because it was like a local one, not in the center of Tokyo, there were just other Japanese people there.
And I was attempting to appear, yeah, I'm fine.
This kind of stuff doesn't bother me.
You know, he was saying that the water is very hot.
Is this going to be an issue?
No, no, no.
You know, I'm fine.
Don't worry.
And I got into one of the baths and it was exceedingly hot.
I felt like the proverbial lobster had made a very bad choice.
But I needed to sit there.
And after kind of reassuring him that I would have no issue with this, I stayed, you know, for longer.
Than I should have.
And I also hadn't drank anything before I went in.
So upon exiting the path, I promptly fainted.
And I think I gave all of the other Japanese people present a story for the ages that they could remember that day.
Because I went on to, I think I fainted two times after I was revived and stood up and said, no, no, I'm fine.
I subsequently fainted again.
But that was, you know, doing all of the things that you're indicating.
That's an excellent story.
Yeah, it doesn't paint me in the best light.
But I will say, as soon as I drank water, I recovered.
I was fine.
So it was, yeah, it was dehydration rather than intolerance to nonsense.
But, yes.
I mean, imagine Martians looking at us and so much of what we do makes sense.
You know, we're...
Putting foods into our faces and mating and building shelter and fighting for territory.
It's all, you know, evolutionary biology.
And then they zoom in and there's extremely hot water.
Then gently dipping into extremely hot water.
And it's not a torture.
It's not a punishment.
They pay to get in and do this.
And in some way, that's why.
I'm fascinated by these sort of puzzles.
I think these puzzles reveal something really interesting about ourselves.
Yeah.
Well, I appreciate you indulging me on that topic, which is a pet interest, as I say.
It's a great topic.
And another pet interest that we occasionally talk about on the podcast is the kind of emerging Secular gurus and the marketplace of ideas that we all find ourselves operating in.
And as we discussed prior to the pod, you, Paul, are not necessarily immune from featuring as a potential.
I would say, you know, like we tried to cover people like Carl Sagan and Robert Wright and so on, people that we also generally appreciate.
But basically anybody that we can say.
As a public intellectual with a following, we could at least wedge them into the gurometer.
I'm kind of a guru in the model of Sagan or maybe Einstein.
Not one of these cheap gurus, but important ones.
Or, you know, like a stats guru.
People don't mind being called a stats guru.
But it is curious because you're a well-known author.
Psychologists that people may have heard of in discourse land.
And that means that inevitably you will be interacting with, or at least in the same kind of conversation space, just people like Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris we talked about, or any number of the people that we cover.
And yeah, I have my thoughts about why...
You in particular, but others who are publicly intellectuals in the space don't really fit well to the kind of character that we're talking about.
But I'm curious, do you see a big disconnect?
From, like, you and Russell Brand?
Or are you basically doing the same thing, just with words arranged in different patterns?
I'm just not doing it anywhere near as well as him, if I was trying to do the same thing.
You know, like the two of you, like a lot of people, I have a lot of ambitions and a lot of things I want to do.
I really like teaching.
I teach at my university.
I like advising graduate students and postdocs.
I like doing research.
And I like writing popular books and popular articles.
There's a lot about the guru lifestyle that actually seems kind of a lot of fun.
It'd be nice to make bags and bags of money, which I think many of the gurus do.
But in the end, I'm just kind of most interested in thinking through interesting ideas and exploring them.
Like the questions of why we like to suffer, the nature of psychology.
I have a TED talk that just came out actually eight hours ago on perverse actions, which was a lot of fun.
And I do things because they're fun and interesting.
In some way, I think I'd be not honest if I said that I'm entirely uninterested in what people think of them.
I probably am.
I think we're all vulnerable to, I guess, what they call audience capture these days.
I've never been pulled into the vortex of needing to talk about the political and social issues of the day.
I've never felt a particular temptation to mouth off on something I didn't know much about.
Or at least I know I don't know much about it.
Somebody might say, oh no, dude, you do that a lot.
But so I talk and I explore what I find interesting and fun and I have enough people who seem to enjoy it and I have good back and forth and good discussions.
I think there's something about that that doesn't quite match the kind of guru status of the people you discuss.
Does that make sense?
No, it does.
What you're saying is you're up there with Gadsad in terms of having...
I am...
I'll tell you.
I'll tell you.
Steven Pinker was one of my teachers at MIT and somebody who's a friend and somebody I respect a lot.
I know he's in the public sphere more than me, but I view him as kind of a model, and I don't think of him as a guru.
I think of him as somebody who has strong opinions and ideas, but doesn't aspire towards that sort of status.
If he's a guru, it's only accidentally.
We're always trying to be as sciencey as possible in terms of algorithm.
The worst thing for it to be would just be a pejorative label to be affixed to people that we don't like.
But I think a pretty objective way to...
What someone like yourself does versus the more toxic gurus is that looking at the stuff you do, the talks you give, the books you write, you have your own insights and thoughts and contributions, sure, but it's positioned within the orthodox literature.
It's positioned within a field as far as I understand.
I mean, this is the thing that I think is sort of epistemically different with gurus in that they stand alone.
They are like a little island offering stuff which is kind of disconnected from the external field.
So even when they do give academic citations or reference various things, like Jordan Peterson might reference lobsters as a role model for men, it's not a genuine kind of connection.
I think what distinguishes the gurus, and I'm using it in a pejorative sense, and so not the ones I respect, but the ones I have less respect for, is this extraordinary confidence.
This extraordinary, where there's pronouncements on all sorts of issues without qualification, often with the most extreme emphasis.
And, you know, first thing, this is actually not how, it's not a proper way to understand the world.
I have all sorts of views about.
Our evolved cognitive capacities, about language, about AI, about sex differences and where they are and where they aren't.
But I'm not going to say, you know, look, there's one thing we really know for sure, and only an idiot would deny this and go on.
But then the second thing is that that, I think, is a very powerful way.
That's part of the guru trick.
The pure confidence.
A mere mortal stumbles upon somebody who has this pure confidence, and then they feel, wow, this person knows the way.
I have found somebody to worship.
All the rest of the mortals around me are qualifying things.
I need to learn more.
I could be wrong.
But the mortals are doing it right.
The gurus have somehow found a hack that subverts other people's normal caution.
And then you fall under your sway.
And that causes the real gurus, the sort of religious gurus or the political gurus, you know.
Including the very worst of them, you know, no dictator ever stood on a stage and says, you know, I think we should invade Poland, although there are arguments against us.
That's not how they're doing it.
I'm not really sure.
I'm going to have to consult with other people.
Yeah, yeah.
I could be wrong.
No, you don't hear Donald Trump say that very often.
Yeah, so that's right.
Trump, in some way, he doesn't follow near Ambit, but in some way he's a perfect guru because of the...
Unqualified, the confidence, the narcissism.
Yeah, yeah.
And that's why, and I gotta say, some of the people you have under the guru scope are people I respect a lot.
And people like Sam Harris or Robert Wright, I hear he's a guru now.
But part of the reason why I expect them is you can argue with them.
Yeah.
Just to be super clear, by the way, it's confusing because not everyone we cover we diagnose as a toxic guru.
So you have a taxonomy, the toxic gurus, the small g gurus.
It's a spectrum.
It's a spectrum.
We have a measurement scale which runs from, what's the minimum you can get?
10 to...
No, wait, 5 to 50, right?
Yeah.
There's a broad spectrum, and Sam Harris actually does all right.
We haven't done him.
That's right.
We threatened to, but then he came on, and we haven't got Ryan Deer since then.
But we will, you know.
You could have a graph out.
You could publish this graph where you have the line, and then you have all the gurus in different spaces there.
But you keep updating it.
So, you know, Scott Adams pulls back.
He apologizes.
He qualifies.
He could slide a bit down a lower number on the scale.
Yeah, we could have a positive feedback effect on people.
But I suspect what will happen, Paul, given the people that we've covered, is they'll just all gradually migrate to the top right-hand corner.
Currently at the very tippy-top of our readings are Reverend Moon from the Moonies.
He's quite the toxic guru, would you believe?
And then the Weinsteins come with me.
Immediately after him.
But it's not to say that the level of societal harm that they introduce is the same, but I think they fit the prototypical secular guru archetype that we're looking at.
