Modern Wisdom - #338 - Robert Wright - Psychology, Aliens & Averting The Apocalypse

Episode Date: June 24, 2021

Robert Wright is President of the Nonzero Foundation, an author and Visiting Professor of Science and Religion at Union Theological Seminary in New York. Bob's book The Moral Animal has changed my thinking more than pretty much any other over the last few years, so naturally I wanted to bring him on to discuss whether aliens are real and how we can avoid existential risks. For real though, expect to learn the role that evolutionary psychology plays in mindfulness practice, why Bob thinks that aliens are probably enlightened, how global coordination can be improved by everyone meditating, whether we're doomed for civilisational collapse and much more... Sponsors: Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours at https://www.drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 83% discount & 3 months free from Surfshark VPN at https://surfshark.deals/MODERNWISDOM (use code MODERNWISDOM) Extra Stuff: Follow Robert on Substack - https://nonzero.substack.com/ Follow Robert on Twitter - https://twitter.com/robertwrighter  Buy The Moral Animal - https://amzn.to/2Sco8Vd  Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/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

What's happening people, welcome back to the show, my guest today is Robert Wright, he's the president of the Non-Zero Foundation, an author and visiting professor of science from religion at Union Theological Seminary in New York. Bob's book The Moral Animal has changed my thinking more than pretty much any other over the last few years. So, naturally, I wanted to bring him on to discuss whether aliens are real and how we can avoid existential risks. But for real though, expect to learn the role that evolutionary psychology plays in mindfulness practice. Why Bob thinks that aliens are probably enlightened, how global coordination can be improved by

everyone meditating, whether we're doomed for civilizational collapse, and much more. Bob's been talking to some of the intellectual powerhouses from the last few decades since he's been on the internet and he's got a wealth of experience. If you're not familiar with him, then I highly recommend that you check out the moral animal. It really is a barn burner of a book and it will make you view the world in a very different sort of way. But today was just a bro chat amongst bros, broing it out, you know, just doing what bros do. So yeah, enjoy this one. In Apple podcasts related catastrophic news, they have managed to set anyone who already subscribes to modern wisdom to automatically have episode set oldest to newest,

rather than newest to oldest. So if this is you or this might have happened on a different show as well, open up the modern wisdom show page in your Apple podcasts app. There's three dots in the top right hand corner, press that, press settings and then go newest to oldest, rather than oldest to newest because for no reason on earth would anyone choose to listen to an episode from three and a half years ago just on a whim, Apple podcasts there making my life increasingly difficult on a weekly basis. But yes, that is how you fix it. If you want to do it and if you haven't found out that you've hit subscribe, there's a plus button just at the top there.

Gun, give that little tap for me. I thank you. But now, it's time to talk aliens with Robert Wright. Bob Wright, welcome to the show. Well, thanks for having me. My pleasure. How do you go from working on evolutionary psychology to mindfulness, to politics and the end of the world? I don't know, they seem closely interconnected in my mind at least.

Well, as for evolutionary psychology and mindfulness, that's actually kind of straightforward, I think. I mean, I, my view of Buddhism, or at least of kind of Buddhist meditative practice and kind of the Buddhist prescription for dealing with a human predicament, is that it's actually a pretty smart response to the problem posed by human nature, to the way we naturally view things, process information, feel things, and human nature is a product of evolution. I mean,

evolutionary psychology is about human nature. So, you know, for example, mindfulness can deal with anxiety. And so the question arises is, why is there anxiety to begin with? The answer seems to be we're engineered by natural selection to feel it under certain circumstances. But that doesn't mean that it's always good for us. And mindfulness gives us a way of dealing mindfulness gives us a way of dealing with anxiety and a number of other kind of problems with being human. The end of the world stuff, I mean, you're right, my latest obsession is this thing I call the Apocalypse a Version project. That's long been a concern of mine. It's certainly related to human nature in the sense that I think our evolved psychology is in some ways an obstacle to forming the kind of global community. I think we need to form to solve the world's problems before they get out of hand. And I'm specifically thinking of what is sometimes

called the psychology of tribalism. That is those parts of our evolved psychology that can lead us into pointless and counterproductive arguments and hostilities. This psychology tends to involve cognitive biases and you might say a kind of warped perception of the world. And so, you know, if that indeed, if this psychology is one thing standing in the way of solving the world's problems, then you can see how mindfulness comes back into the picture. It might help us get our minds in a position

where we're better equipped to help the civilization survive. So avoiding the apocalypse, is that a global coordination problem? Is that an individual responsibility? I would say it's both. I mean, you know, I wrote a book a while ago called Non-Zero. That was a reference to game theory. A non-zero-sum problem is a problem where or a game, non-zero-sum game is a game where

there can be a win-win or a lose-lose outcome. Doesn't have to be a win-lose outcome. And one thing I said near the end of that is that the world, you know, more and more nations face non-zero-some challenges. That is to say problems where they can both come out ahead or many nations can together come out ahead like avoiding nuclear war. That's a good example. Nuclear weapons create a radically non-zero-some situation. Nuclear war would be bad for everybody and avoiding it is good for everybody.

And I was just saying there are more and more problems like this. Climate change is one, various environmental problems like overfishing the seas, various arms control problems, bio weapons. So on the one hand, yes, it's a political challenge that nations could cooperate to address, but on the other hand, there is a dimension of individual psychology because if you ask, well, why aren't nations, in some cases, getting along well enough to cooperate? Sometimes at least, I think the answer is, you know, the human psychology. I wouldn't say it's necessarily kind of the fault of a bunch of individual Americans say that they're not on better terms of various nations, but it is true that that individual psychology makes us susceptible to politicians who want to manipulate us and make us feel more fear of another nation than maybe is warranted and things like that.

