The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #1073 - Steven Pinker

00:00:00.000 I can keep it in check.

00:00:02.000 Four, three, two...

00:00:06.000 And we're live.

00:00:07.000 First of all, Steve, thank you very much for doing this.

00:00:08.000 I really appreciate it.

00:00:37.000 No, that's right. 0.56

00:00:38.000 And I think a lot of people who are ignorant of the alt-right equate them with the skinheads and the neo-Nazis carrying the tiki torches.

00:00:48.000 But I was referring strictly to the alt-right from its origin in internet discussion groups.

00:00:53.000 And I know some of them.

00:00:55.000 Some of them are former students and some of them are highly intelligent and highly read.

00:01:01.000 But that's not what people often think of when they think of the alt-right.

00:01:04.000 And that's what I was referring to.

00:01:05.000 There are people in tech.

00:01:07.000 There are some people in universities who stay undercover.

00:01:09.000 And I made some remarks on how to starve that movement, not how to feed it.

00:01:15.000 But so many people jumped on it as if you were endorsing the alt-right.

00:01:19.000 What was the What's the exact quote?

00:01:21.000 You were just basically saying something along the lines of there's a lot of intelligent people that are involved in this.

00:01:26.000 Well, it wasn't so much that.

00:01:27.000 It was also that because of the various taboos in mainstream intellectual culture, because of political correctness, there are certain things that are just kind of not discussable.

00:01:38.000 But then when people in the alt-right discover them, they feel tremendously empowered.

00:01:42.000 Like we are now privy to the truth that the establishment can't handle.

00:01:46.000 You can't handle the truth.

00:01:53.000 I think we're good to go.

00:02:11.000 We're good to go.

00:02:17.000 Now, if that's – and that's often quite taboo in intellectual circles for, I think, bizarre reasons.

00:02:24.000 I think there are people who think that somehow women's rights depend on men and women being indistinguishable, which I think is a bad equation in the first place.

00:02:32.000 I agree.

00:02:32.000 But as soon as you come across the fact that men and women on average are different, you also come across the fact that men and women overlap in a lot of these traits, that whatever trait you name that men on average are – I think we're good to go.

00:02:54.000 We're good to go.

00:03:13.000 What are your thoughts on how the subject got out of bounds?

00:03:16.000 Because it's very confusing to me that certain subjects like the differences between genders are so taboo when they seem so obvious.

00:03:26.000 I mean, you just could go to a mall and just look at the way the men dress and the women dress, and you go, well, there's some obvious distinctions here.

00:03:34.000 There's a history to it.

00:03:35.000 Right.

00:03:51.000 I think?

00:04:06.000 So if you say that there are differences between men and women, you're sending women back to the kitchen and the nursery. 1.00

00:04:12.000 So this is a total non sequitur because fairness is not the same as sameness.

00:04:18.000 So obviously women should have equal rights to men whether or not they're exact copies of men or have a distinctive profile as men have a distinct profile.

00:04:26.000 So I think it was just a mistake to conflate the issue of women's rights with men and women being identical.

00:04:34.000 But that's the way it kind of shook out and it became kind of an article of faith in a lot of – in some feminists, some kind of left liberal circles that men and women have to be identical.

00:04:45.000 And if they aren't, that means you're a traitor to women's equality. 0.62

00:04:49.000 Yeah, and articles of faith are always dangerous.

00:04:51.000 Always dangerous.

00:04:52.000 Especially in that regard.

00:04:53.000 Articles of fairness are always important.

00:04:55.000 I mean, being fair to each other.

00:04:57.000 But being fair is also recognizing differences.

00:05:00.000 Yeah.

00:05:00.000 That's right, and not assuming that any difference is a deficiency.

00:05:03.000 If you're really doing an honest comparison of the differences between men and women, men wouldn't come out looking so good.

00:05:10.000 Yeah, I have a whole bit about that in my act.

00:05:14.000 When we're looking at the reaction to this though, what was strange to me was how many people seemed like they wanted to jump on board and criticize you and I think a lot of it is almost like to take away some of the potential criticism of themselves.

00:05:30.000 Like, it's instant claiming of the moral high ground, virtue signaling, and it's just very disappointing when you see this from intellectuals and college professors and people that should know better.

00:05:41.000 I mean, to be fair, I did not get into much trouble from my peers and among professors and grad students and so on. 0.99

00:05:48.000 There are a couple of trolls who ran with it, but by and large, the mainstream reaction was that this is almost a sign of, as the New York Times put it, that social media is making us stupid. 0.97

00:05:58.000 Yeah, that was the title of the article in the Times. 0.87

00:06:02.000 Yeah, so by and large, I came out of it okay, but it was a real indication of how These mobs of outrage can corrupt any kind of intelligent discourse.

00:06:12.000 Yeah, well, subtle discussions, discussions that involve nuance, like complicated issues that are – they're complex.

00:06:20.000 They require a long sort of description of the issue and a very – It's a complex sort of take on these various differences between men and women and the alt-right and the left and political correct—these are long discussions.

00:06:40.000 I mean, these aren't something that you can smash into a very short soundbite and completely cover your take on things.

00:06:48.000 All the more reason that they shouldn't be taboo, because if you can't discuss them, then the only interpretation you're going to have is the simplistic one.

00:06:54.000 If you bring them out in the open, then you can start to have that discussion.

00:06:57.000 I'm hoping that this is turning around.

00:07:00.000 I'm hoping that what's happened is the outrage culture has become almost a parody of itself.

00:07:06.000 It's gotten so ridiculous that people will sort of shy away from outrage.

00:07:11.000 Seemingly like the same reason why people are terrified of talking about the differences between men and women is because they don't want to Be grouped into the people that legitimately, rather, were sexist in the 1900s and the 1800s and these people that did have these terrible ideas. 0.80

00:07:33.000 So now we're trying to go so far away from that that we've become a little bit ridiculous.

00:07:37.000 And I'm hoping it's a swing and it'll just kind of bounce back towards the middle again.

00:07:42.000 Yeah, and in fact, there's some hope that just when any medium is new, there'll be these excesses, and it takes a while for the system to kind of re-equilibrate, to have an immune response that damps down the worst of it.

00:07:58.000 I mean, I've been on the Internet a long time, and in the 80s, when it was mainly academics and computer scientists who were on the Internet, there were these discussion groups.

00:08:06.000 This was before the World Wide Web, so it was all text.

00:08:09.000 And there was this concept of flaming.

00:08:11.000 Yes.

00:08:12.000 I don't know if the word is used.

00:08:13.000 Flame Wars.

00:08:14.000 Flame Wars, yeah.

00:08:14.000 Those were great.

00:08:15.000 Those were good old days.

00:08:16.000 Well, it came from the – there was an award given – I mean a jokey award called the Flaming Asshole Award.

00:08:23.000 Oh, really? 0.90

00:08:23.000 To the worst insulter in these intellectual discussions. 0.90

00:08:30.000 And the trophy was supposedly an asbestos cork.

00:08:35.000 Yeah.

00:08:36.000 But from the Flaming Asshole Award, there was the noun of flame, the adjective flame wars, the verb to flame. 0.97

00:08:44.000 And then it did damn down. 0.84

00:08:45.000 As people became aware of flaming as a phenomenon, in the discussion groups, it was, well, let's not turn this into a flame war or enough flames.

00:08:53.000 And when people kind of realized that this was a thing, then they could push back against it.

00:08:58.000 And let's hope that that happens with the social media again.

00:09:00.000 Yeah, I hope so.

00:09:01.000 It was a sport in the late 90s, early 2000s.

00:09:06.000 It was essentially like an online sport.

00:09:07.000 Someone would say something about you and you'd go, okay, how do I attack this?

00:09:12.000 And it was more fun than anything.

00:09:15.000 I felt like...

00:09:17.000 There was very few people, relatively speaking, involved in discussion groups back then, in terms of the mass amount of people that are on social media now.

00:09:26.000 It's seemingly like everyone is in some form, or most people, are in some form of social media now.

00:09:32.000 Whereas back then, the number of people that were on message boards was so small.

00:09:36.000 Oh yeah, so small, that's right.

00:09:38.000 And you're right, there is an art form of ritual insults, like in Shakespeare and African American snapping. 0.98

00:09:44.000 There, when people Realize that this is a sport, then no one gets hurt.

00:09:48.000 It's just like martial arts.

00:09:51.000 It's part of the fun.

00:09:52.000 But the thing is that when it goes out of control and it really does attack people's reputations, then you've got a problem.

00:09:57.000 We have a thing in comedy called Roast Battle.

00:10:00.000 Roasting, another example.

00:10:01.000 Yeah, absolutely.

00:10:02.000 And Roast Battle is this great...

00:10:06.000 We're good to go.

00:10:36.000 There are rules.

00:10:37.000 There's an arena.

00:10:38.000 And when you're done, it's over.

00:10:39.000 You don't plot revenge.

00:10:41.000 But sometimes people can misunderstand it.

00:10:43.000 There's that famous press roast where Obama had some fun at the expense of Donald Trump when he was still just a reality show.

00:10:53.000 And you could see famously the camera zoomed in on Trump and he was not amused at these jokes at his expense.

00:10:59.000 And there's a theory that one of the reasons that he plotted his presidential run was to get revenge.

00:11:05.000 Well, that's one of the things that Obama said during that roast.

00:11:08.000 Here's one of the things that I am that you'll never be.

00:11:10.000 President of the United States.

00:11:12.000 And everybody went crazy and cheered on.

00:11:13.000 Boy, history could have turned out very different if he hadn't made that one joke.

00:11:16.000 Isn't that amazing?

00:11:18.000 Well, apparently he had been thinking about being president for a long, long time.

00:11:23.000 But that might have been the straw that broke the camel's back.

00:11:26.000 Oh, Barack, what have you done?

00:11:32.000 When you see social media today, like as a psychologist, and you see this thing that people do when they can behave anonymously in the absence of social cues, not in front of each other, not seeing how the cruel things hurt each other,

00:11:49.000 how does that make you, do you think that this is just an unnatural way of communicating?

00:11:55.000 Well, there is something.

00:11:57.000 The anonymity is certainly unnatural and the lack of face-to-face contact.

00:12:01.000 And I think one of the big discoveries of psychology over the last couple of decades is that we're moral animals to the extent that we have reputations.

00:12:12.000 Going back to Richard Dawkins' famous book, The Selfish Gene, where he posed the question, how could niceness and generosity and cooperation evolve, given that in Darwinian competition, you'd expect the most aggressive, the most selfish to predominate?

00:12:27.000 And there's an answer to that question, and Dawkins worked it out back in 19...

00:12:32.000 I think we're good to go.

00:12:45.000 You do something that harms me and I threaten revenge.

00:12:48.000 Then people can kind of settle into cooperation because we really are better off if we extend favors to each other that do a lot of good to the other in response to a fairly minor inconvenience to the self.

00:13:02.000 If everyone does that, everyone is better off.

00:13:04.000 And that's only stable, though, if everyone has a memory for what everyone else did.

00:13:09.000 Therefore, that sets up a pressure to cultivate your reputation as someone who is trustworthy and will reciprocate.

00:13:18.000 But without the reputation, without the memory of who did what and how...

00:13:28.000 Thank you.

00:13:29.000 Thank you.

00:13:30.000 Thank you.

00:13:59.000 It's a big deal to insult someone to their face and people do it, but you've got to do it very carefully.

00:14:06.000 You take that away and it's just typing a bunch of characters at a keyboard and especially if the person doing the typing has a handle, they're just anonymous, then that kind of eliminates some of the constraints on civility and generosity and maintaining a reputation as a credible co-operator.

00:14:23.000 I also feel that there's a selfishness in being nice and being generous, because the way I describe it, I think it feels good.

00:14:34.000 It feels good to be nice to people.

00:14:36.000 It feels good to be generous.

00:14:37.000 When you give someone a nice tip at a restaurant and they get happy, that feels good.

00:14:41.000 It's good for you, too.

00:14:43.000 It's not just a one-way street.

00:14:45.000 Well, it's kind of a benign selfishness.

00:14:47.000 Yes.

00:14:51.000 The irony is that it can't just really be calculating.

00:14:54.000 If it's really that I just do exactly as much that gets me gratitude and recognition, then other people see through that.

00:15:02.000 And so the paradox is that it's kind of got to be sincere for it to be credible to someone else.

00:15:09.000 So the most effective way to prove to someone else that you're a nice guy is to actually be a nice guy.

00:15:14.000 Because if you're just calculating, if you're just doing the bare minimum you can get away with, then since we're all pretty good intuitive psychologists, we're always kind of thinking, did he really mean it?

00:15:25.000 Is he just kind of kissing up?

00:15:26.000 Is he trying to curry favors?

00:15:28.000 And we see through that.

00:15:29.000 It's the person who actually isn't doing that calculation that we really admire and respect.

00:15:34.000 Right.

00:15:35.000 It's very unusual.

00:15:36.000 It's one of the reasons why we admire, like, look at this completely altruistic person.

00:15:41.000 Yeah.

00:15:41.000 I mean, it's kind of like the marketplace of reputations kind of can select for true niceness and goodness if you've got enough information and enough interactions.

00:15:53.000 I mean, here's a crude analogy.

00:15:55.000 So in the business world, you can have cutthroat fly-by-night businesses that just try to squeeze everything out of the customers and then take off as soon as the cheating is discovered.

00:16:06.000 They don't last very long.

00:16:07.000 They don't actually make a lot of money.

00:16:09.000 It's often the companies that will take back the product, no questions asked, even if they lose a little bit of money, but they earn the loyalty of their customers.

00:16:17.000 Those are the companies that often do the best and stick around the longest.

00:16:20.000 That's kind of an analogy to the way that being honorable, even if you have little losses, well, I did a little bit more for him than he did for me.

00:16:28.000 But over the long run, that's what makes you desirable as someone that other people want to hang out with, if the reputations can spread.

00:16:35.000 Yeah, it's kind of amazing if you think about how cherished true generosity and kindness, how cherished they are.

00:16:44.000 It's an amazing thing.

00:16:46.000 You see people that are truly kind and truly generous, and we value that so much.

00:16:51.000 It's kind of amazing there aren't more of them.

00:16:53.000 Because it's such a virtue that we admire, and if someone does behave in that manner, people gravitate towards them.

00:17:02.000 It's a real trait that is attractive to people.

