Speaker 1: Welcome to the Psychology Podcast, where we give you insights
Speaker 1: into the mind, brained behavior and creativity. I'm doctor Scott
Speaker 1: Barry Kaufman, and in each episode I have a conversation
Speaker 1: with a guest. He will stimulate your mind and give
Speaker 1: you a greater understanding of yourself, others, and the world
Speaker 1: to live in. Hopefully we'll also provide a glimpse into
Speaker 1: human possibility. Thanks for listening and enjoy the podcast Today.
Speaker 1: It's great to have Jeffrey Miller on the podcast. Jeffrey
Speaker 1: Miller is the author of Virtue, Signaling, Spent and The
Speaker 1: Mating Mind, the co author of METE What Women Want,
Speaker 1: and the co editor of Meeting Intelligence. He has a
Speaker 1: BA from Colombia and a PhD from Stanford. He's a
Speaker 1: tenured evolutionary psychology professor at the University of New Mexico
Speaker 1: and has also worked at the University of Sussex, the
Speaker 1: Max Punk Institute for Psychological Recas, Church University College London,
Speaker 1: London School of Economics UCLA, and NYU Stern Business School.
Speaker 1: He researches evolutionary psychology, sexuality, consumer behavior, behavior, genetics, intelligence, personality, creativity, humor,
Speaker 1: and mental disorders. He is a long ass bio. He
Speaker 1: is over one hundred ten act publications, that's given over
Speaker 1: two hundred invited talks in sixteen countries. Sorry I'm laughing.
Speaker 1: His research has been featured in Nature Science. Ecuse me.
Speaker 1: His feature is featured everywhere, like you look, Jeffery, it's
Speaker 1: so good to have you on the Psychology Podcast. Finally,
Speaker 1: it's great to be on. Yeah. We've been kind of
Speaker 1: kicking around a lot of these ideas for a long time.
Speaker 1: You were a contributor to that Mating Intelligence volume long
Speaker 1: time ago, so you know, we've been Powells and colleagues
Speaker 1: for ages. And it's great violently on your show. I
Speaker 1: have so much to talked about. When I was doing
Speaker 1: prep for this, I was looking in the archives that
Speaker 1: a lot of your auto work, and I was able
Speaker 1: to start to see these larger patterns and threads that
Speaker 1: have weaved through your career. And it's going to be
Speaker 1: very very interesting to talk to you about this and
Speaker 1: also discuss things we might not agree on. But I
Speaker 1: don't think it'll get to to you know, in the
Speaker 1: ven diagram like non overlapping. But okay, so I want
Speaker 1: to just start off by talking about the ideas in
Speaker 1: The Meeting Mind. Because you're approaching a ten year anniversary,
Speaker 1: is that correct on that book, it's actually a twentieth
Speaker 1: anniverse twenty Oh my god, yeah, I know it's crazy.
Speaker 1: So yeah, twenty years ago I published this crazy book
Speaker 1: called The Mating Mind, How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution
Speaker 1: of Human Nature, which I wrote in the late nineties,
Speaker 1: and it was based on my original Stanford PhD that
Speaker 1: I wrote way back and sort of ninety through ninety four,
Speaker 1: so it's it's ideas that have been out there for
Speaker 1: a while. So that book had a lot to do
Speaker 1: with signaling theory, and signaling theory seems to be a
Speaker 1: very prominent theme in your career, and you applying it
Speaker 1: now in lots of really interesting ways. We'll get to
Speaker 1: regarding politics and ideologies and virtue signaling. But that idea
Speaker 1: of morality as signaling was on one tiny part in
Speaker 1: The Mating Mind, part of a broader framework. I mean,
Speaker 1: you talk about a lot of things, you talk about morality.
Speaker 1: You know. When I read that book, I started to
Speaker 1: see the whole world in that way. Everything everywhere I looked.
Speaker 1: I was like, oh my gosh, we're all just these
Speaker 1: signaling animals and it almost drove me insane. So thanks,
Speaker 1: by the way for almost at a certain point in
Speaker 1: my life, almost had a nervous breakdown because I was like,
Speaker 1: what's real anymore? But I thought you could talk about
Speaker 1: your earlier work that led to the mating mind on
Speaker 1: signaling theory and the handicapped principle and all these cluster
Speaker 1: of ideas that led up to the maiding mind, because
Speaker 1: I think that'll provide a really good foundation for your
Speaker 1: newer research. Yeah. I think signaling theory was one of
Speaker 1: the big red pills that I've had to absorb in life.
Speaker 1: And I got into it a little bit when I
Speaker 1: started studying sexual selection way back in grad school at Stanford,
Speaker 1: and I was fascinated by sexual selection as a process
Speaker 1: animals choosing their mates for certain traits, and then the
Speaker 1: traits evolving not because they're useful necessarily for survival, but
Speaker 1: just because they're attractive and or they convey credible information
Speaker 1: about the individual's good genes or good behavior or good
Speaker 1: brain or whatever. And so in sexual selection, a lot
Speaker 1: of the signaling is kind of sexual signaling. It's for
Speaker 1: sexual attraction. But then after I kind of wrapped my
Speaker 1: head around that, I got deeper into the kind of
Speaker 1: game theory of signaling. So I spent four years working
Speaker 1: in an economics department at University College London, where all
Speaker 1: of my colleagues did evolutionary game theory and they were
Speaker 1: trying to figure out in animal in humans between institutions,
Speaker 1: how do people strategize, How do group strategize? How do
Speaker 1: you do things like signal? Maybe in geopolitics, if you,
Speaker 1: you know, violate our sovereignty in some way, we are
Speaker 1: going to do military force against you. So how do
Speaker 1: you saber rattle effectively? That's one kind of signaling issue.
Speaker 1: Or in morality, how do you signal that you're a
Speaker 1: good person, whether it's attracting a potential mate, or attracting
Speaker 1: a colleague, or signaling to professional colleagues that you're reliable
Speaker 1: and trustworthy as a scientist, any of that. So, once
Speaker 1: you start seeing signaling, it's absolutely everywhere, and it kind
Speaker 1: of takes a while to regain your mental equilibrium. It
Speaker 1: really because you really start, yeah, you start seeing you
Speaker 1: realize at least half of what everybody is doing all
Speaker 1: the time is signaling in some way about some trait
Speaker 1: to some audience, including ourselves. Yeah. Yeah, including signaling to
Speaker 1: ourselves about how great and smart, we can't really boost
Speaker 1: our own self esteem or or have those feelings that
Speaker 1: evolved that good feeling when our ego is boosted. Yeah, well, okay, Son,
Speaker 1: can you connect signaling theory to sexual selection and talk
Speaker 1: a little bit about how the meeting mind offered an
Speaker 1: alternative perspective on the evolution of our cognitive characteristics and
Speaker 1: particular creativity that wasn't up to that point wasn't represented
Speaker 1: in the literature. So the traditional thinking about, you know,
Speaker 1: the evolution of human intelligence and creativity and language and
Speaker 1: all these amazing distinctive traits that we have is that
Speaker 1: those traits were useful under prehistoric conditions, mostly for survival
Speaker 1: or for living in groups, for hunting, gathering, avoiding predators,
Speaker 1: making allies, or helping a group to compete against other groups.
Speaker 1: And I think there's a lot of legitimacy to certain
Speaker 1: as respect to the human mind being good for those things. Absolutely,
Speaker 1: But I was struck that there's a lot of stuff
Speaker 1: that people do in many domains, like art and music
Speaker 1: and humor and creativity, and particularly in courtship, where it's
Speaker 1: really hard to figure out a kind of pragmatic survival
Speaker 1: payoff for a lot of those activities, like doing elaborate
Speaker 1: cave paintings, or dancing around a campfire for hours on
Speaker 1: end to a rhythm, or telling funny stories to your clansmates.
Speaker 1: What's that all about? And it seemed from the anthropologist
Speaker 1: and also just from my personal experience, to be honest,
Speaker 1: that a lot of the payoffs for that were sexual.
Speaker 1: They were getting potential mates to pay attention to you.
Speaker 1: And sexual selection theory is basically a theory of how
Speaker 1: those incentives for good courtship get compiled over hundreds of
Speaker 1: generations or thousands of generations into things like bird plumage
Speaker 1: or given song or whale song or bird song or
Speaker 1: all of these amazing signals that animals give to each other.
Speaker 1: And I thought humans must do a lot of this
Speaker 1: as well. And yet in the academic literature on human evolution,
Speaker 1: the signaling incentives for doing amazing creative things seem, I
Speaker 1: thought to have been neglected. So that was kind of
Speaker 1: the genesis of the mating mind book idea. How did
Speaker 1: you come to that realization? I think the realization was
Speaker 1: a combination of, you know, my own personal experience in
Speaker 1: grad school. I've always been very safeio sexual. I've always
Speaker 1: been interested in smart women and smart women who appreciated
Speaker 1: smart men. And I you go very meta when you're
Speaker 1: a psyche grad student. You've had this experience, no doubt,
Speaker 1: you know, you read all this actdemic theorizing, and then
Speaker 1: you think, how does this apply in my real life
Speaker 1: to my relationships? And I thought, you can read the
Speaker 1: sociobiology and the evolutionary psychology as it existed when I
Speaker 1: started grad school in the late eighties, and it was
Speaker 1: really great. On a lot of points. It was very
Speaker 1: We already had a pretty good idea about why certain
Speaker 1: things are physically attractive. We had a pretty good idea
Speaker 1: about how people trade goods and services and do reciprocal
Speaker 1: altruism and why we scratch each other's backs. But it
Speaker 1: seemed like we're we had a huge gap where human
Speaker 1: courtship should be that was not being analyzed very well.