So, yeah, I see it as both in answer to that question. It's a grassroots problem of individual psychology. And I'd like to think of ways to get people more mobilized, to address the problem at the individual level with an eye to the global goal. And one asset in that regard, I mean, one way to get people interested in this is that I do think that addressing

the psychological obstacles to global cooperation is also a way to become a happier person. I think these are, we're not, you know, I don't think we're made happy when we are whipped up into a state of like tribalistic frenzy, you know, and go on social media and find people to hate. I mean, there is a sense in which that must be gratifying or we wouldn't

do it, maybe, but I think in the long run, you know, we can be happier and more deeply happy if we avoid some of these pitfalls. So what is good for humanity in the civilization-wide potential of us as a species is also enjoyable in the process of getting to it for the individual agents as well? I really think so. I mean, I really think that if you just follow mindfulness for the purpose of kind of therapy. If I become a little less anxious, maybe a little more stable,

a little more appreciative of the beauty in the world and of other people, I think you will wind up becoming a better citizen. And without even trying necessarily, I just think it'll be harder for politicians to whip you up into a state of hatred. You'll be a little less inclined to fall for bait on social media and contribute to kind of the tribalism problem by sharing things, retweeting things, without really examining the consequences of that.

So, yeah, I do think that's the good news that self-help and kind of helping the world can coincide. I mean, stepping into that mindfulness gap, if you've spent a bit of time doing meditation, one of the coolest things is observing an emotion arise inside of you, and sometimes they're negative emotions, right? And sometimes they're triggered by some idiot on the other side of the internet. And sometimes the idiot is you for watching something that you know that you shouldn't have watched or reading something you know you shouldn't have read. But yeah, it's everything can be a method to exercise in that regard. Yeah, absolutely. And I encourage people. People think of mindfulness, some people do, as something that happens during meditation

or at least that you have to meditate rigorously to cultivate. And I do encourage people to try meditation and to keep meditating. But you can also just try to be mindful even if you've never meditated in various ways. You can, for example, if you're feeling sad and would rather not feel sad, or at least would not rather not suffer from sadness, just sit down, close your eyes, and examine the feeling. Just ask yourself, like, where exactly in my head and body is the feeling of sadness? And just examine the contours. And you'll probably find that some of the suffering has gone out of it in the process

of you're examining it. And I would also encourage people to experiment on social media, even if they've never met a day. Just next time you're about to retweet something or about to reply to somebody who annoys you or about to do anything on social media, just like stop and close your eyes and examine the feeling you're feeling that is motivating you to do that. You know, we do things because of feelings. Feelings are the great motivators. Thoughts are involved in the process, but generally speaking, when we are motivated to do something,

there is a feeling, however subtle driving us to do that. And I'd encourage people, yeah, on social media, just at any point in life, just stop, close your eyes, examine the feeling. It's just kind of interesting.

Whatever feeling, good, bad, whatever. It's just good practice. And sometimes it can keep you out of trouble. One of the things I've been thinking about a lot recently is whether or not another alien civilization could be any more emotional than we are or quick to emotion. And one of the things that I've come to believe is they couldn't be, because if you were to turn up our emotionality by 10 or 20%, I think that coordination would be so difficult that you wouldn't actually be able to achieve very much. So given the fact that we're trying to overt an apocalypse, we're hopefully going to fulfill our civilizational potential and become multi-planetary space-faring type 3 cardichev civilizations.

Is there a potential that our emotional set point is a glass ceiling which it's a sycophian task to try and get past with regards to mindfulness? You would need everybody to be dedicating 10,000 hours of their life simply to be able to get to the point where we could coordinate sufficiently well to reach our potential. Are we too emotional to be the civilization that we want to be? Well, it's a great opportunity to plug my newsletter, the non-serial newsletter, because the issue I sent out last night, I think this one went out only to pay and subscribers, but the, was about UFOs and because, you know, they've gotten a lot of attention lately. The US government is

going to publish its big report on UFOs within a few weeks, apparently, and there's a big 16 minutes on them. And I made the argument that you shouldn't worry that they may be extra the argument that you shouldn't worry that they may be extra-terrestrial. I mean, I have no idea if they are not. I'm not like a UFO guy, but you shouldn't worry that, oh, no, maybe they're extraterrestrials. In fact, in a certain sense, you should hope that they are. And the reasoning I gave is, is, is, I think pretty aligned, if I understand you correctly, what you're saying. I mean, I said, well, this, this, this, I can use a little background. Maybe you, you may have heard of the Fermi Paradox, the idea that, you know, wait a second, in principle, there are so many planets out there that could have

life. If you ask, just in our galaxy, the Milky Way Galaxy, which is one of a million galaxies, how many planets are there that seem to be in the Goldilocks zone that is neither too hot nor too cold for life? The current estimate is like 20 billion or something, or more, probably more. And so if you assume that well, on some of, you know, so probably a lot of them, you know, fair number of those, probably have water. And so if life is the kind of thing that arises when circumstances are conducive given long enough,

and by the way, a lot of these planets are way older than ours, so there's been a lot of time. If you assume that life kind of tends to start, and that evolution has a decent chance, at least a producing intelligent life and that intelligent life tends to launch technological evolution, you know, pretty soon you find yourself asking, well, why haven't we been contacted by aliens? Because you'd think there would be some out there that are like millennia ahead of us

in terms of technological evolution. And so, challenging as it is to communicate from another solar system or even travel from another solar system, you'd think there would be some that would solve the problem and so on. So, that's the Fermi paradox. And, you know, if there are so many opportunities for an advanced civilization to develop in our galaxy and the universe more broadly. Why haven't we heard from that's the paradox.

One answer you get is, well, maybe when civilizations get to our level, that is, they have the technology that they could use to bind themselves into a planetary community, solve any problems they need to solve, or they could blow the whole thing solve, or they can blow the whole thing up, maybe they blow the whole thing up. That's a common answer to the question posed by the Fermi paradox. And so I said two things. First of all, you might hope that there are extraterrestrials showing up just so that you'll know like it's doable. I mean, they've got passed the great filter. That's also can also get past this so called this one variant of the so-called

great filter. The other the other thing I said is I would guess that if they did get past the great filter, they're probably morally enlightened enough that they're not going to just like torture us or eat us, right? Because, you know, again, my view is that if planet Earth is going to get past the current crossroads, then people broadly are going to have to really make, in a certain sense, more moral progress. They're going to have to overcome some of their tendency to be just gratuitously and harshly judgmental of other people and kind of come up with reasons to hate other groups and stuff. And so, you know, I think if there's a civilization that's gotten beyond this threshold that we

are maybe stuck at and surmounted the challenge, I would suspect that they're probably closer to moral enlightenment than we are and not inclined to gratuitously inflict suffering on other sentient beings. That would be my guess. Well, that actually rolls forward from my proposal. My proposal is that most civilizations couldn't be more emotional than us because they would struggle with global coordination. If I'm saying that I think we're somewhere near the ceiling of that,

you have to presume that, well, I don't know if less emotionality would be akin to more enlightenment. I'm not really too sure about that. I don't know how those two map onto each other, but they shouldn't be at least more tribal than us, or else how the fuck have they managed to colonize the galaxy and get over here at the very least? Right. They would have to be less tribal, I think. I mean, you can imagine scenarios where they consolidate planetary order without becoming less tribal.