And confidence, as you've highlighted, is not something that they tend to be lacking in that respect.
And I mentioned to Paul beforehand that he's something of a unicorn, right?
Because, you know, as he mentioned, Steven Pinker, you could add Jonathan Haidt, us as well, Sam Harris.
Magnets, in some respects, for people getting annoyed with various takes and political issues.
Not us so much.
Most people love us.
But, you know, there's a few weirdos out there, Paul.
Who couldn't love you?
But Paul is involved in various discussions about controversial issues on various podcasts.
And yet, I've never seen him included on Watchlist.
No, I've never heard a bad word about Paul.
No, now you mention it.
Well, that's nice.
I feel my luck is going to end.
So I had someone to look into for anybody running out of culture war targets.
A lot of my interests don't overlap with the culture war like the people you discussed.
I'm not going to talk about the lab leak theory or issues about trans adolescents or stuff like that.
Don't know much about it, and I don't want to go there.
I have, just in defense of my own controversy, I wrote a book a little while back called Against Empathy, which actually did generate some discussion.
That's true.
Now, in the end, a lot of people read the book or listened to me give a talk on it and had perfectly interesting arguments against me, which I've engaged in in print.
My friend, Jamil Zaki.
Wrote some objections, and we went back and forth.
And other people who I really see as friends disagreed with me.
And that was fine.
And maybe there I'm speaking about the sort of lack of confidence that I say.
That is what I'm missing for Guru's status.
But some people pretty much just read the title, not even the subtitle, which was the case for Rational Compassion.
They assumed I was a psychopath arguing for psychopathy, and they let me have it.
And, you know, I have memories of being treated very poorly by some people.
By a cadre of attackers.
And I have long memories.
They will have forgotten.
And then, you know, one day...
That's how we operate.
A good friend of the...
Paul has talked about how if you live long enough, you can see your enemies come around the bend of the river, usually.
I think that's a motto to live your life.
But I think I have to pick up, Chris, on something Paul said about himself, which is obviously true, which is that he's got a broad range of interests, sometimes might touch a slightly controversial topic, like should you be empathetic or not, but doesn't feel a compulsion to opine strongly.
Yeah, I have that to be the impulse.
Just going back to the last theme, by the way, there was somebody who was very nasty to me in a very public way.
And then he got himself immersed in quite the scandal over Twitter.
And I got very tempted to simply do a tweet, which in its entirety would be what goes around.
And my wife suggested I do not do that.
I do not do that.
Because he would read it and he would know.
When they go long, we go hard.
No quote tweet.
You mean, Paul, you would do the subtle subtweet.
The subtle subtweet.
What do you call it?
Vague booking or whatever.
But no, I just watched in quiet satisfaction as his life blew up for his very real sense.
Yeah.
I have done that myself and usually I don't have someone except Matt to tell me not to post it.
But yeah, the against empathy thing is interesting because you're right, there was a lot of discussion around that.
But the interesting thing is, I'm sure you're much more privy to the unhinged responses to it, but the way I saw that and the way, for example, I use you in my various courses is Your position is very useful in the way that a consequentialist is very useful because you can present,
okay, so this is somebody making the case strongly why empathy can cause bad heuristics to come into play and be distorting of what we would want.
And actually, Sam Harris, in the same way, is often very useful because he sticks out very clear, strong stances on positions.
Those stances, like his stance on consciousness, for example, and I think there's a similar thing that what I was going to say is people respond a little bit more, from what I saw, academically or philosophically.
They might strongly disagree with you, but they're not saying you're a moral monster who's going to go out and execute children.
But that is the tenor of if you're in a culture war frenzy, you are a very, very malignant and dangerous person.
Maybe that's what your critics were saying.
I think what happens to some people is that they get a reputation for it.
People hate them for something.
And then no matter what else they do, all other responses are filtered through the hate or through the adoration.
And to some extent, I'd like to think I have the luxury of being able to come to each issue.
Fairly fresh.
If people don't like my book Psych, they won't like my book Psych.
But I don't think people are going to say, oh my god, his book Just Babies got me so mad.
I'm going to really attack him for this.
Chapter 4, Paul.
Chapter 4. I have a sort of series of email folders.
And one of them is crazy emails, and a smaller one is death threats.
Because there is a small minority of people who respond very badly to what you say, if you have any sort of public space at all.
Just to get you to say a little bit more about the case against empathy, I was, let me ask you this, something that...
We've encountered recently is, and I don't want to draw you into a controversial political topic, which you don't want to, but about the Ukraine conflict, Putin, NATO, Zelensky, all that stuff.
I'm against Putin, by the way.
I've got to say, this may push me over, but I think it was an immoral war, and I'm not in favor of his side.
Matt's a huge Putin fan.
So this is going to be fireworks.
I will say, I could be wrong, though.
And I don't want to be too happy.
Well, this leads me to the question, which is, I've seen a point of view from people like Robert Wright, who would say that we don't have enough empathy for what it's like to be in Putin's shoes.
And, you know, that kind of lack of empathy is leading us to have the wrong view about that conflict.
Is that the kind of thing that you'd be against with the against empathy argument?
It's good for me to clarify that because I've actually talked to Bob about that.
I'm not against that.
That you're talking about is somewhat times about cognitive empathy, which is understanding what's going on with somebody else.
And I think the empathy I'm arguing against is when you feel what they feel, or at least you think you feel what they feel.
And my problem with that roughly is we feel empathy for those who look like us, who are close to us.
It is a very biased emotion and it leads to sort of myopic and poorly and ultimately immoral decisions.
But getting into somebody's head and trying to figure it out, what's going on, is, I think, a pretty useful skill.
Now, I remember, I think you two went back and forth with Bob on this.
And I think that there's room to sort of ask the questions, how good can we be at this?
And how much of a difference will it make in the end?
But I still think, I agree with Bob in the spirit of this, that If you had to choose between knowing too much about somebody's head, what they're thinking, knowing too little, you should try to know too much.
You should try to err on the side of cognitive empathy.
Do you two disagree with that?
No.
I'll speak for myself and you can rejoin what I say, but I have no issue and I think it is useful to understand even the most terrible people, like understanding how Hitler seen himself or whatever.
I think it is good to have cognitive empathy, even just from strategic.
Purposes of trying to defeat your enemy, right?
If you don't have a good model for them, it's going to go worse for you.
But I think the issue that we had with the way that Bob applies it is that it feels a little bit like there's an issue of cognitive empathy if it's unevenly applied.
So if you extend the whole heap of cognitive empathy to understand how Putin feels aggrieved at the West and NATO expansion and so on.
And the possibility that various countries will join NATO.
But you also should be surely extending the cognitive empathy towards Finland and the various other countries neighboring Russia who might find a belligerent imperialistic neighbor of concern.
So I kind of feel everyone is employing a selective degree of cognitive empathy and then just appealing to the cognitive empathy idea.
Can allow you to justify, well, I'm really focusing on, in the worst case, leaning into apologetics for people.
I see what you're saying.
I guess what I think is, you're describing bestowing cognitive empathy almost as if it were a gift, a kindness.
And to some extent, I see this, which is, if I care for you, I want to know what makes you tick.
I don't want to hurt your feelings.
I want to sort of be able to appreciate why you're doing what you're doing.
So yeah, in a perfect world, we extend cognitive empathy to everybody.
But you might say, I think that Bob would say this, is you would really, if we had a limited supply, not much time, too much, you know, it's hard.
We don't have much time.
We should direct a lot of it towards Putin because he's our enemy on this.
And far from being a gift, if you have to figure out what's going on, Figure out what's going on ahead of the person who might blow up the world.
No, I think, Chris, that I totally agree with that aspect of it, that that kind of cognitive empathy is a very good thing, whether or not you're looking to work with somebody or work against them.
I think where we see the danger is that it can open the door to a kind of relativism, which is, I see the world this way, you see the world that way, well...
North Korea.
Yeah, which I don't think is healthy.
You know, I worry about it because I think it's, so what somebody would say is, well, if I see the world through Putin's eyes, then ultimately, I think if I was in his shoes, I would do the same thing.
I mean, in a way, I would be governed by the same history and beliefs and desires and so on.
And I don't think that makes you a moral relativist.
I think you could say, but that would be wrong and step above it.