Speaker 1: And I thought, we're good at explaining why people are
Speaker 1: initially attracted to each other in the first few seconds
Speaker 1: of seeing each other and assessing visual cues or assessing status,
Speaker 1: but we're not really good at explaining why people actually
Speaker 1: fall in love with each other. There once they talk,
Speaker 1: once they get to know each other, once they spend
Speaker 1: hours or days or weeks with each other, and when
Speaker 1: you feel like, oh wow, this person really gets me.
Speaker 1: You know, she laughs at my joke, she makes me laugh,
Speaker 1: she's cool, she has talents, and she feels the same
Speaker 1: way about me. That to me is the heart of
Speaker 1: romantic courtship. And I thought, we are not the first
Speaker 1: generation to do this. This has been happening thousands of generations,
Speaker 1: and it's left its evolutionary imprints on our brain and
Speaker 1: that must have had an impact and sculpting our traits.
Speaker 1: And yeah, and in our motivation to express those traits.
Speaker 1: Can we talk about some common misconceptions of your theory,
Speaker 1: because I think that's almost as important as discussing your
Speaker 1: theory itself. So can you talk a little about the difference,
Speaker 1: because this is a lot of people don't talk about this.
Speaker 1: This distinct takes me proximal and distal causes. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: think it's really important when you think clearly about signaling,
Speaker 1: to understand that sometimes the best signals are not the
Speaker 1: most self conscious signals. Sometimes it's important to have plausible
Speaker 1: deniability about what you're doing So, for example, imagine you're
Speaker 1: you know, a prehistoric man or a woman, and you're
Speaker 1: already kind of sort of in a relationship a little bit,
Speaker 1: but you're not fully committed. Maybe you want to keep
Speaker 1: your options open, maybe you want to trade up, maybe
Speaker 1: you want to mate switch. Okay, so you want to
Speaker 1: broadcast to anyone who will listen. I'm a cool person,
Speaker 1: I'm creative, I'm artsy, on musical whatever. It's really important
Speaker 1: when you're doing that not to be consciously aware that
Speaker 1: the function of all this behavior is sexual, that the
Speaker 1: potential payoffs are a new relationship. Why because your existing
Speaker 1: mate is going to challenge you and go, why are
Speaker 1: you doing this? Why do you have to keep Like
Speaker 1: I fell in love with you because you're a great drummer,
Speaker 1: a musician, singer, whatever, Why do you have to keep
Speaker 1: doing it now that you have me? Well, the right
Speaker 1: response is, I don't know, man, I just feel creative.
Speaker 1: I feel this burning desire to share my genius with
Speaker 1: everybody because it cheers them up or whatever. You can't
Speaker 1: say you're pretty good, but maybe I think I could
Speaker 1: do better. I might want to mate switch. Let's see
Speaker 1: how it goes. That's a terrible. That's a terrible mission
Speaker 1: to articulate. So it's very very important in the sexual
Speaker 1: courtship domains for us not to be conscious about a
Speaker 1: lot of the you know, the true functions of these behaviors. Well,
Speaker 1: do you think that underlying every creative motivation, even at
Speaker 1: a subconscious level, the meeting motive is active, because I
Speaker 1: would challenge that, I guess. But first of all I
Speaker 1: want to see is that would you say that is true? No? No,
Speaker 1: I think a lot of the functions of signaling are
Speaker 1: you know, have a big overlap between kind of the
Speaker 1: sexual domain and broader social domains. So this is not
Speaker 1: to say that all the signaling is sexual. Signaling I'm
Speaker 1: smart or I'm creative brings many social benefits. Right. You
Speaker 1: can attract friends, you can attract allies, you can help
Speaker 1: your group to signal. We in general are very competent
Speaker 1: and creative and you know, have our act together. So
Speaker 1: those signaling benefits aren't restricted just to forming new sexual relationships.
Speaker 1: It might even be you know, kids signaled to their parents,
Speaker 1: hey mom, look at me. I'm artsy, I'm creative, i
Speaker 1: can do things I'm worth investing in. Or we can
Speaker 1: signal to existing mates. I'm still a valuable mate, I'm
Speaker 1: still competent. It's worth staying in this relationship with me.
Speaker 1: So it's not all about acquiring new short term mates.
Speaker 1: You know, the same signals that are impressive to new
Speaker 1: romantic partners can also be impressive to existing partnerss allies, anybody,
Speaker 1: and not everything is signaling either, right, So for unders
Speaker 1: thinking of what about the painter who has a great
Speaker 1: intrinsic motivation for what they're doing, gets such joy from painting,
Speaker 1: is not actually interested in even sharing it with the world.
Speaker 1: Let's say they keep it in their cupboard for years now.
Speaker 1: It doesn't seem to me in that situation there's either
Speaker 1: a meeting motive active nor a signaling. Yeah. I think
Speaker 1: this really is a case where it's crucial to understand
Speaker 1: this proximate versus ultimate distinction. That the evolutionary reasons why
Speaker 1: we're able to do something. You can track what were
Speaker 1: the fitness payoffs for that over the last few thousand generations,
Speaker 1: and the proximal motives are why am I doing this
Speaker 1: right now under these particular conditions, And the proximal motives
Speaker 1: are going to be mixed up up with a lot
Speaker 1: of other things that are going on. So you might have,
Speaker 1: let's say, a high degree of creative genius, but also
Speaker 1: a high degree of introversion and shyness, and you would
Speaker 1: kind of love for people to appreciate your creative displays,
Speaker 1: but you don't quite have the social outgoingness or the
Speaker 1: social skills to convey them in public effectively. And this
Speaker 1: is the tragedy of the introverted genius, right. And that
Speaker 1: doesn't mean that you know, the capacity for creativity wasn't
Speaker 1: shaped for signaling. It just means you're not a very
Speaker 1: good signaler. Is it possible that, even from an evolutionary perspective,
Speaker 1: that some of those behaviors that you're seeing weren't even
Speaker 1: shaped by signaling or meeting. I've been working on a
Speaker 1: paper which my gosh, I wish I was published already
Speaker 1: so I could send it to you and we could
Speaker 1: nerd out about it, arguing that the need for exploration
Speaker 1: is a need in and of its that evolved not
Speaker 1: through the meeting motive. Even from an evolutionary perspective, it's
Speaker 1: the neat for expiations. I think they can be reduced
Speaker 1: to the meeting or the status motives, and that that
Speaker 1: underlies a lot of what we see in terms of
Speaker 1: creative motivation, like the openness to experience, demean of personality
Speaker 1: and stuff like that. I just want to get some
Speaker 1: of your thoughts on that. Yeah, So when I teach
Speaker 1: my undergraduate seminar and human emotions, we spend a whole
Speaker 1: week on the so called cognitive emotions like curiosity and
Speaker 1: awe and all these things that seem to be there
Speaker 1: to motivate exploration of new landscapes, new social relationships, new ideas,
Speaker 1: new worldviews, and so forth. And I think a lot
Speaker 1: of those cognitive emotions do drive a lot of creative behavior.
Speaker 1: They drive a lot of scholarship, a lot of research,
Speaker 1: And yeah, you're right, they're not necessarily there for signaling.
Speaker 1: They're there because, you know, imagining, you have two different brains.
Speaker 1: One brain is highly motivated to explore the world of
Speaker 1: ideas and level itself up and get better as a brain.
Speaker 1: The other brain is complacent, not curious, doesn't give a
Speaker 1: shit about ideas. That second brain is going to stagnate
Speaker 1: and it's not going to be ultimately as competitive or attractive.
Speaker 1: That's exactly right. And you know we're looking at too.
Speaker 1: Dopamine systems and the reward of value of information seeking,
Speaker 1: which is not the same thing as me acquiring more meats.
Speaker 1: Acquiring more information. Information doesn't always lead to acquiring more meats,
Speaker 1: and you can decouple those. So I'm really glad that
Speaker 1: we're on the same page about that as well. And
Speaker 1: these things aren't mutually incompatible theories obviously. Yeah. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: think a lot of the intellectual curiosity, of course that
Speaker 1: people have is partly ooh this is really cool, and
Speaker 1: I'm kind of unconsciously motivated by the realization that if
Speaker 1: I master this particular set of ideas or this story
Speaker 1: or this domain or this bit of history, then it's shareable.
Speaker 1: Right then I can tell people this fascinating stuff and
Speaker 1: get the status and the attractiveness for knowing these things.
Speaker 1: And you know, anybody who's active on social media kind
Speaker 1: of knows how mixed up these motives get. Like, am
Speaker 1: I checking Twitter every morning because I want to learn
Speaker 1: stuff just for pure curiosity? Or is it partly I
Speaker 1: kind of want to retweet stuff that sounds cool so
Speaker 1: I can get you know, some status from doing that. Absolutely,
Speaker 1: And it's amazing how quickly we can get derailed. It's
Speaker 1: the motive for that virtual singing is so strong that
Speaker 1: even despite our best intentions, we get the morning like,
Speaker 1: I can't wait to dive more into that journal article
Speaker 1: I was reading last night. The second we get on
Speaker 1: Twitter and we get engaged in that motive is active.
Speaker 1: It can override every all our best intentions and we
Speaker 1: get we get kind of caught up in this. So
Speaker 1: I think that's right. Yeah, yeah, We're just we're such
Speaker 1: deeply social creatures that even when we feel like, you know,
Speaker 1: I'm passionately pursuing this arcane part of academic research or
Speaker 1: this arcane intellectual worldview, there's always the possibility and we're
Speaker 1: kind of semi aware of it that this makes me
Speaker 1: a more interesting person to others. So this is interesting,
Speaker 1: And I always found this interesting about your work, even many,
Speaker 1: many years ago, the connection between social rewards and sexual selection?
