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Paul Bloom: Against Empathy · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

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  Get a humans welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas and what idea is more dangerous
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  than that your empathy is actually something that is leading you astray and you need to be
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  more rigorously rational, maybe less empathic, maybe you feel other people's pain too much,
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  maybe you use the claim of your own pain and suffering and victimization too much.
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  Today's guest is one of the world's leading moral philosophers Paul Bloom. He works a lot in
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  moral psychology. He looks at the development of our sense of right and wrong when we're babies.
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  He looks at our intuitions about moral responsibility, the role that anger and disgust and empathy
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  play in our lives. Most controversially he wrote a book called Against Empathy in 2016.
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  That is the bulk of this conversation. Me trying to tease out exactly what he means. Like
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  shouldn't we all be more empathic? Shouldn't we have a broader empathic imagination towards our
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  opponents. Paul throws a few wrinkles into that. It makes a very interesting conversation,
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  a very interesting thinking. His other books include The Sweet Spot, How Pleasure Works,
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  and Just Babies, the origin of morality in little kids. This is fascinating, especially the
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  interplay between social media algorithms, artificial intelligence and how we know what is right and
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  what is wrong. I hope you enjoyed this conversation with the one and only, Paul Bloom.
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  Let's start with empathy. What's wrong with empathy?
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  I wrote a book called Against Empathy and got a lot of it was the most controversial thing I've
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  ever written. People use the term in different ways. Sometimes people use the term empathy just to
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  mean kindness, compassion, love. I'm not against that. What I am against is empathy in the sense of
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  putting yourself another person's shoes, feeling what they're feeling. I'm only against that in
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  the specific way. I'm against that as using empathy in that sense as a guide to our decisions
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  about right and wrong. There's a few reasons for that. One is that empathy is very biased. If you
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  think about the people that you personally find it easy to experience what they're experiencing,
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  to see the world through their eyes, to be able to look like you, people who other white
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  guys of your age, speak your language, and same for me, same for everybody. In that biases
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  are moral decisions. When you use your heart to make moral decisions, it's always going to turn
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  out your moral decisions are just bias and favorite people who look like you. Empathy, I think,
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  ignores numbers. You feel empathy for individuals, not for groups as a whole, but sometimes
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  array moral decision involves paying attention to numbers, realizing that 100 lives is worth
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  more than one. I could go. Yeah. Well, let's start with bias. Isn't that just, doesn't that just
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  mean that empathy without reason is bad, but we need to adjust our empathy? I mean, isn't the
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  point of having an empathic imagination that you can think to yourself, oh, even though this
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  person looks different to me and lives in a different country from me, that there, I should extend
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  my empathy towards them. I mean, it's my almost my duty to modify my empathy using reason,
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  or is that the kind of overriding of empathy that you're talking about? I view that as overriding.
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  I agree we could do it. We could struggle. You could have empathy for your worst enemy in the
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  world. For the person who wishes you dead, the person doesn't respect you. I mean, you, you're
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  saying struggle as if you need, as if it runs counter to empathy, but I'm talking about an expansion
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  of empathy and that if you are simply a cold AI robot, you might, you might be denuded of
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  something that's crucial to extending, you know, to doing the right thing because you wouldn't be
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  able to feel what it's like to be another person. So is it, is it the opposite of empathy to
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  feel empathy for everybody or is that just better empathy? So, so two things, you're raising
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  a couple of good points. One thing is that empathy by is very nature. It doesn't flow to everybody.
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  You, you feel tremendous empathy for a child or somebody you're close to. You can feel empathy
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  maybe for, you know, for a rat, for a pig, for your enemy, but it is work. It is a struggle. It
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  doesn't come naturally. If you, maybe you're a saint and maybe for you, you know, free love just
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  flows to everybody. Most of us don't work that way, but, but important. I'm not saying we should
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  be cold bloodless robots. I think that intelligence and reason in the absence of feeling doesn't
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  lead to morality at all. He have no motivation to care about people to do good things. I just think
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  that the caring, the compassion, the love, the desire to be a good person can be separated from
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  the sort of spotlight laser focus of empathy. You could want to be a good person because you care
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  about people because you want to do the right thing. But as soon as you start zoom in on people,
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  you zoom in on something. What's an example of that in real life?
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  Oh gosh. Charity. People give enormous amounts of charity to their neighbors, to people, other
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  wealthy people who are close by, to stories they hear involving people suffering in some dramatic
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  way that they could, they could feel for them. And they can not put their money into things that
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  actually make a difference that improve people's lives. One of the interesting movements over
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  the last many years is effective altruism. And effective altruism says, look, yeah, don't go
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  with your heart. Don't go with your feelings. Rather, ask yourself to somewhat cold blooded
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  questions. So first, first you want to help. And that's not cold blood at all. But now ask
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  yourself the cold blooded question, where can my money do the most good? What can I, what can I
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  cause the most help? Yeah, sorry, finish that thought. No, just just an example. I was once,
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  I was actually once on a radio show. And, and I describe, you know, being approached by child beggars
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  in India. And, and realize it because it could be up to me that, you know, this isn't the best
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  way to give your money because these kids actually, they take the money, but they're, they're rather
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  almost enslaved by adults. And you're encouraging a system that causes more suffering. And the person
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  I was also on the show was shocked. And she said, now, when the child asks me to help and holds
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  up the hand, I help. I don't, I don't do all of this rational, you know, mumbo jumbo. And at the
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  time, you know, because I'm naturally slow. And, and I always think of things like a, like a
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  year later, I didn't know what to say. But now I know what to say, which is, it depends what you
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  want. If you want to feel really good, get a rushed. Listen to your heart, give to people who
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  ask, look at their smiling faces as you help them. If you want to actually help people, you might
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  have to do something different. Why help at all in the absence of empathy? Because we have other
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  moral emotions, we have compassion, we could care for people. I could care, I could care for
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  somebody. Even, I don't put them myself in their shoes. I, I hear about people suffering in war
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  or there's at least there's several wars going on as we're talking now to, as this thing comes,
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  comes alive, there'll be several more. And I could say, oh my god, it's horrible. I, there's so much
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  suffering and I want to help. But I don't have to say, oh, I know exactly what that feels like.
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  I know what it feels like to have terrorists come in and shoot my children. I know what it feels
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  like. The bombs raining over my head. I, I, I actually don't know what it feels like. And I don't
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  have to. I could just say, look, there's, there's bad stuff going on. And I think we should be
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  morally obliged to help. You mentioned the numbers game as well. How, everything can mislead us
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  on numbers. Can you articulate that? Yeah, there's actually laboratory studies on that. We're showing
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  that you, you tell people, you know, this is some, some really nice, nice work done by some
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  behavioral economists. You tell people, you get to vote your money to helping 10, 10 people and
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  really improve the life of 10 people. Then you tell another person, you've been devote your,
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  you could spend your money, same amount of money to helping the life of one person. But here's
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  your picture and here's your name. The people in the second group, who's a one, give more than
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  the group of the 10. And you know, in everyday life, we see so many cases where a singular victim
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  draws immense sympathy and caring. And that's really nice. Except when you multiply them,
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  something blurs. It becomes, oh, it's a number. 100 people, 200 people, 5,000 people. What do I
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  care? I, the motions resonate to individuals. Right. And so, so end of the, if, if a morality
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  just, just based on empathy is, isn't a new one. It feels like woolly headed sentimentality is
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  what you're attacking. And that if you could make empathy, the most expansive grounding. Yeah, so
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  how do you avoid the, we're all just going to do a highly rational calculus and in a cold,
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  blooded way attempt to output the most utilitarian outcome. And then strip that of so much emotion
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  that people don't feel compelled to give it all or to be moral. Yeah. So I was going to say,
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  I don't avoid that at all. I think that's what we should do. I think if you want to make the world
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  a better place, you want to help people, they're not just in charity, but helping the people you
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  love, the people around you being a good person, you should think in that kind of cold,
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  blooded rational way say, well, we'll do the most, the most good. But you're right. You need something
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  to give you a kick in the pants, right? You need some way to care. And for that, there's other
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  things. There's, there's, there's, I think compassion, there's love. I think sometimes there's
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  other emotions like anger. As you know, people from Martin Luther King Jr. on have pointed out
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  the force of anger, righteous anger, in making the world a better place. And so you got to anger,
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  fueling you. So I'm on a fixed thing. I see, I see injustice as being done. But then the question
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  comes up, how? And then I think we should be rational, cold blooded utilitarian maximizers and
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  so on. I mean, who could be in favor of being woolly headed? Well, the straw man version of you
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  that people attack you for being is the person who could be in favor of being woolly headed
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  Paul. Um, I'm, I'm a softie. I mean, that's, that's why I wrote, that's why I wrote,
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  the reason I wrote the book was because I'm a very empathy driven guy. And I've kind of noticed
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  that as a result of my empathy, sometimes things just don't get any better. I feel good. I've
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  sort of scratched an edge. And so I start to look towards other people who really do make the
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  world a better place. And I see how they do. Another one example of the, the potential pitfalls of
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  empathy that you give is victims impact statements in like the justice system. Can you just articulate
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  that? Because they're, they're quite popular and the idea of having sort of mediation sessions
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  between perpetrator and victim is becoming more popular. What's the hazard there? Yeah, um,
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  I know you think of something, we're almost all opposite of the, of the mediation sessions where
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  at least, I don't know if they still do this, at least in the United States courts,
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  sometimes people who are victims of crimes give a statement about how to even victimize
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  maybe how the death of somebody was murdered affected and maybe how they were traumatized by
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  their rape or their assault. And, um, and it turns out that that the punishment that somebody is
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  given depends radically on the victim statement. If you are an attractive articulate young woman
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  and you describe yourself being victimized, it really moves people. If you are quiet and you
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  don't cry and you don't make a big deal, people give less of a sentence and that's a terrible
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  way to do the justice system. I mean, you know, I, I think punishment is an necessary evil. We have
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  to punish people for doing wrong or else people continue to do wrong. And I think we should be
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  sensitive to suffering somebody causes, but an empathy driven system just skews things on facts
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  that we know upon reflection shouldn't matter. Shouldn't matter whether whether the relatives
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  of somebody who was killed are really articulate in describing their pain as opposed to stoic.