I think it just makes you more effective.
But Chris mentioned this, and it's a very real worry that by dint of applying cognitive empathy, it makes you maybe softer towards people.
And I think we feel this way towards third parties.
After 9-11, just to go to example, a lot of people, or a few people, would say, well, let's try to figure out why bin Laden did what he did.
And people were furious at them for doing it.
They said, look, he did it because he was evil.
Maybe we'll raise it a bit and say, he hates our freedoms.
Okay, we can do that.
But to talk about grievances he might have had was treasonous.
And I think this is a very natural response.
You know, someone murders my child, and then do I really want to hear somebody explain, well, the guy had a certain circumstance.
No, he's evil, and you want him punished.
But I think when we do things well, we override this impulse to demonize the empathizers.
And I think this sort of cognitive empathy is something we should apply, even though it's distasteful at times.
The thing that I think, Paul, specifically when I'm thinking about Putin and those kind of things, is that whenever I hear people expand on what Putin is feeling or the way that his model of the world works,
I usually...
Don't find any of it hugely surprising.
I understand that Putin is resentful for Russia's diminished influence in the world, feels that NATO expansion is a threat to the influence of Russia and sees America throwing its weight around.
So all various things I understand.
But then there's a part where whenever I look at the Historical actions and consider the other actors in that territory and the various countries that have been invaded by Russia,
you know, in the past 20 years.
And I still end up at the position that, like, okay, Putin thinks of things like that.
Hitler might have thought that the German people were entitled to an expansion of their living space and that this had been stolen by a malignant element of their society.
But we agree that Hitler was wrong.
And in the same respect, I think that international relations, of course, there's more debate, especially around contemporary things.
But it can be the case that people are just, one side is wrong.
Or they're framing things too charitably, and another site isn't.
And when I see the presentation of dictators on sites like the Grey Zone, which they could be presented, I don't know if you're familiar with them, like Aaron Maté and that kind of thing, but they would present themselves as just understanding Bashar Assad,
the Syrian leader, and trying to provide a counterpoint to the Western narratives about Russian aggression.
But in actual fact, they are downplaying Chemical attacks.
They're going on guided tours in totalitarian regimes and saying everyone here is happy and so on.
And I feel that there's a danger that people will appeal to cognitive empathy.
But it's like I say, like it's so selectively applied that it leads to a misrepresentation of the scenario rather than a grasp of the different perspective.
So it's kind of getting into different motives that people would have.
Doing that, but I think that definitely happens.
So it's kind of hard because both kinds of people can say, well, I'm just doing cognitive empathy.
Yeah.
I can see it happening in the way you're worrying about.
I'm thinking of it more like in all the TV shows I watch, the three of us are trying to track a serial killer.
And so we ask, you know, we have all the maps up and he says, like, we have, you know, where's it going to strike next?
I get this misty look as I start to inhabit his body and the music changes and so on.
And then I figure out, oh, he's going to attack in Delaware next because the letter D is special to him.
And we're doing cognitive empathy.
At no point do we say, you know, he's not a bad guy.
It's pretty clear.
He's not a bad guy.
We fully recognize what he's doing is awful.
We're just trying to get in his head.
Yeah, there's a series that was just out on Apple.
I don't know exactly how accurate it is, but when I looked into it, it was kind of amazing to me that it does seem to have occurred in the 90s where somebody was in prison for various drug dealing charges and was perceived to be very charismatic and good at getting...
Oh, and they brought him in to see this kid.
I saw that.
Yeah, they brought him into a high security...
And offered to dramatically reduce his sentence if he could get the guy to confess to these murders of young girls.
I forget the name of everybody, but the actor who played the murder of young girls was the most astonishing acting I have seen in my life.
And he played this creepy killer guy so well.
But yeah, they got somebody to get inside of somebody's head.
Yeah, and it worked.
And I looked it up expecting to see, you know, those articles where you're like, oh, here's 20 differences between what actually happened.
As far as I could tell, it's fairly accurate representation.
I was like, they did this.
Like the FBI got someone, sent them into a high security prison and was like, you know, you get the confession and you can get out of jail.
It's like, oh, America is a crazy place.
That's how we do it here.
If you ever get arrested, your eyes are pretty high.
You get talked into going to another prison to get in the head of another serial killer.
Here's a practical version of Bob's claim, as I understand it, which is that for a long time, people have been provoking Putin in all sorts of ways.
And, you know, they might say, look, I don't care what Putin thinks.
I want to provoke him anyway.
Maybe it's good for me politically.
Maybe I feel he deserved to be provoked.
Maybe these things we're doing are right.
But wouldn't you want to know how what you're saying affects people?
I mean, here's another case.
This is going to seem crazy.
White House Correspondents Dinner, many years ago.
Donald Trump's in the audience.
Barack Obama's on stage.
Very funny.
Obama can deliver a speech.
Starts taunting Trump.
Obama's having time of his life.
Everyone's loving it.
I'm watching.
I'm cracking up.
Because Trump is humiliated there.
You're just stuck there.
I think that was the moment Trump decided to run for president.
Now, imagine that's true.
Imagine Obama could have known that.
He would have just skipped those jokes.
Look, I think we're on the same page with Paul on the cognitive empathy part of it.
Absolutely.
It's just that in practice, we suspect, we have our suspicions that there's sometimes other things going on.
You're worried.
You're worried that some people are sympathetic.
To somebody, to a bad guy.
We'll then say, well, let's look at the reasons and do the cognitive empathy dance.
But what they're really doing is providing excuses and justice.
I think Chomsky, after 9-11, wrote a rather infamous piece, which many characterized as essentially saying why we deserved 9-11.
And like you said, that wasn't received warmly in all quarters.
Though some people were perfectly...
Fine with it.
But I think Chomsky is a good example of someone, he might be quite strongly ideologically possessed as well, but I don't doubt his sincerity or his sense of morality, but I do doubt that it's applied evenly across nations equally.
I think he has a particular soft spot that makes it likely.
That he would defend the Khmer Rouge from accusations of genocide and very likely that he would not defend the U.S. foreign policy in almost any regard.
So, like, in that respect, I think the cognitive empathy is real and useful that he's extending towards the Taliban and Osama bin Laden.
But it's that chestnut of the distribution of cognitive empathy is selective and it can skew things.
But the practice of it, I'm completely in favor of.
Like you say, most people could benefit from doing it more, including about people that they think are vile.
Yeah, yeah.
Chris, we're living proof of this.
I mean, first of all, I'm old enough to remember the 9-11 situation well and the responses to it.
I remember what Paul was talking about, which is that they're just evil, right?
They're just evil.
Bill Maher on his TV show said they were brave, meaning that they overcame fear of death to do what they wanted to do, and he was taken off the air.
So there's all kinds of hot takes, but the truth is, whatever you want foreign policy to be or the response to be, the real reasons are complicated and are understandable.
And kind of interesting.
And we have the same approach, Chris, with the gurus.
There are people who are haters or activists who would like to take down various people.
And, you know, you get these interpretations of what makes them tick in terms of, oh, they're all grifters.
Oh, they're all trying to create a gateway to fascism or something.
Basically, simplistic explanations for...
And understandings of who they are and why they do what they do.
And the real reasons are often really interesting, like the narcissism that you mentioned before there, Paul.
Often they're acting in full sincerity.
They really are that full of themselves.
And the picture you get is not a pretty one necessarily, but it's a more complicated and interesting one.
Before you respond, Paul, I just qualify that Matt is not saying that there's no structural
Influences that are relevant because I think as we've looked at gurus and the networks that inhabit, it is clear that there are sometimes influences coming from either their audience or political ideologies which do Impact beyond,
like, just their psychological motives, but in, like, reducing it to the single factor that, oh, this person doesn't hold any of those actual beliefs.
In many cases, like, they find the ideology and the partners that match their psychological and personal beliefs.
So, yeah, that's just a qualification.
I'm just saying that.
I'm anticipating emails.
Paul?
I'll even get more sympathetic towards your gurus, because we're just mentioning motivations that are sort of unsavory, like narcissism and the like.
But sometimes the gurus, even the ones that you're hardest on, may be making the world a lot worse.
But their motivations might be to impress their friends, to show some people that they're worth taking seriously, to avenge past humiliations.