Speaker 1: Now do they always do those two? Do those tools
Speaker 1: have to be compable with each other? Because we are
Speaker 1: social animals, we are Roy baumeistart to show this brilliantly
Speaker 1: in a lot of his writings, and he doesn't necessarily
Speaker 1: link it to the meeting. Ultimately, from a from an ultimate, ultimate,
Speaker 1: ultimate perspective, does all do all of our social interactions
Speaker 1: from an evolution perspective. Oh, you're arguing their sexual selection benefits.
Speaker 1: I think the bottom line is often sexual selection. So
Speaker 1: and I do push a little bit on the people
Speaker 1: emphasize things like social competition or status. Right, And the
Speaker 1: thing to ask always is how exactly do you cash
Speaker 1: out your alleged fitness benefit into survival or reproduction? Okay,
Speaker 1: so status is not an intrinsic evolutionary reward. You don't
Speaker 1: automatically spread your genes just because you get status. Okay,
Speaker 1: it has to cash out into higher status people survive
Speaker 1: better where their blood relatives survive better, or they get
Speaker 1: more mating opportunities and more kids, you know, or their
Speaker 1: kuld survive. Yeah, it has to you know, go down
Speaker 1: to the bottom line, just in a corporate earning statement.
Speaker 1: You know, that's reproductive success is the bottleneck and evolution.
Speaker 1: So what frustrates me about a lot of the social
Speaker 1: selection theories about the evolution of the human mind are
Speaker 1: they don't actually connect the dots fully from making friends
Speaker 1: and influencing people and attaining social status into dot dot dot,
Speaker 1: how does that cash out into reproductive success? Well, you
Speaker 1: could you could see how it cashes out in terms
Speaker 1: of natural selection or or survival. Yeah, so right, and
Speaker 1: absolutely yeah, higher status people do tend to survive epidemics
Speaker 1: and and famines and natural disasters better because they have
Speaker 1: better social networks that are more supportive. And absolutely you can.
Speaker 1: You can connect those dots in that way. But I
Speaker 1: haven't seen as much work on that as I would like,
Speaker 1: even from an evolution perspective, and all you're saying, yeah,
Speaker 1: even even among evolutionary like people, Yeah, let's let's do
Speaker 1: more work on that. That's we are. We are such
Speaker 1: a social species. And I've been interested in Mark Leary's
Speaker 1: work showing that our feelings of self esteem track our
Speaker 1: perceptions of social value, like the sociometer theory. I've always
Speaker 1: wanted to see more of an evolutionary tie into the
Speaker 1: sociometer theory, and I think it's so naturally connected, right,
Speaker 1: It's so important clinically also that if people are depressed
Speaker 1: or anxious, so they feel like they're losers, or they're
Speaker 1: not valuable, or they're having suicidal ideation, a lot of
Speaker 1: that is feeling like I'm not being valued sexually or
Speaker 1: socially in a group. That matters to me. And I
Speaker 1: think a lot lot of clinical psychology could really benefit
Speaker 1: from a clear understanding of that sociometer idea that people
Speaker 1: really are trying to track how much value do I
Speaker 1: add to my family and my local group, and if
Speaker 1: I feel like I'm not adding enough, like that sucks
Speaker 1: and I feel like a burden. And conversely, happiness and
Speaker 1: self esteem and self respect are they're kind of hard
Speaker 1: to fake to yourself. You know, this is another issue
Speaker 1: of reliable signaling that if you're getting credible cues of adulation, appreciation,
Speaker 1: respect from people who you in turn respect, it's kind
Speaker 1: of hard to stay depressed if you're getting that on
Speaker 1: a consistent basis face to face. For me, throughout my
Speaker 1: whole academic career, one of the best antidepressants is always
Speaker 1: going to conferences and giving a good conference talk. If
Speaker 1: it wasn't a good talk, that's pretty that's like even worse.
Speaker 1: But you know this, just meeting people and finding people
Speaker 1: who read your stuff and appreciate it, it's a huge boost.
Speaker 1: It's a huge boost, but you still I actually saw
Speaker 1: a Netflix special with Neil Brennan, who was one of
Speaker 1: the cauthors of the Chappelle sh and he gets really
Speaker 1: personal in that show. I don't know, did you see
Speaker 1: that special by chance? No? I didn't. I'm pretty familiar
Speaker 1: with the Dave Chappelle's stet up comedy, but but Neil
Speaker 1: Brennan in particular, he really got personal and talked about
Speaker 1: how he's suffered from depression his whole life, and how
Speaker 1: he even he would use those ego boosts as a
Speaker 1: way of overcoming his depression. But there became a point
Speaker 1: in his life where even that anymore didn't didn't didn't
Speaker 1: hold it, didn't do it for him, and that really
Speaker 1: made him rethink his life. I guess when I think about,
Speaker 1: ultimately the most sustainable way to a well being, I
Speaker 1: don't think about finding ways of pursuing the feeling of
Speaker 1: self esteem. I think ultimately of intimate connections. I think
Speaker 1: of things like finding meaning in things that don't necessarily
Speaker 1: bring you an ego boost, but that give you meaning
Speaker 1: in it of themselves. I think of other things. But
Speaker 1: but your point is still very valid that we still
Speaker 1: can get these momentary boosts. We evolved in such a way,
Speaker 1: but ultimately they're fleeting right. Well, I think there's ego
Speaker 1: boosts and then there's ego boosts. Right, There's different kinds
Speaker 1: of adulations. So you know, if you're in a long
Speaker 1: term relationship with someone you respect a lot and they
Speaker 1: give you an ego boost, that's kind of a qualitatively
Speaker 1: different thing than just a big crowd clapping after you
Speaker 1: give a cloak whim, right. And I think to some degree,
Speaker 1: everybody needs a healthy mixture of those. They need the
Speaker 1: respect from intimate relationships, from blood relations from their own kids,
Speaker 1: from their parents, from their neighbors, but also from the
Speaker 1: broader community. And I think if you have that sort
Speaker 1: of healthy mixture of you know, adulation that's kind of
Speaker 1: a mile deep from people who've known you for years,
Speaker 1: but also a mile wide from people who are just
Speaker 1: getting to know your ideas and like them, that's really powerful.
Speaker 1: But a lot of people kind of over specialize in
Speaker 1: like getting just one or just the other. I love that.
Speaker 1: That's a mean point of my new book, Transcend. Sorry
Speaker 1: to be the guy who just plugged his new book,
Speaker 1: but it really is. It really is relevant in the
Speaker 1: sense that my argument in that book is really for
Speaker 1: integration of these evolved needs and what does that mean,
Speaker 1: integration of the need for self esteems. I argue the
Speaker 1: need for self them is a real need, but it's
Speaker 1: best when it's folded into real, authentic mastery, real intimate connections,
Speaker 1: not just for the sake of the pursuit of it,
Speaker 1: which is what narcissists or those discovery narcissm get addicted to.
Speaker 1: And I talk about the addiction model of self esteem
Speaker 1: that I really like, So it sounds like we're on
Speaker 1: the same page about that. Actually, yeah, yeah, yeah, And
Speaker 1: I think a bad thing that can happen, Let's say
Speaker 1: with I've just been watching a Waco series about you know,
Speaker 1: David koresh And and the branch Vidians. It's amazing, it's
Speaker 1: really good. It first came out a couple of years ago,
Speaker 1: but it's having a moment on Netflix. And cult leaders
Speaker 1: have always kind of fascinated me because, you know, they
Speaker 1: often have a pretty high degree of sociopathy and machiavelianism
Speaker 1: and ability to influence people. But I think what can
Speaker 1: happen is you get in this trap of finding followers
Speaker 1: who you manipulate very effectively, but who you don't really respect.
Speaker 1: So you're getting cues evatulation from people who kind of suck,
Speaker 1: and that can actually be very alienating. I think the
Speaker 1: same thing can happen with stand up comedy. That if
Speaker 1: you've done a routine dozens of times and you know
Speaker 1: exactly how to time the punchline to get exactly this
Speaker 1: kind of laugh, it's like playing a keyboard. It's like
Speaker 1: you're not even interacting with real humans. You just have
Speaker 1: created a kind of stimulus response loop, and you end
Speaker 1: up with a kind of contempt or the audience because
Speaker 1: you know how to play them and influence them and
Speaker 1: make them laugh almost too well, and it starts to
Speaker 1: feel kind of fake. Does that make sense? One thousand percent?
Speaker 1: And I think I see it natural linkage there between
Speaker 1: that and the pickup artist community and why so many
Speaker 1: of them have reported feeling depressed after getting to that community.
Speaker 1: And I know you've done working this, So I was
Speaker 1: wondering if you coul talk about it about this a
Speaker 1: little bit. You wrote a book with Tucker Max, right,
Speaker 1: you know, I thought you could talk a little bit
Speaker 1: about that. What is the pickup art community, what is
Speaker 1: a better route to sustain sustaining it? And yet and
Speaker 1: why might it be linking to what you just said
Speaker 1: if you do go through all the motions, and yes,
Speaker 1: maybe you can attract meats, but you start to lose
Speaker 1: your soul at a certain point in a more poetic way,
Speaker 1: then maybe you would frame it. But do you see
Speaker 1: what I'm saying? Yeah? Can you talk about that? Yeah?
