Decoding the Gurus - Rutger Bregman: Piglets vs. Toddlers

Episode Date: November 7, 2020

Rutger Bregman is a Dutch Historian who wants to tell the world that humans are actually fundamentally kind, hunter gatherer societies contain important wisdom about how to live well, and that collectively we need to cooperate to do something about climate change and economic inequality. So, obviously there was no way Chris and Matt could let these dangerous ideas go unchallenged!Join them this week as they delve into one of Rutger's talks and address Noble Savage myths and other age old debates including whether human nature is fundamentally brutish & cruel or compassionate & kind, whether war is ancient or a recent product of societies, whether civilisation was a good idea or the worst one ever, and perhaps most importantly whether Matt could defeat a chimpanzee in one on one combat when armed with two swords.LinksThe Futures interview with Rutger examined in the episode (with transcript)Research Article that raises doubt about the domestication hypothesis especially in regards to silver foxesAn old blog post by Chris that discusses the debates over the topic of ancient war

Hello and welcome to Decoding the Gurus. It's the podcast where two academics listen to content from the greatest minds the online world has to offer, and we do try to understand what they're talking about. I'm Professor Matt Brown. I'm a psychologist from Australia. And with me, as always, is Dr. Chris Kavanagh, a cognitive anthropologist from Ireland, originally. Now, his background in anthropology will be pretty useful today because we are covering someone who's written a book and in large part deals with some of those topics. So that's going to be pretty helpful. Hey, Chris. Yeah, that's right. I might actually have something to contribute for once.

Yeah, yeah. That's characteristically modest of you. But yes, I agree. Yeah. So but we got some housekeeping and a few little things to talk about. I guess we should say that this recording takes place on a momentous day in history, the second day of counting votes in the American election. And how are things looking, Chris? Joe Biden, at least according to The Guardian, needs six more electoral college votes to win. Although one suspects it's going to take a significant more time to go through all the challenges and recriminations that Trump's already throwing up.

that was the initial results coming in and Trump doing better than expected to the mail-in ballots coming in and pushing things back towards Biden. It's kind of actually a fairly anticipated swing between the two. Like this is what was expected, but maybe quite a bit tighter than was expected. So yeah, it looks like at this stage stage we might end up being incredibly wrong, but it looks like the left are going to have something to be happy about or maybe the world. Yeah, definitely, definitely. Well, you know, by the time this goes to air, it'll all be done and dusted, I guess.

But, yeah, for you guys in the future, spare a thought to Chris and Matt, who are still on the edge of our seats, along with the rest of the first world, waiting to see what's going to happen. I will say that online, you know, watching election results or whatever, of course, you can watch all the, you know, the trackers of the results coming in and all this but the way i experienced these elections is more like a sentiment based one you know about who's panicking and who's happy yeah and like at the beginning of the night it very much reminded me of the brexit and like first election of trump where a lot of the dare i say shitty online accounts seem to be very happy and, you know, kind of lording it over people. And the folks on my side and your side of the aisle were looking rather downhearted and gloomy. And I just had a sinking sense of deja vu. But when the second day, things have flipped and all the terrible accounts like Alex Jones and stuff are

now claiming about it being a fix and so on. So it looks like all is back with the world and it's happening on my birthday. It was happening on my birthday. You've been a good boy all year, Chris. I'm just glad America delivered

for you for the one thing you asked for. Yeah. I'm the same. I rely on the sentiment analysis. I don't need to look at the predicted website or one of those live election results thing. You can just sort of imbibe a few pages of Twitter and just get a sense of who's happy and who's going slowly insane

and you've got a pretty clear idea of who's winning it. Yeah, maybe that's a good segue matt to our update section checking in on past gurus any notable developments yeah yeah yeah i mean you've you've paid attention to eric and brett and what what are they doing at the moment well you'd be surprised to learn that the outcome of the election has proven all of the beliefs that they held are correct and basically any insights that they had were completely vindicated by the results so you know it's a surprise it's a surprise but they they are pretty sure that they called it exactly right um yeah i didn't hear much about unity 2020, though. Like, I checked in as the election was going on.

I actually searched for the Unity 2020 hashtag to see how hot it was. It's strange, that. It's very strange, isn't it? I guess, you know, the campaign got pulled. But if it wasn't for that, Tulsi Gabbard and Dan Crenshaw would be, you know, prime presidential candidates. So luckily, the duopoly got them shut down before they were too much of a threat oh the irony is so strong with you chris so strong um okay so so the other hot tape maker uh james lindsey how's he going uh not well having he we we've mentioned a couple

of times he's been descending down the right wing partisan rabbit hole. And I think he was starting lament about mail-in ballots a couple of days before the election. And he's generally having a meltdown about Biden's going to start the critical theory apocalypse and that the resistance needs to rise up and so on. So, yeah he he's continuing down to the the rabbit hole and our friend jordan peterson didn't emerge so you know better for him better for everyone that he sat this one out so yeah so yeah and and jp seniors is uh, I'm not sure, but I can imagine.

Yeah, I can imagine too. Well, yeah. Well, yeah. So now America is heading towards kind of woke Maoist concentration camps and re-education camps. It's going to be a crazy new America with a Biden presidency, I guess. Yeah. This podcast might need to pivot at some stage to you know just uh pointing out how to

resist the d'angelo re-education camps but but for now we're we're still basking in the potential glow of a trump yes tentative tentative basking is what we're doing okay in other news uh look this is look chris there was there was a there was another kind of election going on. It wasn't as official as the American election, but, and it was kind of happening on Twitter and kind of happening's the best co-host of this podcast, it seems. I mean, I've been described as more mature, more balanced, and a good role model for you, in fact, Chris. Do you accept this defeat gracefully? Well, I think there's a sampling issue from the accounts that are issuing those opinions. And I think we need to take that into account but but i'll accept my status as the renegade of the podcast the the one who's willing to tell the truth the the harsh talker that's that's me matt yeah well yeah chris i said it before the podcast values your dark

energy and uh you know there's you know it's it's not so bad being the bad boy of a podcast. I mean, it is like being the bad boy on campus because we are a milquetoast moderate type podcast, but you are the bad boy. That's pretty cool. You know, there's a kind of dark attraction there, I think. Is that cool, Matt? I don't know.

You know, I'm not sure I'll be telling anyone know I'm not sure that I'll be telling anyone that I'm the bad boy of a random podcast about

online gurus where there's only two possible candidates so but I

appreciate that vote nonetheless I'll take the yeah look Matt I'm not

the hero we need wait no what how do you say that you're the hero we need. Wait, no, what? How do you say that? You're the hero

we want. No, that's not how it goes. It's like the Batman thing. What's the Batman thing? I'm not... Chris, I had it right. You're not the bad boy people want, but you're the bad boy Gotham the people need. Yes, that's it. That's the one.

See, this is why i'm the superior co-host because i get these things right i'm like i'm like the bad medicine you know i taste bad and you don't like swallowing it but it's good for you it's good for you i was i was thinking bad medicine like i don't know like a rock song or something i was thinking you're kind of like the meat life to my John Denver. That's kind of how I see it. You know, like you've got this kind of, you know, attractive energy, but you're not really marriage material.

Maybe good for a night. Yeah. Well, there we go. We've solved that. Glad we got that out of the way at this time. Yeah, we've probably spent enough time talking about that. Oh, okay. out of the way at this time yeah we've probably spent enough time talking about that um oh okay so another completely podcast specific topic is the reviews we asked for reviews we begged we cajoled and we demanded and we got them and i i did say that i would you know read some out uh

if if we got them so i think i should do that if you don't object. Yeah, please do. I can't wait. I haven't seen them. So this will be exciting for me. Yeah. So here's an unusual thing. I'll go positive to negative.

So here's a positive one. Five stars by SpyMystic. Already one of my favorite podcasts because they mentioned Follow Ted ted which means they are brilliant and also because they talk about other stuff that's a good review that's a good review i like that i'm done with that i just want to say like to all of us see how easy it is to leave a review like you can see how little effort was put into that review yet it still counts it still counts they're not the sparage spy mystic this is like one of the reviews

for what we asked for i know i know you should be positive about it i am positive that sounded ironic but i i meant to i meant to say it's kind of positive but look how little effort look how how uninteresting and like how little effort was put in that's what you can do no how do you think spymistic feels about that i'm sorry spymistic i i actually meant that was a funny good review and it clearly wasn't very hard to do either and that's what made it good yeah yeah okay next one i'm gonna cheat a bit because normally i give a negative review and this one does have the title of absolute rubbish free exclamation marks but but that's a curveball because it's a five-star review from sir stromulus who says this podcast is so bad, exclamation mark, one exclamation mark.

I want to listen to every episode in its entirety from the minute it hits my iTunes feed, exclamation mark, exclamation mark, one, one, one, five stars, exclamation mark, exclamation mark, so on. So this is your thing, a result of the call for people to write incongruent negative reviews with five stars so it seems we've been successful that you know our strategy i'm not sure if that was a great idea but it but it was pretty funny and i read yeah it was okay and also i could say spy mystic your review was just far far above that review and quality. So. Sir Stromulus? I don't know. I like Sir Stromulus' one. So again, Matt, this is a divide. This is, you know, we're reaching across the aisles. We've got different things, but here we are

able to deal with our differences. Very admirable people. Yeah. I'm loving the heterodoxy. I'm loving the heterodoxy, Chris. Yeah, I mean, even the way you pronounce that is heterodox. There's no end to the level of heterodox that we dive into. Very good. Very good. Okay, we're happy with that. We're satisfied with those reviews.

Keep them coming. Don't disappoint us. That's what you should have asked for for your birthday, Chris. More five-star reviews. But you asked for the Democrats to win the election. So yeah, you made your bed. Have to lie on it. All right.

Good. What next? So shall we get into our man of the hour for this week? It's not a special episode. It is a full length episode where we actually took individual talk and dug into it and extracted clips

and did all the usual things. Shall we introduce him? Yeah, let's do that. Now, did you post this talk on the Guru's Pod account, Chris? No, I'm not.

Both of us have access to the Guru's Pod account. I'll just mention that in passing. But as it happens, no, I did not. Ah, I see. Yeah, so nobody will have been able to follow along. But I'll post it when we finish we finish this so no chris you know what i'll post it all right i'll post it i i'm taking i'm taking that very broad hint uh i will post it okay good all right so um tell tell the good people uh um what what we're about to post, what it's about. So this is an interview with the Dutch historian Rutger Bregman.

It's for a podcast called Futures Podcast by an interviewer called Luke Robert Mason. So it's an interview segment about an hour and 23 minutes long. So it's quite an extended discussion of his ideas. And in part, he's talking about his ideas from his new book, which is called Humankind. And he's talking about the role of the kindness plays in humanity and how it's been overlooked. And he has a previous book called utopia for realists and how we can get there yeah yeah actually you know what um my my dad actually has a copy of utopia for realists and uh has read it and uh it had a big influence it was a big influence on him actually it he liked it an awful lot just Just a little aside there. And maybe Rutger Bregman's name might not be immediately familiar to people, but I think this clip of him speaking at Davos will sound very familiar.