It seems to me unlikely. Totalitarianism, perhaps, or some sort of technocracy overlord. It tends to be an unstable thing. I mean, as for whether you're talking about kind of level of emotionality, in a certain sense, I would agree. I mean, I would say when you become mindful, yes, there's a sense in which you're becoming less emotional. But, you know, people, mindfulness practitioners and teachers want to be very careful with the language here. It sense in which you're becoming less emotional, but you know people mindfulness practitioners and teachers Want to be very careful with the language here. It's not like your feelings are going away

It's that you are less slavishly obedient to that identify with them right? You're better at not identifying with them when it's not your interest to do that and So I think if you presumed that the emotionality being higher made not identifying with them more difficult though, that should end up a similar sort of imagine just of doing the emotions and that having

somewhat the same effect. I'm just saying it's not exactly I understand. It's not exactly, I think it's not exactly the same as mindfulness. You know, it's of course the little thing I just said about the Fermi paradox and might take on it, there are all kinds of assumptions underlying my analysis and some of them are hard to And some of them are hard to kind of get a grip on, like, you know, well, would any speech, and it would any technologically advanced species be prone to tribalism in the first place? In other words, would that be something it had to overcome?

I think you could argue that there are reasons to think maybe so, given the way natural selection works. I think there are reasons to think maybe so, but I would just acknowledge that that's an example of something I'm kind of assuming when that really examining. Mm, yeah, I think, I'm not sure, obviously the next couple of months are potentially going to be some of the most revelatory in human history,

it depending on what gets released from these files. But to me, it seems unlikely that they're living beings, unless they've got some underwater station perhaps, but what would make most sense would probably be, I mean, what do you do when you've got in the Antarctic and you're just doing observations? Observation posts tend to have some sort of technological component that's able to do the observation on your behalf. You have cameras, you have sensors, you have sun and so forth. You know, why not just make a base down at the bottom of the sea bed. It's far less likely the fish aren't going to bother you. Perhaps you're able to capture some sort of geothermal energy that can keep you taking over or based on what these tick-tax

videos are showing. It looks like you probably don't even need that. You can just bend spacetime around you, so who needs energy? Yeah, it's an interesting one. It's going to be a fascinating period, but I mean, God, this kind of, if it's not something from Earth, there's so many fields that get upended a little bit. Yeah, I'd be pretty freaky. I mean, the report has been leaked to the New York Times or at least selectively. The officials who leaked it wanted to get some messages out. And what the New York Times said is they don't find strong evidence that these are extraterrestrials. On the other hand, they are puzzled by the properties that some of these apparent, if these are indeed flying objects,

they seem to possess capabilities that we don't have. And, you know, I honestly don't know, I'll be curious to look at the report itself. But as for the question, you ask, I mean, there's a couple of things. First of all, you might say, well, given the fact that a civilization would presumably develop the capacity to communicate with us from a distance before it would develop the capacity to actually get here, which isn't an easy thing to do from like 10,000 light-years away. Then, although some solar systems are much closer than that, but wouldn't you expect that

that would be the first sign that you'd be getting these radio waves? That's one question. The other question, maybe more closely related to the one you asked, is, you know, these, this kind of a couple of pretty interesting sightings that I'm aware of. The most interesting thing seemed to be the, on the one hand, the eyewitness testimony of this David Fraver guy, the pilot off of San Diego, because there were three eyewitnesses in two planes, right? I mean, there was one of his, there was a woman who was a fight who was flying the plane above

him. And she, so she watched what he did from a distance. He, meanwhile, went down and engaged what he says was an aircraft. And so, and you've got two people in each plane. And for the first time, I'm aware of, we actually heard from this woman on 60 minutes the other day. So, that seems to be intrinsically interesting when you listen to their testimony. And there are kind of remote kinds of corroboration of that. I mean, there was a, they were originally dispatched there by a cruiser, I think it was a cruiser, Navy ship that

had seen these things on its radar that wanted to investigate. But they did not get anything on camera from there plane during that sighting. A plane came later that day, I think a plane went out and saw something that might be something and that's the flair video, you know, infrared video. The other interesting sighting is apparently these things just persisted for months in like the one I just described just 2004. These other ones were like, I think around 2014. And they were off the East Coast of the United States. And those are the videos where it's like people are going, whoa, you know, and the, those

are two other videos. And so I've asked myself, looking at those like, okay, so suppose these are extraterrestrials, I've asked myself the question, you've asked like, well, for some why are they exposing themselves like this? And I guess one thought could be like, they didn't realize they were that visible because the Navy never released the videos, you know, I don't know. I mean, but it is puzzling and it may be reason to think there's less here than meets the eye. I don't know, but I don't, I mean, maybe that's a better answer to the San Diego one.

Because there was only one sighting that craft seemed to have the ability to maybe even submerge in the ocean at a minimum, hover above it. And that's the only sighting of that kind. So maybe that's a case where like, okay, it got seen once, and then it's like, then they change their program, right? You like, I don't know. It's fun to speculate about this stuff, but have you gotten very deeply into this stuff? I've watched the Joroganan episodes with Commander David Fraver

and I've seen a bunch of other videos on the internet and I mean, Joe's balls deep in this stuff. So he's actually a pretty good sort of one-stop shop in terms of a resource for it. But yeah, you're right. It's a very unceremonial, if this is aliens, it's like the least ceremonial way that he'd no landing on the White House lawn just right

Dicking about in the Pacific and the Atlantic Ocean Yeah, and you would think if they're advanced enough to get here I mean we're talking about advanced technology if they could get here from another source system You would think you would think that it wouldn't take them terribly long to decode our communication and be able to communicate with us and At that point like why wouldn't they I guess if they think of us as this interesting experiment They just want to watch I don't know but You know it's it's You know, it's, it's, you know, I've walked, watched debunking videos and I am totally agnostic on the question of whether there's anything here at all.

