Modern Wisdom - #608 - Paul Bloom - How Does The Human Mind Work?

Episode Date: March 30, 2023

Paul Bloom is Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto, Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Yale University and an author. The human mind is a mystery. If it wasn't for the fact that we experience it, the universe would give us absolutely no indication that consciousness existed. After an entire career studying psychology, Professor Bloom has some answers to the psychology questions we've all asked ourselves. Expect to learn whether you actually remember everything that you've ever experienced, whether we know why consciousness evolved at all, why we should remember Sigmund Freud, why babies are way smarter than you think, whether attachment theory is rubbish, if psychology can tell us how to live a good life and much more... Sponsors: Get the Whoop 4.0 for free and get your first month for free at http://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get over 37% discount on all products site-wide from MyProtein at https://bit.ly/proteinwisdom (use code: MODERNWISDOM) Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and more from Athletic Greens at https://athleticgreens.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Buy Psych - https://amzn.to/42JQ4PZ  Follow Paul on Twitter - https://twitter.com/paulbloomatyale  Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the show. My guest today is Paul Bloom. He's a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, professor emeritus of psychology at Yale University, and an author. The human mind is a mystery. If it wasn't for the fact that we experience it, the universe would give us absolutely no indication that consciousness even existed. After an entire career studying psychology, Professor Bloom has some answers to the psychology questions we've all asked ourselves. Expect to learn whether you can actually remember everything that you've ever experienced, whether we know why consciousness evolved at all, why we should remember Sigmund Freud,

why babies are way smarter than you think. Whether attachment theory is rubbish, if psychology can tell us how to live a good life, and much more. Don't forget that if you are listening, you should have also got a copy of the Modern Wisdom reading list. It is 100 of the most interesting and impactful books that I've ever read, fiction and nonfiction, real-life stories, and there's links to go and buy them and descriptions about why I like them and it's completely free and you can get your copy right now by going to chriswillx.com slash books. That's chriswillx.com slash books. But now ladies and gentlemen please welcome Paul Bloom. What do we actually know about human consciousness?

Do we know why it evolved or what its function is? No. We don't know why we're conscious, as opposed to zombies that are fully functional. We don't know how the brain gives rise to consciousness. We know it is a brain. I mean, the best science tells us that consciousness emerges from our very physical brain.

But one of the great puzzles and psychology is how this three-pound piece of meat, bloody meat, gives rise to love and hate and the feeling of first kiss and slam your hand in a card or big on a podcast. There's a lot we do know about consciousness. We know how it works in attention and perception. We have theories of differences in consciousness experience. But the big question at this point, Aloudus, I've heard that one potential explanation for the reason that consciousness comes about is that it's kind of a byproduct of us being

able to have quite a complex theory of mind of other people, that when you have a large social group and I need to be able to predict what Paul thinks about me thinking about that person and what they think about him thinking about me, that you end up having a lot of layers of abstraction and that basically consciousness is potentially kind of like a side effect, like how a light bulb gives off light, but it also gives off heat, that all of the fancy mental imagery that we get is just kind of dressing on the side of that. I think it's possible. One issue here is there's two senses of consciousness at least, but two is any people to have one. One is sort of what's in it's called access consciousness, which is the idea of information being available to us.

You can mull it or re-can-analyze it. And I think that's really necessary for high-level reasoning, for language use, for making sense of what other people are doing. So I'm not right now directly conscious of my blood pressure or heart rate. It's unconscious, it's fine. But I'm conscious that I'm talking to you, and I know you we met before. And the fact that I'm conscious of the music, I talk about it, I get a reason about it. And we have good theories of that. The more mysterious thing is what's called phenomenological consciousness, the feel. And some philosophers think you could have one without other. We could

have, we could be fully reasoning and maybe AIs are like this, are will be like this, what we're able to reason and make arguments and have an and and and understand other people other in people. But but the feel of it, the feel of being a person right now to feel as you're sitting there to of the seat against you're behind the feeling of it, headphones in your ears, where does that come from? And that's kind of a mystery. And it may be epiphenomenal or something else. But then you have to explain why is it epiphenomenal of that? What do you mean? What's the word epiphenomenal mean? It means that you have a certain ton of a certain function. And then something else comes as an accident from it. And what would be another epiphenomenon that humans have?

The, say one example is there's all sorts of things about blood, which are really essential for what blood does. But the fact is the color red, when brought into the light, is epiphenomenon. It didn't have to be red. It could be green, it could be brown, doesn't matter. It's just, there's no point to it. I learned the other day that there is a particular genetic mutation in some Asian people,

which causes them to have both, I think it's low blood pressure and extra dry earwax. And you think you're lying. Give me the adaptive reason. So that's another example. Some people only stare into the sun, we'll sneeze. Now, why? That's a good question. I don't know.

There's a story behind it. But the story isn't our ancestors who did this reproduce more than those who did. I'm as much of a fan of evolutionary explanations as anybody and and and my books follow them and you know, reasonable stories for perception and sexuality and and reasoning. But but when it comes to the feel of consciousness, some people say it's as much as much of an accident as as as the sneezing. I don't know. One thing which is kind of cool, which is something I've been interested in recently, is how our consciousness differs. And so does people as you know, synesthesia, who senses blip over from one to another. So does a story of this Russian guy who, when he looks at words,

tastes them. And this is so much he can't read the newspaper-wise eating breakfast because it spoils his meal. You know? Then there's other people on the other extreme who have things called aphantasia, no visual imagery. There's a weird kid, there's a guy on Twitter who said, I don't know if I have like 30, 40, some of that, way into his adulthood says, I always thought when people said they have images in their heads

They were just it was just a metaphor But you know, he had not you close your eyes with nothing can't see anything can't then drop anything Some people have voices in their heads. I'm not talking about schizophrenics. I'm talking about sort of a narrator Like in the East United these comedies or these these these movies, which is a narrow area, and a little narrow area. Some people don't. Maybe we experience pain differently, maybe we see colors differently. That's kind of cool. The fact that we're able to hear a voice in our heads when we think it, when you think about interaction that you had with someone, an embarrassing one

or an enjoyable one or a loving one or whatever, and that you can hear a sound. But you can't hear the sound. There's no sound being played anywhere. That, and I think that this may be because my, I've heard that certain people are more image oriented. Other people seem to be more whatever auditory oriented. I wonder whether there's some people that are kind of more somatic, like they feel, I wonder, I don't know. But for me, I'm definitely lean more heavily on hearing the words, hearing them spoken. Fuck me, they're loud. They're really loud sometimes. I think, how can I hear anything? And they compete. You can be listening to something. How can I hear anything? And they compete, you can be listening to something. Actual sounds of actual words can be coming into your ears and being played to your brain.

And yet, you can be hearing your inner voice talk louder than real words. Yeah. Yeah. I, you know, there's research with mental imagery that finds that when some people, people in laboratory terms, create an image. So I ask you to sort of close your eyes and think of the inside of your house or your apartment.

You know, count the windows, walk around and count how many windows are and you can do that navigate around everything. Now while people do this, their visual cortex is activated. The same system that actually sees is activated. It's just in some sense you're seeing it. Now, I don't know if you've studied it and then with sound, but it wouldn't surprise me if the auditory cortex was activated. You know, I can sometimes call to mind not just voices, but music chords, for instance, that, you know, and I hear them as if I was hearing them. You talk in your new book about the system of human memory, and I think that you've just nudged

there on one of the ways in which it could be a little bit more fallible, just how useless of a system is the human memory construct. The human memory construct is extraordinarily useful. Just try getting amnesia and seeing how well it works for you. You lose your memories of the past or these cases, like these famous cases, where people can't form new memories. It's in the excellent movie, Memento, Christopher Nolan's film, this guy can't form new memories. But it's not what we think it is. And sometimes when people tell me, oh, psychology, just common sense. Tell me something I didn't know. Well, I got a list. And memory is one thing on the list, where a lot of people think what happens in memory,

it's like you hold up your iPhone, and it's just recording the world. And then, in all cases, it stays in this hard drive. And then later on, through hypnosis or a kind therapist that could all come out it's just there. And this is total nonsense. Most of what we experience is lost forever. You don't intend to it, it just doesn't get in. And then when we recover our memory, when you say, what happened, we talked a while ago,

how did that conversation go? Where were you? Where was I? What was said? And some, we go back and there's a storage system there. There's some art as a reconstruction. You know, if you said to me, said to me, well, I was quite a storm the day we talked. And then a week later, you asked me to remember, tell you about the day we talked. You say, I might say, yeah, it was a storm, wasn't there?