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  Should it matter if I actually experienced more hurt? Yeah, I think I think from a legal point of
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  you, maybe you don't want to titrate it that closely, but from a moral point of view, you know,
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  it's complicated, but probably I think the more pain you cause, particularly if you know
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  the more pain you're knowingly cause, the worse of an act that you...
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  We can even just... Yes, I was going to say we can even think of the examples where the perpetrator
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  themselves and their charmingness or callousness can then taint the outcome. I mean, I'm thinking of
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  Johnny Depp and Amber Heard's trial and their mannerisms and thinking of the classic case in
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  this writer of Lindy Chamberlain who Merrill Street played in that movie about the dingo taking her
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  baby who seemed cold and unemotional during the trial, which gave people lots of suspicion that
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  she had actually killed the child instead of it having been an accident. There are all kinds of ways
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  in which we just sort of smell a lack of... Yeah. That's a great example. I mean, now we're away from
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  empathy and towards other... Yeah, what is that? Just where... You know, there's an attractive
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  despise. You're good looking defendant. We'll get off easier than you're ugly wine. There's, you know,
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  a lot of your apogma charm, not just for civil case, but also for criminal case, how you appear,
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  how sympathetic you are. And you know, it's a terrible way to run a justice system.
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  I mean, isn't that still empathy in the sense that those... the characteristics that the
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  perpetrator is exhibiting are not, is not empathy, but what's being triggered in the onlooker
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  strikes me as empathy. It could be, it could be... How could this mother be behaving this way
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  after she's just lost her child? I lack a sense of being in her shoes, whereas if she was crying,
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  I'd understand it more. I feel more empathy towards her plight.
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  I think that's right. I think I think people with a certain amount of charm have the gift of
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  getting other people to see the world as they do. And people without the charm. Don't, don't,
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  people, people say you're not, you know, how come the mother's not crying? How come the mother's not
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  behaving as I would behave? She must have been some way implicated in it. And, you know, I haven't
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  followed the depth of her trial. Congratulations. One sort of thing I decided to sort of stay out of,
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  but I was told a lot of people just found her extremely unsympathetic. And if you find her unsympathetic
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  because her case isn't as strong when that's one thing, but if you find her unsympathetic because
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  of her facial expressions, her house isn't moved or her herched, the tone of voice, then you really
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  want to somehow build a moral system, an justice system at the beginning. That's not sensitive to those
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  things. So let's define empathy versus compassion versus sympathy because I still feel in my
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  gut, and maybe the gut is the wrong place to be doing the thinking about this, the question
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  about empathy that you, you are objecting to trusting our immediate first empathic response.
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  But I don't see how you get to, you know, take Israel and Gaza or whatever, or you create
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  it in Russia. I don't see how you get to walk a mile in another person's shoes without trying to
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  expand your sphere of empathy such that you're not merely taking pity on the side that you're
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  politically opposed to. You're not merely trying to feel compassion for people with their limbs blown
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  off. You're actually trying to comprehend in an empathic way that there are two sides here,
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  or that there are people who are genuinely having their life aspirations pulled out from underneath
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  them in order to be less partisan and less biased in your politics. Is there no place for that?
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  I think there's different levels of what you're asking for. I think what we should try to do is
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  understand these clashes, understand, you know, if you're as an Israeli, you should understand
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  the Palestinians, your Palestinians should understand Israelis. And as a third party, you should try to
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  understand what's going on in both. But that's a very hard thing to do. I mean, you can gloss over
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  that. You know, in one sense, no, no, I quickly, oh, you should try to do this. You should try to do
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  that. But obviously, people don't do that. And it's enormously wrenching for them to try to do that.
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  So to what on the shelf are they reaching for in order to do that? If not empathy.
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  No, I think I think what I'm saying is difficult. What you were asking is much harder, which is
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  there's really not only has to look at the Palestinians, but okay, I see you have agreements. I see
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  this. I see you, you know, you're your positions. But I'm going to see the world through your eyes.
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  In fact, I want to see the world through your eyes and look at me and my friends and my family
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  and appreciate your genuine, you know, and in this towards us that how you really and feel sympathy
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  for this. I'm going to look at Bin Laden and say, I see what that guy would, I get it now. I see,
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  I see why he did what he did. I think true empathy in that case, it's difficult enough for me to
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  feel empathy for my true empathy for my wife or my kids. For people who want to kill me.
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  And they only occasionally want to kill you, your wife and kids, which is an upside.
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  Well, you know, we could we could we could talk about that with that relationship between love,
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  love and hate. But but I think you're asking for something which in some way is is is is beautiful.
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  If we could do it, but I think you're asking for too much. I think what you want to do is you want
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  to you want to sort of approach the sides fairly understand our grievances. Here's another case.
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  Hillary Clinton at one point said, well, you have to do to understood to deal with race problems in
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  America as somebody like me asked to sort of feel what it's like to be a black kid who deals with
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  the cops and is afraid of the cops and angry at the cops. And my reaction that is we can't do that.
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  I like the cops. It's always been nice to me, given my skin color and my age and so on.
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  So what about instead of trying that instead of trying to feel what it's like to be a woman who's
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  sexually harassed. What does like to be a Palestinian? Why don't I just try to say, well,
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  listen to what's just what's right? What's fair? What do people want? What's being done to them?
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  Treat it, you know, a little bit more coldly without fully immersing yourselves. And it's more
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  it's more tangible, more practical. And and I think when people try off of and there's an
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  arrogant stamp. You know, imagine me talking to some woman who's a victim of sexual harassment.
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  I know what that feels like, you know, a little while ago, so I'm somebody whistle at me. Man,
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  I know that feels good. I say, I have my own perspective. And it's but that's not empathy.
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  Is it, Paul? I mean, that's not empathy. That's parachuting your point of view on top of
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  hers. Actual empathy would be listening to her experience, recognizing that your experience
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  differs from her experience and trying to take the imaginative leap to what it would to what
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  that would be like. I mean, I feel personally that I that my mind has been changed on certain
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  social justice issues just by really trying to grok what it's like to have people look at you
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  a certain way or treat you a certain way all the bloody time. And the fact that I can't feel
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  exactly what that's like is one more reason why it's important for me to expand my empathy in order
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  to insert a new perspective on the world into my worldview. And I don't know how that that
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  jigsaw piece of the mosaic of my worldview genuinely gets inserted without me trying to utilize
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  my own empathy to understand what that other person is feeling. That doesn't mean that feelings are
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  the the be all and end all. And then I don't use reason as well. But it strikes me that there's a
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  dance between the two. Do you think you need to be successful at this to be a good person?
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  Probably. Just some extent. Yeah, I think it would be hard to be a completely unempathic.
