Modern Wisdom - #120 - Professor Paul Bloom - What Do BDSM & Meditation Have In Common?

Episode Date: November 14, 2019

Paul Bloom is an author and a Professor of Psychology at Yale. Why is suffering a cause of pleasure for some people? What do BDSM, being robbed, extreme sports and meditation have in common? How does pleasure work? Why is empathy bad and what is the case for rational compassion? Why do we love people who have died? One of my favourite conversations this year, do not miss this. Extra Stuff: Follow Professor Bloom on Twitter - https://twitter.com/paulbloomatyale Buy Against Empathy - https://amzn.to/32G5SD3 Buy How Pleasure Works - https://amzn.to/2CHRteQ Starting Therapy Video - https://youtu.be/jK-mw8rXziY Check out everything I recommend from books to products and help support the podcast at no extra cost to you by shopping through this link - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Oh hello friends, welcome back to Modern Wisdom. Before I go on to today's guest, I need to give you a warning that you will only be receiving one episode per week for the next couple of weeks. I'm jetting off a game to Bali, which means that you will unfortunately be left with just one Modern Wisdom episode every seven days until I get back. But today's episode will make up for it. Professor Paul Bloom is a psychologist from the University of Yale. He's just a crazy, interesting guy. Someone that swims in the circles of philosophy and psychology

and looks at the first principles of why we are the way we are in the way that Professor Bloom does is it's just an absolute dream for me. So I mean, we get to talk today about why empathy is bad, the case for rational compassion, how pleasure works, and why we like what we like. We talk about racism, how to have a productive conversation, why we love people who have died. I mean, these questions are just so cool, very, very interesting for me to sink my teeth into. Hopefully, we'll be the same for you as well. Before we get into it, I recently, I recently, recently released a video talking about me starting therapy. Might not be quite what you expected, but that's on the Modern Wisdom YouTube channel, so you should go and check that out as well. But for now, please welcome Professor Paul Bloom. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back. I'm joined by Professor Paul Bloom. Paul, look at the show.

Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure to have you on. It's been listening to a lot of your work recently. Some fantastic interviews with Sam Harris and podcast that you did a little while ago, but some super interesting stuff we've been talking about empathy and about resilience a lot on the show. Recently, discussed Elliott Kipchow gave Sub to our marathon performance, which is a very resilient, physical feat that people have seen. So we got a lot to delve into today, but how would you describe the work that you do

if someone hadn't met you before and didn't know you? So I'm interested in psychology professor at Yale, and I'm interested in human nature. And so, my work goes from topic to topic and they're kind of related. Broadly I'm interested in pleasure, what we like, why we like it. I'm really interested in morality. How do we explain our intuitions about good and evil? How do we explain our who we hate, who we admire?

And what kind of moral judgments are good for us? Like, how should we think morally? And there my work kind of blends into philosophy. And I was by most recent book against empathy. And I'm interested in cluster of things and interest in the self. I'm interested in how we think about things that aren't like us like robots or non-human animals. Interest in religion where religious belief comes from. Most recently I've been interested in suffering. So I have a kind of dream job where I get paid perfectly fine to just ask some really cool

questions under my students and my colleagues work on them. It must feel nice to be able to indulge your intellectual curiosity on a yearly basis and just keep on changing that up every so often. Yeah, they haven't fired me yet, and it is very nice. So you touched on a word there, morality, and I think a lot of the stuff that you're talking about are questions that people take for granted or their appearance that is something that people just take as fact. Do you often find when you begin to look at the first principles or real strip things back to basics? Do you find a bit of a disconnect or people just looking at the first principles or real strip things back to basics. Do you find a bit of a disconnect

or people just looking at the questions that you're asking and thinking, well, why are you asking that? Why are you asking what is morality or why are you asking what is empathy? It's interesting. My it's a good question. I work hence the following to one of two extremes. So I'm sometimes interested in things that are honest to God puzzling for a lot of people. Like you ask people, you know, what do people get out of, um, uh, SadomasochisticsX or hot sonas or, um, or watching movies that terrify them? And people say, I don't know, that's really cool that we do. But some of my questions, and this is what you're getting at, involve questioning things that we take for granted. And William James, a long time ago, a great psychologist, you're getting at, involve questioning things that we take for granted. And William James a long time ago, a great psychologist, you know, said, it's only to a scholar can you ask a question like, you know, why do people get flushed when

everybody's looking at them? Why do we get hungry when we smell something delicious? And these are questions like, you know, why does the apple fall from the tree? You know, you've got to be in some way step back and be a scholar. And so it's like, you know, why does the apple fall from the tree? You know, you've got to be in some way, step back and be a scholar. And so they said, say, well, okay, sure that happens. That's obvious, but why do we work that way? And so for morality, you know, if you right now, you walked outside and you saw somebody slapping a child, just beating a crap out of a four-year-old, you would be shocked.

You'd probably spring to action. Why? And it's not enough for you to say, well, of course, it's just natural, it's obvious. Okay, let's spell it out. What's bothering you? Can you imagine a person who would find it funny or have no interest at all?

And those are sort of the questions I ask. Yeah, I imagine that that must get you into some interesting situations, thinking about some of the times, some of the people that I spend my time with and talking to. And every so often you do, you posit a question or make a point about something and half of the room sort of turns and looks and gives you this. Yeah, when you discover you really know one of them. Yeah, there's sort of a looking at things from the outside perspective in our business.

Yeah, I think to fly a flag for the outside is I definitely find those questions more interesting than not being able to look at them with perspective. Yeah. So let's talk about empathy. It's something that we've discussed recently on the podcast. I often use the cliche that I have a crippling level of empathy, but then I don't actually know if I do have a crippling level of empathy or if I have a crippling level of compassion. And I'd quite like to work out whether which one of those it is. So some days I regret calling my book

against empathy because the word empathy has a lot of meanings. And I don't care what you call it. So, some people just take empathy to mean kindness or goodness. And I think everybody should be kind and good. And I don't think there's such a thing as a crippling level of goodness. You should be as maximally good as you can. It would be great. You just have a lot of goodness to make sure you're a good person.