Because what you tell me fits it creates a story and leading questions can create false memories. You know, just a study after 9 or 11, a couple of my colleagues came in to ask people, where were you when a plane's hit? And these guys have been older colleagues there. And people gave their stories and then they went back and asked them like five years later, ten years later. And the stories are entirely different. We just see, we just, our memories are deeply unreliable. I'd heard a brochine through that nothing is forgotten. Everything is kept and it is a case of us are knocking that. You're definitively saying that that's whole shit. Horseship. How do you know it's all shit?

It's horseshit in a couple of ways. One way is that some things that you experience that you're sort of right in front of your eyes. You don't attend to them. Most of the worry don't tend to you tend to like a percentage of the world. If you don't tend to it, it's not that gone six months later. It's gone five seconds later. What do you mean when you say attend to it? So there's a wonderful experiment, then it's classic experiment. People probably have heard of it before. We're going to watch a film and you get them, there's going to be people wearing different color teachers and tossing

basketballs back and forth. And you ask them at the end of the film, how many basketballs are tossed? And how many times there's a toss? And he was like, I was at 18, was at 17. That's not what the study's about. The trick is that in the film, somebody with a gorilla suit walks into the middle, pounds his chest and walks out, and people don't notice even the front of their faces.

And because their attention is drawn one way, the rest world is invisible to them. In fact, they became to a book called Invisible Gorilla, summarized by Dan Simons and Chris Shibri. And you're not going to remember Gorilla because you didn't attend to it. If you don't focus on something that's gone, so that's one way is horseshit. The second way is there's just no evidence for this sort of perfect recording. People, the reason why this, I guess pro science things come up is you can feel that way. Oh my god, a photograph, remember exactly what it is. I can recreate it exactly. And people have memories that are confident and powerful and genuine and false. So, and I think we mistake the confidence for the reality. And then, this, by the way, so much of my work is theoretical stuff, which I think isn't

really cool, but not a much practical way. This has practical value because of eyewitness testimony. Somebody sits on a witness and says, that was a man who attacked me and they point to somebody and Juries here to say, wow, that's sincere. That can't be wrong. The person is so confident. People are confident. Then you do a DNA test, are you checked back and a person didn't do it. And so now we have a better understanding of the weakness of eyewitnesses. We're particularly bad when it comes to other races, recognizing and remembering our faces. And, you know, so there's a practical value in knowing

this. I remember learning before I even started this show about a study that was done on babies when they were young, being shown different images of sheep. And what the babies would do because they hadn't learned to condense together all sheep faces into just a sheep that they were paying more attention because they could see that's one sheep, that's another sheep, but a different sheep, that's a third sheep, different to the first two, whereas, and I think it was maybe around age, either six months to a euro, so that they lose that ability, presumably the same way that I always heard that we could wiggle our ears, but because the muscles don't get used, they atrophy away. I heard, I'm be just spouting total bro signs at you today.

I heard that that is a similar system that's online as to the reason as to why we struggle more so with different races to be able to pick their faces apart? Do you think that that sounds accurate? It might be. You can use in some ways babies are the perfect, you know, amateurs. They don't have experience of anything while we are a her amateur in some way versus other ways. A sort of, so, so the story for adults, I'll tell you the story for adults, you can tell me if it connects to the baby story. The story for adults is, the race of it doesn't have to be your own race. It's just who you have the most experience with. So if I see 10,000 white faces,

and I regularly have to distinguish them more, or last maybe for like 100 of them, I get very attuned to small differences. Just like if you really into, I don't know, classic rock, you'll distinguish this pink Floyd song from that, Just like if you really into, I don't know, classic rock. You'll distinguish this pink Floyd song from that, pink Floyd song, this is definitely a song, that is definitely a song. But if you don't have much experience

or interest in something, it all blurs together. Oh, that's more classical. That's another Asian face. That's another black face. I can't pull them apart. And so it's a matter of sort of discrimination with expertise. And their it's a matter of sort of discriminational expertise. And their faces are just like songs,

they're just like foods, they're just like wines. When you zoom in on somebody, you get better at it. But then when you're sort of separate domain, you're not used to it, you get worse at it. Does that sound like the baby thing? Yeah, I think it is. And what it highlights is that the race of the person that is the viewer has basically no impact on their ability to see the people.

It's very much kind of like training data. It's training data, right? For AI system. And in fact, for babies themselves, one of the sort of creepy findings, I don't know, is that white babies send a pervert look at white people? Black babies then revert, look at black people. But it's not, again, it's not their own race. It's just, it's just you get a familiarity preference. You like to look at what you've seen before. And we know that there's an Israeli study that looks at kids race and sort of a cosmopolitan environment. A lot of black people, white people, they show no preference. And again, it doesn't matter what color the baby is. It's just their training data. When it comes to our biases that are trained heavily, seems slightly less inbuilt, humans are incredibly tribal. Do you think that we have a predisposition to a small amount of racism in all of us? I think tribal is a great word here. Racism carries some extra baggage. So,

I want to be honest. I've never noticed that racism carries a little bit of extra baggage. You've heard it before. Have you heard it as a fraud issue? You're not of this country, are you? So, it's um, no, um, so yeah. Tribal. From humans predisposed to be tribal. I've, I've written about this and people have summarized it. It was a gochareline. Babies are a little racist. It's not quite true.

And in fact, it's not quite true in an interesting way. We're very tribal. But here's a cool finding from the baby's, from the baby work in toddler work. Babies show strong preferences very early on age one, age two, age three, into who to interact with, who to take a toy from, who to accept food from, and they've done these experiments where babies are where they are white baby is given something by a white person or black person and they have to choose. And the cool finding is up to a certain point, they don't care about color.

They recognize color, they notice color, they have a preference sometimes to look, they just don't care about it. They care deeply about language. So, and it's not just you, you say, with baby raised in the States, they have a black person speaking English, offering a matoi, and a white person speaking French,

offering a matoi. They'll choose it from a black person speaking French. a mentor, they'll choose it for the black person speak. Fuck the French. Fuck the French. It's not specific to French. But not racist against anybody except for the French. You're taking this to literally. Yes, yes, they hate the French.

There you go. That's what I want people to take from my book. I mean, you know, I will say something actually pro-French, which is they did a study a while ago where they exposed babies born in France to either French or Russian. And babies prefer to listen to French. So they concluded in this, and this is a story of her from the researchers that may or may not be true, but it concluded, well, you like to listen to the language you were exposed to early on. The rhythms resonate through the womb and everything like that.

And then some reviewers said, what if French just sounds better, period for everybody? So they had to go do the study in Russia. And then they found Russian kids preferred Russian to French. So it's not that there's a universal preference. But the very idea somebody would say that, is this a bit of pro-French to respond to your anti-French? Right, rightly so that's fine, we've balanced it out, the French people are still listening. I also was looking at a study from who's the guy that wrote this psychopath book, British

Dude, that lives in Australia. No, no, no, no, no. His name's escaping. Anyway, him. And what he was saying was how people have massive prejudice, much, much greater than between skin color for different accents. And this would be adaptive because typically,

and, essentially, you would not have been exposed to people of different skin colors. I mean, what the fuck's... Where have you ended up that you've seen someone with a different skin color in, you know, 2000 BC? But someone from the next valley who says a couple of vowels in a slightly different way, that's somebody that you should be very, very cautious of. And, yeah, you know, it makes so much sense. And I really, really love that insight, which was on I'd never thought of before, which is, if somebody of a different race with the same accent as you walks into the room, you feel like you have so much in common with that person. If somebody of the same race with a

different accent walks into the room, it is, it is straight just so in your face and obviously go, oh, you're going to be a little while before we got to find common ground for us to talk about. And that's the argument. The argument is like the psychopath guy. Is he a psychopath? Or is he a psychopath? Study psychopath. He may also be a psychopath, but he seemed quite nice. The point is that from an adaptive point of view,

from an historical point of view, evolutionary, you would expect language to be a wonderful cue to us versus them and babies seem to think that way. Now later on, you pick up whatever tribal, whatever counts as us versus them in your society. So if you're in Ireland at a certain point, it's one thing.