I just, I just don't know. It's just that it's fun to speculate. And when you hear some of these people like Fraver and that other pilot talk together, you think, hmm, pretty weird. And it's compelling because you have these multiple viewpoints, Mark. Yeah, it's an interesting one, man. Going back to what you were talking about at the beginning, which is this relationship between evolutionary psychology and mindfulness or Buddhism, is how much of a place is there for an evolutionary psychology insight from the individual if they are a mindfulness practitioner or just if they want to live a peaceful life, because I have my biases with regards

to this particular worldview, but what are your thoughts? You mean the worldview of evolutionary psychology, or the fact that, in my opinion, mindfulness, without an insight into evolutionary psychology, at least a shallow one, and a little bit of an understanding of how cognitive biases work. I don't think that you're getting the full picture

because for me, I want to ask the question, why? Why is it like that? Why does this affect me in this way? And that's when you need the adaptive explanation. Right. You know, obviously for centuries and centuries and centuries, meditators have gotten something out of meditation, including mindfulness meditation, without having evolutionary psychology.

Since we've only known about natural selection for about a century and a half. So it can have benefits and it can have profound ones. There are people who, I'm sure, have gotten to great, great depths, greater depths than I've gotten to who lived centuries ago and got their via mindfulness meditation. At the same time, I have found, since writing my book about Buddhism, why Buddhism is true, that a number of people respond by saying it is helpful to their practice to understand where these feelings come from in the first place, like why they're here, why do humans have anxiety? Why to look at a more generic problem that's confronted head on by Buddhism? Why are we so hard to satisfy? Why is it that you know you have that one donut, you wait a while, you want another one. You know, it's like whatever it is, that next promotion, the latest material acquisition,

your new gimmick that brings you gratification for a few days, sex, whatever gratification tends to be fleeting. And this is, you know, this is just the fundamental problem that Buddhism confronted from the get-go. The fact that we seem to be driven by these thirsts, they can never be satisfied for very long. In fact, the term duke, the famous phrase life is suffering, which actually the Buddha never quite exactly said in so many words. But anyway, he did say life is pretty full of suffering.

And the word that's translated as suffering is Dukka. And some people think you could also translate that as unsatisfactoriness, that in any event, it would have had that connotation in the Buddha's day that the problem with life is that we keep wanting more, right? There's always this restless feeling of more. And I don't plan to ever completely prevail over that. I don't even really want to. I mean, you know, it's not...

You need a motivating force, right? Yeah, yeah. It's not a horrible affliction in itself, but it really does get out of control more often than I'd like. And, you know, you're just, you're better off. I mean, even, you know, if you have this motivator of wanting more in just in the sense of more influence, I mean, say you're in like kind of my line of work of years, you're a podcast or you're right or whatever, you would like to have more influence on people, you'd like to think that you're trying to influence them in a positive way, and you'd like to do more of that. Okay, so fine. But even that goal,

I think you can pursue more effectively if in a lot of realms, you'll let go of the desire for more. I mean, just to take a very simple example, like I have, you know, what I think it's fair to call attention deficit disorder. I have a lot of trouble focusing. If you examine what's going on there in a kind of a mindful way, you realize that it's a quest for pleasure. It's like I'm trying to write an email or

write something. I get a little stuck. I don't know what to write next. And that causes an unpleasant feeling. It's like, I don't know what to do. And then you think like, wouldn't it be fun to research like your next smartphone purchase or something? Yeah, that would be a lot more fun. I enjoy doing that.

And that's just a click away, right? And when I examine what keeps me from being able to focus on things, it is this constant desire to be to get a little more pleasure and have a little less discomfort. And that leads you to not confront things that need confronting. And if you can discipline yourself, this isn't easy, but if you can get yourself when you feel that desire to like go open another tab or go downstairs and watch TV, watch sports or something, if you can just close your eyes and examine the feeling that's making you want to do that,

you know, you can get better at, well, some people would complain if I say resisting it, some mindfulness of Tiscianatos, but at any of it, not being kind of governed by it. So, I'm not, I'm not, you know, looking for an all-out assault on our quest for pleasure or achievement or accomplishment or anything. I'm just at least in my own case trying to pursue my goals more effectively

in a way, and as it happens, I think pursuing them more effectively makes you happier as well. and more effectively make you happier as well. I think this point about the duke bias comes to one of the most central questions that most people in the 21st century are asking because we are objective metrics of success, we are meritocracy, materialist, reductionist, utilitarian, and when you combine all of that together with the state of hierarchies that are built in and where am I and what do I want next and hedonic treadmill, all this sort of stuff, the inevitable unsatisfactoriness of most of the experiences in life can cause you to continue to chase things in a desperate attempt to try and fill that hole, coming

from a scarcity mindset that you're running away from insufficiency as opposed to running toward abundance. And that is the number of conversations that I've had about that map of experience is huge because for most people, for many people, especially with social media now, which is an objective, quantifiable metric of your social status, maybe a rough shitty one, but yeah, with all of this combined and weaponized and utilized and monetized, it's a difficult situation to be in, to be a happy, peaceful, balanced human. Yeah, now that's a good example of, I think, how evolutionary psychology figures into this. I mean, you know, the quest for esteem, the quest to be respected is the most natural thing

in the world for human beings. We are designed by natural selection to want people to think highly of us. But we weren't designed to live in this environment where we are every day seeing how much affirmation we're getting from all of these people who don't actually even know us, right? I mean, you know, it is genuinely painful to tweet something that leads a bunch of people

to judge you negatively, and they're like in no position to judge you. You know, it's crazy when you think about it and yet, and yet here we are, and it's another case where if you can just pause and examine the actual feeling of pain, like, this is hurting me. Just reflect on the feeling. I think the feeling will be a little less painful. But at the same time, the desire, the, you desire, when you tweet something and you're like, let's check every five seconds to see how many likes I have or retweets, that feeling too, I think, warrants reflecting on, because it can become pathological. And's, and you know, this is, to get back to psychology of tribalism, this is a big problem for our society at large because

