Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / Steven Pinker on Moral Panics, Media Bias, and Why We Hoarded Toilet Paper During Covid

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Steven Pinker on Moral Panics, Media Bias, and Why We Hoarded Toilet Paper During Covid · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

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  G'day humans, welcome to The Safe Space for Dangerous Ideas, Steven Pinker.
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  He might be one of the world's best known cognitive psychologists, a public intellectual
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  who for decades has used his fame to help us understand how we think, how we develop
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  language, how our behaviour is shaped by evolution and biology.
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  He is a professor of psychology at Harvard University.
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  His most recent book is a hugely entertaining reflection on social norms, on cooperation,
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  on outrage, cycles and social media, pylons, sudden political shifts, and moral panics.
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  It's called When Everybody Knows That Everybody Knows.
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  And Pinker joins me to discuss echo chambers and bank runs and media bias and why we
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  hoarded toilet paper during COVID, I hope you enjoy it.
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  As much as I did, the one and only, Steven Pinker.
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  I think everyone is aware of the general contours of the problem of people being in echo chambers
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  at the moment.
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  Steven, part of the success of this show is it's attempt to help people who would normally
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  be in different bubbles of group think to understand what the hell the other one is talking
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  about.
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  What I think is really interesting in your new book is the fact of noticing that it isn't
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  just the fact of the echo chamber that's a problem.
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  It's also that everyone being on the same page, that everybody is on the same page, is
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  the crucial sort of missing component.
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  It's not enough for everybody to just be consuming the same worldview.
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  They need to know that everybody else is also consuming the worldview for it to have currency.
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  Why?
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  Because that state of knowing common knowledge is the technical term, a little bit different
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  than the ways used in ordinary conversation, but common knowledge where everyone knows
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  that everyone knows something, I know it, something you know it, you know it, you know
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  that I know it, I know that you know that I know it, and so on.
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  It's necessary for coordination, for people to be on the same page, for them all to join
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  the same cause, for them to rendezvous, for them to respect societal conventions like paper
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  currency or the words of a language.
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  And so the state of knowing that everyone knows is a prerequisite to acting together.
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  Now it's very hard for, and it took for us to wrap our minds around all these layers
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  of I know that she knows that I know that she knows and so on, and we don't really have
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  to think it through to that depth.
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  If something is salient, if it's public, if it's self-evident, if it's visible in an arena
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  in which I can see other people seeing it, and they can see me seeing it, we can all see
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  each other seeing it, that gives us the sense of common knowledge at a stroke.
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  We don't have to think through all of the confoluted layers, we just know that the states
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  of knowledge about knowledge are there as many layers as you would care to go down.
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  And your argument is that they basically need to be there for infinity in order for everything
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  to hang together.
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  It's not just enough that I know that my neighbour knows that we both subscribe to the rule
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  of law.
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  My neighbour has to know that I know that my neighbour knows that I know that he knows
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  that I know that he knows all the way down.
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  Technically that knowledge, yeah, well that knowledge is implicit, that is we obviously
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  can't think an infinite series of nested thoughts, but it's tucked into what we do appreciate
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  namely that something is self-evident, that it's seen in circumstances in which the
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  seeing is seen, and then implicit, packed into that is as many layers of I know that he
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  knows that you may want to unfold.
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  So another way of putting it is that we have reason to believe that everyone knows that
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  everyone knows that everyone knows, even if we don't go through the bother of thinking
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  that thought.
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  In the same way that you know that they're an infinite number of even numbers, even
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  though you're not going to count them all out, you just know if anyone ever proposes
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  that there's the largest one, you can add to it and you get another one, and that gives
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  you the tacit implicit reason to believe that they're an infinite number, even if you
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  don't actually work your way through the list.
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  Yeah, right, and so the argument of the book is essentially that a lot of what we take
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  for granted in human civilization is hanging together on the principle of our assumption
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  that we know that everybody else knows a certain thing, and that that is currently being
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  corroded, what is your concern?
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  Well, it has not been corroded across the board because common knowledge is always relative
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  to some group of knowers.
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  They can be common knowledge between two people.
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  They can be called knowledge in a group of friends or group of onlookers, and they can
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  be common knowledge through a group of, through an entire society.
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  And what maybe happened is that the networks of common knowledge are getting smaller than
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  they were at their peak when there was, say, a couple of national networks in the U.S.
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  they were the big three, and Britain, it was pretty much BBC.
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  You could know that everyone was seeing the same thing that you were seeing and that everyone
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  knew that.
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  Now with cable news networks with social media, the pools of common knowledge are fragmented.
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  But there's, it's more than that because it's not just that you know what knowledge people
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  are being exposed to, but you got to believe it.
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  And the sources of credibility have multiplied and fractionated so that we don't all trust
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  the same sources of knowledge.
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  So it used to be that if you pretty much heard it on a national television, you believe
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  it, you could have confidence that other people were believing it.
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  Now some people know what's being said on a national TV.
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  It's not that they're ignorant of the fact that some guy said it.
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  They just don't believe them.
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  They have different sources of expertise, of credibility, of confidence, and the, or in
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  the case of, say, social media, there may be very little betting or filtering at all.
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  And rumors and urban legends and conspiracy theories propagate without people necessarily
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  thinking, what is the credibility of the source?
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  Is there good reason to believe that it's true?
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  Not just that you hear it, you see it, but what goes into whether you believe it.
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  Yeah, you don't spend a lot of time on conspiracy theories in the book, but as you speak there,
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  it is making me think that some of what gives energy to the counter narrative movement.
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  You know, if we've gone from a world in which everybody knew what Walter Cronkite and
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  Johnny Carson said, and they knew that everybody else knew it, and they knew it to be true,
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  and they knew that everybody else knew that it was true, and they knew that everybody else
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  knew that everybody else knew that it was true to a world in which some significant minority
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  of the population believes that most of what Joe Rogan says is true, and I'm not shitting
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  on Joe here.
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  He's a friend of mine, but you know, there are a lot of things that come out of his mouth
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  that are not fact checked.
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  They derive some of their confidence in their counter narrative precisely from the fact
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  that all of the normies believe, all of the sheep will believe this other thing.
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  Then it's like, you know, there is a certain subset of, I know that you know, which becomes
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  clanlike or clique like in opposition to the mainstream knowledge.
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  Yeah.
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  And the traditional sources of authority have compromised themselves in aligning themselves
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  too much of the political faction, particularly the left, that when you have scientists and
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  public health officials and academics and trusted broadcasters, just looking and sounding
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  and feeling and smelling as if they're advocates for the political left, then that arose
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  their credibility.
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  People just say, well, that's their tribe, I'm going to listen to the priests in my tribe.
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  Also, in the best of times, it's not clear that people, how seriously people take their
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  beliefs in realms beyond their immediate experience.
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  So everyone is pretty much an empiricist, they believe in objective reality when it comes
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  to whether there's petrol with a car, whether there's food in the fridge, whether the kids
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  are dressed, because you have to be, your reality is unforgiving, unless you're logical
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  and committed to the truth, you're going to run out of petrol, you're going to run out
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  of food, the kids are going to be linked to school.
