The Art of Manliness - How Moral Grandstanding Is Ruining Our Public Discourse

00:00:00.000 Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.

00:00:10.740 It's hard not to notice how heated and divided our public discourse has gotten, especially

00:00:14.340 online. People insult and vilify each other, take un-nuanced positions, and seem to be

00:00:18.960 competing as to who can seem the most committed to a cause or the most outraged about an issue.

00:00:23.140 You may have called some of this behavior virtue signaling, but my guest today says

00:00:26.240 that it's better described as moral grandstanding, and he studied the phenomenon, not in terms

00:00:30.120 of eye-roll-inducing antidotes, but through the lens of both philosophy and empirical research.

00:00:34.360 His name is Brandon Warmke, and he's professor of philosophy and the co-author of the book

00:00:37.760 Grandstanding, The Use and Abuse of Moral Talk. Brandon begins by defining moral grandstanding

00:00:42.500 as the act of engaging in moral talk for self-promotion and status, and explains why he thinks moral

00:00:46.880 grandstanding is a better term for this behavior than virtue signaling. We then get into the

00:00:51.060 difference between prestige and dominant status, and how moral grandstanding can be used to

00:00:54.660 obtain both types. We then discuss why it's tricky to know if you or someone else is engaging in

00:00:58.340 moral grandstanding, before turning to whether there's a personality type or side of the political

00:01:02.380 spectrum that's more likely to grandstand. Brandon then delves into why moral grandstanding isn't

00:01:06.860 just an annoyance on social media, but comes with real cost to society. And we enter conversation

00:01:10.780 with what we can do about moral grandstanding. After the show's over, check out our show notes

00:01:14.800 at aom.is slash moral grandstanding.

00:01:27.040 All right, Brandon Warmke, welcome to the show.

00:01:29.480 Hey, thanks for having me.

00:01:30.660 So you are a philosopher, and you, no, literally, you are a PhD in philosophy. You specialize in moral,

00:01:39.120 social, and political philosophy. And you co-authored a book with a guy named Justin Tosi

00:01:43.520 called Grandstanding, The Use and Abuse of Moral Talk. And it's all about moral grandstanding.

00:01:50.800 So let's talk about those definitions. How do you guys define moral grandstanding? What is that?

00:01:56.420 The simplest way to think about, first of all, thanks for having me. It's a pleasure. I've been

00:02:00.060 reading your blog for, I think, since the beginning. So this is actually really cool for me.

00:02:04.080 Well, thanks, man.

00:02:04.600 So the simplest way to think about moral grandstanding, if you were to put it on a

00:02:09.800 bumper sticker, is that moral grandstanding is the use of moral talk for self-promotion. So

00:02:17.040 people who get on Twitter, or a cable news channel, or even maybe around their friends,

00:02:22.780 and they make a contribution to some conversation about morality and politics,

00:02:27.620 largely because they want people to be impressed with them. They say something about immigration,

00:02:34.600 or about COVID, not so much to say something true or to persuade, but because they want

00:02:41.140 recognition. They want to impress people with their moral status. And so, you know,

00:02:46.420 grandstanders can say all kinds of stuff. I mean, they might say something like, you know,

00:02:51.860 as someone who has long fought for the poor, I find all these proposals to eliminate rent control

00:02:58.080 laws disgusting. If you think these are even worth listening to, you don't care about poverty in this

00:03:03.580 country, hashtag do better, right? You can imagine someone saying like that, saying something like

00:03:07.380 that. And, you know, as we'll see in a minute, just saying something like that doesn't count as

00:03:11.800 grandstanding. Grandstanding involves wanting to say something because you want to impress people.

00:03:19.320 You want to seek status.

00:03:21.200 Okay. All right. So it's moral talk plus seeking status. I'm sure people listening to this description

00:03:26.840 are thinking, well, that's virtue signaling. That's a word that's come to, you know,

00:03:30.180 has arisen, become part of the common vocabulary, I'd say in the past five years.

00:03:35.560 How would you all differentiate moral grandstanding from virtue signaling? Or is there even a difference?

00:03:41.520 So this is a great question. For all practical purposes, I think that what people often mean

00:03:47.700 when they talk about virtue signaling is just what we mean when we talk about grandstanding. I think

00:03:53.060 they have the same basic idea in mind, which is people contributing to discussion about politics

00:03:58.960 in order to show off their moral bona fides to try to impress others. However, I have to say,

00:04:05.720 so we started, Justin Tosi and I started writing about this stuff in 2014. We were both PhD students

00:04:13.380 at the University of Arizona. And around that time, you know, looking at Facebook or Twitter,

00:04:20.140 it just looked to us like a lot of people started using social media differently. It was almost like

00:04:27.280 they were releasing like corporate press releases, like I stand against this, I'm for this. And at the

00:04:33.940 time in 2014, the only term that we knew of to describe this sort of behavior was moral grandstanding.

00:04:41.140 I mean, President Obama had accused Republicans of it, Republicans had accused Obama of it. And the

00:04:48.180 term actually goes back to the 1800s. It was a term that originates from baseball, where, you know,

00:04:54.680 a player would like make some impressive catch on the outfield and sort of like roll around and played

00:04:59.400 the grandstands. And so these, these were the grandstand players, these sort of showy,

00:05:03.260 showy baseball players. So the term has been in existence for a long time. And so when we started

00:05:08.500 writing about grandstanding in our philosophical work, that's all we knew. Now, flash forward to about

00:05:15.720 2015 or 16, this new term virtue signaling, you know, it's sort of weird, it feels like it's been

00:05:21.740 with us longer than it has, but it's a relatively sort of new term in public discourse, this term

00:05:27.540 virtue signaling came into prominence. And for whatever reason, I think because it kind of sounds

00:05:33.280 smart or sounds cool or something, that term has taken prominence. And so, you know, often when we talk

00:05:40.380 about our work, people say, oh, you mean virtue signaling? And we have to say, yes. So, however,

00:05:47.220 I have to say, I actually do think that virtue signaling is not the best term to describe this

00:05:56.040 sort of behavior. And I'll just briefly mention a couple of reasons why this is why we think this is

00:06:02.180 so. So if you look at how psychologists and biologists or economists use the term

00:06:09.940 signaling, you can mean a couple different things by it. So one way to signal something is to

00:06:16.000 intentionally try to get people to think something about you. So I recently turned 40, Brett, and you

00:06:22.300 can imagine, you know, I go through a midlife crisis, and I buy a fiberglass speedboat in a, you know,

00:06:28.180 convertible, and I, you know, I start driving around town, and I want to signal something about me,