Twitter, you know, social media tends to reward tribalistic behavior. The easiest way in the world to build up your Twitter following is to find a pre-big group, Trump supporters, Trump haters, whatever, and just reinforce the prejudices, right? Just like, oh, like whoever it was, this genius thing the other day, claiming that Trump had his pants on backwards, which Trump had to be true, but fuck didn't it? But somebody had, you know, whoever the person is who came up with that picture,

seeming to show that, hey, my hat's off to you. You really know how to play the Twitter game, man. Just come up with total bullshit that is deeply gratifying to everyone who hates Donald Trump. And there's a lot of those and get it out there, you know? And then of course, the effect of that is for Trump supporters to say, see, they do nothing but lie about us, right? The Trump haters do nothing but lie

about us and about Trump. That's all the more reason not to trust the media. So if the media tells you the election wasn't stolen, don't believe them. And it's just, you know, it's a, it's a, it's a really deep problem. I mean, I, I think somebody needs to find a way to make it be considered cool to not be an asshole on Twitter. Well, the problem is no, no one knows, no one notices you when you're being silent, right? Reasonable people very rarely make the headlines. No one says, look at this incredibly well-balanced nuanced centrist point that was just made here. No one gives a shit. And also a point that I realized about Sam Harris toward the back end of last year, by being in the middle

you can guarantee disagreement from both sides. At least when, by being in the middle, you can guarantee disagreement from both sides. At least when you're out on the extremes, you get agreement from one of them, but by sitting in the middle. And the stupid thing is that your view on gun control should in no way be influenced by your view on abortion or your view on the federal tax level or your view on immigration or anything else, but because of the way that people have become tribalized and because of how politics works that you tend to have this two party system

at least in America, you get that. So people get bunched together in groups, but there's no reason. If I know one of your views and from it, I can accurately predict everything else that you believe. I can probably safely assume that you're not a serious thinker. that you believe, I can probably safely assume that you're not a serious thinker. Right. But what political polarization does is make it more and more true that that's the case, because people choose their policy preferences by whatever the other side doesn't like. I mean,

a version of this kind of is there a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a little less there than met the eye. I mean, the Mullergate investigation didn't really turn up all that much. I mean, Russia did try to intervene and help them where they could. And actually, the email hack, I think, was genuinely consequential. But the idea of floating around in the resistance for a while was like, oh, he's there. He's there, you know, their man, Curie in Canada, that he did a deal with them. And he's in bed with Putin and blah blah blah and that that led all these democrats to suddenly be like the cold warriors that republicans used to be

and there was just a complete flip on that and and then republicans started saying hey Russia what's a bad with Russia it's it's it's not a rational process political polarization well look at the positions on free speech now that the people who are calling for restrictions in free speech traditionally would have been the ones that were calling for free speech absolutism right uh... now that that's that's

absolutely true the uh... you know when trump is thought to be the problem, then a lot of liberals are in favor of him and his people like him being shut down by social media companies. And I got to say life is a lot easier without him on Twitter. But I would have been very interested to see if we could have mastered the discipline. I think if he hadn't been kicked off Twitter, there would have been a movement. I certainly would have supported it. I think you would have heard it would have

made some noise to just ignore him, to just like start, he's no longer president, don't do him the favor of retweeting anything, he does, just ignore him. I would have been curious to see if we could muster that much self-discipline. I'm sure it wouldn't have been a complete success, but I'd like to know, and I guess we won't know because I think he's banned from Twitter for two years. On Facebook, I think it just

came out. It's at least it's at least January 20, 23 on Facebook. But I think Twitter sounds like they have no plans to ever reinstate him. I don't know. Yeah. Well, I mean, the news is a lot more boring without him being around. Hey, I'm okay with boring news. Yeah, I'm not, I mean, I'm very ambivalent about the social media companies shutting him down. And in general, I mean, like, well, just there, you know, I don't think they're doing a great job of handling the challenge. And I think they should err on the side of handling the challenge and I think they should air on the side of openness and have clear rules. But it's a weird, I kind of feel their pain. I mean, if I were running Twitter or Facebook and saw

how, you know, untrue and dangerous things can spread rapidly. And saw that we had a president who, you know, was inclined to say things that weren't exactly thoroughly corroborated and get them spread widely. I I I understand their temptation to do something. It's a tough. It's not easy. I think the problem that people have is that it appears like the rules are being applied I think the problem that people have is that it appears like the rules are being applied discriminately between the picking particular actors or particular viewpoints or particular political positions. And both sides of the aisle consider it to be their side, which is the one that's being

maligned. If you have someone that is in their left echo chamber, they will only be served people on the left who have been cancelled, I had their channels removed and everyone's up in arms about it. But if you are on the right hand side of the aisle, you don't see that at all. You just see your side of people that have been cancelled and have been removed. Yeah, I mean, it is another thing. Do you remember when the first big Facebook congress, was it in front of Congress where you had to give a statement, where Zuckerberg had to give a statement and there was that photo of him and everyone accused him

of being an Android. Remember this? It was maybe about three or four years ago. He is an amazing-looking guy, I gotta say. He's a very Android-y-looking human. But think about that. Look at Jack Dawson. I mean, Jack Dawson just looks like a man

that's done far too many psychedelics, which very well may be the truth. But these are people, especially, Zuck, right? He was just a kid that started a thing, and now he's strapped to this nuclear warhead rocket, going at a million miles an hour, and you just look at him and you think you just wanted to do like a cool thing on the internet, and as people progress on, we go through life, we leave our old epochs behind, we find our new ones. we go through life, we leave our old epochs behind, we find our new ones. But God, I don't know, I really do wonder in his darker moments or his more mindful moments, whether he thinks, God, life has just been easier if I started a Shopify store or something and was just doing e-commerce.