So let me just play the viral clip that many people are likely to know him from. This is my first time at Davos, and I find it quite a bewildering experience, to be honest. And I mean, I hear people talk in the language of participation and justice and equality and transparency, but then, I mean, almost no-one raises the real issue of tax avoidance, right, and of the rich just not paying their fair share. I mean, it feels like I'm at a firefighters' conference

and no-one's allowed to speak about water. I mean, this is not rocket science. I mean, we can talk for a very long time about all these stupid philanthropy schemes. We can invite Bono once more. Come on. We got to be talking about taxes. That's it. Taxes, taxes, taxes. All the rest is bullshit, in my opinion. Okay. So taxes, taxes, taxes. And this was quite a celebrated clip, you know, kind of speaking truth to the elite class at Davos about how they're not addressing the elephant in the room. Yeah, talk about speaking truth to power. You got to say go Bregman for that one, I reckon.

Yeah. And I will say, you know, I quite enjoyed that as well. And because it's a kind of anti-elite message, he was also invited on to discuss with Tucker Carlson, his views and the interview that also ended up going viral. I'll play the short clip from the interview, which I think you'll be able to see why. So I think the issue really is, is, is one of corruption and of people being bribed and of not being, you know, not talking about the real issues. What the family, you know, what the Murdochs basically want you to do is to scapegoat immigrants

instead of talking about tax avoidance. So I'm glad you're now finally raising the issue. But that's what's been happening for the past couple of years. Uh-huh. And I'm taking orders from the Murdochs? Is that what you're saying? No, I mean, it doesn't work that directly. But, I mean, you've been part of the Cato Institute, right? You've been a senior fellow there for years.

You've been taking their dirty money. They're funded by coke billionaires, you know? Wait, why don't you tell me how it does work? Well, it works by you taking their dirty money. It's as easy as that. I mean, you are a millionaire funded by billionaires. That's what you are. And I'm glad you now finally jumped the bandwagon, you know, of people like Bernie Sanders and AOC.

But you're not part of the solution, Mr. Carlson. You're part of the problem. But I am talking about this issue. Yeah, only now. Come on, you're part of the problem. But I am talking about this issue. Yeah, only now. Come on, you jumped the bandwagon. You're all like, oh, I'm against the globalist elite, blah, blah, blah. It's not very convincing, to be honest. Why don't you go f*** yourself, you tiny brain, and I hope this gets picked up.

Because you're a moron. I tried to give you a hearing, but you were too f***ing annoying for me. You can't handle the criticism, can you? give you a hearing but you were too you can't handle the criticism can you so you got to hear him like lay it down to Tucker Carlson millionaire

paid by billionaires or however he put it yeah yeah and once you know that's pretty cool too let's face it I like it yeah and he got he clearly got under Tucker Carlson's skin so so yeah he's like quite a celebrated figure. And I think for us, the feeling was with the utopia stuff that he might fall into the guru sphere.

But maybe this is a chance for us to look at someone who we agree more with and who doesn't necessarily exaggerate or be so hyperbolic. That was our thinking, right? A kind of palate cleanser. Yeah, yeah. Look, I was keen to Rutger Bregman because I'd read little bits of Utopia for Realists and I'd read a few articles and stuff like that. But I wasn't super familiar with him.

But from the little I did know, I thought, well, first of all, he's kind of a bit of a guru in terms of having, you know, the big ideas and the big solutions to things. But also he's, you know, clearly on the left side of the political spectrum and we've definitely been looking at people that are, if not necessarily right-wing, then certainly what they call centrist or classical liberal or whatever.

And the other thing too is that I thought, well, you know, at least this guy, he might be wrong about stuff, but he's probably talking about some pretty substantive ideas that will be fun for us to talk about and hopefully interesting. So, yeah, I think he didn't disappoint in several respects, although I think we do have a few a few criticisms but more than we perhaps originally thought to um the level yeah especially because you're such you're such a critical person i have to keep up my reputation but but yeah to provide a spoiler i will say that this annoyed me a lot more than I was actually anticipating.

So yeah, maybe that's, you know, is it Rutger or is it me? Let's see. Yeah, so look, I think this is a good talk for us to analyze because I did listen to a few other interviews with Rutger and they were a bit lighter. Like they just sort of talked about his general political views about which direction the world should go. And that sounded pretty good to someone like me. But in this talk, he spells out a lot more of his reasoning and kind of the more he says, the more stuff that just doesn't sound right is apparent. So yeah, tell us about this talk, Chris. Well, let's start with a clip of him introducing his big idea.

You know, it sounds quite innocent, doesn't it? Like, oh, this guy has written this happy-glovey book about, ooh, the power of kindness. Isn't that nice? But if you really think it through, the assumption that most people are fundamentally decent then you realize that it actually has quite revolutionary implications because nowadays so many of our institutions are designed around the idea that most people are selfish right our schools our workplaces our democracies even our prisons you name it so if you turn this around, I think it has quite some radical implications. Yeah. So that's a good intro clip, I think, because it does describe where he's coming from. His thesis here is really that the sort of systems and stuff we have in place,

you know, capitalism and the various meritocratic systems and political systems and so on, and the various meritocratic systems and political systems and so on are kind of assuming that people are very sort of driven by naked self-interest and act in a selfish way. And because of that assumption essentially encourages more of that behavior, that kind of competitive, selfish behavior. And it could be like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Do you think that's a fair summary there? Yeah. And he wants to contrast the view of humans as fundamentally cooperative and kind with the alternative so-called veneer theory, which is associated with a Hobbesian view, that humans are fundamentally

cruel and selfish, and that we need society and civilization to tame our base desires. And he points out how this concept is quite an old idea. Same is true for the Christian church fathers. so you read saint augustine for example and you discover this idea of original sin you know that we're all born sinners then you start reading the enlightenment philosophers thomas hobbes david hume adam smith you name it all these brilliant philosophers and you would expect some kind of break with orthodox christianity but actually their view of human nature is again quite similar you know they emphasize that we have to assume that most people are selfish yeah so the it's a it's an idea that you know he before that he's talking about it being represented in like uh ancient greek historian writing as well so

it's it's this long-standing idea that humans are, like the concept of original sin. And his thesis is, maybe this is wrong, and that it's overlooking not just like a philosophical argument, but recent evidence from evolutionary theory and science. So let me just play that. You know, I think that what you assume in other people is what you get out of them so when we talk about human nature you're you're talking about two things at the same time on the one hand you're talking about what we really are what we really are like you know you're talking about our evolutionary history and in that case we got to talk about new evidence from biology and evolutionary anthropologists who suggest that

human beings have actually evolved to be friendly they literally talk about survival of the friendliest you know which means that for millennia was actually the friendliest among us who had the most kids so had the biggest chance of passing on their genes to the next generation but on the other hand when you're talking about human nature you're also sort of talking about a self-fulfilling prophecy because if we buy into a certain view then we start designing our society around that idea and we'll create the kind of people that our theory presupposes yeah i think that's that's his argument in a nutshell those two pillars the

survival of the kindest and friendliest is actually not survival of the most ruthless and most selfish. And that if we take the alternative veneer theory inspired approach, that we end up creating a society that functions as a self-prophesying prophecy where selfishness and self-interest are the things that are promoted. Yeah. Yeah. So can you tell people a little bit more about that veneer theory? Yeah. So I think this is the view that derives from, you know, nature is red and tooth and claw and or greed is good, right? This kind of maxim. And it is true. He's right that there's been an emphasis in evolutionary anthropology and I think evolutionary biology as well to focus on the fact that cooperation and sociality have been somewhat ignored in the literature. work of people like joe henrik or gintis and boyle there's a bunch of evolutionary theorists that are now emphasizing and focusing on our ability to cooperate our ability to live in large

groups and to behave pro-socially with people who are not kin uh strangers is a intrinsic part of our species ability to develop and that this is what allows us in part to develop cumulative culture and the civilization and societies that we have so if we focus just on the darker aspects of our nature our tendency to compete for resources that really doesn't do justice to the forces that hold enable us to form these like kind of mega societies yeah i mean i think i think if you go back like 50 or 70 years then certainly there was that um red and tooth and claw kind of view of evolution but at least i mean i'm only passingly familiar with all of this stuff but i've read a lot of stuff on on cooperative behavior and

pro-sociality and and and so on so yeah like i i don't think i think we should over exaggerate the degree to which um behavioral what are they called evolutionary behaviorists or behavioral let's call them evolutionary anthropologists that seems a good name oh yeah that that sounds that sounds familiar yeah sorry let's give them credit yeah i didn't i didn't mean to erase those people there chris uh yes you and your anti-anthropologist bias mark um but yeah look he's he's definitely tapping into like a lot of long-standing discussions like you know he's referencing brousseau and Hobbes and the theological literature about whether or not man's original state is one of sin or whether they're born in a state of grace and they're corrupted by society. So, you know, that kind of dynamic or pull and push of these two poles, those discussions have been going on for hundreds and hundreds of years.

Yeah. And I think maybe some aspect of it is arguing against at least a popular perception of the Dawkins selfish gene model. Now, I know you're probably going to argue, Matt, that Dawkins wasn't actually arguing that people are selfish in nature. In fact, Matt, that Dawkins wasn't actually arguing that people are selfish in nature. In fact, kind of the opposite, right? That despite selfish genes, we are reciprocal altruists and cooperative and so on. But it is fair to say that a lot of the public conception or presentation of his idea is that the gene-eyed view of the world is one of competition, ruthless, and ultimately everything derives down to genetic self-interest. Yeah, that's right.

And I think that is a misperception, as you say. I mean, in the extended phenotype, he explains that a bit better. And, you know, that disregards the benefits one gets by cooperating. And, you know, we discussed this before, Chris, so I know you're familiar with it, but probably our listeners aren't. But there's quite a famous mathematical model of cooperation called the iterated prisoner's dilemma. So I could describe it real quick because it's easy.

This is this game where in each round you can cooperate or defect. And if you both defect, then you're both going to lose a lot you'll lose a lot of points if you both cooperate you'll both get a little bit of points but if one cheats so one one person cooperates but the other person defects and the person who cheats who defects can win the most essentially while the other person loses the most. Now, when you structure that correctly in those times of wins and losses, then from an individual's point of view, it's always better to cheat. But from the group's point of view, it's always better to cooperate. So it leads to quite an interesting situation when you have to play that game in an iterative way.

Iterative means repeated. Iterative does mean repeated. Yeah. It's an academic jargon, so it seems worth mentioning. Yes. Sorry. I didn't realize. So where was I? Yes. In a situation when you have to play that game in an iterative way, which is kind of a good approximation of people or any animal that lives in a group of some kind and has to keep interacting with of people or any animal that that lives in a in a group of some kind and has to keep interacting with those people and so the really interesting thing about this mathematical model is that it leads to a kind of dynamic equilibria where the best strategy evolves um and that is evolves in a computational sense because you can set it up with with little

bits and bytes coding the behavior and so on. And just purely based on individual selection, that is like the points that one little agent gets basically influences their reproduction rate and the little electronic community. Even though that's the function that's getting optimized, what evolves is this cooperative group behavior, but it's not always cooperate, like always be a super nice guy um what evolves is tit for tat and that is you start off by cooperating but if the other player defects then you punish them back by defecting back to them and if they start cooperating again then then you cooperate so it's it's it's tit for tat now you know when when the other person is defecting, you're getting hurt too by defecting against them.