00:06:33.540 right? I'm still young. And that's something that I can do more or less consciously. I'm doing it

00:06:38.980 deliberately in full awareness of what I'm doing. That's one kind of signaling. But there's another

00:06:44.420 kind of signaling that people talk about. And that happens below the level of awareness. So think about

00:06:50.400 like, you know, female chimpanzees, their rear ends, like swell up when they're when they're most 1.00

00:06:57.940 fertile. And that's a signal to the male chimps that it's time, it's time to get to business. But 0.99

00:07:05.420 that signal is not something that that chimpanzees are intentionally doing. They're not, they're not

00:07:10.520 saying, okay, activate, you know, the butt signal. That's not what they're doing. It just happens

00:07:14.560 naturally. And yet, it's still a signal. Okay, so why do I say all this? Because there's this

00:07:19.860 ambiguity built into virtue signaling, people often say things like, well, what's wrong with virtue

00:07:25.080 signaling? What's wrong simply being seen doing something virtuous or good? And we have no problem

00:07:33.500 with people merely being seen doing something good. That's not necessarily a problem. Our complaint

00:07:39.700 is when people use public discourse intentionally, deliberately to show off how good they think they

00:07:45.700 are. And so virtue signaling, it's just ambiguous between these two different ways of saying something

00:07:53.180 about yourself. And so for that reasons, and that, you know, that that reason and others that we go

00:07:58.100 into in the book, we think that virtue signaling opens itself up to all kinds of confusion. Now,

00:08:02.980 we're not going to get people to stop using that term that that ship has sailed. But we do think that

00:08:07.880 a lot of the frustration or the confusion about the term virtue signaling, it's big, it's become

00:08:14.440 conscripted into the culture wars. Those are good reasons to talk about grandstanding because it avoids

00:08:20.500 all these kinds of ambiguities.

00:08:23.160 And also, moral grandstanding, you all focus on moral talk. So it's not just behavior, because you can

00:08:28.920 see, you know, someone who, I don't know, drives a Prius, for example. And so like, well, that guy's

00:08:34.900 virtue signaling. You guys say, well, maybe, maybe not. If they talk about it and make a big deal about it on

00:08:41.300 social media with their friends, that's moral grandstanding because there's like talk involved, whether

00:08:45.400 that's talking to someone face to face or typing out text.

00:08:49.680 That's right. Yeah, that's a nice point. I mean, one of the things we point out in the book is

00:08:53.120 grandstanding just refers to your contributions to public discourse. But as you rightly know,

00:08:59.280 you can, you can virtue signal simply with your non-linguistic behavior, you know, as you, as you

00:09:06.720 said, you know, driving a speedboat or, you know, buying a Cadillac or something, those things can signal

00:09:12.180 something about me without ever uttering a word. And because we're really interested in how people

00:09:17.380 talk about morality and politics, that's another reason to avoid this talk about signaling.

00:09:22.360 All right. So moral grandstanding, there's moral talk, and it's done with the desire for recognition

00:09:27.200 or status. We want people to think something about us, some, some, particularly something good about us.

00:09:32.460 And in the book, you talk about, there are two ways we can gain status. There's prestige and

00:09:37.180 dominance. So I guess I think it'd be helpful to talk about the difference between the two

00:09:40.940 types of status, prestige and dominance, and then how moral grandstanding can allow you to achieve

00:09:46.380 those two different types of status.

00:09:48.980 Good. So one way to think about grandstanding is that grandstanders are in it for the status,

00:09:55.720 right? They're in it because they're trying to promote their own brand or promote their

00:09:59.960 reputation, make themselves look good. And what psychologists tell us is that there's two main

00:10:04.840 ways to try to gain social status. I mean, we are status-seeking creatures. Like

00:10:10.880 it or not, this is just what homo sapiens do. I mean, it's up there with like the drives for sex 0.96

00:10:17.600 and food and relationships. And, you know, status-seeking is just one of these things we do.

00:10:23.760 It's very important to us. And one way to seek status is by seeking what psychologists call

00:10:29.900 prestige. And a very simple way to think about prestige is that when you have high prestige,

00:10:34.880 people look up to you. And they might look up to you because of your talent, right? So you're a world-class

00:10:40.100 tennis player. They might look up to you because of your knowledge. Maybe you're a Nobel laureate

00:10:44.720 in, you know, chemistry or something, or they look up to you because of your wealth. You know,

00:10:49.960 you were able to, you know, create something that lots of people want. And so when you're high

00:10:54.760 prestige, people look up to you. And so that's, that's one way to gain status. Another way to gain

00:11:00.360 status is a little darker, and that is by dominance. And whereas with prestige, when you

00:11:07.460 have it, people look up to you. When you have dominant status, people fear you. And this might

00:11:14.540 be, you know, with our ancestors, this, this might've been because you were physically imposing.

00:11:19.420 I would not have had much dominant status in our ancient ancestors, but some people, you know,

00:11:25.580 Shaquille O'Neal or someone would have had a massive dominant status because they're physically

00:11:30.580 imposing. Now, what does this have to do with grandstanding? Well, if you think about what

00:11:34.400 a lot of people do online, just think about what happens on Twitter or cable news. Some people use

00:11:42.420 moral talk because they want prestige. They want people to look up to them for their moral insight.

00:11:49.100 They want to be thought of as morally enlightened, somehow morally special, some kind of moral

00:11:56.640 exemplar. They want to be seen often as being among the angels. They're really on the right side of

00:12:02.060 history. So, so some grandstanders and in our, some of our social scientific empirical work,

00:12:08.380 what we've discovered is that among the grandstanders, the grandstanders who seek prestige are the more

00:12:13.700 common sort. They want to be seen as, you know, really morally impressive, but there is this darker

00:12:19.420 form of grandstanding where people grandstand for dominance. They'll use morality as a cudgel to 0.99

00:12:27.220 shame or humiliate doxing people, you know, maybe de-anonymizing someone on Twitter, posting their

00:12:35.240 phone numbers or their emails. And they do this for status, right? They want to push, you know,

00:12:41.240 their enemies down and they want to look impressive and powerful to their in-group.

00:12:47.040 And so one helpful way to think about grandstanding is that people are using morality to seek status.

00:12:53.520 And so you can think of this in terms of prestige and you can think of it in terms of dominance.

00:12:59.040 Okay. And what do you guys have done research on this? Does, does grandstanding actually work

00:13:03.860 as a way to get, get status, either prestige or dominance?

00:13:07.260 Well, I'll be honest. We don't know from our studies so far, the extent to which grandstanding

00:13:14.440 is successful. And by successful, I just mean that you actually get people to think things about you.