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  I think it would we would likely be an asset. I mean, if you if you take two hypothetical human beings,
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  one of whom has all of the right information about the world and the other of whom has all
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  the right information about the world and can try to experience things as well, the latter would be
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  been better stead. If the latter succeeded, I probably would agree with you. But I think you could
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  have the right to treat somebody properly, someone who is the victim of rape or a terrorist attack
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  or something without knowing what it's like. I think I think we tend to sort of exaggerate how
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  easy it is to get ourselves in the head of as a lot of people. And part because to use your
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  term, we parachute and we say, I just figured on a kind of YouTube kind of imagine it. I think
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  sometimes, by the way, the temp that you're talking about, if it's successful is wonderful. Sometimes
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  it when you fail, it leads to certain coldness. So people, I've heard many people say, you know,
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  dealing with the victims of discrimination of some sort. They say, you know, I know I can imagine
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  what that's like and it's not so bad. No, maybe they're right. I don't know, maybe maybe the people
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  who are complaining are just complaining and making a lot of noise. But in some sense, they're putting
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  a lot of confidence in their empathic attempt. And we know, we know from all sorts of studies that
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  we're just not good at it. Here's a simple example. There's there's been experiments where you try
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  to get able-bodied people to imagine what it's like to be blind or in a wheelchair or deaf or
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  something like that. And you get them really to focus on it, to simulate it, to think about it at
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  heart. And then what they always say is, if I was, I now know what it's like to be blind, I kill myself.
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  It'd be horrible. But they aren't imagining what it's like to be blind. They're imagining
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  what it's like to be someone who can see and all of a sudden you lose that. And that is horrible.
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  But after six months, after a year, after 10 years, it's not horrible anymore. You adapt. But we're
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  not good at simulating that. Right. Which side of politics is doing more empathy peddling? Because
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  superficially, it seems like the sort of the current progressive fad for my own lived experience.
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  And as a white cisgender male, I feel this. And as a woman of color, I feel that. And as a
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  survivor of this, I feel that there is a sense in which your own experience gives you a trump card.
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  And it seems to me that there's an underlying assumption there that anyone who hasn't had that
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  experience has no standing to have a conversation with you even about rational policy discussions.
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  You have to have had the experience in order to have any standing. But then on the other side,
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  I see a total almost frowned, blasting through of any concern for empathy where it's like,
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  just get over yourself. Snowflake. Right. And we should, you know, anything that relates to
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  feeling or your sensation about how you move through the world is illegitimate as the basis for
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  conversation. What do you make of those two positions?
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  I think you've captured exactly right. Progressive talk empathy. They talk live experience.
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  They talk about about your own personal thing. And, you know, people on the right tend to dismiss a
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  lot of talk as snowflake thought and so on. But when it comes to actual political reasoning and
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  moral reasoning, I think both sides use empathy a lot. So you give a lot of good examples of that
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  left uses it and they do use it. But people on the right use it in almost parallel ways. So
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  Trump, who maybe want to at least empathic humans, you would ever encounter, is masterful at using
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  empathy to make his arguments. So a lot of his anti-immigration stuff, which has been doing less,
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  you know, but his early in his in his presidential run, he really pushed crimes and by immigrants.
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  And he would tell moving stories about people who have been horribly salted and murdered by him.
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  And he would get his audience to feel what it's like to be them. To use in their, you know,
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  to use to for his political goals. Somebody on the left, a sort of, you know, anti-Trump,
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  would talk about what it's like to be a refugee coming to America and spacing discrimination
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  because people hate you and so on. And so much of political discourse is, you know, an empathy
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  argument. You're going to care about the person who is, um, who is, uh, shot because somebody left
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  the gun in the house and somebody, you know, their, their child commits suicide and that's horrible.
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  You shouldn't have guns around. You're going to care about the person who's victimized by a
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  savage criminal because the government took away their guns. You're going to focus on a woman who
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  can't have an abortion or life is ruined. You're going to focus on, on a baby murdered by an
• 25:45
  abortionist. You got, and for each one, you could go flip back and forth. Now, there's some,
• 25:51
  but there's some political positions, even somebody like that don't, that aren't amenable to,
• 25:55
  the empathy. So if you care about climate change, there's actually very little few empathy
• 26:00
  arguments for climate change. If you care about free speech, there aren't many. Why are there
• 26:05
  few empathy arguments for climate change? I think I could articulate an empathy argument on both
• 26:09
  sides. I think one, what would be, you know, the plight of workers who've been systematically
• 26:15
  screwed over who work in fossil fuel industries, they're, you know, their towns being wiped out.
• 26:21
  And on the other side, there would be, think about your children and grandchildren who are going to
• 26:25
  live in a much more expensive and chaotic world. Indeed, we in 30 years, but mostly our kids and
• 26:30
  grandkids. But there's a symmetry. You're right. You could, you could try that. But here's a
• 26:36
  symmetry for the, for the workers are people who've screwed by a gas tax, which they can afford or
• 26:41
  something like that. You could pull out a man or woman and say, look at this person. Let me tell
• 26:46
  you about this person. For the future, you say, well, hypothetically, in 20 or 30 years, individuals
• 26:53
  will suffer from this and other. And, and part of me, you know, to part of me that's,
• 26:57
  this way, and it is, show me. Why can't you show you the statistical?
• 27:02
  Right. You know, also, even if you can show the person right now, the people who are most
• 27:06
  impacted by climate change first tend to be poor and maybe darker skin in foul way. So they're
• 27:12
  less, I mean, yeah, maybe, maybe the, the, the presence of climate catastrophes increasingly,
• 27:18
  whether that's the Maui bushfires or the Canadian bushfires or the Australian bushfires or
• 27:23
  increased hurricanes is a way of bringing the empathic reality of that home. No?
• 27:28
  That's right. That's right. That, that would help. It's, it's never entirely honest,
• 27:33
  because you can't point to any specific thing and say, ah, that wouldn't have happened if
• 27:37
  a lesson for climate change. But no, but I think people, I think people have gotten over that.
• 27:41
  I think that there's enough now that people's common sense, you know, even in terms of snow coming
• 27:46
  later, everyone, everyone who's been looking at weather systems, who've been alive for 20 years or
• 27:51
  more can see that some things happening now that wasn't happening previously. I think even if
• 27:56
  you can't pin each specific event. No, maybe you're right. I mean, it's one of the, it's a, it's
• 28:02
  hardly a good thing. But one of the benefits of the world getting worse, we had climate, you
• 28:06
  can actually find identifiable victims. Yeah. Or, or take them, you know, take free speech issues
• 28:12
  on, on campus. I mean, I know you're interested in them. My friend Greg Luquiano just has a book on,
• 28:18
  on, yeah, easy. I've just interviewed him actually, yeah, and Ricky. I'm not surprised.
• 28:22
  That's where it is. And so, supposedly, you know, somebody says something incredibly offensive
• 28:27
  on campus, a professor of visiting speaker and everything, it really hurts people.
• 28:31
  On the side of repressing their speech, you could say, imagine, imagine what it would feel like
• 28:35
  to feel unwel to be all endangered on campus, to feel humiliated by someone else's words.
• 28:40
  Now, the case for free speeches, oh, well, the open currency of ideas encourages more ideas
• 28:46
  and allows for blah, blah, blah, blah. And I find that that argument very persuasive, but it's not
• 28:51
  a very empathic one. It's a very cold one. Is there a way to insert empathy into that argument?
• 29:02
  Well, so, so here's, here's where, where maybe you and I have it, that's a perfectly good
• 29:08
  question. Um, and one could always ask the saying that, how do we appeal to people's emotions
• 29:13
  like empathy when making a political or moral argument and sway them? But maybe give people
• 29:18
  let it a habit of looking for those things. You know, you ever see the, you know, every president
• 29:24
  giving a state of union speech at one point tells a story of, let me tell you a story.
• 29:30
  You know, I remember when we were arguing about healthcare,
• 29:33
  publishing reach into their breast pocket, pull out a piece of paper that I said,
• 29:36
  I got a letter from a 11 year old named Marcy and then it would be some sort of thing,
• 29:40
  either how healthcare killed her father or see. And I think people should just start
• 29:46
  brewing and say, and say, we're not children. They should treat it like an openly racist appeal.
• 29:52
  They should say, I know that stuff works, stopped, but stopped trying to use it,
• 29:57
  make arguments. Yeah. Yeah. But until then, maybe, maybe we should, we do need to appeal to emotions.