But that's done in order to prevent the development of the uncooperative players, basically. So that's a bit of a long tangent, Chris. But I guess the interesting point there is there's very good mathematical models that explain why there is cooperative group behavior that are purely based on a dawkins style just genes essentially maximizing their their own interests yeah and so it's kind of the public good dilemma right the dilemma of the public good yeah the um the tragedy of the commons is sometimes what it's called too yeah yeah if everybody donated to certain public parts then everybody could benefit but it always is better off for the individual to extract the

profit without taking the cost so those tournaments organized in the 80s i think by academic called something axelrod there were competitions to see which strategy would work best in the Prisoner's Dilemma tournaments and tip for tat, maybe generous tip for tat or punitive tip for tat. I can't remember which one, but like they won out. So that's like a really interesting literature. But I think the relationship to this talk is that there's been something of a shift to focus on just how willing to cooperate people are. For example, that people are willing to forego profit in order to penalize other people who aren't cooperating, so-called third party punishment.

And that this doesn't work from the view of viewing individuals as economic profit maximizing machines. People will incur like economic costs or physical costs in order to punish people who don't cooperate, even though it doesn't directly benefit them. So it relates to this clip about what our true superpower is as a species. So what is our true superpower i think it is our ability to connect with one another and to actually establish trust so that we can build really large social networks and learn from each other this is i think really what distinguishes us from the other primates in the neanderthals our ability basically to work together to be friendly. That is our true superpower. Yeah.

And so alongside that, he introduces this contrast about this ability not relying on us being the most intelligent primate. So he talks about this photo experiment with two different types of primates. On the one hand, you have the copycats. then the other hand you have the geniuses and the geniuses are really really smart you know they've got really big brains they come up with inventions on their own say they learn how to to fish they just just find that out but the problem is they're not very social they don't really have a lot of friends so when they come up with something brilliant they just they don't really share it now the copycats they're like us you know they're they're not very smart they're quite stupid in fact they it hardly ever happens that they come up with something interesting but when

they come up with something interesting you know when they have an isaac newton among them then boom quickly everyone learns it because they've got so many friends you know they've got these really large social networks this is sort of what made us intelligent so the the contrast though right that humans are not that impressive except in our ability to cooperate and learn from each other and share culture physically we're not that imposing compared to other primate species and according to rutger we're not that intellectually gifted as well so there's one two very short clips where he makes unflattering comparisons for humans abilities which i think illustrate this point well but then you actually look at the evidence we've got there and it's very weak you know we're not very smart actually you do

intelligence tests and you let a human toddler of around two years old compete with a pig and usually the pig wins. If you do a boxing match with a chimpanzee, well, I don't recommend it. He's going to smash you. So we're not very smart. We're not very strong. There you go. Not very smart, not very strong. So any thoughts about that, Matt?

Yeah. Okay. very smart very strong so yeah any any thoughts about that Matt yeah okay so it's true people aren't very strong but that's kind of beside the point isn't it um are you not saying Matt that you could win in a boxing match I could totally kick a chimpanzee's ass I'm sure of it I'd be sneaky you see I'd I'd have tricks well before we get to the pig before we get to the pig issue i want to just stick on the chimpanzee for a minute because i like i you know we're not we are not idiots right we understand how powerful a chimpanzee is and that they have like giant canines and that you know they can rip a man's arm off and puncture his neck. So one-on-one, you're unlikely to fare well. Like an unarmed boxing match with a chimpanzee.

But I will say, if you're armed, your odds greatly improve. And the thing which makes humans formidable often against larger prey is the fact that we use advanced hunting weapons. Spears are like a big metal pole. If it was you with, say, two swords versus a chimpanzee, I don't know, I'm giving you like, you you know if they're good swords and you're up for the fight i'm giving you a fairly decent chance you don't know how much of a coward i am but i'm flattered though um thank you um yeah look so this is let's uh let's step back a little bit he he really does downplay the cognitive abilities of people because he really wants to make it all about cooperation right and you know there's a there's a reasonable version of this which is that like a like a human

being that's you know has been raised by wolves or something like that has very little going for them um you know it's true that a huge amount of our advantages, even if it's something like making a spear or a throwing stick, is culturally derived. So yes, it's true that a lot of that is due to the power of transmitting that cultural knowledge through communication from generation to generation and that knowledge accruing. So that part is right. But he makes this strong distinction between the sort of cooperation and being kind to each other on one end and intelligence on the other end when they're actually just two sides of the same coin. Like the very expressive and powerful language abilities and communication abilities that people have is inextricably linked to our intelligence. So I think he's making a false dichotomy, first of all. And the second thing is, I think he's completely exaggerating the degree

to which pigs, for instance, are just as smart as people. It's just silly. What do you think, Chris? Well, I noticed that you slid off the chimpanzee versus moth scenario, which I was hoping to spend more time on, but I'll allow it. Yeah, so on the topic of

two-year-olds versus pigs i think it's worth noting there that he's talking about toddlers versus pigs and intellect because it's quite clear that were you to take an adult pig versus an adult human that the human would be able to outsmart it right what about what about but what about chris what about a toddler versus a little piglet like a cute little piglet one you could hold in your hand no that's a good question i think we need some time with that but there's also species which mature quicker right like there's horses when they're born i think can run after like an hour or two. But anyway, so I'm not going to have a toddler versus a horse battle in my

mind. But there's, you know, there's this literature, comparative psychology literature, looking at human capabilities versus other animal species. And the general trend is to say that lots of the golden barriers that we've set up between humans and animals are much more fuzzier than were previously believed. Other animals use tools. Other animals have complex social hierarchies. And the more that we look, we see fuzzy boundaries between us and other species. And tons of people who have seen these clips of chimpanzees doing these memory tasks with touching numbers and completely decimating human abilities, right? But these all tend to be

within focused areas of competence. And it's very noticeable that we don't see any real evidence of significant cumulative culture in all our species. You do see transmission of culture, but it hasn't led to iPhones in chimpanzees for a reason because the degree is different. Cooperative hunting is also different. There's species that can take down large prey, but humans got extremely good at that. that can take down large prey, but humans got extremely good at that, hunted species into extinction and domesticated animals and so on.

So it's, yeah, I think there's two versions. There's the one that presents humans as far too unique and that we are completely separate from the rest of the animal kingdom. And Rutger is at the other end of the spectrum. Well, I i mean he is he is also pointing out like a speciality which is our cooperation but in in like downplaying the

importance of intelligence it feels like he's he's kind of exaggerating for effect yeah i think he really is i mean take bonobos for instance you know bonomo is a famously um peaceful and friendly and pro-social hello that's exaggerated okay sure um sorry i mean you know the the peaceful image being anyway anyway chris i'm i'm i'm just going by a quick wikipedia article you know don't don't burst listeners bubbles here please carry on okay but they're they're i think you know people are pretty nasty too right so let's just say for argument's sake they're they're about the same well can i say they're about the same they're like they're more interested in sex and less interested in fighting than other species of chimpanzee that's fair to say. Yeah. Yeah, sounds like people.

Sounds like me anyway. So, I mean, so they haven't built a space shuttle or anything. So, you know, what's going on? The Bonobos should get their act together. Because if Rutger's point of view is correct and we're really just about it's not about intelligence at all, then so, you know, basically I'm saying he's wrong about this. It's got a lot to do with not just kind of like tool using or just the abstract reasoning,

but also intelligence also involves communication and language abilities. So those are two aspects of intelligence, which are the key things to be able to both create cultural artifacts and then transmit those cultural artifacts you know forward in time and i i think he's drawing a little bit on the work of michael murta krishna and joe henrik who are two evolutionary anthropologists who i like and and know and their their kind of argument is that human societies rely on this thing the cultural brain hypothesis, as opposed to the social brain hypothesis, where it isn't about individual genius. It's cultural, like when there's a certain population that you will have inventions and

innovations begin to emerge. And it isn't down to individual genius. It's more the whole system. And I think Rutger is drawing on that literature. And that is a good literature. So it's not arguing against that, right? We're just arguing that still human intelligence is pretty remarkable in many respects in the animal kingdom. Yeah, absolutely. I'm on board with that sort of incremental cultural achievement and not about just raw genius you know kids that are raised by wolves don't generally

they're not generally very good at double entry accounting for instance you know um so anyway i i think we've i think we've um laid out our position on that one um what should we move on to next this ties in nicely with the fact that Roller, surprisingly to me, was how much evil psych was in this talk, because this is not, you know, evolutionary psychology is generally not a favorite topic amongst the left wing at the minute, at least. Yeah, yeah. I think Rutger Bregman hasn't been on um because you know he's definitely very very left so he clearly hasn't been on twitter enough because he doesn't doesn't know

how on the nose evo psych is because yeah this talk is largely about evo psych yeah so let's let's hear him talk about two evil psych explanations for features about humans which are notable how could it ever be an evolutionary advantage to give away your feelings involuntarily to someone else? And I think the answer here is that blushing helps us to establish trust. Okay, so that's an evolutionary psychology explanation for why humans blush.

And here's the evolutionary psychology explanation for our whites in our eyes if you look at all the other primates and there are 200 primate species in total all of them have dark around their irises which means it's it's not very easy to see what they're looking at they're a bit like poker players wearing shades while human beings you, we reveal our gazes. And this, again, helps to establish trust. There are some scientists who think that this happened during this process of domestication.

Yeah. So this notion that a lot of the features that we see in humans that are interesting that we don't see in other primate species are related to this capacity for kindness and sociality. Blushing being a good example. Why would you want embarrassment and shame to be visible? And secondly, that the way that humans' eyes are mean that you can track gaze easier.

And these are both things which don't have to be because we can see that they aren't present in other primates and can suggest, as he explains that they are an adaptation related to making us more focused on sociality and better able to read all our humans and he makes this point about the how expressive our faces are now another example here you really see this as well in our faces. Human beings have the most expressive faces in the animal kingdom. Yeah. So all of which, from my point of view, I don't think any of these are necessarily wrong. There likely is an adaptive reason for blushing, but not necessarily, right? It could be a spandrel but but it's the fact that evolutionary psychology

explanations are so readily given and so tightly linked to sociality it just was surprising to me that this was such a strong feature of the talk yeah yeah yeah me too um they definitely do read as um as evolutionary just so, which are rightly not given very much weight. And I say that as someone who's actually, you know, pretty comfortable with evolutionary psychology generally. But, yeah, these particular things that he's leaning on are, yeah, pretty weak.

I mean, like you say, they might well be true, but they're just, they may well just be just random happenstance. There may be just no particular reason why we have the whites of our eyes that for them being white could just be a coincidence that they're white and it's slightly easier to see where somebody is looking. Yeah. And I think another problem with it is to focus on that from the point of view of pro-sociality, that these are features which

allow us to you know cooperate better that's true but it also enables like machiavellian intelligence as well yeah exactly that's what i was thinking as well like for like when you think about gaze and facial expression if you think about in situations where people non-verbal type situations i think i mean correct me if i'm wrong you're the expert here but i think in in other primates they do a lot of looking at each other and seeing where the other person's looking and that's often a way to either exert some kind of dominance or to see where the other chimps looking or whatever so you can run away and have sex with one of the

females without getting into trouble like it's not necessarily for any altruistic purpose altruistic purpose exactly yeah yeah there's a whole literature about machiavellian intelligence and monitoring what con specifics are looking at or paying attention to so you can get away with things um so yeah i mean these are all debates in the literature but it's it's telling that he kind of focuses on one explanation and presents that as almost the completely confirmed one when there's a lot of debate yeah around it but i will say map he gave an example that i've heard you give before. Oh, go on. When he's talking about humans being mismatched for civilization. So let me play that.