00:13:21.460 And, you know, you can think of this in many ways, like bragging. I mean, you might think bragging

00:13:27.140 sometimes works, sometimes it doesn't. And I think the same thing is true with grandstanding. I think

00:13:33.000 sometimes it does work. Sometimes you are able to convince people and sometimes you're not. And

00:13:38.400 we think there are two main factors that go into whether you're successful at grandstanding. One

00:13:43.400 is you're more likely to be successful in your grandstanding among your in-group, among people

00:13:49.000 who vaguely share your values, like you think you're on the right side and so on. The best,

00:13:54.680 the best illustration of this, I think is a few years ago, you or some of your listeners may recall

00:14:00.240 at the Golden Globes. Meryl Streep did a little speech shortly after the election of Donald Trump.

00:14:08.620 And she said, you know, her voice, she'd lost her voice and she begged their forgiveness and pardon

00:14:14.360 because she was screaming in lamentations and sorrow all week because of the election.

00:14:20.760 And if you looked at the responses of this, so I don't know if that was grandstanding or not,

00:14:26.120 it's hard to tell. But let's just suppose it was for the sake of discussion. The people in that room,

00:14:31.860 the Hollywood people and on Twitter thought this was like the bravest thing. This was amazing. This

00:14:37.780 was beautiful, speaking truth to power and so on. And then you look at, you know, maybe Republican or

00:14:43.720 right-leaning media and you saw, oh, she's just grandstanding. She's, you know, of course,

00:14:48.800 she's just hamming this up and making a big deal. Of course, she wasn't screaming in lamentation.

00:14:53.500 She's just trying to impress people. And so you really saw this divergent reaction. And so I do

00:14:58.960 think that your grandstanding is generally more successful among people who like you or like your

00:15:04.760 values. Your grandstanding is also going to be more successful if it matches roughly what people

00:15:10.660 already think of you. In other words, if your grandstanding is inconsistent with what people

00:15:15.920 already believe about you, they're less likely to buy it. And the best example of this is Harvey

00:15:20.720 Weinstein a few years ago. So Harvey Weinstein, this Hollywood mogul, you know, it came out that

00:15:26.280 he had allegedly assaulted and, you know, dozens of women over the years. And yet throughout his

00:15:32.660 career, he had been propping up and talking about feminist causes and how important women were to

00:15:37.940 the Hollywood industry. And even after he got caught, so he released this statement where he said,

00:15:43.800 you know, he's going to start a scholarship for women and he's going to do it for his mom. And I think a lot

00:15:48.940 of people across the political divide thought this was just blatant grandstanding. And the interesting

00:15:54.180 thing is that no one bought it. Like no one thought, oh, I guess he does care about women.

00:15:59.120 Why? Because it was inconsistent with his other behavior that had come to light. And so I think

00:16:05.440 grandstanding is like one of these, it's like lying, it's like bragging. Sometimes it works,

00:16:08.960 sometimes it doesn't. Very, I hesitate to use the word skillful, but very skillful grandstanders

00:16:15.500 know how to raise their status, at least with their end group.

00:16:19.400 All right. So I'm sure people are listening to this and they, okay, grandstanding, it's moral talk

00:16:22.920 with the desire to seek recognition. But people will be like, well, how do I know if I'm, or if I

00:16:29.360 am, or if someone else is grandstanding or not? Like I could be talking this moral talk because I

00:16:34.840 actually believe in this cause. I'm not grandstanding. So, I mean, how do you guys figure that out

00:16:40.760 between the difference between actual legitimate moral talk or whether it's being driven by this

00:16:45.800 status drive?

00:16:47.720 Yeah, it's tough. So our hearts are a mystery, even to ourselves. It's often difficult to know,

00:16:56.240 you know, we find ourselves doing something and say, well, why did I do that? Like, well,

00:16:59.460 I told this to myself at the time, but was that my real motivation? I think that happens to us quite

00:17:04.680 frequently. So it's true that our motivations for why we do the things we do, not just with

00:17:11.880 grandstanding, but just in general are often opaque to us. So, you know, think about, you know, you're

00:17:16.680 on a date, you know, maybe a first date with someone and you order a salad or you order something

00:17:22.620 healthy, let's say, you know, iceberg lettuce. Now you might order a salad because you want to impress

00:17:29.160 a date who wants to, you know, who happens to be a vegetarian, but you might also have this

00:17:34.340 motivation like, oh yeah, but you know, it's also healthy. It's good for me. And so you, you know,

00:17:38.060 you, you order the salad. And so in that case, you have these mixed motivations. There's lots of

00:17:43.180 desires that go into doing the things that we do. And I think that's just part of life.

00:17:48.000 Okay. So you can have multiple desires then.

00:17:50.360 That's right. Yeah, sure. This happens all the time, you know. So with grandstanding, you know,

00:17:56.060 you might find yourself saying something because you want to seek status or impress others,

00:18:03.520 but also because maybe you really do believe what you're saying. And, and so on our view,

00:18:10.120 what makes something grandstanding is the strength of your desire to impress other people. If you're

00:18:17.140 really strongly motivated to impress other people, that's going to be grandstanding. Now you may not

00:18:24.260 be aware of this. I mean, this is just a tricky part of our psychology. And I, but I think this

00:18:28.620 is true with lots of parts of our lives. When you think about bragging, sometimes you might say

00:18:33.040 something that's a little self-serving or braggy in the moment, you don't really realize it. And

00:18:37.840 you're laying at bed at night and you think, oh man, I was a jerk. Like that was really self-serving. 1.00

00:18:42.260 And so you realize what your true motivations perhaps were. And so it's very difficult to know,

00:18:49.520 even among our, you know, when you're reflecting on ourselves, whether we're grandstanding or not,

00:18:55.460 we do give this test in the book. It's a kind of rule of thumb for determining whether someone,

00:19:03.480 even yourself is grandstanding. And that is, would I be disappointed if I said this thing and no one

00:19:09.860 walked away thinking I was morally special, morally enlightened? If you think you would be disappointed

00:19:17.340 if no one thought that, chances are you're grandstanding. So yeah, you're, I mean, it's,

00:19:23.940 look, it's very difficult to tell in our own case and it's even harder to tell. I mean,

00:19:28.440 we can talk about this too. It's harder to tell in others. And this is why, you know,

00:19:33.260 it's very impractical and probably unfair to go around just calling people grandstanders and

00:19:37.640 accusing them of it. Yeah. We'll talk about that in a bit. You know, this idea of multiple desires

00:19:41.760 driving behavior and it's sort of mixed in with like, it seems like a sense of altruism,