00:17:06.000 It is.

00:17:07.000 And there's a misunderstanding of the evolutionary explanation of the appearance of altruism and generosity, a misunderstanding of The message that Dawkins conveyed in that book that it predicts that we're all just kind of calculating favor traders,

00:17:26.000 that we do just enough to get a favor in return and if we don't think someone could help us in return, then we just cut them off.

00:17:33.000 Kind of a cynical view of generosity.

00:17:35.000 But it's actually – the reason that that's not true is that as soon as the game begins, you kind of get to higher and higher levels of people psyching each other out, seeing through them.

00:17:45.000 Because if I have a choice between – I'm going to befriend.

00:17:50.000 There's one person who's going to do exactly for me what will help him in the long run.

00:17:56.000 There's someone else who really is generous and he's really going to help me and he's not going to keep a long memory of who did what for whom.

00:18:02.000 Well, I'm going to pick the second guy.

00:18:03.000 And so he's going to actually be better off for being the better person.

00:18:07.000 Now that – I mean you can take that to an extreme and predict that it means that we're all infinitely generous, which of course we're not.

00:18:14.000 And so there's kind of a tradeoff, an equilibrium between not being a total sucker or not giving so much away that you just harm yourself in the long run and being the kind of person who is generous and honest enough that other people want to affiliate with them.

00:18:31.000 And the reality is that all of us are probably mixtures.

00:18:34.000 I mean, we're not cutthroat sociopaths, most of us, although some of us are, nor are we total saints, self-sacrificing saints.

00:18:45.000 We're somewhere in between and different people are at different points in that continuum.

00:18:49.000 When you look at social media and you look at the nastiness that's so common, and obviously, in some ways, it's got to be connected to the ability to be anonymous.

00:19:02.000 But I feel like...

00:19:04.000 I've thought of this more and more lately, that this negativity is probably a temporary thing.

00:19:11.000 I feel like people are realizing that this is an unnatural way of communicating and that it's so relatively recent in human history and such a small window.

00:19:22.000 I mean, 1994 is essentially when people started getting online and here we are in 2018 and you're seeing people switching to flip phones.

00:19:35.000 Yeah.

00:20:09.000 I think that's right.

00:20:12.000 Staring at the screen like zombies, and you'd never have a conversation over the dinner table ever again.

00:20:17.000 Even before that, when telephones were invented, families would never sit down together because the phone would constantly be ringing and attention spans would be disrupted because the phone could ring any time.

00:20:29.000 Wasn't there a similar conversation about books?

00:20:31.000 Actually, there was, yeah.

00:20:33.000 And about writing, going back to the ancient Greeks, when writing was considered to be kind of...

00:20:41.000 You know, degenerate and decadent because you let your memory go to pot.

00:20:45.000 How are people going to cultivate their memory?

00:20:48.000 They could just write things down and look at them.

00:20:49.000 That's crazy.

00:20:50.000 Isn't that interesting?

00:20:51.000 Why do you think we're always looking to dismiss some new fantastic technology?

00:20:58.000 It's partly because we don't understand it yet.

00:21:00.000 I mean, it's new.

00:21:01.000 And also a lot of the adjustments that you were just talking about, you know, you can't really predict them beforehand.

00:21:07.000 A lot of what happens in a society is there are like hundreds of little adjustments that people make, like not spend too much time on Facebook or email and Facebook.

00:21:17.000 Leave this platform for that platform.

00:21:19.000 Where if you were starting from scratch and asked to kind of imagine how it's going to play out, you can't really anticipate these things.

00:21:26.000 It's like thousands of adjustments that people make.

00:21:29.000 They happen when they happen with millions of people making decisions.

00:21:34.000 But you can't just deduce them beforehand like a logical proof.

00:21:39.000 And so we just don't know.

00:21:40.000 We know what the threat is.

00:21:42.000 We don't know what society's response is going to be.

00:21:44.000 Well, this is a fascinating time when it comes to social media and just human interaction because this is so new and because it's uncharted territory.

00:21:52.000 I mean, I think this is one of the reasons why so many people have so many concerns about it.

00:21:55.000 They're like, where's this going?

00:21:57.000 Like, what's it going to do to our children?

00:21:59.000 You walk down the street and everyone's just staring at their phone.

00:22:02.000 It really is.

00:22:03.000 I said this, that imagine if there was a drug that came along, that this drug made you only think about the drug, you were more likely to get into car accidents because of this drug, you were more likely to sleep late, cause more anxiety,

00:22:18.000 and soak up immense amounts of your time with very little reward for it.

00:22:23.000 You would go, wow, what kind of crazy drug is this?

00:22:26.000 It's robbing people of their lives.

00:22:27.000 Well, that's cell phones.

00:22:28.000 That's social media.

00:22:30.000 I mean, it does give you something.

00:22:32.000 I mean, if you use it correctly, most of the time I try to spend on social media, I try to spend, or most of the time on my phone, I try to spend off social media but reading things.

00:22:42.000 I try to read articles, and I try to in some way justify, like, oh, I'm doing something productive on my phone.

00:22:49.000 But in a lot of ways, I'm just...

00:23:10.000 I'm addicted to checking that thing.

00:23:13.000 Wow, Professor Pinker, how do you have time to read so many books?

00:23:17.000 And she paused for a second.

00:23:18.000 She said, I bet you're not on Facebook.

00:23:21.000 LAUGHTER I mean, there's got to be some good that comes out of those communities as well.

00:23:27.000 Oh, there is.

00:23:27.000 I don't want to throw out the baby with the bathwater.

00:23:29.000 Oh, undoubtedly.

00:23:30.000 Yeah, absolutely.

00:23:30.000 And, you know, I confess, I mean, I'm on Twitter and I sometimes look at my Twitter feed and I learn really interesting stuff from it.

00:23:37.000 But I also say, okay, enough.

00:23:40.000 Get back to work.

00:23:41.000 Get back to reading.

00:23:41.000 Go outside.

00:23:42.000 See some friends.

00:23:43.000 Spend some time with your family.

00:23:46.000 Yeah, I will go down a Twitter hole.

00:23:47.000 I went down a Twitter hole yesterday about these new Mayan ruins that they found in Guatemala.

00:23:52.000 Oh, amazing.

00:23:53.000 Yeah, cool.

00:23:53.000 It's crazy.

00:23:54.000 Thousands of structures swallowed up by time and they're just now realizing like, oh my god, this is a city.

00:23:59.000 Yeah.

00:24:00.000 Amazing stuff.

00:24:01.000 So that stuff's good.

00:24:02.000 Yeah.

00:24:02.000 No, absolutely.

00:24:03.000 And it's a question of are all finding the balance between getting the advantages without the disadvantages.

00:24:08.000 Well, it's just so new.

00:24:10.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:24:11.000 When you see so much negativity, though, and this is a big problem with anonymous accounts in particular, you see it in Facebook, but in Facebook, there seems to be repercussions.

00:24:23.000 Like if you're Tom Smith, and Tom Smith writes something horrible, like Tom Smith could get fired from his job for it.

00:24:30.000 We've seen that.

00:24:31.000 People write something racist or sexist or whatever, and we'll see them get fired from their job because of something that they put on Facebook because your profile represents the actual you.

00:24:42.000 Yeah, it's not anonymous, yes.

00:24:43.000 I feel like there's benefit to that.

00:24:44.000 Yeah, that's right.

00:24:45.000 I mean, the problem is there can also be outrage mobs.

00:24:48.000 Yes.

00:24:48.000 Where someone will post something and it's taken out of context and they didn't realize, well, they meant it as a joke.

00:24:53.000 Like the woman who took that trip to Africa and made a kind of a self-effacing comment kind of about racism and people thought it was racist, but she was actually making fun of racism.

00:25:04.000 I think she was drunk and she was being racist. 0.99

00:25:08.000 Really?

00:25:08.000 I just think she was being funny.

00:25:09.000 Look, I'm a comic and I have a lot of comedian friends that are not racist, but they will say hilarious racist things.

00:25:17.000 Because it's funny.

00:25:18.000 It's not because they're racist.

00:25:20.000 What was her name?

00:25:22.000 Justine Sacco.

00:25:23.000 Thank you.

00:25:23.000 This was the...

00:25:24.000 I hope I don't get AIDS, but...

00:25:26.000 I'm just kidding. 0.97

00:25:27.000 I'm white.

00:25:28.000 LOL. That's what she wrote.

00:25:29.000 She woke up 12 hours later after a Xanax and wine hangover, I'm sure.

00:25:34.000 And her life was a living hell.

00:25:36.000 Yeah.

00:25:36.000 I mean, she's still to this day.

00:25:38.000 I mean, Jamie knows her name.

00:25:39.000 Oh, yeah.

00:25:40.000 Right.

00:25:40.000 And she probably is not...

00:25:42.000 Racist.

00:25:43.000 She meant it. 0.85

00:25:43.000 Ironically, she meant it. 0.85

00:25:45.000 I mean, she herself was not racist.

00:25:47.000 Didn't she become controversial after that as well?

00:25:49.000 Yeah, she was like the PR person for DraftKings or Fandor or something when they were going through some issues a couple years ago.

00:25:55.000 Yeah.

00:25:55.000 DraftKings is an online gambling thing.

00:25:58.000 It's kind of controversial.

00:25:59.000 Gambling on sports and stuff like that.

00:26:00.000 Yeah.

00:26:01.000 Yeah, we look for people also.

00:26:04.000 We were talking about this before without getting into details about who we're talking about, but there are certain people that are very flawed individuals that look to find people and attack them to take away some of the spotlight on their own flaws.

00:26:19.000 Absolutely.

00:26:20.000 This is a big part of virtue signaling, right?

00:26:24.000 Like a big part of going after people and outrage mobs.

00:26:28.000 As long as the mob is attacking someone else, they're not attacking you.

00:26:31.000 That's right, yeah.

00:26:32.000 That's right.

00:26:33.000 And there is...

00:26:35.000 Trevor Burrus There's an interesting question over history is how do some of these – sometimes called extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds.

00:26:45.000 Tulip bulb mania in Holland in the 17th century.

00:26:49.000 Trevor Burrus What's that?

00:26:50.000 Oh, there's this kind of bubble where people started to outbid each other on tulip bulbs and the price of a single tulip bulb went like through the roof and then it suddenly crashed.

00:27:03.000 People lost fortunes because everyone was expecting everyone else to keep bidding up the price.

00:27:08.000 Wow.

00:27:09.000 Tulip bulbs.

00:27:10.000 Tulip bulb mania.

00:27:11.000 Just went nutty.

00:27:12.000 But then there were also witch hunts where a woman would be accused of sinking a ship or causing a crop failure or making someone's child get sick. 0.99

00:27:22.000 There are the pogroms in Europe where Jews were accused of poisoning the wells or killing Christian boys to make matzah out of their blood.

00:27:29.000 There are the lynchings in the American South where African Americans were accused of There's the McCarthy era.

00:27:44.000 There's the daycare satanic ritual abuse, a mania of the 1980s, where these daycare workers were accused basically by coaching kids to embellish I think we're good to go.

00:28:20.000 I think we're good to go.

00:28:53.000 That's going on right now in North Korea, right?

00:29:08.000 Absolutely.

00:29:08.000 And so governments know how to exploit it, but it isn't just governments.

00:29:11.000 It can happen spontaneously too.

00:29:13.000 It's a weird human trait, isn't it?

00:29:15.000 It is.

00:29:15.000 It's a combination of a kind of human trait and a kind of dynamic when you have kind of a network of people and they all are kind of trapped and no one can be the first person to escape from this vicious circle because they don't want to be the one who is denounced and imprisoned and tortured or whatever the consequence may be.

00:29:36.000 Where do you think, if you think at all about this, where do you think this is all headed?

00:29:41.000 Especially in terms of social media.

00:29:43.000 It's hard to tell, but you mentioned the possibility that there's been such growing recognition of the problem that we will mount a response, that it'll just seem ridiculous.

00:29:55.000 The outrage mob, once it's recognized that there are outrage mobs and virtual signaling fanatics, once we have a label for them, once we know that it's a thing, it'll seem so ridiculous that people will be less tempted to do it.

00:30:09.000 That's the optimistic outcome.

00:30:11.000 Well, there's just such a flaw in...

00:30:14.000 There's a real issue in writing things.

00:30:17.000 And one of the issues, especially if you're writing about a subject where there's a lot of people involved, or perhaps even an individual, is that you're the only one that's writing.

00:30:28.000 Like, if you were having a conversation with that person, they would be able to say something back.

00:30:32.000 You'd be able to say something, and they would go, well, that's not exactly how I was thinking.

00:30:35.000 Actually, I was looking at it this way.

00:30:37.000 And the other person would go, oh, okay.

00:30:39.000 So your take on it was, you know, and they would go back and forth and exchange information, hopefully come to some sort of an understanding of what's going on in each person's mind.

00:30:49.000 Absolutely.

00:30:49.000 Whereas you can define someone in a tweet or in a Facebook post or a blog post.

00:30:55.000 You can define someone without...

00:30:58.000 Yeah.

00:31:17.000 But it's not an accurate method of communicating ideas with a person.

00:31:23.000 It's just your one uninterrupted take on things.

00:31:28.000 Absolutely.

00:31:28.000 So my second to last book, the one just before my current book, Enlightenment Now, but the previous book was called The Sense of Style.

00:31:35.000 It was a writing manual.

00:31:36.000 The way I began it is I said, why is so much writing so bad?

00:31:41.000 How come there's so much writing where you just can't understand what the person is talking about?

00:31:45.000 And I mentioned some theories.

00:31:48.000 Some people think that it's academics and intellectuals trying to show off how profound they are by how incomprehensible they are.

00:31:56.000 If people can understand it, it can't be that complicated.

00:31:59.000 So I'm going to write the stuff that no one will understand.

00:32:01.000 Then they'll think I'm really smart.

00:32:02.000 So that's one theory.

00:32:03.000 And, you know, there might be some truth to it.

00:32:06.000 But I think that the main theory is that writing is, just as you described, it's a one-way channel of communication.

00:32:12.000 It's very unnatural.

00:32:13.000 You know, when we speak, you and I, we're having a conversation.

00:32:16.000 We're looking at each other in the eye, and our eyebrows go up, and they get knitted.

00:32:19.000 And if I start to become too obscure, you're going to give me a quizzical look.

00:32:25.000 I'm like, oh.