Yes, yes. So mismatch is a concept from evolutionary anthropology, which is all about sort of recognizing that for the vast majority of our history, we were nomadic intergatherers. So our bodies have sort of evolved to adjust to that lifestyle simple examples of a mismatch say for example the fact that we find it hard to say no to sugar when we were intergatherers you know it made sort of sense whenever you saw a tree that was full full of fruit to sort of just eat it all because that was sort of a good protection for the for

the future you know uh but now in a modern supermarket you know it's it's not very adaptive yeah look i i i do remember giving this example before and he's yeah referring to that mismatch between the artificial modern world that we've created for ourselves and the environment in which we spent the vast vast majority of our evolutionary time in and you know so he's touching on ideas like supernormal stimuli are you familiar with that chris yeah yeah yeah so the original example of this was in um i think a brood parasitism in which there's a trick you can play on on nesting birds they've got this drive to sort of sit on eggs and there might be a particular color and what another bird can do maybe cuckoos do it or an arsty experiment is actually put a bigger brighter egg in that nest and then the

bird will go sit on that egg to the exclusion of the other ones even, just because it's a supernormal stimuli. It triggers all of their responses for which there's an adaptive response to, but it's a heightened version of the stimulus, which can actually lead to maladaptive behavior, which is basically not sitting on your own eggs and sitting on the artificial egg instead. So it's pretty interesting ideas, I think, floating around. A lot of things in the modern world are supernormal stimuli for humans,

things like calorie rich and sugar rich junk food, pornography. But yeah, look, Chris, I'm generally sympathetic to that. How about you? Yeah, I don't have an issue with well-supported evolutionary psychology theories or research. And I think the notion about our fondness for sweet foods is a good example, right? So I'm not flagging it up to say, oh, evolutionary psychology, look how much nonsense it is. No, just to say that it's a feature of the position that he's introducing. But I think where it goes awry is where he's focusing on this mismatch, that humans are not well adapted to modern civilization and modern civilization is full of super stimulus. That a lot of this leads to a criticism that I see often on the left about evolutionary psychology, that it's creating

this imagined evolutionary hunter-gallera past and tracing everything to that psychology, right? Like the famous parody is like linking everything to finding berries. And this ties into another point that I think we both wanted to get to. This really strong binary he draws between mankind in the hunter-gallerer lifestyle versus mankind as it exists now in civilization. Maybe I'll play two clips, one of him explaining hunter-gallerer society

and then the second discussing modern civilization so here we go so let's start with our health we know that the nomadic and together lifestyle was quite healthy you know you had a varied diet a bit of fruit a bit of vegetables a bit of meat so that was good uh you also had quite a bit of exercise because you moved around all the time then if you look at the organization of those societies, not bad, you know, quite egalitarian. You could almost call them proto-feminist. The work week was not very long, 20 hours, maybe 30 hours max. And then it was also quite peaceful.

So, as I said, there's almost no evidence for warfare among nomadic intergatherers. Okay, so that the idyllic. Sounds beautiful, right? People living healthy, eating a varied diet, proto-feminists in hunter-gatherer societies. Just wandering around, eating a balanced diet, appreciating nature. Sounds good.

Yeah. I want to talk about the naturalistic fallacy. Hopefully I can after this clip. 20 hours a week, Matt. Imagine 20 hours a week. Sounds good. Yeah, I want to talk about the naturalistic fallacy. Hopefully I can after this clip. 20 hours a week, Matt. Imagine 20 hours a week. Sounds beautiful. Now let's contrast that with modern civilization. But it got even worse because also the era of hierarchy and patriarchy started, right?

When people settled down, they started amassing property, and then they invented the idea of inheritance so uh you know kids would get the property from their parents and we know that you know this builds up and builds up over the generation then at some point uh a kind of status differences became also hereditary and uh yeah uh then these rulers started raising armies and started fighting with each other and so yeah, yeah, you really see this whole process of warfare also starting. The archaeological evidence is quite convincing there. So it's just, as I said, it's just one shit show, basically.

Yeah, so civilization is a shit show. But even before we get to modern civilization, just the agricultural society was quite a horror. But then you look at the transition, right? And you look at the farmers and the people who started to live in villages and cities, and their lives were so much worse, right? Their health deteriorated. Their diet was much less varied, you know, like grain in the morning, grain in the afternoon, grain in the evening, always grain. Then you had to work really hard for that. No pain, no grain.

Often you paid another high price as well in terms of infection diseases. Yeah, so he's sounding an awful like Jean-Jacques Rousseau now, isn't he? I think, I don't know if you have a clip of it in this recording, but I'm pretty sure he, I'm not sure if he attributes it to Rousseau. Oh, he does. He does. And there is a clip where he makes his feelings about Rousseau quite clear.

Rousseau has always been described by many commentators as the romantic, right? As the revolutionary sentimentalist.ist is not a very realistic guy but then for this book i started going over all the latest evidence we have from anthropology and archaeology and at some point i thought you know what i gotta call my book russo was right because you know on many points he actually was especially about this transition from hunter gathering to farming i mean russo had it all right actually yeah so he's he's wearing his influences on his sleeve there which is which is good yeah so so russo as well feels that as the

minute that people pointed to a bit of land and started settling down and owning things and so on that's that's when everything went wrong and And all the oppression, all the corruption, all the wars and so on started from that point. And that really what you need to do is go back to a state of nature and remember that the fruits of the earth belong to everybody and so on. So, yeah, there's a lot to be unpacked there. What do you want to say there, Chris? Well, there's two points to be unpacked there. How about, what do you want to say there, Chris? Well, there's two points I would want to make.

One is that he's definitely creating this like stark binary between agricultural society and hunter-gallery society and then eventually civilization. And, you know, in the same way as we've seen with James Lindsay or we saw with Jordan Peterson or any of the other gurus we looked at, there's this distinction where everything good is associated with one side of the binary, the hunter-gallers. Everything negative is associated with the other side, agriculture and society. And those kind of binaries are never realistic. They're always

way too simplistic. And that leads to the second point, which is his description of hunter-gallerer societies. Granted, he's giving a big picture overview, but it's much more complicated than he presents in terms of what it means to say that like hunter gallerist societies are generally egalitarian which which isn't completely controversial or what it means to say that there was no warfare in pre-history there actually is lots of debates and literature about this and and the notion that like hunter gallerist societies are proto-feminist feels really like projecting inappropriate values back through history. Because you still have a lot of things to do with forced marriages and, you know, violence against partners. It is certainly true that until you have larger societies settled down with excess resources, that it's relatively hard to mobilize large forces.

But the notion that violent raids or intergroup conflict are just very rare throughout prehistory is hugely debated. There's anthropologists, yes, who argue that, and there's anthropologists who say no. It's called ancient roots of war versus the kind of argument that warfare is a modern illness of civilization. But his presentation is like all evidence points to one specific viewpoint, and that's not true. No. Well, look, your understanding of it is definitely better specific viewpoint, and that's not true. No. Well, look, your understanding of it is definitely better than mine,

but it's definitely not consistent with my limited understanding, admittedly, of, say, Australian Aboriginal or Maori groups. You know, it was pretty tough. There was raids and abductions and so on. But I guess my main issue is yeah i think it's a similar point of view to yours like i think supernormal stimuli is a useful example for instance where the sort of modern civilized artificial world we've created has as you know led to some mismatch and led to can lead to bad things like obesity but that

doesn't mean that everything associated with civilization is unhealthy and bad for you. In fact, the vast majority of it is very good for us. That's why we're working so hard, I suppose, to create and maintain it. So I think he's very much falling into that romantic and naturalistic fallacy of projecting what he'd like to imagine on hunter-gatherer groups. Yeah, and I think that's my issue, is that presenting the vast array of hunter-gatherer societies that have existed around the world, and not just now, right back like tens of

thousands, hundreds of thousands of years into history and giving this really simplified overview of them rather than like, yes, he's presenting them in a positive light, which is different than somebody who presents them as just violent savages who have no civilization or culture and murder each other. But it's not necessarily more neurons. It's presenting them as the kind of noble savages of Rousseau, that they exist there to be a fantasy that are projected upon the values that we want for modern society to adopt or wants. And yeah, that's presenting people not as complex humans that are capable of violence and are capable of cooperation and have their own cultures and their own conflicts and their own interests but we're all are presenting them as mythical archetypes that we uh you know that jordan peterson would be proud of and okay let let me go ahead yeah yeah i think i think the i think the thing that you find annoying is that projection and that reduction of extremely complex Indigenous societies or prehistoric hunter-gatherer societies, not as themselves, like for what they were or what they are, but as what somebody...

They can teach us yeah what they can teach us or what somebody's sitting in a in a comfortable conference room in the netherlands fondly imagined you know that that sort of suits the argument in his particular book and that's that's a little bit annoying yeah and like he isn't wrong about the issues about health that developed with early stages of agriculture, right? But that was, you know, there's transitionary periods. And like the reason that agricultural societies have dominated over hunter-gallery lifestyles is because they, in the long term, they do produce more stable food sources and allow larger groups of people to exist together and and yeah

i'm not disparaging hunter galler lifestyles but purely to say that the kind of demonization of agriculture it just it just feels like you know what how do you put it like a rhetorical a rhetorical maneuver yeah and look he issues a disclaimer about this point. So let's, let's hear him defend himself against this accusation. I know that some people at this point may think these guys are using highly advanced technology to talk to each other, you know, even though they're hundreds of kilometers away and they're, you know, sort of talking about how we should be hunter gatherers again. That's not what I'm arguing.

I'm just saying that if you look at the last 10,000 years of our history, that for the most part, civilization was a disaster. It's another one of those beautiful disclaimers. Look, I'm not saying just negative things about technology, but I've been finished with just saying that 10,000 years of civilization has been a complete disaster yeah that's a that's a that's a nice trick that yeah okay i think we've made our views clear about that he's definitely casting hunter-gatherer societies in a particular light

and definitely focusing on the positives when it comes to this humanity existing in a state of nature or a natural state and i guess that's setting him up for the argument that he wants to make which is that the modern world has gone wrong in kind of rewarding and encouraging the wrong things yes so there So there's parts of this where his presentation about the modern world sounds very similar to previous gurus that we've had on in describing the level of corruption that exists. And so here's a clip which just struck me as how similar it was to what we were listening to with JPCers a couple of weeks ago. Again, I think it's important to keep in mind here is that those at the top, they want you to watch CNN and Fox News all day because that'll make you scared. And it's much easier to rule people who are scared. Yeah.

Yeah. who are scared yeah yeah and that that ties in to a point that he's making about our current leaders being like traditional leadership was achievement-based leadership as he talks about so here's how he describes that but leadership was temporary and you had to prove that you were really the right man or woman for the job, right? This is what anthropologists call achievement-based inequality, which makes sense, right? If you're really better at something like a better storyteller or a better hunter, then it makes sense that people listen to you. Okay, so that's valid, reasonable leadership that we see predictably in hunter-gall now how about modern society and we came up with sort of

status-based inequality or our hierarchy based inequality like very very different kind of thing you also started to getting different kind of leaders and the whole process of the corruption of power also started playing a very important role So this is modern leaders are not like the leaders of old. They're self-serving, they're manipulative, and they're not interested in the common good, right? Just in power. And there was this section where he talks about doing brain scans of leaders. I'll just play that and then we can talk about it.

