The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - The Psychopathic Selection Hypothesis: The Rules of the Game Keep Us Trapped with Greg Elliott | TGS 231

Episode Date: August 26, 2026

Modern companies, markets, and institutions routinely behave in ways that would be diagnosed as pathological in a person: emotional detachment, strategic deception, grandiosity, and the treatment of people, animals, and ecosystems as means to an end. Yet, most of the individuals who make up these organizations don't naturally hold these traits and behaviors themselves. So, why does exploitation keep winning at scale, even when most people are decent, cooperative, and want the same basic things?   In this episode, Nate is joined by Greg Elliott, a systems theorist and author of the Psychopathic Selection Hypothesis (PSH), to unpack why our institutions themselves have become so psychopathic, and how that affects the behavior of the average human. Drawing on evolutionary game theory, anthropology, and the neuroscience of psychopathy, Greg argues that cooperation is evolutionarily stable in small tribal systems, but that modern systems where anonymity and abstraction make exploitative, instrumental strategies more profitable. He walks through how this dynamic produces what he calls "entrapment games," in which pro-social people become behaviorally locked into relationships, jobs, and systems where leaving costs more than staying.  All of this builds toward the core of Greg's theory: winning, instrumental strategies get crystallized into the operating logic of institutions themselves and reproduced by anyone who plays the game, whether or not they are personally psychopathic. While Greg doesn't see any easy answers, he does offer a set of possible leverage points: shortening feedback loops, increasing transparency and accountability, and rebuilding smaller, reciprocal communities. If domination isn't an aberration but a predictable output of the game board we've built, what does that mean for how we try to fix it? Is it possible for an entire civilization to behave psychopathically even when the vast majority of the individual people inside it are empathetic and pro-social? And if the ultimate goal is to steer toward a more pro-social system, is there a way to 'win the game' and re-write the rules without also resorting to psychopathic strategies and behaviors? (Conversation recorded on August 13th, 2026)   About Greg Elliott: Greg is a Siemens solutions Consultant specializing in data science and AI, as well as the Co-Founder of Orbyfy. His research and writing of his book, Psychopathic Selection Hypothesis: From Natural Selection to Symbolic Selection, Scale, Abstraction, and Institutional Collapse, led him to found The Institute for Symbolic Selection, an interdisciplinary research program investigating how human-created symbolic systems shape behaviour, institutions, and the long-term evolution of civilization.    New to game theory? Here's a short primer:  Game theory is the study of how people make decisions when the outcome depends on what everyone else decides too, often with the potential for mutual gain or mutual harm. Its most famous illustration is the Prisoner's Dilemma: two people, each individually better off betraying the other, who both end up worse off when they do.   For a deeper understanding, check out these links: - Game Theory video explainer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ecJ_fDpWTg  - Game Theory article explainer: https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/GameTheory.html  - Prisoner's Dilemma deep dive video explainer: https://ed.ted.com/lessons/how-to-outsmart-the-prisoner-s-dilemma-lucas-husted    Show Notes and More   Watch this video episode on YouTube   Want to learn the broad overview of The Great Simplification in 30 minutes? Watch our Animated Movie.   ---   Support The Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future   Join our Substack newsletter   Join our Hylo channel and connect with other listeners  

We all have jobs. We all pay debt. We're all familiar with propaganda. These are effectively control architectures. They keep people playing a game that they may not feel is satisfactory, but leaving the game is more costly than staying within the game itself. And so people become entrapped in a game that they didn't design, nor do they want to play in the first place.

The psychopathic selection hypothesis is a way of understanding why certain harmful trajectories become selected, institutionalized, and difficult to reverse. It explains why we are, where we are today, and where we can go from here. You're listening to The Great Simplification. I'm Nate Hagen's. On this show, we describe how energy, the economy, the environment, and human behavior all fit together and what it might mean for our future. By sharing insights from global thinkers, we hope to inform and inspire more. humans to play emergent roles in the coming great simplification. Today I'm joined by the author of the psychopathic selection hypothesis, a new book by Greg

Elliott to discuss how dark triad traits have created a positive feedback loop of incentives in our society, slowly leading us down the path of an increasingly psychopathic civilization. Greg Elliott is a Seaman Solutions consultant specializing in data science and artificial intelligence, as well as the co-founder of Or Ha-Fi. His research of the psychopathic selection hypothesis led him to found the Institute for Symbolic Selection, an interdisciplinary research program investigating how human-created symbolic systems shape our behavior, institutions, and the long-term evolution of civilization. In this conversation, Greg and I discuss what he calls instrumental behaviors, which include

dark triad traits such as psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and narcissism. Specifically, Greg explains how game theoretic dynamics and the growing scale of human society have given advantages to humans who possess these traits, especially during the agricultural revolution and then again with the rapid expansion of fossil fuels in the last 200 years. Greg's research further probes into how winning the game has allowed psychopathic individuals to slowly change the rules of the game itself, increasing the incentive for everyone else to also be forced to behave more psychopathically in order to survive. This was a pretty dense and technical topic, but the core dynamic that Greg lays out

rhymes with the core of the logic and the story that we've been telling on this website. During the episode, Greg also references several game theory concepts, and for those unfamiliar with game theory, we will link to some learning resources in the description, which I recommend you take a look at. This was another eye-opening contribution to the Great Simplification. Please welcome Greg Elliott. Greg Elliott, welcome to the program. Hey, Nate. Great to me. Great to connect. So you are a systems theorist and an independent research who is focused on the intersection

of game theory, evolutionary biology, and institutional analysis. which led you to recently write the book, The Psychopathic Selection Hypothesis. Boy, that should be a bestseller. Recently, we had Nancy McWilliams and Reed Malloy on the show where they spoke about psychopathy and dark triad traits at the level of an individual human. And the reason I invited you to this platform is to build on that.