If you're in Israel, it's another thing. If you're in Israel, it's another thing. If you're in the United States, it's another thing. So at some point, you start to realize that wow, us versus them in my society may well be race, may well be skin color. And that might really matter a lot. And in fact, for adults at least, there are three things we focus on

when we look at a new person. The things that stick in memory things that really count. Sex, gender, male-female, age matters. You'll remember whether you're talking to a baby or an adult or an old person or whatever. And race. But race is in some way to odd man out. Race is unlike the other two things. Race might take on significance as you're being raised in a society or race matters. If you go to a society where race matters less, maybe not because they're angels, but because they focus on linguistic differences or something else, then then you won't be as a tune to it.

That's interesting. I am just rounding out that conversation about memory. What does it suggest about what we should do, how our attention system works, what people should do if they feel bad about their memory and remembering things that stuff that isn't attended to is so easily forgotten? stuff that isn't attended to is so easily forgotten. Yeah. Yeah. Nothing. You kind of stuck to it. The funnel of attention is very limited. So I mean, it would be maybe a bit of concrete device or a couple of concrete device, pieces of concrete device.

One is you choose what to attend to. But if you want to remember what people wear when you doctor them, focus on what they wear, but you have you you can't expect to get into the system without making it through the sort of the sort of bottle neck of Attention, so you need to you need to attend and people who are skilled at that sort of thing like in some way radiologists We're looking for science of cancer or air traffic controllers monitoring director You're a lot of the training is what do you attend to? You know, if you put somebody who never played football and they're all of a sudden, they're playing

game of football, they don't know where to look. They don't know this counts and that counts. You know, they're looking at people's hairstyles or looking at, you know, watching the ice cream track roll by, you know, there's certain part of becoming expert in is knowing what to attend to. Now putting that aside, there are memory techniques. When I taught my interest, I course I had a Joshua 4 come in and give a guess lecture.

He's a writer, he wrote a book called Moonwalking with Einstein, where he outlies the historical the classical memory techniques where you basically got to make vivid associations between things. And you know, with a couple of hours of training, you could learn to do really powerful tricks of memory. But here's the thing, and he gave me permission to tell the story, if I tell him my book. He gives this bang-up lecture in my class about memory technique, students love it. I get an email from him, like a couple of hours later saying,

dude, I left my phone in the class. Because he doesn't have good normal memory. That sort of stuff you can't drink. Wow. Yeah, I have a bunch of friends who were medical students, Anki, Ebbinghaus, Forgetting Curve, Space Reptition, all of that, Peter C. Brown that wrote, make it stick, was like episode 20 on the show, I think. And yet, we do things like leave our keys.

And meet someone. And as they are telling us their name, forget the name. Forget the first half of the name as they speak the second half of the name because our mind is just somewhere else. Yes. And they're right. And that's actually a really good example, which is, you want to remember people's names, you've got to make a freaking effort.

Chris. And then I sort of, I see your, and there's all these techniques which sound ridiculous. I see your face and I imagine the sea around it. I don't know, but, but, which I'm, I'm horrible at that. But, um, names you could use techniques, faces are tougher. And that's actually enormous difference. Are you good with faces? Hmm, not bad.

As a club promoter for a long time, that was something that was pretty good for me. But what's worse is being good with faces and bad with names, because what the fuck does it mean to be good with faces? Like, I've met this person before, which is even more awkward for you to say, well, I suppose it mediates you going, hi, nice to meet you. And they say, oh, we've already met. But it's only half a step away from high. We've, I know we've already met. And I forgot your name. I am so, so bad at both faces and names. I have said good to see you in the hopes that it's ambiguous between meeting them for the first time and meeting them and having your head in your bed and your bed. Fair enough. Well okay so true story.

Well I was at yeah we had a party for incoming graduate students. I tried to lure them into coming to the program. We had a party at the rest. And I go up to somebody and I say, you know, hi, it's really, it's really nice to meet you. Welcome to the, and these students, I've been in the graduate program for three years here. And since, since, and it's, and it's not, I don't know, there's this enormous variation. We have to forgive each other and mostly me for things out of our control. Okay. Being bad at phases is a thing.

I know very little about Freud. My completely self-taught psychology experience has almost exclusively missed out everything that he did. How much of him should anybody be taking seriously now in 2023? So first, I bet you know more about Freud than you think you do, because Freud has sort of trickled into modern culture. So if you've ever heard somebody say to somebody else, you know, you know, look, I'm not your mother, or he has an anal personality, or you know, it's something like that. These are Freudian ideas. I don't think you need to know anything specific about Freud's theory, because for the most

part, it's wrong. The details, the oral stage, the anal stage, the phallic stage, the edible complex, the primal scene, the idea that for every kid, the most pivotal moment in our life is when they see their parents having sex or fantasize about. It's a lot of just nonsense. You think a lot of this was just projection from him? No, I think that's... He was actually, I think, he was not a nice man.

He was vicious to his enemies, and sometimes to his friends, and he was ruthless in his pursuits. He was pretty, seems psychologically normal in many ways. He didn't think he was a genius, really wonderful writer, brilliant scholar. What it was was very much of a construction of this time, which was extraordinarily repressed about sex. And people really did come in with bizarre hysterical symptoms, for instance, that may

well have been rooted to sexual repression. There were issues of, he struggled his whole career making sense of stories of sexual abuse that women told him. At one point believing they were real. And then later on saying that they were fantasies by these women and struggling with that. But wherever his views came from, they have no us to disaster time. With the exception of the most important thing at all,

of all, which is Freud-Champkin, more than anybody else, the idea that we have a dynamic unconscious, that what we think and what we do, who we follow, and love with, who we vote for, who we hate, when we make mistakes, when we miss an appointment, we were set up to do. He would view all of this as generated by factors that are not conscious to us, that we're not aware of. And this idea, he wasn't a first, but he was one developed most, this idea I think is right. Like sometimes I do political psychology, I'm honest I call it, people say, no, we're

really interested in why people vote for Trump or why other people voted for Biden. Well, you're not going to find out by just asking them, because it's not that they lied to you, though, that we'll do that too. Is that you don't know? We don't know. You know, we tell narratives, I can say, so you have a very popular podcast. How did you get into what made you do it?

And you'll have a story. That's what we do. We have stories. Is your story true? Probably not. Probably the answer to a lot of stuff, this stuff. You're not aware of. And Freud was the first to sort of make such a thing about it. And there he was right, there was like a thousand, a million psychology studies that support the idea we're

driven by, unconscious. That's what you need to know before. That suggests something that I meant to say earlier on about the eyewitness. So the eyewitness erroneously points the finger at Paul and said, it's him. It's him that forgot my name and stole my lunch. And then the DNA evidence of her lunch box shows that it wasn't you. It was me and everybody then points at the eyewitness and says, willful deception. She was trying to pin it on Paul because she had a thing and he got, no, no, no, no, it is possible for you to fully believe what it is that you're saying, like the way that the memory system works allows you the best way to deceive someone you're trying to deceive

is to believe it yourself. Yes. I mean, that gets into another interesting topic, which very much dovetails on Freud, which is why are some things unconscious in the first place? And the standard story is, well, consciousness is limited. Unless something needs to be conscious, better to keep it out of the system. So this is why we're not conscious of our blood pressure, we're not conscious of our body

temperature, our heart rate, we can infer them from other things, but we don't direct access to them. And maybe this is true for all sorts of things. You're not conscious to all these systems going ahead. But the great evolutionary theorist Robert Krovers, who's still around, suggested that there's another reason why something might be unconscious. And this is your reason, which is deception, which is sometimes the best way to fool somebody else is to fool yourself. So imagine, so take confrontations, you know, I'm in a conflict, a physical confrontation with somebody and everything, and I want to, I also want to act like I will not back down, I will kill you coming closer, I'm fearless. And I believe it myself, even

or not. But to convince the other person, which is what I'm really after, what the system works is, it's really good to believe yourself. And the other example is falling in love, where sometimes the system, what's the best way to convince somebody, your head over heels and love with them, you'll never leave them, you're totally into them. Well, to believe it. And having ulterior motives, like a sort of one, well, this doesn't work out at Plan V. Having that not available to your consciousness is a wonderful way to see a lot of people. One of the interesting things about the love example is I actually don't know what the difference is between believing that you're in love with somebody and being in love with somebody.