If you put powerful people on brain scanners, you'll discover that the regions that are involved with empathy, they don't really work anymore. Blushing, they don't do that anymore. I mean, imagine Boris Johnson blushing. Imagine Bolsonaro, Donald Trump blushing. I mean, it doesn't happen, right? Yeah. I'm just going to say, Matt, I find that incredibly ridiculous, the notion that he doesn't happen, right? Yeah, I'm just going to say, Matt, I find that incredibly ridiculous, the notion that he doesn't think Boris Johnson can blush, or that when we scan the brains of modern leaders, empathy centers don't light up, they don't work anymore. Because like, one, I really think that's a misrepresentation of whatever research literature he's referencing there and it sounds incredibly

incredibly implausible like i can't i find it hard to believe there's a study out there where they recruited powerful leaders to come and sit in fmrr machines or tested whether or not they blushed but even if they did you know fmri studies are notoriously unreliable with small sample sizes. I don't know what he's referencing there, but I find it highly questionable. And the second point that Trump and Boris Johnson aren't able to blush, just like, no, maybe they don't blush in public because they have developed a certain public persona and they're practiced. And maybe Trump, certain public persona and their practice. And maybe Trump, you know, is narcissistic to a pathological extent that he doesn't feel shame, but that's like the most extreme example. And I am perfectly willing to believe that in their personal lives or with friends,

that they can feel shame. They're not aliens. They're just're just you know politicians are able to train certain responses and that but the presentation here is almost like they're not human anymore it reminds me of a book i did read which was um the psychopath test by john ronson where he uh i think in one of the chapters there he talks about you know many of the corporate leaders being probable psychopaths. Have you come across that before, Chris? Yeah, yeah. That the, whatchamacallit, that they're lacking in empathy

and this makes them able to succeed in business. So like that, not all psychopathic people are necessarily like serial killers or that kind of thing. They can channel it towards success in business, right? Yeah. They're overrepresented in elite business circles, right? Yeah.

And I've heard similar arguments before that modernity and bureaucracy and capitalism demand the kind of traits that, you know, highly dispassionate, calculating, ultra rational, ultra instrumentalizing in terms of how you treat other people, that it kind of encourages and rewards those sorts of behaviors. So I agree with you. I think his specific claims sound silly. I've just taken a softer and more general version of what he's saying and you know i don't know if there's any hard evidence for it but i i guess it feels somewhat plausible to me yeah i i mean this is a clip of him expanding on it a bit about what he views modern leaders to have lost exactly the qualities that made us so successful as a species you know our ability to connect to work together to blush to see each other in the eye

etc etc leaders if they're really under the influence of this drug that we call power for too long they lose them yeah i mean that spells it, right? And that just doesn't ring true to me, because there certainly is completely cynical manipulations in politics. And lots of leaders are engaged in that. But part of the reason that they're often able to do that is precisely because they're charismatic. They're able to engage with people and get people socially to fall in line with them, even when they're being unreasonable. And I find it hard to believe that these dynamics did not exist in other societies. I know that hunter galleries and various other societies around the world today see self-promotion negatively, that they promote self-deprecating as social values but but that doesn't mean that charisma and manipulative kind of machiavellian or self-aggrandizement is something completely foreign to our human nature that that just sounds way too strong for me yeah i i'm totally with you there i think his his his twist on it is is really quite weird and implausible like there's as as you said definitely the the very manipulative calculating

people are usually people people yeah they're the they're the used car salesman type type person with a twinkle in their eye and a very friendly and very good at mobilizing, you know, support because that's what you need to do, whether you're running a university or a company or an organization. And I think it would be very, very necessary if you were the leader of a small hunter-gatherer group as well. I think being charismatic and being, you know, socially capable, which has just as many dark sides as positive sides to it, is really important. So I think he's just, I agree with you, he has, he's presenting this very perturbed view, which has grains of truth in it, but it just focuses on one side.

There is this funny section where he's talking about, you know, well, how would we deal in the past? How did our ancestors deal with people like Trump who were shameless? And it's quite interesting to see where he ends up. So let me just play this clip. Well, let's go back to how our forefathers and mothers did it, right? Let's go back to the nomadic intergatherers. They mostly relied on the power of shame. Now, if that didn't work anymore, they would expel these shameless people from the group. And if even that wouldn't work, if someone would be really a sociopath or psychopath, then that person would be executed by the group.

Now, I'm not saying that we should go back to execution. But yes, at some point, you need to find some way to expel these people. So there's just this point that like he does you know offhandedly mention about group sanctioned murders and i also don't think it's true that the only people who died in ancestral societies were those who deserved that no right the image there is very much of perfect justice functioning um where it's only sociopaths who are killed. But I've got a feeling that there's plenty in our history and the Hunter Gallery societies

where there's many innocent, good people who suffered terribly and were murdered, right? Are you saying vigilante justice isn't always the best justice chris because this is very controversial uh i mean yeah like he's pretty cavalier about the kind of um you know the sort of expelling or the execution of the undesirables um and uh like he extends he chooses that example that was a culture war issue of that Central Park lady. Oh, I've got that.

Shall I play it to tee it up for you? Yeah, that would be good. I know that in this era of Twitter and social media, the group can go overcorrect a little bit. You know, we've seen the incident in Central Park a couple of weeks ago, you know, with this woman, park a couple of weeks ago you know with this woman in this terrible racist behavior in which she sort of faked that she was attacked by an african-american man and called the police and you know she was destroyed in the in the days you know she quickly lost her job and and the man himself you know the birder later said that she he sort of felt that it was maybe a bit too much right that her whole life had been destroyed over this one,

even though it's still a horrible incident. But then I think, you know, maybe that's collateral damage. Maybe that just happens. Yeah. Yeah. So that rubbed me the wrong way a little bit because he's very cavalier about the collateral damage and isn't too worried about the justice being fair or proportionate and i think in that particular case i mean we don't want to re-litigate it but i think it's fair to say it was a little bit complicated and he uh yeah he's definitely he was just a little bit too cool with that kind of thing so i think he places too much faith in just the sort of natural group behavior doing good justice. I actually prefer our modern, civilized, highly formalized procedures of, you know, evidence and judges and juries and all that stuff.

I mean, call me like, you know, a civilization apologist. But that's just me. apologist but uh that's just me yeah i think like with the central park lady i mean there's very little debate that what she did was unjust and specifically focusing on his racial characteristic to to increase the threat but it's complicated like you said by the fact that the guy was intimating that he was going to feed her dog something and she wouldn't like what was about to happen right like so i think there's like it's a little bit like you say there's more complications there but the the cavalier attitude towards uh like if a right-wing person invoked collateral damage as in that way as uh you know well that's just the price we have to pay i don't think it would be regarded as yeah that's fine's fine. You know, a few people will get harmed, but overall things will

shake out okay. And so when we were looking at JPC years, we noted that a lot of the talking points that JPC years presents are just fairly standard boilerplate right-wing talking points about culture war things, right? About court packing or Biden's cognitive decline or that kind of thing, American culture war points. And I have to re-issue here. There was a lot of this, especially at the Q&A section at the end, where Rutger basically, there's no position of his which doesn't fall almost completely predictably

along liberal culture war viewpoints. So we've already had his opinion of cancel culture. Here's him talking about the role of the police, the ideal role of the police. Prison. And in the case of policing, you would move to something that we call community policing. When the police officer becomes something of a social worker, right? Where it's really important that you know the community,

that you become friends with the grandmothers and the aunts and the uncles, that you really have your connections in the whole neighborhood. So they are your allies and they can help you with doing something about serious crime. Yeah. So like, I'm not going to respond negatively to the notion that, you know, you should become involved with the communities that are policing. But I think the reason we have social workers and police as two different roles is for good reason.

Yes. Yeah. The different jobs. Yeah, that's true. That good reason. Yes, yeah. They're different jobs. Yeah, that's true. That's true. That's true. He's like community policing is definitely a good idea. I think both you and I definitely agree that European style policing

is better than that kind of California or New York or whatever style of policing. Militarized policing, yeah. Militarized, yeah, of course. But yeah, he just is maybe going a little bit too far to think that you can have a police force that is just essentially social workers. Well, let's hear him describe a little bit more about that.

The US is in many ways very far removed for that. So my feeling is that maybe you just need to kill the beast first and then start over again. So maybe first defund the whole thing and then start over again. I don't know. It's going to be a very, very long journey. Okay. Okay. Bingo.

Bingo. Bingo, I guess. Defund the police. Yes. Defund the police gets name-checked. And, you know, we're not here to debate the merits or demerits of it, but just to note that these are fairly boilerplate positions on the left. And one last clip I'll play to illustrate this point.

I mean, the vast the vast vast vast majority can't emphasize this enough of protesters is peaceful yeah and even with the protesters who are peaceful you know i just saw this tweet today of the son of martin luther king who said i will never condone violence you know never i will never justify it but i can understand it right i mean it is understandable uh martha luther king himself said that a riot is the language of the unheard and the real perpetrators here are obviously those at the top yep yep so that's another yeah yep that's another sort of um yeah left wing ifwing. If we're playing left-wing bingo, then, yeah, that's another one. Yeah, look, it's just, I think he meant to say at one point,

even if the protesters are violent, not peaceful, because he said peaceful twice. But it's the kind of, you know, I agree. I mean, I agree because I'm left-wing that most protests are peaceful. But a lot of it has this, you know, if it was a right-wing person, I'd be describing it as weasel words, right? Saying that, you know, I don't condone the violence, but I understand it.

And yeah, like I think to be consistent, it just, we have to point that out. Yeah, I think you're right. And I think it is important to be consistent because you know that kind of whataboutism or victim blaming as as sort of lefty people we don't tolerate it when right-wing people do those rhetorical tricks and uh violence is violence and um you know i think yeah you can just sort of avoid having to deal with it by pointing to other things or saying, oh, it's really due to the system made me do it or whatever. I mean, it's just kind of a it's a bit of a it's too easy a way to avoid grappling with the issue, I think.

Yeah. And there was a point that kind of so there's there's discussions of anti-capitalism and what real democracy should look like. And there was this section where he's talking about how you achieve things. And I wanted to play it because there was an interesting parallel I noted. So this is the clip. 60% of our income is dependent on, you know, the country in which we live, which is pure luck. Then there's like 10 gender 10 race then you've got like 20 socioeconomic like your wealth etc i don't know like real skills real like you're you're the real effort you put in yourself maybe that's like five

percent and even then you could argue you know philosophically does the free will really exist right isn't that also just a matter of you the right getting the right genes and being lucky there yeah so the the reason i wanted to highlight that what is on the one hand i think that's quite a left-wing perspective on achievement right that you you focus on the circumstances that allow you to achieve, right? Rather than individual ability and merit, it's the circumstances of society that you need to credit for it. But the interesting parallel for me was that, so on the one hand, he's making the kind of anti-Jordan Peterson view, right? That like, it isn't about you. It isn't about your individual ability. You, a lot of your things are just chance and circumstance and your family that you

didn't control and you don't deserve credit for. But the other part of that kind of fits nicely with Peterson's message that you benefit from all of the efforts of your family, the society, the institutions that exist. Almost nothing you achieve can be achieved without that foundation that you were born into and that you must give credit to. So in a weird way, they arrive at different points as the conclusion, but they're both arguing, we have to give this massive credit to the social systems that bring us into being and that their power cannot be overestimated. Yeah, yeah, I think that's right in a roundabout way.