00:19:47.580 but there's also some self-interest involved. It reminds me of the founding fathers,

00:19:52.040 particularly George Washington. So I think the story we tell ourselves in America as Americans,

00:19:56.580 like, well, these guys, they were all, it's all about freedom. They wanted rights to govern

00:20:01.200 themselves, taxation without representation, all that stuff. But I interviewed a guy a couple of years

00:20:06.560 ago who wrote about the concept of American honor. And he made this interesting case that

00:20:12.040 that was part of the rhetoric that, you know, like the founding fathers really,

00:20:16.420 they believed in that, but there was like some mixture of self-interest. And he talked about

00:20:20.440 George Washington. The thing that really, for a long time, we always forget that George Washington

00:20:25.680 was an officer in the British military, right? The thing that turned him was he finally realized he

00:20:33.260 would never be able to advance in rank because he wasn't considered a full British, like he was a 1.00

00:20:38.420 colonist. And once he realized that, he's like, I'm done with these guys. Sayonara. I'm going to,

00:20:44.680 I'm going to start fighting against them because I'm not going to be able to get that status or that

00:20:47.720 honor that I want. So there was sort of this mixture of, yeah, it was altruistic. He was fighting

00:20:53.120 for higher ideals, but there's also, yeah, he wanted, he had some self-interest as well.

00:20:57.940 Yeah, that's, that's a, that's a great story. I do think we often have a rosy view, a too rosy view

00:21:03.460 of many important historical figures or moral reformers. I mean, I think a lot of these people

00:21:09.940 certainly had good motivations, but you know, they also, people want to be famous. People want to be

00:21:15.100 liked. People want to be accepted and have status. I think this explains a lot. I mean, so I'm an academic

00:21:20.320 and if you look at what a lot of academics say about morality and politics, I often wonder,

00:21:25.840 you know, do you really, do you really believe that? Or is this an easy way to fit in and seek

00:21:31.700 status and conform? Because that's just the, that's often the path of least resistance. And so,

00:21:39.060 you know, I think the takeaway from thinking about our psychologies is we are, we are complex and

00:21:46.180 mysterious creatures, even to ourselves. And we can grandstand or brag or status seek,

00:21:53.460 you know, or even deceive often without even in the moment knowing that we're doing it.

00:21:58.760 Is there a type of person who is more likely to engage in moral grandstanding?

00:22:03.220 Yes. Narcissists. It's probably not a surprise. So, you know, we've done over the past three or four

00:22:10.500 years with the psychologist, Joshua Grubbs, who works on narcissism and entitlement. One thing we found

00:22:18.460 is that people who are highly motivated to grandstand are also very likely to be narcissists. And there's

00:22:27.040 a few different kinds of narcissism. One kind is what's called narcissistic extroversion. And these

00:22:33.920 are people who, I'm sure you've met people like this, are always talking about their accomplishments.

00:22:39.380 They're kind of, look at me, look at what I did. I'm so great. And narcissistic extroverts are very

00:22:45.880 likely to grandstand for prestige. Again, this is not that surprising. There's also a form of

00:22:53.140 narcissism called narcissistic antagonism. And these are people who are much less pleasant to be around.

00:23:00.620 They tend to have what's called a darker sort of personality traits. You know, they seek power,

00:23:07.120 they dominate others. They want to bring themselves up by pushing others down. And again, as you might

00:23:12.340 imagine, narcissistic antagonists are highly correlated with grandstanding for dominance.

00:23:19.680 And so, you know, chances are, if you meet someone who's a narcissist, or if you are yourself a

00:23:25.960 narcissist, you know, you're probably going to be, you know, to the extent that you're talking about

00:23:30.660 morality and politics, you're probably grandstanding. But there's also some interesting political

00:23:35.920 correlations. Now, as it turns out, at least as far as our research goes, roughly speaking,

00:23:42.820 people on the right and people on the left are no more likely to grandstand than the other. So,

00:23:50.500 you know, if you're a conservative, you are no more or less likely to grandstand than someone who's a

00:23:56.220 progressive or liberal. However, as it turns out, what we did find is that the more extreme you are,

00:24:04.100 in other words, the further to the right that you see yourself, or the further to the left that you

00:24:09.960 see yourself, you are more likely to grandstand. So, you know, if you think of it in terms of a U

00:24:15.560 curve, people that are roughly in the middle, or center right, or center left, are probably not

00:24:20.940 doing all that much grandstanding. The people at the extremes, the people that you do see on Twitter,

00:24:26.780 on cable news, or Facebook, the people that are on the extremes are contributing a lot of the

00:24:32.060 grandstanding. And so, you know, we do think that there are some problems here with political

00:24:38.040 polarization, and grandstanders are likely to be at the far ends of the spectrum. And the problem is

00:24:44.560 that these people are the most vocal about politics. I mean, people who are centrist,

00:24:50.220 center left, center right, these are not typically people who are spending lots of time on social media

00:24:56.300 talking about politics. And so, the problem is our discourse gets dominated by people at the edges.

00:25:02.380 And, you know, even to make matters worse, these people are often just grandstanding.

00:25:06.700 We're going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors.

00:25:11.200 And now back to the show. You also take a deep dive into the way people can engage in moral

00:25:17.400 grandstanding. And you identify five ways. Let's walk through some of those. Like,

00:25:21.060 what are they? And like, what do they look like? So, one form that grandstanding can take is what

00:25:27.480 we call piling on. And I'm sure most people are familiar with this phenomenon. So, someone says

00:25:34.660 something or does something, maybe it's wrong, maybe it's very wrong, maybe it's a slight, you know,

00:25:41.080 moral mistake, or maybe they're totally innocent, doesn't really matter for the purposes of piling on.

00:25:45.320 But what tends to happen is an avalanche of criticism, humiliation, shaming. And what happens

00:25:54.820 when you pile on is, what I do is I add my two cents simply to show that I'm on the right side,

00:26:03.840 right? So, I want to be seen as criticizing this alleged wrongdoer. I want to be seen as taking a

00:26:10.800 hard stand. And so, you know, maybe a million other people have already given this person,

00:26:16.460 you know, their comeuppance, but I'm going to be a million and one. Not because I think this person

00:26:20.760 really deserves all of this abuse, but because I want to, I want people to see that I don't tolerate

00:26:27.840 this, that I'm a good person, that I will punish wrongdoers as I see them, and so on. And so,

00:26:34.300 piling on often has this negative effect. There is also this sort of positive piling on, which is,

00:26:40.520 you know, maybe someone does something like a low, you know, they make a low-cost effort to take a

00:26:47.100 stand on something, and then you get a million comments like, oh, this was so brave, you know,

00:26:51.400 this is the most loving act I've ever seen, you know, you are, you know, you're my hero.