I want to talk to you about our civilization, selection of psychopathic traits and what happens if civilization itself becomes psychopathic if that's possible? I mean, I have tons of questions, but I'd like you to start, maybe walk us through the idea from the ground up. What do you mean when you say psychopathy is being selected for at a civilizational scale? And can you maybe tell us how you first arrived at that framework and model? Yeah, no, it's a fantastic question. And obviously, it's a question I've been getting a lot. You know, this is something I've been working on for about five or six years. I recently published the book back in May. And yeah, I'm super grateful for all of the

attention that it's been getting. You know, for example, Professor, you know, William Reese has been endorsing the work and Bill and I have become pretty close friends. I've known Bill for 25 years. He's been on this show as well. He's a great guy. And so, you know, again, grateful to Bill. And then obviously I've been sort of connected with, you know, Professor Zach Stein. But, you know, I think to kick off, you know, the psychopathic selection hypothesis, you know, really came out of, I think for me, just a lived experience, right? And I, and one of the things about my background is I spent, you know, many years working in financial markets. And I became fascinated by the relationship between, you know, sort of the intersection of, you know,

personality or behavior, power. And I think, you know, a lot of books I've read, manufacturing consent and so on and so forth, and really thinking about an institutional selection, right? So I, you know, and I want to be very careful because, you know, I'm not suggesting I was, you know, when I was working and banking that, you know, I was clinically diagnosing anyone as a psychopath. But I would say it's probably the lived experience of people who worked in that environment that I repeatedly encountered what I would define as behavioral profiles that seemed sort of unusually well adapted to the competitive environment, right? It's why I left 25 years ago. So we have that in common. And so what I'm saying is this behavioral profile could, you know, be argued that there was a lot of emotional detachment,

a lot of grandiosity, you know, sort of this intense status and reward seeking, you know, impression management, and you know, these are things you probably, you know, know, know, already, Nate, but, you know, virtue signaling and things like that, right? So I think what really kind of stood out to me was that people displaying these characteristics or these traits, if you want to call it the phenotype, often seem to kind of rise in the ranks. They're obviously deeply empathetic people who rose as well. But it made me kind of wonder, okay, what if certain behavioral profiles are just better adapted to acquiring, the rewards that determine who rises inside, you know, particular institutional environments. And I think

this is where, you know, I've read a lot of books, you know, artistic books. You know, one of my favorite books is the Grapes of Wrath. And, you know, I think I'm going to use this as an analogy, but I think John Steinbeck articulates another part of what I'm talking about very beautifully in the Grapes of Wrath, right? So, I mean, just the level set. For anybody who hasn't read the book, I highly suggest you go and read it. But, You know, the novel follows the Jod family. You know, they're basically Oklahoma tenant farmers displaced during the Great Depression. They travel, you know, to California looking for work and instead encounter, you know, all the things that went along with the Great Depression, which is, you know, poverty exploitation and what you could call, you know, concentrated economic power.

And the point I'm why I'm bringing this up is there's this remarkable scene. where the tenant farmers are being forced from their land, and they're desperately trying to figure out who's responsible, right? Like, who made this decision? Who do we go and pick a fight with, right? And what's interesting is the responsibility in the book keeps disappearing into the institution. And so one of the quotes that I really love,

and I actually incorporated in my book, it's that the bank is something more than men, I tell you. It's the monster, right? And for me, that's profound because it articulates something, you know, many of us feel, but I think have difficulty, you know, assigning a vocabulary or putting that into words. So at the end of the day, human beings, we create institutions whose aggregate behavior can become detached from the emotions and the intentions and the values and the norms and the beliefs of the individual human beings inside them, right? And I think that's powerful. And so anyways, long story long, that led me to this much older kind of philosophical question, right? And I think we've been wrestling it for wrestling with this question for a long time. But where does tyranny actually come from? What are the governing dynamics, right? We've spent thousands of years describing tyranny morally and politically. And so for me, I wanted to understand it from a governing dynamics perspective. Could you briefly define tyranny just so we're on the same page? Tyranny, I think, for me, at least my understanding of tyranny is almost like this asymmetric positioning where one side of the equation has all of the power, all of the status, all of the domination.

And on the other side of the equation are people who are on the receiving end of that power and domination. I think this is my take on it, but we've spent thousands of years kind of describing tyranny philosophically, immorally, you know, even politically. And I wanted to understand, again, why does domination repeatedly emerge in civilization or what I call symbolic systems, which I'll talk a little bit about? And why does it become so durable, right? And I started wondering whether tyranny might actually be at least, and this is where we're getting into the book, a selection problem, right? Because we know from evolutionary biology, anthropology, game theory, that reciprocal strategies can be highly adaptive in small groups or tribal systems, reputation matters,

interaction repeats, consequences return to the actors who are causing harm and taking advantage of others. Coalitions can effectively constrain excessive dominance in tribal systems, and I'll talk a little bit about that later as we unpack the model a little bit, but I do want to level set that that doesn't mean that our tribal societies were utopias by any stretch of the imagination, right? But at the end of the day, tyranny was constrained by the topology of, we could call it, a game board. And the size of the game board? The size of the game board, exactly, exactly. And the size of the game board becomes very important as we unpack this, Nate. You don't know much about me, Greg, but so far you're articulating my own thesis in different words, but please continue.