In the eyewitness example, we have a real world and then we have an experience and we can compare those two, right? The DNA on the lunchbox. In this scenario, I don't know what it would mean for your mind to... For my mind to kid me that I'm in love with you when I'm not. Yeah. I don't know how that would differ. In a lot of ways it would overlap and it's hard to see the believing you're in love with somebody and being in love with somebody pulling apart too much. But you could imagine that you believe it, but at another level, you're constantly hedging and that there's a caution to it.

Imagine you're about to bond with somebody, say, I'll never leave you and you believe it totally. And then all of a sudden, you know, a party to hit clicks, let's get a prenup. Where did that come from? And the fact that that comes to my name is just that you really don't, that there's part of your head that's kind of looking towards other things. I mean one of the findings which I kind of like is you kind of sweet is you ask people who are about to be married. What are odds of you getting divorced? And I'll often say zero, one percent, two percent,

tiny. What else if somebody else getting divorced? 50% 6% I know what the number is. But not me. And you see, that's kind of nice. It's kind of supporting what you're saying. That sort of over optimism is part and parcel of what it is to be in love. If you really thought it was 50%, that's not a good sign. Even though that's what that sort of co-blooded math says. But I wonder if at some level you believe it or you don't believe it. At some level we hedge these things. What do you think intuition is? So there's many answers to that. Here's an answer which I like.

It's from Danny Connellan who won Nobel Prize and And talks about two systems of the mine One call system two is the rational the liberty system. I think this is extremely important I think it's what separates us from other creatures where we plan we do cost benefit analysis The other one is system on our gut a gut works metaphorically on our gut. Fast, intuitive, quick. Our system two could be egalitarian. Our system one's almost always racist. Our system two can do the math. Our system one goes with whatever options there. I think system one's the gut. And we have system one for a reason. It's really, for

something we need to move quickly. Sometimes the statistics are the way to go. You don't want to work your way through. But despite what some people say, it's not always right. And sometimes you want to distrust your gut. I was once asked for a while if I would put on a billboard that could say anything. What would I say? And after a while, I said, don't listen to your heart. And I think our heart, our gut feelings often are right within a narrow range, but let us down for a lot of things. What's a better approach then? Deliberation, rational deliberation, with the help of others because we're really kind of sometimes awful deliberators when I make a decision and I start thinking about it,

I'm offering, well, let's explore all the ways in which I'm right. But if you have good friends, you talk about, and you say, well, I'm thinking of, you know, of leaving this person. I'm thinking of getting a new job, moving here. And I'm really enthusiastic. And in your friends, we'll say, well, let's, let's, let's work this out. And, and I think that that's sort of if you agree, if you have the time, if you have, if you have more than like 10 seconds act, you have some time, deliberate. And it's like, it's like science. It's like, it's like politics at its best. It's like culture where smart people,

different views getting together can bring you way more than you can as an individual. I wonder whether I'm seeing a trend at the moment of people being too deliberate with their decision-making. I think... Maybe I'm wrong, but certainly a lot of my friends out here in Austin, I think could actually do with a little bit more intuition, could actually do with letting go of some of the deliberate cerebral cognitive horsepower that they're applying to some of the decisions that they go through and that they're moving more slowly, that they're vacillating, they're talking themselves into and out of decisions that are bad and good for them. And I wonder whether, I don't know, I mean, this is me totally bro-sizing here.

But a lack of embodied practice, a lack of movement, time outside, where you're not just doing the thinking thing, more people have got knowledge, work of jobs than ever before. And also, for the first time in history, your opinions are more important than your deeds. Now, it's not really about what you do, it's about the takes that you have. And I wonder whether that is causing people to self-identify with their thoughts

more than with their feelings and body. Yeah, so I'm a pro-rational guy and I sort of like so I'm inclined to disagree for that, but I'll give you two reasons why I think you're right, our two cases where you're right. One is for certain things, you don't want to deliberate, you want to go if you're gotten everything, and obvious examples if you're really good tennis player, just return to the backhand. Don't sit down and think about it, make a diagram and it will mess you up. And in fact, for really good athletes, thinking about it, kills them, thinking about it, has led to people's careers being destroyed. Where else?

And they said, you know, what is it like to catch a fly ball? You know, what do you know? How does it feel to throw a punch? Is this the right way? Is it this way? And you this? And you're gone because you have to let the body do it. Let the gut system do it. And some things are probably like that. For people, if you're good, if you're socially adept and someone says, suddenly in a party, you're maybe some repartee or maybe an argument, go, your gut is better, is statistically better than a rational system. That's one case. Another case is, I think our

intelligence, when employed properly, could bring us to places that our gut never can. And I think it really is how to handle good, good choices. I don't think you should decide to get married in a split second. I don't think you should quit your job because you're just really in a mood to do that. But sometimes you actually said this, a rational system, all it is is it defends your initial gut feeling. Jonathan Height has this line where I disagree with him in general on this, but I think he's quite wise upon it that it's possible, which sometimes are deliberating minds are like lawyers, not like judges.

So it's not like, it's a judge balance, a good judge balances things and makes a decision. A lawyer takes something, it makes a case for it. And if that's what your rationalities may use for, do less of it. At the other end of the spectrum, too Freud would be skinner in his behaviorism. He also seems to have become a little bit or quite a lot less popular recently. What's why his behaviorism being sort of thrown away? I thought that was pretty locked up. It's deservedly so. So I have a lot of love for Freud. I have no love for Skinner. I met him once though when he was old. He gave a talk. He had an enormous influence on psychology.

he gave a talk, he had an enormous influence on psychology. His insight was developing, he wasn't the first to develop, but it'd be building on this theory of basic learning mechanisms. Class of conditioning is sort of Pavlov and thing. You hear dentist, and he flinch. You see a commercial for some delicious food in your mouth waters. But also awkward conditioning, rewards and punishment. It's how we train animals. It's very useful. But skinner was very, skinner was in some way, I'll put this in the most offensive way possible, let a strange cult where you could only look at what people did and their inputs and you can't talk about

during terminal states. Some behaviors would say, this is not scientific to talk about memories or beliefs or desires, dreams, ambitions. Others would say, these things don't exist at all. We're just behaviors. Everything else. Just anything else. Input. Input. Input. Input. Yeah. There's a joke about two behaviors at a conference, the abstracts, and one of them says to the other one, was it good for me? And the idea is to explain the joke. There's no such thing as monitoring your own states. Oh, you got it as your behavior. And that's so weird. Of course, whatever my complaints are with the AI movement, they get something really important, right, which is that you can't explain and program complex behavior

without putting a lot of machinery inside. Statistical analyses, I think also rules, memory bases, and so on. And, you know, Skinner thought this was all unscientific. I think the fact the existence of computers has shown that building machines with stuff inside, and trying to explain the stuff inside, is how you do good science of intelligence and behavior. And it's how psychologists do their stuff.

Are we losing something by casting off the insights of behaviorism in the modern world? It's a good question. I think sometimes Skinner gets it right. The time I think was Skinner the most, so Skinner was one of his nice ideas was that of intermittent reinforcement. And the idea is, if I wanna make you learn to do something quickly, I'll reinforce you every time, but you could be a you, it could also be a rat or a pigeon.

I'll reinforce you every time. But suppose I want you to do something forever. I want you to stick with it. Then I randomly reinforce you, rarely. And then, and then you start getting into behavior. And because you don't expect to reward every time, it's always coming up next, you can't stump yourself. I've never been tempted by slot machines, which was Skinner's favorite example, but like a lot of people, social media gets me. And, you know, so three in the morning, I wake up, I decide, isn't it a great idea to check my phone and check Twitter? It's a perfect, brilliant idea.