00:32:26.000 You're terrified to see someone with that expression on their face.

00:32:29.000 Or you can interrupt and say, well, what the hell was that about?

00:32:32.000 When you're writing, you have none of that.

00:32:34.000 Right.

00:33:02.000 And there's another kind of psychological problem that we all have.

00:33:06.000 It's just part of being human called the curse of knowledge.

00:33:10.000 Namely, when you know something, it's really, really hard to imagine what it's like not to know it.

00:33:16.000 You just assume that everyone knows it, that your understanding is everyone's understanding.

00:33:21.000 And so you write away, you know, write, write, write, write, write.

00:33:24.000 And it never occurs to you that the I think we're good to go.

00:33:43.000 And a lot of the cure is either to at least know that it's a problem and think, what can my reader be reasonably expected to know?

00:33:51.000 And because we're not even that good at that, I mean, none of us are mind readers, just showing someone a draft of what you've written, you're often surprised at how often they'll say, I don't know what you're talking about.

00:34:01.000 Maybe that's what we should force people to do at Twitter.

00:34:04.000 Maybe we should have a team of people that you send your tweet to, like a circle of confidants.

00:34:12.000 Well, I mean, that's the way it works in publishing.

00:34:14.000 You have an editor in academia.

00:34:16.000 You've got peer review.

00:34:17.000 Before it's published, they send it out to other people just like you, and they write a little review, and you've got to modify it if it doesn't make any sense.

00:34:24.000 Right.

00:34:24.000 So if Justine Sacco had sent that to a team of confidants, they would have went, No, Justine!

00:34:30.000 Don't write that!

00:34:31.000 I'm sorry.

00:34:31.000 I'm on a plane.

00:34:32.000 I'm drunk.

00:34:33.000 I'll call you from Africa! 0.93

00:34:35.000 Well, this is – one of the big themes in my new book, Enlightenment Now, is how is it that we're simultaneously in many ways getting smarter but also seem to be getting stupider as a society?

00:34:48.000 So I think part of it is that none of us individually are that smart.

00:34:54.000 We all – and cognitive psychologists have shown that humans have all kinds of biases and fallacies.

00:35:01.000 We reason from stereotypes.

00:35:04.000 We assess risk by how easy it is to imagine something.

00:35:09.000 So we're afraid of getting on a plane because it's very easy to imagine a plane crashing and plane crashes make the news.

00:35:16.000 We don't worry about texting while driving because there's never a headline on page one of the I don't know.

00:35:33.000 I don't know.

00:35:41.000 We're part of a kind of collective brain that works by rules where all of the excesses of one person get kind of balanced out by other people.

00:35:50.000 And that's why you have, you know, things like I think we're good to go.

00:36:12.000 Announcing the way the world works, he or she has to subject himself to peer review and let other scientists criticize him or her.

00:36:22.000 And whenever you get people acting intelligently, it's often because they belong to these institutions with rules that are designed to make up for the idiocies of any individual person.

00:36:35.000 That's fascinating.

00:36:37.000 I completely agree with that.

00:36:39.000 That makes so much sense.

00:36:40.000 I've also felt that there's not a lot...

00:36:45.000 We have difficulties.

00:36:48.000 Obviously, people have difficulties in this life.

00:36:50.000 There's social difficulties, economic difficulties.

00:36:52.000 But in terms of survival difficulties, it's way easier to get by today than it has ever been in human history.

00:37:01.000 And I wonder if...

00:37:04.000 Human beings have a need for adversity and complexity and problem solving and all these things that are less present today than ever before.

00:37:17.000 I think things are just almost too simple.

00:37:19.000 We've made it too easy.

00:37:21.000 We've nerfed the world.

00:37:22.000 And in doing so, it's easier to just kind of be dull-minded and drift through and follow the herd.

00:37:29.000 The herd is so big, and there's so many people in the herd If you just do what most of the people are doing, wear what most of the people are wearing, say the things most of the people say, you'll survive. 0.95

00:37:41.000 And you'll survive, and you'll find some other dim-witted person to breed with, and you'll make dim-witted children. 0.73

00:37:46.000 And I'm being dead serious. 0.80

00:37:48.000 I think there's a certain – when you're dealing with this massive pack of humans, 300-plus million on a continent, there's just – there's so much – I've always said, like, If you have a group of people, if you're being very generous, and you have 100 people in a room, 0.99

00:38:03.000 what are the odds that one of those people is a moron? 1.00

00:38:06.000 It's 100% that one is going to be a moron. 1.00

00:38:09.000 That leaves you with 3 million morons in the United States of America, if you're being really kind. 1.00

00:38:14.000 And 3 million geniuses. 1.00

00:38:15.000 Yes.

00:38:15.000 Well, probably – I'm an optimist.

00:38:20.000 I would like to think you're dealing with probably 6 million geniuses.

00:38:22.000 Right.

00:38:22.000 Okay.

00:38:23.000 My book is often described as a book on optimism and enlightenment now because I have 75 graphs, almost all of which show the world getting better, including what some people think of the most incredible graph in the book on a phenomenon called the Flynn effect,

00:38:40.000 which is that, believe it or not, and I know most people do not, IQ scores have been rising for most of the last 100 years, about three points a decade.

00:38:49.000 Now this, I know it seems totally unbelievable.

00:38:52.000 But yeah, they discovered it when Flynn, a philosopher, discovered it when he realized that the people who make IQ tests had to keep re-norming the tests to keep 100 as the average because the average kept creeping up.

00:39:04.000 And it was like, gee, 110, well, that's what most people score.

00:39:08.000 We say that the average is 100. We've got to adjust the scale downward.

00:39:11.000 And Flynn realized, hey, wait a second.

00:39:13.000 They keep doing this over and over again.

00:39:14.000 That must mean the population is getting smarter.

00:39:16.000 Now, not biologically smarter.

00:39:18.000 It's not that people's brain power has somehow magically been increasing, although probably a little bit of that through better nutrition, better sanitation and healthcare and so on.

00:39:29.000 But a lot of it is just that ideas that used to be kind of sophisticated and restricted to professors and scientists and statisticians kind of trickle down to the population and so we – things like – Placebo effect or trade-off or cost-benefit analysis or win-win situation.

00:39:52.000 All these things that actually came from pretty fancy-schmancy theory originally, but they kind of are loosed on the whole population and they become part of everyone's conventional wisdom.

00:40:02.000 Also, we have to think more and more in abstract ways just to deal with things like a subway map or a smartphone, watching TV. It used to be you'd turn on the knob and your TV would be on.

00:40:15.000 Now you've got to kind of program the bloody thing.

00:40:17.000 So the demands of life have become more sophisticated and ideas spread more quickly.

00:40:24.000 And so we are quite literally getting smarter up to a point.

00:40:27.000 Things that can't go on forever don't.

00:40:29.000 And the Flynn effect is starting to level off.

00:40:32.000 But there has been this drift upward in intelligence.

00:40:36.000 Wow.

00:40:36.000 I don't think that's surprising at all.

00:40:38.000 I think if you look at the amount of information that people are subject to today and just the sheer raw data.

00:40:44.000 I mean, there's a lot of the data is just nonsense and Twitter.

00:40:48.000 What is the quote that we produce more content in two days than in an entire human history every two days?

00:40:56.000 Something crazy like that?

00:40:57.000 Is that right?

00:40:58.000 It sounds plausible.

00:40:59.000 It sounds plausible, yeah.

00:41:00.000 But most of it is like, LOL, I just went to the mall.

00:41:04.000 You know, like...

00:41:05.000 You know, there's a lot of nonsense in there.

00:41:07.000 But the sheer amount of interesting information, like those newly discovered Mayan ruins in Guatemala and things along those lines, or, you know, there was some interesting new information on the history of human beings,

00:41:23.000 because they found some new teeth and some The throwback, the date of modern humans, and they keep moving that back.

00:41:30.000 The point is, we're constantly getting more information, more data, more things to think about, and I've just got to assume that the amount of information that comes to a person in 2018 is just vastly larger than the amount that came to them in 1978. Absolutely.

00:41:47.000 And there are – as idiotic as a lot of public debate is today, there's a lot of idiocy in the past too. 0.99

00:41:53.000 I mean in the – as recently as the 1960s, there's that movie on the first interracial couple in Virginia where there was a court, a judge who said God – It didn't mean for the racist to intermarry. 0.99

00:42:08.000 That's why he put black people in Africa and yellow people in Asia and white people in Europe. 0.90

00:42:13.000 It's a judge.

00:42:14.000 The judge.

00:42:14.000 Hilarious.

00:42:15.000 The judge said this in his decision, eventually overturned.

00:42:18.000 Loving versus Virginia. 1.00

00:42:20.000 Now, I mean, no one would make that stupid an argument today. 0.99

00:42:24.000 Even people that we think of as kind of racist, they'd be embarrassed. 1.00

00:42:28.000 I mean, it's too stupid. 1.00

00:42:29.000 And people on the left made some pretty stupid arguments as well when Castro— Sent all of the gay people to concentration camps in Cuba. 1.00

00:42:38.000 You had Susan Sontag, a respected left-wing intellectual, saying, well, this is, you know, you've got to forgive them because Latin America was such a sexualized culture and there were prostitutes and there was decadence that, of course, it was a little bit of an overreaction. 0.99

00:42:53.000 Now, today, I don't think anyone on the left or the right would say it's okay to send gay people to concentration camps because there were a lot of prostitutes in Havana. 0.99

00:43:01.000 But that's the kind of idiotic statement that we kind of forget that people used to make in the past too. 1.00

00:43:08.000 So it's a way of reassuring ourselves whenever we see debate getting – seemingly getting stupider and stupider. 1.00

00:43:15.000 You've got to remember there's a lot of stupidity in the past too. 1.00

00:43:17.000 Trevor Burrus Oh, yeah. 1.00

00:43:18.000 A massive amount.

00:43:20.000 And I think you're right that the – you know, it's hard to tell day by day, especially when your attention is concentrated by the worst things that happen.

00:43:28.000 And again, this is a big theme of enlightenment now, that your picture of the world when it's – because the human mind really is driven by anecdotes and images and stories, and that's what the news gives us.

00:43:41.000 But if you look at trends, if you follow the trend lines and not the headlines, you see that a lot of things really are getting better gradually, but that kind of accumulates over time.

00:43:51.000 And one of the things, with the flow of information, we are actually getting more, we meaning Americans, but also worldwide, there is this trend of getting more liberal, more tolerant, more progressive.

00:44:04.000 You know, hard to tell.

00:44:06.000 Day by day, but when you think that in the 1960s, there was a debate over whether there should be racial segregation, whether African-Americans should drink out of different water fountains or stay in different motels.

00:44:16.000 There's debate over whether women should be allowed in the workplace, that what's going to happen to all the kids if they I think? 0.93

00:44:44.000 There is this gradual trend toward more tolerance, even in parts of the world where it seems to be totally absent, like in a lot of the Islamic world, which world surveys show this is the least progressive part of the world in terms of attitudes towards women,

00:45:00.000 attitudes towards gays, attitudes towards child-rearing.

00:45:03.000 But even in the Islamic world, there's been a drift in the liberal direction.

00:45:06.000 We just saw it two weeks ago when Saudi Arabia allowed women to drive.

00:45:11.000 I mean, it's kind of, you know...

00:45:14.000 Kind of hilarious.

00:45:16.000 But it shows.

00:45:18.000 I mean, they just could not live in this absurd situation forever.

00:45:22.000 I mean, the world really did drag them kicking and screaming out of the Middle Ages in this way. 0.98

00:45:27.000 And that kind of tends to happen over the long run.

00:45:29.000 Yeah, I'm an optimist, and I really do look at all these trends.

00:45:34.000 You'll like the book then, 75 Optimistic Graphs.

00:45:38.000 Oh, excellent.

00:45:39.000 Yeah, I think that if you look at just the overall human race, one of the best indications of that is go and look at media representations of life from the 1950s and 1960s.

00:45:50.000 Watch movies, especially, from the 50s, and just see how people behaved.

00:45:55.000 I mean, you're getting sort of a time stamp Of human interaction from 1950. I mean, it's obviously an artistic representation of that time, but you get a sense of how people thought it was okay to behave.

00:46:09.000 There was a lot of smacking women. 1.00

00:46:11.000 Yeah, that's right.

00:46:12.000 Really common in movies, right?

00:46:14.000 And children.

00:46:15.000 You remember the scene where Junior would misbehave and mom would say, wait till your father gets home.

00:46:21.000 And then dad comes home and he pulls the belt out of his pants so he could use it as a weapon.

00:46:25.000 So the buckle would really hurt the child.

00:46:27.000 And the child would tie a belt.

00:46:40.000 I think this idea of being dragged, kicking and screaming into this new age, I think we're all doing that.

00:46:46.000 And I think you're seeing that in so many different places.

00:46:49.000 Parts of our culture today.

00:46:51.000 You know, I think that's one of the things that's happening with this Me Too movement, is that all this mass public shaming of sexual harassers and sexual assaulters and all this different thing, it's like forcing human beings to reassess the way they interact with each other.

00:47:06.000 And like this really radical, very quick sort of a movement over just a short period of time has had a giant impact on culture.

00:47:15.000 Yeah, and like a lot of social changes, it happens really quickly.

00:47:19.000 It probably mixes some good things and some not so good things.

00:47:22.000 And it's really good that men no longer have a license to just expose themselves or harass women who work for them and treat them in these crude and ugly ways.

00:47:37.000 And there's also a legitimate concern that You just can't really believe all accusers.

00:47:44.000 I mean we kind of learned that through history from witch hunts and lynchings and pogroms.

00:47:51.000 And there's got to be proportionality.

00:47:53.000 Not all infractions are the same.

00:47:55.000 The punishment should fit the crime.

00:47:56.000 So we haven't quite settled in how to balance the very necessary corrective to men harassing women with rule of law and standards of justice.

00:48:08.000 Correct me if I'm wrong about this, but this is one of my theories, is our brains, our capacity, and our understanding is relative to what's necessary at the time.

00:48:19.000 And one of the things that I use is Dunbar's number.

00:48:24.000 So that Dunbar's number is this idea that you could only have these intimate relationships with 150 or so people, or in terms of intimacy of understanding who they are, knowing their name, knowing things about them.

00:48:36.000 But as our circle of people that we interact with grows and expands, I wonder if that's going to expand as well.