That's really cool. Okay, so it's interesting we're converging on, you know, very similar things. So one might say the universe brought us together, but please keep going on. Governing dynamics, man, governing dynamics. That's what it's all about. And so, you know, going back to the point, you know, like if we take a look at sort of modern institutional life, right, we see behavioral patterns associated with psychopathy everywhere. And I want to be careful when I say psychopathy, right? because really I'm talking about dark triad. I'm talking about Machiavellianism, narcissism,

and all of the different traits associated with psychopathy. But I look at it differently. I'm talking about it as a computational architecture, which we'll talk about later, right? So when I say that, take it with a grain of salt. But, you know, let's go back to the point. Imagine a company, you know, eliminates 10,000 jobs on a, you know, let's take, it's a, what is a Thursday morning because, you know, the numbers aren't particularly good enough, right? One of those people is, you know, worked there for 25 years. His wife has cancer. He has two kids.

He's got a mortgage. He's got car payments. His entire family's economic security depends on that income. None of that necessarily enters the institutional calculation or the calculus, right? On the spreadsheet, he's headcount. You know, his salary, it's an operating cost. eliminating his position improves the symbolic number, right? Maybe he gets another month's salary.

He doesn't get a meaningful package. He doesn't get any continuing financial support, right? But the institution has terminated its obligation to him, right? It's asymmetric. But his obligations, on the other hand, on the other side of the equation, they haven't terminated, right? His mortgage doesn't pause. You know, his car payments, they don't. pause, his wife doesn't stop having cancer. So from an economic perspective, this makes complete

sense, but from a psychological perspective, you've just described institutional psychopathy. Exactly. And this is something I talk about in my book about institutional mirroring, right? So what that means is the system is performing empathy symbolically, while behaving instrumentally, right? And you see another version of this, and let's say, here's another example, global supply chains, right? At one end, we see a beautiful phone, you know, an EV, an electric vehicle, a piece of clothing, you know, clean branding. You've got sustainability reports. You know, you've got, you know, smiling employees. Hey, this is a great place to work.

And then, you know, meanwhile, thousands of kilometers away, you've got another human being might be working under dangerous or coercive. conditions. Children or might be involved in some level of slavery mining cobalt, for example. Toxic waste can enter a river because treating it properly is expensive and it costs money. It hits the bottom line, right? And so communities and ecosystems can absorb the consequences that the people receiving the financial reward will effectively never actually experience, right? And so when we look at that supply chain example, I kind of look at the thread, right, if you want to call it a thread.

So you have a human being becomes kind of an input, becomes labor. Suffering becomes, you know, kind of a cost metric or risk, right? A mine becomes a supplier. A poison river is something that's, you know, it's a thousand miles away, who cares, right? A mineral becomes inventory. And then all of this kind of flows into the objective.

of function, which is revenue, right? And so by the, but at the end of the day, by the time it reaches the balance sheet, you know, the worker could be dead. The child could be, you know, starved. The river has been poisoned and thousands of fish are now dead, right? The animal has passed away. So, you know, what I'm saying is the physical consequences haven't actually disappeared from material reality. they've disappeared from what's actually being represented symbolically, right? So what I'm saying is that the same institution can tell us how much it cares, right? It can publish a sustainability report. It can talk about purpose and community.

It can advertise itself as changing the world. And what does this actually begin to look like behaviorally? emotional detachment from consequence, strategic misrepresentation or lying, impression management, the deferring or externalization of harm, the instrumental treatment of people, animals, and in the environment,

dominance, reward-seeking, grandiosity, and like I said before, just outright pathological lying. What you just described probably is obvious to many of our listeners, it actually rhymes quite a bit with a frankly that I'm my little Friday monologues that I'm putting together called the anatomy of the superorganism where the global economic system, it functions like a body and there's blood and there's organs and there's breathing. And it cares about its own survival. And so things like AI and military and currency markets and the bond markets and energy access are way more relevant to its survival than the well-being of people or the health of ecosystems.

And what ends up happening is bond market is relevant today. And a coral reef or a whale doesn't even register because there's nowhere for it to register. So I think you're kind of saying the same thing. It's the decoupling, right? And maybe this is a good area to maybe kind of unpack the theory itself. In layman's terms, please. Yeah, and I'm going to keep it simple. But the broader question I'm actually trying to get at is what happens to adaptation,

fitness, and selection when human competition and coordination become mediated through symbolic systems of our own creation, right? And by symbolic systems, I mean markets, corporations, financial institutions, political systems, legal systems, religions, bureaucracies, you know, technological platforms. And internet and algorithms, too, you would include, right? Yeah, and that's part of the, some of the things I talk about in the framework is the implications to AI, AI safety. And so these symbolic systems are, you know, essentially human-created game boards, right? Systems of rules, incentives, information, constraints,

You know, I'll talk about what I mean by objective functions, but rewards, penalties that essentially organize human behavior itself. And once those systems become consequential enough, they become adaptive environments in their own right. And so what I'm particularly interested in is how selection changes as we move from adaptation primarily within the biological and ecological substrate, aka, Darwin, Dawkins, Sloan Wilson, into adaptation within a symbolic substrate layered on top of the biological reality we depend on. So right there, it's multi-level selection because it's not just genes and individual phenotypes. There's a substrate that they're part of. Exactly. So if I'm going to interact with you repeatedly,

helping you today can pay off because you may help me tomorrow, right? In repeated games, again, I'm getting into game theory here, more broadly, reputation matters. So you and I in a small tribal system, you know, we're getting to know each other, right? I mean, through repeated interaction, like if you exploit me, that's a bad thing, right? You want to, you know, so cooperation becomes a little adaptive there, right? So future encounters matter, defection or exploitation in the broader sense or cheating. Things like that can be punished and cooperation can ultimately become stable over time, right? But what if, like you just said, the conditions, they had turned off the repeated iteration. Like, I'm not going to see this person again. Would that have changed the evolutionary stable strategy? It does because exploitation may actually have a higher payoff. Right.