Speaker 1: I kind of first got fascinated with the whole pickup
Speaker 1: artist manisphere, red pill community maybe fifteen years ago. My
Speaker 1: first exposure, I guess was David Angelo aka Evan Pagan,
Speaker 1: who's still a close friend of mine, who did a
Speaker 1: book and video series called Double Your Dating. He actually
Speaker 1: flew to Albuquerque, I don't know, fifteen years ago to
Speaker 1: talk with me, and he was very keen to learn
Speaker 1: about evolutionary psychology and mating and courtship and dating and
Speaker 1: romantic love and how do you apply all these Darwinian
Speaker 1: insights to attracting women if you're a single guy. And
Speaker 1: I talked a lot with him and some of the
Speaker 1: other pickup artists about these issues. First of all, what
Speaker 1: is a pickup artist? Many of our listeners might actually
Speaker 1: be like, what's that? So pickup artists are kind of
Speaker 1: a subculture that flourished from maybe about you know, the
Speaker 1: early two thousands until maybe a few years ago. I mean,
Speaker 1: they still exist, but they kind of had a cultural
Speaker 1: moment around two thousand and five twenty ten, and there
Speaker 1: were guys who figured out that there are some life
Speaker 1: hacks in courtship and romance that are very effective and
Speaker 1: that can be taught, and that can make desperate single
Speaker 1: guys who want girlfriends dramatically more attractive to women. And
Speaker 1: it doesn't require cosmetic surgery, it doesn't require going to
Speaker 1: get a PhD. These are often very simple things that
Speaker 1: increase your parent confidence, your status, your sense of humor,
Speaker 1: your sense of being in a desirable group of other guys,
Speaker 1: YadA YadA, and that women reliably respond to in kind
Speaker 1: of predictable ways. So they figured out some ways to
Speaker 1: kind of hack human courtship, and they shared this information
Speaker 1: and it worked. A lot of it worked pretty well,
Speaker 1: but a lot of it seemed incredibly superficial, and I
Speaker 1: think it led to a lot of these guys kind
Speaker 1: of getting what they wanted in the sense of, like
Speaker 1: they attracted women, they got girlfriends, but they lost a
Speaker 1: lot of esteem for women in general, just the way
Speaker 1: stand up comedians can kind of lose esteem for the
Speaker 1: audience if they get too good at making them laugh
Speaker 1: right exactly, It seems like a natural analogy. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: think that's that's really a danger that faces anybody who's
Speaker 1: an effective influencer, whether they're a stand up comedian, a
Speaker 1: politician giving the same damn stump speech, you know, two
Speaker 1: hundred days in a row, a marketer trying to sell
Speaker 1: stuff and facing the same the same objections, manipulating the
Speaker 1: same pain points over and over. Once you understand human
Speaker 1: nature well enough to influence it, it starts to seem
Speaker 1: like this kind of weird alienating game that you're playing.
Speaker 1: You know, if you teach, this even happens if you're
Speaker 1: a professor teaching courses. Right the fifth or seventh time
Speaker 1: you teach something, you know what students are going to
Speaker 1: be interested in, what they're going to laugh at, what
Speaker 1: they'll find interesting. So what is a broader lesson from
Speaker 1: that we can learn about the nature of well being
Speaker 1: and what leads us to to deep fulfillment in life?
Speaker 1: Is part of it? That because I found in my research,
Speaker 1: I looked at the Dark Tride, and I looked at Macavalienism,
Speaker 1: and I found that those those of couverhind Macavalienism aren't
Speaker 1: report lower levels of life satisfaction. So I was wondering
Speaker 1: if there's if that's relevant here at all for me personally.
Speaker 1: One thing that protects against that kind of cynicism is understanding, Hey,
Speaker 1: the parts of human nature that you're kind of influencing
Speaker 1: or manipulating if you're doing effective courtship or if you're
Speaker 1: doing effective salesmanship or marketing, these are not trivial things.
Speaker 1: It's actually deep evolutionary logic to the responses that you're
Speaker 1: kind of influencing. So if let's say you're a pickup
Speaker 1: artist and you think, oh, women are really superficial for
Speaker 1: caring about resources and money and status, right, you can
Speaker 1: rapidly go down this very kind of blackpilled cynical rabbit
Speaker 1: hole that says, yeah, women are just these simplistic, superficial
Speaker 1: creatures that just go around scanning for alpha males, and
Speaker 1: I just have to look like an alpha and then
Speaker 1: life is good. That I think is a recipe for despair,
Speaker 1: because you end up not respecting the people you're spending
Speaker 1: all your time with your girlfriend. If instead, you take
Speaker 1: a step back and you get this evolutionary perspective that says,
Speaker 1: here are the reasons why in interest in status and
Speaker 1: popularity and fame and genius are actually really deep and
Speaker 1: not at all superficial. And there's a hidden logic to
Speaker 1: why women care about this and they embody, you know,
Speaker 1: their own form of genius in their mate choice for
Speaker 1: caring about these things. And once you really get that,
Speaker 1: I think it's a powerful way to counteract that cynicism. Yeah,
Speaker 1: does that makes sense? It does? And I think more
Speaker 1: needs to be written about that. Okay, So out of
Speaker 1: the four hundred and thirty six thousand topics identified we
Speaker 1: could talk about today, I'll just pick how about this one?
Speaker 1: Humans are ideological animals? I thought that was a really
Speaker 1: interesting statement you said in your book. Can you talk
Speaker 1: a little about how humans are ideological animals and how
Speaker 1: that relates to virtue signaling in politics? I know that's
Speaker 1: a topic. You've been a source since the nineteen nineties. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: ever since I got fascinated by signaling in the late
Speaker 1: nineties and talked to economists and also talk to political scientists.
Speaker 1: It seemed like they had a model of like citizen
Speaker 1: behavior and voter behavior that didn't strike me as realistic
Speaker 1: at all. Right, Like, one big question in political science
Speaker 1: is why do people bother to vote at all? Given
Speaker 1: that your individual likelihood of like influencing an election outcome
Speaker 1: is negligible. It's like winning the lottery. Your vote is
Speaker 1: really doesn't matter. And yet people whose votes don't really
Speaker 1: matter statistically spend huge amounts of time gathering news information,
Speaker 1: forming political opinions, talking to their family and friends about
Speaker 1: their political ideologies and their values, and signaling I really
Speaker 1: care about gun rights or abortion or Biden or Trump
Speaker 1: or blah blah whatever China. And we're just full of
Speaker 1: these ideas. We love to develop them, broadcast them, argue
Speaker 1: about them. That's really weird. And so when I talk
Speaker 1: about us being ideological animals, it's this idea that we
Speaker 1: are so much more ideological than we need to be.
Speaker 1: If we had just evolved to like survive and find
Speaker 1: food and avoid predators and like, why would we care
Speaker 1: so much about national partisan news. I think that's one
Speaker 1: of the major questions in the social sciences, actually, is
Speaker 1: why are we so ideological tribal partisan? You know, it's
Speaker 1: it's easy to spend a story about why we're tribal beings,
Speaker 1: why we care about our local group, and why we
Speaker 1: care about competing with other growth groups, But why do
Speaker 1: we do that? At this level of political beliefs or
Speaker 1: religious beliefs. Why not just do it at the practical
Speaker 1: level of like we want more territory and food and
Speaker 1: you know, better barricades and fences and more local military power.
Speaker 1: Why do we make it ideological? Is part of that
Speaker 1: the fact that human individual differences and personality exist, which
Speaker 1: can sometimes create different clusters of beliefs and ideologies that
Speaker 1: stem from that. I mean, you do see that conservatism
Speaker 1: tends to be related to certain aspects of the Big Five,
Speaker 1: and Democrats tend to be more interested, they tend to
Speaker 1: score higher, and certain aspects of agreeableness both score high,
Speaker 1: and agreeableness just in different politeness versus compassion and things
Speaker 1: like that. And I'm just wondering to what extent is
Speaker 1: that a natural outgrowth of the fact that individual differences exist. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think a lot of it is signaling our personality
Speaker 1: traits rather than signaling any sort of deep political philosophies.
Speaker 1: So I set you up for that one. Yeah, A
Speaker 1: lot of what I learned about scientific collaboration incidentally came
Speaker 1: from playing volleyball in grad school. It's all about to
Speaker 1: bump the set and the spike, like you want a
Speaker 1: collaborator who can like kind of dig down and save
Speaker 1: you from, you know, a terrible objection to your theory.
Speaker 1: You want somebody who can set you up for the
Speaker 1: call shot, and then you want the person who can
Speaker 1: take the col shot. Anyway, my whole book spent about
Speaker 1: consumer behavior is basically the idea that a lot of
Speaker 1: the goods and services that we buy end up being
Speaker 1: signals of our personality traits like how open minded are
Speaker 1: we versus how conservative are we? How agreeable? And you know,
Speaker 1: how big a bleeding heart do we have versus how
Speaker 1: assertive and aggressive and dominant are we? And I think
Speaker 1: the same goes for political ideologies or religious ideologies. But
Speaker 1: a lot of what we signal if we get furious
Speaker 1: about something on Facebook or Twitter is we kind of
Speaker 1: have this passionate desire to signal I'm more open than
Speaker 1: you are, or I'm more agreeable, or I'm more assertive,
Speaker 1: or I'm more conscientious and have higher will power or whatever.
Speaker 1: And sexual ideologies, right, I mean, isn't that Do you
Speaker 1: see that too? Someone might feel a certain way, I
Speaker 1: have a certain interest, but they had the signal. Oh,
Speaker 1: that's disgusting that people who are into that right, isn't
Speaker 1: that another demean where you see that? Oh yeah, A
Speaker 1: lot of political ideology really boils down to different sexual strategies.