But there's a more focused, there's a set of more focused meanings that are more interesting and one sense of empathy, which is what I'm at targeting in my book, is putting yourself in another person's shoes, feeling what they feel, absorbing her pain. And a lot of people describe this as a very good thing. I actually think in many ways it could be a very bad thing. And you actually put your finger on one aspect of it, which is you look at the people who help other people, face to face day to day, people who work, firefighters, comps, nurses, doctors, shrinks, people who are ER workers.

Here's what they have in common. They're pretty low empathy. They care about people. They understand people. They want to help people. But they could be with somebody who's screaming and agony, and they're cool with it. They don't feel it.

And then they treat people for nine hours and then they go home with their family and they order sushi and they watch TV and they don't get upset. Now if you have a crippling level of empathy, you cannot do that. You may not last a week doing that because the pain of others might get you too much. This is on way of answering your question, whether it's empathy or something else. So, I'll ask you, if you, with somebody who's very depressed or very upset or very angry, does that affect you in a way that you're not comfortable with? Yes. Then you have high empathy, my friend. And there's nothing wrong with that. There's, as long as you keep it under wraps, but it means that there's certain things you probably

are not as good at doing as others. Other people would be. You would not do well as a therapist because a therapist you might spend eight hours a day, nine hours a day dealing with people who are anxious and depressed and weeping and deeply upset. If you absorb their feelings, if you feel what they feel, you will be run through a ringer each day. So I have a friend of mine and she's a shrink.

And so she tells me, she works like 50-minute session, pause, 50-minute session, pause, 50-minute period. And I say, that must drive you up the wall, dealing with those people who are so upset. And she says to me, no, I actually find it fascinating. I love solving her problems. I try to work, try to figure this out and everything. I find it exhilarating. And she's wired up differently than me. And it's why she could do the job and I can't. What's your disposition? Highly empathic in that way, in that.

So in some way, when I talk about the problems of empathy, and say there are better ways to do things, better ways to be good and getting caught up in the pain of others, to some extent, it's a sort of self therapy thing. I'm talking to myself here. For a couple of hundred pages. Yeah, well, I put in some jokes, I tell some stories.

I mean, it's also, it's also just to make sure it's not, I don't want people to think my work is entirely self-therapy. It's a lot of people, even people aren't empathic, think that empathy is the way to go for morality. And I discuss in the book all sorts of reasons, why not? So one is the reason that you raised, which is the extent of a personal connection, impairing your role as a helper. But the more general thing is that empathy is powerfully biased.

We know this from everyday life. We know this from a thousand experiments. So I'm looking at you, you know, you're a guy is the same rough, same skin color ethnicity as me, English speakers, similar background, whatever. So I could feel for you. You're my kind of guy. I could feel your pain. If I heard you in trouble, I could get upset by it by that. That's how empathy works. But what if you were different? What if you were different skin color, different gender? You didn't speak English. What if you were disgusting in your front? Like you

were a homeless person. There's nothing I didn't wash for a long period of time. What if you were frightening? All the other things shut down empathy. And so to extend, we can say intellectually, I think that a middle aged white man from my my city, his life matters just as much. As somebody I will never see in Sub-Saharan Africa. The extent I could acknowledge that, it means I have to transcend empathy. Empathy pushes you to the close to the similar and as moral reflective beings we say we could do better than that. So what's a pure version of empathy or what's a less biased version of empathy?

So I think bias is very nature. Empathy is biased. Empathy is impure. In some way, your question is like saying, I complain about racism, and you say, what's a pure form of racism? Well, racism is going to be racism. Racism is going to be racism. But I think the gist of your question is, what should we replace it with? And so as book against empathy and the subtitle is the case for rational compassion. And so rational is part of that, which is that you should sort of, as you go through the world, if you're a country, if you're an industry, if you're an

individual, and try to make the world better for people, you should head to do so. Try to figure out what's, you know, what's the best thing to do. But compassion is, I think, the answer to your question, which is you should care about people. You see this distinction in Buddhism. So Buddhism is very clear. It says, you know, you want to be a good person, you want to be a helper. Don't get caught up in other people's pain. Instead, love them. Fill your heart with good share and happiness. You know, you see these Buddhist monks and they're great at enjoying, even when dealing with people who are in horrible pain, living in the squalor, and that's the way to do it. Compassion and love, but not empathy.

How do you define the difference, the specific differences then between empathy and compassion? Is it simply not putting yourself in somebody else's shoes? That's at the core of that. So maybe here's a good example. Suppose we're really good friends and I'm anxious. I'm coming to you and I'm upset about something. I'm just anxious. I'm upset. Maybe I'm in tears and everything. If you were to feel empathy for me, you would feel my anxiety. You would share my anxiety with me and you would be anxious too. But if you were to feel compassion for me, you would see I'm in distress and you'd want to make my distress go away. And you'd like to help me.

And this could lead to two very different responses. If you felt empathy, you'd kind of be there, maybe crying a little bit with me and so on. And it wouldn't make me any better. In fact, in some extent it makes me worse. I now have two problems, not just one, but if you felt compassion for me, you might try to cheer me up. You say, good calm down, take a deep breath. It's not as bad. You would be a model for me, with your calmness, with your authority. This is an old insight.

We want what we want in friends, take sadness. We want our friends is not something to multiply our sadness, but somebody to replace our happiness. Now, I don't want to overstate this. There are things I think I wrote in my book that were a bit too strong. And I think there are some cases where we do want empathy. So a good example of this is anger. So suppose I come to you, my friend, and I'm furious at somebody.