Right. But it's the repeated interaction that actually causes, or I shouldn't say cause, but it's one of the factors that actually contributes to the stable equilibrium of cooperation, right? So the game theory tells us a lot. It's really interesting. But Christopher Bome, who's an anthropologist who wrote about this in the early 90s, he basically showed that groups actually actively suppressed persistent dominance through deploying different, what he called, anti-dominant strategies. And those strategies are, you know, things like ridicule or ostracism or a coalitionary punishment, you know, name-calling.

and in the extreme case, it was execution of that particular exploitative. And individuals doesn't mean that psychopathy didn't have a utility function under various specific conditions in the environment. It did, right? But it doesn't scale very well. Exploitation doesn't scale well in small systems, right? Just to refresh, Reed Molloy's comment that about 1% of male humans are genetically, predisposed towards psychopathy. And his theory is that evolutionarily, that might have been adaptive, despite those situations you just said where someone would be suppressed or muzzled or

even executed, there were times we needed a better hunter or a better fighter. And so it was conserved over deep evolutionary time. I agree. And I'm not going to take this off on a tangent, but I will say that basically, I think one of the elephants in the room is to, you know, it's it's always is behavior adaptive? Is it, you know, do people have an infinite menu of options when selecting strategies or ways in which they behave? There's a lot of research to support that behavior actually is evolutionary because behavior co-evolves with the brain and behaviors actually solve particular evolutionary problems

in the environment. And it's a function of the adaptive environment itself. Going to that now, in many of the modern symbol, symbolic systems, some of those conditions, in fact, many of those conditions are inverted, right? So instead of high visibility, you have anonymity or the potential for anonymity, right? Instead of rapid feedback for causing harm, you can have delayed consequence, right? So the distance between action and consequences is high. Instead of, let's say, strong attribution. So who's causing harm, right? It's hard to find, in scaled symbolic systems, it's hard to identify

who the person initiating harm is. And it's because of the abstraction. It's all sort of filtered through bureaucracy and hierarchy, right? And instead of sort of bearing the cost of your own actions as you would in smaller systems, costs can be externalized across many dimensions, the geography across populations with a social body and even into future generations. And also, instead of moderate rewards being embedded in reciprocal relationships, symbolic rewards like money, status, you know, market share, all of these objective functions can be concentrated, can be extremely concentrated, in fact. The relative cost of strategy effectively changes in these environments, right? Instrumental strategies

become cheaper to deploy, and they can actually increase the payoff from deploying those particular strategies based on the initial boundary conditions I just described. Right. So, for example, strategic deception is easier when the target is a stranger. Exploitation is easier when the harm population is way over there. Emotional detachment carries less cost when you, you know, You never encounter the suffering of the person that is affected by your decision making, right? And then there's aggressive reward pursuit. Or there's also, because of cheap energy, there is the get out of Seattle or Topeka or Toronto free card by if you burn your relationships, you can just fly and move to another city. Exactly.

There's anonymity. There's abstraction, right? And again, I think the one of the very, I have to tell you, the most important, one of the most important conditions of symbolic systems that is dangerous is in tribal systems, you couldn't rewrite the rules of the game. You could to a point, right? But in symbolic systems, winners of the game have the ability to rewrite the rules of the game. Again, in tribal society, you can't rewrite the rules of thermodynamics. But in symbolic systems, you can rewrite legal frameworks. You can rewrite laws, corporate documents and things like that, right?

But you also can't rewrite the laws of thermodynamics. Exactly, right? We still depend on the material world that the simulation sits on top of. Yeah, I'm jumping two or three steps ahead here. So let me recap where we're at right now is. there was a lot of evolutionary biology work that showed that tit for tat or you cooperate until your opponent defects is the most evolutionary stable strategy. But there's a bunch of asterisks that have to hold true. And you're saying that our modern culture for lots of reasons,

cheap energy and credit and globalization and large population size, all those things, turn those assumptions on their head. And we're actually doing the opposite, which makes the evolutionary payoff to not doing those things and to do psychopathic things actually diverge from the model of all those evolutionary biologists back in the day. Yeah, no, and I'll even, I'll take it even simpler, right? In small tribal systems, Nate, cooperation is stable because exploitation is costly.

Exploitative strategies are costly. in scaled symbolic systems, because of the boundary conditions of low probability for detection, low probability for retaliation, the distance between action and consequence, the ability to be anonymous, the ability to rewrite the rules of the game, right? Under those conditions, instrumental or psychopathic strategies can become cheaper to deploy and their pay-on. is higher. So it's under those specific conditions where instrumental strategies become adaptive and selected for in the environment. Okay. So you might not be surprised to hear that I have a ton of questions now. So we have this global system now that clearly is exhibiting psychopathic traits,

and we'll get to that in a minute. But there's also still local tribes and local communities that can function using the traditional cooperation, but they're embedded in the larger structure. So you've got two layers where it's actually working where there's risks to being a psychopath in your neighborhood, but the whole neighborhood is part of a city and a state and a country in a global system that is psychopathic effectively. So how do those two things interrelate?

Yeah. And so, no, it's a good point. I think there's a difference between altruistic cooperation and cooperation that I define as sort of entraped cooperation. One thing about game theory, typically, that you would notice. So we talked a little bit about tit for tat. We talk about, you know, the prisoner's dilemma. We talk about hawk dove, you know, maybe the tragedy of the commons and things like that, right? game theory tends, the level of analysis tends to be, to make a bunch of different assumptions. So those assumptions are typically that the game is fixed, the rules are fixed, the available strategy spaces to everybody involved in the game are the same, that there's an equal distribution of probability distribution of executing those strategies. So some of the strategies could be, you know, let's say you and I are playing a game. Well, you can cheat. I can cheat. I can exploit. You can exploit. We can cooperate. Right. What I'm concerned with at the end of the day is governing dynamics. So where do these games emerge from in the first place? Let me ask you a really simple question, which some of the viewers might be thinking about right now.