00:48:44.000 When you think about the amount of information that people can hold in their brain and what people are used to knowing about, this is a radically different world in 2018 than it was in 1960. The amount of things that you were aware of in 1960, just by virtue of not having social media,

00:49:02.000 the internet, Google, all these different ways that you could get information from, it's just so different.

00:49:10.000 I don't know how many times more information you're getting, but it must be much more.

00:49:16.000 And over an incredibly small period of time, when you think about the relative time span that human beings have been here, a few hundred thousand years or whatever, I wonder if this is...

00:49:30.000 I wonder if we're changing, and I wonder what we're going to be like if this continues to grow and continues to be a part of our life, if we're going to adapt our abilities.

00:49:45.000 We're not going to change the neurobiological structure of the brain very much because even though we all learn through our lives, there are limits as to what our brain can do.

00:49:56.000 But what I think happens is there's a back and forth between our brains and the technology.

00:50:02.000 So the technology adjusts to take into account how our brains work.

00:50:06.000 So the restriction of you can't know or feel that you know more than 100 or 150 people Kind of that helps define the set of top We're top-ranked friends in a social network.

00:50:22.000 The fact that we're visual creatures, you know, we're primates.

00:50:25.000 We get a lot of our information through our eyeballs.

00:50:28.000 It's one of the reasons why computer technology has changed so much since the 80s and 70s.

00:50:34.000 Like when I first learned to program a computer, it was just all text or use a computer.

00:50:39.000 I mean, there are just 80 characters in a line and you have the letters of the alphabet and that's all there was.

00:50:44.000 And it soon became clear that that's not a very efficient way of getting ideas into a brain.

00:50:51.000 It's really laborious and tiring.

00:50:53.000 And so you have graphic user interfaces.

00:50:56.000 I mean, Apple was the first to commercialize it, but it had been developed beforehand at Xerox.

00:51:01.000 But it was really exotic at first when you saw a screen with these windows and pointers and icons and a mouse.

00:51:08.000 And computers don't work that way naturally.

00:51:10.000 It took a huge amount.

00:51:11.000 It still does.

00:51:12.000 It takes a huge amount of programming to get a We're good to go.

00:51:32.000 I'm thinking in terms of the actual capability of the human mind.

00:51:37.000 And when you read about modern human brains, like there was an article that was published recently that was trying to remap the timeline of the modern human brain.

00:51:49.000 And I think they were pointing to about 35,000 years ago now.

00:51:53.000 And see if you can find that.

00:51:56.000 Trying to figure out what exactly they were saying, but essentially they were saying that the modern human brain was far more recent.

00:52:04.000 How interesting.

00:52:05.000 I mean, I'm not surprised.

00:52:06.000 Yeah.

00:52:07.000 I would have guessed a little bit older than that, but yeah.

00:52:10.000 But, you know, in the tens of thousands of years, yeah.

00:52:12.000 So, one of the big mysteries, right, is the doubling of the human brain size over a period of, what, it was like two million years.

00:52:20.000 Something had to happen to cause that, like some change in our environment, some change in our behavior, and our...

00:52:26.000 What has been a bigger change than the internet?

00:52:28.000 What has been a bigger change than the access to information that people have today?

00:52:31.000 And I'm wondering if we're not experiencing, when you're talking about these steady rise of IQs, obviously it's not just the internet, it's education, the cumulative data that people just keep piling onto, and more people learn more things, and people get wiser, and The way we interface with information is better than it's ever been before.

00:52:49.000 But I wonder about the capacity and the capabilities of the human mind.

00:52:53.000 If it's happening right now, it's just a very gradual thing, this 10% tick or 10-point tick per decade.

00:53:02.000 If this is going to lead, you extrapolate.

00:53:05.000 You go 100 years from now, 200 years from now.

00:53:07.000 What are we going to be looking at?

00:53:09.000 Well, the thing is that what happened over the last few tens of thousands of years It's not going to be replicated anytime soon because that a lot was driven by Darwinian natural selection, which just meant that smarter people had more surviving babies.

00:53:23.000 That's a process that happened as a speed limit measured in generations.

00:53:28.000 And it may not be that Coping in a modern society makes you have more babies, maybe the other way around.

00:53:35.000 You know, as you're more educated, you have fewer children.

00:53:39.000 And so I think a lot of the...

00:53:41.000 There's going to be a certain amount of plasticity of what you can master in your own lifetime, especially if you start in childhood.

00:53:51.000 You're going to...

00:53:52.000 A lot of these skills become second nature, how to look things up, how to use these devices efficiently.

00:53:58.000 And then...

00:54:00.000 That can reach limits.

00:54:02.000 There are only so many hours in the day and there's only so many neurons in your brain.

00:54:06.000 But in conjunction with that, the technology becomes more human-friendly and there are new ways of getting information into the brain.

00:54:15.000 We've gone from just lines of characters to graphic user interfaces and video and more like creative data graphics where you see moving colored graphs as a way of getting a bunch of variables into a human head more efficiently.

00:54:30.000 And virtual reality might be the next step where we've got 3D environments that we can explore and that may be a way of getting our puny brains to experience more information.

00:54:43.000 Yeah, I was going to bring that up to you next, because that's one of the things that concerns me the most, is how good virtual reality is now, but how relatively crude it is in comparison to the potential.

00:54:55.000 And have you experienced it at all?

00:54:57.000 Have you used, like, an HTC Vive or any of those?

00:54:59.000 No, I've used more kind of lower-tech kinds of, like, you know, Google Cardboard and things like that.

00:55:05.000 Yeah, that's kind of interesting.

00:55:06.000 Which is still pretty interesting.

00:55:07.000 Yeah, but the Vive will freak you out.

00:55:09.000 Yeah, I bet you.

00:55:14.000 Several years ago's version.

00:55:16.000 I think my friend Duncan Trussell had one two or three years ago that I used, and I was blown away by that, where you're underwater and there's a whale that swims up to you, and it seems so real.

00:55:27.000 And you didn't get nauseous.

00:55:29.000 No, I didn't, but it's obviously fake.

00:55:33.000 Like, I'm looking at it and I can make a distinction quickly.

00:55:37.000 Like, when you see a movie, and in the movie there's like fake...

00:55:58.000 I'm really concerned that there's gonna be a Just a giant section of our population that completely checks out of the regular world and lives in some strange fantasy land most of the time.

00:56:10.000 They just consume food and water and figure out a way to feed themselves and spend most of their time locked into a helmet living in some fantastic artificial environment that people have created.

00:56:22.000 Yeah.

00:56:23.000 There's a – well, although just putting things into perspective, there were those fears when television became popular.

00:56:30.000 Right.

00:56:31.000 And even before that with movies.

00:56:32.000 So it's a question of what kind of balance people will find.

00:56:36.000 I mean clearly it's going to be more of exactly what you describe.

00:56:38.000 But people do like reality too.

00:56:42.000 People – I think we're good to go.

00:56:59.000 As much as we're seduced by just sensory experiences, we also – we have a sense of reality and we value it.

00:57:06.000 And we don't like being fooled too much and the question is what balance will we find between the desire for authentic experience and the pleasure of these cheap artificial ones.

00:57:20.000 When you chose to write a book about enlightenment and you chose to write a book that's showing all these positive graphs and all these trends that seem to be optimistic, are you writing that, obviously you feel this way and this is the data and this is your interpretation of where we're headed,

00:57:41.000 but are you also kind of like Encouraging people in a way to have a more rose-colored view of the world and just understand that.

00:58:18.000 We're good to go.

00:58:45.000 Art of history or dialectic or any mystical stuff that just makes us better and better.

00:58:50.000 There's recognizing problems and figuring out how the world works and doing our best to solve them.

00:58:57.000 So that was the message and the fact that we have had progress, contrary to the impressions you get from the headlines, shows that this is not a crazy, idealistic, optimistic pipe dream.

00:59:08.000 It's happened and so more of it can happen.

00:59:10.000 Yeah, that's where I was going with this.

00:59:12.000 Why do we have this desire to concentrate on the negative?

00:59:16.000 I have a friend, my friend Ian Edwards, has this bit about the news, about renaming it to the bad news.

00:59:23.000 He goes on this whole rant about the news.

00:59:25.000 I've got to check this out.

00:59:27.000 But he's right, and it is a thing that we, is it because we have this concern, like we have to recognize danger and we want to know what's happening so that we know that we're safe, but the reality is we're dealing with a world of 7 billion people with 7 billion stories.

00:59:43.000 You know, so you're going to be able to see negative stuff all day long if you so choose to do that, if you so choose to concentrate on negativity.

00:59:52.000 And it gives you this bizarre portrait of the world that the world is just this horrible place.

00:59:57.000 And Bill Hicks used to have a bit about CNN, about watching CNN and it'd be death, AIDS, pitbulls.

01:00:03.000 You go outside, birds are chirping. 1.00

01:00:05.000 Where's all this shit happening? 0.99

01:00:09.000 There's a lot to that. 0.99

01:00:10.000 Those are great examples.

01:00:12.000 But why do we concentrate?

01:00:14.000 What is our desire to concentrate only on the negative or mostly on the negative?

01:00:19.000 Well, there is a phenomenon in psychology called the negativity bias.

01:00:23.000 That bad is psychologically stronger than good.

01:00:26.000 So we dread losses more than we enjoy gains and criticism hurts much more than praise makes you feel better.

01:00:36.000 We're – our minds are attracted to possibilities of death and danger and so on.

01:00:42.000 I think it's because we are really – as you say, we are vulnerable.

01:00:46.000 There are many more things that can go wrong than can go right and that's kind of an implication of the law of entropy.

01:00:51.000 There's a tiny fraction of the way – That the world could work that works out well for you in an awful lot of ways that things can go wrong.

01:00:59.000 And so our minds are attuned to things that can go wrong, and that kind of opens up a market for experts to remind us of things that can go wrong that we may have forgotten.

01:01:08.000 And so the news It tends to gravitate to the negative and there are actually studies that show this.

01:01:14.000 You give editors two different framings of an event, an optimistic one and a pessimistic one.

01:01:20.000 They pick the pessimistic one and that's a trend that's actually increased.

01:01:23.000 I have a graph in the book, one of the 75 graphs that shows an automatic analysis of the tone of the news.

01:01:31.000 How often are there positive words like improve, better?

01:01:35.000 How often are there negative words like crisis, disaster, catastrophe?

01:01:38.000 The news has been getting more and more negative for about 70 years.

01:01:42.000 Is it uniform on both sides, right and left?

01:01:46.000 Good question.

01:01:46.000 I don't know the answer.

01:01:48.000 I suspect it is, but I don't know the answer for sure.

01:01:50.000 And there are fluctuations.

01:01:52.000 There are ups and downs, but overall the trend has been downward.

01:01:54.000 So partly it's all – even though, by the way, all the other graphs in the book show that – In reality, the world has actually been getting better.

01:02:00.000 There are fewer deaths from war.

01:02:02.000 There's fewer homicides.

01:02:05.000 We're making some progress in pollution.

01:02:08.000 There's less poverty than there used to be, more education. 0.52

01:02:11.000 But the news has been getting more and more morose.

01:02:14.000 Part of it is also that there is an ethic of journalism that to be responsible is to point out what's going wrong.

01:02:23.000 Good news isn't news, it's advertising.

01:02:26.000 And it's also because of the timescale that it's very easy to destroy something really quickly.

01:02:32.000 I mean, something blows up and that's news.

01:02:35.000 Improvements tend to be gradual, day by day.

01:02:37.000 And there's never a Thursday in March in which something happens that...

01:02:42.000 As Max Roser, an economist, pointed out, newspapers could run the headline, 138,000 people escaped from extreme poverty yesterday, every day for the last 30 years.

01:02:53.000 But they never ran that headline even once because there's never a particular day in which the 138,000 people were different than the 138,000 people the day before.

01:03:03.000 And so a lot of the good things kind of creep up on us and they're never reported in headlines.

01:03:08.000 Whereas it's easy to blow something up and that does happen on a Thursday.

01:03:12.000 So you have a very positive view of the future of humans.

01:03:16.000 Well, it's – as the great Swedish doctor and TED talk star Hans Rosling put it when he was asked, are you an optimist?

01:03:25.000 He said, I'm not an optimist.

01:03:27.000 I'm a very serious possibleist.

01:03:29.000 Yeah.

01:03:31.000 So what happens in the future, it depends on what we do now.

01:03:34.000 There are real threats and dangers.

01:03:38.000 There's a possibility of nuclear war.

01:03:40.000 There's a possibility of catastrophic climate change.

01:03:43.000 So we can't kind of sit back and say, well, things have gotten better.

01:03:46.000 Let's let them continue by sheer inertia or momentum.

01:03:50.000 That's not going to happen.

01:03:52.000 But what it does indicate is, well, we faced crises in the past and we have made things better.

01:03:58.000 Let's figure out how to deal with the crises now.

01:04:00.000 Yeah.

01:04:01.000 That's a great way of looking at it, too, to be realistic about it, because the possibility of positive things is a real—that's real, but also there's a reason why we find those ruins in Guatemala.

01:04:14.000 That's right.

01:04:15.000 Those people aren't there anymore.

01:04:16.000 I mean, they're a thriving culture of thousands of structures, and now it's a jungle.

01:04:22.000 Like, what happened?

01:04:24.000 Something happened.

01:04:25.000 It's wise to remember that that can happen.

01:04:28.000 Yeah, it didn't become Manhattan.

01:04:30.000 That's right.

01:04:31.000 I mean there is – I think there is a difference between modern – all modern societies and all of the ones that did collapse.

01:04:38.000 Namely that after the enlightenment, we developed a kind of a scientific network and community.

01:04:46.000 We developed the habit of free speech and open debate and Accumulation of information in written and electronic records.

01:04:56.000 I mean, it is not the same now, which doesn't mean that we're out of danger because we've created new dangers, like nuclear war, like climate change.

01:05:05.000 But there are mechanisms in place that if we concentrate them, if we are determined to keep doing it, then there's a reasonable expectation of success.

01:05:16.000 Again, but not automatically.

01:05:18.000 We've got to make those choices.

01:05:21.000 Yeah, the history of the human race is so weird in terms of the rise and fall of these civilizations and cultures that we're always, at least I am, always looking at, like, how long is this going to last?

01:05:36.000 Like, how long is this one particular nation going to keep it together?