Honest belief that are right.
Honest, you know, which we all have maybe more than we should.
None of us would be talking to this unseen audience of a lot of people if we didn't have this somewhat unhealthy belief that what we say, what we have to say matters.
Yeah.
You know, we're a small proportion of the population who has that sort of weird psychological state that we share with the gurus.
While a lot of the world, you know, I just wanted somebody to say, hey, you know, have you ever thought of being on a podcast?
And they'd say, well, I don't really have much to say that people would be interested in.
And I think maybe that's true.
Me too.
That's right.
We've all got unwarranted confidence.
There's no doubt about that.
That's right.
In some way, I know you're the guru hunters, but these movies just end one way where you become what you've been fighting against.
Don't worry.
I'm ready to take them down, Paul.
I've seen the warning signs.
This is going to be like Backdraft, isn't it?
It's going to turn out one of us is lighting the fire.
But yeah, we were talking at the beginning about how human beings are...
We're intrinsically status-seeking animals and social animals looking for recognition and respect.
And one of the patterns you see with some of the gurus is that the traditional avenues of respect and recognition haven't really panned out for them for whatever reason.
Now, someone like you, Paul...
You're one of the lucky ones.
I'm not going to embarrass you, but there's lots of things you can point to where you can be very secure in that and you wouldn't be driven or vulnerable to wanting to make very hot takes about the dangers of getting vaccinated in order to get this alternative source of respect.
And in fact, in there lies an argument against cancellation and censorship.
I think there are arguments just based on...
Intrinsic values of free speech and open discourse and so on.
But you're pointing to a very practical argument, which is if you shut down people's access to normal avenues, it doesn't make their desire to be heard go away.
It drives it underground.
It might make it more extreme.
I think I'm not a Freudian, but I think that there's something to the sort of hydraulic metaphors where it's good to have the valve a little bit open so that people can, you know.
express whatever they want to express.
And if you shut it down too tightly, it comes out in other ways.
I think, Paul, that both of you and Matt are talking about the fact that people in general, they're psychologically motivated by seeing themselves positively and believing that what they're doing is good.
There are a few people...
I imagine that do exist that knowingly do evil and enjoy it, right?
But they're rare.
Very few.
The majority, even if they're objectively doing evil, will have a self-narrative or justification for why it's necessary to do it.
You always have to crack a few eggs to create the utopia that we all need.
But with that as a granted, it's psychologically normal to do that.
It's kind of orthogonal to what you're actually doing in the world.
Like you could be a ranked partisan like Dave Rubin, but I think he still thinks he is doing something good.
But one thing that I've noticed with Matt and I, when we're trying to do the kind of cognitive empathy thing with the gurus, is that sometimes we fall short.
Because when we try to model in our head about like...
What would you do in this situation?
Say you take a stance and just get an endless wave of people saying what an idiot you are and just like a flood of hate coming at you for your takes that you constantly put out into the world.
For most people, as you said, I think that would be an experience where it's negative.
Lots of people are talking about how you're an extremist and so on.
But the gurus, lots of them, Don't seem to react like a normal person.
It's like they're immune to that in a way that's similar to Trump, where he doesn't seem to be embarrassed by being caught lying.
He just ploys on through it in a way.
And it looks not psychologically normal.
At the very least, it's at the top of a distribution.
And I wonder, do you think that that is more often the case or that that is rare?
Not saying that people are psychopaths, but rather that they're, you know, on some psychological toggles, they're way up high, where actually most of us aren't, and that makes the cognitive empathy thing difficult.
I think people have different tolerances and even sometimes take delight in controversy and argument.
Some people will collapse at a single negative thing said to them over Twitter.
Other people could take pride.
In a huge storm of hatred against them.
But I think one thing which is important not to miss is that there's often another audience that we don't see.
So Twitter's attacking me and everybody's yelling at me for something.
And you wonder, why is Paul holding on to this view?
But what you don't see is all the messages of support I get from my side.
And all the people on social media you don't even follow.
You don't even see.
And the fact that, you know, Joe Rogan gave me a thumbs up over a text, and I'm just...
And that sort of status dynamic explains something which I've seen more than once.
I'm sure you two know more about this.
You have a character who's fairly centrist, maybe on the left a little bit, ends up in a huge storm.
Bereff loses reputation, often a job, but there's people waiting for him on the other side, on a conspiratorial right, who take him in.
And offer him, you know, and it really is a sort of familial dynamic, but they take him in, they offer him a home, they offer him respect and love, and that's where he stays.
And it's not right to dismiss it as sort of audience capture.
It's more like, you know, it's more like all these movies where some poor kid who's abandoned in a family of criminals adopt him.
And looking at it, it shows these people are not exempt.
From being respected and being loved.
It's just there's a dynamic.
I see it more.
I'm framing it one way because I don't think it happens that often the other way.
I don't see many cases where conservatives rip into some conservative and then that person being adopted by the left.
The conspiratorial left.
That's right, where all of a sudden they're with Paltrow or they're Hawken Crystals.
Yeah, I mean, we've wrestled with this too, Paul, because we'd actually be, just on theoretical grounds, happier if there was more political symmetry, I guess.
But, you know, it is just the case that there are these odd asymmetries in the current political climate.
I guess, if I have understood the first thing you said properly, I think you were kind of saying that...
Even though we all yearn respect and regard, yearn for it, it's not a democracy, right?
What matters is our in-group, our familial, whatever our perceived group is, and if they respect us, what builds respect in those circles is the thing that counts for us.
And to be hated or despised or whatever by the enemies out there, that doesn't really hurt our self-esteem, does it?
It's really right.
The first thing I ever wrote in my life was an op-ed piece about that there is no soul in the New York Times, which was like nobody read it.
Some priest sent me a very long, polite letter saying that I may be mistaken.
Anyway, but as it was coming up, my uncle, who I love very much, said to me, aren't you worried that you're going to get attacked by very religious people for what you're saying?
And the truth is, no, because that doesn't bother me that much.
I've written some things critical of Trump, making me the one millionth person raised.
I don't care if Trump people attack me, but it really stresses me and burns me if my colleague down the hall attacks me or my professional organization condemns me.
Yeah, we're most worried about what the in-group feels like.
And this is the peculiar dynamic, which is so many people on the left who commit some hearsay.
Hearsay?
Heresy?
Heresy.
Yeah.
So, like, there's a couple of things where, you know, the dynamics that some people have referred to, especially in, like, cult scenarios, like love bombing, right, where the group is so affectionate and welcoming, at least initially, before the bigger asks come,
like, leave your family and, you know, sleep with the leader now.
But at the beginning, not like that.
And then that love bombing...
I'm not making the comparison just with cults to be disparaging, but because I think that helps to explain in a way, because when people see people in the cult, they're like, why would anybody join that group?
It's so horrible.
It makes such demands on their time, but they don't see all of the psychological work put to bring the person in and to make them, you know, interdependent and the genuine happiness.
That they often have in the initial stages of joining the group, like genuine connection with people.
And I, for my sins, I listened to James Lindsay document his descent, shall we say, to where he is now.
But what was interesting for me was he would do things like, you know, he's pretty much an open book when he's recording, like on his podcast thing.
And he would talk about...
All these people on the right are being nice to me now.
Like, I don't agree with all the things, but they're, you know, they're welcoming me and I had this wrong image of them.
Like, you know, my voice is screaming, like, be self-reflective.
Consider what if you were saying something different that they didn't like, would they be so welcoming?
But that seems to really be a dynamic that applies.
And I do think that the left is...
Particularly prone to just being like, the best kind of love is harsh love.
Like, you know, we will tell you all of the sins that you've committed and why you're actually an evil right-winger.
And then I'm not saying that all the people just respond like, you know, there's that meme of, okay, well, now I'll go be a Nazi.
But there is a little bit of, okay, if you keep telling people...
You're not a real, you're not actually a liberal.
Like, go join the conservatives.
And then they join the conservatives.
You can't, like, you know.
I know exactly that sort of leftist rhetoric you're talking about.
I can't imitate it on the fly.
ChatGPT could do better.
But it's stuff like, you know, look, own up to your mistakes.
You messed up and you messed up big, big, and you hurt a lot of people.
So just shut up, apologize to people, and just, you know, don't censor yourself.