He said, you know, this guy did this and he did that. And how would he treat me that way and everything. And I want you as a friend, not to say, huh, I really appreciate your perspective. And I'll give you a minute. I want you to say, he said that to you. Let's go to his house and beat the crap out of him. You get angry too. That's what pals do. If I'm watching a TV show and I'm really into it, I don't want you to sit there next to me. If you're sitting there, I want you to be into it too.

I want you to share the feelings. And there's actually psychological work showing that just two people silently sharing each other's feelings, while watching a movie or show and everything. There's a pleasure in that. And there's a connection in that. So I'm not against empathy in general. I'm thinking to do a law for us.

To do our relationship could be a great source of pleasure. But as a moral guide, who should I help? Who should our country go to war with and everything? It is, I think, very limited. It strikes me that both empathy and compassion can't exist in isolation. If I was the only person on the planet, and the planet was completely whitewashed except for me, is this such a thing as, well, I suppose, the self-compassion, but there's not such a thing as self-emathy, is there?

No, it's hard to imagine what to be to put yourself in your own shoes. Metal gymnastics is hard to imagine. You could of course feel much empathy and compassion for people, but they would just have to be from your imagination. People from your memories are people you imagine, and you know, if there's books left in this this apocalyptic world, you could feel plenty of empathy for characters and books. Yes. And again, I think that, you know, I love stories and I read a lot and the feeling of empathy and that sort of imagined a pleasure is super important.

I wouldn't want to add that. To immerse you in the story, right? Exactly. There are other things that could have immersed you in a story, but you know, you often, a story has an engaging character, and you put yourself in his or her shoes, and then you adopt their perspective and you go through life as them. So, you know, I'm reading a Stephen King novel now, the Institute, and a lot

of us is boy who's trapped, who's kidnapped, and you really see the world through his eyes. Now, that's not such an interesting case. To me, the cooler case, and again, now just gets back to the problem with empathy, is that even a bad character, if you get connected with him, you would have dumped his perspective. I don't know, you ever watch on, like, breaking bad or subprinos? So both of these shows at the core at Walter White, Tony Subrano, guys who are actually not good guys. You're not supposed to take them as, like, these wonderful superheroes to follow. But once you have them on the screen and you think about them and you get absorbed in them, all of a sudden their interests become your interests. There's no problem, you know.

One of my favorite books is Lolita by Nabakov. And the main character of that, Humbert Humbert, is a pedophile. He's a pedophile pursuing the affections of his young girl, but by the time you're 10 pages in the book, he's your guy. It's the first person to hurt if you're in this head. Part of you says, you know, this is wrong, but part of you cheers them on. And so a good storyteller can use empathy to cause you to have a connection with characters who are just awful. And I suppose that manifests itself in the real world as bias. Yes, yes.

All of this manifests itself as bias. As soon as one person steps out of a crowd and says, put yourself in my shoes, the whole world changes. And there's an experiment on research on this. So Dan Batson, this great psychologist ofathy, has a study where he tells you about a little girl and she needs an operation. And if she doesn't have an operation, then terrible things will happen to her. But there's a line up, a list, and she's low down on the list.

And it's a fair list. Other kids are ahead of her. Should you move her up? And you say, no, it's a fair list, other kids are ahead of her. Should you move her up? And you say, no, it's a fair list. But then he has a little twist. He says, try to fear what it would like to be her. Put yourself in her shoes. Now things flip. And you want to move her up to list. You know, I have a hundred people applying for a job. And I'm looking at their files, and then in one person comes up to me and says, let me tell you my story.

All of a sudden, that person, here she is, is my person. Even though the other 99 also had stories, it's just that by accident, the one who got to tell me theirs got to sway me. I think that these things are morally corrosive. I think they're very natural, but the amount of bias they incur in the world is terrible. And it sets up empathy in a very tight connection to something like racism. I mean, whose stories are you likely to hear? Whose lives are you most likely to get connected with? Well, people around you, the group, your friends, your family.

And those people are your your psychologist call your in-group. Empathy favors the in-group. But as a moral person, you might say, look, even if somebody doesn't have the good fortune to be one of my friends, or to look like like me still, that person as is much more value as anybody else. And that's what empathy misses. Hmm, it's totally removing rationality, isn't it? That's rank order of whatever it is first come first serve or people who need it the most of a group of 100. What's your end?

Did you have a look at how empathy and compassion would have been used evolutionarily by our ancestors? Did you think about that? I did. It's a very interesting question. So the idea of caring for others, some sort of compassion for others, it used to be thought that this is crazy non-Darwinian. Why would we ever have that? And there's a great puzzle for Darwin. Like, if nature is

red and tooth and claw off, the survival of the fittest, why would we ever care for another? It's actually a miracle some people said. Or other people say, we don't really care for other people. Can't, you know, just cynics all the way down. But the neoodar we need to be about really sophisticated about a hundred years ago. And then people began to make sense over time of how you could evolve caring for others. So for instance, one simple way is that if you take a sort of, once it was a genetic understanding, there's no hard and fast division between myself and my children who share half my genes and my siblings who share half my genes and my cousins and nieces and nephews and so who share different fractions of my genes.

So it behooves me from an evolutionary point of view to care about them as well to really have them matter. So that's one thing to call a kin selection. A second thing is when we're typical altruism. So suppose you and I work well together, you know, when we kill an animal that's too big for either one of us to bring back, we work together and bring it back. We do this repeatedly. We both gain from our interaction. Well, then it makes sense for me to care about you.