• 30:05
  There's a kind of, I feel like we're we're groping around underneath a meta conversation about
• 30:11
  empathy, Paul, which is that there's that there are the all I take all of your criticisms about
• 30:18
  trusting empathy as our principle guide for reasoned decision making and the ways in which
• 30:24
  that's flawed. But so much of what's happening in the world at the moment, it strikes me comes from,
• 30:30
  and I'm not just talking about wars and just talking about like our cultural strife as well and
• 30:34
  our misunderstandings of each other and our partisanship comes from a certain intellectual arrogance,
• 30:41
  I see more and more self certainty, I see less and less humility, I see more stridency,
• 30:50
  and the way I think of my job is to create greater intellectual empathy for one's own fallibility,
• 30:58
  for other people's, the possibility that other people are right. You know, checking myself to
• 31:04
  recognize that of course I think that I'm right, because that's what human beings do. There are other
• 31:08
  people who are as convinced that they're as right as I am, so for me it's an empathic leap to say
• 31:16
  it's entirely possible that I'm right, it's also entirely possible that this other person who
• 31:20
  also feels just as right as I do is right. Is that empathy? I wouldn't, we'll put it this way,
• 31:28
  if it is in that kind of empathy I'm in favor of, if you're dying with the act of intellectual
• 31:33
  humility, of respecting other people's views of entertaining, you could be wrong and this person who's
• 31:38
  usually don't like and doesn't like you could be right. I wouldn't normally call an empathy, but
• 31:44
  I don't want to argue about the words, it's a good thing, whatever you call it. And I got to say,
• 31:50
  I'm in favor of reason and rationality and I think these get a bad rap, I think this is really
• 31:56
  the core of a lot of goodness in the world and our gut view is a core lot of evil, but it just
• 32:02
  that doesn't mean that everybody who says they're using their reason and rationality is doing so
• 32:08
  correctly or in good shape. A lot of people just talk a good reason game and they're just kind of
• 32:14
  yelling about their own prejudice is just loudly and in a certain tone of voice and so
• 32:20
  so there is there is a sort of stridency and I feel this there's all sorts of forces which
• 32:26
  have led to sort of a coarsening of discourse and in some of it is emotion-driven, I will agree
• 32:32
  to some of it is with people who would describe themselves as being on my side. Yeah and you're
• 32:37
  confident that if you start heckling the politician who pulls out the letter from the 11-year-old girl,
• 32:43
  you aren't also going to turn down our empathy for other people's intellectual positions.
• 32:48
  I'm confident that if we insist on a sort of respect from politicians and try to blunt emotional
• 33:01
  appeals that that would have good effects and the analogy I think of is racist appeals. So just
• 33:07
  like empathic appeals, racist appeals work very well, look at these people, they're different
• 33:11
  color than you, you know, look at these people with me victimized, look at them, they look like you,
• 33:16
  they're very successful and it must be very tempting for even a very good politician,
• 33:21
  good goals to say, I wonder if I could kind of appeal to sort of racist tendencies on the part
• 33:26
  of the voters to get this good end, you know, maybe there's a terrible politician they want to
• 33:33
  stop in the politician happening black, I use racism to do it and you know as a utilitarian,
• 33:39
  I think this is uncomplicated but I think in general we should try to, we should try to play
• 33:43
  fair and treat people for respect and we might lose some small battles, but in a long run,
• 33:49
  it will be better. But again, surely racism is the ultimate lack of empathy.
• 33:55
  Oh no, racism in some sense, racism is the ultimate lack. In other words, I mean, again,
• 34:00
  I'm just saying that what you seem to be criticizing is a very woolly headed sentimental
• 34:05
  and constrained version of empathy. The solution could be with the one that you propose,
• 34:11
  which is to dis empathy, but the solution could also be to create a more expensive vision of
• 34:17
  what empathy looks like. So I think racism and empathy are connected and in sending me obviously,
• 34:26
  racism is sort of being unempathic, un compassionate to a lot of people, but it's also focusing on your
• 34:32
  group, caring about those who look like you're caring about your tribe, caring deeply and lovingly,
• 34:38
  putting yourself in their shoes. It's just if you turn up that dial very much,
• 34:43
  it starts to fade out everyone who's not in your tribe. I can kind of agree with you,
• 34:50
  in principle, if we could make it so that we could put ourselves in issues of everybody,
• 34:55
  care equally, that the scales are matched equally for your brother, your son, your wife,
• 35:01
  and those people across the way who have murdered your people in the past and your arch enemies.
• 35:07
  If you can make the scales equal through empathy, then that's one problem, bias would go away,
• 35:11
  you'd have unbiased empathy, and empathy would be something you draw upon. It's just not how we work.
• 35:18
  It's kind of like saying, you know, well, we treat attractive people for trials and
• 35:24
  those are better than unattractive. And if we just stop doing that, that'd be really nice.
• 35:29
  But that's actually not how it works. We make progress when we sort of set up procedures
• 35:36
  and waste a block bias. But bias is fundamental to us. We'll have to be angels.
• 35:44
  Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, what impact is social media and our current media environment
• 35:48
  having on all this? Because when you talk about cherry picking examples that trigger our empathic
• 35:53
  response, I just see an Instagram feed right there. I mean, this is taking any one of these hot
• 36:01
  button issues. If you're, you know, if you're an anti-trans person, then your feed is full of
• 36:08
  these poor teenagers who've been butchered and now regret having had mastectomies because of
• 36:14
  their gender dysphoria. And if you're pro-trans and all you see are these poor people who don't
• 36:19
  have access to healthcare because of bills that have been passed in Republican states that
• 36:24
  deprive trans people of healthcare. And it plots the heartstrings like it, you know, it's
• 36:29
  assisted, the algorithm systematically reinforces things that you already believe and demonizes
• 36:34
  positions that you don't. So in a way, it's a way of reducing your empathy towards the other
• 36:41
  and increasing your empathy towards the tribe. On the topic of empathy, you're making my argument
• 36:46
  better and I could make it. I mean, it's exactly right. So what you see on social media and I'm on
• 36:52
  Twitter, I X, way too much, is is empathic traps and be where they focus you on. They say, look,
• 37:00
  look at this kid who was denied healthcare of a certain sort. Now, look at how how residue
• 37:07
  their life has cried for them. And the weird thing because of social media, we always had those
• 37:12
  things. But now, if I'm anti-trans, I get a steady diet of those things giving me empathy,
• 37:18
  pushing down to a trans position. If I, if I'm pro trans rights, I get to flip side. If I'm,
• 37:24
  if I'm, if I'm, if I'm certainly now, if the conflict, if I'm, you know, one person will go on
• 37:30
  on X and see endless videos and the reenactments and stories of a people who have been, you know,
• 37:37
  murdered, raped, tortured in the Hamas attack a couple weeks ago. If you're a different kind of
• 37:44
  person, you'll get, I'm sure this isn't it, when we're, when this is true, when this shows up,
• 37:48
  the situational change, where you, you will get videos and descriptions of babies, children suffering
• 37:53
  in Gaza, good Israeli attacks. And this is the predictable thing. It makes, it makes us zoom in,
• 37:58
  it makes it entrenches our views. It's not just information where the Trump supporter gets a
• 38:03
  different diet of information than a person doesn't like Trump. It's, it's, it's feelings. And it's,
• 38:10
  if it's, it's terrible. I mean, you talked before, but your goals is sort of expand the
• 38:15
  intellectual circle and get people thinking about other side. Social media does the opposite.
• 38:21
  Yeah. Yeah. And there's a, there's an interesting, you know, and I'm sure you'll want to distance
• 38:27
  yourself from this instinct, but there's something which, which strikes me as at least tangentially
• 38:32
  related to what you're talking about, which is a kind of a big brain tech bro attitude towards
• 38:40
  empathy, which is also anti empathic and seeks to kind of dunk on what all the sheeple have been
• 38:46
  misled to believe by powerful institutions. So like a few times recently on Twitter, I've seen
• 38:56
  a debunking of this individual who seems to be a hummus terrorist, but who poses as a young
• 39:04
  freedom fighter. And he's been, so he's got, there's images of him in a hospital bed and
• 39:10
  guards are almost dying. Then there's footage of him in the terrorist attacks, you know, killing
• 39:15
  people. Then there's footage of him in some other scenario in Gaza as a bomb is raining down.