Do better.
Okay, I've got to ask you this, though, the two of you.
And I come at you out of love, really, because I am a huge fan.
But where do you fit in this ecosystem?
You're not separate from it.
You're strong critics and, you know, just moral critics.
You have to be fair critics of people.
But do you worry that you do a very critical episode on Gadsad, for instance, and you push them further away from, you know?
What do you think?
Where do you put yourself in?
We don't like the idea of having any influence on the world.
I'd always like to be a little bit smaller.
So whatever we do, we don't have to worry about that kind of thing.
Lead us one star on Apple Podcasts, please.
We get enough of that, Paul.
Don't encourage people.
I was thinking, you know, but Paul, it's obvious we flew above the discourse.
You know, we are just the pure angels above that.
No, that's not the case.
But you actually, you swerved from allowing me to answer flippantly by talking about our impact on the people that we cover, which has been a reliable...
Whenever we've done the right-to-reply things, like Chris Williamson, for instance, brought up...
And that was very decent.
Chris came back and said you treated him unfairly, and you guys apologized for unfair parts and went back.
And now I understand that you all love each other now.
That's right.
We endorse everything that he puts out, especially that recent stuff that he's done about eugenics.
That's the one that I really signed off on.
But yeah, so, you know, like with Chris, I...
I do think that the way that you framed it is the way that I would take it.
There's things that we are harsh about that can be a bit cruel or you could be more kind, more empathetic.
But it doesn't remove the things that you're actually criticizing.
And sometimes I feel like when we displayed empathy, people assume, well, that means all the electrisms dissolve.
And they don't.
And usually the people...
Themselves understand that, but not always the people following.
But that's not really what you were talking about with the impact.
And I think like Matt said, there is a case to be made that we don't like to think that we are impacting the discourse that much.
And that lets us off the hook a little bit in our own mentality from dealing with the consequences.
But it shouldn't really, because especially as audience size grows and it's...
Quite clear that we can get under people's skin at the very least in some contexts.
And I think one of the defenses that we would raise, and we did recently when we had a conversation with John Vervaki, is that we're very clear that our assessment is our assessment, right?
And it's not coming from this ethereal place of perfect judgment.
It's coming from our...
Assessment of what we think people are doing rhetorically.
But you can have a different judgment.
We are not calling for people to be, like, exorcised from the public discourse or that kind of thing, right?
We are generally not people that are jumping on cancellation campaigns, despite what people might perceive.
So I think in that respect, it feels a little bit like...
All of these big figures that we cover, or even the slightly lesser famous people, they're out there spewing discourse into the ether.
And they often have very large audiences.
They tend to get a lot of positive feedback.
And we're just injecting our brand of criticism.
So they put the information out there.
So it's a response to that.
That's one of the defenses, I think.
Was that convincing?
You know, it's reasonably convincing, and I think there's some words in there which are important, which is, I think it makes the most sense if you go after the big guns.
You know, take an extreme example.
If you're going to have an episode about Trump, I don't worry about you having a huge effect on Trump.
But there's a lot of smaller gurus in there, and I think...
You're morally obliged to treat them gentler because you have some reasonable influence.
Certainly, they'll watch your show.
And to some extent, you know, it goes back to cognitive empathy.
If you think about the effects of being harshly criticized, and that might drive them to do worse and not better.
It's something to just keep in mind.
No, no, Paul, this is something we've talked about a fair bit.
And actually, it was a Chris Williamson episode that wrong-footed us because we, until that point, were pretty...
Or thought of ourselves as small and insignificant and didn't really think about that.
And since then, we do think about it.
So, you know, you can go off at Donald Trump.
You can go off at Jordan Peterson because, you know, you're not going to have any effect.
But say, Sevovaki, he's a bit less famous than Jordan Peterson.
I spoke to him a couple of days ago on a committee together.
We had a very pleasant discussion with him, but I think it was still quite obvious where we were looking at things in very different ways.
But it's a challenging one because it can be hard to criticize people when you have genuine, very large differences in point of view with those personal connections.
And I guess we're pushing back a little bit.
I'm a bit worried about the way the alternative media system works because unlike the sort of hard-nosed traditional journalists that would go about their business in, I think, a pretty professional kind of way, there is an awful lot of back padding and,
you know, it's almost like a gentleman's club where no one will ever be mean to each other.
Or if they are, it'll be expressed very genteely in private.
Paul, I have a question which is a bit out of left field, so I feel I should wait.
Unless it's okay to completely fill the topic.
But that might seem like us skipping.
No, I'm good.
I didn't come here to scold you.
Decoding those who decode the girls.
No, we welcome that.
We're like a sponge.
We absorb that.
Yeah, I've heard this.
Sponge line.
We welcome the negative reviews.
We're always accepting them with open arms and no defensiveness.
That's our brand.
But, you know, I'll try this very torturous connection to what we were just saying.
So, in contrast to the world of alternative podcasts and the heterodox ecosystem where...
I do think there are very thin skins on display amongst people that throw bombs readily.
Academia, in my experience, I'm not saying there's no egos involved.
There are large egos.
There are data terrorists roaming around the halls of psychology, tearing down illustrious...
Replication bullies.
Yeah.
I count myself on their side, but nonetheless, it's a good example that not everybody welcomes.
Criticism with open arms.
And I think we're all defensive when we get reviewer 2 comments.
But there is that culture of criticism and robust exchange.
And related to that, I enjoy your developmental work, your older developmental work with the moral development of children.
And I had a methodological query, which I'm sure is really rudimentary.
But in those paradigms, typically...
Children are shown a puppet show or a video or something.
And then there are various things that you can look at.
How long they looked at different characters and, you know, or forced choice selection, right?
Which toy that they want to play with.
So to give children the option to play with a toy, somebody has to give them the toys, right?
Near them.
And in those experiments, in a bunch of them that I read, it wasn't clear that the person offering the toy was blind, To the condition.
And similarly, the exact thing for how to characterize a child leaning versus a child actually reaching out wasn't clear.
And that worried me because I'm always thinking about clever hands and the signals that people can give off.
So I was wondering, I imagine this is something that people have addressed, but is this a robust thing which happens when Nobody knows and it's all very, very well controlled?
No, it's a very fair question.
Infant researchers are obsessively worried about exactly that sort of thing.
So I won't say it's for every study, but every study I've been involved with and every study I've had any collaborator do, everything is as blind as possible.
So you might have an experiment.
I've been involved in experiments where one guy helps somebody up a hill and another guy pushes that individual down.
You can see this as a one-act play.
And then someone's going to hold the two guys, the helper and the hinder, up to the kid to see which one the kid picks.
That person holding out the characters has no idea which character played which role.
The experiment was set up.
They could not see.
Even if they tried to cheat, they couldn't have a look at it.
Someone else, typically someone else, is monitoring the kid and marking off on a sheet of paper or on an iPad which one the kid chose.
That person also has no idea what the right answer is.
So in habituation studies, we look to see how long kids look at a scene.
Again, studies are in there because this is a very serious concern.
The person making a judgment is blind to the condition the kids are in.
Some of these studies, the kid is sitting on a mother or father's lap for very young babies.
In those cases, their father are blindfolded.
So they can't see or have a visor.
So they can't see it and unconsciously give the baby any cues.
There are always questions about the replication crisis.
There's always questions about a lot of the studies I'm most interested in have replicated.
Some studies, including baby studies, have failed to replicate.
But I don't think this is the locus of the problem.
You have exactly the right concern, and people are hyper-concerned about it.
I remember some of the methodologies of those kinds of things and even seeing video of them and just how strict they are with themselves in terms of, you know, lay out the things like this and then cross your arms, you know, that's like really buttoned down.
There's all sorts of things, you know, like you have the red character help the kid up the hill and the green one push him down, kid chooses the red character.
How do you know he just doesn't like the color red?
Well, you got to counterbalance the color.
What if he likes squares enough so you got to counterbalance that?
And it's difficult.
And there have been claims in the literature.
So we did some research that got published in Nature that said the kids prefer to help her to hinder her.
But another team investigator said they prefer it not because it's helping, but because of certain patterns of movement that it made.
So we do more experiments.
Liz Spelke, who's a friend of mine, a brilliant development psychologist, made me the brilliant infancy.