00:26:58.340 And so, you can also pile on in this positive sense where what you're doing is you want to be seen as

00:27:03.780 on the side of angels, recognizing the moral goodness among us.

00:27:07.920 So, that's one way that people often grandstand is what will be called piling on.

00:27:12.800 Another form of grandstanding is ramping up. And ramping up is a dynamic that happens in the

00:27:20.640 context of a conversation between often multiple people. So, you know, and it takes the form of a

00:27:27.600 moral arms race where people are trying to outdo one another. So, you know, Brett, you might say,

00:27:33.980 oh, you know, the senator's behavior was bad. She should be censured. And I say, are you kidding?

00:27:39.740 If you really cared about justice, you know, the senator should be, you know, kicked out of the

00:27:45.580 Senate and, you know, never hold office again. Do better, Brett. And then a third person chimes in

00:27:51.680 and says, Warmke, you know, I'm disgusted if you, you know, that you would tolerate this. If you 0.68

00:27:58.180 really, you know, cared about the poor and justice, you know, you'd think the senator should be arrested.

00:28:03.940 She should go to jail or something like that. So, you've probably seen these kinds of dynamics where

00:28:08.400 you start having a conversation and then, you know, 10 comments later, someone's a Nazi or someone's a

00:28:14.620 fascist. And so, there's a kind of one-upmanship that discourse often takes, and that's because

00:28:20.040 people try to outdo each other. You know, I might think that I really care deeply about the poor,

00:28:25.780 but if someone chimes in and says, you know, we should have a $10 minimum wage, I either have to

00:28:31.460 let that person get the credit or I have to outdo them. And I can say, are you kidding? Of course,

00:28:37.480 it should be $20 or, you know, $50 an hour or something. And so, ramping up turns moral discourse

00:28:45.760 into an arms race. A third form the grandstanding can often take is what we call trumping up. And I

00:28:51.220 have to say, we named this before the previous president, so there's really no relation here.

00:28:58.460 Trumping up in terms of, like, trumping up charges. So, someone does something innocent or maybe

00:29:03.600 slightly morally wrong. And then the grandstander concocts, you know, a massive moral problem.

00:29:11.000 You know, so, you know, you often see people make minor missteps with their language,

00:29:15.600 and this has turned into a crime against humanity. And what that signals about the grandstander is

00:29:21.660 that they're very sensitive. You know, what passes as morally innocent doesn't pass as innocent for me.

00:29:29.260 I'll stand up for justice. You know, I have a more sensitive moral compass than the hoi polloi.

00:29:35.180 Often grandstanding takes the form of, and this is the fourth form, what we call excessive emotions.

00:29:41.120 So, people will emotionally react to things far out of proportion to the wrongness of them.

00:29:48.880 So, often this occurs with outrage. You know, so, Brett makes a, you know, he says he uses the wrong

00:29:56.420 word, you know, or does something in a podcast. And then, you know, you have thousands of people

00:30:02.580 on Twitter. I don't know, I don't know how much abuse you've gotten on Twitter, Brett, but

00:30:06.880 someone says something on Twitter, and they're just outraged, and can't believe what you've done.

00:30:12.480 And people do this because outrage is a reliable signal of moral conviction. The more outraged you are,

00:30:18.920 the more things morally affect you. And so, when you're outraged about everything,

00:30:23.660 the signal is supposed to be, wow, this person really cares about morality. This person really

00:30:28.140 cares about justice. They're deeply affected and deeply sensitive to these things. And then,

00:30:32.720 finally, a fifth form of grandstanding is what we call dismissiveness. So, one way to signal that

00:30:37.820 you're morally superior to others is just by telling them that you aren't even worth talking to.

00:30:44.000 Like, if you can't see that the minimum wage should be $50 an hour, then I'm not engaging with

00:30:51.700 you any further. Go read a book, right? So, there's a kind of dismissiveness that grandstanding often

00:30:58.040 takes. And that's just a grandstander asserting themselves as a moral expert over others without

00:31:05.200 any argument, without any evidence, but just declaring it. I think all of them tap into basic

00:31:12.940 psychological, fairly well-understood psychological dynamics that we engage in with each other. And

00:31:20.540 that's mostly just having to do with social comparison. You know, we think of ourselves as

00:31:26.140 occupying a certain place socially. And when that gets disrupted by seeing someone challenge our

00:31:34.400 place in the moral hierarchy, you know, it's very tempting for us to reassert ourselves.

00:31:40.580 So, you delve in deep to the cost of moral grandstanding to us as a society. You mentioned

00:31:46.720 one earlier, polarization is one. You see that with the ramping up. But how else can moral

00:31:52.620 grandstanding have a cost on our culture and our society?

00:31:56.500 So, one cost, as you point out, is polarization. Polarization gets talked about a lot these days,

00:32:02.380 and there's a lot of confusion about what polarization is. Is it even happening? The basic

00:32:07.980 idea is polarization occurs about morality and politics when groups of people get pushed

00:32:14.340 further apart from one another. And there's a couple of different ways that you could be

00:32:18.620 pushed apart. So, scientists talk about what's called affective polarization, which is basically

00:32:25.160 just how you feel about the out group. So, if you're a Republican, it's how you feel about

00:32:30.620 Democrats and vice versa. And so, affective polarization refers to an increasing animosity

00:32:37.040 or hatred to people on the other side. And there is some pretty strong evidence that affective

00:32:42.080 polarization has been increasing over the past 50 years. People just have come to dislike and perhaps

00:32:48.200 even hate the other side more than they used to. There's another form of polarization called

00:32:54.120 ideological polarization, which doesn't have to do with your emotions or your emotional reactions to

00:33:00.220 the other side. It actually has to do with your beliefs. So, what passed for a respectable view,

00:33:07.400 I'll just pick at random, the left, is now, you know, basically fascism. In fact, I went to a

00:33:13.540 baseball, a Cleveland Indians game yesterday with, I will not name his name, but a faculty member at

00:33:18.840 Harvard. And, you know, he describes himself as a center-left liberal. And he says, many of my grad

00:33:26.560 students basically think I'm a fascist now. And so, there's a kind of ideological polarization where

00:33:33.000 the views that would have kept you in good standing with your, you know, with your political group 10

00:33:38.300 years ago now cast you out into the darkness. And so, there's a kind of pushing apart of what people

00:33:44.520 actually believe or at least report to believe about their political views. Now, what does this have to do