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  So reality is a firm check on your beliefs, and I think that's why, by a large, people
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  are pretty rational about their own lives.
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  But when it comes to big academic and cosmic and abstract and ultimate questions, like,
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  what is the cause of fortune and misfortune and disease?
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  What is the cause of economic crashes and bubbles?
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  What really happens in the corridors of power?
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  What really caused the Great Depression or World War II?
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  There, I think that probably people like you and me, and probably a lot of your listeners
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  think that there's an objective truth and there's a way to find it.
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  We've got science, we've got historians, we've got data sets, but intuitively, that's
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  not the way people work.
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  I've got feeling is, nobody knows, and you can't find out.
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  And so, unclear what truth actually means in these big abstract cosmic realms.
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  You may as well believe the most uplifting myth, the best story.
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  The one that makes your side look good, the other side look evil.
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  The one that's good inspiration for the children, the one that keeps the troops together,
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  and the idea, well, is it actually objectively, factively true?
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  Well, people who have absorbed the lessons of the scientific revolution and the enlightenment
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  feel that even in these big realms, there is truth, there is falsity, there are ways
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  of determining which is which.
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  But you've got to kind of sign on to the whole project of being part of universities,
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  government record keeping agencies, encyclopedias, and so on, intuitively, people aren't necessarily
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  plugged into that network, and they fall back on, I think, our default way of believing,
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  which is for these big questions, the myth is as good as objective truth.
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  There is no way to find out what the objective truth is.
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  Has that risen over the course of your lifetime, Steven, that instinct, I mean, you're reminding
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  me a little bit of Jordan Peterson in the sense that this is something that he will get
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  tangled up in quite a lot.
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  He'll say, well, what it depends what you mean by truth, what are we even talking about?
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  You know, he'll be like, you know, essentially, if it's functional, then it is true, right?
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  You know, Christianity is true by definition because it's so successful.
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  And, you know, I think people tend to backslide into that way of thinking.
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  It's the natural way of belief.
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  Those of us who think, no, you can't believe something just because it's taken over,
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  it's powerful, it's compelling, it feels good, it gives you, gives you a life meeting.
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  The question is, is it true or not?
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  Does the evidence support it?
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  People who believe that are the weird ones in the sweep of human history.
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  I think it's very good to believe that.
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  I think we are blessed with the scientific method and standards of journalistic editing
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  and fact checking and integrity and reputation and an adversarial process in the court system
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  designed to uncover the truth and checks and balances in the democracy.
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  All of these contraptions and gadgets and conventions that try to make more and more
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  of human experience verifiable a matter of truth and falsity.
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  But it's always an uphill battle and the natural tendency is to slip back down into subjectivity.
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  What's your hunch, Stephen, about the epistemology of this in terms of people's desire to actually...
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  Well, I guess I'm asking about how much do we actually believe the things that we say
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  that we believe when they are abstract things rather than concrete things?
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  Because Sam Harris will sometimes say that he's done studies when he was doing his PhD
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  that show that religious belief is indistinguishable from literal beliefs.
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  That when a person says that they believe that they're going to heaven,
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  it's firing up the same parts of the brain as the one that is talking about how much petrol
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  is in the car or how much when the kids have to go to school.
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  I've always been skeptical of this and more so now that Donald Trump is in office
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  when people ask me whether or not I think that Donald Trump actually believes the things
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  that he says that he believes, to which I have a hunch that it's not salient for him
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  whether or not the number of people on the ground at the inauguration
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  was more or less than what he claimed or whether or not the number of ballots
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  lodged in 2020 or more or less than he claimed.
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  For him, I suspect that he has a more Jordan Peterson attitude towards truth,
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  which is it got me reelected, it functionally works.
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  It might as well be true. It's as good as true.
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  Who knows, really, we're never going to account all of the ballots.
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  There's never going to be perfect knowledge of anything.
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  Holding to this line is functionally true in the universe of the interest of Donald Trump,
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  and therefore it's almost immaterial whether or not he does or doesn't believe
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  the literal truth of the facts on the ground.
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  Where do you think, how do you think our brains operate on that?
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  I think that is the way our brains operate.
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  At least when it comes to realms outside of our immediate experience,
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  our concrete surroundings, the cause and effect that govern our daily lives.
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  Even there, people can dilute themselves or people can be
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  kind of squirtly about the facts, but I think there is more likely that if you're lying,
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  you know you're lying and you know that there is a truth.
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  Whereas for anything at a larger scale, a nationwide scale,
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  anything you can actually see, I think that Donald Trump, the postmodernist,
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  postmodernist academics, pragmatist, about a truth like Jordan Peterson,
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  fall back on the idea that intuitively, how could anyone know?
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  Now, and admittedly, it is unintuitive that you could know
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  that you can come to inferences based on sampling,
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  that extrapolation on statistical algorithms.
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  Yeah, I believe that that is a way to ascertain what is true or false at the national scale,
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  but I'm willing to concede that this is not a natural way of thinking that I've been immersed
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  in culture of truth seeking. That's kind of what science is.
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  I believe with Bertrand Russell that it's undesirable to believe a proposition when
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  there are no grounds for supposing it is true, but I also realized that that is an exotic,
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  weird, unnatural state of belief. I think the more people that adopted the better,
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  but it is an uphill battle. We've got to persuade people that there are better and worse ways
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  of being in touch with reality. We've been fortunate to have science and record keeping,
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  and we ought to promote the use of that kind of falsification as thinking in all realms of life.
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  However unnatural it may feel. Yeah, you're reminding me of Jonathan Rache's
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  excellent book, The Constitution of Knowledge, which you should read if you haven't.
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  Well, no, that basically makes the argument. Actually, I did read it, and in fact he is,
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  as yet, well, now he is cited, but he was up to this moment and unsighted influence on the line
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  of argument that I had it just gave you. At least he is here by officially I cited it.
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  Yes, right. At least that he is one half of the story that I told in my previous book,
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  rationality, the one half is simply that the natural mode of knowing when it comes to
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  phenomena outside the realm of experience is a kind of postmodernist, mythological, nonfactual
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  way of thinking about it. The other half, and this is where Jonathan's book is so
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  so important, is that those of us who've moved away from mythological thinking when it comes to
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  big abstract realms do it only by benefit of institutions that have been contrived
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  to seek the truth despite all these human biases. And what Jonathan pointed out is that in
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  science, with its demands for empirical verification or falsification, in democracy with
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  checks and balances in the judicial system with the adversarial parties in Wikipedia with its
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  pillars of sourcing and objectivity in journalism with fact checking and editing,
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  all of these are unnatural institutions that have been cobbled together with the explicit goal
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  of seeking the truth, with mechanisms that are workarounds for human cognitive biases.
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  Without those workarounds, you're never going to get to the truth, and so you may as well believe
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  in the most comforting myth. But since we do have those institutions, and of course at any given time,
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  they're all flawed and always constantly in need of repair and maintenance and reform,
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  but there it's good that we have them, we should strengthen them, we should rely on them more,
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  we should try to persuade other people to rely on them more.
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  Yeah, and if people haven't read Jonathan's book, they can listen to him on this podcast,
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  but I think the next one is excellent points.