• 39:20
  And I was sort of tempted to retweet it because I thought, oh, this is interesting. This is kind of
• 39:24
  interesting that like, you know, even the most heartfelt images that are coming out of
• 39:29
  Gaza are sometimes manipulated. And then I thought, hang on a second. What the fuck does that
• 39:34
  matter? There's one guy who's misleading people, maybe 50 guys who are misleading people.
• 39:40
  Does that change the fact that thousands of people are suffering that thousands of people are
• 39:45
  dying? It's like there's an instinct to be anti empathic and to be like, oh, I'm the smart guy
• 39:50
  in the room here. Everybody look at me. I've got the solution. I've got the thing that you guys are
• 39:54
  being misled using your dumb empathic emotions into believing. And I can lift the veil and show
• 40:00
  you why you're wrong. And it strikes me that social media also enhances that. The smart ass who
• 40:07
  knows better than everybody else because he's not fooled by empathy. Yeah, I agree. You can't,
• 40:14
  you can't always pick your allies and there is a sort of, and I know the kind of person you're
• 40:19
  talking, but there's sort of a, yeah, I should say, a tech bro type who is extremely proud of his,
• 40:26
  usually his intelligence and and and sneers at other people who get caught up in emotions
• 40:32
  and and lords it over people and so on. And you know, I think I'm not, there's a lot of sins going
• 40:40
  on here. There's there's intellectual arrogance. There's often a tribalism, which is these people
• 40:46
  would be the first to, you know, the last to admit that they have any tribal instincts, but,
• 40:51
  but they care to people who matter are very small band of people they associate with. And there's
• 40:55
  often it tremendous indifference and sort of sneering this towards the rest of the world.
• 41:02
  So and and also, they're also missing something, which which you mentioned before. I am sensitive to,
• 41:08
  which is all of us rationality is extremely, once you have a goal, you want to be rational figure
• 41:14
  how to get to the goal. How do you know, we have this thing in the middle east. What's the best
• 41:18
  way to resolve it? What side should we support? What charity should you give to and so on?
• 41:23
  But you also got to persuade people to want to do these things. And for that, you know, reasons,
• 41:30
  logic doesn't motivate people. You got to motivate people. And I think there are dangers to
• 41:36
  motivating people with, you know, videos of people getting their heads chopped off or crying babies
• 41:42
  and all of that. But you do need, you do need to appreciate that, that is emotions that drive us
• 41:47
  and dread a nurture carrying in compassion. You have to make people want to hear other sides. You
• 41:53
  have to make people want to make the world better. You have to make people hope that there's
• 41:57
  that there's a chance of doing so and not become sort of, you know, nihilistic and but all.
• 42:02
  And for what do you make of moments where we all come around some very emotionally charged
• 42:08
  story of goodwill or hope or tragedy or something. And every time that happens, you'll have
• 42:14
  people sniping from the sidelines saying, why do we care so much about this? Sometimes those people
• 42:18
  include me. But you know, the like the brush and submarine that was at the bottom of the ocean,
• 42:23
  or the Thai cave children, they're stuck in a cave. Are they going to get out? You know, it's like,
• 42:28
  it's, it transfixes the world. And I've always felt a little bit like I'm halfway along the spectrum
• 42:33
  because I'm like, why do we give a shit about these tankids? I mean, like, you know what I mean?
• 42:36
  Like it, yes, of course, it's like dreadful. So I look at those cases and on the one hand,
• 42:46
  I roll my eyes because you get tremendous resources and tremendous people's energy and attention
• 42:53
  and emotions and tons and tons of money and time devoted to saving, you know, a little girl stuck
• 42:59
  on a well. Well, you know, there could be a famine someplace else and that sounds. I mean,
• 43:04
  they're almost, it doesn't really is a famine somewhere else. There's always a famine somewhere else.
• 43:09
  And but nobody gives a, they only cares about the case because because you get a wrong color
• 43:13
  under too far away and they're not adorable. So I, I am the sniper on that one. However,
• 43:18
  I'm also a sucker. You know, you tell me, but the Thai cave kids are the tear up when I hear it.
• 43:24
  You know, so, um, so again, you know, I can't be too superior about to draw these emotions
• 43:31
  because I think I'm probably more vulnerable to them than a lot of people.
• 43:34
  You mentioned tribalism, Paul. And that's, that's one thing that you've written about that I'd
• 43:39
  like to get into like our, our sense of having an in-group or an out-group. I don't remember
• 43:45
  which book you were talking about. The Rapples and the Eagles, uh, Dottie. Can you explain that?
• 43:50
  Um, there's a lot of it. It's, it's, it's, I don't know, it's eager to study. Actually, it's been
• 43:54
  discredited. It's going behind it. It's a, it's a, so, but what's really clear is that we are
• 44:01
  biased. Certainly, you know, once we're young children at maybe, maybe babies or some, there's
• 44:07
  some debate about that. But universally, to break the world to us versus them, you have a simple
• 44:12
  study where you give, you get kids in a, in a classroom, half of them wear red t-shirts, half
• 44:16
  them wear blue t-shirts. And almost the instant they put on the t-shirts, they say their group is
• 44:22
  better, smarter, nicer, but get more money to their group and so on. And it's a simple switch
• 44:29
  in our heads in, in, in group versus out group. And it is, um, I think it is, it may well be
• 44:37
  inevitable and something you have to work around. But it's the source of so much ugliness in the
• 44:43
  world. Hmm. Yeah. Is it inevitable? I mean, can you turn the volume up and the volume down?
• 44:49
  Yeah. For just about all of this, you could turn the volume up and the volume down. But
• 44:56
  I think, I think for somebody like me say, I'm, you know, born in Canada. I'm a professor. I'm
• 45:04
  I'm, I'm Jewish. I, you know, I've always, you know, I'm certain age, that, uh, heterosexual,
• 45:10
  so I'm always gonna care more, more, and more empathy, but more compassion, more love.
• 45:16
  To people I see as falling to my groups, you know, it's like, I see another professor who's got
• 45:21
  my, they give them a nod, you know, and well, well, the rest of the world is just not, not in my,
• 45:27
  in my group. And intellectually, I can ignore all people, but, but there's a warmth, a real caring,
• 45:34
  you know, I had a colleague of mine, uh, is, uh, is Korean. And, um, and she had a fundraiser at her
• 45:41
  house for a Korean politician, Korean American politician running for office. Um, and nobody's
• 45:46
  surprised. Nobody's surprised, you know, when, when I was, when I was Jewish, Jewish,
• 45:52
  Jewish family being raised in my show, we send money to Jews in, in Russia. So why didn't we
• 45:57
  send money to, to the Kurds or to Hindi's or what? Yeah. Well, because you, you, you connect to
• 46:03
  your people. Um, is that ethical? Oh, that's a good question. Um, it is so ingrained in us that
• 46:14
  as long as it wasn't causing harm. Um, well, there's an opportunity cost to everything. So there's
• 46:20
  some, yeah, it's a lot of them. Yes. I don't think it's optimal. I think it would be better if my
• 46:26
  family back there said, who needs this the most? What could we do the most good? Instead of assuming
• 46:32
  who are people in trouble? But then you, I mean, then, of course, the, you know, the Jewish charity
• 46:38
  would say that if all Jews had taken that attitude, then Jews would have been wiped out thousands
• 46:42
  of years ago because they're always the persecuted minority and it's only by banding together
• 46:46
  and supporting each other that they've been able to endure to which the universalist might say so
• 46:50
  what? Yeah. I mean, the responsibility universalist is, and this, this is what you move on a little
• 46:57
  bit, but when I saw about the problems with empathy is that, um, what if universalism doesn't work?
• 47:03
  What if telling people care about everybody equally? Um, doesn't, doesn't motivate people
• 47:09
  and people say, fine, I'll just sit this one out. And I worry about that because I'm very much
• 47:13
  into effective altruism. I think it's, it's this wonderful movement, but, but it is true that
• 47:20
  when we're, our best emotions often go along in group lines, you know, it's hard for me to say
• 47:26
  for say, a woman who's been a victim of rape, who gives her money and her time to helping other
• 47:33
  women in that situation. Oh, you're doing something wrong. You're being immoral because certainly
• 47:38
  starving children, the kids, the kids in the famine, we're talking about they need the money more
• 47:42
  because she's doing good. It's not optimal good, but maybe optimal good is asking too much.