00:33:50.540 with grandstanding? On our view, grandstanding plays a role in pushing people apart. And we published

00:33:58.460 some empirical work last year that suggests not just a correlation between grandstanding and

00:34:04.340 polarization, but a causal link that the more grandstanding there is, the further we push each

00:34:10.820 other apart. And here's one very simple way of thinking about that. You know, remember the ramping up

00:34:16.100 dynamic where people are engaging in a moral arms race. And, you know, one way to polarize is simply

00:34:24.420 to keep outdoing each other so that we eventually end up with a much more radical view than we had

00:34:32.480 before. And this happens on both the right and the left. And it's like, how do we get here? Well,

00:34:38.080 one mechanism is this kind of discourse dynamic where people are pushed to extremes in order to show off

00:34:43.900 how morally pure or how morally committed they are. Now, you might think, well, what's the problem

00:34:48.860 with polarization? I mean, merely to be polarized, merely to be, as it were, radical does not mean

00:34:55.920 you're wrong. The problem is that status-seeking is not a reliable way to arrive at the truth of the

00:35:04.900 matter. So, there's a, you know, one question is, what's the best policy? There's another question,

00:35:10.740 what's the policy such that if I said it on Twitter, people would retweet me?

00:35:15.180 And those might be two very different answers. I mean, the truth of the matter may not be popular,

00:35:20.100 it may not be something that, you know, that gets you attention. And so, status-seeking and

00:35:25.580 grandstanding is just not a good way of arriving at the truth about these things. And so, that's one

00:35:33.240 problem with polarization that's driven by grandstanding, is that it not only pushes us further apart,

00:35:38.780 is that it pushes us further apart in a way that's unlikely to help us arrive at good policy or the

00:35:46.340 fact of the matter. So, that's one thing we talk about, is how grandstanding has this social cost,

00:35:53.500 and that's polarization. I'll just mention two more briefly. One is cynicism. So, I think a lot of people

00:36:00.800 are cynical about public discourse. There's lots of reasons for that, obviously. But, you know, we think

00:36:04.900 one reason is that people have spent a little bit of time on social media or watching cable news or

00:36:10.440 listening to politicians, and they think, these people are just promoting their brand. You know,

00:36:15.940 they're saying what sounds good. It's almost banal. It's trite to say this. But, you know,

00:36:21.140 politicians say things to get elected. Are they true? Well, that's a different question. But they're

00:36:26.420 saying things to get elected. And once enough people come to see that people are engaging in public

00:36:32.520 discourse because they're trying to manage their reputations, promote their brand, make themselves

00:36:39.620 look enlightened, then people say, look, I don't want to be a part of this. Discourse becomes a nasty

00:36:46.120 practice of people just dunking on each other. And so, many moderate people, moderate either by

00:36:52.280 temperament or by ideology, just check out. And that's bad. It's bad for people to get cynical about

00:36:58.520 this really important practice that we have of discussing moral and political issues.

00:37:03.320 And then we have a discourse that's dominated by the loudest and most radical voices.

00:37:07.580 And as you might imagine, that's not a good idea. So, thirdly, you know, one thing we talk about in

00:37:12.180 the book that's, I think, quite common is what we call outrage exhaustion. So, if you think back to one

00:37:19.860 of the forms of grandstanding is, you know, using lots of outrage to signal how good you are.

00:37:24.220 Outrage exhaustion refers to two things. One, I use outrage so often about so many things.

00:37:32.960 Some of them may be morally inconsequential, but it's actually harder for me to muster up the

00:37:39.040 outrage when it really is important. I mean, our emotions are kind of like, you know, we got to keep

00:37:43.980 them in reserve. You can't go around all day being mad about everything imperfect in the world. You'd

00:37:48.640 never experience any other emotion because the world isn't perfect. And so, when you use outrage

00:37:54.140 in that way as a tool for self-promotion, you stop using it in a way that is actually going to be

00:38:02.040 needed when something really bad happens, when you can use your voice. You know, you've got to keep

00:38:06.800 your powder dry and use outrage when it's going to be useful. But also, there's this kind of boy who

00:38:12.200 cried wolf problem. I mean, if you know, if you get as outraged about, you know, what's served in

00:38:17.960 the local school elementary lunch packet as you do about world historic injustices, people will stop

00:38:24.460 taking you seriously. I mean, if your level of outrage is like 11 for everything, people will come

00:38:30.960 to see you as an unreliable determiner of what's morally bad. And so, we, you know, we lose this really

00:38:38.600 valuable resource, outrage. I mean, I think outrage in minimal amounts is very useful. It can signify

00:38:45.760 serious injustice. But to preserve that signal, you can't use it all the time. And so, one social cost

00:38:54.780 of grandstanding is that outrage loses its reliability or efficacy at actually identifying things that are

00:39:03.220 truly horrific about the world. Yeah, it ends up devaluing moral talk. And this is the case you're

00:39:07.860 making. You guys are saying that moral talk is good. This is how we make progress. But if you engage

00:39:13.840 with this grandstanding, it can devalue and make people cynical about it or just people ignore it

00:39:18.760 completely. That's right. Moral talk, moral discourse is a tool, you know, and like any tool, it can be used

00:39:25.940 well or it can use poorly. I mean, think of the hammer. You can use a hammer to build homes. You can use a hammer

00:39:32.380 to crush people's skulls. And the hammer itself is not necessarily good or bad. It's how you use it. 0.94

00:39:39.800 And public discourse is the same way. All right. So, we talked about the cost of moral grandstanding.

00:39:45.200 Are there any benefits of moral grandstanding? Of course. I mean, there's benefits. I mean,

00:39:51.320 anything that can be used for good. I mean, lying can sometimes have good benefits. Bragging can

00:39:56.360 sometimes have good benefits. And so, you know, I think the question is, is what benefits does

00:40:04.720 grandstanding have? I think there are a couple. It can legitimately draw awareness to important

00:40:12.400 problems. It can start a conversation about some important new moral problem or moral value that we

00:40:19.880 should take seriously. It can have those effects. But I think the more important question is,

00:40:27.460 can you get those effects without grandstanding? You know, in the book, we go through lots of

00:40:33.660 arguments for why grandstanding is bad, morally bad, irrespective of the consequences. I mean,

00:40:40.200 consequences aren't the only things that make something bad. And so, even if grandstanding

00:40:45.320 had some good consequences, there's two questions we should ask. Do the consequences themselves outweigh

00:40:52.460 the costs? So, you know, if we're right that the grandstanding has lots of costs, does grandstanding

00:40:59.500 as a general practice outweigh the costs? It may or may not. But even if it does, there's lots of

00:41:07.600 moral considerations that we think tell against grandstanding that don't really have anything to do

00:41:13.420 with consequences. Gotcha. So, here's another question you explore because you guys are moral

00:41:19.640 philosophers. You get into some virtue ethics and you try to suss out, is the virtuous thing, does a

00:41:27.280 virtuous person not morally grandstand? What does virtue ethics say about that? So, virtue ethics tells us

00:41:36.700 that roughly the good thing to do is what the virtuous person would do. And how do virtuous people

00:41:43.780 act? There's three different kinds of motivations you might think you can have. Very broad families

00:41:50.380 of motivations. You can have altruistic motivations. You can be motivated to help people, do good to other

00:41:57.640 people. Or you could have what we call dutiful motivations. You're motivated to do what's right,

00:42:04.280 to follow the rules, act on good principles. A third kind of motivation is an egoistic motivation.