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  Yeah, and I think the main thrust of it that I took away from it is that if you're a layperson,
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  you aren't necessarily aware of the systems that exist in particular science and journalism
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  to rectify human error, and that you can, it is always a bit of a cannot or a red herring
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  for people to say, well, but look at how biased the media was about this particular issue,
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  we'll look at how scientists got it wrong in the past, scientists have been wrong about in the
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  past, so maybe they're wrong about this now. That is true, but what you're overlooking is the fact
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  that there are a bunch of systems that are in place where if you've worked in a scientific
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  institution, which I haven't, but I have worked in journalistic organizations, people who haven't
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  worked in a newsroom are not aware of the number of layers of fact checking an editorial oversight
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  that will over time conspire to yield a superior result to simply throwing our arms up in the air
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  and saying, well, journalists make mistakes and scientists make mistakes, so therefore anything
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  might be true. Dead on, that's exactly right. And the thing is, none of us is infallible, none of us
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  is omniscient. Yeah, the New York Times has biases, scientists have biases, but at least the
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  New York Times recognizes that these are bad things, and scientists do are ought to, and they
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  have workarounds, reforms, they're willing, at least should be willing to show their work.
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  This is something where I think some scientists and public officials have fallen short,
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  especially in the time of an emergency like COVID pandemic. I think we would have all been better off
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  if the experts acknowledged the error bars around their estimates, if they indicated how they
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  came to their conclusions, if they acknowledged their own fallibilities, that when, as inevitably
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  happens, they turn out to be wrong about something, they haven't forfeited all credibility,
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  but have a self-healing, self-improving process that is fallible, because we're not angels,
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  we don't have a pipeline to the truth. But on the other hand, Irving with his Twitter feed
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  is not going to be any more accurate. He's pretty much guaranteed to be less accurate.
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  Who the Holocaust and I are, David Irving? No, no, I'm sorry. Irving was a randomly selected
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  forename. I could have been calling Irving. Irving was just a funny name for the person.
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  Oscar and Captain Melvin. It was just the first meeting.
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  Okay, Irving is interesting, though, because that's, although that also fits in the context of
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  the last 12 months, hand-ringing, in the Tucker Carlson, elevating. But that was
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  if it was true, that was a coincidence, yes.
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  Okay, there's another interesting, one of the interesting COVID anecdotes in the book relates
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  to the toilet paper shortages, which you're just reminding me of, Steven, which you make a really
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  interesting point, which is that the reason there was a run on toilet paper during COVID is not
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  necessarily there wasn't enough toilet paper to supply everybody. And it wasn't even that people
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  were afraid that they would run out of toilet paper. It was that they were afraid that everybody
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  else thought that there was not enough toilet paper. So everybody else would behave in that way.
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  And that when supermarkets imposed a rule that you're only allowed to buy one pack of toilet paper,
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  the reason that succeeded was not so much because all of a sudden there was more toilet paper
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  and people didn't hoard, but because everybody knew that everybody else knew that everybody
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  else wouldn't be hoarding toilet paper. There was therefore no need to.
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  Yes, toilet paper hoarding was a kind of a bank run on toilet paper. It was a self-fulfilling
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  prophecy. Of course, if everyone started to hoard toilet paper, there really would be a shortage.
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  It wasn't that the shortage caused the hoarding. It was the hoarding caused the shortage. And that
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  was set off by cycles of to use the fancy word recursive mentalizing. Mentalizing means getting
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  inside someone's head, recursive mentalizing means getting inside the someone's head is while
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  they're getting inside someone else's head and so on. And so when you think about it, you think,
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  well, if the rumor has gotten out that there's a shortage of toilet paper, it doesn't matter whether
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  people believe there is or not. They're going to believe that other people believe the rumor.
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  If only because they fear that other people will believe that still other people will believe
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  the rumor. And that could cause the shortage. And therefore, I better go out and get some myself.
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  According to one story, this all originated with a common knowledge generator of its time. In the
• 23:28
  United States, the talk show host Johnny Carson, who hosted the tonight show. He was called the
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  King of Late Night. And a good percentage of the American population would tune in every night.
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  There were only three networks. And his was the show, the dominant show. And to the extent that catch
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  phrases from the show, like, here's Johnny, we're just recognized even by people who didn't watch the show.
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  It was that famous. And in 1973, at a time when there were shortages of petroleum, beef, sugar,
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  Carson made the quip. There were a lot of shortages these days. But have you heard the latest?
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  I read it in the papers is a shortage of toilet paper. And in fact, there wasn't a shortage of toilet
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  paper when he didn't have that line. But soon there was as people started panic buying. And
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  according to that story, ever since then, whenever there is an emergency like a hurricane or a blizzard,
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  people think that toilet paper is the thing you've got to hoard because other people
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  noticed it with faces. Right. Notice the back and forth here. And this is a theme of my book
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  between a salient public event. In this case, Johnny Carson making the quip and people being aware
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  that he had a nationwide platform. And the the thinking about thoughts, about thoughts, about
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  thoughts, we go back and forth between one and the other. And it can generate nationwide phenomena,
• 25:05
  such as an actual toilet paper shortage. So now he goes back to John Maynard Keens. I think
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  in the 1920s, the 1930s, where he compared speculative investing, also subject to bubbles and
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  crashes that are self reinforcing, namely people buy a security because they think everyone
• 25:26
  else is going to want to buy it. And so the price will go up. So they hope to buy it now in the
• 25:30
  hope of selling it at a profit later. Or Bitcoin. Bitcoin, yes. And not coincidentally, Bitcoin was
• 25:39
  touted in viral ads in the American Super Bowl. Another common knowledge generator.
• 25:44
  Yeah. Larry David, the Larry David ad, the Matt Damon ad, where they said nothing about the
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  advantages of Bitcoin, like you can buy weapons with it, you can buy drugs, you can buy hookers,
• 25:53
  and the government can't confiscate it. Nothing nothing like that was even mentioned. It was
• 25:58
  don't miss out. Other people are buying it by now. So in the hope that you will be able to unload
• 26:04
  it in the future at a profit too, as they say, and invest in a greater fool. Now the idea what
• 26:11
  what came the way Keynes analyzed speculative investing was he imagined a beauty contest.
• 26:16
  I think he even said that they there was such a beauty contest in the British papers of his day.
• 26:21
  I don't think it's ever been confirmed. But the object of this contest is not to pick the
• 26:25
  prettiest face is to pick the face that the most other contestants pick, knowing that the other
• 26:31
  contestants are picking a face by the same criterion. Right. Not the ones that they find. So everybody
• 26:38
  is trying to second guess what everybody else thinks is the prettiest face. Exactly. And he noted
• 26:44
  that that can result in kind of cycles of people trying to out guess each other. And he compared
• 26:50
  that to many economic phenomena, speculative bubbles and pops, speculative bubbles. But also
• 27:02
  even confidence in the economy that can result in depressions. Depression is used to be called
• 27:10
  because they firms would not hire out of fear that no one would buy their products. People
• 27:16
  wouldn't buy anything out of fear. They might lose their jobs. So it became a self-fulfilling
• 27:21
  prophecy. People in real bank runs would dash the banks to withdraw their savings, which meant
• 27:29
  pretty quickly the banks could not redeem the further withdrawals. And so when in the debts of
• 27:38
  the Depression, Roosevelt said we have nothing to fear, but fear itself, that was literally true.