01:05:40.000 And if you look at how many different countries have been around, that just, how many, you know, dominant cultures, Rome, for instance, Now it's just Italy.

01:05:50.000 It's just normal.

01:05:51.000 It's like a normal European country.

01:05:53.000 It used to be this conquering nation.

01:05:56.000 How long can we kind of keep this thing up?

01:06:00.000 What are your thoughts on the future of Just even the idea of nations, it seems like our boundaries, our borders, the way we have online, this ability to communicate with people all over the place, everywhere, it seems to me to lessen the necessary,

01:06:19.000 or the need, rather, for borders and for these walls that we're now literally and figuratively talking about putting up.

01:06:29.000 Yeah, I think there's going to be a kind of balance.

01:06:32.000 I mean, an interesting thing about nation-states now is that there's a sense in which they're treated as immortal.

01:06:40.000 Whereas, as you mentioned, for most of history, they were conquering emperors and And nations were wiped off the map and engulfed and conquered.

01:06:51.000 And now you look at a map of the world, and it's actually not that different from what it was 70 years ago.

01:06:56.000 I mean, there are colonies that achieved independence.

01:06:59.000 There are some big states like Soviet Union that fragmented.

01:07:03.000 But the borders in between the Soviet republics are now borders between nation states.

01:07:09.000 And no nation has gone out of existence through conquest since 1945, at least internationally recognized state by the UN. So there's this norm, even though the borders are often crazy and they're arbitrary lines drawn on a map.

01:07:25.000 But one of the reasons that, again, this is counterintuitive, that wars have gone down and deaths in wars have gone down is that borders are now treated as sacrosanct.

01:07:35.000 By the kind of international community, not 100% of the time.

01:07:38.000 You had Russia annexing Crimea.

01:07:41.000 But those are exceptions.

01:07:43.000 And by and large, unlike, say, in the past, in the 19th century, where the U.S. had an unpaid debt from Mexico, so it conquered Texas and Colorado and Nevada and California, that doesn't happen anymore.

01:07:57.000 And so the borders have kind of been grandfathered in, and that's one of the reasons why the The world has been more stable in terms of the map.

01:08:06.000 On the other hand, as you mentioned, there's another sense in which we have this global community that transcends borders.

01:08:12.000 We have things like the European Union.

01:08:14.000 We have the United Nations.

01:08:16.000 We have trade agreements like NAFTA, which try to get simultaneously the grandfathered borders, but this extra layer of cooperation that transcends the borders.

01:08:29.000 And we need them more and more despite the fact that our current president is pushing back against the global community.

01:08:36.000 But because there are problems that are global, migration, terrorism, climate, pollution, rogue states, and the fact that people – even if you grow up in France and you consider yourself a French citizen, you want to be able to spend a summer in Italy or in England or in Belgium if that's where – There's a good job and there's a desire among people to be able to move to wherever the opportunities are best.

01:09:02.000 So there's going to be some kind of compromise, I think, between keeping the nation-state borders just so you don't have constant wars of conquest and border disputes but allowing the world and allowing the people of the world to take advantage of a true global community.

01:09:18.000 Yeah, I feel like that's one of the things that people were most upset about, Brexit, was that this is, even though the people that were pro-Brexit felt like this was in the interest of the UK and the interest of England to be separate from all this because they were doing better and because they didn't want all the negative possibilities from all these other places coming into their environment.

01:09:42.000 But What I think that people, what they didn't like about it was the idea that this is a regressive move and that the progressive move is that we would all move towards this idea of a global community,

01:09:59.000 of this entire world being free and connected.

01:10:04.000 We've talked about Some of the problems that Paris has with immigration.

01:10:10.000 We showed some of the videos of these immigrants that had just littered all over the street and taking this place apart. 1.00

01:10:17.000 And we're looking at it going, man, that is a real tragedy.

01:10:21.000 What it represents is a bunch of people that really don't have anything.

01:10:25.000 Like, the real tragedy is that these people live like this.

01:10:28.000 The real tragedy is not that they've done it to Paris.

01:10:30.000 The real tragedy is that these people exist at all, and that they moved to Paris looking for a better life, and now they're stuck in this situation where there's not a lot of sanitation, and the garbage is all over the place, they're littering everywhere, and...

01:10:44.000 I wonder if we ever will have a world where there isn't a place where you can go and ship a factory and pay people a dollar an hour because they don't need a dollar an hour because it's just like living in Los Angeles or just like living in Phoenix.

01:11:01.000 You would never be able to pay someone a dollar an hour because there's too much opportunity.

01:11:05.000 The world has caught up and surpassed it.

01:11:09.000 Yeah, there are a number of really complicated issues.

01:11:15.000 Mobility is, in general, a good thing and countries do well when they welcome in immigrants, but not too many too fast, faster than they can be assimilated and integrated into the new country.

01:11:28.000 So just opening the doors probably is not a good idea.

01:11:32.000 No country really does that, but building the wall is a terrible idea too.

01:11:37.000 And of course, the best way to prevent massive amounts of migration is to make life better in the countries of origin.

01:11:45.000 That is happening slowly and unevenly.

01:11:49.000 But it's been noted that even in the United States and Mexico, more people are going – or the same number of people are going – Doing the reverse migration from the U.S. back to Mexico now that the economy of Mexico is so much better than the last 25 years.

01:12:03.000 Yeah, my parents live in Mexico.

01:12:04.000 Okay, there you go.

01:12:06.000 And there is a – hard to detect, but there is a huge improvement in the standard of living in what used to be called the third world, the developing world, where – If you look at the cutoff for extreme poverty, it's kind of defined somewhat arbitrarily as $1.90 per person per day,

01:12:25.000 kind of the bare, bare, bare minimum to feed your family.

01:12:30.000 It's down now from 50% a few decades ago to 10% now.

01:12:35.000 And the United Nations has set the goal of bringing it to zero by the year 2030. And what is causing that?

01:12:41.000 What's causing the change?

01:12:42.000 So a lot of it is globalization.

01:12:45.000 I mean, even though that's kind of a villain in many people's eyes, but when you have...

01:12:51.000 I think?

01:13:06.000 When you have people integrated to the economy selling their products on a world stage, they can get richer.

01:13:12.000 And so a lot – also better policies.

01:13:15.000 We have governments that are no longer communist or really heavy-handed forms of socialism where everything is – Right.

01:13:48.000 And leaders that think of their mandate as how do I get my country to be richer?

01:13:54.000 And the most dramatic case was China where Mao had these harebrained schemes of huge collective farms and people smelting iron in their backyards and anything that occurred to him in the middle of the night, he would force on hundreds of millions of people and it caused these massive famines.

01:14:11.000 Then Deng Xiaoping took over and he said, getting rich is good.

01:14:16.000 And he said, black cat, white cat, as long as it catches mice, it's a good cat.

01:14:21.000 So much more pragmatic, much more concerned with the welfare of their citizens.

01:14:25.000 When you have leaders who have that mindset, then their country can get wealthier and their citizens better off.

01:14:34.000 Now, but are you concerned?

01:14:36.000 I mean, I agree with you that it probably is one of the reasons why these people are experiencing this greater quality of life is because of globalization, because these factories are moving in.

01:14:48.000 But they're living lives that are very different, and maybe perhaps it's by our standards that their lives are better.

01:14:54.000 That maybe if these indigenous people were living this sort of subsistence lifestyle, that even though on paper they would be existing in extreme poverty, but if they're perhaps like living in the jungle or somewhere along those lines where you have access to all these natural resources,

01:15:11.000 That even though they'd be living in extreme poverty, they'd be living maybe perhaps even a better life by just eating the fish and eating the plants and hunting and fishing and doing what they had normally done for thousands and thousands of years rather than making a dollar an hour in a Nike factory.

01:15:26.000 Right.

01:15:26.000 And it's certainly true that of indigenous peoples who are living in hunter and horticultural lifestyles that there are real crimes in displacing them Welcome to my show!

01:15:48.000 The vast majority of poor people are peasants, not horticulturalists. 0.99

01:15:55.000 And they're kind of agricultural laborers.

01:15:59.000 And for them, just based on their own choices, often the factory life is an improvement.

01:16:06.000 It's an improvement not just because they're not kind of in the fields, knee-deep in muck, pulling up seedlings and getting bitten by bees.

01:16:20.000 We're good to go.

01:16:41.000 So this is not to say there isn't exploitation and cruelty, which ought to be opposed, and in the case of native peoples, often criminal displacements. 1.00

01:16:52.000 But on the whole, globalization has led to this escape from grinding poverty for literally hundreds of millions of people.

01:17:01.000 So even when they move these factories into these places and charge or pay them a dollar an hour rather, it's still a dollar more an hour than they would have gotten if the factory had been there.

01:17:12.000 In many cases, that's true.

01:17:14.000 Which is not to say there isn't exploitation.

01:17:15.000 But we look at our ends.

01:17:17.000 My grandparents worked in a clothing factory when they emigrated from Poland to Canada.

01:17:24.000 And it often is a route of upward mobility.

01:17:28.000 Yeah, it's hard for us to accept that or even think about it that way because we're saying, well, why – how come they don't have to pay these Mexican folks minimum wage just like they do in America? 0.99

01:17:37.000 Like, well, why don't they have the same sort of setup that we do here?

01:17:40.000 It just seems cruel.

01:17:42.000 It does.

01:17:42.000 No doubt there is cruelty.

01:17:44.000 But the relevant comparison is not so much the difference between working in a factory there and working in an office in Berkeley or Manhattan.

01:17:54.000 It's the difference between working in a factory there and laboring in the fields there.

01:18:01.000 And the people often given that choice, they line up to the factory jobs.

01:18:05.000 Do you anticipate a time where there is no third world and there is no like a massive economic disparity?

01:18:13.000 It's conceivable.

01:18:15.000 You know, it's a ways off.

01:18:18.000 But it's happened in huge parts of the world.

01:18:20.000 I mean, we forget that places like South Korea now, you know, this rich upper middle class society, not so long ago, that was the third world.

01:18:30.000 I mean, they were hungry.

01:18:31.000 They were – the children died young.

01:18:36.000 A lot of them living in squalor.

01:18:38.000 And that was true in – certainly in China, lots of places – I have an anecdote in the book in Enlightenment now of my...

01:18:53.000 Ex-mother-in-law who grew up in Singapore, and she remembers a childhood meal in which her family split one egg four ways.

01:19:01.000 This was back in the 1940s.

01:19:04.000 Singapore is now one of the world's richest countries.

01:19:06.000 So it can happen.

01:19:08.000 It is happening.

01:19:09.000 The most remote, poorest parts of the world are going to be the hardest to bring up to middle-class standards, like Congo, like Haiti, like Afghanistan.

01:19:19.000 But in large parts of the world, there's been a huge increase in the standard of living.

01:19:24.000 You talked recently about the dangers of overly politically correct thinking, just politically correct thinking of sort of a rebound effect, where politically correct thinking is actually causing more extremism,

01:19:42.000 more radical thinking in terms of response to that.

01:19:47.000 Like an overcorrection.

01:19:49.000 Yeah.

01:19:49.000 So at the top of our conversation, we talked about the possibility of sex differences as being kind of taboo from polite company.

01:19:58.000 I'll give another example, and this kind of connects to this conversation, is in a lot of academia, capitalism is just a dirty word.

01:20:07.000 I know – or something now called neoliberalism.

01:20:11.000 And a certain percentage, surprisingly large percentage of academics are actually Marxists, probably about 15 percent in the social sciences.

01:20:19.000 And to say the obvious fact that capitalism is better than communism, I mean that's just a fact.

01:20:27.000 I mean just compare – would you rather live in South Korea or North Korea?

01:20:30.000 Would you rather live in the old East Germany or West Germany?

01:20:33.000 Would you rather live now in Venezuela or in Chile?

01:20:37.000 It's just obvious that capitalism makes people richer and freer and better off in pretty much every way.

01:20:45.000 Now, that's a fact that's almost unmentionable in academia.

01:20:49.000 Now, but if you say it by itself and suddenly people discover it for the first time, then you can get the extreme right-wing position that any amount of regulation is bad, any amount of social spending is bad.

01:21:04.000 We need the most extreme form of almost anarcho-capitalism, like radical libertarianism.

01:21:11.000 That's because I argue that if you never have a discussion of the relative advantages and disadvantages of different economic systems, you never hear the arguments for why some mixture of a free market with regulation of things that have to be regulated because the market won't take care of them,

01:21:29.000 like pollution.

01:21:30.000 I mean the market just won't put up – We're good to go.

01:21:50.000 I think I'm going to go.

01:22:07.000 Opening up the possibility that someone discovers, hey, capitalism isn't so bad, then they leap to the strongest possible conclusion.

01:22:15.000 Well, as soon as you have social security, then we're going to be like Venezuela or carbon pricing.

01:22:24.000 And the rational way of organizing society with just the right balance of free markets, regulation, social spending is just something that doesn't get discussed out in the open.

01:22:34.000 You get these polarized extremes.

01:22:36.000 Anyway, that's the argument that I made.

01:22:37.000 What's the origin of that thought process in academia?

01:22:40.000 Like, why has capitalism been demonized and socialism been praised despite all the evidence that, especially Marxist socialism or Marxism, it's never been shown to be effective and it's been shown to be very dangerous?

01:22:53.000 Yeah, it's a good question.

01:22:55.000 One theory from Thomas Sowell, an economist at the Hoover Institution, is that intellectuals tend to like systems where you can articulate a theory in a bunch of verbal propositions and the government kind of implements them.

01:23:11.000 I think that's true.

01:23:37.000 The theory as to how that ought to work.

01:23:40.000 A language is another example. 0.99

01:23:42.000 I mean there's no committee that designed the English language.

01:23:45.000 There's no theory of how the English language ought to work.

01:23:47.000 It's like hundreds of millions of people just talking and they invent new slang and they slur and they emphasize and they borrow from other languages and the language changes and it works pretty well.

01:24:00.000 Here we are speaking in English and no committee ever designed it.

01:24:03.000 So according to Sowell's theory, I think he was influenced by Friedrich Hayek, the Austrian economist.

01:24:11.000 That systems of distributed intelligence, where no one genius ever designed it, but millions of people cooperating give rise to a collective intelligence, kind of run against the grain of the way intellectuals often think.

01:24:24.000 Not all intellectuals, because of course you could do what Hayek and Sowell did and realize there is this phenomenon of collective intelligence.