And so these mechanisms, which aren't infinitely broad, but specific, I think can help capture where compassion comes from. Empathy is a little bit different. Nobody really knows why we have empathy, feeling the pain, feeling the feelings of others. One theory is that it actually has to do parenting, that your connection with your young child or your young baby helps if you have a truly empathic bond. And one reason to take this seriously is that the hormones that connect up with empathy

are also involved in breastfeeding and childbirth. Okay, so empathy may be an adaptation for dealing with babies. Have you defined how empathy physiologically manifests itself in someone then? You mentioned tolerance there. There's studies of hormones. There's way in which hormones can elicit empathy and drive empathy. What's interesting is you get a dissociation with a separation from compassion. So for instance, if in some studies they raise people's empathy, but then these people become more racist. And there's no contradiction. When you raise people's empathy, you're not ratcheting up your goodness. What you're doing is you're

making a more connected to those they're connected to. Well, by the by, they'll be less connected to those. They're not connected to. There are studies, there are brain imaging studies, some lovely work done in Germany, where they get people to be empathic, put yourselves in a shoes of others, or to get people to care about others in the show very distinct neural profiles. So I think just by now, good reason to believe that empathy and compassion run on different

brain certitory are connected to hormones in different ways and are kind of separate. And this is important because if empathy and compassion were inextricably linked, then me telling you to give up on empathy would be kind of crap advice because then you also wouldn't care about people at all. So it's important for us to try and work out whether rubber meets the road between these two. It really is, it's important for us, is a more or something like me as a psychologist

understand it, but it's important for everybody to realize as they make through their, make it through their regular life, where did their moral thoughts and feelings come from? You know, if you say, oh, you know, same-sex marriage is horrible, it's a metrosity. And I say, no, it seems fine, it's perfectly fine. I think each of us should be able to look and say, well, why do we feel that way? Where's our arguments?

We should be reflected about these things. You think this is just what a sort of psychologist philosopher would say, but I think a lot of our moral instincts. Let's do this. Let's punish these people. Let's reward these people. Let's reward these people. Are based on sort of brain processes and psychological processes that if we reflect upon them, we wouldn't trust them as much. So all things that people take for granted about our nature, that as you've identified,

perhaps not even is an optimal, is detrimental or is damaging. And I think, I honestly do think that these sorts of questions, I can see how they're inflammatory, I can see how the suggestion that racism for someone who's empathic might actually be natural, that they have to work against that because immediately it's such a slippery slope with bigot at the bottom as Douglass Murray says, a bog of bigot at the bottom that you slip down to say, well racism might be natural. It's like, okay, well let's think about that. We spent the vast majority of our evolutionary history in tribes of what, 25 to 50, something like that,

absolutely terrified that there's some pathogen, one value away that's gonna infect us and kill us or a tribe that will come and take all of our food and rape all of our women. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, it's extremely, like, whether or not race isn't natural, it's kind of a fraud topic.

It depends what you think races some people think that the The modern notion of race isn't something we've had for that long but certainly Breaking the world up into us versus them And liking us and really hating to them It is natural there's there's tons of studies, including from babies, but also from young children, cross-cultural studies, computer simulations of biological evolution. If there's one thing we know, my field knows, is that a propensity to break the world up into us

versus them comes natural. So there's even these very clever studies. You get a hundred people in a room, you know, like you and me, and we all have a coin, we all flip our coin. So roughly half is head's half is tails going to different parts of the room. Then we ask, so what do you guys think your tails? What do you think of the tail group? You think we're smarter. Even putting myself aside, it so happens a tail group is smarter. The head's group, you seem to have like a bunch of dicks over there, who likes them. And even the most arbitrary ways of cutting as a part, sets up psychological mechanisms where we split the world. And you're entirely right that is natural. Now, of course, you know, it could still be terrible. And so much, it's a bizarre fallacy to say, since it's natural, it's good. I think so much of what we do in the world

with great success is we use our intelligence to sort of transcend our natural instincts. 100%. We do this physically. You know, I'm wearing contact lenses because my eyes are bad. We take antibiotics to fight infections and none of this was natural. But we also just psychologically. We also say, like for instance, we have, we say, some forms of bias are wrong, so we make him illegal and we try to work around them and so on. Some sort of vengeance, revenge, to advertise for revenge is, I think, profoundly natural.

But we say, don't have it, offload it to the cops. And a guy cuts me off, no, I can't kill him. What about something that's very natural that would be jealousy induced stealing. If you were to see someone else has something, why wouldn't you just take it? Like, well, I want that. It seems that that sort of impulse, I think, would be very natural. But you can imagine, as we all get together in society, we all sit around as a word. This is like a reconstruction of things.

And you say, you know know all that jealousy induced stealing We're better off about it And some hands go up and they say I really like it and you say to a person okay What do you like more? A world in which you get to steal from everybody else, but they get to steal from you are a world where everybody gets to keep their stuff And presumably people say Unbalanced let's all keep our stuff You know an example I use in one of my books is hitting people. Sometimes it just feels great to hit people.

I wish I could hit people. But my dislike of someone smacking me in the head is greater than the pleasure I get from hitting other people whenever I want to. So no hitting rule on sort of flat out utilitarian grounds is pretty good. Yeah, and then you have, I suppose, the social enforcement, if there's some people that are hitters and some people that aren't, and then the ones that are hitters get found out

by the ones that aren't, and then all the ones that aren't, can then say, you're one of the hitters, you're not allowed to be in our group anymore, and then it goes back to tribalism again, and we're in the them and us group. Yes, yes. I mean, so much of modern evolutionary theory and cultural evolution focuses on exactly these questions.

So as you know, you can't develop a good society without some way of punishing people who aren't good. If we're all no hitters and you run around the smack everybody you on, your life is so much better than the rest of us, so we have to have some way of putting you in your place. Maybe we punish you, maybe we shun you, and then there's complexities. For instance, suppose you do bad stuff, and so you should be punished.