00:42:11.800 You're doing things for yourself. You're putting yourself above others and so on. And the question

00:42:17.980 is, so try to hold in your mind like a virtuous person. Okay. And then ask yourself, how would a

00:42:26.640 virtuous person contribute to public discourse? And what we argue is that the virtuous person would

00:42:32.920 contribute to discourse for one of the first two reasons, either to help other people or to stand

00:42:38.320 up for the right principles and do what's right. A virtuous person would not go into discourse asking

00:42:43.900 themselves, first and foremost, the following question, how can I use morality to benefit me?

00:42:50.140 That is not what a virtuous person would do. A virtuous person would not engage in this practice

00:42:54.800 of political discussion or morality in order to promote their own brand. A virtuous person would not,

00:43:00.780 at least in this instance, have egoistic motivations. And so, you know, we think one argument against

00:43:07.860 grandstanding is a kind of virtue-based argument. What would exhibit virtue in public discourse? Is it

00:43:16.740 helping others, standing up for what's right, doing good in the world, or is it the promotion of my

00:43:23.880 reputation so that I can seek status? And I think when you put it like that, it's pretty obvious,

00:43:28.940 at least to us, that the virtuous person is going to shy away from grandstanding.

00:43:34.260 Would a virtuous person, this takes a little step further, would a virtuous person even ask

00:43:37.360 themselves, okay, I believe in this principle, I think this is the right thing to do. Would they ask

00:43:43.580 themselves, would this benefit me, like my reputation? And if so, would I abstain? Or would I modify how I

00:43:49.720 approach this moral discourse? Because I would be, there would be like a conflict of interest.

00:43:54.000 I think the question that will occur to a virtuous person or a person on their way to virtue

00:44:02.420 would be this, would I still say this if it didn't increase my status, if it didn't impress people?

00:44:12.360 Would I still say this even if people thought less of me? I think that's the question that will often

00:44:19.300 be running through the mind of the virtuous person is, am I willing to help others do what's right,

00:44:27.280 stand up for the right principles, even at a cost to myself? And I think the virtuous person,

00:44:33.720 you know, unless the cost is way too high, I mean, we're not, you know, the virtuous person is not going

00:44:38.100 to take a stand on a minute issue if it results in their death. I mean, I don't think that's what

00:44:43.560 virtue is. Virtue requires being prudent and weighing all the considerations. But I think what

00:44:49.460 a non-virtuous person will often not do something if it doesn't increase their status. And so, I think

00:44:58.500 that often marks a distinction between people who are virtuous or on their way to virtue and people

00:45:05.280 have, you know, people who have less interest in becoming a good person themselves and have more of

00:45:11.440 an interest in projecting the image of being a good person.

00:45:14.660 All right. So, what do we do about moral grandstand? I think I would say most people

00:45:18.640 don't like it. They don't like their social media feeds just being filled with outrage.

00:45:24.280 So, is there anything to do about it?

00:45:27.660 So, the most important thing that needs to happen is a change of norms. And a norm is just a social rule

00:45:35.860 that people follow and expect others to follow. And so, the hard question is, how do you change

00:45:43.080 the norms about how people behave and how they expect others behave? And there's a couple different

00:45:49.880 ways to try to promote norm change. One is, first and foremost, to change your own behavior. So,

00:45:58.480 you know, I get lots of messages from people saying, you know, I used to be a Facebook war hero,

00:46:07.700 and then I read your book, and like, I hardly post on social media anymore. I don't know if I should

00:46:12.740 take credit for that or not. I sometimes worry that like, I'm silencing people who should be saying

00:46:16.820 things. But one thing is, you know, is to turn our attention on ourselves and ask, you know, am I

00:46:24.580 contributing something that's an overall net positive to public discourse? Or am I just spewing

00:46:31.100 my frustration and anger and hate out into the void and acting like it gets shot into space,

00:46:37.620 and it doesn't have to affect anyone else? That's just not true. And so, I think, you know,

00:46:43.580 there's a temptation, we talk about grandstanding, to turn our gaze onto others. And people ask, well,

00:46:50.120 how do I know when other people are grandstanding so that I can call them out and accuse them and like,

00:46:53.960 fix them? But I think that's like the totally wrong response. The right response is to look

00:46:59.740 ourselves in the mirror and ask ourselves, how am I contributing to discourse? Am I doing this

00:47:04.280 to do good? Or am I doing this to look good? And there's various ways that we can do that.

00:47:09.740 We discussed several of them in the book. One of them is just to change your situation. So,

00:47:15.520 if you find yourself doom scrolling through Twitter or on social media,

00:47:20.000 and this makes you angry, you know, maybe the moment that you get frustrated or angry or feel

00:47:26.380 the urge to say something to someone, like shut off your phone, close the browser, open up Netflix,

00:47:34.580 like go make a sandwich, just do something that changes the situation so that you're not

00:47:40.760 continually tempted to lash out and grandstand and show off how good you are.

00:47:44.960 The other thing that we can do, you know, I mentioned earlier that our desire for status is

00:47:50.280 just fundamental and inherent. And I think maybe we can make some changes at some margin and how

00:47:56.640 strongly we feel that, but it's just true that humans desire recognition and want to feel important.

00:48:03.180 And there are more and less healthy ways of doing that. And so, one thing we recommend is,

00:48:08.500 you know, we have this desire for recognition. And one way to satisfy that is to get on Twitter or

00:48:13.900 social media and just like parade ourselves around like peacocks. Another way to discharge

00:48:19.180 that desire and get status and feel important is to actually do something where people can see you

00:48:26.300 and praise you for actually helping. So, you know, maybe it means like volunteering at a soup kitchen or

00:48:32.420 going to the Kiwanis club or like picking up trash on the side of the road. You know, if it's really

00:48:37.020 important to you to get status for it, take a selfie and like post it on Twitter. At least you'll be

00:48:42.620 doing something helpful to other people aside from just mouthing off on Twitter all the time.