• 27:45
  It was the fear of other people's fear that generated and kept the country in a depression.
• 27:52
  And indeed, in fact, you make the point in the book that the one reason why banks look so
• 27:57
  lavish and opulent or the nicest building in any town is off in the bank. Is the bank proving
• 28:02
  to everybody, look how rich we are. You don't have to take your money out. We've got all this
• 28:07
  marble columns, the guilt lettering, the massive lobbies. Yes, we're ready to say we've got not only
• 28:17
  are we telling you that we have assets to fall back on, but you are now seeing that everyone else
• 28:25
  sees that the bank has assets and it was meant to tamp down these self-fulfilling panics.
• 28:31
  Now, of course, it obviously worked only so well because, you know, despite that, we did have
• 28:36
  a great depression. And that's why at least in the United States and I believe I'm guessing this
• 28:40
  is true in Australia as well, that there is federal deposit insurance that up to a certain amount
• 28:47
  if your bank goes under the federal government will be a lender of last resort, we'll bail you out.
• 28:54
  And the thing is that the reason that's actually a good deal is the government never does have to
• 29:00
  bail out a bank or very rarely because the fact that the government is willing to bail them out
• 29:06
  means that they will have to because there won't be self-fulfilling bank runs. Of course,
• 29:10
  that can be exploited where you can have if there is an expectation that the government will
• 29:18
  bail out risky behavior that can lead to what they call a moral hazard where companies and investors
• 29:26
  will take crazy risks knowing that the government will be there to bail them out. And that's one
• 29:31
  explanation of the financial crisis of 2008 that it was a house of cards with finance companies
• 29:39
  knowing that they were, as they say, too big to fail and that a safeguard against the kind of
• 29:46
  self-fulfilling panics could itself cause one if people exploited it.
• 29:52
  Interestingly, the Australian federal bank deposit insurance was only introduced
• 29:57
  during the relatively recent financial crisis and had been resisted in 2008-2009.
• 30:02
  It had been resisted prior to that for that reason for the moral hazard reason,
• 30:05
  but eventually it was bad enough that the government relented. You're also reminding me that
• 30:11
  during the Eurozone crisis, when it looked like Greece might crash out of the Euro,
• 30:17
  the thing that markets were waiting for, according to my friend who was writing for the Wall Street
• 30:22
  Journal at the time and knew this better than anyone, was just for the head of the European Central
• 30:28
  Bank, Mario Draghi, I think his name was, and the Chancellor of Germany to say that they will do
• 30:36
  whatever it takes to keep the Euro together, meaning the subjects being will give Greece whatever
• 30:42
  money it needs in order for it not to crash out of the Eurozone. Simply saying the words will
• 30:47
  do whatever it takes was the moment at which everything turned. Then you don't have to do everything
• 30:52
  because everybody knows that everybody else knows that Greece is still a good bet.
• 30:57
  Indeed. That's why the sayings of financial leaders could be.
• 31:01
  So, influential, and why they often have to wordsmith their remarks.
• 31:06
  Sometimes to the point of comedy, I cite a famous quotation by Alan Greenspan, the chairman
• 31:13
  of the Federal Reserve in the United States for many years, that since I've become a central
• 31:17
  banker, I've learned to mumble with great incoherence. If I seem clear to you, you must have
• 31:24
  misunderstood what I said. I think people hang on their words because they're signals that other
• 31:30
  people are hanging on. I also cite one of his predecessors, the Karlsman, Alfred Khan,
• 31:39
  who was the inflation czar of Jimmy Carter. Carter told him never to use the word depression because
• 31:50
  it could be self-fulfilling. At one point he said, okay, I know I'm not supposed to say certain
• 31:56
  words, but we're in danger of having the biggest banana in 40 years.
• 32:04
  I love it. Stephen, I don't know if you've seen the Unaked Gun movie just as an aside,
• 32:09
  but on the question of crypto being a Ponzi scheme, essentially, one of the big stadiums in
• 32:15
  the United States is sponsored by Binance or one of the companies, is it right? So, Seth McFarlane,
• 32:23
  Seth McFarlane has the main sports stadium in naked gun, is entitled PonziSkeem.com stadium.
• 32:33
  I haven't seen it yet, but I saw the first two and it's very good. It's as good as you can
• 32:42
  expect a remake to be. One of the interesting things that I've been thinking about since reading
• 32:46
  the book, Stephen, is how we telegraph authority to each other, especially in multi-ethnic
• 32:53
  and multicultural societies, because you talk about how a boss or a leader or a general will often
• 32:59
  festoon themselves with big hats and robes and they'll elevate platforms. They'll have the
• 33:04
  corner office. They'll have giant statues. They'll have bigger planes. They'll have ways of trying
• 33:11
  to telegraph to everybody that everybody knows that everybody knows that this person deserves your
• 33:16
  field and the reason why it works is because there's a common knowledge that they expect subordinates
• 33:22
  to give way and the subordinates expect the big person to stand his ground and as long as everybody
• 33:30
  is on the same page about that, that works. It works. However, yeah, sorry, jump in there. I just
• 33:37
  wanted to complicate that with sub observations of mine. Go proceed. Yes, go ahead.
• 33:42
  Well, so yesterday I was at a water park here in Australia with my kids, a big water slide,
• 33:48
  gigantic water slide, so a theme park. There were a couple of young, white,
• 33:54
  Aussie, lads, probably 15 or 16, who were being sort of larychanish behind an Arab Muslim
• 34:02
  couple and she was wearing her hijab and they had a younger daughter there. The man was quite
• 34:12
  aggressive towards these guys and they, I think, just accidentally bumped into him and he turned
• 34:18
  around and did the big, I'm a big bear type act and he was like, you guys want to make something
• 34:25
  over? You want to make something over? Puffing his chest out, kind of coming towards them,
• 34:30
  the Alpha Gorilla and really got to sufficiently threatening that it was almost at the point
• 34:36
  where I wanted to step in and defend them. Everyone's on edge in Sydney anyway. We had a terrorist
• 34:42
  attack a week ago, relations between maybe the Muslim, maybe he's feeling besieged and he's been
• 34:49
  subject to racism in the wake of the jihadist attack or something. I don't know, but I was reminded
• 34:54
  of your book because I thought the way that he is asserting his dominance, he thinks that it's
• 35:00
  understood by them as a legitimate way for masculine authority to be exercised. But in my common
• 35:12
  knowledge, he's pulling off a shitty move and he's actually in the wrong by being so overtly
• 35:18
  threatening because we would have a more conciliatory, in Anglo-Saxon culture, we'd have a more
• 35:23
  conciliatory way of trying to get the people to stop bumping into us and acting out. So what do you
• 35:28
  make of it when you've got sort of different networks of different common knowledge or living
• 35:33
  together and having to essentially translate on the fly as to what the intention of the other
• 35:38
  party is? Well, of course, there's a difference between what we are to do and how in reality,
• 35:46
  human social relationships actually work and so sometimes there are things that are very effective
• 35:51
  for even though we can deplore that they work that way. So yes, in the case of dominance,
• 35:58
  the dominance can be self-fulfilling in the sense that if there is cost to a conflict,
• 36:04
  both that is if they come to blows, then both parties are better off. It's certainly best of all
• 36:12
  to be the dominant and to enjoy the perks of dominance without the cost of a fight. For the subordinate,
• 36:22
  it kind of sucks to be the subordinate, but it might suck even worse to be in a fight, especially
• 36:27
  if chances are the other guy will win the fight, but whether or not he wins, you can both be bloodied.