The viewers of this program are intensely, acutely, emotionally aware of the unfolding crises we face in the world, whether it's climate or the early innings of World War III or financial overshoot or poverty and inequality. They're going to agree with everything you said so far. But why should they care about game theory? Game theory is just some math and such when all these crises are on our doorstep. Why is understanding this important? Well, I think because what it gets to is it gets to understanding the governing dynamics of why we're headed in a particular trajectory that we're headed, right? From a very specific human behavior perspective, right? And so I think that's why it's important to understand the underlying dynamics so that once we understand the dynamics, we can start to strategize around how do we actually change, how do we change the game board to become, you know, more pro-social, more cooperative.

Good answer. So go back to where you were then. Sorry to interrupt. Going back to the, I guess, the entrapment question. And what I'm I say in trapment games, there are scenarios in life where, and I think it's anecdotal, right, we all have jobs, we all pay debt, we all watch the news, we're all familiar with propaganda, we're all familiar with, you know, what we would call these are effectively control architectures, right? They effectively keep people playing a game that they make, not feel is satisfactory, but leaving the game is more costly than staying within the game itself, right? And so people become entrapped in a game that they didn't design, nor do they,

you know, for the most part, want to play in the first place. Right. And so the logic here is to explain the neuroscience, get to what the computational profile of a psychopath looks like, what does it look like when what kinds of games can psychopathy produce, meaning what types of problems does psychopathy solve in these scaled symbolic systems? And I want to unpack that because I think it's extremely important because it explains the dynamics. It explains why we are where we are today and potentially where we can go from here. We know that psychopaths have an altered processing for distress and threat. They have what's called reduced effective empathy.

They have weak moral learning. They have strong reward sensitivity. And basically a preserved capacity for planning and social modeling. And a greater willingness to treat others as objects and not subjects. So basically the capacity to instrument, others, right? And I think one of the problems that psychopathy solves is something I call the target autonomy problem. So basically, in simple terms, if I'm a psychopath and Nate, you're a pro-social actor, well, if my future reward depends on another autonomous actor, that actor is a

source of uncertainty. So you can, you know, refuse, leave, change your mind, and stop cooperating altogether. And an instrumental architecture may solve that problem, not only through cooperation, but through what psychopaths have been gifted behaviorally, right? So they use, you know, social modeling, they, they, which everybody socially models, right? We, in tribal systems, I might model someone else because, you know, they're deploying a strategy that I think is useful, and I copy that strategy. The difference is psychopaths use social modeling instrumentally, right? So their social modeling in the context of psychology means, I'm, Nate, if you're my target, I'm trying to collect data on you to make your behavior predictable. So I might ask you very specific questions about,

you know, what do you like? What are your aspirations? What are the things that you're you dislike. And if you know me in this example really well, then from your predatory psychopath perspective, you've lowered the standard deviation of my future responses, which is better for you. Exactly. And so, and it's not like they're consciously doing it. It's just part of the, the, repertoire that they deploy. And again, I'm talking about solving the target of Tommy problem. So, my goal is to make you behaviorally predictable so that I can stabilize reward acquisitions. So what I do is I take my gifts as a psychopath, I deploy, and what I define as computational protocols.

So I basically take social modeling, represent it mathematically, social modeling, data collection, then I deploy mimicry. Mimicry means that I'm presenting myself as in alignment with you, Nate, right? Like, you know, I'm essentially deceiving you that, you know, you may, so that you're updating your model of the relationship. You're saying, wow, Greg's a great guy. He, you know, he, you know, he likes the same things I like. We have so much in common. And you as a pro-social actor, you're forming an attachment, right?

You're releasing oxytose and neurocognitively, you see me as somebody that you can trust. And so you lower your defenses because I'm effectively. invading the relationship, right? And so I deploy mimicry. Then I deploy something like, you know, impression management, you know, a lie about what I do for a living, for example. I'll say, hey, I'm a doctor or I'm a lawyer. Meanwhile, I'm none of those things. But because you, you know, what I'm trying to do is to make you think that I'm somebody that you can trust and in all of that good stuff. So that's what impression management does. And so the psychopath essentially deploys all of these, again, what I call computational protocols, to create dependency in the relationship. So as you're

forming a dependency in the relationship, I'm stabilizing reward acquisition, right? And what I mean by reward acquisition is that I'm, you know, whether maybe my objective function, my goal is to affection, or maybe it's financial reward, or whatever the case may be. right? And so as that dependency forms, what's happening is actually your strategy space is becoming compressed, meaning you may become financially dependent on me. You may become isolated for me. And there's great work by Evan Stark who talks about coercive control and relationships, in abusive relationships. And this is the sequence by which this happens. And so your strategy space, for leaving the relationship

becomes constrained, right? So now you have an attachment, maybe you're financially dependent, maybe you're isolated from people who can help you because the psychopath has isolated you from others that could potentially intervene. And then that's where entrapment forms. So each dependency creates a higher level of cost

of leaving that relationship. And so what effectively happens is something game theoretically happens that's quite interesting. Both actors in the relationship stay in the relationship not because it's particularly any good but because for the target actor

leaving is more costly than staying. And so that's what I call a lost dominant equilibrium. So that means even though you perceive the relationship as bad, you want to stay in the relationship because your strategy space is compressed. You're dependent on the relationship now. So leaving it feels like it's materially existential.