Scientists in the world has complicated objections to our interpretations.
So this stuff's very much being debated.
But those sort of worries, the clever Hans worries, I think we pretty much have worked out.
Followed the research a little bit, including various back and forths.
And I like, you know, those studies where somebody proposed an alternative explanation, then another group tested.
That's psychology working, from my point of view.
I think part of my bias is that I've seen so many videos from, you know, like the New York Times or something, where I don't think it's the laboratory conditions.
It's just the video of a session.
I was going to say this, and maybe we're a bit to blame for this.
The New York Times did some videos of this.
60 minutes.
Did some videos.
And the videos are, you know, Alan Alda came to the lab, and that was so much fun.
But the videos are sham trials, where everything's moved away to get good camera angles.
We use the most obedient kids, smart kids, you know.
And it all looks great.
But then somebody says, oh my god, you're not controlling for that.
And, you know, Alan Alda has his eyes open, and everything like that.
And you're exactly right.
The videos are not accurate depictions of the studies.
So I'm guilty of that exact effect, that this is why you should be careful about getting popular media representations.
But in a better presentation of that, though, Paul, and perhaps like a slightly more general one, like the replication crisis, we would be remiss if we didn't address it.
And I'm, I think, firmly on record as pro-open science, pro-methodological reform.
I think the replication crisis was very good.
For psychology and led by psychologists, so it kind of reflects well in the discipline in certain respects.
But I'm curious, you know, you're obviously no opponent to the replication crisis and methodological improvement, but some of the work which you are known for, like I would say the kind of maybe this embodied cognition,
like the impact of disgust on moral judgments and that kind of thing, there has been.
Questions raised, right?
Not about like anybody doing thing on the board, but just how well it replicates.
And I, yeah, I'm curious, you know, big picture thoughts about the replication crisis and any interaction, your research particularly, embodied cognition or otherwise.
Yeah, big, big picture thoughts is I devote a chapter of my book to it because, and I talk about it and, and I give the perfectly view, I think.
We all agree on the standard view, which is a lot of studies have failed to replicate.
They failed to replicate because psychologists have been doing their studies poorly.
We've been doing p-hacking and harking and file drawer problems and read the book for the gory details, but we've been doing them badly.
I also go on to say that may not even be the biggest problem.
The biggest problem might be the weird problem, which is so much of psychology has been done with a small sample of humans from, you know, United States and Canada and Europe.
Under one estimate, an American college undergraduate is about 4,000 times more likely to be in a psychology experiment than a resident of China, India, or Africa.
And this might make a real difference, really limiting the generality of our findings.
That's the bad news.
The good news is we're doing our studies better.
We're pre-registering.
We're using bigger samples, doing more international stuff.
So that's the big picture.
My own work?
I've done some work, which I've done one study which has failed to replicate, and I believe that nobody ever decided to study, nobody ever decided to fail to replicate.
I believe that the failure to replicate was done very poorly, and it wasn't a fair test, but of course, what am I going to say?
But as for the relation of disgust and morality, I think it's really interesting.
There have been, I would say that some of the stronger finding claims that being disgusted makes you think something is immoral may probably don't work out.
It falls under the whole social priming, embodied cognition thing, which has just been a disaster.
I think, however, the correlational claims that disgust sensitivity is related to political attitudes and moral judgments is pretty robust.
And if I'm right, there's a meta-analysis published a few months ago that supports it.
At least my colleague, Yoel Inbar, who knows 100 times more about this than me, assures me that the evidence is on our side.
So I'll tell you the broader philosophical thing, which is I've done a lot of research.
Some of it I'm more confident in than others.
There's experiments I've done 20 years ago where the results were so strong that, of course, it's going to replicate.
Give me 10 kids, I'll replicate it for you.
Boom, boom, boom.
There's other findings where we squeezed out every level of significance we could using crazy-ass analyses.
And if it replicated, it's just because God has a sense of humor.
I have the same guilty conscience about a subset.
I emphasize a subset, a minor subset.
For those listening, not the majority of my work.
There's no need to check.
No, no, stay away.
Don't let it.
Paul, can I ask you a bit of a random question?
But it's just such a hot topic right now, which is about artificial intelligence.
I'm sure you must have been following stuff like ChatGPT3 and now ChatGPT4, which I've been playing with.
And you may have also seen, there's a lot of hot takes on it.
Some people saying that the singularity is here and the world's going to hell in a handbasket.
Do you have thoughts about that?
Yeah.
This is an area where I will admit I was wrong.
Five years ago, I would have said, This stuff we're seeing now is 50 years in the future.
And that these deep learning things would never get this far.
And I honestly think people are being, oh, you have a machine that could solve, that could pass the Turing test.
Oh, it gets high SAT scores.
Oh my gosh, who cares?
Boring, boring, boring.
Get into top law schools.
Boring.
This is not boring.
This is stuff that a lot of people would have put money would have been impossible.
And here we have it.
So it is shocking how good this stuff is.
So that's one half of it.
And I'm very interested.
Here's the other half, which is I've been persuaded by people like Gary Marcus that there's certain walls these systems are going to hit because they don't have the proper symbolic.
Reasoning systems are pure statistics.
And because they lack the symbolic reasoning things, they could paper over something with a billion examples and make it look like they got it right.
But they fundamentally lack certain things that humans possess.
Until you put those in, you won't get fully human AI.
Yeah.
But I'm saying the second thing, acknowledging I was wrong about the first.
Yeah.
I heard, Matt, that the...
I can't remember where I heard this.
I'm stealing from another podcast knowledge, but that the computer...
AI Go playing systems were doing things unheard of and coming up with strategies that humans couldn't devise.
But then it was discovered that you could box them in just because they weren't really understanding the game.
They were running tons of algorithms on strategy and whatnot.
But the basic thing about...
If somebody forms a box around the outside, that you will lose.
The top layers couldn't compete, so they could beat these massively highly ranked things by just exploiting.
Now, of course, it'll be patched, but I think it's a good illustration, the point that you made, that there are these things that look incredibly impressive, and then you realize, wait, but it's actually doing that in a way which...
It's quite different than what we imagine from what humans are doing, and that there might be holes that are not there.
That's what I'm wondering.
I guess it's kind of reprised the...
Well, it's also called embodied cognition, but I think in a different kind of context, which is that the challenge in artificial intelligence, when they were back in the day, when they were building those rule-based systems, and it was all symbolic, manipulation and so on, and the consensus kind of was that, look, this is ultimately a fool's errand,
It's like trying to define words in the dictionary via other words in the dictionary, and at no point is there ever actually a connection to the real world.
And it's kind of interesting to me teaching, every year I get reminded of this when I teach cognitive neuropsych, how at some level there is a grounding, that there is a grounding in sensory and motor interaction with the real world, and even highly abstract concepts that we've got likely can be traced back to certain concrete.
So, is that kind of what you were saying there, Paul, which is that despite very clever statistical learning that's going on with massive corpuses of text and images, it's still kind of disconnected from a world?
You're raising a real concern.
It's somewhat separate from what I'm raising, which, again, I could have indebted to.
My friend Gary Marcus for pushing so hard.
It's that you're right.
They did these kludgy symbolic systems based on these logics, and it couldn't do much of anything.
And it just barely plays chess and so on.
And then these brilliant people started, let's get through statistics.
And then statistics took over.
But what Gary says is, you've given up too quickly on the symbolic systems.
The fact that we can do language and math and...
Logic and hypothetical reasoning, at some level, involves a symbolic understanding.
And this debate over how to create a smart AI mirrors the debate over how the mind works, where a lot of people picked up the sort of British associationist empiricist view and said, the mind's just a big statistical machine.
And people like Gary and Steven Pinker and others say, no, we also have symbolic understanding.
So the idea would be once you develop a hybrid model that has both, then we'll have machines powerful enough to destroy the world.
Great, we can look forward to that.
For what it's worth, I'm sure any technological development ultimately hits a...
They tend to hit a ceiling, right?
And it might be hard to perceive where that ceiling is.
Just because it's kind of exponential growth now doesn't mean it's not going to saturate shortly.
And again, it's weird what it can and can't do.
We still don't have robot butlers or robot gardeners.
We don't have them that can deal with the 3D world anywhere near the amount of a child.