• 36:33
  So that's why many animals and probably humans settle into dominance hierarchies based on common
• 36:39
  knowledge of who will stand as ground because they can expect the other one to give in and who will
• 36:44
  give in because they expect the other one to stand as ground. That is signaled by some
• 36:52
  common knowledge generator, something that is visible to both and the most natural ones since they
• 36:58
  correlate with fighting ability are signs of strength and size and here we've culturally mimicked
• 37:06
  what many animals have evolved, such as a lion with its mane, a gorilla with its sheer bulk
• 37:14
  orangutans with the alpha male actually grows these preposterous cheek pouches.
• 37:21
  Sometimes they really do indicate probability of prevailing in fisticuffs. Sometimes they're just
• 37:30
  correlate that when they're just big and they just start our signals. Well, someone's got to
• 37:34
  back down, someone's got to predominate, it'll be the one that has the fancy ornament that
• 37:42
  everyone recognizes. Now, that doesn't necessarily last forever. The person or Baboon who getting
• 37:52
  a short end of the stick can leave and just not engage with the dominant indefinitely and in
• 38:01
  relationship, such as a marriage, that's often what does lead one person to leave where they just
• 38:10
  are in a locked into a relationship where they're doing all the giving and the other person is
• 38:15
  doing all the taking. It can sometimes result in blows, it can come to blows when the one getting
• 38:23
  this short end of the stick realizes that it's actually there no worse off actually joining the
• 38:29
  fight than always accepting crumbs thereafter. If the subordinate judges that the cost of
• 38:41
  fighting is not higher than the cost of submitting, then they may very well be a fight or it can
• 38:48
  be done collectively, even in cases where the subordinate will lose a one-on-one fight. If they
• 38:54
  feel they have safety in numbers, then they can strike back knowing that they've got a posse of
• 39:03
  conrads of brothers and arms. That's why in another phenomenon that I'd write about the communal
• 39:08
  outrage, an incident in which a member of your group is conspicuously attacked in a public arena
• 39:18
  can lead to a lashing out, a sudden disproportionate rage, where people in the group that they feel
• 39:29
  whose member has been victimized can suddenly coordinate, use that common knowledge, insult or a
• 39:38
  front as an invitation to try to upend the dominance hierarchy and collectively assert their own
• 39:47
  dominance. You get that repeatedly in history when some event that would seem to be relatively
• 39:56
  minor or at least something that a blow that one could absorb, in fact triggers a massive
• 40:03
  collective retaliation. I go through many examples, the Spanish-American War, which led to the
• 40:10
  pretty much the end of Spanish colonies and the United States taking over Cuba and Philippines
• 40:16
  and so on, was triggered by the sinking of a ship, the main leading to the slogan, remember the
• 40:21
  main, may even have been misattributed, not sabotaged by the Spanish just an accident, but that
• 40:29
  didn't much matter. Pearl Harbor in World War II got the United States to finally join the war.
• 40:35
  9-11 led to the invasions of Iran and Afghanistan. The Arab Spring was set off by a
• 40:42
  Arab Petler. The United States actually worldwide the events of 2020 of the great awokeening
• 40:51
  and the United States, many demonstrations and riots, some of them violence set off by the
• 40:57
  killing of George Floyd. Then in the other direction, the assassination of Charlie Clark in the
• 41:03
  United States a couple of months ago was taken as a communal outrage by the American right who
• 41:10
  used that to spread the sense that they had been symbolically victimized in that event, but
• 41:19
  collectively victimized for many years by the liberal establishment and used that as an opportunity
• 41:27
  to lash out at anyone who didn't treat the assassination with a sufficient r and dread and gravity.
• 41:35
  I mean, it feels like in those cases you've got the manufacturing of common knowledge,
• 41:42
  right? I mean, in some ways the hysteria of the social justice left during wokeness and the
• 41:48
  hysteria of the right after Charlie Kirk almost seemed like an attempt to enforce a new consensus.
• 41:57
  In the absence of a genuine consensus. In the sense that itself was already was common knowledge,
• 42:04
  which allowed for the coordination with us these manufactured agendas or grievances,
• 42:11
  such as in the case of Charlie Kirk killing where not only was it misattributed to some kind of
• 42:17
  left wing conspiracy, but it was seen as emblematic of a widespread persecution of the right by the
• 42:26
  liberalists. Yes, and yes, that was the narrative that Democrats are the Democrats are the
• 42:31
  party of murder and the left is the party of violence. Yes, but the thing is that the trigger for
• 42:37
  the spark was something that was common knowledge, namely the killing was widely reported.
• 42:45
  Any assassination will attract outsize attention and moreover the attention is something that you
• 42:53
  itself aware of. You know that as you're reading about the Charlie Kirk killing, so is everyone
• 42:59
  else. And so it is, yes, the common knowledge is generated simply by the fact that it's public and
• 43:05
  salient and dramatic and unignorable, then that could be put to use in service of a manufactured
• 43:11
  agenda. Yeah, I see. I see. Yes, that's absolutely true. And obviously in moments after a tragedy,
• 43:18
  everybody is growing around. Some people are growing around for the truth and others are
• 43:21
  growing around for ways in which they can try to assert their narrative, their version in which
• 43:26
  the the the instance of common knowledge can be used as a way of indicating their prior beliefs
• 43:32
  in the first place. Yes, the fact that that a police officer smothered a suspect in Minneapolis
• 43:38
  is not obviously related to the fact that there is an underrepresentation of African Americans in
• 43:45
  symphony orchestras or art museum boards. Nonetheless, it was the killing of George Floyd was taken
• 43:55
  to be emblematic of systemic racism of which underrepresentation of African Americans was was
• 44:03
  framed as another manifestation. You know, and the right wing equivalent. Yeah, in case,
• 44:08
  yeah, correct. Yes, I recently wrote a piece for the the broadsheet newspaper here a week after
• 44:16
  the the terrorist attack, which began with a paragraph summarizing one sentence each of the ways
• 44:21
  in which all of the different factions in Australia are trying to co-opt it in order as evidence of
• 44:26
  you know, the left says it proves this, the right says it proves this, Jews say it proves this,
• 44:30
  you know, non-Jews say it proves this and so a plea for assault to just calm down for a moment
• 44:36
  and find some common ground. One of the interesting I mean, you still you answered half of my question
• 44:41
  which I think was kind of muddied in the sense that we've talked about the dominance and submission
• 44:47
  signals inside common knowledge, but I'm still intrigued by where you think we find ourselves.