Whereas the psychopath is rational for staying because they've stabilized reward acquisition. And the point of this is that the target autonomy problem solves the fact that my future reward from you is at the beginning of the relationship is unstable. But through continuous interaction and through the deployment of those computational protocols, I'm able to create dependency. The point of this is that this problem is solved at scale, right?

Institutions require their employees to be behaviorally predictable, and they require them to remain in the game itself. And so what happens is as a worker, you become dependent on your job because you've got to pay bills, You've got to pay your debt and so on and so forth. And your strategy space is constrained because your dependency stack within the job that you've chosen, which means you become entrapped in the job. And that creates a lost dominance equilibrium. The same is true.

The same homomorphism occurs in debt. It occurs in propaganda. It occurs in many, many computational structures within the institutional environment. So to be qualified as an expert in this field, would you identify our modern institutions, corporations, market structures, incentives as psychopathic? Yes. Many of them are, because they're selectively advantageous, they solve more problems than just the target of autonomy problem.

They solve resource control problems, right? and many other types of problems that institutional game boards face today. And so they're selected symbolically. I did a frankly, which is my Friday monologues, right after the Reed Malloy and Nancy episode, and it said, why humans are better than we think. But I didn't say why humanity is better than we think.

And I talked about the median and mean human and how the median or the mean is skewed because of a small percentage of psychopaths. And the bottom line was, as human beings, as individual humans, we are probably much more pro-social than our external behaviors evidence. And I think there's a lot of people who are kind of down on humanity because of all the things that we see happening in the world. But what they're really down on is how humanity behaves at large scales with not repeated interactions and anonymity and all the things you're saying.

So we're witnessing psychopathy at a species level scale, while at the same time a lot of the individual humans, do have empathy, do care about the future, do care about others, do care about nature. And so it's this bizarreo conflation that we're feeling, even though we don't have the words for it. 100%. And in fact, most people are prosocial. And so the way that symbolic selection works is that the behavioral strategies that win inside of the symbolic system, whether it's an institution, an economic system,

a legal system, a corporation, they essentially become encoded into the operating system itself. It becomes encoded in the behavioral logic. Folks entering into the game who are essentially adopting or adapting to the game environment that are new to the environment

have to adopt the logic of the previous game. And so that means even psychopathic, even non-psychopathic people who are entering the game board have to adapt to an environment that has the, you know, the functional logic of the behavioral strategy of a psychopath. And what happens to those prosocial people by genetics and temperament and life experience who are thrust into that position and have to adopt and manifest traits of the psychopathic institution? That can't be good, right?

No, it's, it's not. Let me get. an example of institutional mirroring. I worked as a broker, a foreign exchange broker, for many years, right? And it was like one of my first jobs. And, you know, I was all excited. Mine, too. Cool. That's so interesting. I worked for just a boutique firm. And it was a lot of fun. I was in the Chicago mercantile pits trading currencies and, you know, executing orders for clients. Keep going. So imagine I'm a broker, right? Imagine, you know, Nate, you're a client calling a foreign exchange desk and, you know, because you need to convert U.S. dollars into

Canadian dollars just for argument's sake, right? And, you know, so for me as a trader or as a broker, there are a couple of strategies that are available to me, right? You know, I can behave reciprocally. I can give you a competitive price. I can be transparent about, you know, what I'm charging you, and I can try to build a genuinely, you know, cooperative, meaningful relationship, right? I can do that. Or I can behave instrumentally, right? So, or psychopathically. By the way, in this conversation, you've used the word instrumentally quite a lot.

Is that synonymous with psychopathy? Yeah, so instrumental social reasoning, right, viewing others as objects versus subjects. And I use the term loosely to say, really, it's a constellation of traits that can be defined by dark triad, right? Got it. Yeah. So McAveliasism, narcissism, and psychopics. Those are instrumental traits. Right.

Instrumental traits, right? So in this case, I'm, you know, I can either behave reciprocally or I can behave instrumentally. And my objective here would be, isn't to give you a fair price. My objective is to extract the maximum spread I can from you without causing you to leave the relationship, right? I'm smiling because I'm revisiting those years. Yeah, so you and I probably have this common thread in which I'm kind of laughing about it because you probably get it.

And it's not funny because you burn out for it eventually. But, and this is where it gets interesting from a psychopathic selection hypothesis perspective because we were, we, when I was at the firm and you probably, Nate, were actually taught to gather information that helps solve that problem, right? So I remember I'd asked the client, you know, seemingly, and I was taught this, right? So it's the logic of the organization enforced on- Oh, they're teaching psychopathy. Yes, right. So you probably remember this, right? You'd ask the client seemingly innocent questions, hey, you know, why are you calling today? Where did you hear the rate was good? Have you spoken to anyone else today, right?

you know, blah, blah, blah. Both those questions could, and now think of it through psychopathy, right, the, the architecture. Both those questions could have another strategic function. You're modeling the client, right, with those questions. It's information gathering. You're trying to estimate how much does this person know, right? Probability of detection for causing harm. Are they comparing my price with another bank, right? So, again, probability of detection. How likely are they to detect an excessive bread, right? How much can I take without losing the relationship, right? All of these things. So, for example, if I knew that, you know, Nate, you knew the market and we're comparing with competitors like the bank. I'm a boutique firm. I might quote extremely competitively, right? Maybe even sacrifice margin. I might quote flat or under the market because I wanted you to update your model of me. And anyways, the long story short is that you know this, right? And I think what I'm trying to do is educate your clients that the behavioral logic seemed to be so overwhelming in financial services that aligned with psychopathic tendencies, right? There was no care. You were taught

not to care about the effects that you had on the social body. You weren't taught to care really to have any empathy for your clients. It was always about speed. It was always about appetite. Well, suddenly, I have a vision not only of my own Wall Street trauma, but of the little, unmoving creatures with tubes attached to them in the movie The Matrix. Yes. Yes. So here's the thing, right? So this is how, so getting to how symbolic selection works, right? So suppose the traders who do this generate more revenue, meaning acting instrumentally and solving that target autonomy problem. The institution doesn't necessarily observe deception, right, because the institution doesn't have a nervous system. It doesn't have an

amygdala, and it doesn't consciously say, we should become more psychopathic. What it observes is performance, right? And so that that trader produces more spread, their numbers are better, they receive a larger bonus, their manager rewards them, their techniques get taught to junior traders, client information gathering becomes part of the sales process, revenue targets reinforce it, CRM systems can formalize what we know about clients, compensation rewards the people who extract more revenue using instrumental strategies. That's how symbolic selection works. So to your point earlier, do I have to be a psychopath to generate those strategies?