Speaker 1: I'm wow, that's unpack that one. Well. Basically, political conservatism
Speaker 1: is highly correlated with belief that long term monogamous marriage
Speaker 1: is good, promiscuity is bad, polyamory is bad, nuclear families
Speaker 1: are good, and anybody who deviates from kind of monogamous
Speaker 1: nuclear family norms is an existential threat to Western civilization
Speaker 1: blah blah blah. And then on the other hand, people
Speaker 1: who are a little more sexually adventurous tend to end
Speaker 1: up being politically liberal at least with regard to certain issues. Right.
Speaker 1: And people like me who are kind of patchwork centrists
Speaker 1: who have like I've got a libertarian streak, I've got
Speaker 1: a new reactionary streak, I've got a progressive streak. We
Speaker 1: are extremely confusing to most people, and what they really
Speaker 1: want to know is, yeah, but what's your sexual strategy.
Speaker 1: That's so interesting? What kind of mating system do you advocate?
Speaker 1: And so like, on Twitter, I have a lot of
Speaker 1: conservative followers, and yet I'm polyamorous and I'm in an
Speaker 1: open marriage, and this is extremely confusing to them. They
Speaker 1: can They're like, butmiliarly, you like traditionalist representational art, you
Speaker 1: like traditional architecture, you love Western civilization, you like the
Speaker 1: ancient Greeks and Romans. How on earth can you be polyamorous?
Speaker 1: Because they're seeing politics through this sexual strategies lens. I
Speaker 1: keep in my head. I keep going back to the
Speaker 1: idea though, that not everything is signaling, and it can
Speaker 1: become a bit maddening trying to if you're someone who's
Speaker 1: generally good faith, you care about this, what am I
Speaker 1: actually signaling versus what is really because I believe it. So,
Speaker 1: for instance, and I'll tell you something that that quite
Speaker 1: frankly does annoy me. Sometimes I will genuinely feel anger
Speaker 1: over something that really does upset me. Right, Not everything
Speaker 1: is virtue signaling, Is that right? Oh no? But I
Speaker 1: mean the thing is that this kind of goes back
Speaker 1: to the approximate versus ultimate distinction, right that if you're
Speaker 1: virtue signaling, and you're signaling a genuine conviction, a real virtue, right,
Speaker 1: it feels indistinguishable from genuine moral outrage, because the function
Speaker 1: of moral outrage is to signal these are my values.
Speaker 1: They're rock bottom non negotiable values. I'm going to stand
Speaker 1: up for them. I'm going to challenge people who don't
Speaker 1: agree with them. And you know it, it really comes
Speaker 1: full circle, like the most effective signals are the most
Speaker 1: offen and reliable and heartfelt. I see. That was a
Speaker 1: great answer to my question, and it did make me
Speaker 1: realize that it is important to distinction between cheap talk
Speaker 1: signaling and reliable virtue signaling. Yeah, and also to make
Speaker 1: the point, as you do in your book, that virtue
Speaker 1: signaling explains a lot of good of humanity and it
Speaker 1: and the kind of virtus you're talking about, you're you're
Speaker 1: not doing it is a pushdown or an insult, which
Speaker 1: is how it's almost exclusively used amongst certain political circles
Speaker 1: to say, oh, that person's just virtusing, so we're going
Speaker 1: to dismiss It is possible to have reliable indicators in
Speaker 1: the sense that you generally have that trait. So I
Speaker 1: could be virtue signaling compassion and still be actually be
Speaker 1: a compassionate person just because I'm virtue signing doesn't need
Speaker 1: to be a put down in the sense that, oh,
Speaker 1: that person is fake, doesn't actually have that be what
Speaker 1: you would put in the more the cheap talk category.
Speaker 1: Is that right? Is that fair representation? Oh yeah, this
Speaker 1: is a huge theme also throughout my little Virtue Signaling
Speaker 1: book and all the essays there is. There's cheap talk
Speaker 1: on the one hand, where you just like slap a
Speaker 1: bumper sticker on your soubrew that expresses your political ideology,
Speaker 1: but you don't actually do anything about it or donate
Speaker 1: any time or money just to supporting it. And then
Speaker 1: there's extremely reliable, heartfelt virtue signaling where you're dedicating your
Speaker 1: entire life to solving some huge problem of human or
Speaker 1: animal welfare, and it's it's crucial for us to understand
Speaker 1: it can all be signaling. That's not to diss it.
Speaker 1: Some of the best things in life are genuine, heartfelt,
Speaker 1: reliable signals. So something it looks to be like something
Speaker 1: you're trying to do is strip virtue signaling from its
Speaker 1: political context just to play under the microscope as the
Speaker 1: phenomenon exists. That's a wonderful but hard thing to do
Speaker 1: when you're living in this political question. Confusing to people, right,
Speaker 1: because I know, I know, yeah, virtue signaling is a
Speaker 1: term from the right to critique the left, and I
Speaker 1: kind of I've been trying to remind people for years
Speaker 1: that there is a signaling theory that is relevant to
Speaker 1: understanding virtue signaling, and that not all signaling is bad.
Speaker 1: In fact, some of the best things in life are
Speaker 1: a result of signal evolution. And in fact, some of
Speaker 1: the best things in human ethics and morality and ideology
Speaker 1: have to do with signaling genuine values in a way
Speaker 1: that's hard to think exactly. I found the quote from
Speaker 1: your book virtue signaling includes the best of human instincts
Speaker 1: and the worst of human instincts, So it's quote unquote.
Speaker 1: So let's talk about I think the natural segue is
Speaker 1: to effective altruism and how can one, even sometimes if
Speaker 1: they are not feeling the emotion, still compute what will
Speaker 1: be the maximum benefit to people? So effective altruis in
Speaker 1: some ways decouple the feeling of empathy sometimes from the
Speaker 1: rational calculation of what would actually do the greatest good. Right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's the distinction that Yale Psychology as or Paul Bloom
Speaker 1: the Bloom makes between empathy versus rational compassion. So empathy
Speaker 1: is sort of, you know, it's a relatively easy state
Speaker 1: to get into, where like, oh, that person or animal
Speaker 1: is suffering. They're cute, they don't deserve to suffer. I
Speaker 1: feel bad for them, I want to do something okay,
Speaker 1: and that's nice. That's that's a nice response, and it
Speaker 1: can lead to good things. But it has a lot
Speaker 1: of systemic problems, which is that, for example, you tend
Speaker 1: to overfocus on isolated examples of like cute, sympathetic things
Speaker 1: that are suffering rather than broader, you know, systemic problems
Speaker 1: like let's say, factory farming or the coronavirus pandemic, or
Speaker 1: you know the risk of nuclear war or other things
Speaker 1: that could affect billions of sentient lives. And so rational
Speaker 1: compassion is something that the effect of altruism movement tries
Speaker 1: to cultivate. It's something that we talk a lot about
Speaker 1: in my I have a Psychology of Effective Altruism seminar
Speaker 1: that I've taught three times now for undergrads, and we
Speaker 1: talk a lot about all these different emotions we come
Speaker 1: into play when you're trying to do good, and that
Speaker 1: you know, humans are not very well adapted to doing
Speaker 1: good effectively in large scale modern civilizations that face weird
Speaker 1: new you know, global catastrophic risks like viral pandemics or
Speaker 1: artificial intelligence or nuclear war or you know, climate change
Speaker 1: or stuff like that. Yeah, I did find your linkage
Speaker 1: between effective altruism and existential risks and threat very convincing,
Speaker 1: very interesting. I went down a rabbit hole of taking
Speaker 1: your course from the comfort of my home the last
Speaker 1: couple of days and read all these papers, and one
Speaker 1: paper I thought was really interesting I read was about
Speaker 1: how cognitive biases in a lot of ways can explain
Speaker 1: why we're not really good at thinking about existential risks logically.
Speaker 1: Could you please talk about some of some of the
Speaker 1: cognitive biases and the economy Tiversky sort of things like
Speaker 1: availability heuristic, things like that. Yeah, so this is one
Speaker 1: paper I assign it's actually not by a psychologist, is
Speaker 1: by this rationalist guy, Eliezer Yudkowski has written a lot
Speaker 1: of brilliant, brilliant things. He's been involved in the rationalism
Speaker 1: and effective altruism community, and he knows this cognitive biases
Speaker 1: literature pretty well. I think a key thing is what
Speaker 1: the effect of altruisks called scope insensitivity, that we're insensitive
Speaker 1: to the scope of suffering in the sense of like
Speaker 1: if you see one kitten suffering, we know that's bad.
Speaker 1: If you try to think about one hundred kittens suffering,
Speaker 1: that's really hard, hard to do. It's hard to visualize.
Speaker 1: If you think about a million kitten suffering, that's bad.
Speaker 1: If you think about ten billion chickens a year being
Speaker 1: killed in factory farms, it's literally inconceivable. You can't wrap
Speaker 1: a human mind around that kind of number, and so
Speaker 1: you need help. You need cognitive augmentation. You need grafts
Speaker 1: and charts and math and science to take you from
Speaker 1: a place to see human mind with all its voibles
Speaker 1: and limitations and emotions, into being a kind of good
Speaker 1: rational citizen who can think clearly about the true scope
Speaker 1: of certain challenges, like just how bad nuclear world would
Speaker 1: really be, or just how bad a global pandemic would be.
Speaker 1: And it's hard, it's really hard to do. It takes
Speaker 1: years of training to do it. But I think it's
Speaker 1: extremely important, you know. I like to think if a
Speaker 1: student takes the psychology you have effective altruism. Of course,
Speaker 1: that the end up I hope being much better citizen.