The other aspect of it, too, is he takes it even further, of course, into sort of, you know, questioning free will. So, you know, if there's no free will, then really nobody deserves anything. So, you know, you may as well have a perfect utopian communism, I suppose, because nothing really matters, I guess. You know, your actions are not determined by you at all. They're entirely externally determined, which, you know, like I get it, but it's at some point it seems like

that point of view kind of leads to madness, doesn't it? It's a deterministic universe, so who can blame Trump, really, for what he does, right? Yeah, that's it. It's a weird way to kind of abrogate all responsibility for everything. So I get, you know, it's a philosophical problem that we're not going to resolve in this episode, but, yeah, he takes it in

some weird directions i do want to jump in and say by the way i do have some very nice things to say or some things that i've some things that he's saying that i that i like that i hope we can get to because all your clips are usually kind of things that we can criticize him for but i dare you ma look i i think i think it's fair to say that overall, I share a lot of his intuitions or a lot of his political opinions about, I prefer European style policing to American. I think the level of inequality in modern capitalism is ridiculous and that viewing success in business as all about personal effort rather than luck and family circumstances and so on. Like, I actually agree with a whole bunch of the things that he's saying, but it's

more the degree to which he goes and the lack of reflectiveness that there is genuine room for disagreement on some of these points. So like like let me play a clip here where he's talking about real democracy and and what it isn't about yeah and like genuine democracy so if you look at the original meaning of the word right you go back to the greek demos kratos it's about the people ruling it's not about the people you know sitting on a couch and watching netflix or the news or the reality show that we call politics no it's about actually participating it's about joining it's about you know making decisions for yourself that's a pretty vague description though of his alternative view of democracy um but i also thought he's kind of demonizing the existing democratic system of, you know, voting, right, without active participation.

Well, yeah, he's demonizing representative democracy where we vote for other people to do the political work for us, which I quite like because I don't really want to participate that much. I'd prefer to make podcasts and go swimming and things like that. Well, I think that's actually my point is like this notion that a good thing for people to do is not watch Netflix, but is to be politically active and involved. Is it? Like there hasn't been talking about how sociality and personal connection is the important thing because like I genuinely don't think it's better emotionally that everyone gets involved in politics and has ideas about how society should function. I don't presuppose that everyone has to have those interests, just as the same, I don't presuppose everyone has to have academic interests

about stuff I'm interested in. I'm not saying that people are there to be ruled over, just purely that it isn't a moral feeling of someone to watch movies instead of engage in activism. Yeah, I mean, and it's actually contradictory to something he says later on, I think it is, where he talks about this sort of in the context of the UBI, universal basic income, which can essentially redistribute, act to redistribute wealth, give people more freedom and autonomy in terms of not being perpetually worried about the problems of staying alive, essentially. And he emphasises that the good thing about that is that it sort of satisfies both sort of libertarians and left-wingers, because it kind of combines a

very small state, which is basically only concerned with some redistribution, but essentially people are sort of free to do what they want. And he calls this anarchist kind of state, right? Which, you know, it sounds radical, but I actually like the sound of that. That makes sense. But that completely contradicts, I think, what he's sort of saying there, which is everybody being political and being activist. I mean, I think an anarchist state that he's describing is a state in which people don't have to think about politics all the time

because there's not too much to argue about. Everyone's kind of free to do what they want, which, yeah, I don't know. I mean, we can talk about the realisticness of an anarchic society, but I think the better option would be before my relentless cynicism raises its head again, maybe you want to introduce some of the positive point you you find good uh before i drag us back down oh yeah you're saying that i could exercise some autonomy and discretion

in the content that chris thank you yes i look i i'm saying that whoever has the master key to the clip is the master of the clip. If you have your own clip there, please be my guest. Damn you. You've got me there. I've got no response to that. Okay. Okay. So without a clip, I've just got to rely on my memory.

Yeah. Some stuff I liked. I mean, look, yeah. Like essentially, I like the things that he's arguing towards, you know, like you said, Chris, you're basically occupying the same kind of political bit of the spectrum as him. the uvi because he's wanting for us to be less fixated on cutthroat competition and just more focused on cooperating and exercising freedom and autonomy just just living a good life which so i'm really on board with those sorts of ideas um he does issue all of these caveats so a lot of the stuff that we've been analyzing he's pushing the idea those those romantic and naturalistic kind of type of notions um that the people are kind of angels

and if we treat them like that then society will become like that but you know he does he does sort of undercut that a lot he talks a lot about all the bad things that people do you know atrocities and history and wars and so on and so he kind contradicts himself, which I think is a good thing because it makes his point of view more realistic. But actually the more accurate way to describe all the evidence he gathers is that not so much people are fundamentally good or fundamentally, you know, bad, but just more that people are fundamentally very adaptable.

And I think that's probably the more realistic tactic from his evidence. So I think that's probably the more realistic tactic from his evidence. So I think that's probably the main things that I liked about it. Like, I like the place that he's arguing for. I just think that the backflips and the sort of one sidedness in trying to construct that argument for it is rather weak. Yeah. And I will say that he issues disclaimers in a way that we have seen in previous weeks, but in a different sense, he is more measured in the degrees to which he claims. We've been focusing on some of the extreme claims he makes, but he definitely doesn't go to the same level of some of the previous people that we've been talking about. It's more like selective citing of evidence and exaggerating the level of certainty rather than dramatic images of the

coming apocalypse. It's also when you make prophecies of doom, like, oh, this is going to be a disaster. That's going to be a disaster. It's always fine. It's always fine. If it doesn't happen, then you can say, oh, it's because I warned everyone for it. And fine it's always fine if it doesn't happen then you could say oh it's because of i warned everyone for it and if it does happen then you can yeah see it did happen but but i will say okay so one point that you brought it up there was this concept that he focuses on how the ideas that we tell about our society have the ability to transform society, to make reality. So what that leads to is him talking about the Lord of the Flies and how this story that is in our popular culture about people being stranded on an island, young boys being stranded on an island and descending into savagery and barbary is contradicted by this actual story where there were people from Tonga

stranded on an island, young boys for, I think, 155 days or something like that. And that they actually, instead of killing each other and like executing piggy or whatever happens in Lord of the Flies, they cooperated and survived and remain lifelong friends today. And he argues that that's important because telling these kind of stories can have impacts on society. Obviously, I know this is not a scientific experiment, right? And I don't know if any parent would ever say, well, take my kids and drop them on an island for the sake of science. But it is a fascinating story.

And so if we still tell millions of kids the fictional Lord of the Flies, right? If they have to read that for school, that's fine. I think in a way it's a good novel. I mean, it didn't win the nobel prize for nothing but then let's also tell them about what really happened when real kids shipwrecked on a real island yeah so that i agree with that take that the stories that we tell about our society or

the values that we are transmit are important and that it is important to have these examples where you highlight that humans are not just uncooperative and selfish and barbarous. That's important. The criticism I mainly have is that he goes too far in the opposite direction. In emphasizing the positive aspects of our nature, he underplays the negative parts. Yeah, I think the other thing too is that Lord of the Flies isn't the only work of fiction that kids are or young people are exposed to in fact robinson crusoe i mean but there's some if you just think of the kind of young adult or children's storybooks that you were read when you were a kid i mean i don't

know about you chris but the vast apart from the brothers grim stories which are kind of grim but the but the vast majority of fairy tales and stuff like that or or just um just stories for kids are all about those sort of positive messages of cooperation and you know friends helping each other and overcoming obstacles and you know like i so i think i think he's exaggerating a little bit to make out that lord of the flies is kind of the cultural touchstone that we all refer to yeah you a reason that it's used as the example of the like hobbesian view of man because it's it's an encapsulation of that viewpoint but that's that's the point you can look at all the literature as you say to see different views and i will say that i did notice that he slides a little bit close to arguing that what energy you put out into the world is what you will manifest. And he points out that this is

very similar to the viewpoint articulated in The Secret, this New Age book. And this is him explaining why his view is not that. It's almost ridiculously simple, right? At one point, someone said to me, this is the secret. The hugely popular book promoted by Oprah Winfrey, like, oh, if you just want something, you can just ask the universe and it will happen. Like, oh, if you just want something, you can just ask the universe and it will happen. Now, that's obviously total bullshit. And it's a way to legitimize very big inequalities. But in this case, yes, you have to understand that ideas have performative effects. You know, ideas are never merely ideas.

You can't just describe a situation without changing the situation at the same time. Yeah. No, look, I mean, I i get it so here's the thing um i believe he's right in that those sorts of assumptions and stories and heuristics that kind of form part of our culture are instrumental in maintaining it and driving it and through legend and myth or whatever you want to call it but by changing that you can direct stuff in a better direction i just the thing that sort of rubs me the wrong way is that i i i am interested in reality as well you know i'd like to yeah i like like it's it's it's nice to use hunting other societies as a

metaphor for whatever and i'm sure it can provide, you know, great instructive value for better behavior in the future. But they're, you know, they also are real people who really lived and, you know, it's kind of disrespectful to just treat them as a, as a convenient myth. And rather, let's, let's think about that. This is just one example of, I think, the injustices he does to reality. And I get this is a common view, I think, among activists who are activating for social change. They do see research or a description of reality as not an impartial or a thing with no valence. Rather, it's always a political act and should be recognised as such. And there's truth in that, yes, but for me personally, I feel like it would be a shame if we put political objectives

and just let them override determining just what really happened and what really is really there in in the real world yeah i mean i i think in the great debates about activism versus science or objectivity uh we probably fall on the same side right that this this was to be it in anthropology where the side for objective sciency views roundly lost. But in psychology, the battle continues. Yes, we're still fighting on. We stand alone. One thing is, though, I think just saying like,

of course, this isn't the secret. The secret is bullshit. I think there is a thing with disclaimers where people highlight they're aware of something and then say, that's not what I'm doing doing but they don't actually highlight how it isn't you know how it isn't exactly that and there's there's another part where he's talking about it's still focused on this question about you know our ability to control the world through our mind and and this is him describing placebos and and sham surgeries and one of the most effective placebos is called sham surgery so what you do then is yeah you you

bring someone uh in an unconscious state and uh yeah then when the person wakes up you say you know it was a huge success the whole operation and you didn't actually do anything. You just went to get a coffee. And we've got some really good evidence that in a huge amount of cases that this works almost as well or sometimes, yeah, or gets like a similar result as to the real thing, the real surgery. So let me just make a point here, right? I'm not saying that placebos are not a powerful effect that we are interested in, and that sham surgery is one of the strongest ways to generate a placebo effect. The bit that I think is complete bullshit is the claim that placebo surgeries are in many cases just as effective as actual surgeries. Wait, wait, wait, wait. Chris, are you saying that if I have an inflamed appendix, it would be better not just to go through the motions of removing it?

Well, yes, I am. I'm taking that position because what he's saying is true. If the surgery is not a valid treatment, right? This is one of the ways that we find out that the previous surgeries that people thought were important turned out not to be. There's famous cases of this, even in the case of like heart surgery. But the point there wasn't, well, we should just do sham surgeries. It's that the treatment wasn't necessary. So it's not true that, like you say, if you have a cancerous tumor, that you just do a sham surgery and the outcome is likely as good. No, that's not true. And he talks the same,

again, when he's talking about nocebos. So here we go. If people believe they'll get side effects from a certain drug, for example, if the doctor says, oh, where are your side effects? They're probably going to develop it because you get what you expect. And I think that our view of human nature works a little bit like either a placebo or a nocebo. So if you believe that most people are pretty decent, then you're probably going to treat people in that way. And that's what you're going to radiate, right? That's sort of your whole

attitude to life. And that's going to be contagious. Everything is contagious in human societies. But then if you sort of choose the nocebo and have a more cynical view, then that can spread as well. So this isn't me just reacting to the denigrating of cynics. It's just that could be JPCers, right? Talking about, you know, you put the energy out into the world and the connections come back what you feed. And if you're negative, that's what you're going to get. And there's like a certain degree of truth to it that your psychology determines how you interact with the world.