• 47:48
  Yeah, that's interesting. And I worry about that. And it also empowers the tech bros,
• 47:52
  sniper galaxy brain dickhead who wants to poo poo everybody for doing anything good because
• 47:58
  they're like, well, actually, you could be using your resources better by doing XYZ and then you
• 48:03
  ask them, what are you doing? And they're like, well, nothing, but that's only because it would be
• 48:06
  irrational to pick any one charity. I was, yes, or, or to people. And I don't think they're
• 48:13
  dickheads. They're, they're, they're people who have sincere views to say, look, we shouldn't be
• 48:17
  spending any money on anything, having to do with current people. Because in the distant future,
• 48:23
  there'll be 10 to the power of a million people are trying to put in that. At a staggering
• 48:29
  large number of people, we should try to make things better for future centuries. We should worry
• 48:33
  about existential risk like AI at risk. And it's hard. It sounds extremely cold. Somebody's saying,
• 48:39
  no, don't, don't send money to, you know, to help homeless people. Send money to do AI research
• 48:46
  to stop day eyes from becoming too powerful. And it does, it does sound very cold. Yeah. You know,
• 48:52
  I think I don't want to dismiss it because I want to take arguments seriously, but I, but I
• 48:56
  appreciate how cold that sounds. Yeah. Yeah. It also, there's something wrong with it that I can't
• 49:00
  quite put my finger on, which has to do with. It's, it's very zero sum. It like, it, there's
• 49:06
  something bothers me about how it assumes that we cannot do more than one thing. It reminds me,
• 49:12
  it smells a little bit like the argument that we have before every new year's eve about why does
• 49:17
  Sydney Harbor spend millions of dollars on this extravagant fireworks display when there are people
• 49:22
  who could use that money so much better. It's like, come on, stop being such a killjoy. We
• 49:28
  would never do anything fun. We would never do, we would never spend money on anything, apart
• 49:31
  from just pouring it into, you know, the, the neediest people. That's right. Now, if you told,
• 49:36
  if you said that he had Peter Singer on and he was defending utilitarianism and everything,
• 49:41
  he would, he would say, um, say, yeah, spend the money on people need to most and when you have
• 49:46
  stuff left over, have fireworks and art shows and theater and so on. And yeah, the life of people
• 49:53
  like ours, like us would be greatly impoverished because we wouldn't have all of our, our fun stuff.
• 49:58
  But people, little babies who would starve to death and they're an agony would be in less agony.
• 50:03
  I mean, I'm not even sure Singer would go that far. I mean, I, I think I would guess that singer
• 50:08
  would probably say there is some marginal utility in having fireworks because it in, if you could
• 50:15
  measure the, the pleasure that it gives to the million people who are standing by the heart before
• 50:19
  sure and amortize that is some utilitarian way, then maybe that can be justified, but maybe not
• 50:26
  the amounts that we spend and certainly not the amounts that rich people spend on bequeating
• 50:31
  museums and art galleries and stuff. I think Singer would say some matter of the math. So if you,
• 50:36
  if you convinced them that the number of heat on some millions of people got a weighed, you know,
• 50:40
  save curing 100 children from blindness, then you say, good. Yeah, go ahead. Yeah. I mean,
• 50:48
  interesting. The thing I struggle with because I'm, you know, I, I, I deal with it in my own life is,
• 50:54
  is I have family. I have children. I love very much, you know, I'm married. I have, I have
• 51:01
  relatives and I put a lot more effort and focus on them than they do on, on strangers. I don't
• 51:08
  know what anybody actually. And, and honestly, I'm, I'm a utilitarian, but, you know, we're talking
• 51:13
  here. I want to be, I want to be honest with it. I don't think I'm doing anything wrong.
• 51:18
  I, I, I know the arguments that I should be spending less effort on helping my kids and more on
• 51:24
  helping with, I'm making a bigger difference, but I think some sort of biases are so entrenched in
• 51:29
  us. The love we have for those around us that it is, you can't ask, it, you can't say the right
• 51:37
  thing to do is something you're incapable of doing. Well, I don't think some, well, then we're all
• 51:45
  sinners in some way and we have to live with that. And, and, and maybe, maybe that's the solution.
• 51:50
  Maybe all, maybe, maybe you're, maybe I should take that back and say, we, we all do bad then.
• 51:57
  I mean, I'm, I'm with you. I don't know what to make about this. You know, I hear some
• 52:01
  effective altruists wrestling with the idea of whether I have children at all because it would be
• 52:06
  such a distraction of their time and resources from the bigger mission that they have to improve
• 52:10
  people's lives. Having children myself has certainly impeded me in, you know, being able to
• 52:17
  expand my career and change minds and help people understand the world as much as I would have
• 52:23
  been able to had I not had kids. But it does strike me that there's, you can't just be relying on
• 52:29
  a crass utilitarian approach when it comes to parenting. You would end up neglecting your own
• 52:36
  children. And that just strikes me as so obviously rough that something's gone wrong in the math
• 52:41
  if that's the, if that's the place you end up. And I ignore you, but, but the utilitarian
• 52:48
  would say, no, neglect your kids, you know, if you're, if you're your podcasts are making a
• 52:54
  difference, have an extra one each week and spend less time with your kids, less time with those
• 52:58
  you love. And in a make their lives maybe a little bit less fulfilling, but just do the math.
• 53:03
  And, and that I can't, I can't go that far. Yeah, but I'd like to have an argument against it.
• 53:08
  Yeah, yeah, that's interesting. So one way of getting one way of escaping the trap of group
• 53:13
  thinking and in group and out group tribalism that is plaguing us is to have some kind of a shared
• 53:19
  purpose or a shared problem, right? The, you know, we always talk about if aliens attacked,
• 53:24
  then we'd all come together and, you know, all of our petty differences and squabbles would be
• 53:29
  overcome. A is that true and B, we're living in a world where shared problems don't even look
• 53:36
  like shared problems anymore because we have prisms through which to perceive them that reliably
• 53:41
  antagonize us. See, for example, climate change. It's, it's, it's a nice idea that if we had a shared
• 53:49
  enemy, we would dissolve our, our animosities and come together to fight it, but I think aliens
• 53:54
  did attack. I think we had COVID and COVID was, it was a global pandemic. I was, I was in my house
• 54:01
  at one point and it just occurred to me, I read this somewhere that that almost everybody on earth
• 54:07
  was in my situation and did this give me a shared purpose and bring the whole world together? It
• 54:13
  did not. I think that nor does climate change and so on. And I think the fact is that for just about
• 54:19
  anything, depending on where you're situated, it will affect you differently and you, and you
• 54:25
  will still have goals that will differ from other people. So, you know, so to climate goals,
• 54:30
  you know, how it would affect somebody in the United States versus Bangladesh is very different.
• 54:36
  And so, we never quite get the situation where aliens attack us all the same.
• 54:41
  Yeah. And even if we did, we'd find different solutions to the problem of the aliens and then
• 54:47
  yeah, social media algorithms would amplify those differences to be, to be pro alien videos of
• 54:54
  things alien and alien atrocities or even if it's not pro alien videos, just as there weren't pro
• 55:00
  covert videos, there would be lots of videos about why the actual, why the approach to attacking
• 55:06
  the aliens is actually just an excuse that people are using to hoodwink you into becoming
• 55:12
  sheep and, you know, obeying them in some new world order or whatever it might be.
• 55:17
  That's right. There's incentives within the social media. You know, part of this just being
• 55:21
  a person, but I think particularly for social media is always incentives to, you know,
• 55:26
  when aliens attack say, you know, it's actually, you know, Bill Gates and so, yeah,
• 55:29
  because you get a lot of followers and, and you get a lot of money and so on.
• 55:34
  If, you know, if Biden's in charge when aliens attack, well, he's messing it up and we need Trump.
• 55:39
  Yeah. That's right. A lot of your work at Paul is about why we like what we like and how we come
• 55:45
  to like what we like and how we come to develop a sense of good and evil when we're young. Why do,
• 55:51
  why do I like the things that I like and value the things that I value?
• 55:56
  So a lot of reasons. Some is just straight up natural selection. You know, if you give a list of
• 56:03
  what people like, people like, you know, they like, they like food at food, winter, hungry and
• 56:08
  drink, winter, thirsty. At stages of their life, they like sex, they always like love,
• 56:13
  they like respect, they like status, they like to be warm, they write temperature and so on.
• 56:19
  And then there's a lot about pleasure, which I find super interesting because it doesn't
• 56:23
  straightforwardly follow from evolutionary theory. Like, why do we like art and music and stories?
• 56:30
  And that's kind of what I'm what I'm really interested in. I think sometimes we like things
• 56:37
  because we like to, we like things in imagination because we like to simulate things.