00:48:48.400 So, those are things that we recommend people to think about in their own lives. And we don't want

00:48:53.020 to tell people how to spend their time. But, you know, I think a lot of people would probably,

00:48:57.680 myself included, be better off spending less time on social media. Now, a lot of people want to go

00:49:05.420 around and fix others. So, we want to accuse people of grandstanding. And as you alluded earlier,

00:49:12.500 we argue in the book at length why it's a bad idea to call other people out for grandstanding.

00:49:18.520 And there's a couple of reasons for that. One is that it's really hard to know whether someone's

00:49:22.320 grandstanding because you don't know what's motivating them. It's much like lying. In controlled

00:49:27.840 studies, humans are not any better than the flip of a quarter at detecting lies. We're just really

00:49:35.920 bad at figuring out whether someone's lying or not. And I think the truth is grandstanding. And so,

00:49:40.120 mere fact that it's hard to know whether someone for certain is grandstanding is a reason to not

00:49:44.540 accuse them. I think it would be unfair to accuse someone of grandstanding without being certain that

00:49:50.800 they're doing it. And even if you are certain they're doing it and it would be fair to do it,

00:49:54.840 I think that there's practical reasons not to accuse people of grandstanding. I mean,

00:49:58.500 imagine how this conversation goes. So, like, Brett's on Twitter and he says something and I say,

00:50:01.980 Brett, you stop grandstanding, you buffoon. And he says, I'm not grandstanding. You're 0.96

00:50:08.000 grandstanding by calling me out. And then we're in, we're locked in this never-ending argument about

00:50:12.500 what's in my heart and what's in your heart. And we've just added more toxic waste to the,

00:50:17.920 you know, the pond of public discourse. And so, I think that calling people out just from a

00:50:24.000 practical perspective is not helpful. Okay. So, what do you do instead? I think there are a couple

00:50:29.480 of important social things that we can do to change the norms away from grandstanding

00:50:34.760 to more positive contributions. One is to set an example, right? So, do things on social media

00:50:41.840 that would be very hard to construe as grandstanding. Things that aren't about yourself. Things that are

00:50:48.100 hard to see how you can get status from. Posting good stories or positive things or praising other

00:50:53.600 people. I think praising people who are doing and behaving, doing good and behaving well in public

00:50:59.460 discourse is a way to change the norms. But there is, finally, one way, I think, to sanction or punish

00:51:07.900 grandstanders. And it's not by calling them out. It's by ignoring them. I mean, think about, you know,

00:51:14.080 you write some really detailed post about how you can't believe so-and-so did this and you're on the

00:51:20.800 right side of history and so on. And then, like, it gets zero likes on Facebook. For a lot of us,

00:51:27.940 that would be embarrassing. And so, what do grandstanders want? They want attention. They

00:51:34.540 want status. And so, one way to divert people's behavior away from grandstanding to more productive

00:51:40.680 conversations is simply to withhold from them the praise and status they seek. So, you know, if you see

00:51:46.620 someone that you think is grandstanding, just ignore it, right? In doing so, you are depriving

00:51:52.080 them of the thing they want, which is praise and attention, often for just taking cheap stands in

00:51:57.240 the first place. So, my co-author and I, Justin, we sort of vacillate between being optimistic about

00:52:04.580 public discourse and being pessimistic. I mean, I do think that social media has just given everyone

00:52:09.720 a soapbox. We all have these desires for status, and it's basically put in each of our hands an

00:52:16.680 opportunity at any given moment to speak to hundreds or thousands of people and get that instant status

00:52:23.260 seeking rush, get people to praise us. It's very difficult. It's very difficult to avoid that

00:52:28.560 temptation. And I actually don't know whether I should be pessimistic or optimistic. I mean, I hope

00:52:33.660 that what the book does is at least help people identify what the problems are so that other people

00:52:39.600 along the way can figure out better ways to improve our discourse.

00:52:43.560 Well, and the other thing you'd said, too, instead of calling people out individually,

00:52:47.180 instead of doing that, just make critiques of moral grandstanding in general, right? So,

00:52:51.580 you just say, this is bad. And so, people are like, yeah, that is bad. I'm not going to...

00:52:55.060 So, they at least start thinking about that's not something they should do.

00:52:58.460 I do think that's good. I mean, instead of calling someone out and responding to someone

00:53:02.640 for what you think is grandstanding, have a general conversation about what discourse is for.

00:53:07.400 Now, as it turns out, I'm a philosopher, and there's an old joke that, you know, for any

00:53:12.560 obviously true thing, there will be a philosopher who denies it. You know, there are several philosophers

00:53:17.360 who've argued that, no, actually, grandstanding is good and virtue signaling is good. But even,

00:53:23.100 you know, having those kinds of conversations about what public discourse is for and what are the

00:53:28.500 better and worse ways to behave, I hope that on balance, those things help us be more productive

00:53:33.780 and talking to one another and have better conversations about controversial issues.

00:53:37.880 Well, Brandon, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book

00:53:40.740 and your work?

00:53:42.180 Well, they can Google me. There's all kinds of interesting stuff there. On Amazon,

00:53:46.020 the book is for sale. It's in print, and it's on Audible. You can find it at a lot of Barnes and

00:53:52.420 Nobles. I don't know if you can find it at every one, but it's in many. And if you speak Portuguese,

00:53:57.500 Arabic, or Korean, those translations will be coming out soon.

00:54:00.460 And Brett, thank you so much for having me. This was a pleasure. I really appreciate talking

00:54:04.680 with you and look forward to all the good work you do in helping people talk better to one another.

00:54:10.260 Well, I appreciate that, Brandon, and I appreciate you coming on.

00:54:12.900 Thank you.

00:54:13.980 My guest is Brandon Wormke. He's the co-author of the book,

00:54:16.600 Grandstanding. It's available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find out more

00:54:20.160 information about his work at his website, brandonwormke.com. Also check out our show notes

00:54:24.100 at aom.is slash moral grandstanding, where you can find links to resources,

00:54:27.580 where you can delve deeper into this topic.

00:54:30.460 Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Check out our website at

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00:55:02.940 of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, it's Brett McKay,

00:55:06.100 reminding you to not only listen to the AOM podcast, but put what you've heard into action.

The Art of Manliness - August 23, 2021

How Moral Grandstanding Is Ruining Our Public Discourse

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