Yeah, I don't have a very clear sense for what the answer to that is because he's so hard to figure. I think- It's because he's's an Android. Well, honestly, I mean, I don't think he's Android, but I mean he does seem not constrained by certain basic human feelings to my side. I mean, like, you know, when he went to like when he went to Harvard, you know, he started that site hot. It was a hot or not site. You know the one where So they show different people who I guess we're in the freshman book or whatever at Harvard and people would vote on how attractive

They were now if I had that idea I think like I don't want to cause pain to these people who are gonna get down voted It's like this isn't cool. He doesn't have feelings like that. And he has treated Facebook that way. He's just like, I do think he kind of sees this as a laboratory rat. I mean, they've literally done experiments on, you know, where they, I forget the details, but where they just, they're like, let's throw this out here and see how people respond. And I forget the details, but there are some really controversial examples of that.

So I don't know, I don't want to get off on Mark Zuckerberg, but I'm trying to think, are there any of these companies that are in the hands of people who seem like deeply conscientious? Hard to say. But there is a lot of power in a small number of hands now because of the way these companies, Google, Facebook, Twitter just blow up and dominate. Just by virtue of their internal dynamics, you don't have to be a ruthless monopolist to make that happen. That just the positive network externalities make these platforms dominant and then you're right. Suddenly, you're running a dominant platform.

Matthew principles a hell of a drug man. Yeah, really is. Just finishing off that doocabias thing that we were talking about. So there's another side of the coin, I think, that when people achieve something that they thought was going to give them pleasure, my favorite example is talking about holiday, so you're planning a holiday for ages, you're all excited, you know the restaurant, you know the table, you might even have looked at the menu and know what you're going to order, and then you sit down, but then you notice that the sand between your toes and maybe it should have been iced instead

of shaken, and I wish I'd gone for medium well instead of medium rare. That is a feature, not a bug, right? That's part of the source code. It's inbuilt into the substrate of our existence that everything's just going to be a little bit more tarnished than you probably thought, or if it isn't, it's going to be briefer. What practices have you found to allow yourself to be able to relish those sort of good moments a little bit more?

Well, first of all, ask for the feature bug thing before you answer your actual question. I mean, that that I think is interesting to delve into a little because I think you're right the the the constant evaluation of these things. Like, couldn't this be a little bit better? It's not quite as good as I had expected. That is it is built in. And the reason it's built in is because it's a feature by the lights of natural selection. Okay. That is to say that apparently in our species, and I think this would be true of a lot of species, but animals that had that did a better job of getting their genes into the next generation than other animals. But that doesn't mean it was ever a feature

in terms of the happiness of the individuals. Cause natural selection doesn't care about our happiness of the individuals. Because natural selection doesn't care about our happiness to begin with. So it could be a feature from natural selection's point of view and a bug from the point of view of human psychology and human happiness from the beginning. And then there's the second sense in which things can become bugs. And that's by virtue of how different the environment were in is from the environment we were designed for. So, for example, the desire to feel a little better. Well, in an environment where there's cocaine, that can become a huge bug, right?

And cocaine wasn't part of the natural environment. So it wasn't a bug of that kind in the environment of our evolution. So anyway, that's just a little, just wanted to be clear on kind of the feature bug thing. I mean, as for, so you're asking now about like, I mean, I'm first of all a little blessed. Well, there are senses in which I'm very fussy and senses in which I'm not. And I'm not like a foodie. You know, it's like my wife's family, they're foodies. And they're there, you know, so we'll be eating and they'll be commenting on whether something is, you know, above or below their expectations.

And I'm like, oh, grub, good. Put in mouth. Choo, swallow, go do something else. Fine. So, but, but I definitely have the problem at some level. And certainly one way to get it. What do you have a weakness for? If it's not food, what are some of the things where your dookaius reads its head?

Oh, well, I mean, first of all, I'm very fussy about like writing and stuff that can be productive. Like, couldn't this be a little better? Couldn't this sentence be a little better? That can make you writing better. I, but I'm just, I mean, this will seem at odds with what I just said. I'm very aware of, at odds is what I just said. I'm very aware of, I'm very self conscious in the sense of being aware of how I'm feeling at the time. And I think that's, well, I mean, the worst form of that is something I already alluded to, it's just making it hard to concentrate because I do find myself thinking, wouldn't I feel better if I had a little more coffee or a little more chocolate or something of this. I mean, that may seem at odds with what I just said

about food, but my point is, I'm not like a connoisseur. It's like what I naturally do is just think about the psychological effective food. So like, I'm aware that carbohydrates will sedate me. So I will eat them for that purpose. And I could probably stand to be a little less conscious at that level of how everything is influencing me. But I don't know. I mean things I'm things that I find,

temptations I find it very easy to succumb to are like watching sports on TV. That's not a horrible thing. But carried too far, I can lead you to never accomplish anything again for the rest of your life. What? too far can lead you to never accomplish anything again for the rest of your life. What I don't know. I just think about what about reveling in things end-state events, achievements, just allowing those to linger a little bit longer. It feels like that's something that I think a lot of people wish. The holiday that they're planning to go on, the new house that they're planning to buy, even someone that's taken the hedonic treadmill red pill, and knows that, look,

this isn't going to be an inherent source of happiness, but it's still something that I can be proud of in what it symbolically represents that I have worked for this, that it is a new stage, a new level that I have reached within my life, whatever it might be. Yeah, just not looking for that next thing. It seems like that balance, again, delivered by culture, delivered by evolutionary psychology, both kind of colliding and combining and increasing. That just seems to be one of the challenges that people have and I think one of the reasons they get into mindfulness to avoid negative emotions and to further allow themselves to enjoy positive ones. Mm-hmm. And, uh, yeah, I mean, I think the... The trick is partly not to have too much of a grasping kind of attitude toward the feeling of success. I don't know. I sometimes wonder, you know, these,

like right now I'm wondering, like how does Phil Mikkelson feeling? Like I don't know if you follow golf, but he just became the oldest person ever to win a major golf tournament. He was a month away from 51. This was a couple of weeks ago. And he had been working just incredibly hard to get back in the game, even though he's passed