So, and then I spend an hour flicking my finger, oh's nice. Huh. And then this intermittent reinforcement, and I'm like, I'm like a rat in Skinner's cage. And so much of the sort of addictive techniques that people in Facebook and Twitter use are straight up Skinner. So, you know, I'm not a fan, but we ignore a matter-of-own-pair. Yeah, interesting. You know, I'm not a fan, but we ignore a matter-on-peer. Yeah, interesting. You know, Diana Fleischmann, Evolution of Psychology, Lady Edges. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,

no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, to inform that back and forth that you do have. And I know Peterson's touched on this a little bit where he says, if you're partnered does something that you want them to keep on doing, make sure that you remember to praise them about it. That's not exactly rats in a cage, that just feels a little bit more like not being a shit human. But... Yeah.

And people, so there's an insight there, but people are complicated in a way. So, suppose you want your kid to read. Let's take it away from that more interesting domain of sex, and let's get boring here. You want your kid to read. So, what's going to give him every time he reads a book, give him 20 bucks.

Certainly, he's giving us a lot of money, because, oh my god, this is great. And he'll read books. But the argument against this is his ultimate view will be books don't have any intrinsic value. Like a rat's never gonna think this. A rat's gonna bang away at whatever you put, go down and shoot down a maze for the reward.

It will never think going down this maze is kind of futile. It's just for the reward as no one prints it. But people will do that. People will do that. People will do that. And imagine for either of us getting some sort of monetary award for doing something. You might do it if the money's big enough, but the minute the money goes away, you'll stop.

Sometimes for people, it's almost the opposite where the way to get people to value something, very anti-froid, a Hattie Skinner, is to get them to pay for it. So therapists say with some justification, if the clients don't pay, they don't take this seriously. Conventment applies. Exactly, exactly. Politicians like volunteers. Now, they like volunteers that are cheaper, but they also like volunteers,

because after you volunteer with a politician, you think, oh my God, I'm really believing this. While if they're doing it for $50,000 a month, they think of doing it for money. Who cares with a politician? So this is a way in which operant put in condition, a logic of it. I'm not sure you want to reinforce your boyfriend for something. If you want him to do that thing, when a reinforcement goes away,

interesting. That'll be very, very fascinating. I totally understand what you mean. There's always these stories about parents trying to use reverse psychology on kids to get them to want to eat vegetables. Like, oh, unless you're good, you won't get any vegetables. And then if you ever looked at any of this stuff, is that legit?

Does it work? Nothing works. But this is one of the lessons that nothing works. But the logic is right. Look, my next project after this book is, I'm very interested in perverse desires. I'm very interested in why people do something because it's bad. I have a TED talk coming out on this next week. And it's like, it's, it's, and there the, the draw is the badness. What's an example of a bad? The classic example, which is St. Augustine,

in the confessions, one day, he and his friends go into an orchard and he just start sealing the pairs. They're not hungry. They throw them away. They throw them to pigs, actually. When a guy seems like shocked at this, this isn't a story. I want to tell you stories of sexual debauchery. But I understand my sexual debauchery is reinforcing, as Skinner would say, why do you do this? Because it was wrong, because I shouldn't have done it. So then I started a thing called a perversity project, where I started as webpage, and they got people to tell me semi stories of things that they did that were perverse in that way. And my favorite story is this guy,

this guy said, young guy, he says, I'm nervous with my friend, and we each order an ice cream walking down the street, and suddenly I get a surge, and I jam my finger into his ice cream. And my friend says, dude, why do you do that? And the guy said, I didn't know what I said, I just thought for a second, it would really be fucked up if I stuck my finger in his ice cream. And it's very non-scanarian

thing. But the designers and just because it's really fucked up, not despite it, but just because it's really fucked up, not despite it, but just because it's a powerful word. When it comes to development, we talked about babies and stuff earlier on. Have you got any idea how much babies actually know? Yeah, that's one of the great discoveries of psychology. I've been lucky enough to be acquainted with where it was in people who really made these great discoveries like Elizabeth Spellke at Harvard, for instance. Babies know surprisingly a lot about the world, but at time they hear about their first birthday. You could test in subtle ways when you find to understand the physical world, they understand

it, they know it because reasonable gravity, they understand what an object goes out of sight, it still remains, they reason about how things move by contact. They also understand because reasonable gravity. They understand when an object goes out of sight, it still remains. They've reasoned about how things move by contact. They also understand a social world. They know that if one person helps another person, the person who's helped will later go back to that person who helped them. They know that if one person messes with another person, the person who got mess with will avoid that first person

so that it's a tank thing. And these incredible research programs showing that very early on we seem to be hardwired with some rich understanding of the world. So people like Plato and Kant and Chomsky, I think, have been vindicated by the science of developmental psychology. And the idea to What do you mean pre-programmed? It means that just like every other animal starts with certain instincts about the world, some basic understanding of the world, to varying degrees, maybe they already know how to communicate, maybe they already know how to move around. We're no exception.

So we come in the world in some ways tremendously behaviorally helpless. Babies are extraordinary vulnerable for a long period of time. Then there's going to get an argument that this is because you need a long period of time for development because we're such social, cultural creatures.

There's an enormous period of helplessness, and an enormous period of waiting for sexual maturity, just to get the system all up to speed, just to do the learning that has to be done. But in addition to the class you'll learn, I think evolution is wired up as up with a pre-programmed understanding of the world. Some things don't have to be learned.

Wow. So, I was thinking about this before, I was walking around the park that's next door I live, and it's sort of a dog, and it does its business, and then it does that back leg flicking thing. Which, I mean, it just, it wasn't even facing in the right direction, it was pointless. But I always wondered, who taught the dog to do that? Did the dog learn, did you watch other dogs? Is it a reflex like putting a hand on a hot stove? For a lot of the behaviors of animals, including really complicated behaviors, more complicated than that, I think they're just born with it. Now animals differ. Some animals pump out and are basically adults. They're basically

they know everything. Other animals, there's a long period of learning and for other animals, kind of a compromise. So bird song, for instance, is partially innate, but then depending on the community of birds you're raised and it will always be a bit of learning, like learning English versus French versus Korean or whatever. I think for humans, there probably are not that many inborn behaviors. A few, you take a baby, you take a tiny, put your head, the baby will grip, stuff like that. We were once, you know, hairy animals that are doing, there's a bit of a connection with that.

So we have a few behaviors like that. But I think most of the stuff is just pre-wired understanding of world. You know, my favorite thing, uh, uh, effect that we have that's vestigially carried over from our time as primates. I learned this from Robin Dunbar, and uh, it's the stroke response that you get. And there is a maximum and a minimum speed that your finger needs to move across someone. It's around about three centimeters per second is the optimal speed.

And any quicker than about three centimeters per second, you don't get the same area of the brain lighting up because quicker than three centimeters per second wouldn't be fast enough you'd be able to pick little bits of whatever it is out of foot. And they look and they've done the same thing whilst doing the primatology work and it's exactly the same. I really, really, really love that. I haven't heard that.

Yeah, that's in his new one, Friends, did this book, Friends, really great. So you mentioned there about language, something that you touch on in your new one. What's the relationship between language and thought? I had this lesson that I learned a little while ago. I think it's Ludwig Vickinstein and he says the limits of my language mean the limits of my world and I take that to Mean that a rich of vocabulary means a richer life that basically the more precisely that I can describe the things that have occurred Using the best kind of language, the richer I get to experience it.

How much pro science or shit have I used there? No. There are some claims of relationship in language and thought, which I think are deep and important and true. Like, you know, we could use language to convey our thoughts, which is what we're doing now. We could, to some extent, the language we have reflects our thoughts. You know, we're going to simple examples by John McWhorter,

where he points out that so many of our obscenities have to do with God and damnation and sex. And universally, because these are universally taboo and serious things. A deeper connection is that language like language like English uses the same expressions for space and time, you know, I put the coin in my pocket, I'll do it in an hour. So if you know we got a spatial thing at that, language is all over. Work on that model, suggesting that there's a deep relationship in space and time in our how we think, and this gets conveyed by language. What isn't true or what doesn't seem to be true is the claim that the specific language you learn affects how you think.

There's a very popular idea that people who learn a language like Navajo, which might have a different time system, will think differently from time to time. People learn English versus French versus Korean versus Urdu versus whatever. We'll think differently about the world because of the structure of your language. And it turns out that whenever people look at it, it doesn't seem to be true. It seems to be that language, the language is all around the world, had the same sort of communicative power. And don't seem to reflect what we think, but don't seem so much to shape what we think.