But robot professors and podcasters, wow.
That's just around the corner.
Paul, you obviously haven't been to Japan.
My robot butler is just out of freedom.
Robot gardener was just chatting to you this morning.
I know you're kidding, but is the technology a little bit more advanced there in terms of data use?
No.
Well, Japan is famously a land of contrast because it does have areas where it seems more futuristic in the application of technology, but then it has Fax machines in every office, which are still in use.
So it's got that weird thing.
But I did notice that in media representations of Japan, there's a whole bunch of tropes that you usually get.
But I've seen one which was about a conductor.
I can't remember.
Mozart in the Jungle or something it was called.
And in one of the seasons, the thing was set in Japan.
But the storyline was around a robot.
Conductor, like taking the jobs of the conductors.
And they had a concert at a shrine, like a Western orchestra at a shrine, which just has never happened.
The whole thing, you know, the Japanese were just really into the robot conductor.
And you occasionally see these stories as well that appear on, like, they appear in The Guardian and New York, maybe not The New York Times, I hope not, but where they're saying, in Japan.
Now, funerals are being done by robots, right?
And they have the little video of the Pepper robot hitting the thing and doing the chant.
And every time I look into these, there's like one enterprising funeral company, which has found a way to get massive coverage across the media.
And I don't know if anybody's actually ever had a robot funeral performed, but it doesn't matter because just the concept is, well, it's Japan, so they probably do do it.
But I will say that in counter to all of what I've just said, in a bunch of the restaurants that I go to with my family, the kind of chain restaurants, the servers are now like kind of robot cats.
Robot cats.
They're portable trays, but they have a cat face.
And they deliver your food.
You order it on the tablet and it comes over.
And then, you know, you hit the button and the cat says...
Wow.
That's the stage that we're at.
Okay, Paul, we will let you go and we'll finish up by asking you about yourself.
But before we do, we're going to be selfish and ask you a quick one about ourselves and just see whether...
You can think of anything.
Is there anything that's occurred to you in terms of what we're missing?
Some aspects of gurus or some dynamic that's going on that we've missed?
It's fine if nothing occurs to you, but we can't help but ask.
If it's a personality failure of Matt, if you find his relaxed attitude too annoying.
He's welcomed, like a sponge.
I welcome him.
No, I enjoy the podcast.
I hear you mention certain people.
I say, oh, this is going to be a punching bag.
Because there are certain characters who are just characters.
So I'm more interested when you go after something like, I don't know, Kendi.
And I think also you should have Helen Lewis join you.
All the shows, because she's so much fun.
She's amazing.
She's great.
We can't afford her.
She's got a proper career in everything, sadly.
Okay, so how about yourself?
So there's the book, the latest book, and the associated podcast, and all your day jobs.
Are there any sort of extracurricular activities that you're preparing for or getting into next?
No, I have this TED Talk on...
Why we do perverse things.
And that, I think, is going to be my next book.
And honestly, I'm looking forward to starting to write.
I like writing books.
I mean, it's one thing having a book that just came out.
And it's fun promoting it and everything.
But it involves the ego way too much.
And you worry, oh, how many people are reading this book?
And what are people saying?
And everything.
And I like just sitting down and working at home and just kind of writing a book and taking my way through.
Nice.
See, and that's why...
You're not a very suitable guru material.
Oh, man.
What a sad way to end.
To end with an ask of why you're not guru material.
Toxic guru.
You're not toxic guru.
Have you considered getting into race science?
That's such good advice.
Race science has some strong opinion on trans issues and an unconventional take on Ukraine.
That's all I need for that.
Yes, yes.
January 6th wasn't a big deal.
Come on.
You know, they were just having fun.
I think it's just peaceful protests and the media is on a way to work.
How am I doing?
Mostly peaceful.
Mostly peaceful.
Except for the Antifa provocateurs.
Yeah, well, if you didn't know, Paul, they were planned that it was in coalition with the FBI.
They were just dressed up like crazy QAnon.
I know all of that.
I know all of that.
This is amazing career advice.
I really appreciate it.
It's been a genuine pleasure.
And all of this was essentially just to lull you in the false sense of security for the next week's episode, which is the Paul Bloom.
I'd be honored.
And I get to come back for my right of response, and I'd be so happy.
But thank you guys for having me here.
This was a thrill.
Thanks very much, Paul.
Great to meet you.
Thank you.
Nice to meet you, too.
So, that was Paul.
And that was a very entertaining, I feel with Paul that I could literally just pepper him with questions endlessly and just be entertained with the results because he knows so many topics and has interesting things to say.
So, you know, if I'm taking gurus, Matt, if I have to take a secular guru with me to a desert island...
Paul's a possible candidate.
You're going to take Paul?
All right.
But does he know how to, like, fashion a spear out of a stick?
Could he survive based on his knowledge of evolutionary principles, first principles, like Brett Weinstein?
That's a good question.
I'm not sure.
Yeah, maybe I need to factor in practical survival abilities.
So, yeah.
Yeah, but he wouldn't annoy you.
He wouldn't annoy you.
Like, you and him would not be throttling each other on the beach.
Death grip.
Not at the start.
He might reach there within a week, but yeah.
But I don't think that it would be much higher danger from any...
I think they tried to get me on the second or third night.
So yeah, Paul, you're invited on the island.
On the island.
Yeah.
Okay.
That could be the new format.
Yeah.
Instead of the garometer, we'll just go, are you invited on the island or do you get kicked off the island?
Even like reality TV.
We had it with Travis, you know, like the zombie apocalypse thing.
Do we want him in?
He's definitely in.
He's definitely in.
He's our number one pick.
Sorry, Paul.
Well, look, this is going pretty well.
So on our anti-zombie island paradise that we're building, we've now got Travis Yu and Paul Bloom.
That's our society so far.
So there's obvious gaps, but we've just started.
We'll populate the island over time.
So, yeah.
Yeah, we're building a team.
It takes time.
Probably no philosophers, though.
We'll have a sign on the island saying, no philosophers.
Yeah.
What are they going to do?
They'll just complain about everything.
And ask questions.
So, no, they're not allied.
They're not allied.
Sorry, Aaron and T. Liam.
Liam.
Neil Levy as well.
Not allowed.
It's unfortunate for them.
Now, Matt, we had some people ask for, well, we had one person ask for the wisdom of Makila to return.
I'm not quite ready for that because I haven't listened to any Makila, so I'd just be guessing.
At what nuggets she's been throwing out there.
So, yeah, we will decode Oprah and she may feature there.
We'll have to see.
It may be too much to combine, but we'll see.
We'll see.
We'll see.
Now, we do have reviews, Matt, and we've got mostly five star ones.
No, no very critical ones.
Okay.
That's okay.
Yeah, we could do that.
Yeah.
Great podcast, 100% five stars.
This is from Hola Getito.
I like the cut of this job already.
At first, I didn't like this podcast.
Mainly because of their voices.
Matt sounds exactly like the insufferable Australian Formula One driver, Daniel Ricciardo, who is someone no one would like if he wasn't a famous race car driver.
Chris says he's Irish, but his accent sounds like he was orphaned in an international airport and raised by a different sympathetic traveler every other day.
It's distractingly odd.
Despite all this, you will eventually really like this podcast.
Trust me, I'm trustworthy.
That's pretty good.
That's pretty good.
No lies detected.
Do you have Daniel Ricciardo?
Do you sound like him?
I don't know him, unfortunately.
I don't watch any sports, let alone racing.
Is racing a sport?
What is it?
I guess so.
I guess it feels like you're cheating when you have big mechanical things with wheels.
Yeah.
Like, I don't mind a wooden thing.
Like a go-kart.
Like a go-kart would be a test of...
Yeah, the one that you have to pedal.
Right?
But the Flintstones car as well would be okay.
I'm alright with bobsleds, but it's, yeah, Formula One.
Formula One, yeah.
Like jet racing.
Why do we have jet racing then?
Which jet is the fastest?
Oh, that's a good idea.
We should have jet racing.
Yeah, the crashes would be spectacular for them.
Yeah, so that's our diss on the sport of...
Formula One.
Alternative opinions, please let us know.
Now, the last one, Matt, because I don't want to read too many positive reviews, unless our heads swell to enormous proportions, but this one is from Days of Fears.