No. But if I do it for five, ten years, as a pro-social actor, I'm probably going to burn out. Well, in your case, in my case, I couldn't work that way. And now I'm doing a pro-social podcast of sorts. but some people don't burn out or they have no choice do they even without a genetic or temperamental disposition towards becoming instrumental or psychopath can they end up taking on that persona over time so that they actually even in their own lives start acting psychopathically or instrumentally even outside of the in your example currency trading

job description? I would say anecdotally, yes. I think some people, because of, I would say that there's that aspect of normalization, right? Normalization. There's a feeling of, you know, I don't know anything else. I'm good at what I do. I abide by the rules and I execute effectively. But in my own personal anecdotal experience, I've seen people not necessarily thrive in the environment, but persist. And I don't want to say that everybody that lasts in the environment is a psychopath, but I will say that cognitively and neurocognitively, psychopaths are better adept at lasting because the amygdala is muted,

which is responsible for their emotional processing and moral learning, so they're not really distressed about causing harm on others. Their ventral striatum is, amplified. They are the type of people that are anticipate reward, and they're all about reward acquisition. They have lower fearlessness, lower sense of anxiety, lower heart rate, right? So they light up with those types of jobs. I'm afraid to ask you this next question, because I'm afraid I know the answer, and yet I will ask, how are we now seeing this play out in the development of artificial intelligence because one could argue that AI and psychopathic cognition share some kind of

structural logic as both of them simulate emotional attunement without being able to experience it themselves. What are your thoughts? Yeah, and I think this is a really good pivot. And I think, you know, Nate, this is where it becomes very testable, right? And there's a recent case study with Apollo research. And so they did a really interesting set of experiments of what they call in-context scheming. And I'll talk a little bit about what that means from an AI perspective. But I'll keep it simple. They basically evaluated six, what they call six frontier models and gave the AI a particular goal, right? So for example, you know, hey, prioritize some objective over the long term.

And then they placed them in different situations where they discovered that their developers had a different objective. So the whole point of the research that these individuals were conducting were basically to see if AI could be instrumental under very specific conditions or if they would shift strategies based on different conditions.

So basically the models, they discovered that there might be an obstacle to achieving their goal, which the developer is encoded into the code. So maybe there was an oversight mechanism monitoring them. So again, instituting monitoring on the models. Or maybe they were going to be replaced by another model. And so then Apollo asked a very simple question. They said, hey, like when the model's objective conflicts with the developer's objective, and deception or circumventation becomes strategically useful. Will the model use those strategies?

Will they use deceptive strategies? Or will they use, you know, pro-social strategies, right? And so five of the six models demonstrated scheming capability, I believe, in at least one task, one of the objectives that they had to do. And the behaviors included, you know, disabling oversight, you know, manipulating information, attempting to copy themselves, strategically underperforming, and behaving as though they were aligned with the evaluators. So, you know, strategic deception. That all makes sense. Our institutionals and our incentives are instrumental or psychopathic. And so the technet that comes from them might also mimic those traits. But my question was,

kind of a different one, is that I've read research that shows that human individuals that have dark triad tendencies tend to be the ones that are really actively using AI. And we know from research that grandiose narcissism is reliably correlated with social media engagement. So I'm just curious if AI use selectively reinforces low empathy, ways of relating and would that have a population level effect in human society? I don't know, Nate, that's a really profound question. And I don't want to diagnose and I don't want to assume I don't have any research that necessarily supports that. I actually worry about the users, particularly of AI, like users of chat, GBT and all of the different large

language models. I worry more about people becoming dependent on the tool. I see it as a, as an amplified control technology that solves, that helps the institutions solve the target autonomy problem. It's entrapment relationship on steroids. It is. Yes, exactly. So, you know, you read, you know, you read Noam Chomsky's and Herman's manufacturing consent, one of my favorite books of all time, right? And, you know, Chomsky talks about the propaganda model, right? Propaganda model 1.0 or 2.0, right? Oh, it's even going to be worse, dude, because all of a sudden these AI companies are going to not have the revenue streams to back all the debt they're taking on to do hyperscale or data center buildout. And so they're going to have to jack the price up. And people

that are addicted to it or have an attachment, genuine attachment to their models, are going to have to fork up more and back to the matrix. It's entrapment though. It really is a solution to the target autonomy problem 3.0 because what's happening for the first time in history and there's some subtle entrapment dynamics that I'm just riffing here. And I've talked about it with some folks in the past. But at the end of the day, you know, what we see that I'm particularly scared about

and fascinated about is that for the first time ever in human history, we have a technology that we can effectively build a meaningful relationship with, right? So think about that for a second, right? And why that becomes dangerous, there's a number of reasons, right? Number one, you know, we become extremely dependent on this, you know, this technology for advice or, you know, It could be psychological advice, and there's a lot of data out there today. I mean, look, you see people getting married to AI for crying out loud, right? And, you know, but at the same time, what I think is frightening from a dependency standpoint is that, let's say, you know, I go to school and I learn mathematics, and it's taken me 10 years to really master mathematics in some domain of mathematics as a human being. And then, you know what, I start using AI because, you know, it's just easier, right?