Given that a lot of the time people think in words, and the words that they think in are in the language that they're in, what does the fact that the language that you speak doesn't seem to impact the things that you think mean. How do we square this circle? I think what's really interesting is, and this brings us back to what we're talking about before, we have a feeling we think in words, but we really can't in a way. So, suppose you think, you know, I'm going to go play baseball because of the rinse. I've got to go and buy a bat.

Well, the English word bat is ambiguous between the baseball bat and the flying animal. But your thought isn't ambiguous. You know, linguists like that, linguists like that, they give centers, visiting relatives can be boring, which is ambiguous. I mean, when they visit you, it's boring, or when you visit them, it's boring. But it's not, there's no ambiguity when you think. So the idea we think in English is I think to some extent the fact that you do your thinking and you kind of have a shadow impression of English words that go with it. But you don't really think in English in the same sense. That's it.

Do you look unconvinced? I'm just trying to work out. I don't speak another language. I don't know whether you do, but I only speak English. And I've heard about people who speak other languages, sometimes dream in different languages. And that there's, I forget, I saved

a psychology today article that I, the other week about this, something to do with the people who dream in different languages, it has some kind of downstream psychological effect on them. I just can't work out how I'm so language heavy when it comes to my thought. I can't get myself outside of what to me feel like the thermodynamics of thinking. Yeah. So there's a there is a tight ban between language and thought, but here's how it would go. If you were also fluent in Japanese, maybe you'd get to think in Japanese, but your thoughts wouldn't change. I mean, I don't want to overstate it. Sometimes languages have a flavor to them in a sense that if you were raised in Italy,

learned English is the second language. Sometimes thinking and talking in Italian will bring back certain memories and feelings of the past. While English will get you in another mode. We do pick up associations, but the mental life of somebody who thinks in Japanese is not different than the mental life of somebody who speaks English. Good. Yes.

If it was, there would be a lot different than what it is. Each language would essentially be a different species in a psychological sense, right? Yes, that makes sense. Yes, I understand. You've got it. Nailed it. Right.

What are the biggest differences between male and female psychology? Look, I have a layman around, feel to it. The biggest difference between men and women is that on average, men are sexually and romantically attracted to women and on average women are sexually attracted and romantically attracted to men. That's the biggest difference.

Obviously, it's not 100%. A lot of men are attracted to men. A lot of men are attracted to both. A lot of men are attracted to neither. But the majority of men are attracted to women. That's the biggest difference. When you get out of that, the big differences have to do very roughly. That man, and this is of all the sort of research

I talk about in my book, surprisingly, oh my god, evolutionary stuff, that's very weak. This is sort of research that gets done in a hundred countries. This is sort of research we've talked about about the psychologists David Bus and the disease, enormous meta studies and across different, and you find big cultural differences, but you always find the same sex differences. And the sex differences typically aren't roughly, men are more aggressive and risk-taking and women are kinder and more nurturing. So, and you don't have to go to a psychology lab to see this, you go anywhere in the world

and you say, who does more of your killing? It's man. Women may be aggressive in other ways, they may be, I don't want to try to to buy lose verbally aggressive or socially aggressive or whatever, but pure violence is mostly a male a male activity The the care and nurturance of children is mostly a female activity and This is true for humans is true for primates who are sort of similar to humans now You always got to have the caveat that you're end up talking about Valcaire. So everywhere in the world is also true, men are taller than women.

This does not preclude the fact that there are some women taller than average men, and some men shorter than average women. You kind of have, when every time a human difference is maybe it's worth putting in this caveat. There was a study I recently read. What I loved about it is it has all the continents and it just tons and tons of the beautiful, enormous amount of people.

It just has people's simple question, how many sex partners do you want to have before you die? In every country you look at, men want more than women. But the cool thing was, in addition to that, is you've got cultural differences. In some countries, in some parts of the world, Eastern Europe, everything is higher. So men want a lot, and women want a lot. In other cases, in this day, Africa, everything is lower. And the way it works is that women in Eastern Europe want more sex partners than men in Africa.

So what you have is you have a sort of what's I call one effect, a main effect of gender. Wherever you go, men want more than women. But you also have an effect of culture. In this place, it's more in this place. And then you have cases where there's this crossover where the effect of culture is so big, you have the cases where it kind of flips if you compare it. But to answer your question, issues like aggression, risk-taking, and then other aspects of sexual preference, typically men want younger partners, women care less about age, stuff like that. Yes, the best example I saw about the disposition, let's say, that males would do war and women would

do care, was from Joyce Beninson and she spent a ton of time with kindergarten kids. She says, if you look at the games that three and four year olds play, the boys will find an enemy, even if it's an imaginary one. It's aliens, it's cowboys, it's robbers, it's whatever. And the girls will be keeping something alive. That's the way that that's what they tend to lean toward. And you know, for all denial of sex differences thing wants to happen.

This is replicated in chimps. You know, you give a fluffy little sort of baby chimp toy to a even slightly smaller baby chimp. And the same thing happens there too. Yeah. And I think this stuff that the basic differences grounded in our evolutionary history, people have looked at cultures where more egalitarian cultures, you look like Norway are sweet in those countries versus less in Galatarian cultures like countries in the Middle East for instance. The effect is in shows up everywhere. In fact, some of these sex differences are bigger in

more egalitarian cultures, which might seem that seems so weird. You'd think that they would just disappear and know. The reason why they're bigger is that if you're in a egalitarian society, you're free to express whatever you want to do. And again, the overlapping bell curves is worth keeping in mind. As well as the fact that just because something is a natural tendency doesn't mean it's morally good. If some women want to be aggressive, if some men want to be

nurtured, I think it would be free to do whatever they want. But this is the way the trend goes. Do you think that attachment theory is bullshit? Because I have been seeing this more and more. I have a bunch of friends that work as coaches and therapists that rely very heavily on attachment theory and whatnot. And I don't know how far it's getting out over its skis. Have you looked at it at the theory? So funny you should say this. I got into a discussion a few days ago, somebody had developed a mental scholar and I said attachment theory is bullshit. And we argue back and forth and and bullshit's too strong in that there are different

attachment styles, parents and children have. There's different attachment styles we could have as adults. I think the strong claims about them are bullshit. I think in this domain, as in so many others, people tend to forget the basics or principles of how traits get passed on from parents to children. So, the fact that a child in a certain attachment style as a kid might duplicate that attachment style as an adult need not be because of experience. It could be just from the get go, it was maybe an aggressive parent or a timid parent,

and it just got passed on to the kid. When you're saying that you're not talking about a behaviorally aggressive or timid parent, you're talking about a genetically predisposed aggressive or timid parent, you're talking about heritability and behavioral genetics. Yeah, that's right, that's right.

But and even if you, so I don't have any deep problem with talking about attachment styles to say that that's one style and that's another style. I think some of the claims about them really of research. One and a more, again, I keep talking as sort of findings from psychology, I think are a little bit shocking. You would expect that the parent's relationship to the kid would have an enormous effect on what we grow up to be. It's just common sense. A loving parent makes a kid later on, loving says it a brutal parent, traumatizes the kid. It's not true as much as we think it is.

A lot of the traits are just passed on by the genes in an environment doesn't matter very much. And to the extent environment matters, there's some of them 50%, 60%, 40%, whatever. It doesn't seem to have so much to do with parenting, but more experiences outside the home. So, and what this means is that you take parents and they have biological kids and then they adopt kids into their family.