But punishing is costly. What do we think about people who could punish, but don't, which she was not to? Do we punish them? And there's a recent study find that we tend to punish people who don't punish people who deserve to be punished. It's so complex, isn't it? It's so complex. One of the things that I was thinking there, again, rolling it forward to sort of the real, the real sort of worst parts of human impulses is how the development of pushing people to have consensual sex and saying that unconcentual sex is something which is absolutely not allowed because I'm going to guess that for the vast majority of our evolutionary history that that also might not have been the case,

not naturally. And all of these things, you know, when you think about it, it is, when you look at it from a first principle's perspective, it really is an interesting sort of question, a set of assumptions to look at as to why these things happen. Yeah, I mean, there's a general argument that Steve Pinker and many others have made, but Steve Pinker makes it in a strong, this form that in a lot of ways the world is beginning better and better and better and better. You think the world sucks now in many ways it does, but I would rather be, this is the best time in history. Take last, you know, last say 30 years, I think, to be an ethnic minority, to be physically disabled and mentally disabled, to be a woman,

to be a sexual, you know, to be, and a large reason why this is so is that we've been better at working out into very problems you're talking about. We're trying to understand consent. We're trying to figure out how to balance all sorts of things, but also a growing respect for people's rights and autonomy. When I was young, nobody cared about bullying. You know, just considering how kids smag each other and how we cares.

And now when my kids go to school, people just really concerned about it. They say, you know, no kid should be bullied. And I'm thinking about it and I'm like, yeah, that makes sense. It's kind of messed up. That kids like punch each other nobody minds. And similar things issues about sexual harassment and sexual assault, I think,

I think we're learning to become better to each other. Now, you know, plainly, there's a million ways in which we're crap to each other, but we're getting better, I think. We're getting better in part by smart people struggling with these questions. I suppose as well. I don't want to go down this road because I've swam down it too much recently, but I suppose

that people who take complex issues like these plant a flag in one side of the ground or the other and reduce them down to their most simplistic forms and then attach them to a Twitter bio are really, really do need to service to the development. And I do think, as I've seen, posted more recently, like within the last year to six months, concerns about where our real intellectual integrity and our real intellectual power is being placed. Recently went to go and see Douglas Murray give a talk

with Lionel Shriver, literally two days ago for the spectator. And his primary concern at the moment is that some of the best minds on the planet are spending their time thinking, including him, his most recent book, The Madness of Crowds, is about this, about socially constructed differences between gender, race, sex, sexuality. And I do wonder how much further along we might have been in 30 years. Obviously, we don't know how much more time is going to be embroiled in some of these discussions. But yeah, when you talk about some of the things that you're doing, which are really uncovering the first principles of our nature, trying to work out real hard questions

about why we are the way we are. And yet, some super smart people, Douglas, Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, Sam Harris, they get embroiled in these things. That one tweet that he sent could have been sent about something else that wasn't that. Do you get what I mean? I do, I mean, you're raising a lot of issues here. So personally, actually, I find questions of gender and sex to be absolutely fascinating and under-explored.

But I see a broader point, which is that my experience, I spent too much time on Twitter. And so much of it is people defending a land-ishly extreme positions. And then a sense of ideological purity on both sides, very strong. And then nasty attacks that don't bring us anywhere closer.

And I'm kind of an optimist of other things. I think outside of social media, there's actually some excellent discourse and progress. But for a lot of these questions about human nature, particularly questions belonging to sex, revolving around ethnicity and race, they connect very much with our identities. And so they're not abstract theoretical questions to be bad either, but maybe nor should they be because they affect people's real lives. I understand a point that Jordan Peterson was making about wanting to have freedom to

describe people as he chose. I also understand anger he got by people who felt that our identity was being belittled by somebody with a power over them. So this is not getting in one way or another, but these issues are, as you say, complicated. And to go back to what we were talking about racism, everybody I know would say, oh, well, racism, that sort of in-group out-group is just morally wrong.

That's morally atrocious. But other forms of in-group out-group division, it's the less clear. I love my children much more than I love you. More than that, I care for them. I would give them resources. Much more than I would give to you. Is this morally wrong? Well, maybe an extreme utilitarian, am I Peter Singer, might say,

well, it's kind of human nature, but we could have done better. But I'm inclined to think that some sort of in-groups, might say, well, it's kind of human nature, but we could have done better. But I'm inclined to think that some sort of in groups, like in groups of family, in groups of friendship, are actually intrinsically valuable. So I would draw a distinction between me saying, I only care, I care to most about white people. And that's kind of a crappy way to live your existence. On the other hand, if I was to say, I care the most about my family and friends,

that doesn't seem as odious. And what do you think? I agree. I think the interesting question is, where does the group of family and friends extend out to? At what point does the rubber meet the road? Yes.

And our affiliations are complicated. I think I think, you know, we all have multiple ones. I'm a Canadian. I'm Jewish. I'm a professor. I'm a man. You know, for the whole team, you have to be a hockey team. Maybe it's a hockey team in Canada, wouldn't it?

That's right. That's right. I am wearing a Toronto Blue Jace T-shirt. Nice. No, if you've got it. But we have multiple affiliations. To some extent, our harmless, I think sports teams actually just give the world more pleasure than any suffering.

And sometimes, when it comes to religion and race, they're the most serious things in the world. And to go back to it, we recognize this natural. We should never ever infer that that means it's good. But it does mean that we have to be very prepared for an uphill battle when fighting it. Do you literally combating human nature or combating what most people take to be natural? Yes. And, you know, there's different responses.

So you mentioned San Harris before. So I do think there's a powerful impulse or sediment pulses leading us to be religious. One way you do it is like San does deal with it head on. You know, don't be religious anymore. It's stupid. Do something else. Another hand or other people who say, no, we're never going to get rid of this. So let's try to make religions more reasonable, more kind, defang them a little bit, a little bit less religious,

more spiritual, tone them down. I think this guy, Aladdin Bhutan, argued it once in a talk, I saw. He's so, I have, the listeners will be familiar. I've been reading his most recent book, which might interest you an emotional education. And it is, I'll link it to you once we're done. It's absolutely fantastic. And very bizarrely, sorry to interject there. Very bizarrely, one of the things that strikes me about his writing and I went to go and see him speak in London the other week is how I said I had crippling empathy, he has world-stopping compassion. Like that guy, oh, unbelievable, that his ability to make you feel, to not only show his own vulnerability, but to make you feel like the feelings that you have or like the things that

are going on are as natural as can be. It's just a lovely, a really lovely guy. And his most recent book, anyone who's listening that needs something that's an easy read, but something that's nice and reflective and emotional education linked in the show notes below, along with all of Professor Bloom's books, of course. Of course. But when you've done all my books, go check out that one. Yeah, for sure.