But just take it one step further. And it is the secret. And it is JPCers. And it's New Age bullshit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's coming perilously close to it, shall we say. Yeah. So, okay.

Like, that's a little bit heavy. It's very heavy. You're killing me with your relentless fact-checking, Chris. Okay. You're killing me with your relentless fact-checking, Chris. Okay, I'll get you on a subject that's a little bit fun to round things off. So there's one thing which, when we were covering James Lindsay, he really had a strong impression of the dangerous power of cynicism, right? You remember this? dangerous power of cynicism right you remember this his book is called cynical theories because of how corrosive cynicism is to liberal societies so rutger actually has a a similar concern about cynicism so the cynicism the cynical worldview has always been used as a legitimization of power

differences of inequality and of hierarchy. Because if we can actually trust each other, you know, if we do believe that most people are pretty decent, then we don't need them anymore. Then we don't need all these CEOs and managers and kings and monarchs and queens and generals and you name it. We can move to a very different kind of society. Yeah. So, okay, explain to me. and queens, and generals, and you name it. We can move to a very different kind of society. Yeah. Okay, explain to me, what's the link with James Lindsay? Let's spell it out. Well, in James's case, it's that relentless cynicism is the corrosive effect which melts

democracies, right? Liberal democracies are incapable of surviving that relentless criticism. Yeah. So this is the relentless cynicism of believing that everything is just like a power play and all of these cultural artifacts that we've got are really an expression of oppressive power. Yeah. That kind of cynicism, right?'s james lindsey's one and here here it's sort of inverted right it's a cynicism that we we can't reach utopia that we need institutions that we need hierarchies and inequality as a part of society our inability to see beyond that just seeing that as an inevitable part of the world, in Rutger's view,

that's what's preventing us from reaching a utopian society where none of those things exist. So it's like cynicism is doing a different thing in both views, but it's hell of a powerful in both of them. Yeah, that's bending my brain just to kind of follow the follow the

logic in both cases i can see the parallel but you've got a direct description from ricker about what he sees if we don't give in to the cynicism but then you know quite a lot can happen and i i really sense a shift into zeitgeistist. If I look at the last, say, 10 years, I think there's a new generation coming. I mean, in the 90s, you were avant-garde when you were cool when you were a cynic. That was really cool in the 90s. That's not the case anymore. Cynicism is out, hope is in. I really think you can see that right now. You can just look at the millions of people protesting right now in the United States or the massively successful climate justice movement that was started by a 16-year-old Swedish girl, there's

really something changing here. Yeah, look, Chris, I'm going to put a positive interpretation of what he's saying because I take all those criticisms and I pretty much agree with them, but there's a reading of his that I've got, which admittedly comes from other talks that he's given rather than this one, in which what I took him to mean anyway was that we're being too cynical and assuming that everyone is fundamentally motivated just by getting as much for themselves as possible, accruing wealth and getting these ostentatious displays of status and so on,

basically living life like a Trump, basically. And I think he's arguing that we have other motivations too. You know, some of them are more meaningful motivations and they can be quite strong. So, for instance, you and I think it's true to say we didn't make our decisions in terms of what we would do for a living purely based on using the same kind of logic as Donald Trump made his decisions. Right. You know, we think that we're doing things because we find them interesting. We're doing things because we we like working with a community of people with common interests and we like finding out stuff together. Now, admitted admittedly academia is probably a bad example because it's not it's not it's not real life but i think in the broader

sense a lot of that is true and the capitalist system that we do work in i like i'm i'm a capitalist i love i love capitalism kind of um as it, does it? But as an engine room for generating wealth, I like it, right? But I take his point that it does tend to encourage people, at least in the part of the world where I live, where many people are thinking about upgrading their house because they need a bigger house with five bathrooms. And if their friends have got more fancy stuff than they do, then they feel like they're losing life.

And, you know, I'm all for a cultural change where we reward different things. And I think we are kind of moving slightly in places like Australia towards a bit of a post-scarcity type culture where we stop neurotically trying to accrue as much stuff. And we kind of realize that getting stuff isn't really what it's about.

And I think we can encourage those other motivations. What do you think? Yeah, I decode your effort to remain the baby face of the podcast with your positive spin. But yet I have to sign on with what you're saying, because fundamentally, I agree with him that other values are important and that we should consider them and that the level of inequality in our society is shocking and potentially unsustainable, right? Yeah. In fact, on that point, he says specifically that billionaires shouldn't exist, that they're a symptom that something's going really wrong in the allocation of resources.

Because sure, there might be a spectrum of effort and a spectrum of ability, even if we put aside his argument that there's no free will or whatever. But even so, you'd expect incomes that were to be somewhat normally distributed, and they wouldn't have this crazy long tail into super wealthy people sorry sorry to interrupt though but i just wanted to elaborate on what you were saying that's all right i was just going to push this billionaire shouldn't exist i think the fact itself that billionaires are there it proves that capitalism is failing there we go so just echoing echoing your point yeah look look i don't know if it proves that

capitalism is failing i like you said he's look i agree with everything he's saying he's a little bit more edgelordy shall we say on in the way he expresses it i sign off with you this time that he does come across as unnecessarily edgelord at times and in like the very undramatic way that liberals tend to but there was one point that we kind of glossed over earlier that i want to touch on before we finish and it's it's dark and it's evil and it is another somewhat questionable claim, but I feel we'd be remiss not to mention it because I love the description he came up with. So this was him talking back in the evil psych section that humans, through our focus on kindness and sociality, that we've actually self-domesticated ourselves. And this is him describing that. And most importantly, domesticated species,

they just look cuter. They look more childish. Or the scientific term is pedomorphic. Now, we also know what genes are associated with domestication. And the fascinating thing is that if you look at us, right, at our DNA, at our bodies, then it's like, whoa, we're domesticated. We really, you know, check a lot of the boxes. So then the question is who domesticated us, right? Who did it? And the answer is we did it ourselves. Yeah. So this is the self-domestication thesis that humans display characteristics that are in line with other domesticated species.

And the prototypical example that is given for this is silver foxes, which are described thusly. There's one really famous experiment that I talk about in the book with silver foxes, a species that had never been domesticated. talk about in the book with silver foxes a species that had never been domesticated and then this experiment started in russia with a russian scientist called dmitry beliaev who selected sort of the friendliest among these wild silver foxes and just in a couple of generations he already started to see this domestication syndrome that i talked about earlier so so chris i i have a suspicion that you are going to continue with some relentless fact-checking on this one. Matt, how dare you? All I wanted to say was that he came up with the description homo puppy for our species. And I find that adorable to, you know,

imagine our species as homo puppies. And although we disparage the chimpanzee's ability to defeat you if you were armed with two swords, it is true that humans are not physically imposing primates compared to many of our great ape cousins. Okay, yeah, but that doesn't, look, you're not living up to your bad boy of decoding the guru's reputation, Chris.

There's got to be more to it than this. If you insist, Matt, if you insist. There is just one article I came across, which is from last year, 2019, called The History of Farm Foxes Undermines the Animal Domestication Syndrome. This is in Trans and Ecology and Evolution. And it's a very interesting paper.

It's looking at domestication of species. But one very crucial fact of it is that the silver foxes, often used as the paradigmatic example of domestication, were not wild foxes. domestication were not wild foxes. They were already a domesticated or partly domesticated species bred for fur, which dramatically undermines the case for how readily species can be transformed by selective breeding pressures. And the other thing that paper did was it looked across all the papers that talk about domestication of species and the various features that are presented to be associated with that. Things like floppiness of ears or decrease in brain size and so on and so forth. And it basically pointed out that there are very inconsistent features across all of the species that are supposed to demonstrate this theory and if rutger and other academics are then likening

those features to humans to say that we are a domesticated species the whole thing becomes you know a lot less compelling um yeah like it's more like it's more complicated. It's more complicated. That's the point. Yeah, yeah. So I guess what you're saying, Chris, is that Rutger, who has a Bachelor of Arts in History and a Master of Arts in History and primarily has worked as a journalist or being an academic historian,

plays a little bit fast and loose with some of the technical details of evolutionary behavior. Listen, Matt, you are disparaging the arts and humanities scholars, not me with that claim. And I will make this point that a lot may not seem like it on this podcast, but I typically allow for people to make simplified arguments in non-technical papers and this kind of thing. But when I'm reading a book or an argument that somebody is representing from a book, I'm often struck by the lack of research that people put in. often struck by the lack of research that people put in. Like this, this strikes home when it's Douglas Murray referencing stories or statistics or, or like how Google searches prove that, uh, Google has a anti-heterosexual agenda. There, there's these arguments made where it just would require an evening of research to highlight that the, the thing is more complicated and there's issues.

And the reason I think it's fair enough to bring it up here is that when talking about the Stanford prison experiment, another psychology study, which has recently had questions raised about it, here's what Rutger says. Do you put someone in a uniform and then they become these killer cops? I don't think that's true. And in my book, I have a chapter about the Stanford prison experiment where I try to show that actually it was a hoax. You know, it shouldn't be used in textbooks anymore because these students were specifically instructed to be as sadistic as possible. Many of them said they didn't want to do it. And then the researcher, Philip Zimbardo, said, come on come on you got to do it because i need these results so it's like fake science uh shouldn't use it anymore yeah yeah i guess what you're saying is that he he put the he put he put a bit of time in

debunking the studies that he didn't like that that didn't work for his for his argument but um so he might have done a bit more reading on the foxes and if he had done so he perhaps wouldn't have relied on that example yes what's good for the goose is good for the gander that's what i'm yeah yeah i mean that's right and i'm not having a big go at ruka for this either but it's it is just as you say it's a common thing with these kinds of popular you know ted talky type books or thinkers that that that cover a broad range of stuff often scientific or historic or anthropological findings um that you're often far outside of the domain of the training of the author. And Jordan Peterson is another example of someone who does this.

And where it's just done in a very broad, sweeping, patchy kind of way where stuff is cherry-picked to support the pretty grand theme and narrative that's really the centrepiece of the book. Now, this is an interesting case because i like the theme in the book overall you know what i mean i like this centerpiece i'm on board with it you know um i want to have um what is it um gay future communism what's it called what are you you saying? Is that gay future communism? Fully automated luxury space communism. That's the me.

You know the one. I know the one. Yeah, don't gaslight me, Chris. I knew you knew. Yeah, so, you know, I'm all for building utopias. But, yeah, you know, you don't. I'll just add that you added the gay in. There's no gay in that.

There is. Fully automated, free communism. That's my personal utopia. Let's just leave it at that. Okay. I'm sure there's a version you created. I have no issue with that being, you know... Richard, Chris, what's going on? Look, I'm accepting of i've got i've got no

issue i just just noting you have it there look i'm looking at okay i have fact-checked this live just this is joe rogan style um google fact-checking and i'm looking i'm looking at a meme right now that says fully automated luxury gay space communism. Oh, okay. I think that's a parody, though. I think that's making fun of it. Okay. All right.