Parenting played a huge role. You'd expect adopted kids to be very much like the biological kids, they're raised the same way. It doesn't seem to happen as much as it is. And to accept that attachment so as to get folded into those sort of parenting, parenting matters immensely for shaping your personality and intelligence, I think there are problems with it. So would it be your view that attachment style is less malleable, for instance, personality,

your ocean, big five personality, doesn't seem to change a massive amount throughout your life? There are a few interventions to massively change that set point, at least compared with other things. Would you see attachment style kind of folded in with that kind of predisposition? I'd be tempted to think that, but I don't know. I would want to be careful when I look at the studies. You're right that for the most part, again, putting aside to hatch, our personality is relatively constant over our lifetime of kid,

who at age eight is introverted and agreeable and studious. Who could be in that almost like lose introverted, agreeable and studious. We can, to some extent, hack our personalities. Sometimes people do a medication. If you're over anxious, there are sometimes people. People claim that disciplines, everything from mindfulness meditation, dystoicism, to Catholicism,

can transform your personality in certain interesting ways. But for the most part, it doesn't change that much. You know, I sometimes think that this is me not being a psychologist, it's just me thinking that the trick to life isn't so much changing yourself, but is finding friends, lovers, family, unemployment fun that mesh with how you are. I'm not an extroverted guy and I could have tried to be extroverted, more extroverted, and then took it to be a salesman, but maybe I'd have ideas that I'm not a salesman, I'm a professor and it could be a bit less introverted, less extroverted and more focused on other things. I really like that take away, especially as someone who recently moved from a country

where I was felt a little discordant, a little bit like an off note and then to one now where it feels a bit more aligned and I have people around that I can understand a little bit more and I went from a career and a job that I was incredibly successful in and Took a ton of pride in what we did running these massive events and one of the biggest events companies in the UK and all the rest of it But again with that there was just something a little bit it was you know half an octave off and I thought What's going on here? and you know, I'm now doing something which again aligns with My disposition with the way that I like to live my life,

with the things that I like to think about in private, in public. And yeah, I totally agree. If you take it as relative truth that the person that you are is going to remain pretty constant in terms of your disposition throughout your life. That's not to say that you can't change the kind of capacities that you have and learn things, but your propensity towards wanting to learn or wanting to be open or wanting to change or wanting to be neurotic or wanting to be extroverted are going to stay the same. You go, okay, look, these are kind of the physics of my universe. They're not absolute laws, but they if I try and fight against them, they're going to drag me back toward whatever they are. How can I get myself? How can I marry what I am with what I want to become with what the world can deliver to me? I think that's a really nice way to fold

all of that together. Yeah, I like your example, which is if you're in a UK and you're kind of a natural American, well, you could try to stomp that aspect of yourself out of you or you could do what you didn't move to Texas. And I think there's an event, it might be easier to move to Texas. One thing to keep in mind is implicit in all of this is, I think there are general ways to be that are bad, that are just maladaptive. You know, that's, that's a slight and mental illness. You know, nobody, nobody wants to be schizophrenic, nobody wants to be severely depressed, nobody wants to be incredibly anxious, and for that you'd want to fix it.

You're not going to find a world that's good, that, that, that, that, that, where you prosper in it. But within a surprising large range, there's just a lot of ways to be. I was talking about this in my intro-side class and student, raised her hand and asked me, it was a very good question saying, is that, well, what's the best personality for a world

of these things? What's the best? And it's a good question because a lot of people think there's an answer to this, extroverted, agreeable, low neuroticism., said, they're wrong actually. In some worlds being an extrovert is a real power. In other lives being an extrovert is a recipe for misery and failure and introverts thrive. In some worlds it's really good to be agreeable.

They're a very likes and agreeable person, but this agreeable person, but disagreeable person, people, you know, transform everything and someone and so forth. Where, where so it's not as if you, you, you get yourself on a personality scale, you find say, oh, I want to move here, here, here, because that's the right way to be. Rather, there's a world and jobs and people for just about every space in the personality matrix. Does that explain why people differ so much in their intelligence and their personality? That there would have been a lot of different environments and ways to succeed. And if we had pigeonholed every human to be this much agreeable and this much neurotic and this much whatever you wouldn't have had as effective of a tribe? That's really interesting.

I don't know, I've heard that sort of it. There's two ways of looking at it. One is, any system is going to have noise. Why isn't everybody exactly the same height? Because there's just random stuff with diet and genes and it pushes us around and everything. But it might well be that in some way, some degree of human variety turns out to be adaptive. And in some way, you don't have to talk sort of for the good of the tribe, a good or to group. In some way, it's sort of frequency dependent where if everybody, if enough people in my society are A's,

it might pay to be a B. And then once you get enough B's, and they overwhelmingly might pay to B and A, if there's enough of people are agreeable, a disagreeable person to clean up, then up people are disagreeable, an agreeable person, oh yeah, everybody wants to be with them.

And so in this way, in a sort of dynamic, one could imagine that that that variety turns out to be to be beneficial. It's like a personality arms race in a way. Yes. Yes. That's where everyone's finding different different ways to come through. I mean, consider some other sort of sort of market. Like, consider, you know, TV shows. Why doesn't everybody make the same great TV show? Because if you have 10 prestige dramas, all of a sudden, a dirty, low-brow comedy, it's like, oh my god, let's see that. What a break from it. And then when you get enough of those, you toss in some reality shows, you get an aftery, and then you get a range of things.

shows you're gonna have to and then you get a range of things because in this world, sometimes you do intend to sort of negative adverse selection to being the way of one else's. My, we've just touched on behavioral genetics there. I had Robert Ploewen on the show. Maybe a year and a half ago, two years ago, and the guy's phenomenal. I love his work. I feel like if I was to look at the field of science at the moment, not diet, but sort of psychology and personal development style stuff, the biggest hole in terms of public education, the longest lever that we could push down on would be teaching people about how behavioral genetics works, about how heritability works. I think that that would help people to make better life choices,

better partner choices. It would help parents to feel less culpable or less neurotic and over concerned about the outcomes that their kids are going to have. And then when you fold in the nurture part of the nature, nurture debate, isn't the nurture that you give them, it's the nurture that Jim's dad next door gives them, and it's the nurture of the boxing coach that they give them, and the friends that are around them that they impart on them. I feel like that from the outside looking in is the biggest hole that we have in terms of public education. I think that's a wise point. I'll just add two things. One is, as you notice that gets very politicized. And talk about genes and behaviors and everything. For some people, it brings up

a specter of scientific racism and holocaust and all that stuff. For some people it brings up a specter of scientific racism and holocaust and all that that stuff. So I think now we're starting to sort of say, well, we could sensibly talk about these things without it being carried to ugly baggage of history, just like, you know, behaviorism, other ideas of human nature, similarly having ugly baggage of control

and totalitarian governments and everything. I think we're going to look at the facts in a way that's compassionate and reason. But the other thing is, at some level, this is stuff worth getting out, but at another level, when people aren't on Twitter or Facebook or writing op-eds and everything, people kind of know there's some really nice stuff done by Emily Willoughby where she just asked people From a scale of zero to a hundred how heritable are these different traits? You know how your your introversion aggression religiousness sexual orientation

eye color and so on explains a little bit what this means. And then graphs it. It turns at your average person is not bad at knowing this. Your average person pretty much matches with some exceptions, the scientific literature. When you're not dealing with people who are ideologues and you ask people say, do you think how shy somebody is sort of a genetic trait? Do you think how shy somebody is is sort of a genetic trait? People often appreciate it. Yeah, it is to something. There was a chart in Plomence book, Blueprint, and I think that that's the same study you're talking about.

You might be thinking about it. Yeah, well, I had a guy on talking about embryo selection and genetic enhancement, Johnny and Omnile talking about this recently, and that I think will force everybody. It will be a very difficult to avoid red pill for everybody about heritability, because as soon as you can go in and say, well look, these are the raw materials that we're playing with, and this is how far we can push these different things, and downstream from that, look at the changes that children have from genetic interventions before they were born. It kind of bursts this conversation open a little bit. And that technology is not slowing down. It's not stopping. It seems like it's partly already here,

and in the future is only going to be more here. I think that's right, but I'll give you something which is here. And I haven't looked into this, but here's my intuition. Many people have kids through a donor sperm and donor eggs. I don't think there's many people who say, I don't care. It's all how reviewer it. Send me, get me anybody's sperm, anybody's eggs I'm in. No, people really want the sperm and eggs. People they see as having, you know, not just good physical health, but they have an idea of history of severe mental illness.