So one question actually that I've been thinking, have you considered why we still love people who have passed away? It's a question that got brought up in interstellar. Actually, if you really sort of listen, it's a tiny, it's like two lines, three lines long in this tiny little bit and they're talking about one of the astronauts is saying, I know this person is alive, they're saying, should we make the rational utilitarian choice about what we do with the mission or should we do this other one? And they're talking, referencing a tiny little bit of evolutionary psychology and a few of the little bits and pieces.

And one of the things that she brings up is, why is it that we love people that have passed away? I wonder whether you'd consider that. Such a good question. I was talking to my partner other day, and we were talking if she were to die. And I said, someway, why would I have loved you? And she called me and said, why do past tense want you still love me? Well, you don't exist anymore.

Can you continue to have feelings for somebody that doesn't exist anymore? I don't believe in life after death. So it should really literally be gone. Maybe a kind of saccharine response, but one that might be true, which is if you know somebody well enough, in a non-trivial sense, they continue to live with you. They live inside your head. It's not merely passive memories. It's a way in which they view the world around you. You often see this in bad TV shows and movies, which I watch a lot of them where our guy ends up talking to his departed wife, and like that. But I think to some extent they continue to live with us. But I haven't thought of that deeper than that. That's a good question.

It's a little bit like the character in your book, right? You extrapolate out from that character, this person who doesn't exist, who actually never existed. But they live inside of your head, right? You think about what they would have done or could have done or should have done if they were in the situation that you're in. Yeah, it's a little bit like that. Yeah, yeah, we, you know, our heads are populated with all sorts of people. We, you know, our heads are populated with all sorts of people. And, and, you know, I, I, I, I understand this is not universal, but I do spend a terrible amount of time having conversations in my head with people I know, people I want to, you know, if I, if I'm experiencing something and I want to tell somebody that in a future, I'll sort of be narrating it

as I'm having it. So, so yeah, our heads are very crowded. I agree. Moving on to what you're working on now. At some point within the next two years, there will probably be a new Paul Bloomberg out. Yes. What can you tell us about it? It's title may be the pleasures of suffering, it may be a sweet spot and a helpful subtitle like suffering, pleasure, and the good life. And it will be about why we are drawn towards suffering. And it will look at it at two levels.

One level is the pleasures we get from certain forms of suffering. It's one of the things, it's all the mundane things. We eat spicy foods that burn our mouths. We like saunas and hot bass and roller coaster rides. Halloween's coming. And people are going to go to haunted houses to have the terrified to be scared. Some people engage in consensual sex involving some degree

of pain and degradation, humiliation. Where do all those appetites come from? They're so paradoxical. There's not a huge puzzle to go back to sort of things that are explained. Somebody would look at you funny, you say, I wonder why people like ice cream. And they'd say, well, dude, ice cream is delicious. Okay, it's not. The details need to be worked out, but that makes sense.

But then you ask, you know, why do people like eating spicy food so hot, it makes them soaked with sweat and they're crying? Some people do. It's half the book. The other half of the book is sort of asking a broader question, which is, what do we want at a life? And I want to argue, it's not just pleasure or even happiness. It's a deep performer meaning or purpose. And for that, suffering arises again because we know we're living a meaningful life when we're suffering to some extent. Any project, any, because any project of any value requires effort.

It requires the possibility of failure. It requires difficulty, often conflict, often anxiety. You know, having kids is the pure example of this, which is, you've got to be an idiot. Everybody knows. If you're going to have kids, it's going to be tough. But this toughness is tied in so tightly with its reward. If you told me about something you did and you said, it was easy peasy. No pain at all, no suffering at all.

I would guarantee you, you're not going to take much value from it. How hard could it have been? How significant could it have been? How significant could it have been? So I think meaningful, difficult life pursuits will require suffering. It's wrapped in a very notion of difficulty. I think there's some really broad implications for how people live their lives there, talking about overcoming obstacles and suffering. Certainly, I know for me that when my life gets too comfortable, that's the only time that a little

existential sort of take at the back of my head starts to appear. But when I'm constantly working on something that is both challenging and worthwhile. That really doesn't occur. Yeah, that's one aspect of what I'm interested in. So this guy, Mehally, took sent me Hy E, developed the concept of flow, which is what you're alluding to. And a flow state is when you're just really into something, and it's just perfect, it's just right. If it's too easy, it's boring. It's just fun, it's boring, whatever. Like watching TV, watching bad TV.

But if it's too difficult, it's frustrating. And you just sick of it. Flow state, it's just a goalie lock state right in between where if you do it right, you lose track of time. You struggle, the level of difficulty is such. It captures you and it captures your consciousness. People in these states say, you know, you go for a long time, you're working on your book or some project, and then you forget to eat.

You forget to eat, you lose track of whomever, you don't sleep, whatever. And that's sort of, that's one aspect of what I'm talking about. But you don't have that unless you have difficulty. Because that needs to be a challenge. It needs to be a challenge, that's right. I'm trying to relate that to people that like to get spanked with leather things during sex and wear reticulate outfits. I wanna see, I wanna hear the flow states for BDSM.

I was going to say sufferers there, but it's not as BDSM fans. Well, I'll make the connection for you, actually. I think that I cannot wait to hear that. They're not going to be quite the same story, but here's a connection. It's not my own, it's by the psychologist for a Valmeister, which is one thing that really what goes on with BDSM is that it will liberates you from your consciousness. So if you're like

a lot of people, I'll speak for myself, I'll speak for you, but I've been in my head all the time. My kind of, my anxieties, my nerves, my self-talk, my memories, my responsibilities, things I'm ashamed of, things, all of the stuff is in my head. One way to empty your head of all of this is to get really good at meditation. And maybe after 10 years of meditative practice, you can empty out that head of yours for a while.