• 44:54
  I guess there's I'm particularly thinking about this now in the case of multiculturalism and
• 44:58
  jihadism and anti-Semitism and so on because when there are groups with different levels of common
• 45:05
  knowledge, you know, even take, for example, the Australian government is contemplating
• 45:09
  banning the phrase globalize the interferer to be from being chanted in public. We don't have
• 45:14
  a first amendment, so hate speech laws can cover that sort of thing. Half the country thinks that
• 45:18
  it's an innocent expression of Palestinian liberation and soft determination. Half the country
• 45:24
  thinks that it's an implicit way of saying that all the Jews in the Middle East should be driven
• 45:28
  out of killed. There are two camps of common knowledge here. Neither of them can understand the other.
• 45:36
  Are you optimistic about the capacity to find our way through these increasingly
• 45:43
  uncommon knowledge spheres? I don't know if I'd say I'm optimistic. It's very hard to predict the
• 45:48
  the, you know, what will happen. I think there is an imperative, you know, moral,
• 45:54
  and normative imperative of what we ought to do, namely to explore the historic origins and the
• 46:01
  likely effects of particular expressions and to argue against them. As a, I'm a fellow
• 46:11
  member of the Commonwealth, I was born in Canada, but my adopted country is the United States,
• 46:16
  and I do think that the American attitude toward free speech is the more defensible one.
• 46:23
  Namely, I don't think it should be outlawed, but I think that people should come down on it like
• 46:27
  a type of bricks and saying what globalized the Indifada means is mass murder. Literally,
• 46:35
  and in effect, you just saw it, and I think it is perfectly appropriate to try to shame people who
• 46:42
  use the expression either innocent or duplicitous about both what it literally means and how it
• 46:53
  could be taken and to condemn it publicly. The First Amendment doesn't protect an expression
• 46:59
  against being condemned. All it does is it protects the people against the government,
• 47:05
  punishing someone for using it, but it's absolutely should be condemned.
• 47:13
  One of your, I wanted to put on your linguist hat for a moment. One of the most interesting things
• 47:19
  in the book is sort of buried in chapter three, where you say that language, which you've spent
• 47:26
  your life studying, has 1,000 explanations for why it came to be. A lot of people disagree about
• 47:33
  why language arose. Your explanation is, at first and foremost, it's a tool for establishing
• 47:39
  common knowledge, which makes me wonder what you make of seemingly nonsensical forms of language.
• 47:48
  If language is an agreement that we're hardwired to understand, so that I was going to understand it,
• 47:54
  what do you make of something like six, seven, which my son, my eight-year-old son, says,
• 48:01
  and has no idea what it means? Yes. Well, it's a language to be a coordinating medium.
• 48:11
  Needn't be through the literal meaning of words. It could just be what they signify in terms of
• 48:18
  who recognizes them, who acts on them. Very often, our words are not meant to be taken literally.
• 48:28
  I have a whole chapter on that called Weasel words, but the mere act of uttering something can
• 48:35
  signal something about the circle that we belong to, or that we want to convey that we,
• 48:43
  you and I belong to, independent of the literal content. And so I think the idea that language
• 48:55
  is a common knowledge generator is compatible with the fact that it often doesn't have that
• 49:02
  functioned by virtue of what words mean. Although it very often does. If it's two people
• 49:07
  arranging for a rendezvous, they are to attend to the literal meaning of any time two people
• 49:15
  divide up a task or make a plan. They're taking advantage of language's ability to do that.
• 49:23
  But sometimes words can be formulas that generate common knowledge, just like signals,
• 49:28
  like hats and feathers and so on, and can have that function in a parallel channel to the
• 49:35
  semantics of what's being said. That's why in, say, cementing a romantic relationship,
• 49:41
  the fixed expression, I love you, then the, I love you return, the reciprocation is a ritual
• 49:49
  that can mark the transition between friendship or a coin ship and a deep romantic relationship,
• 50:00
  which is why the words are often fraught. Actually, while ago, when I said to me, I love you,
• 50:08
  but not in a scary way. That is. And none of this, but what she meant is, you know, I just,
• 50:18
  a lot of affection between us. I really, you know, deeply admire or cherish you,
• 50:25
  but I'm actually not using the word in the ritualistic sense that often accompanies
• 50:33
  saying those three words. Yes. Do you remember a scene in, there's a romance with Jack Nicholson
• 50:42
  and is it Diane Keaton from maybe 15 years ago? And I, I maybe were misremembering this,
• 50:49
  but they're falling in love and they're older, you know, single people. And he says, she says
• 50:55
  something funny, and he says, I love you. And she looks at him and says, I love you too.
• 51:01
  And the way he said, I love you was just a little not that. He was like, he'd sort of said it,
• 51:07
  but he didn't quite say it. And it was a nice moment where you realize there's a difference between
• 51:12
  a throwaway, I love ya. And, and I love you. No, no, absolutely. I forgot about that scene,
• 51:19
  but there is a New Yorker cartoon that works on the same difference where a man says to a man,
• 51:26
  I didn't say I love you. I said, I love ya. Big difference.
• 51:32
  But anyway, that's exactly the same. That's exactly the same. Yes.
• 51:37
  When my kids say I love you, I am sometimes wonder what the evolution of the meaning of words is
• 51:45
  as children grow up, because one of the first things that they said after Daddy would have been
• 51:53
  I love you, because we were saying it a lot and, you know, they mimicked it. So before they
• 51:59
  had a grasp of what we think that the phrase means, they were saying it. Now that they're eight,
• 52:05
  they know what it means. And I think their understanding probably aligns roughly with mine.
• 52:11
  But how do children develop? What is your theory about how richly and how early children develop
• 52:17
  an understanding that aligns with what we would understand, understanding debate?
• 52:21
  Yeah. Well, we all see also seeing a cultural transition where it used to be in my generation,
• 52:27
  a parent or a child would say, I love you, you know, on the parent's death page. That'd be
• 52:31
  pretty much it. Not because there was any. Right. Yeah. Yeah.
• 52:35
  I also love it. This is like a very solemn and interesting thing to say. Now it's going around like,
• 52:43
  like, you know, hi, how are you? Totally. Like saying hello. Yeah.
• 52:48
  So I think kids, so this is something I've given a lot of thought to because I've written several books
• 52:52
  on language and language development in children. So what children do when they're acquiring language
• 52:57
  is they're not just pure cryptographers, just, or you're not like chat GPT processing the
• 53:05
  co-occurrence of one word with another word. They hear language in context and they try to relate
• 53:12
  the words they hear to their best guess as to the intention of the speaker. That is,
• 53:18
  they are engaging in getting to use the word mentalizing or mind reading, getting in the side,
• 53:23
  the head of another person and then connecting that to what they said and that that can occur
• 53:31
  multiple levels at the level of the entire expression in that emotional circumstance or they
• 53:38
  can parse it into particular words and a salient object or salient action in that circumstance.