Speaker 1: Is he able to think more clearly through a lot
Speaker 1: of these political issues. That'd be nice, and by doing
Speaker 1: so they would also think more like an effective altruist.
Speaker 1: More generally, those are skills that can be applied to
Speaker 1: not just existential risk. I think this is your point
Speaker 1: as well. You know, we can apply it to making
Speaker 1: decisions like what charity should I donate to? Or should
Speaker 1: you know who should I help? But a lot of
Speaker 1: that though, and this is another part of the rabbit
Speaker 1: hole I went down yesterday. A lot of it goes
Speaker 1: down to utilitarian reasoning, which is something that we may
Speaker 1: be innatly predisposed to find disgusting. And I thought that
Speaker 1: was very interesting too. Is another potential barrier to this
Speaker 1: form of thinking is not just the cognibiases we have,
Speaker 1: but also our gut reaction to utilitarian thinkers. Could you
Speaker 1: talk a little about that. Yeah, So there's a lot
Speaker 1: of fascinating work now emerging from social psychology and moral psychology,
Speaker 1: from people like Molly Crockett who analyze our research. Yeah,
Speaker 1: just how disgusted we are by utilitarians and that humans
Speaker 1: have this sort of person perception bias to say, if
Speaker 1: a person is a good deontologist, that is to say,
Speaker 1: they believe their rights and duties and responsibilities and absolutes
Speaker 1: and black versus white, you know, moral judgments and that
Speaker 1: certain things are to boo and you can't do them
Speaker 1: and you can't even talk about them. We tend to
Speaker 1: like that. Actually, we trust those people, we respect them
Speaker 1: as ethical, stand up people. Utilitarians present all these kind
Speaker 1: of social red flags, which is they're willing to contemplate
Speaker 1: to boo trade offs, like they're willing to quantify, Hey,
Speaker 1: if we keep the economy in lockdown, how many lives
Speaker 1: does that save versus how many jobs we do we lose.
Speaker 1: Most people aren't willing to contemplate those trade offs rationally, dispassionately,
Speaker 1: publicly effective altrus are. They strike a lot of people
Speaker 1: as sociopathic. But I think it's really important to do that,
Speaker 1: I think, and I've tweeted about this. I've said, look,
Speaker 1: you know, a good leader, a good politician, is someone
Speaker 1: who's willing to publicly talk about heartbreaking trade offs and like,
Speaker 1: this policy is going to be good for these reasons
Speaker 1: and bad for these reasons, and on balance, I think
Speaker 1: it's good, but there are going to be bad side effects.
Speaker 1: And in contrast, we get politicians who know that that
Speaker 1: kind of reasoning is sort of discussing to voters and
Speaker 1: aren't willing to engage in it. So I'm trying to
Speaker 1: do the Venn diagram in my head right now between
Speaker 1: psychopathy and effective altruists, and I want to draw it.
Speaker 1: I feel like it's a be a productive. It be
Speaker 1: a productive based on the research I've conducted, because I
Speaker 1: have shown a very correlation between the dark triad traits
Speaker 1: and utilitarian thinking and a very strong correlation between my
Speaker 1: new light tria. I don't know if you're aware of
Speaker 1: my light triad research I've initiated recently and non utilitarian
Speaker 1: thinking more personalized thinking. To me, it seems pretty clear
Speaker 1: the difference between a psychopath and a effective altruist, and
Speaker 1: some some effect in this vent diagram. Some effective altrus
Speaker 1: are psychopaths, so that has to be acknowledged, but a
Speaker 1: lot aren't, and the ones that are in the category
Speaker 1: of that aren't. It seems to be that it's very
Speaker 1: possible to be an effective altruist to not necessarily score
Speaker 1: very high in compassion or empathy, but do a lot
Speaker 1: of greater good and not have the lying, cheating, thrill
Speaker 1: seeking characteristics of the psychopath. So this was just my
Speaker 1: on the spot way of trying to I want to
Speaker 1: draw it, so badly now. But you see what I'm
Speaker 1: visualizing right this van diagram. Yeah, it is. It is
Speaker 1: very confusing because, like descriptively, you know, the effect of
Speaker 1: altruism movement as I've been involved with it now for
Speaker 1: five or six years, involves a lot of neurodiversity in
Speaker 1: many directions. It involves a lot of a lot of asbes,
Speaker 1: a lot of people with kind of Aspergers traits, who
Speaker 1: a little socially awkward, but who love thinking systematically and
Speaker 1: dispassionately about things. It does involve some people who can
Speaker 1: come across as a little bit cold hearted and yet
Speaker 1: who are rationally devoting their entire lives to causes like
Speaker 1: reduce animal suffering or reduce the risk of bad AI
Speaker 1: taking over dusky net scenario. So I think, you know,
Speaker 1: in contrast, the sort of normies, normal people who aren't
Speaker 1: sort of neurodivergent. They tend to be constrained by whatever
Speaker 1: society says is kind of a respectable way to think
Speaker 1: about certain issues. It involves respect to you know, the
Speaker 1: taboos about which trade offs you're not allowed to talk about,
Speaker 1: and it involves you know, a fair amount of virtue
Speaker 1: signaling about like oh, I like you know, my dogs
Speaker 1: rescue and so I'm a good person. And yet I
Speaker 1: still eat factory farm chicken, you know, five times a week,
Speaker 1: and I don't care about the suffering of the chickens.
Speaker 1: So effect of altruism is a weird movement that attracts
Speaker 1: weird people. But I love them because they're willing to
Speaker 1: step outside societies kind of normal ways of thinking and
Speaker 1: to kind of harness their neurodivergent traits for the greater good.
Speaker 1: Can we talk about neudiversity because this is an area
Speaker 1: of high interest. Maybe out of all the other topics
Speaker 1: we could talk about today, maybe with the exception of intelligence,
Speaker 1: the idea of neurodiversity, and well exception of intelligent creativity,
Speaker 1: maybe nerdiversity is the one we have the most common
Speaker 1: interest in. So very I'm an advocate of the big
Speaker 1: advocate of nerdiverse movement. I was misplaced and misdiagnosed in
Speaker 1: special education as a kid and was bored out of
Speaker 1: my gorg and and had to actually fight my way
Speaker 1: out to show them that I was smart enough of
Speaker 1: eventually you know, getting to Yale, for instance. But it
Speaker 1: was very frustrating to me as a kid being this
Speaker 1: quirky what was my charge When I looked at I
Speaker 1: looked at all the ips. What was the thing that
Speaker 1: they kept me out of the classes for? It was
Speaker 1: essentially my awkwardness. I mean that was it. Like my
Speaker 1: social awkwardness and my just asking weird questions. That was
Speaker 1: that was my That's why I was in special education
Speaker 1: as a kid when I actually look at it, because
Speaker 1: they didn't know what to really diagnose. I mean when
Speaker 1: I was really young, I had an ear infection and
Speaker 1: central Aultroye crossing, but that I outgrew that, so they
Speaker 1: kept me in because that. I loved reading your work
Speaker 1: linking the neuro diversity movement and people who think differently.
Speaker 1: Quirky asked be people and speech codes and why maybe
Speaker 1: we're discriminating against a lot of people who are nerve
Speaker 1: who are neurodivergent. Can we talk about that? Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: apart from the mating mind, I think the thing I've
Speaker 1: written that I'm kind of proudest of, to be honest,
Speaker 1: is this collect magazine article called the Neurodiversity Case for
Speaker 1: Free Speech. Can I just say it's one of my
Speaker 1: favorite articles thanks I've ever read in my life, like
Speaker 1: in my and I really mean that Yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: no versure saying me, I mean that yet. No, that
Speaker 1: means a lot to me because a lot of people
Speaker 1: who you know are kind of aspy or nerdy or
Speaker 1: geeky or nerdi virgin in some way read it and
Speaker 1: really resonated with it. Because my key argument there basically
Speaker 1: was if you have a kind of system of internalized
Speaker 1: censorship and speech codes and things where like everybody knows
Speaker 1: you're supposed to have certain views and certain opinions and
Speaker 1: you're not supposed to say certain things. But you know what,
Speaker 1: we're not going to write it down explicitly what you're
Speaker 1: allowed to say and what you're not allowed to say.
Speaker 1: It's all going to be implicit. It's all going to
Speaker 1: be like in codes, and you from, well, that's fine.
Speaker 1: Most normies can kind of learn those codes and euphemisms
Speaker 1: and taboos by the time they get in college maybe,
Speaker 1: But people who are a little aspy literally can't read
Speaker 1: between the lines in that way. They literally can't understand, like, well,
Speaker 1: why is this taboo? Why can't I talk about this?
Speaker 1: And that means if you have a system of kind
Speaker 1: of expected self censorship and speech codes and like things,
Speaker 1: you're not supposed to say because otherwise it's hate speech,
Speaker 1: or it's offensive, or you should be canceled if you
Speaker 1: say it. That is intrinsically discriminatory against asbies and other
Speaker 1: people who are neurodivergent because you're literally asking them to
Speaker 1: do something they can't cognitively do, which is understand your
Speaker 1: ideological euphemisms and taboos that you never even state explicitly.
Speaker 1: And it's very important to point out that we're not
Speaker 1: saying and I don't believe you're saying that anyone can
Speaker 1: really use their neudiversity as an excuse for being an asshole,
Speaker 1: but you're saying something different. You're saying there's a lot
Speaker 1: of unintentional confusion, unintentional that And I suspect with a
Speaker 1: lot of the me working. I've worked with a lot
Speaker 1: of people on the spectrum as well as other spectrums,
Speaker 1: and in the neudiversity movement. This is a big part
Speaker 1: of my work I do now these days. And and
Speaker 1: I noticed that the second you explain to someone maybe
Speaker 1: why that hurts so and out, they feel horrible about it.