• 56:41
  We like to, there's all sorts of experiences that would be great to have, but I can have them
• 56:45
  because, you know, because of just, I'm not situated properly or I don't want to risk my life
• 56:50
  or so. So I have my imagination. I don't, some of the things that we like, I don't know why we like.
• 56:57
  I honestly don't know the appeal of humor. I know humor is, is terrific, but I've never heard a theory
• 57:02
  of humor that I find satisfied with. I don't think anybody really gets music. And this is why I kind
• 57:10
  of love my job because I could say for some of them, yeah, I, you know, pornography, I got a
• 57:15
  theory of that. It's pretty straightforward. But classical music. Right. So he's pornography and
• 57:23
  other and movies and television shows and novels and social media. Those are those appealing
• 57:30
  because they're, I assume, representations or simulations of real life scenarios that we
• 57:36
  find titillating. So, so summer, some pornography is so, so people, you know, predominantly men,
• 57:46
  but, but it depends on the type of pornography people find certain things erotic in the world,
• 57:52
  like attractive naked people of that, that they're attracted to. I'm familiar with the concept of
• 57:57
  pornography. You get, okay, so it means, well, if you go on the internet, you don't really just
• 58:02
  look up, blow your mind. So, so, but you can't always have an attractive naked person there when
• 58:08
  you need one. So you, you open up your laptop and boom, there they are, depictions of them. But
• 58:15
  it strikes the visual system as if there was somebody real and you respond accordingly.
• 58:21
  And sometimes we like company of attractive amusing people, but you're alone in your house, you
• 58:27
  switch on some sitcom or some drama and there you are. You're immersed with the cast of billions
• 58:32
  having their adventures and so on. I think that stuff is straightforward. It's almost what you
• 58:37
  call a super stimulus. It's like artificial sweetener. You know, porn is the artificial sweetener
• 58:43
  of sex. It's just technologically built, not the not the real thing, but it hits you as if it was
• 58:48
  the real thing. But then you get things like, you know, we're talking now and Halloween's coming
• 58:54
  up in a few days. And why do we like to be scared? Because in a real world, you know, fear is bad.
• 58:59
  If, you know, if you're lying at home, you do not want actually the feeling hearing an axe
• 59:03
  murderer come up the stairs. So why do we like that? In fiction. And that's kind of a puzzle. That's
• 59:08
  a bit hard. What's your hobby? My hunch. My hunch is it's a form of play. And what play is,
• 59:16
  is practice. So what you do is for things that are dangerous, things that are dangerous and risky,
• 59:22
  but important, like learning how to fight. We play. We wrestle with our friends and we get some
• 59:29
  training in a safe way. And sometimes we do this in imagination. So what, what horror movies are,
• 59:37
  horror TV shows and so on is depicting worst case scenarios. The world, the world goes to shit.
• 59:43
  You know, there's a plague wiping on everybody. There's a, there's no, there's a murder in the
• 59:48
  house. You can't trust the people around you. All those worst things ever, often in a fantastical
• 59:54
  form of zombies and vampires, but, but it's, but that the poor, it's realistic fears. And,
• 1:00:00
  um, and horror movies exposes to them in a safe way. I can always close my eyes, switch them up.
• 1:00:06
  You know, um, I could be watching Saul for, but, but I'm myself never going to get hurt.
• 1:00:12
  Yeah. So it's ways to safely explore bad stuff. Yeah. That makes sense. It strikes me that it's
• 1:00:18
  a similar thing to riding a roller coaster or going on G jumping. You know, here's what it would
• 1:00:23
  feel like to fall off a cliff. But here's the kicker. Here's the kicker. You're not going to die.
• 1:00:29
  This time, you know, you get to have the experience without the without the payoff, which is nice.
• 1:00:34
  Yep. Same. And to get a bit more harvesting with tragedies. Like, here's what it's like to have,
• 1:00:39
  you know, your family, this own you and your love life leave you under the, and you're crying.
• 1:00:44
  But it's, it's, it's a bungee jump. Yes. You know, you're not really going to get hurt.
• 1:00:48
  And, yeah, I mean, your most recent book is about why some of the things that we actually like in life
• 1:00:53
  are seemingly not pleasurable, uh, like suffering. And maybe that leads us here.
• 1:00:58
  Why do some people like to do things that aren't? Well, what kinds of things are you talking about
• 1:01:02
  to begin with? So this is a, this is mainly, I have, I have a book since then called, called,
• 1:01:07
  Psych, which is a, you're too prolific for living. But I'm slowing down. Um, but, uh, but sweet spot
• 1:01:14
  is, is about why we choose just to suffer. And I find it so interesting. So an idea with it at
• 1:01:20
  a different level. So, um, so there's basic sort of, why do we like spicy foods? Why do we,
• 1:01:26
  why do some people like BDS and why do people, um, why do people like roller coaster rides,
• 1:01:32
  you know, vertigo, which isn't so pleasant. But also, why do we do things like trained for
• 1:01:36
  a marathon or cryathlon? You know, struggle. Why, why do we enjoy chosen struggle, chosen
• 1:01:43
  suffering? Why does all of us have kids, even though, you know, we know that that's not,
• 1:01:47
  it's not gonna make life easier. It's gonna make my life much harder. And I think there's
• 1:01:53
  different answers to that part of it is forms of play, forms of self stimulation. But I root
• 1:02:00
  the deeper story behind the book is that we're not heatin' this. We do like pleasure. Pleasure's
• 1:02:05
  great. But we, but, but we also want meaning. We want meaningful activities. We want to do things
• 1:02:10
  that, that, that's, you know, tangible. And we want to climb Mount Everest and have children and
• 1:02:16
  learn a new language and do hard things because we take meaning out of them. Is there a time scale
• 1:02:23
  here over which the heatin is a mistaking place? I mean, there's a, so the most short term way to
• 1:02:29
  feel gratified right now is to shove my face with sugary fatty food and masturbate probably,
• 1:02:36
  right? But over the long term, if I construct a life in which that's my main, the main way I
• 1:02:42
  derive pleasure, that life is gonna be vastly unfulfilling. Whereas I know that if I do things that
• 1:02:48
  are challenging to me, then on the other side of that, there's greater, maybe not great,
• 1:02:54
  greater, maybe deeper. Pleasure, then I would get in the short term from eating a cake,
• 1:03:00
  eating a piece of cake. So just, is there, is there, is timing a difference here? Yeah, yeah, it
• 1:03:07
  definitely is. We, Holly, she sent me high. I wrote a book on flow. And, and he points out that
• 1:03:15
  flow is a state of, when you enter a difficult state, you, you, some degree of difficulty. Not
• 1:03:19
  so hard, you kind of freak out, but not so easy that you're bored. And it could be like artistic
• 1:03:24
  work or athletic stuff or music. And then you lose yourself in it. But he also points out a lot
• 1:03:30
  of people have lives without flow because they get caught up in the fact that that we are living,
• 1:03:36
  we are living in a world where it has never been so much opportunity for eating ice cream and
• 1:03:41
  masturbating. It's just, it's just yeah, there's, at, we are, we have the possibility of never being
• 1:03:46
  bored. I walk around my phone, I have games on and I have YouTube, I have Twitter, you know, and
• 1:03:52
  because of this, an immediate timescale, hedonism always backens. And you do need some degree of
• 1:04:00
  willpower and self control to hold back on that and choose the difficulty. Train, start training
• 1:04:06
  for marathon, get in shape, learn the musical instrument, all stuff which is difficult.
• 1:04:11
  And I don't know, I've heard people could say that the youth of today are really screwed because
• 1:04:16
  they don't have, there's so many temptations. When I was a kid, there were no smartphones,
• 1:04:22
  there's no internet. And so it's actually, you didn't have a choice. You know, you learned
• 1:04:27
  to play music, literally because there's nothing else to do. It's ten at night and the TV is off.