• 53:46
  They're doing it at multiple levels from word to utterance. And a bit of your evidence that
• 53:55
  this mind reading is essential to language acquisition is that in a population that
• 54:02
  whose primary symptom is an inability to get into someone's head, namely autism,
• 54:09
  profoundly autistic kids never learn to speak. And I suspect that isn't a deficit in whatever
• 54:16
  circuitry there is from language, but a deficit in the circuitry for getting inside someone
• 54:22
  else's head. So the noise is coming out of their mouths. You don't think of as expressing an
• 54:28
  intention in particular an intention to recognize that the intention of what they're actually saying.
• 54:35
  If that whole psychological process or mind reading process is disabled, then the child can't
• 54:47
  make a first base when it comes to figuring out how language works.
• 54:51
  Right. Fascinating. Yeah. And so do you have a guess at the age at which children,
• 54:58
  at which developmentally normal children develop? I guess the richness of the words that take it
• 55:07
  from mimicry to... Well, if anything, some of the first things that kids learn are expressions,
• 55:14
  like bye-bye and high and work which don't necessarily have to be parsed in terms of their syntax
• 55:27
  or even the meaning looked up, but they're just used in a... The formulas that you say in that
• 55:33
  context, like high noddy, bye-bye, no. And in some cases, kids will use a formula that they don't
• 55:43
  really understand and only later start to chop it into words each of which has its own meaning.
• 55:50
  Yeah, that's right. I mean, that's certainly the way that I love you began. It was a thing that
• 55:54
  kids said, my kids said, when they were two years old, because that was the thing that they got
• 56:00
  a good response when they mimic that one. But now when my son feels that I'm being especially
• 56:07
  tender to him, he'll look me in the eyes and say, I love you. And that's different. I'm just
• 56:14
  wondering how long that takes to evolve and when that happens. Oh, you mean in the course of
• 56:17
  childhood? I think a lot would depend on how it's used in the family. Again, when I was growing
• 56:23
  up, the answer would be who never. But there's plenty of affecting. It wasn't that we were
• 56:28
  called robots. It's just not the thing you would do. And I imagine in different subcultures,
• 56:35
  there would be a lot of variation in whether an expression like that which could be so fraught,
• 56:39
  could be so scary, is brought into everyday social interactions. That's a historical
• 56:47
  thing that we are living through. And I'd be willing to bet that it's very uneven across families
• 56:53
  and across subcultures. There are things that you're noticing about how university students speak
• 56:59
  that catch your ear or just new forms of vernacular. I mean, I mentioned 6.7. So you never
• 57:06
  quite got to 6.7. Is that when you say that not all words literally mean the thing that they
• 57:11
  mean? I understand that and you've got a whole chapter on euthamisms and weasel words in the book.
• 57:15
  But for something to drop out of the sky seemingly unconnected to any meaning,
• 57:22
  is it serving as a tribal, just a marker of like I can do this to show that I'm the type of person who
• 57:29
  says this thing. All of the languages filled with things like that that can be markers of solidarity
• 57:36
  and deeper connection. Languages, certainly all of the reflexes of politeness are there to
• 57:47
  establish certain relationships. That is, I am not treating you like an underling or a flunky
• 57:55
  or mixed up with the hierarchical signals that language conveys. There's also a horizontal
• 58:05
  dimension of closeness, solidarity, equality. And in languages that have a distinction between
• 58:13
  two second-person pronouns to and voo in French or English used to have thou and you
• 58:20
  in German and you and see. The meaning is actually two different meanings. Say in French,
• 58:29
  you would use voo either for respect like a student addressing a teacher or in two
• 58:36
  strangers or plural or plural. Yes, that's actually a third meaning. But or actually I should
• 58:41
  say better put is that in the these distinctions are not made in the plural and voo is used
• 58:47
  without distinction for either familiarity or respect. But we can also so, oh yeah, so that
• 58:55
  two is used either for looking down on someone or familiarity that is within a family and in a
• 59:07
  social change that's been going on for more than a century toward informalization,
• 59:12
  egalitarianism, leveling of hierarchies. The two voodistinctions used less and less for
• 59:19
  hierarchy and more and more for intimacy versus distance. So it used to be, for example,
• 59:26
  that a department store say a customer could address a sales clerk with two on first meeting
• 59:33
  because they were lower in status. More and more, they would address them with voo simply because
• 59:39
  they are strangers until they became more intimate. A close analogy in English is a first name
• 59:47
  basis, addressing someone on a first name basis as opposed to Mr or Mrs or Mrs so and so. Where
• 59:54
  it used to be that Mr would be used either for someone who is superior to you whereas the boss
• 1:00:01
  would address the employee just by his last name or by strangers on first meeting. But
• 1:00:08
  more and more, it would be used for more distant, less intimate acquaintances and even across the
• 1:00:18
  board giving away to a first name basis. So this is the phenomenon of informalization which has
• 1:00:25
  effects our dress, effects our styles of speech. And it's another example of how language
• 1:00:35
  operates on the channel of serving as a conduit for information. But also its surface forms the
• 1:00:42
  words that we choose in parallel signal the relationship we have with someone else.
• 1:00:48
  Yeah, that's fascinating. And of course, there are different common knowledge assumptions
• 1:00:52
  in different communities. I was recently on I stepped on the border quantus flight to the
• 1:00:58
  Australian airline and it was in business class and the flight attendant said came over to
• 1:01:03
  greet me and said, do you mind if I call you Josh? And I thought there is no Asian airline and
• 1:01:09
  probably not very many European airlines where the flight attendant in business office class would
• 1:01:14
  not just address you as Mr Zeps and you know would have the audacity to ask. But in Australian
• 1:01:19
  culture, that's nice. Like the flight attendant is doing that and I quite like it as a way of
• 1:01:25
  saying, let's just be more relaxed here. It's going to be nice. You know, you're part of the
• 1:01:30
  family of this team. Well, indeed, in cultures do differ. Australia being proud of its
• 1:01:35
  informality and egalitarianism. Japan having far more formulaic and ritualistic
• 1:01:42
  honorifics and class distinct. Yes. But the world in general is sort of heading, you know,
• 1:01:50
  Australia word. That is that many of the trappings of social hierarchy are either
• 1:01:59
  eroding altogether or this two dimensions of hierarchical rank and horizontal closeness
• 1:02:07
  are collapsing to mere horizontal closeness. Notice that even in that case, she asked
• 1:02:13
  your permission. She didn't just blurt it out. That's true. Yes. What do you, how do you fail?
• 1:02:19
  Are you the old guy waving his fist at the sky when you see people getting on an aeroplane
• 1:02:23
  wearing sweatpants or you know, some people just being very casual with each other in broader life.
• 1:02:31
  Is there a place for hierarchy and formality more than we currently have?
• 1:02:34
  I think something is lost and maybe it's just like all generations as I age and see
• 1:02:40
  social change going on from under me. I lament what we lost. But it was just a more pleasant
• 1:02:48
  experience in the days when people would dress up to board a flight. And when there was less
• 1:02:56
  profanity and casual speech when people would save a taboo word for a moment of high emphasis or
• 1:03:02
  emotion, that's just aesthetically, I think something is lost when we sacrifice a distinction
• 1:03:11
  that that that that that was there. I also wonder and here I'm just this is pure speculation.