01:24:33.000 But if your first impulse is, what's the theory?

01:24:37.000 What are the set of principles?

01:24:41.000 Hyper-planned systems and be a little bit oblivious to distributed systems.

01:24:48.000 But in academia, for whatever reason, looking at things in terms of, from a socialist standpoint, looking at things as a distribution of wealth is a big, a common subject that keeps getting brought up, and class structures.

01:25:05.000 That there's going to be a time, if everything works out correctly, if we continue to evolve our culture, where we will no longer have classes, and we'll be able to distribute wealth completely equally across the board.

01:25:20.000 But it's sort of denying the motivation that human beings have to succeed.

01:25:25.000 It's designing the Denying this desire that people have to stand out and to overachieve or to be an outlier in terms of performance, which is just a natural part of human beings.

01:25:39.000 And also, competition.

01:25:41.000 That competition is fueled by reward.

01:25:44.000 And without competition, you don't have iPhones.

01:25:47.000 You don't have most of the technological innovation that we have...

01:25:51.000 That's been funded by these companies.

01:25:54.000 They've done it in order to make money.

01:25:56.000 There's got to be some sort of a reason why they've pushed all these things. 0.80

01:25:59.000 It's so ironic when someone is talking about how capitalism sucks on an iPhone.

01:26:06.000 Jesus Christ, that is one of the more bizarre ironies that is unexposed.

01:26:12.000 Well, you know, I think you put your finger on another phenomenon and I discuss this in my book, The Blank Slate, where I also discuss the kind of the politics of gender, that part of it is there's a history to it.

01:26:22.000 So there was an idea sometimes called social Darwinism.

01:26:25.000 It wasn't – it had nothing to do with Darwin, ironically.

01:26:28.000 But the idea that the only way societies progress is through ruthless cutthroat competition and poor people are just dragging the species down and screw them and if we're bleeding hearts – Then we'll retard the progress of society and we need just everyone against everyone else to advance.

01:26:47.000 Now, that's really not a very good way to organize a society, but there's such a reaction against that in the 20th century.

01:26:55.000 That you got the opposite extreme, that we are all blank slates.

01:26:59.000 That is, we all start off identical and that any kind of competition is bad.

01:27:05.000 You need kind of the benevolent government to distribute everything in the fairest possible manner.

01:27:11.000 Now, the reality is something in between.

01:27:14.000 We are – there's going to be inequality in any fair system simply because some people really are smarter than others and some people have more discipline and more self-control.

01:27:24.000 And it's good to harness that so that our competitive impulses have some people – I think?

01:27:46.000 You also don't want a central committee to decide that everyone has to have the same amount and parcel out every reward because that just gives too much power to a government. 1.00

01:27:58.000 But it also doesn't mean that you have the opposite extreme where the – if the poor people die, then it's their own fault because they're lazy and stupid. 0.99

01:28:05.000 It's not true. 1.00

01:28:06.000 It's not humane.

01:28:07.000 And what we need to do is find the right balance between – I think?

01:28:35.000 Sand down some of the sharp edges of competition there.

01:28:38.000 It doesn't have to be either or.

01:28:40.000 And the thing is, if you make one position taboo, then it makes things either or.

01:28:43.000 But how bizarre is it that these kind of rational conversations about this very important subject is taboo in intellectual circles?

01:28:52.000 It's not good.

01:28:53.000 How did that happen?

01:28:55.000 It's not good.

01:28:55.000 I think some of it is a reaction to the excesses of the past.

01:28:59.000 Some of it because people do tend to form kind of intellectual tribes.

01:29:04.000 You have sports teams and you root for your team.

01:29:08.000 And when you're a sports fan, when you acquire information, it isn't to become better and better informed in some objective way.

01:29:16.000 It's to kind of enhance the fan experience.

01:29:18.000 You want to find out what's great about your team and what's awful about the other team.

01:29:23.000 And that's a human habit that we bring to intellectual debates.

01:29:30.000 And academics are as susceptible to it as anyone else unless they take steps to recognize it and avoid it.

01:29:37.000 But if you're on the left, you root for the left team.

01:29:39.000 And if you're on the right, not so much in the universities but in the think tanks, you root for the right team.

01:29:44.000 And you tend to discount evidence that goes against your ideology.

01:29:49.000 You kind of filter out the things that are a little bit embarrassing.

01:29:55.000 And people then adopt certain opinions as almost loyalty badges.

01:30:01.000 And this is true of a lot of controversies that people often think are due to scientific illiteracy, like climate change.

01:30:09.000 Where you ask a lot of scientists, why do people deny the obvious facts of man-made climate change?

01:30:15.000 They think, well, people just don't get enough information.

01:30:18.000 We need better outreach.

01:30:20.000 And I think we do need better outreach.

01:30:21.000 But in fact, and I talk about this in Enlightenment Now, if you actually do surveys of how well people understand climate science, there's virtually no correlation between acknowledgement of human-made climate change and sophistication in climate science.

01:30:37.000 So you get people who do believe in human-made climate change, which I think is an incontrovertible fact at this point, but they don't really understand it.

01:30:45.000 I mean, they may even think, oh, it's caused by a hole in the ozone layer and we can fix it by cleaning up toxic waste dumps.

01:30:52.000 I mean, like crazy beliefs, but they're still on what I would consider the right side.

01:30:57.000 What happens is that in some politicized debates, Right.

01:31:08.000 Right.

01:31:09.000 Right.

01:31:17.000 And what we need both in the left-wing academic departments and the right-wing think tanks is kind of recognition.

01:31:24.000 We're probably all wrong about a lot of things, especially if we talk to each other and act like kind of litigators, like lawyers who mount the best possible case for our side to prosecute it against the other side.

01:31:37.000 That's just not a good way of arriving at the truth.

01:31:40.000 You've got to kind of check the tendencies in yourself and To just want more and more evidence for your belief and force other people to be as open-minded as possible.

01:31:52.000 Yeah, it's very fascinating to me.

01:31:55.000 These sort of mindsets that you see on the left and on the right, that there's certain subjects that if you support that subject, you are automatically thought of as a left winger.

01:32:06.000 If you support this subject, you're automatically thought of as a right.

01:32:09.000 If you're on the right, you probably think in some way, like if someone says to me that they think that climate change is probably an overblown thing and it's a cycle that the world has been going through forever, I go, oh, you're a right winger.

01:32:25.000 And you'd be right.

01:32:26.000 Yeah, almost always.

01:32:27.000 Almost always.

01:32:28.000 And if you think, you know, all gay people should be allowed to get married, who cares? 1.00

01:32:32.000 Oh, you're probably a left-winger.

01:32:34.000 That was probably true 10 years ago, and it's actually less true now.

01:32:37.000 That's one of these amazing changes.

01:32:39.000 So sometimes there can be these changes that just catch us all by surprise.

01:32:42.000 And gay marriage is one of them. 0.99

01:32:44.000 I mean, even people on the left had misgivings about climate change, about gay marriage, I'm sorry, in the 90s.

01:32:52.000 It was still something that a lot of people on the left were kind of – let's not go that far.

01:32:56.000 Maybe we should have civil unions or – now the whole – the country has flipped.

01:33:03.000 But in general – so these changes can happen.

01:33:06.000 But you're right that a lot of opinions are just – What's your opinion of Russia?

01:33:29.000 Now for decades, if you're on the right, you mistrusted Russia and if you're on the left, they weren't so bad, they misunderstood.

01:33:37.000 Now it's like totally flipped.

01:33:39.000 Opinions on whether you trust Russia just because of the influence of Donald Trump have shifted so the people on the right are more sympathetic to Russia, something that would have been almost unthinkable even 10 years ago.

01:33:51.000 Free trade is another example.

01:33:53.000 It was kind of a right-wing cause and then Trump managed to flip it.

01:33:58.000 So what it shows is – I mean where I'm going with this and this is something that I've – where I've changed my mind.

01:34:04.000 I used to think there were these ideologies kind of like religious catechisms where these are the beliefs that follow from one another.

01:34:12.000 But a lot of it is just raw tribalism.

01:34:14.000 Just like in sports, the players churn through the rosters with free agency and he used to be a good guy.

01:34:24.000 Well, now he's on the other team.

01:34:25.000 Now he's a bad guy.

01:34:26.000 You know, as Jerry Seinfeld once said, you're rooting for clothing.

01:34:29.000 And that kind of happens with political ideologies as well, to everyone's shock.

01:34:34.000 Yeah, the tribalism thing is very confusing to me because you could see it.

01:34:40.000 Like, it's such an obvious pattern.

01:34:42.000 And that when it plays out, like, you know, with the global warming thing.

01:34:47.000 I was having a conversation with a guy in my jiu-jitsu class, and I'll never forget this.

01:34:51.000 And he was like, ah, it's a cycle.

01:34:53.000 You know, it's a cycle, global warming, and then the climate change has always been a cycle.

01:34:58.000 And, you know, the people that say that it's not, it's like, whoa, whoa, whoa.

01:35:03.000 How much have you studied of this?

01:35:04.000 Are you scientists?

01:35:05.000 I don't know a lot about global warming.

01:35:08.000 I don't know a lot about climate change, but I know what I've read.

01:35:10.000 And it seems to me to be a very complex issue.

01:35:13.000 And I'm talking to this 25-year-old guy who was in the military who's telling me, I mean, do you have an education in this?

01:35:19.000 Like, no.

01:35:20.000 I'm like, well, why did you just automatically, like, decide that this is it?

01:35:24.000 We're talking about the very temperature of the planet.

01:35:27.000 Yeah, that's kind of a big deal.

01:35:29.000 This is complex.

01:35:30.000 And what is causing it?

01:35:31.000 Is it a carbon monoxide thing?

01:35:34.000 Why do you just automatically subscribe to this?

01:35:39.000 And it's because that's how his tribe communicates.

01:35:42.000 That this is how his tribe.

01:35:43.000 And that it gives people comfort to be in these weird little groups where everybody has groupthink.

01:35:49.000 Yeah, and I talk about this phenomenon in Enlightenment now because it's a book that argues for The importance of reason and how there has been progress thanks to application of reason.

01:36:04.000 And a natural pushback is, well, you look at things like that, we don't seem so reasonable as a species.

01:36:10.000 What's going on that we seem to be getting less reasonable?

01:36:14.000 And I think the answer is reason can work for different goals.

01:36:19.000 And here I'm using the ideas of a Yale scholar named Daniel Kahan.

01:36:24.000 He notes a perverse way in which there actually is a kind of rationality to that kind of belief.

01:36:30.000 Namely, when you vote, what are the chances that your vote is really going to swing the election?

01:36:35.000 Pretty close to zero.

01:36:37.000 On the other hand, when you express an opinion in your peer group, the people you work with, your family, what are the chances that holding the wrong opinion will lead you to be kind of condemned and ostracized and treated as a real weirdo?

01:36:51.000 Very high.

01:36:52.000 So if everyone thinks what opinion is going to help my esteem and the people I care about, they can latch on to all kinds of beliefs if they've become kind of identity badges for their tribe.

01:37:08.000 This is rational in terms of the world they live in.

01:37:11.000 It's not so rational for the planet as a whole if people just subscribe to beliefs based on tribal loyalty instead of truth.

01:37:18.000 And the challenge is how do we align beliefs more with truth and less with tribal loyalty?

01:37:24.000 Now, it's not hopeless because there are a lot of beliefs that people used to have that have been overturned.

01:37:31.000 People don't believe in unicorns anymore or alchemy and fewer people believe in astrology.

01:37:36.000 And a lot of scientific issues are there's no controversy.

01:37:40.000 Do antibiotics work?

01:37:41.000 Yeah.

01:37:41.000 I mean, it doesn't matter whether you're on the right or the left.

01:37:44.000 So part of the challenge is how do we get more and more of our beliefs to have our social norms be such that if you believe something just because you're on the right or on the left, then you're an idiot. 0.97

01:37:56.000 What you should be doing is looking at the best possible study with an open mind. 0.99

01:38:01.000 That's what a cool person does and only an idiot just paradoxically. 0.99

01:38:04.000 It parrots the right wing line. 0.98

01:38:07.000 That's the kind of social change we need to aim for.

01:38:10.000 Right.

01:38:10.000 Just almost a shaming of that kind of ignorance.

01:38:13.000 This desire that people have to subscribe to a predetermined pattern of thinking and behaving because it's comforting.

01:38:20.000 It's comforting that, you know, and also like they know that other people on their group will also think like that.

01:38:26.000 It's like if you're in the right, one of the things about you see about right wingers is kind of hilarious.

01:38:32.000 I was watching this Kyle Kuklinski Secular Talk podcast where he was talking about these Christians who were talking about Trump.

01:38:41.000 And when you are on the right, you must have a belief in God.

01:38:46.000 You just have to.

01:38:47.000 And when they were talking about Trump, they were saying, we're talking about the man that existed before he accepted Jesus.

01:38:54.000 The guy was literally saying, I don't have a past.

01:38:58.000 How about you?

01:38:59.000 Because I've accepted Jesus Christ into my life, and that once you accept Jesus Christ, you are now a believer in Christ, and you're forgiven for all of your past sins.

01:39:09.000 This is on the right.

01:39:11.000 There's a giant percentage of the people that are on the right that subscribe to a religious Christian mindset.

01:39:20.000 It is fascinating, especially when it comes to our current president, who by any standards is like the least Christian leader that we've ever had. 0.99

01:39:29.000 In the past.

01:39:29.000 He's accepted Jesus now.

01:39:31.000 He doesn't have a past.

01:39:32.000 Well, yeah, but he's still – I mean the Christian virtues include things like – Modesty, compassion for the weak, temperance, chivalry, gentlemanliness. 0.99

01:39:43.000 And this guy is lewd and vainglorious and arrogant and contemptuous for losers. 0.93

01:39:49.000 But which shows, again, kind of going back to our discussion, it's just amazing how much of loyalty doesn't have to do with the actual content of the beliefs. 0.98

01:39:57.000 It's just whoever's on my side.

01:40:00.000 And, of course, he promised a lot of...

01:40:03.000 Perks for the religious right like the repeal of the amendment that tax-exempt organizations can't engage in politics and in lobbying, the Johnson Amendment, which meant that if you're a church, if you don't pay taxes, you can't be politically active.