They want people who are Nobel Prize winners. They want women who have been to the IV leagues. They want people who are, and I think when push comes to shove, people have an understanding that this stuff matters You know, it's very interesting there. I don't know if you've considered this But Johnny taught me about this when it comes to sperm donor selection criteria for women What you get to do as a woman is bypass your own mating psychology With regards to what you're attracted to in terms of what seduces you, which may cause

you to downstream use those genetics to form a child. And what you actually do is you optimize for the traits that you want your child to have independent of the attraction. So a lot of the time, like a pleasant disposition or kindness is something that is really, really optimized for being like dominance and stuff, which may be something which is sexually attractive, but in a child, do I want like a super-dominant child? Well, perhaps not. And that was the first time that I've ever thought, oh my God, look at what happens when you can separate out having sex from the production of the child

that comes from it or attraction from procreation. It's really interesting. You know, there's this work, I'm, I'm about you're familiar with this, on what's attractive. So you take an average face. Average faces are pretty attractive because you factor out all the flaws and everything, you know, imagine, you know, maybe genetic, heterogeneity, whatever, but they're pretty aggressive. For female faces, if you dial up the feminine in the face, everybody thinks they're prettier. Make For female faces, if you dial up the femininity of the face, everybody thinks they're prettier. Make the eyes bigger, makes lips fuller and prettier.

But for male faces, if you dial up the masculinity, it doesn't quite do it. You see these things, these features, these testosterone dies, you know, the enormous jaw, and like that. And, you know, and in some cases, they're considered worse. And there you're capturing what you just said, which is for women, there's sort of two

things that pull apart, which is you may not want a hyperaggressive, most manly man. There's a draw to that, but you also want a man who actually has some female traits, some pro-dividually female, who isn't as aggressive, who is more compassionate and more kind. And so the case for women's life, then, isn't as simple. And you're exactly right. In a case where you could separate what you want as a kid for your kid and what you want for your partner,

there is a separation when one will adopt. Do you think that psychology can help us understand what a good life is? I think the question of what a good life is is not ultimately a psychological question. It is a moral and philosophical question. If one psychologist said a good life is simple, simple pleasure, hedonism, maximized, a lot of heat on the amount of orgasms and cookies and all that stuff,

that's the good life. And another one said, no, no, a good life is being moral and relationships and suffering. It's not going to be an experiment to figure out which is right. There's a philosophical disagreement here. I think the second guy is right, actually, but it's not a psychological question. Where psychology comes in is, once you decide what a good life is, what to maximize, a psychologist can tell you a little bit about how to get there. Then it becomes a miracle question. So I've been interested in a question,

for instance, of do children make you happy? And the question of whether it's good to have children in some sort of abstract way is not a psychological one but what's the fact that people's lives are having children? And the answer actually turns out it was complicated. It depends. It's different for men and for women. It's in countries which good child care. Dig into that, explain. So the original findings studies were done by Connellman in the United States. And they found that they used an experience sampling thing where it took a, where it turned out that people who had kids were on a whole less happy than people without kids. And when they were with their kids, it was kind of stressful. It wasn't a good time. And so the argument was being having kids doesn't make you happy. But then there were more studies then. And the

answer is always with these things is at the pins. In countries which have good childcare, parents tend to be happier than non-parents. The United States isn't the way A typical has a very wealthy country but doesn't have very good paid childcare. Younger parents are in some way less happy than older parents, single parents. As you can imagine, find the period where your kids are young to be very difficult. Women sometimes find it a bit harder than them. To me, the most interesting findings comes when you separate the questions of how much pleasure you're getting from your kid, how happy does your kid make day-to-day, and how

worthwhile do you think it is? How meaningful do you think it is? Because then when you ask about meaning and worth wireless value significance, you do find there's a real significance to having kids. And for me, you know, I have I have two sons in their 20s. And I actually, you know, I actually really like racing them. So many of it is it's not a complicated thing. But in some way, if people say, so what do you think of it having kids? I wouldn't say, it really adds a lot of pleasure to my life. It seems like the wrong way of doing it. It's just, it is of great significance.

I love them. They're the most important thing I ever get. Separate from any happiness they gave me. I remember learning about Kahneman and Dan Gilbert, and they had two different conceptions of happiness. It may have even been from you, then I actually found that from the sweet spot. I had the bit, yes. Yes.

And one was hedonism and the other is meaning. And one is, you spend the entire, the remainder of your life on a lylow with a cocktail in a pool, sunning yourself, and the other one, you do difficult things, but in retrospect, you're glad that you did them. It's my belief, upon reflecting on your book from two years ago, that I forgot it was from your book, that your personal disposition is one of the most important

determinants as to how you move up and down on that spectrum. So if you are the kind of person that ruminates that's introspective, that will tend to reflect and consider your decisions perhaps a little bit more, that will seek the meaning in things. I don't know where on ocean, hedonism lies, maybe like openness to new experience. I don't know. But anyway, my point being, if you are the non hedonistic person, you need to optimize for things that are going to give you meaning.

Whereas if you're someone that does can take more simple pleasure in the moment-to-moment experience of life, then perhaps you also need to factor that in too. How far off do you think I am? I don't think you're far enough at all. I think that I'm a pluralist and I think there's a lot of things you might want to maximize in your life, you know, meaning pleasure. We haven't talked about being a good person, being moral. We haven't done a spirituality for some people. And everybody got to choose how you rank them, how you prioritize them. And I think you're exactly right that some people are more comfortable with one choice over another. Some people like to be challenged. Some people don't. I think for

everybody, though, the simple pure hedonism plan is probably not a good idea, even on its own terms. Like, suppose we both say, my gosh, all that matters is happiness. But we could agree on that, but still say, but don't try to be happy. So for one thing, you get bored if you're just happy all the time. Happiness gets the so-called hedonic treadmill. It's going to get bored of stuff. But for another, there's actually some nice studies finding that at least for people in the West, the East is a little bit different.

You ask them, how important is it for you to be happy? And then you ask them how happy they are. And there's a negative correlation. People put value and importance on happiness, tend to be less happy. Now immediately something like usually is complicated because you can imagine the criticism being, if you're less happy, maybe you take happiness more seriously. So it's hard to pull them apart. But I think in general, trying to be happy, and this is ancient wisdom. It's kind of a suckers move. And what you should try to do is maximize other things. And then happiness will come along.

If you're lucky, I'd do it right for the right. Looking forward, given that we are now, perhaps there's more areas of research to be decapitated by the replication process. But looking forward, what do you think are some areas of psychology that are the unknowns or the unknown unknowns? Where should psychologists be looking? What can people expect do you think from psychology over the next couple of decades?

Wow, that's such a good question. I think in ways that I find it hard to anticipate, I think that the rise of AI over the last very recent, last year or so, six months, what's happening now, Chatsy EPT, is going to transform psychology in certain ways. I know people, and I'm actually involved in one project, where we're testing people to get their intuitions. We're also testing chat GBT. We want to know what it thinks, too. With an eye towards pulling apart what a statistical learning machine would do and what a person would do. So I feel that that's a very rich area. I'll tell you something

another area just to just to kind of mix it up a bit. There's one part of psychology which is sort of punch below its weight and it's clinical. Clinical say I've heard experts in the field expert clinicians say over the last 30 years there's been no big developments in clinical psychology. We know treatment works but it's not like the treatment works better now than it did in 1990. Medications work, drugs work, but you know, we got pro-zac, we got, we got, you know, whereas we've had, we got these, these, these, these things. They're not very different from what was on the market 20 years ago. I wonder if

that's going to change. There's a lot of interest in psychedelics, a lot of interesting, like mindfulness meditation. There's a lot of new, a lot of interest in, in sort of neuroscientific interventions, involving sort of basically zapping the brain in different ways. And it wouldn't surprise me if we're on the cusp of the revolution, understanding them in the most. That would be pretty cool. That would be pretty cool. Ladies and gentlemen, I really appreciate your work. I absolutely love it. The new one, psych is great. Where should people go if they want to check out the stuff that you do and keep up to date with your work? I got a website, Paul Blum.net, and I got a Twitter thing, Paul

Blum.net. And in both of them, I mercilessly try to impose this. Until at one point in Twitter, they're going to say, stop doing this. We're not going to follow you anymore. So I got to stop. You no longer a Twitter account. You're just a salesman. I just a salesman and everything. So, but that's for defining. Thank you so much. This is always this is always a lot of fun. Oh, no offense, oh, no offense