But here's a way somebody could do it really quickly. They could slap you in the face really hard. Now you're not gonna like being slapped in the face, but I'll tell you, when that slap hits for a second afterwards, your head is clear. There's this great quote by Adam and Atrex saying, nothing captures one's attention more than a whip. So the idea is, a B-1 theory, B-D-S-M,

is that, or the physical level, sometimes it's at the psychological level, it's an escape from yourself. It's in some way, It's the opposite of meditation. Meditation, you sit, you've been, you know, you're stuck in your head, observing and trying to deal with it and like that. The BDSM, along with things like intense exercise, some drug experiences. Extreme sports? Extreme sports, yeah.

You know, I'm not a big martial arts guy, but the first time I ever did Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, I'm there rolling with somebody the first time in my life. And this goes on for a while, and I'm like, you know, I'm no good at it, but just, you know, getting twisted and depressing by a guy. And, but I realized afterwards that during that, I don't know, three minutes, five minutes, I thought of nothing else. I thought my head was clear. And that's, I understand, this won't be DSM to do for you. There's not many situations now, you know, to the listeners that tuned in at the moment.

Think about the last time that you didn't have any thoughts other than the one thing that you were doing, or other than any one thing, for more than about 30 seconds. Yeah. If you held a gun to my head right now and told me when that was, I'd have to do a fair bit of work. And so if you're ever fortunate enough to get mud, there you go, maybe you'll have that. Something, now, obviously, there's bad sides to being mud. But, but- It's a wonderful, wonderful,

meditative practice though of being mud. But the one good side is, during that period, you're in the moment. And that moment of the slap. Now, there's all other things going on. And this is the case, your mileage really made very, but I did some rock climbing. Again, I'm not sure my son is this area,

it's rock climber, I'm awful at it, but it's the same thing. The mixture of fear, the need to solve a problem, the physicality, at all. You're not thinking of anything else. But you don't have that, unless you have a task that's powerful enough to take away from your consciousness to devote your entire focus. One way to do that is to extreme difficulty. Another way to do that is to extreme pain. And that's what they have in common.

I tell you what, I did not think that you were going to be able to draw those two together, but you managed to do it. Oh, thank you. Yeah, again, going back to the extreme physical exercise thing, I'm CrossFit myself, I have a lot of friends that do it and the place that I see My athletes that my friends put themselves into on a weekly basis a daily basis in the gym As Jordan who's the owner of the the gym that we have and It's a yearly ritual that the final workout of the open which tends to be a very particular kind of time domain a power endurance workout which is like a sort of a 2k rowish kind of area maybe a 7 to 10 minute or 5 to 10 minute just go full go and every single year there's a it's almost like a metamine now about the fact he's straight outside to go and throw up in the drain.

almost like a metamine now about the fact he's straight outside to go and throw up in the drain, but he does it every single year, he'll go and do it. And this guy is able to choose to put himself in that place in front of a crowd of people who all know that he's going to throw up and he knows that he's going to throw up and he doesn't do it any other time. And it's this workout and he just think, why? But I know why. I know why. And that's one of the situations I can say when when you haven't got anything left There is there is something that's oddly so satisfying about that So have you looked again to ask the same question? Have you looked? Evolutionarily why why that's the case

The evolutionary benefit that kind of thing I have looked I have not really that close to finding an answer. I'm excited to be the find one. I think that would be fantastic. It's a great question. I mean, there's something else going on in the suffering that your story is bringing up, which is sometimes it's social. So sometimes it's social in that. You're signaling something about yourself.

Your friend is signaling that he could put in Oli has. That's going to be proud of. It's not a bad thing to show your friends too. You can be settling your courage, your endurance, your piety. There's always religious rituals involving showing suffering. It's meant to show your subservience to God, your love of your fellow ethnic group, your fellow religious group. So suffering that's there are many purposes. The Puritan work ethic, I suppose, like that. Exactly. Exactly.

Yeah, well, you see that as well in the hustle and grind culture of young entrepreneurs now, right? The sort of Gary Vaynerchuk approach of sleeping five hours a night. And when you want to succeed as much as you want to breathe, a lot of that's signaling. A lot of it's signaling. And then of course, there's, I imagine, in these communities, there's always a counter-signal of somebody who says, you know, look, yeah, I just got nine hours of sleep. I'm going to work at that and I'm going to go for a walk in the park. And what they're saying is, I am so good.

I don't need, you know, it's basically the equivalent of the young.com guy going to him eating, you know, wearing a hoodie and sweatpants, which is, you guys have to wear suits to save no girl off and everything. I am. And, you know, there's no such thing as not giving a shit. There's just signaling you don't go shit. That is that is a fantastic quote. There's no such thing as giving a shit.

There is just signaling that you don't give a shit. Exactly. I'm going to, I'm going to use that. Yeah. You know what I think increasingly about as I spend time speaking to guys like yourself and Robin Hanson from elephant in the brain and Rick Hanson and a lot of these people who think about William Von Hippell, guys, it's really do think about sort of why we come from that and Robert Green was on recently and this and the other. Increasingly

now, and I wonder whether this is the same for you, understanding people's motivations with at least a little bit more nuance than I do, probably a massive amount more understanding than I do. I see people sometimes like WWE characters, you know, like they've got this persona that they're playing and this is the brand that they've attached their flag to. And when you draw it back, you can see the lineage of why that happened. That, oh, well, this fits my particular ethnic group, body shape, background, working class, whatever it might be. Do you find yourself becoming sort of fascinated with the people that you meet and trying to learn the backstory and stuff like that, do you try and apply a lot of the things that you learn to the people that you meet? I'm really interested in the people I meet and building what you're saying. I think