• 1:03:16
  Whether the fact that men tend to nowadays tend to dress the same way they dress when they
• 1:03:24
  were three years old and their mother would dress them. That is the the baseball cap. Well now it's
• 1:03:31
  back backwards and the t-shirt and the shorts and the and the sneakers the running shoes.
• 1:03:36
  If there are no more signifiers of coming of age, we're not the right gender to ask,
• 1:03:47
  but you kind of wonder whether women are kind of less attracted to a male specimen who is
• 1:03:56
  elzing. I have never grown up. I'm still a little boy.
• 1:04:00
  And of course there yeah and there's a whole I mean we could open a whole can of worms there
• 1:04:06
  about the common knowledge assumptions that have now been established within certain communities.
• 1:04:12
  I'm thinking of the tech community in Silicon Valley for example where there are there are overt
• 1:04:16
  signifiers of status that are related to the informality and even cheapness of the attire.
• 1:04:23
  Yes like Mark Zuckerberg with his famous hoodie uniform.
• 1:04:27
  Yeah. It's a hoodie or a black t-shirt or something you know or you know sneakers.
• 1:04:31
  If you would wear a suit yeah if you wore a beautiful $5,000 Armani suit to a you know a meeting
• 1:04:39
  in Silicon Valley they'd look down on you. That would be a marker of low stuff.
• 1:04:43
  Well even if you bought a you know a $200 suit at TJ Maxx and so you weren't flaunting wealth
• 1:04:52
  but they've been you were signaling formality that itself would all would would be negative enough.
• 1:04:59
  I mean I think there's got to be a mix you don't want to go back to the stuffy high society
• 1:05:06
  formalities where a woman couldn't wear a dress a man couldn't go out without a necktie and hat
• 1:05:15
  and on the other hand preserving some of the distinctions that just differentiate
• 1:05:25
  situations that have some aesthetic value you know I think it's with attending to even if we
• 1:05:32
  don't turn the clock back to which we can't. I used to describe my grandfather as the kind of guy
• 1:05:39
  who put on a tie to get on a plane and people immediately understood the kind of person that
• 1:05:44
  until my grandparents to our generation of your grandparents would address their closest friends
• 1:05:49
  as Mr. and Mrs. So and so just you know and they did around the dinner Mr. So and so would you
• 1:05:54
  pass the salt and that's just the way that people addressed each other even the level of intimacy
• 1:06:02
  of close friendship. So it's it's an exact an actual process that the direction is clear
• 1:06:09
  but at what level you make the cuts above that level you use an honorific below that level
• 1:06:15
  of first need basis that varies a lot between different cultures and subcultures.
• 1:06:22
  Yeah you're actually reminding me that I was briefly we moved to a different city when I was
• 1:06:28
  10 and I was briefly put in a hippie-dippy primary school where the students addressed the teachers
• 1:06:34
  by their first which was wild to me right you know and similarly I had a friend of mine who would
• 1:06:42
  come over to my house and address my parents as Mr. and Mrs. Zeps which was the opposite but also
• 1:06:49
  equally weird because my all of my friends when we were kids would call the parents by their
• 1:06:54
  first names because our parents wanted informality but the teachers didn't. Before I let you go
• 1:07:00
  Stephen yeah yeah sorry jump in there and finish that thought. Okay I'll just share a way in which
• 1:07:06
  these conventions are so widely understood by a socially competent member of a society or subculture
• 1:07:13
  but I've been in a professor now for 45 years and with virtually no exceptions undergraduates will
• 1:07:21
  address me as Professor Pinker graduate students on a first name basis it's just a no one ever I've
• 1:07:28
  never heard anyone articulate that convention but that's that's the way it works to the point where
• 1:07:33
  when I had a graduate student who kept addressing me as Professor Pinker she was from Europe from
• 1:07:39
  from Austria perhaps and presumably that's the way it's done there but it felt a little awkward
• 1:07:44
  and I had to tell you please please call me Steve although with undergraduates it's still a
• 1:07:49
  convention unless the unless again the hierarchy gives way to the social closeness if they say work
• 1:07:58
  in my lab if they you know lab parties together then there can be a transition although it's still
• 1:08:05
  marked with some degree of nervousness of switching from professor to to to Steve but it's so
• 1:08:14
  interesting isn't it the yeah we do have an emotional flare-up when that happens I used to work for
• 1:08:19
  the public broadcaster and so as the voice of the of of sort of officialdom if I was interviewing
• 1:08:25
  a prime minister or a minister I would address them as prime minister or minister and now that I
• 1:08:31
  do a podcast I recently had a formal prime minister on my podcast and I was calling him Tony and it's
• 1:08:37
  very weird once you've been trained to expect to call the person prime minister to call them Tony it
• 1:08:44
  feels like I'm big noting myself yes indeed yes and all these emotions the emotions of awkwardness when
• 1:08:53
  it's mild and shame on one on on one side or outrage on the other are the emotions that police
• 1:09:05
  these relational models what kind of relationship of hierarchy intimacy transactional in nature we have
• 1:09:15
  and in in in the book I talk a lot about how navigating switching among those different
• 1:09:23
  qualitatively different kinds of relationships drives a lot of our social life our social rituals
• 1:09:29
  and our social emotions like awkwardness and shame it's getting light where you are so I want to
• 1:09:38
  let you go but I just lastly I can I ask you one last question about meaning and just get your thoughts
• 1:09:44
  about whether the future is going to be okay and the human beings will find meaning in this crazy
• 1:09:48
  world because a lot of your work in the past has had to do with human well-being and human flourishing
• 1:09:54
  and arguing that things are getting better even though we might not be noticing the ways in which
• 1:09:58
  they are and yet I can't find myself I can't help but find myself worrying about right-wing
• 1:10:04
  Christian nationalism in America and the far right in Europe and far left anti-tech environmentalism
• 1:10:11
  and a kind of a general diagnosis that the human kinds problems are caused by a lack of spiritual
• 1:10:20
  fulfillment a lack of purpose and a lack of meaning as a non-religious scientifically minded person
• 1:10:27
  as we were saying at the beginning of the chat what's your remedy well certainly keeping an eye on
• 1:10:35
  what is truly meaningful in the sense that you could defend it you could provide reasons for it
• 1:10:43
  and human well-being solving of problems is foremost because everyone can be better off or
• 1:10:51
  worse off everyone wants to be healthy and well fed and and affluent and comfortable and educated
• 1:11:00
  socially close what we wish for ourselves we can't deny others there's plenty of opportunities
• 1:11:09
  for making other people better off there are inevitably problems hard problems solving those
• 1:11:15
  problems is what ought to give life meaning it can give life meaning to those who succeed in
• 1:11:21
  solving problems and it ought to give meaning in that we can provide reasons why it should be
• 1:11:29
  the source of our meaning and that's why as compared to say following religious commandments or
• 1:11:37
  observing rituals however good that they may feel and that itself is good but it isn't ultimately
• 1:11:45
  not as important it is actually seating lives extending life spreading knowledge
• 1:11:54
  reducing suffering professor pinca or steve depending on our casualness of relationship
• 1:12:02
  thanks for being on uncomfortable conversation thanks for having me