01:40:20.000 Well, they didn't like that and he promised to repeal that amendment and so he got their loyalty.

01:40:25.000 And so it's just raw political muscle kind of overcame Christian virtue.

01:40:30.000 So bizarre.

01:40:31.000 So bizarre, yeah.

01:40:33.000 But it's fascinating to watch just these patterns, these tribal ideological patterns when you see these groups that have this sort of one mindset and this very clear… Not so long ago,

01:40:54.000 it was the other way around.

01:40:55.000 It was actually considered to be a cause of the right.

01:40:58.000 Why?

01:40:59.000 Well, if you were a left-wing activist in the 60s, you would say, well, the only people concerned with the environment are rich people who like the view from their country estates and they don't want them to be spoiled by being cut down for apartments for poor people.

01:41:14.000 Or they're duck hunters who want to be able to go and hunt ducks.

01:41:18.000 And if you're really socially concerned, you should care about Vietnam and racism and poverty.

01:41:24.000 It's just a luxury to worry about trees and flowers and ducks.

01:41:28.000 Now, that flipped.

01:41:29.000 And then environmentalism became a left-wing cause.

01:41:33.000 But these connections between your coalition and your beliefs aren't set in stone.

01:41:40.000 Yeah.

01:41:41.000 Trevor Burrus Yeah.

01:41:41.000 Wasn't it – in the beginning of the forming of the political parties, it was – the Democrats were very different and Republicans were more like Democrats.

01:41:51.000 Trevor Burrus Oh, yeah.

01:41:51.000 Well, starting with Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican president.

01:41:54.000 And they were the – of course, they were the party against slavery.

01:41:57.000 And in fact, even in my lifetime, through the 60s, in the South, the Democrats were the right-wing kind of racist party.

01:42:07.000 I mean George Wallace The governor of Alabama who said, segregation now, segregation forever.

01:42:12.000 He was a Democrat.

01:42:13.000 He formed his own party in 68. Then back in 72, he ran for the Democratic nomination.

01:42:20.000 And the Southern Democrats were kind of the right-wingers.

01:42:24.000 It was often the Northeast Republicans who were the liberals.

01:42:28.000 That's still partly true in Massachusetts.

01:42:29.000 We have a little bit of a remnant of that.

01:42:32.000 We've had some liberal Republican candidates.

01:42:34.000 Governors, we have one right now.

01:42:36.000 Charlie Baker is a Republican and he's a pretty moderate middle of the road.

01:42:41.000 William Weld, who was then the libertarian vice presidential candidate, he was a Republican.

01:42:46.000 Even when Mitt Romney was our governor, he was not particularly conservative.

01:42:51.000 He was a Republican.

01:42:52.000 So there's the remnant of that in Massachusetts.

01:42:54.000 There used to be a little bit of that in New York where there were liberal Republicans.

01:42:58.000 But yeah, that's a case where it's flipped and now Democrat equals Republican.

01:43:02.000 Left of center, Republican right of center.

01:43:05.000 Yeah, you've seen some of that also with some Republicans have tried to disingenuously connect the Democratic Party with the KKK because of the past.

01:43:14.000 Well, and that was true of the past.

01:43:16.000 Yeah, it was true. 0.61

01:43:17.000 But, you know, they're talking about the people in the present.

01:43:19.000 Yeah, no longer true.

01:43:20.000 You know, this is the party that supported the KKK. Well, sort of.

01:43:24.000 That was a long time ago.

01:43:26.000 Yeah, that was the end.

01:43:27.000 Yeah, different people.

01:43:29.000 Yeah, it's just fascinating to me to watch these groups of people.

01:43:34.000 And, you know, we've talked about political parties, the right versus the left.

01:43:39.000 It's always weird to me that there are these two sides, and that people sort of take comfort in choosing this group that they identify with.

01:43:49.000 Yeah.

01:43:50.000 These identity issues where, you know, I identify as a right wing, I identify as a left, I identify as this, that these things are very rigid in their structure and they don't allow for nuanced thinking and they don't allow for being objective about issues and considering the other side,

01:44:09.000 considering other people's points of view and the way they're looking at things and thinking if maybe there's some common ground.

01:44:18.000 I agree.

01:44:19.000 In fact, Enlightenment now has the subtitle, The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress.

01:44:28.000 So I have a chapter on reason.

01:44:30.000 I have a chapter on science.

01:44:31.000 I have a chapter on humanism.

01:44:32.000 But in the chapter on reason, I ask the question, why does it – on the one hand, it appears that we're getting smarter.

01:44:38.000 There's the Flynn effect of rising IQ scores.

01:44:40.000 And there are a lot of areas in life where you see just much more intelligence being applied than just a few years ago.

01:44:46.000 So just for example, a movement in evidence-based medicine.

01:44:50.000 A lot of what your doctor does is just based on kind of superstition and tradition.

01:44:54.000 And now people are saying, well, let's do a randomized controlled trial, see what works, what doesn't.

01:45:01.000 So medicine is getting smarter.

01:45:03.000 You look at policing.

01:45:04.000 One of the reasons that the crime rate has gone down so much, another positive development that I talk about that people aren't aware of, is that policing has gotten smarter.

01:45:14.000 Every day, especially in New York, they would gather data as to where the homicides were, which neighborhoods, which blocks on which neighborhoods, and they would concentrate the police forces on that day to prevent things from getting out of control with cycles of revenge.

01:45:30.000 Look at sports, Moneyball, where you've got kind of smarter teams that can beat richer teams.

01:45:36.000 You look at policy and you've got evidence-based policy. 0.97

01:45:40.000 So all these areas where it looks like the country is getting smarter, but then there are all these areas where it looks like the country is getting a lot stupider.

01:45:46.000 And a lot of them are, I argue, cases where people – where issues get politicized and then people just go with their own coalition.

01:45:56.000 I think we're good to go.

01:46:22.000 Kept an open mind and say, well, what works?

01:46:24.000 Does a minimum wage lead to higher unemployment because labor becomes more expensive?

01:46:30.000 Well, maybe it beats me if I know.

01:46:33.000 Let's look at areas that have tried it and see what happens.

01:46:37.000 Does too much welfare make people unambitious and lazy?

01:46:41.000 Well, I can't figure this out from my armchair.

01:46:44.000 Let's compare different countries, compare different states and cities.

01:46:49.000 Issue after issue, I think we need to be much more pragmatic and open to evidence.

01:46:53.000 But when you do deal with these issues, much like you were talking about the difference between genders, when you deal with the actual raw data, that raw data, a lot of it gets very problematic for people that hold these ideas very rigidly in their mind.

01:47:09.000 And they don't want to accept certain facts and statistics and they come up with reasons why these things are either inaccurate or biased or racist or sexist or what have you.

01:47:20.000 Yeah, no, that's really true.

01:47:22.000 Because I think evolution didn't make us into intuitive scientists so much as into intuitive lawyers and preachers. 0.99

01:47:31.000 So the natural tendency is to amass the strongest possible case for your own side and to boast that you are on the side of virtue, that people who disagree with you are idiots and evil. 0.99

01:47:49.000 And we've got to push back against that tendency. 0.99

01:47:51.000 I argue in Enlightenment now.

01:47:54.000 Yeah, I try to recognize that in my own mind when it comes up, but it's so incredibly common, that tribalism that we see on the right and the left.

01:48:05.000 We see it men versus women. 0.97

01:48:06.000 We oftentimes see it even in gay versus straight.

01:48:09.000 It's a very bizarre but...

01:48:14.000 It's an incredibly common aspect of being a human being.

01:48:17.000 It really is.

01:48:19.000 I started out as a psychologist.

01:48:22.000 I'm not a clinical psychologist.

01:48:23.000 I don't see patients, but I'm a cognitive scientist, so I'm interested in how the mind works.

01:48:27.000 And so a lot of my ideas on which way we're going, how to keep going in a positive direction, are influenced by kind of a recognition of what makes us tick.

01:48:38.000 And what are the pitfalls in having a human brain?

01:48:42.000 I mean, I don't take credit for this.

01:48:45.000 For example, the American founders and framers, Madison and Jefferson and Adams and Hamilton, when they were arguing, well, how should we set up this new country, this new government?

01:48:58.000 They were kind of intuitive psychologists and they pointed out that, well, if you just empower a leader, he's going to get drunk with his own power and he's going to be deluded.

01:49:08.000 And what do we do about that?

01:49:10.000 Because we do need some kind of leader.

01:49:11.000 Well, you've got these checks and balances.

01:49:13.000 Mm-hmm.

01:49:14.000 What makes people better off?

01:49:16.000 Well, if they can exchange things and each one produces something they're good at and trades it with something that someone else produces.

01:49:24.000 How do we set up a country where it takes advantage of people's tendency to trade things?

01:49:29.000 So the connection between politics and psychology has been there for a long time.

01:49:34.000 Now, the subject enlightenment, that's a very loaded subject, isn't it?

01:49:40.000 It is, yeah.

01:49:40.000 Especially in the world of weirdos and cult leaders and charlatans and people that are sort of promoting this idea that You can achieve this sort of zen state of bliss,

01:49:59.000 of being above it all, of being wise to the point of being a sage.

01:50:05.000 That's a weird concept, isn't it, in today's day and age?

01:50:09.000 My editor actually was a little nervous about my choice of title.

01:50:14.000 I went through a bunch of titles for it as I was writing it.

01:50:17.000 He said, well, don't you think people are going to confuse it with Zen and Buddhism and a higher spiritual sense?

01:50:22.000 And so there is that meaning for enlightenment.

01:50:25.000 The meaning that I had in mind was the movement in the 18th century to apply reason to human betterment.

01:50:35.000 The ideas of Hume and Adam Smith and the American founders like Jefferson and Madison and And John Locke and Thomas Hobbes and the 17th and 18th century.

01:50:47.000 And I said, look, if some people are confused and they think this is a path toward – my book is going to be a path toward spiritual enlightenment, well, let them buy the book.

01:50:57.000 They might enjoy it anyway.

01:50:58.000 But I went to the dictionary to see which of the two meanings was listed first.

01:51:03.000 And most of the dictionaries listed the sense that I had in mind first, namely the movement in the 18th century toward greater reason.

01:51:10.000 It's the spiritual distinction, right?

01:51:11.000 Spiritual enlightenment is the one that people...

01:51:13.000 That's right.

01:51:13.000 And that's, to be perfectly honest, that's not what the book is about.

01:51:17.000 Right.

01:51:18.000 But, you know, well, if some people think it is, maybe they'll buy the book by accident.

01:51:21.000 Do you meditate?

01:51:23.000 You know, I don't, but I think I should.

01:51:27.000 But you're such a smart guy.

01:51:29.000 Why would there be anything that you think you should do that you don't do?

01:51:34.000 It's a really good question.

01:51:36.000 Clearly, I'm not that smart.

01:51:38.000 It's not that.

01:51:39.000 It's just a matter of practice and habits, right?

01:51:44.000 I think so.

01:51:44.000 Yeah, and I was in Davos the week before last and was on a panel with Mathieu Ricard, the French A Buddhist monk who I see eye to eye with in a lot of matters.

01:51:57.000 He wrote the foreword to the French translation of The Better Angels of Our Nature.

01:52:00.000 And he had me in the whole room meditating.

01:52:03.000 And it was, yeah, I mean, I liked it.

01:52:06.000 I probably should do some more.

01:52:07.000 There's probably some benefit to it.

01:52:09.000 Probably, yeah.

01:52:10.000 Do you have any practices that you do do to keep your mind clean?

01:52:16.000 Do you exercise regularly?

01:52:18.000 Yeah, I definitely exercise regularly.

01:52:21.000 I like exercise where scenery goes by.

01:52:25.000 So I tend not to hang around in gyms, but I like jogging, cycling, hiking, kayaking.

01:52:31.000 I like outdoor exercise and more aerobic than bodybuilding.

01:52:39.000 Yeah, they say that's one of the best things for cognitive function, high-intensity aerobic exercise.

01:52:46.000 Yeah, I like to think that.

01:52:48.000 And I try to sort of step back and Exert some discipline on this social media suck and email more than social media.

01:53:01.000 I try to spend time with my wife, Rebecca Goldstein, a novelist and philosopher, and we have a lot in common, and it would be kind of wasting life if I didn't get to...

01:53:11.000 Enjoy time with her.

01:53:13.000 She feels the same way because she's also a workaholic.

01:53:15.000 So we both are conscious of, you know, let's get out and go for a walk.

01:53:21.000 Let's see some friends.

01:53:23.000 Let's be close to our families.

01:53:25.000 Do you have a goal when you're writing a book like this, or is it just you have an interesting subject and you just sort of follow it through?

01:53:34.000 I always begin a book when I come across some really deep, exciting, interesting idea that I think has not been made public enough.

01:53:48.000 So in the case of the better angels of our nature, it was the fact that by all these measures, violence has been in historical decline.

01:53:56.000 And this is like a mind-blowing fact.

01:53:58.000 And I came across it by various historians, political scientists, psychologists sort of sent me their data.

01:54:05.000 And I was kind of sitting on all these graphs showing the world getting less violent.

01:54:08.000 And no one knew about it.

01:54:10.000 So I wanted to – I thought I had an important story to tell and I had a big intellectual challenge, namely here I am a psychologist.

01:54:18.000 I like to think I understand how the mind works.

01:54:22.000 But there's a big puzzle.

01:54:23.000 Why were our ancestors so violent and how come we're less violent?

01:54:26.000 We're kind of the same animals that we were a couple hundred years ago.

01:54:30.000 Likewise with the new book, with Enlightenment Now, then I discovered that there was even more good news that if you look at other measures of human well-being, like poverty, like illiteracy, like number of work hours, like disease,

01:54:46.000 graph after graph, it looks like we've made improvements.

01:54:50.000 Car safety, plane safety, workplace safety, pedestrian safety, death by fire, death by drowning, almost all of them are going down.

01:55:00.000 And so that was a story that I thought.

01:55:02.000 I was excited by it because I knew that when people came across it, they would find it interesting.

01:55:08.000 And it was, again, an intellectual challenge.

01:55:11.000 How do you explain it?

01:55:12.000 And I attribute it to Enlightenment ideas.

01:55:15.000 Do you encounter much resistance to this narrative from the doom and gloom people?

01:55:19.000 Oh, you bet.

01:55:20.000 You know, and there are things that go wrong.

01:55:24.000 There's the opioid epidemic.