Speaker 1: I mean they these are very well intentioned people who
Speaker 1: might do unintentional hurt someone's feelings, you know, but if
Speaker 1: they were just explained in a mature way, you know,
Speaker 1: and are just you know, it's very unintentional. So I
Speaker 1: just wanted to make that very clear. That's you're not
Speaker 1: saying that like it's a get out of free card
Speaker 1: to be an intentional asshole. Yeah. Yeah, it's not a
Speaker 1: get out of jail free card. But I think, you know,
Speaker 1: the normies who are very good and navigating these ideological
Speaker 1: landscapes where there's a lot of sort of unstated assumptions
Speaker 1: and unstated taboos, it's really hard for them to understand
Speaker 1: just how much of a cognitive burden they're putting on.
Speaker 1: Ask the people, and so, yeah, if you're socially awkward,
Speaker 1: you're going to be socially awkward. You're going to say
Speaker 1: things that make people uncomfortable, and you're going to you know,
Speaker 1: ask questions that you're not supposed to ask. And the
Speaker 1: normies are like, well, I can't even imagine why you
Speaker 1: do that unless you had a malevolent intent, So they
Speaker 1: kind of misattribute, you know, to the awkwardness a sort
Speaker 1: of ill will or psychopathy or whatever. And really it's
Speaker 1: just ask thes being like, I'm just asking the question,
Speaker 1: and and in a sense, it's almost like there, that's bullying.
Speaker 1: I mean a lot of the same people that do
Speaker 1: that would would would say or virtues sing or whatever
Speaker 1: you're in your framework, you know that we need to
Speaker 1: stop bullying people who are nerdiverse. I mean they would
Speaker 1: say that, right. But then if we had its own
Speaker 1: nerdiverse in a classroom, who makes it a potentially insightful point,
Speaker 1: but which goes against the norms of what kind of
Speaker 1: questions you're allowed, what you're allowed to challenge, might be
Speaker 1: bullied for it. So in one sense it seems like
Speaker 1: a form of potential form of bullying. Another sense, and
Speaker 1: this is another aspect of you, but your papers are rich.
Speaker 1: So I had lots of different sections and I kind
Speaker 1: of was salvating salvating at all those sections. But another one,
Speaker 1: which is a lot of research I've done showing some
Speaker 1: of the most creative geniuses people have really fundamentally moved
Speaker 1: our society forward. A lot of gifted children are on
Speaker 1: the neurodiversity end of things. So by shutting that down,
Speaker 1: we may be shutting down some potential ideas that might
Speaker 1: actually move society forward, right, is that right? Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: the huge cost of a kind of sensorious council culture.
Speaker 1: You know, if you have a culture that says nobody
Speaker 1: is ever allowed to say anything offensive or else, we
Speaker 1: will we will, you know, eliminate their career prospects. Okay,
Speaker 1: that's a way of eliminating all creative genius from public culture.
Speaker 1: That's the side effect of doing that. If you have
Speaker 1: a system, let's say, in stand up comedy, of saying
Speaker 1: if stand up comedian ever is quirky or weird or
Speaker 1: kind of offensive or you know, sexually misbehaves, they're not
Speaker 1: allowed to be a stand up comedian anymore. The result
Speaker 1: is stand up comedy will suck within five years. And
Speaker 1: if equivalently you say, uh, you know, we want to
Speaker 1: encourage people to get into stem science, tech, engineering, math.
Speaker 1: The people who are interested in that stuff tend to
Speaker 1: be a little lasty, they tend to be a little
Speaker 1: socially awkward, and we're going to hold them to the
Speaker 1: same standards of inoffensiveness that we hold everybody else to think,
Speaker 1: I think that's a recipe for civilizational failure in science,
Speaker 1: because it means you're just not going to allow productive,
Speaker 1: creative eccentrics to achieve positions of influence or to mentor people,
Speaker 1: or to teach, or to engage with public culture. Thank
Speaker 1: you for making that point, and I agree. Okay, So
Speaker 1: you teach a course on polyamory and open sexuality. How
Speaker 1: is that possible to get a course in college approved
Speaker 1: as a professor to teach such a course? First of all?
Speaker 1: Second of all, what has the response been from the students? Yeah?
Speaker 1: So I taught this course in fall twenty seventeen, and
Speaker 1: it was controversial. It was not easy to get it approved.
Speaker 1: I think ultimately I was able to convince my colleagues
Speaker 1: that alternative relationships are increasingly common, particularly among younger people
Speaker 1: millennials and gen z, that they raise interesting scientific issues
Speaker 1: about the nature of intimacy and relationships and love and
Speaker 1: family dynamics, and that they're also clinically relevant because there
Speaker 1: is good research showing that, for example, clinical psychologists and
Speaker 1: doctors and social workers don't understand polyamory and don't understand
Speaker 1: open relationships. And if people come in with problems and
Speaker 1: they say like, hey, I'm in an open marriage and
Speaker 1: we have this in this problem, many therapists will say,
Speaker 1: obviously you have that problem. Open marriages never work, right,
Speaker 1: So I kind of made the diversity case that Hey,
Speaker 1: if we're training our clinical psychologists to be able to
Speaker 1: deal with alternative sexual orientations like a lesbian or you know,
Speaker 1: to deal with ethnic minorities, or to deal with people
Speaker 1: with different religious or political views, we should also be
Speaker 1: training our students to be able to deal with alternative relationships.
Speaker 1: We'll turn many ways even more stigmatized, you know than
Speaker 1: being let's say gay or lesbian. I really see, it's
Speaker 1: so obvious to me, this this old arch and pattern
Speaker 1: of the way you think. So so you know, within
Speaker 1: that demean you know, you're like, well, if we say
Speaker 1: we care about these forms of diversity, we should rered
Speaker 1: these and the same thing with a neurodiversity. You're saying, like,
Speaker 1: if there's so much talk about racial ethnic diversity and
Speaker 1: hiring practices and as well as sex and gender and
Speaker 1: those things, yes they are important, but we let's not
Speaker 1: neglect other forms of diversity as well, like neurodiversity. So
Speaker 1: so yeah, you're you're you're we're extending the and and
Speaker 1: and and I feel like I have the same mission,
Speaker 1: you know as well, and extending all these these different things.
Speaker 1: So that's that's that's great. So you have this time
Speaker 1: because I'm really curious is monogamy natural from an evolutionary
Speaker 1: point of view. I'm very curious about that question, and
Speaker 1: I picked out this quote because I think it's funny.
Speaker 1: It's a funny quote in the sense it's true, but
Speaker 1: it's the most non romantic framing of marriage or long
Speaker 1: term as you frame it, long term sexual relations I've
Speaker 1: ever heard in anything I've read. But you say, in
Speaker 1: game theory terms, such relationships and you're referring to long
Speaker 1: term sexual relationships such as marriages are iterated mixed mode
Speaker 1: of games, with very complex conflicts and confluences of interest,
Speaker 1: many possible equilibria, and incomplete information about the other players,
Speaker 1: possible tactics and preferences. So in game theory terms, how
Speaker 1: could those kinds of arrangements ever have been adapted from
Speaker 1: an evolutionary point of view, that's my question for you. Well,
Speaker 1: I do actually think that long term pair bonds run
Speaker 1: really deep in human evolution. I think we've been falling
Speaker 1: in love in forming pair bonds for millions of years.
Speaker 1: I think it's been one of the central reasons for
Speaker 1: humanity's success. I think it's enormously helpful in raising kids
Speaker 1: together with two parents. It's just I don't think enough
Speaker 1: evolutionary history of long term pair bonds is exactly the
Speaker 1: same as an evolutionary history of life long sexually exclusive monogamy, right,
Speaker 1: And that's the crucial difference that, Yeah, we have pair
Speaker 1: bonding instincts, and then some civilizations kind of seize on
Speaker 1: those and go lifelong monogamous marriage that's ritualized and socially
Speaker 1: accepted is the only way to do things sexually. And so,
Speaker 1: you know, most people I know in polyamorous or open
Speaker 1: relationships do have pair bonds, and they love pair bonds,
Speaker 1: and they love falling in love and forming pair bonds.
Speaker 1: It's just they might have more than one. They might have,
Speaker 1: you know, overlapping ones. They might expect some of them
Speaker 1: to be medium term rather than life long, And so
Speaker 1: it's it's not really a question of, hey, are we
Speaker 1: fundamentally monogamous or fundamentally like promiscuous and polyamorous. I don't
Speaker 1: think either of those options are realistic. It's more like, hey,
Speaker 1: we like to form pair bonds, but how sexually exclusive
Speaker 1: do they have to be to sustain families and civilization?
Speaker 1: Monogamous people being in monogamous relationships works for them. For
Speaker 1: some people monogous work. I think individual differences come into
Speaker 1: play as well, And I'm very curious to know if
Speaker 1: there's any good studies or analysis on the big five
Speaker 1: personality traits that predict those different things. Are there any
Speaker 1: studies in that. I think the existing studies have been
Speaker 1: extremely biased by monogamous assumptions. Huh, And I think that's
Speaker 1: a big problem. In fact, you know, my own writing
Speaker 1: about this until a few years ago was pretty imbued
Speaker 1: with a lot of monogamous assumptions. So like when I
Speaker 1: read The Mating Mind again now twenty years later, some
Speaker 1: of it is kind of painful to read because I'm like,
Speaker 1: I would have written this real differently if I'd understand polyamory.