• 1:04:32
  You know, there's no stations. And now there's always something to do. And so I don't know, if I
• 1:04:39
  was that kind of person who said, well, we're heading through your website. So I love the idea of
• 1:04:42
  Paul Bloom, practicing his crombone at 10 p.m. because the television went off and the neighbor's
• 1:04:47
  banging on it. It's something terrible. You from here. No, I'm just being literal. Yeah, I mean,
• 1:04:53
  it's interesting, isn't it? Because that distraction, I mean, we can feel it. I'm sure you can
• 1:04:57
  feel it. I can feel it. It's harder for me today to read a novel than it was eight years ago,
• 1:05:03
  because I've trained myself to expect novelty in every moment. It's harder for me to sit on a
• 1:05:09
  park bench and stare at a park and look at nothing but the clouds than it was eight years ago,
• 1:05:15
  because I get fidgety. I get itchy. I want to pull the phone out and see what people are arguing
• 1:05:19
  about. Yeah. And because of that, I'm exactly the same. And because I go for a walk,
• 1:05:26
  and there's a knuckle look at my phone, I bring it, but I'm not going to call my phone. And then
• 1:05:29
  I'm like staring at it as I walk and the walk is a lot less satisfying because each moment is
• 1:05:35
  sort of more satisfying than the split second of boredom, but you give up the entire experience.
• 1:05:42
  Another thing is watching movies at home where I know I'll enjoy a movie a lot more if I shut
• 1:05:48
  out the lights, put the movie on loud and just stare at it. But sometimes if I'm a hand reaching
• 1:05:54
  for my phone, look up something, check someday. And in that instant, it's more pleasurable,
• 1:06:00
  but to overall experience phase. And you take the story of your story of a walk, my story of a movie,
• 1:06:05
  expanded to a life. And that's, and that's the problem. It's terrifying. I mean, it's terrifying.
• 1:06:11
  Yeah, the idea of waking up on your deathbed going, wow, I was distracted this whole time. What
• 1:06:16
  happened? What have I been doing for eight years? What? Tell me now, now my friend Dan Gilbert is
• 1:06:22
  a psychology professor at Harvard. And he always argues for me about it. He says, no,
• 1:06:25
  I'm going to be a heathenist because it's true that I occasionally look back and say,
• 1:06:29
  my life sucks. I'm ashamed of myself. I've done nothing. But how long do you do that for a minute,
• 1:06:34
  two minutes, ten minutes? Well, if the other 23 hours and 50 minutes has been in heat on,
• 1:06:38
  it's bliss. You're so ahead of the game. He's being cheeky. He's being cheeky. He's not entirely
• 1:06:44
  being cheeky because the nature of the, um, the nature of the pleasure when you're being
• 1:06:50
  heathenistic is also laced with guilt and unfulfillment, I think, unless you're, uh,
• 1:06:57
  unless you're an idiot, you're aware that what you're doing is self-destructive and pointless
• 1:07:02
  and fruitless when you're being needlessly heathenistic, right? So it's not even like a pure pleasure.
• 1:07:08
  And there is a pleasure to be found in the running of the marathon. I must say I never
• 1:07:13
  found it in the case of the marathon, but the, you know, in analogous things that I can imagine
• 1:07:18
  that are difficult, uh, there is a pleasure to be found that's underlying the, the pain even,
• 1:07:25
  even in the experiencing of the thing. And maybe that is an anticipatory sense of your own gratitude
• 1:07:31
  after the fact or something, but he's being cheeky to conflate, uh, moment by moment,
• 1:07:36
  hedonism with, like all pleasures are not alike, right? I mean, the pleasure of
• 1:07:43
  curiously masturbating and shoving your face with ice cream is, is pleasurable on one level,
• 1:07:48
  but it is also tiniest with a kind of regret that is not present where you're up to something big
• 1:07:54
  that's your choice calling. You're right that some pleasures are laced with shame,
• 1:08:00
  though he, I, he, like, he invites you to imagine you're in a rubah, this is greater weather's
• 1:08:05
  gray, you're swimming in the ocean, you're feeling just terrific, you know, you belly's full,
• 1:08:09
  you're ash, you know, and some pleasures are not like it's some pleasure, just fun,
• 1:08:12
  but yeah, but that's great. This is three days. And then you go on the one day for it,
• 1:08:16
  like, what the fuck am I doing in a rubah? I gotta, I gotta do something with my life.
• 1:08:20
  And that's a deep truth, which is there's a sense in which the choice to be a hedonist is self-defeating,
• 1:08:27
  which is pursuing pleasure in a certain point, that for his own say, you get bored, you get bored,
• 1:08:33
  you get sated. And, you know, psychologists call it a hedonic treadmill, you, you keep running
• 1:08:39
  fast and fast, but you don't go anywhere. And, and, and so, because of this, so now I actually read
• 1:08:47
  a neuroscientist, he said, well, the solution is keep finding more and more interesting new pleasures.
• 1:08:52
  But sooner or later, you run out. I'm sooner or later, you just, you know, it's terrifies me,
• 1:08:57
  what this man's gonna be like 20 years from now. Yeah. Um, so the solution is give up on pleasure
• 1:09:03
  a little bit. And, you know, race, race a family, you know, start a business, write a book, do
• 1:09:09
  something awful and boring and slow and meaningful. And if you're lucky, buy the buy, you'll be happy
• 1:09:16
  with it and you'll have lived a good life. It's a bit depressing, isn't it? The hedonic treadmill,
• 1:09:21
  and the, the fact that pleasures that were really titillating fade over time, or at least with
• 1:09:28
  repetition, I've been noticing this lately and I wonder what you make of it and you're thinking
• 1:09:33
  about suffering versus pleasure that there are things that I did for the first time in my 20s
• 1:09:42
  that were so amazingly outrageously fun. Like, can you fucking believe that I've just burnt my
• 1:09:49
  frequent flyer miles on, you know, Singapore Airlines first class, I've got a whole room in the
• 1:09:54
  sky. There's a shower on the plane, like, you know, ridiculous crap like that. And then, you
• 1:10:00
  know, I'm 10 years later, 15 years later, I'm doing it for the fifth time. Great. It's really
• 1:10:06
  cool. I love this game. You get, you get the hot towel and you say, you get this, you know, this
• 1:10:10
  hot as it should. It's warm. It's warm. It's not even that I become an enormous, you know, rich
• 1:10:16
  wanker whiner. It's just that it's great and also not novel, not novel. And that has sacked
• 1:10:25
  my life of a considerable amount of pleasure, the erasure of novelty.
• 1:10:31
  There's some sort of proverb, if a couple gets together and each time they make a love for the
• 1:10:36
  first year, they put us a little stone in a container next to the bed. And then after that, they
• 1:10:41
  remove a stone. You're trying to make a container. The container will never be empty.
• 1:10:46
  Right. That's right. You know, you get, you get, you get used, you get used to things. Yeah,
• 1:10:51
  you get you, you get used to pleasures. First classes, you know, I remember the first time I flew
• 1:10:55
  business, it was amazing. And then later on, you know, the hot towel is not so hot and they had
• 1:11:00
  better peanuts the last way. You're kind of grumping. And you get used to things. I think
• 1:11:07
  this is one reason not to be heatless because it's a longer goods, a satisfaction of a long-term
• 1:11:11
  project. You know, you don't have to see jolts, high jolts, but you also don't get, don't, don't
• 1:11:18
  get sated with it as quickly. And there's also something else, which is, it's not just in your
• 1:11:23
  20s, these were, that was the first time. It's also you were in your 20s. Yeah. And there's an
• 1:11:27
  intensity, there's an intensity of youth, which fades. There's always research finding for happiness.
• 1:11:33
  Very good news. You start off and it drops and in your about 50, and it's at the lowest point on
• 1:11:38
  average, then it starts creeping back up. And people in their 70s and 80s often report the happiest
• 1:11:44
  times their lives. And I think it's true, but it's not the intense, crazy happiness of being 20.
• 1:11:50
  No, it's not an action itself. Jonathan Roush has the book about that. That's right. That's right.
• 1:11:57
  Yeah, it's very reassuring to me in my 40s that this is the low point. I'm like, okay, good,
• 1:12:01
  I'm looking forward to it, guys. It's bad as it's going to get. I'm going to hit like,
• 1:12:06
  I didn't do the Brooks call for the second mountain, the sort of thing where you start,
• 1:12:09
  you start focusing on different things and so on. Yeah. I want to talk to you about artificial
• 1:12:14
  intelligence and empathy and what it's going to do to our minds. I want to thank you for being
• 1:12:20
  here for our free listeners and our premium subscribers. We'll get the next portion of the chat.
• 1:12:24
  So thanks, thanks so much for being with us. And if people want to subscribe,
• 1:12:28
  uncomfortable conversations.substake.com, I wonder what it's going to be like in 10, 15, 20 years
• 1:12:36
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• 1:12:41
  setting aside the question of whether they ever will be. What do you think will happen to our
• 1:12:48
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• 1:12:57
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