Days of Fears.
Days of Fears.
Like a person with a face for days.
Days of Fears.
He's got there.
So, that...
Oh, no, maybe Days of Fears.
Would that be it?
Not Days of Fears, but Days of Ears.
Which one do you think it is?
I can't understand what you're saying.
Like, you know...
Is there an F in there?
Days of...
Days of Fears.
That's my first one, like...
Oh, I see.
I see.
Or it could be Days of...
Look, they're both good.
Whichever one it is, it's one of those.
And their title is Love You Guys.
Five stars.
We love you two days of O-Ace.
And they said, since you were begging for reviews, you make a Norwegian's cold heart warmer.
Look at that.
Scandinavian love.
And in the Patreon map, we had another Norwegian person explained that they listened to us in the frigid, cold, outside, operating heavy machinery.
They're probably not supposed to do that.
That's so cool.
That's true.
Not recommended.
There's a warning label on it.
Yeah, that makes me happy.
You know, I've always wanted to go to Scandinavia.
I've never gotten there.
I'd go anywhere.
Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark even.
It's probably a little bit too far south.
But, you know, it's just so romantic, isn't it?
I don't know, the snow, the pine trees.
We're big in Norway.
We have interest.
There's the comedian Dag Soros over there.
He likes us.
Really?
Yeah.
They should invite me to visit.
They should invite us.
You know, I've got Norwegian heritage.
Svensson.
Svensson.
I've got Svensson in my treat.
They came over to Australia and they set up a furniture factory in Cairns.
Wasn't Dublin pillaged by the...
I think Dublin is a Viking settlement.
Yeah, it was.
It was, but not by my family.
The Svensons stayed home.
All the guys were like, hey, let's get on the boat.
Let's go over and race some hell.
And they were like, no, no.
No, no, we'll just stay here and mind the goats.
Yeah, that's it.
So maybe I'm just saying, you know, probably...
I probably have...
Viking blood that came up from the south into the northern Irish.
That's what's probably true.
I probably connected there.
You know, and I think they are, aren't they?
Like that sense of humor where I'm not very shade on the Italian country, but you know the way, aren't Scandinavians fumed for their, like, direct attitudes towards things, you know?
So now, be funny.
Do it.
That's how I imagine them.
I wonder.
Somebody could tell us maybe.
Probably.
They must be somewhat similar.
Is there a pan-Scandinavian attitude to humour?
I know the Dutch are like...
Very honest.
They don't understand why people just don't say what they mean.
And it's a thing to behold.
It's a beautiful thing in a way.
It is.
I admire them.
That's right.
It's admirable in a way.
In a way it is.
I wonder if Norwegians are the same or maybe they're very frustrated with the Dutch.
So if you people...
From Norway or Holland, can you tell us about your international relations or which Scandinavian countries are very annoyed with other Scandinavian countries?
We'll be very interested to hear those kind of details.
Well, I already know about that.
I know that the Swedish people and Norwegian people, they don't like each other, which is silly because they're basically identical.
Anyone who's not from Scandinavia can't tell the difference.
Very weird.
That sounds to me like someone saying, Irish and English, basically the same, aren't you really?
You're very close to each other.
That wouldn't go down well, Matt.
So I'm outraged on behalf of our Swedish and Norwegian listeners.
How dare you?
How dare you?
I can't do it.
Where's she from?
You Europeans, you're very touchy about these things, aren't you?
You're very touchy.
I'm like...
It's a New Zealand.
We're not.
I can admit on air and live that Australians and New Zealanders are basically indistinguishable.
They've got slightly different accents that are funny in slightly different ways.
That's about it.
Yeah, because you would, because you're an imperialist.
It's the New Zealanders who don't want your cultural oppression claiming them as a homogenous colony.
No, no, no.
I'm not sure, Matt.
They have their own traditions.
No, the colonization's going the other direction, Chris.
All the New Zealanders are coming over here and taking our jobs and our women, probably.
Well, yeah.
They are a sexy bunch, so that would make sense.
I've seen fight of the Concords.
But, yes, enough of that malarkey, Matt.
We also need to give Patreon shoutouts.
And this is...
This is just a perennial stress for me.
We've talked about alternative systems.
We've talked about a lottery system.
Something's got to give.
Something's got to give.
Let's show off your organizational skills once again.
They never get old.
Let's do it.
I'm going to shout out this week, Matt, from our conspiracy hypothesizers.
Robert Diem.
Malik Ismail.
Rosemary.
Simmon.
Christy McCormick.
Drez Tangi.
Samuel Francis.
John Hutton.
And Eric Edder.
Eric Edder.
Okay.
That is our conspiracy hypothesizers for this month.
Excellent.
Thank you.
I feel like there was a conference.
That none of us were invited to.
That came to some very strong conclusions.
And they've all circulated this list of correct answers.
I wasn't at this conference.
This kind of shit makes me think, man.
It's almost like someone is being paid.
Like, when you hear these George Soros stories, he's trying to destroy the country from within.
We are not going to advance conspiracy theories.
We will advance conspiracy hypotheses.
Yeah, you will.
Um, no, Matt.
We have revolutionary geniuses.
And for that, we have...
We already called him out before, but he's thematically relevant today.
Kai Michael Hayes Martin Unland Elioretta
Nick McDonald, Eric Beiler, Nancy Carrozza-Caradonna, Tom McInerney.
Tom McInerney.
Why can't I pronounce that?
And Tina Matthews.
That's who we have for the revolutionary geniuses this week.
Great.
Keep being revolutionary, guys.
I'm usually running.
I don't know.
70 or 90 distinct paradigms simultaneously all the time.
70 or 90. And the idea is not to try to collapse them down to a single master paradigm.
I'm someone who's a true polymath.
I'm all over the place.
But my main claim to fame, if you'd like, in academia is that I founded the field of evolutionary consumption.
Now, that's just a guess.
And it could easily be wrong.
But it also could not be wrong.
The fact that it's even plausible is stunning.
It never fails.
It never fails.
But someone needs to tell Gad that being a polymath doesn't mean that you just weigh in on whatever the current thing is.
You actually have to be good at it.
Yeah, that's the crucial distinguishing feature of polymaths.
But Gad didn't get that memo, I'm afraid.
So, you know, what can he do, Matt?
What can he do?
Now!
Onto the Galaxy Brain Gurus, the most stress-inducing category to find in our horrific spreadsheets.
But nonetheless, oh, and I also want to shout out Mike and Lars Vinh.
Lars Vinh.
I'm not entirely sure.
I'm pretty sure Mike is a Galaxy Brain Guru.
Lars Vinh, maybe, but in any case...
He's getting a shout-out here because I've remembered.
And Martian Stan.
Martian Stan.
That's another Galaxy Brain guru.
Nodg Matt.
We definitely shouted out Nodg before.
And we shouted out Chelsea Tremblay.
But again, they keep coming up.
Zed is also there in the mix.
Old Zeddy.
Now...
Adam Session might be the 100th time he got shouted out.
But there he is.
He's just reappeared.
Matthew Bryan, what's he doing there?
I shouted him out.
Definitely shouted him out.
Loki, Theo Donald, Paul Wilkie, Bradley G. Wall, and Jester.
Jester, a lot of you sound very familiar.
Suspiciously familiar.
I'm clicking the little button.
Why is it?
Anyway, okay, so there we go.
Galaxy be encouraged.
We still thank you, even though you stressed me out finding you in the spreadsheet, but thank you all.
Thank you.
We tried to warn people.
Yeah.
Like what was coming, how it was going to come in, the fact that it was everywhere and in everything.
Considering me tribal just doesn't make any sense.
I have no tribe.
I'm in exile.
Think again, sunshine.
Yeah.
Well, there we are, Matt.
Another decoding and interview done.
Next up, Oprah Winfrey, a big figure in the guru constellation, a classic guru in many respects, and also forthcoming AI guru, as we mentioned, and a possible return to Weinstein world for an out-of-this-world episode.
Should we say?
Out of this world, eh?
Yeah.
Just keep looking at the skies, Chris.
Keep watching the skies.
I want to believe.
But yeah, we're going back to them.
So look forward to that.
And yeah, it's nice to see you all again.
We'll see you again.
If the disc allows, if the gin permits it, we'll meet again.