Speaker 1: So let's say, in evolutionary psychology, for example, you tend
Speaker 1: to get one dimension of individual differences we talk about
Speaker 1: as socio sexuality. So if you score high on so
Speaker 1: called sosiosexuality, you tend to be more interested in casual,
Speaker 1: short term mating, shorter term relationships, more casual relationships, you
Speaker 1: don't tend to be as interested in long term monogamous relationships.
Speaker 1: You score low on sociosexuality. You tend to be a good,
Speaker 1: you know, monogamous marriage oriented, nuclear family kind of person.
Speaker 1: Well that's fine, but where do you put ethical polyamory
Speaker 1: in there? Right? Ethical polyamorous aren't actually very interested in
Speaker 1: casual short term like tender hookups, but they're also not
Speaker 1: interested in sexually exclusive, lifelong marriage, So it's hard to
Speaker 1: shoehorn them into this single dimension of individual difference. That's
Speaker 1: a good point. And yeah, so I think we just
Speaker 1: need more research that kind of integrates, you know, the
Speaker 1: evolutionary psychology and mating strategies and the kind of growing
Speaker 1: literature on alternative relationships. It's really that literature is really
Speaker 1: only about five years old on polyamory and open relationships.
Speaker 1: So what can monogamous people learn from polypeople and vice versa?
Speaker 1: I think a huge amount. And I'm actually working on
Speaker 1: a book that's kind of focused on this. Polyamory I
Speaker 1: think is real, it's growing, it's increasingly popular among young people.
Speaker 1: A lot of young people are doing it badly, and
Speaker 1: they're doing it in a way that assumes we're blank
Speaker 1: slates and that jealousy is a social construct and that
Speaker 1: pair bonding is unnatural. I think there's a lot of delusional, horrible,
Speaker 1: bad poly out there, but I think there's also amazing
Speaker 1: examples of people who are really expert level polyamorists who
Speaker 1: have a lot to teach. Even if you hate polyamory,
Speaker 1: even if you think it's unethical, things like how do
Speaker 1: you manage sexual jealousy in a relationship? It just taught
Speaker 1: to me. Some people might not even know what polyamory is.
Speaker 1: Polyamory is, you know, the theory and ethics and practice
Speaker 1: of having multiple ongoing relationships with the full knowledge and
Speaker 1: consent of everybody involved. Okay, so it's different from monogamy
Speaker 1: and that you're having multiple partners. Realistically, usually it's only
Speaker 1: like maybe you have a primary partner who you're strongly
Speaker 1: paaramonded to, and you have a couple of kind of
Speaker 1: secondary partners and maybe another couple of people you see
Speaker 1: once in a while, like at conferences or when you're traveling.
Speaker 1: That's usually the way it develops. But the full knowledge
Speaker 1: and consent of everyone involved is what distinguishes it from cheating.
Speaker 1: The fact that they're ongoing relationships is what distinguishes it
Speaker 1: from like casual hookup culture. So the ideal is you're
Speaker 1: having meaningful, committed, emotionally intimate relationships with more than one person,
Speaker 1: and they all know about it. And also crucially they're
Speaker 1: free to do the same in their own lives. They're
Speaker 1: also free to have meaningful, ongoing emotionally intimate relationships. And
Speaker 1: so it's different from polygyny, where it's like one alpha
Speaker 1: male with a harem, or one cult leader marries multiple
Speaker 1: fangirls or whatever, because typically the cult leader is not
Speaker 1: happy for his female mates to have other male's a
Speaker 1: control Yeah, it's a control thing. And yeah, so that's
Speaker 1: polyamory in a nutshell. So your interest in ethical polyamory
Speaker 1: and you're writing a book on that, How how will
Speaker 1: ethical polyamory book be different from the very famous book,
Speaker 1: the Ethical Slut. I like the Ethical Slut Book, and
Speaker 1: it's become kind of the bible of polyamory. But you know,
Speaker 1: it was first published maybe twenty five years ago. It's
Speaker 1: in like it's third edition. It's kind of outdated. And
Speaker 1: it also tends to adopt a fairly evolutionary, evolutionarily naive
Speaker 1: view of human sexuality. Right. It tends to view jealousity
Speaker 1: as kind of a social construct, a cultural invention. It
Speaker 1: tends to be a little skeptical about long term pair
Speaker 1: bonds as an important part of human nature. It's shot
Speaker 1: absolutely through with leftist politics in a way that really
Speaker 1: annoys me. And polyamory culture and general tends to be
Speaker 1: very very intensely political lefty, and I want to kind
Speaker 1: of raise the possibility that, like you could be a
Speaker 1: conservative or even neo reactionary or libertarian polyamorous and that
Speaker 1: could be okay also, So I just want to kind
Speaker 1: of separate the idea of polyamory as a as a genuine, ethical,
Speaker 1: alternative mating system from the kind of cultural baggage that
Speaker 1: it's inherited from books like The Ethical Slot that's basically like, well,
Speaker 1: if your poly, you should probably live in San Francisco
Speaker 1: and definitely vote Democrat and definitely be like pro choice
Speaker 1: and antigon and blah blah blah. It's it's become a
Speaker 1: subculture that's a little bit culty politically. I totally get it.
Speaker 1: You're trying to do for POLYMERI what you did for
Speaker 1: virtue signaling. Yeah, strip it of its Yeah, absolutely. I'll
Speaker 1: just end with this question this topic. You know, what
Speaker 1: do you think is the greatest existential threat to humanity.
Speaker 1: I know the answer, but I want to hear hear
Speaker 1: it from you. And why should we be more careful
Speaker 1: about reaching out to aliens extratrustrials? Why should I think
Speaker 1: that through more carefully? So? I mean, the big existential
Speaker 1: threats and most effective altruists talk the most about. Are
Speaker 1: nuclear war still an issue, We're kind of used to it,
Speaker 1: It's been an existential risk for sixty to seventy years,
Speaker 1: still an issue. Artificial general intelligence and machine learning could
Speaker 1: be existential threats. And you know this if you watched
Speaker 1: any science fiction movies in the last twenty years. And
Speaker 1: then global pandemics, but particularly bioterrorism plus pandemics could be
Speaker 1: a much bigger, you know, risk than just kind of
Speaker 1: an accidental pandemic like we're seeing now. But I also
Speaker 1: wrote this kind of whimsic paper with my longtime collaborator
Speaker 1: and friend Peter Todd, where we argued that it's a really,
Speaker 1: really bad idea to broadcast messages to potential extraterrestrial intelligence.
Speaker 1: And we were inspired by Chinese science fiction writer who
Speaker 1: did a novel called The Three Body Problem. Peter's wife
Speaker 1: read it, she got Peter to read it. Peter's like,
Speaker 1: you got to read this science fiction novel. It's really good.
Speaker 1: I read it and we ended up going to a
Speaker 1: conference on active Messaging to Extraterrestrial intelligence conference in Puerto
Speaker 1: Rico near the Arecibo radio telescope. Got to see the
Speaker 1: radio telescope. Awesome, and Peter and I made the argument
Speaker 1: that on kind of evolutionary and game theoretic principles, it's
Speaker 1: a really really bad idea to broadcast that, hey, here
Speaker 1: we are. We're a planet, we've become a sentience species,
Speaker 1: we've developed technology. Here we are. Please be nice, you know,
Speaker 1: come visit us, play nice, or like, in what possible
Speaker 1: universe is this a prudent thing to do? Until you've
Speaker 1: spent at least a couple thousand generations thinking really hard
Speaker 1: about is this a prudent thing to be actively signaling? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I've never heard anyone make that argument before, so I
Speaker 1: thought it was really really cool to think it through,
Speaker 1: thought through like a true effective altruist at the most
Speaker 1: existential level. Yeah, I think I think it's it's kind
Speaker 1: of an introverts approach to interplanetary signaling. It's like, unless
Speaker 1: you're absolutely confident that what you say is gonna you know,
Speaker 1: be taken in a in a benevolent frame of mind.
Speaker 1: You should probably just stay quiet for a while and
Speaker 1: see how things play out. Why an introvert? Why are
Speaker 1: the introvert there is supposed to just intellectual? I think
Speaker 1: it's an introverts view of interplanetary communication because introverts are
Speaker 1: acutely aware of possible social costs of blurting stuff out
Speaker 1: and being embarrassed and being awkward and you know, being aspy.
Speaker 1: And yeah, I found a correlation between introversion and the
Speaker 1: autism spectrum like zero point seven zero. I tweeted that
Speaker 1: out once and I got some yeah vitriol, But I
Speaker 1: mean I reported just a correlation that I found, so
Speaker 1: but yeah, I totally believe it. Hey, Jeffrey, look, thank
Speaker 1: you so much for the chat today, and I'm left
Speaker 1: thinking we should do a part two someday on intelli
Speaker 1: where we talk about intelligence. You know, we talk about
Speaker 1: all the other things we're interested in, but it'd be great.
Speaker 1: Hopefully this is enough to stimulate people's minds and hearts.
Speaker 1: Dare I say it was a really great chime with
Speaker 1: you today. Thank you so much for your time, Jeffrey,
Speaker 1: you too, take care. Thanks for listening to this episode
Speaker 1: of the Psychology Podcast. If you'd like to react in
Speaker 1: some way to something you, I encourage you to join
Speaker 1: in the discussion at the Psychology podcast dot com. That's
Speaker 1: the Psychology podcast dot com. Also, please add a reading
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