01:55:26.000 That's going in the wrong direction.

01:55:27.000 There are big threats. 0.94

01:55:30.000 Always a possibility of nuclear war and we've got to be really careful not to do anything stupid and to, in fact, try to walk the world back from nuclear weapons in the future and climate change.

01:55:44.000 Then there's some people who just don't believe it. 0.70

01:56:14.000 I'm fooled by the headlines.

01:56:16.000 But yeah, I do get resistance.

01:56:19.000 Obviously, we have a massive reaction to any mass tragedy, like a mass shooting or something along those lines.

01:56:27.000 This is a natural thing, right?

01:56:29.000 Because this seems so strange that it could occur.

01:56:32.000 It's a natural thing to have this reaction to this horrible tragedy, but we don't have a reaction to, you know, how many thousands of people die every day because of obesity.

01:56:42.000 Obesity?

01:56:43.000 Exactly.

01:56:44.000 Or even if we concentrate on violence, we forget about, you know, the guy who shoots his wife because he thinks she's been flirting too much, or the two guys who I have a fight in a bar over who gets to use the pool table next and one of them is lying dead on the floor.

01:57:01.000 And there are far more murders of that kind than there are terrorist killings.

01:57:07.000 Every day there are something like 25 of those homicides.

01:57:12.000 And so it's like a Sandy Hill massacre day after day after day after day.

01:57:17.000 And they don't make the headlines because they occur bit by bit here and there.

01:57:22.000 But it's still incredibly confusing to people when someone does do something like the Vegas shooting.

01:57:26.000 Like, what is this?

01:57:28.000 So I have a discussion of that just because it is such a puzzle and because it attracts so much attention.

01:57:33.000 And, you know, a lot of it is just the notoriety.

01:57:37.000 These are often, you know, not always, but they're often kind of nobodies.

01:57:41.000 And their life is gone going down the toilet.

01:57:44.000 And they're thinking, well, how can I do something that makes my life meaningful, go out in a blaze of glory?

01:57:51.000 And so they think, you know, what is the – in fact, I would ask you this question.

01:57:54.000 Let's say you want to become – not you.

01:57:56.000 You're already famous.

01:57:57.000 But if I say to a typical person, what is the one thing you can do that's guaranteed to make you famous by tomorrow? 0.99

01:58:05.000 And the answer is kill a bunch of innocent people. 0.78

01:58:08.000 And that's just a perverse fact about the world.

01:58:11.000 And so for people where fame and meaning and mattering are more important than anything, including life itself, we've kind of given this perverse opportunity to become a somebody because we just give them – Wall-to-wall news coverage.

01:58:51.000 So there is that and so there is a suggested policy.

01:58:55.000 I actually signed on to this from some criminologist that the news media should not publish the names or the faces of mass killers that – It may be newsworthy that it happened,

01:59:10.000 but the particular name of the guy, why is that newsworthy?

01:59:14.000 The problem is it gets clicks.

01:59:16.000 Yeah, it gets clicks.

01:59:16.000 You're right.

01:59:17.000 I mean, there's so many articles that you see today that you look at the title of the article, and it has very little to do with the actual article itself.

01:59:25.000 It's just because they come up...

01:59:27.000 Yeah, I mean, these salacious headlines, they're so attractive, and it seems like today, especially...

01:59:33.000 You're seeing less and less people reading the Washington Post, the New York Times, the LA Times.

01:59:40.000 They're struggling.

01:59:41.000 And one of the ways they keep up is by giving people what they want.

01:59:46.000 If it bleeds, it leads. 1.00

01:59:48.000 Who is this crazy asshole that shot 58 people? 1.00

01:59:51.000 Let's find out what's going on in his life. 1.00

01:59:53.000 Who is his dad?

01:59:54.000 Who's his brother?

01:59:56.000 Exactly.

01:59:56.000 And according to this movement, it's a case that's not so innocent.

02:00:01.000 It's not like the kind of clickbait You wouldn't believe what happened to a 1970s actress so-and-so when they find a picture of her in her 70s, that kind of clickbait.

02:00:10.000 But this is clickbait that does real harm.

02:00:12.000 And you do have to balance it against, of course, freedom of the press.

02:00:17.000 You don't want there to be governments to tell newspapers what they can publish.

02:00:21.000 But there have been some precedents where the press has voluntarily imposed some standards that do nothing to abrogate freedom of the press but to make people better off.

02:00:30.000 So I'll give you an example from sports.

02:00:41.000 Right.

02:00:45.000 Of course.

02:00:49.000 Yeah.

02:00:55.000 And, you know, that was a voluntary restraint, and it was socially responsible.

02:00:59.000 And I think there is something to be said for not giving rampage killers the audience that they seek.

02:01:07.000 Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense in terms of the greater good of humanity.

02:01:14.000 But if you're a newspaper guy and your business is just to sell newspapers, you're a bottom line person.

02:01:22.000 The whole thing is just to increase the amount of revenue that comes into your institution.

02:01:26.000 Yeah, and not go bankrupt.

02:01:29.000 Yeah, especially today, right?

02:01:30.000 But journalists, especially in mainstream forums like the major networks and CNN and the USA Today and so on, they still have a huge readership.

02:01:42.000 And they do – they have to look at themselves in the mirror.

02:01:46.000 They do have journalistic codes of ethics.

02:01:48.000 That's kind of one of the things that distinguishes them from the facts.

02:01:51.000 The fake news and the rumor mills.

02:01:54.000 That will always attract a large following.

02:01:57.000 You want to be able to trust what you can read.

02:01:59.000 So they've got to, I think, balance that against raw bottom line because if they lose their integrity, then that's not so good for the bottom line in the long run either.

02:02:09.000 Trevor Burrus Do you think that there's a – I wonder if there's room for new media today in terms of, I mean, we obviously have these established places like the New York Times and like the Washington Post, but I wonder if these well-respected I wonder if that's really the right way to do it anymore.

02:02:44.000 I think.

02:03:12.000 It's funny, almost inequality in intelligent media, where there's a lot of real crap at the bottom, but there's also room at the top for new voices.

02:03:22.000 When you look at a guy like the President of the United States, who loves to use that term, fake news, it's one of the weirder times ever, his attacks on the media, and it seems to be very similar to, like...

02:03:37.000 The way he reacted to Barack Obama mocking him during that speech. 0.96

02:03:43.000 The media, when they criticize him and critique him, his response is to completely attack them and just say that they're useless and fake. 0.85

02:03:53.000 And it's a weird time for news when it comes to that and for journalism.

02:04:00.000 You know, I agree it is a very disturbing phenomenon because there is a phenomenon of fake news.

02:04:05.000 But fake news is not the same thing as coverage that criticizes the president.

02:04:10.000 Right, exactly.

02:04:11.000 It's an example of a real lack of comprehension of how democracy works.

02:04:16.000 Namely, if you're the president, you can be, will be, should be criticized.

02:04:22.000 That's how democracy works.

02:04:23.000 We don't have a supreme divine leader that we consider infallible and omniscient and that we bow down in front of and anything he says goes.

02:04:33.000 He's temporarily kind of a steward.

02:04:36.000 He's temporarily overseeing the government.

02:04:38.000 But if he screws up, if he says something that's not true, the people have the right to criticize him and there better be that criticism.

02:04:46.000 Otherwise, we're going to get a tyrant or a despot.

02:04:50.000 And taking any criticism and – Labeling it fake news, which is a real problem, fake news, is a genuinely anti-democratic impulse, and it's really disturbing.

02:05:02.000 It is disturbing.

02:05:03.000 It's also disturbing, his attacks on the different intelligence agencies, attacks on- Yeah, law enforcement.

02:05:10.000 Yeah, it's real weird.

02:05:12.000 It's real weird.

02:05:15.000 You know, if you boil it all down and you look at it like, oh, what's going on?

02:05:18.000 Oh, well, anyone that's after him, anyone that's attacking him, criticizing him, like, these people get demeaned and he uses his influence and his power to kind of shut down all these criticisms without any...

02:05:31.000 Seemingly without any concern for the long-term consequences of diminishing the impact of these media companies.

02:05:49.000 I think we're good to go.

02:06:05.000 But we can set up rules and institutions that make the society as a whole better than any of the individuals that make it up and democratic government is the prime example and the whole – the difference between a democracy and a cult of personality like Mao in China or Stalin in Russia or Hitler in Germany or – Mugabe in Zimbabwe now or the Kims in North Korea is that we don't worship a

02:06:36.000 supreme leader who kind of embodies the virtue of the people.

02:06:40.000 That's the idea that the United States tried to get away from.

02:06:43.000 The idea is you got a procedure.

02:06:46.000 You got some rules.

02:06:47.000 You have to have someone making decisions but you kind of rein him in and it's not about him.

02:06:53.000 It's about the whole system.

02:06:55.000 And the fact that we've now got a leader who just doesn't seem to understand that.

02:06:59.000 He seems to think that it's all about him and that if you just – I alone can solve it.

02:07:05.000 Trust me.

02:07:06.000 Let me do it.

02:07:07.000 And all these rules and regulations are the deep state, the administrative state.

02:07:13.000 Well, thank God for the deep state and the administrative state.

02:07:16.000 It prevents some despot from foisting his crack brain schemes on the whole population.

02:07:21.000 We do need rules and bureaucrats and checks and balances. 0.99

02:07:25.000 And a press that can criticize the leader.

02:07:27.000 As a psychologist, when you're looking at all this, is this a fascinating study to you or is it terrifying?

02:07:34.000 I guess some of each.

02:07:36.000 I'd rather not be as fascinated.

02:07:39.000 Ultimately, you really don't want human psychology to be determining the fate of the world.

02:07:45.000 Or at least you want one product of human psychology, namely what we collectively and rationally agree upon.

02:07:53.000 To be embodied in a set of rules and procedures.

02:07:56.000 Yes.

02:07:56.000 And so it's not about, you know, that guy.

02:07:59.000 There's also a way of behaving that we deem presidential.

02:08:02.000 And Barack Obama, in my opinion, embodied that better than anybody.

02:08:05.000 He was very composed, like one of the most composed leaders ever.

02:08:09.000 In terms of leaders of the United States, the way he would communicate and the way he would respond to criticism, he just had a very sort of composed, higher level of his ability to communicate.

02:08:26.000 It was just...

02:08:30.000 I agree.

02:08:31.000 And it was a kind of dignity and self-restraint.

02:08:36.000 And there's a reason for it.

02:08:39.000 It isn't just that it makes you feel good when you see it, but it actually is making a statement.

02:09:01.000 It isn't about me.

02:09:01.000 You know, kill hundreds of millions of people or to make them better off or worse off.

02:09:07.000 I take that seriously. 0.96

02:09:09.000 It's not about me feeling really empowered.

02:09:12.000 It's about me kind of serving the people that elected me.

02:09:15.000 And that kind of self-restraint and respect for the office is a way of reaffirming that principle of democracy.

02:09:23.000 What also concerns me is that the person who's in charge, this is how a lot of the rest of the country views the nation itself.

02:09:33.000 And if you have a person who's measured and objective and well thought out and well spoken, and that when you would hear, especially Obama's speeches, agree with him or disagree with him, everything was very clean.

02:09:48.000 Maybe I use the word clean too much, but...

02:09:52.000 It was eloquent.

02:09:54.000 And it was smarter than most people you know.

02:09:59.000 It was more articulate than most people you know.

02:10:02.000 The way the sentences were formed were impressive in the intellectual capacity of the person that's delivering those words.

02:10:13.000 And so that made us It makes us feel better about who we were as a country.

02:10:17.000 We're being led by this very wise, smart person.

02:10:20.000 Whether you agree with his policies or not, there's no denying that this is an exceptional human.

02:10:27.000 I agree.

02:10:28.000 And again, I think there's a greater reason behind it too.

02:10:32.000 The United States has the most powerful military.

02:10:35.000 It's the richest country.

02:10:36.000 What the United States does matters to the rest of the world and to reassure the rest of the world that we're not just a bunch of cowboys who are going to do what makes us the most powerful, but we really think about our role.

02:10:49.000 We don't do rash things that could really be bad for the world.

02:10:53.000 That gets conveyed symbolically in the way that a leader comports himself or one day herself.

02:11:00.000 Well, one of the things that I think of, though, when I see this whole thing going down, and I see also this reaction to this president, like the giant women's march.

02:11:09.000 You can call it the women's march all day, and it is a women's march, but it's also a march against the president. 0.99

02:11:14.000 I mean, that's a big part of what this is.

02:11:16.000 It's like the idea is that he is kind of against women in their eyes, whether that's correct or not, but that this march is to sort of show solidarity that they disagree with the way things are going.

02:11:27.000 And I wonder if...

02:11:29.000 Having a guy like this in power is going to, as we were talking about before, this sort of swing effect, gonna reignite more people to be politically active and more people to recognize the things they don't like.

02:11:46.000 Like the calling the media fake news or like the attacks on the intelligence community, all these various things, these things that people deem to be racist, these things that people deem to be, you know, hostile or silly that he says,

02:12:02.000 and that there'll be some sort of a powerful reaction in response to that.

02:12:07.000 That is the hope.

02:12:09.000 It's too soon to tell because there are two possibilities and one of them is that he's sort of shattered some norms, created a precedent that means that his successors could be even worse because norms can be fragile like what you just don't do if you're president.

02:12:26.000 Well, now you can do them.

02:12:28.000 That's the pessimistic view and the optimistic view is The country will say, oh my god, look what we've been through.

02:12:34.000 We tried that.

02:12:35.000 We tried crazy.

02:12:37.000 Let's get back to sane.

02:12:38.000 So those are the two possibilities.

02:12:41.000 You're out of time.

02:12:42.000 Yes.

02:12:43.000 Listen, thank you so much for being here.

02:12:45.000 Your book, one more time.

02:12:47.000 Enlightenment Now.

02:12:47.000 The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress.

02:12:50.000 Thank you so much.

02:12:51.000 It's been an honor and a pleasure.

02:12:52.000 I really appreciate you being here.

02:12:53.000 Honor's been mine.

02:12:54.000 Thank you so much, Joe.

02:12:54.000 Thank you.

02:12:55.000 Steven Pinker, ladies and gentlemen.

02:12:57.000 Bye.

The Joe Rogan Experience - February 04, 2018

Joe Rogan Experience #1073 - Steven Pinker

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