way past his prime. And I wondered how long does the thrill last and how, you know, for him. I mean, I don't know. I think it's certainly true that a lot of people who have accomplished great things are not very happy precisely because the feeling always evaporates and that's what keeps them motivated. But I know in my case, I am confident that I could by becoming more mindful, and I think I've already made some progress in that regard, actually become more productive. Because I think there is some level of mindfulness you could get to where you were less ambitious. That can happen. People, it's a common question. People say, what if I meditate so much that I just no longer have the desire to succeed or whatever. And I say, well, first of all, by definition,

you'll probably be happy. That's why you'll let go of it. But also, it's almost certainly not going to happen. I mean, I think for most of us, just getting to a mindful enough to pursue the goals we most care about more effectively is enough of a challenge. And the chances of getting so far beyond that point that we just sit around and meditate all day is pretty slim. It's the same argument that I give to girls who are worried that lifting weights in the gym is going to make them too musli. That you know how long and how hard I've worked in the gym in a desperate attempt to become musly. So do you know how long and how hard I've worked in the gym in a desperate attempt to become musly? And you're concerned that by lifting the sixes instead of the fours that

you're going to walk out of their jacked out of your mind. So this isn't going to happen. Over shooting with things like this, especially where people dedicate a lot of time to it, it's just so unlikely. And there's so much work to be done to get to that point that it's not as if it's going to come out of no way, you're not just going to wake up one day and your default mode networks just completely shut off or you've got 23 in charms. Right. It's like, get back to me if this becomes a problem like you're just sitting around in a state of bliss all day.

I'll have two questions. Is it really a problem if you're in a state of bliss all day A and B, did this really happen because I don't think it's going to happen? But, so you're like a serious fitness guy, right? I train a lot, yes. And is this, do you have trouble saying motivated? Sometimes. Sometimes.

Yeah. And it's like, what, weightlifting and what is it? A combination. So sometimes it's crossfit, sometimes it's bodybuilding. The reason that motivation sometimes ebbs and flows is that one training methodology often gets boring. But you can easily change that up, go into my ties, I went out to Thailand and I'm going to go to more functional fitness.

So I'm going to start doing yoga for a while and now I'm back into bodybuilding again. So on and so forth. Yeah. No, that makes sense. I kind of feel that way about different meditation techniques. Sometimes you start seeming to get diminishing returns and there are different things you can try, different techniques. I've really found that recently.

I was with Shins and Young Five Ways to Know Yourself. So I was following that for the longest time. And it just after a while, it just felt like banging your head off a wall. And I can't remember where I heard it. Someone's used this analogy. They said, don't expect the boat that carried you across the river to take you across land to the next river. And that was a really nice insight. Like, look,

you've made some gains, leave it there. Right. Let's look forward. What can there be? What have been some of the major pivots that you've made that have helped your mindfulness practice? Well, you know, it goes up and down. I think I'm trying now, because I have hit, you know, kind of a wall, is just meditating a second time a day. Because I do meditate every morning and that's good. But later in the day, you'll have a different stuff to meditate on. Like you may buy five PM,

your mind is just in a different place. There's probably a little more restlessness, some aggravations. And what I've just started doing like yesterday is realizing that look as long as you're wearing a fitness watch, you can just set it to go off every day. It's 6.30 PM. And it's a reminder to meditate you can just set it to go off every day at 6.30 pm and It's a reminder to meditate because all other

Reminders in my life don't work because like you know the because my appointment calendar Always signals 15 minutes before an appointment. You just you just getting the habit of dismissing that without even thinking about it So I finally had this epiphany yesterday, like set your watch, and you'll only get one alarm. You know, I'll meditate in the morning, and then, so yesterday was the first day doing that. I like it. You're definitely right in saying that morning is, I wouldn't say easy mode, but it's less hard mode than later on in the day.

If you're committing yourself to, I have to meditate every day and you miss your morning session, the anxiety that you know, it's going to be like, I'm going to sit down for 15 minutes and I'm going to have that song that I heard in the car on the way to the gym in my head and that conversation I've just had with my business partner and so on and so forth. Yeah, yeah. I mean, in a way later in a day, sometimes it's easier in the sense that there is something to meditate on, right? Like there is a specific frustration, or you're mad at somebody or just at that moment, you're feeling some sharp emotion that's a result of what happened that day. Sometimes that's good to have a, to have something in your body to focus on, aside from just the breath. As a new or fairly recent sub-stack convert yourself, what do you think we've learned over the

last 12 months? We've seen people at Matthew Eglaceus decide to just leave his position at Vox, which was super prestigious, probably incredibly well-paid, and maybe now making even more money. There, we've seen Scott Alexander do the same go from probably one of the biggest, if not the biggest, rationalist blogs in the world, to start Astral Code X10. What's your experience been coming at the creator economy from this side? I had actually been on sub-stack a while and I only went paid a few months ago. So I built up a pretty substantial email list of people who are getting it for free.

And so now I'm in the process of doing, you know, you know, certain amount of paid content, some free content, and you try to convert people from the free list to the pay list, that's a basic strategy. And I'm finding it, you know, reasonably gratifying. It hasn't made me wealthy beyond my wildest dreams by any means. I don't have the optimal kind of stick for it. It's kind of like building a big following on Twitter. Your best off if you can make like kind of incendiary arguments and get a bunch of people mad and make a bunch of other people happy, Matt, by the way, Matt Eglaceus, uh, is, is an interesting kind of exception to that. I mean, he does make some people angry, but he consistently puts out

pretty cerebral well, well thought out stuff and he's not especially tribal. He's a pretty mild man. He's a pretty mild man. Dude, I had him on the show and he seemed like incredibly mild man. Dude, although he's internet persona may be different, I haven't seen enough to be able to comment on that. Well, he will tell you that he has a temper and he actually does. I know I'm a little but but it doesn't come out that often

um and he's he's pretty good at rising above uh so i don't know i don't i think there's going to be a limited number of huge success stories like him gling green wall matt tybie um because partly i think people are getting subscriber fatigue i I mean, you know, it's like you can only subscribe to so many newsletters, actually pay for them before you start thinking, wait a second, like how much money can I spend on this? So I don't know, I don't have a clear sense for the landscape in terms of how many people are making a huge success of it and how many aren't. You're going to see more creators paywall their content hide behind stuff because people

do this for different reasons. Some people do it. Stephen Crowder is a good example of this. The reason that Stephen Crowder paywalls some of his content is that he doesn't want that to be the trending news story. He wants to say things within a world community that he doesn't want seen by the wider world or at least shared to the wider world. Other people want to do it to assist them financially. Other people want to do it for a whole litany of reasons. Is that the at least now? No, that makes I can see the logic.