I like that one. Anyway, it looks cool. Yeah. Anyway, where were we? It's hard to know. It's hard to know with that. Well, look, I have relentlessly tore at this because of my black hearted nature and you've at every step tried to subvert my critique because of your

deep leftist political bias i just i just want to be more popular with the ladies because you know i'm supposed to be the like wokey person right, right? Aren't I the one that is like, what's going on? I think I accidentally described myself as a centrist in the first episode, which really probably wasn't accurate. Yeah. Yeah, I think I've come out as a closet heterodox, protests are all riots and so on. This is the shattering of my image. and so on.

This is the shattering of my image. But yeah, look, I actually have a long list of other things I can poke at or talk about. But maybe it's about time we round it off with our overall thoughts. Unless I've missed something. There's some clip you have that you want to play. That's the low blow, Chris. You know, I don don't have any clips i'm totally reliant on you um okay yeah look i think no no there's nothing i think we've really missed i i think i've said i don't think i need to do a big summing up because i think i already said most of it i like the thing that he's arguing towards which which is far more equitable distribution of wealth.

This level of wealth inequality is unnecessary, even with a full-throated capitalism. I like the arguing towards cooperative action on climate change. I think he's right that if people can cooperate to resolve things like the tragedy of the commons, then people can cooperate to sort out common problems. Let's imagine that you were a god, right? You were an all-powerful, all-knowing god. And another god would give you the task to come up with a problem that would be almost or pretty much impossible for humanity to solve like the most difficult problem for humanity to solve i think something like climate change would probably it right because our behavior right now has effects decades from now it's everything what everyone does in the

whole world contributes a tiny little bit so if we can solve this then i think we can solve pretty much everything, you know? I generally like the concept of the UBI or UBI-like initiatives. And he's right in the sense that the narratives and the stories that we tell are important in driving the culture that we are going to end up with. What I don't like is that that and i feel like it's unnecessary this is probably a common thing with me i feel like you don't have to misrepresent the scientific understanding of things in order to support those arguments those are good arguments you can just say these are good things let's do them and people like me will be on board like we we don't need to have the the just so stories and the sort of rousseauian view of perfect tranquility in nature. You know, I don't need that shit. You know what I mean?

I'm on board anyway, you know. So that irritates me when he does that. And a lot of the stuff that he talked about was defending his argument and all of these kind of TEDx-y type. Oh, actually, people are fundamentally, not mean and nasty, but actually fundamentally good. Like, you know, those sorts of things are just intellectually really weak and unnecessary. And unfortunately, that seems to be the bulk of his intellectual output, which is actually supporting

what are some pretty good ideas, but supporting them with a weak architecture. So, you know, I'm going to give him, I'll give him a seven out of 10, you know, good intentions, poor execution. Okay. So from my point of view, just to finish off, there's, there's one thing that I thought was quite nice. I enjoyed. So this, this is his response to being asked a question by one of the YouTube commenters. That's a great, great question. And to be honest, I'm not entirely sure.

Look, this is off topic, but I want to point this out because this is a tip I give to all my students. If you are asked a question at a conference or something like that, the best way to start is to praise the person asking the question by saying, that's a great question. Because whatever answer you give after that, it's hard for them to come back and say you didn't answer the question or because you just pre-asked them. So I just wanted to highlight that that's a very nice technique that people can use. There's a freebie. Yeah, that's a practical tip you can use in everyday life. Yeah, yeah.

Just praise someone and they'll find it hard to insult you. And it works with me on Twitter. You know, Chris, I really like your stuff, blah, blah, blah. Oh, okay. That maybe, you know, I should be nicer. Like, it works. But that isn't my overall point. That was just something I noticed that was nice.

And I do want to agree with you that, you know, although by the nature of this podcast, we end up kind of critical. Anders, obviously, as the previous hours have indicated, stuff that he presents, which I find annoying or exaggerated, I don't see him in the same respect as most of the other figures that we've covered. Certainly not a figure like J.P. Sears

where after listening to it, I just felt bad, right? I just, it just left me feeling like, ugh, like not good. I didn't agree with aspects of this. I thought the stuff about Hunter Gallagher was particularly too romanticized and exoticized. But I also felt that he's making valid arguments at times. And like you, if you trim out a lot of the rhetorical stuff, the points are fine and you don't have to agree with them. He inserts more caveats and although some of them are strategic, it doesn't feel like they're always that way. It does feel like he's acknowledging nuance at times.

it's just really in his presentation of modern society and agricultural society versus hunter galleries where there basically is almost no nuance in in that but in but in all respects he he does have self-awareness and acknowledgement of you know alternative perspectives so yeah i think he's an interesting guy to look at because it is an example that people can use rhetorical techniques and they do engage in hyperbole or create these binaries, but it doesn't necessarily mean everything about the arguments are illegitimate or you don't have to have sympathy for the views. I think it just helps to be aware of them and like yeah and to do research if you care about the validity of claims being made yeah yeah i think it's good like if you're making a good point if especially then i'd like to see it supported by a good argument

so for example i agree with him that, you know, people are extremely social and cooperative creatures and that we often have, in terms of how we act, are acting in a kind of a group oriented kind of way. I think he's right about that. I think it's a shame that he set up that kind of self-interest versus cooperative dichotomy because I don't think those two things are particularly in conflict an awful lot of the time. A lot of the time, the things that we value are the same things that the group around us values. Similarly, with this dichotomy that he sets up to, because he wants to promote the idea that it's not our big brains and super intelligence that really matters. What really matters is our idea to cooperate. But the problem is that he sets up this dichotomy between abstract intelligence and tool using and stuff,

innovation on one hand, and sets that against the ability to communicate and record symbols and the ability to maintain and preserve that shared culture, which creates that incremental growth in technology in the broader sense and culture, really. So that's a false dichotomy, right? Those are two aspects of intelligence. And you don't need to set up false dichotomies because I think his view is very reasonable and doesn't need to be supported by bad arguments.

No, I mean, I think we did cover it, but he basically is arguing that our human sociality, like superpower, was subverted by modern society into these dangerous zones, which lead to totalitarianism and brutality and so on. When we started this whole process that we call civilization, we became sedentary, we became farmers and city dwellers. That's when everything went wrong. That sort of triggered something in us i think this groupish behavior it really went berserk and indeed the archaeological

evidence suggests that warfare is not something we've always been doing but actually had a beginning for 95 of our history when we're nomadic and together we didn't really engage in wars at all but then when we settled down boom explosion of warfare but i think that's the wrong way to look at it rather than that being like a perversion of what human sociality is about it's purely just one of the uses and not one that we should want to encourage, but it in itself is just a neutral ability, the ability for our species to organize in large groups and cohere around values and meanings. It doesn't mean that that would necessarily lead to peaceful, just, and utopian societies. It could lead to brutally repressive feudal societies just as rightly. And this notion that feminist values extend way back to traditional cultures, I think that's a

nice myth. But when you look at the actual complexities of society, a lot of bad stuff was happening in the past, just as it's happening now and and in reality most people are better off living in modern democracies than they would have been you know in the ancient past where life was more uncertain yeah i think that's just i mean that's almost too too obvious a point to even belabor it, isn't it? I mean, despite all the negative things associated with modernity and, you know, our complex artificial societies, clearly it's a better way to live than foraging for your food

in prehistoric Europe, right in not in the way he presents it though that's right the way he presented it well it did sound pretty good like the paleo diet lots of walking i like hiking that's it does sound good because there's a part where he also i mean i'm sorry to re go into this i promise i'll stop after this but he he talks about like homo sapiens and how we didn't kill neanderthals we like they were stronger than us and had bigger brains but the reality is we out-competed them to extinction and and where the populations overlapped the neanderthals like so they interbred with us as we know now through genetic evidence but we we also wiped them out either from out

competing or direct conflict who knows you know we don't have the remains for that but and just i just be clear to the listeners when when when you say out competing like that's just a simple fact of two not in a race not not in a race when two species occupy the same niche, then they occupy the same resource landscape. Then when one continues and the other one diminishes, then that's what they call out competing. It's not that they were having a competition. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Thank you for clarifying. I also mean just that what happened there is that a species with, I don't know, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of individuals died from starvation, from cold, from hunger, from, you know, whatever it was. And it seems likely our species was involved with it. So whether or not it was direct violence, sort of immaterial. Yeah. I just, I don't like the happy clappy version of history the reality is more interesting and i think more respectful to the different species of humans and and our own species that existed in the past now i'm with you and i think the other way in which she's a bit

happy clappy is in setting up yet another dichotomy of whether or not people are fundamentally cynical and motivated by naked self-interest versus what he sets up. Greta Thunberg. Yeah, that's right. This idea that deep down people are fundamentally decent. Now, that's obviously a nice thought, but I think that's yet another false dichotomy to set up. I mean, the thing we can say with a lot of assurance is that people are fundamentally extremely plastic and adaptive, extremely flexible and have the capacity for stuff that we today would consider good and things that we would consider bad. And that just seems, you know, an equally useful framework that is more in keeping with reality. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, okay. So we've done Rutger Bregman. I think we've analyzed him into the dust. He's done for now. That's him out of the public sphere or not. And I think it's worth announcing who our next person will be. And we will post the talk in advance, which we haven't decided on yet. But I believe we're doing another lefty person, Russell Brand. Oh, yeah. Isn't that correct? Yes, that's right. Now he's going to be fun,

isn't he? Yeah, that's going to be fun. I don't feel like he's super deep you know like but he's definitely flashy i like him he's gonna be he's gonna be um he's gonna be good buddy listeners no matt is already throwing shit not me i have said nothing negative yet and here he is calling him empty-headed and no you know he just always seems really like drunk and stoned i don't know maybe that's just his style yeah i have opinions on russell brown but we'll we'll get to them so uh yes if you want to contact us we have an email account which is decoding the gurus at gmail.com we have a twitter Twitter account, which is guruspod. Is that right?

Guruspod. Yep. At guruspod. You got it right. And you can leave us nice reviews, bad reviews with five stars, as we say at ROK, on iTunes. And you did that. So thank you very much.

And, yeah. And maybe in your review, tell us, you know, which is your favorite out of the two of us. You know, you could let us know. I mean, Chris won't be upset. He won't mind. That's, you know, I'm shocked at that. That's the final message you want to say.

But okay. Okay. All right. So this has actually been quite fun this week. Not as depressing as some of the previous weeks. So yeah, I enjoyed it, Matt. Yeah, I enjoyed it too. And I want to say one last thing, which is I don't think this guy is a grifter. I don't think he's motivated by bad things. You know what I mean? I think he's a bit slack in his research and his reasoning.

But I have rather negative views about someone like JPC, for instance, where I just do not think he's in a good place or is pushing people towards a good place. So there's a big difference there, even though we've drawn a lot of comparisons and a lot of similarities. And maybe it'll be interesting to consider coming up with some reading skill for the gurus, like level of griftiness and level of absolute annoyingness in weeks to come. But yeah, it's been fun, Matt. And I'm going to sign off first so I don't say a ridiculous bye-bye. So thank you very much, Nathalie. Yeah, you already did, Chris, unfortunately. But there you go. Yep. Goodbye from me too see you everyone bye-bye

oh you'll have to keep that in that's good Thank you.