on social media, there's a sort of narrowing down, a stripping down of people's characters. So people are always, always, without exception, much more interesting in person than they are in social media. It's not the same for writers, actually. I've been a left writer, so I admire, and I kind of wish I never met the writer. I like the books better. The books are sophisticated, gorgeous world view,

and you meet the writer, and he's kind of a schmo like you. Like like me, I mean, I like both of us. Like both of us, perhaps. But yeah, there I think Robin Hansen is right about how pervasive signaling is. I think he's wrong with saying, and that's all there is, which he often says, I think that, but he's right to think that there's a backdrop in everything we do online and in person where we're not only doing it, we're also saying, and this is me doing it. I'm the guy who does it. So I tell you, oh, Brexit frightens me, and I'm telling you, Brexit frightens me. I want you telling you, Brexit frightens me. I want you to know it. But I'm also sitting, I am the kind of guy who

would say Brexit frightens me. And there's that work. And for both those of us who are psychologically healthy, and only the mentally ill or toddlers don't do this, we're social beings. So we are sensitive to how we portray ourselves. And you're right, I think that because it is, there's often a forceful oversimplification. One of the, you know, I've, I've had to experience

many times of getting an argument with somebody online or something and thinking, what a dope. And then you meet them and they're first smart and you would have expected and their far more nuanced. And you know, it's and sometimes they're false. Sometimes people's what they produce the signal is the sort of dopeiness, the service of some other goal they want to appear to be true believers or morally pure or so on. You know, you go back to the moral thing, which is, you, you, you tend to get stuck on the thing that everybody else has to sort of set conventional moral views of a sort, whatever your community is. My community is pretty liberal.

So everybody has the same sort of liberal views. But you meet somebody close up and you become friends with them. And sooner or later, everybody has at least one way in which germ morality isn't what you'd expect. You know, they're extremely right-wing. But yeah, they're very pro-trans. I was talking to you, I think they're trans, you know, they're extreme lefties, but they hate unions.

And you know, you find this, and it's always interesting. And you know, you find this and it's always interesting. Again, that lack of nuance in conversation is not allowing people to be, take their ideologies or their worldviews piecemeal that you need to swallow it wholesale. That's right. And that's a shame. But nuance is some extent, isn't something that you could display in front of a largely unfriendly crowd. And if you have any, if people are looking at you in social media, a lot of them are looking just to want you fail, and embarrass yourself and contradict yourself and perform some sort of heresy.

And so it's not the best time to fly your nuance. You know, you're better, better in the presence of friends of people who you trust. Yeah, because nuance to a crowd, which is not on your side, will probably come across like a lack of conviction. That's right. That's right. A lack of conviction in coherence. Even saying, I don't know, to an unfriendly crowd is risky. Apologies, by the way, are famously risky, which is, you know, everybody says to politicians, really, apologize, apologize, apologize, and then when they do apologize for ruster of life, they said, oh, he admitted he was wrong. I was in the board. You can't do right for doing wrong there.

Yeah. I wonder whether, because it's a cliche now, to say long form conversations are missed, this is the reason for the podcasting platform taking this growth, because there is a hunger out there for people who want, but I do wonder whether it's less about the long form conversation and more to do with the fact that it is a open battleground to discuss ideas without an

audience which is there immediately giving you feedback, which immediately biases you towards saving things that might get a laugh or get a whatever, because you're still going to have want that at least a little bit from the other person, you're going to want to say things that make you sound x, y, z to the other person. But I wonder whether these the increasing popularity of these sorts of conversations online is something to do with the fact that it is this nice petri dish environment to have a discussion where new ones can be discussed in a way. I never thought about that, but I think you're right.

I think you're right. I think one of the appeals of a podcast is just listening to a conversation where ideas could be sketched out. And as you know, podcasts come in different flavors. There's sort of a straight interview sometimes where somebody, as a word, has a list of 50 questions in front of them, and they try not to be too obvious as they look down

and they do that and like that. But then it's doing what we, you and I, are doing, we're just talking. And when done right, I think that's very powerful. I agree. The topic itself might be interesting, but I think you're right that more generally, it gives me kind of a warm feeling to hear people talk about interesting ideas. This is how we should be doing these things. I think so. And I think as well, as you

said there, as everyone's seen online, right? Like Douglas Murray has this line where he says, people can lose their careers for saying the thing, for not saying the thing that nobody said until yesterday. And yes, the problem with that is that in a sample size that's only 30 second segments, perhaps on the news or that's whatever it is now, 300 characters or something that's on Twitter. It's very easy to take things out of context. Now, that's not to say that I've had clips from this podcast that get taken out of context, but when you spread it across the sample of a one hour conversation, someone can say something that's wrong or that isn't fully formed and then the other person might press them on it and then that allows them to, you know, I mean,

it's less. The peaks and troughs are more spread out. Yeah, yeah, yeah, this is what that's, I agree with that. It's another reason why podcasts of roughly this length seem like a good idea. Speaking of which, that's a round about the length that's right. So, Professor Bloom, let us crack on and I will let the listeners have a look at some of your work, which will be linked in the show notes below. If they want to hassle you online and send you tweets at 300 300 characters long-washed, where should they head? It's a Paul Bloom at Yale.

Cool. And is there a website or a blog that you that you have at the moment? Now you're going to find my faculty website, but I don't I don't want to blog or anything like that. Cool. Well Twitter now can be that right? Twitter is kind of that. Yeah, that's right. Exactly. Hey, thanks for having me on. This was great. It was so much fun. I can't wait. I know you've got, as you mentioned before we started, you have some some chaos occurring in on your side of the pond from like November 2020. But yeah, I really, as soon as you've got the next book out, I'd absolutely love to have a discussion. I'm sure the audience will be through it as well. That would be terrific. I'll be back.

Amazing. Thank you very much to the listeners. If you enjoyed the episode, you know what to do. Like, share and subscribe down below. Links to, against empathy, how pleasure works. All of Professor Bloom's socials and everything else we've spoken about will be in the show notes below. But for now, thank you very much.