In fact, I'm doing kind of a version of that myself. I mean, the way I'm so the newsletters called an answer, a newsletter. The thing the apocalypse a version project is something that I think of as being kind of the part that's behind the paywall for the most part. And certainly one thing that's behind the paywall is, you know, I'm kind of trying to put together a conception of a book on the subject of the Apocalypse of Urgent Project, whether it be called that or not, I don't know, but when I've most explicitly dealt with that, like here's a draft of an introduction to the

book, or here's the overall argument of the book. I've done that behind the paywall, and I do feel more comfortable doing that in front of a smaller and less judgmental audience, right? I mean, these are, you would think, if they're paying for my newsletter, these are people who don't hate me. So they're probably not, you know, just kind of tear into me. And yet, they will, you know, I ask for constructive feedback and they give it in the comment section. And that's useful. Sometimes they email me. And so that is working for me, thinking of this not just as a revenue generation thing, but also as a place where you can cultivate a particular project in an environment that's

conducive to that. So you are able to use the paywall as a selection effect to find a particular group of people who are bought in at a particular level, and then you're building in public and permitting that particular group of more bought in, probably deeper understanding of your work, that community to then give you feedback on it. Jack Butcher from Visualize Value is doing something incredibly similar, but on the graphic side, he has this big community, and then other people, he's got a huge slack thing where all different people show their work and then they all comment on each other. So he's almost got this iterative

process for the people that are doing what he's doing within his community as well. So I think that's a, that's quite a cool thing that you, that you have going on there. I mean, you see this with locals, locals, which is Dave Rubin's equivalent of Patreon, some center and center, right people have kind of taken to that platform because it's like a Facebook. So you want, you have friends and you can have conversations with other people, which means that the creator actually passively creates content just by having a group of followers that all communicate with themselves.

So yeah, I think it's a liberating time. It's just interesting to see what's happening, especially someone. Scott Alexander and Matt were two examples I thought of because Matt was in such a prestigious position. I thought that would be the sort of person that would maybe never leave. And Scott was in a position that was so, it was obviously doing his sight in Dramonica and he was kind of abstracted away from it a little bit and wasn't a public-facing guy

and then came to them turn on a dime. I know the New York Times article had something to do with that, but for him to switch that strategy, I just thought those were two really like, okay, there's something, there's really something to this. Yeah, well, I think think Matt for one thing wanted to feel a little more liberated to write what he wanted.

The he was when he was on my show on my the right show he explained this was a few months ago he explained why he left in a way that's more subtle than how I would characterize it. But I do think at least part of the dynamic was that Vox was getting pretty woke, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but in some cases maybe made him feel constraints. He had signed the so-called Harper's Letter, which is kind of an anti-cancer culture letter as mostly conservatives, but some progressives like him and Michelle Goldberg signed it.

And he got into some trouble for that, from some, I think a trans, Vox staffer who said that because the letter had also been signed by somebody that this person considered anti-trans, you know, it was an issue or was that yeah whatever. So and this was before he left Fox. I don't know how much that had to do with it, but you know, it's certainly a number of people have said they go to sub-seq for the freedom. You know, there are various places you can go.

You can start a podcast for the freedom. And it's true that if you, you know, I've worked in olden times for, you know, a number of actual publications, and it's true there's always some kind of constraint and there always was. I mean, it wasn't always like it is now, but there were always things that, you know,

when you thought about it, if you wrote them, they would not be welcome at that publication, you know, when you thought about it, if you wrote them, they would not be welcome at that publication, you know. There's no, there's no freedom like having your own platform. Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting, especially Apple are rolling out. You may have seen a paid only internal thing now. So you can paywall content within the Apple podcast app itself. Spotify, if they haven't already rolled out it in beta, we'll almost certainly be doing

it. That's the reason for getting Rogan and the Obama's on and so on and so forth, because they want to build up the listener base so that they can then say, look, we'll monetize, we'll host through, I think they've got anchor FM or radio FM or something, and we'll then be able to let you do audience capture in terms of this. So yeah, I mean, for the people that have things to say in an audience to say it to, it's a good time. But look. Although, a Spotify, you know, I think they got some staff blowback on Rogan, and I think they didn't even remove some things from the archives or something. They didn't they even remove some things from the archives or something? They didn't transfer across a bunch of episodes. And then later reinstated most, but it seemed very particular, the ones that hadn't been pushed across. People that had been cancelled, people that held views that were contrary to some of the ones.

So Alex Jones, Chris D'Alea, Michaela Peterson, Saga and I have a card, a couple of others, but some of them are eight years old. But I mean, an English, an English cricketer has just been pulled from the cricket team for two tweets that he sent nine years ago when he was 18. And yeah, so there is no window of time apparently within which you can be liberated from that. So yeah, you know, Rogan's old podcasts were just as culpable, I suppose. Yeah, well, fortunately they didn't have social media when I was 18.

That's one of the things that I have to be a door. I have a very spotty record from that age is not many not many witnesses who are talking I'm happy to say Bob thank you very much for coming on if people want to sign up to the newslett to check out your stuff why should they go well they can on Twitter I'm at Robert writer or w i g hTR. There is the non-zero newsletter, both the paid and the unpaid version. I, on my show, the right show, is actually part of, it's kind of complicated. There's two, two, well, now YouTube channels,

originally websites that I started, one called bloggingheads.tv, one called Meaning of Life.tv, all of my podcasts are on one or the other of those. But both of those channels also have other content on them, and they are podcast feeds as well as being like YouTube channels. And I think that's all that occurs to me. I encourage buying my books, of course, or just sending me cash. Just fly over my house and drop cash. Thank you very much for today, mate.

Thank you, Chris. This was fun. Yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. you