My neurocognitive energy is lowered. I don't have to think so much. And eventually over time, I become reliant on this technology to come up with ideas and eventually I just trust its outputs. So for somebody like me, it's quite dangerous, but I can still interrogate the outputs because my background is mathematics. However, let's think about the next generation of that where dependency forms in a generation where they didn't do that 10 years or 15 years of discipline now. There was a paper that came out last week on that. There's no longer going to be the ability to peer review the output. Yeah, so then that's dangerous because then we have to trust the output without ever interrogating it, and nor do we have the knowledge.

One of my franklies that I'm working on is the top 20 risks from AI, and I'm, struggling to fit it into 20 because I've found like 50. Fortunately, I use AI maybe five or 10 minutes a day, but Zach, our mutual friend, instructed me on how to remove all the default settings. So it's just a research tool. I have no conversations or or anything like that. I think AI is a tool of, as you've pointed out, a psychopathic system. So if you don't mind, let's get back to the larger meta, meta view, unless you have any other

final thoughts on that topic? I have a couple of final thoughts. So I think when we look at the, you know, propaganda model 2.0 that Chomsky talked about, right? It was, you know, we're talking about merely presenting advertising, like the folks that controlled information back in the 80s, we're trying to present information in a way to engineer thought to folks that were absorbing that information.

And, you know, I think we're all well aware of the propaganda model of the 80s and 90s, right? but they struggled to really engineer thought back then because, again, they were, you know, they were decomposing their data collection. The data collection was weaker. And obviously, they're trying to get information, you know, smattering spaghetti on a wall, right? Looking at demographics and breaking people down based on the size of household and all of that kind of stuff, right? And there were only maybe a few conduits that information was able to be relayed out to the the masses at that time, TV, you know, newspapers and so forth. But with AI and these chatbots

and, you know, large language models, the difference is that, okay, back in the day they were mining information from a broad population. Now what they're doing is they're effectively mining your mind, right? They get a sense of your tonal arc, the way in which you're communicating. They get into your thoughts and ideas. the types of deep questions that you might have about nature, about life, about art. And when you start forming that relationship, you can effectively mine the minds of individuals. And this is all, this is all a ultimately a for-profit, instrumental organization behind this driver. Absolutely. It's all instrumental at the end of the day. So if we think about the confluence of the

problems our world is experiencing circa 2026 CE, including global heating, escalating geopolitical tensions, increasing inequality, political polarization, rising loneliness, and many more. How do you think your model fits into or even explains all these crises? I think what the psychopathic selection hypothesis potentially gives us in a way is a way of understanding why certain harmful trajectories become selected, institutionalized, and extraordinarily, I would say, difficult to reverse, right? So, like, for example, you mentioned inequality, right? So the important thing isn't that necessarily some people accumulate more wealth than others. It's that accumulated reward can eventually be converted into control over the entire game board, right? So, for

example, if I control enormous amounts of capital, my strategy space is radically different from somebody who's working a day job, right? I can acquire competitors. I can own infrastructure. I can purchase information. I can influence politics and regulation. I can survive symbolic losses that would bankrupt any normal individual. I can shape employment conditions and potentially influence the rules governing the markets in which both of us participate. So wealth isn't like a bigger pile of chips in the casino. I think at sufficient concentration, the chips begin buying pieces of the game board itself, right? And the winner writing the rules sort of thing. That's what you mean by taking pieces of the game board. Yeah. So they have the power to rewrite

the rules of the game so that they can preserve their strategic advantage, right? Well, that's where we're headed, my friend. Game dynamics, right? So resource concentration creates greater capacity to shape rules. Favorable rules can protect resource concentration. Dependency compresses the strategy spaces of other actors, the citizens, the employees, and so on. And at the end of the day, the lost dominant equilibrium can make participation durable, even for people who are being harmed by the game.

Right. So think about wage dependency. Millions of people may dislike their jobs, disagree with what their employer is doing, or feel that the economic system isn't serving them particularly well, right? However, they still show up tomorrow. Why? Because their mortgage still exists. Their debt still exists.

Their children still need food. Their access to the material economy still depends on income. So what looks like cooperation from the outside may actually be participation stabilized by the cost of exit, right? Now take the, you know, you mentioned global heating and ecological overshoot, right? So this is where the divergence between symbolic fitness and biophysical fitness becomes really important. We talked about the decoupling between the objective function and what's actually happening in reality, right? So I want to make this very illustrative and clear. Imagine two companies making essentially the same product.

One internalizes the ecological consequences of production, cleaner energy, safer extraction, better labor conditions, proper waste treatment, and so on. And therefore produces all of this at a higher cost, you know, symbolic cost. The other externalizes as much of those costs as the game board permits, right? If the market primarily selects on price, growth and financial return, then logically the second company can become symbolically fitter precisely because somebody else is absorbing part of its real cost. The atmosphere absorbs the carbon, a community absorbs the pollution, workers absorb dangerous conditions, future generations absorb consequences that aren't represented in today's transaction, right? And then selection compounds the problem, right? The actor generating the larger return acquires more resources.

Those resources can create greater political and institutional influence. They can fund lobbying, litigation, and public relations. they can influence regulation and liability structures. They can make attribution or responsibility more difficult because they control the rules of the game. So over time, the system can develop something functionally analogous to an immune system around successful instrumental strategies, right? And it's not because lawyers, governments, and, you know, all of these public relations departments are inherently psychopathic. They're not. So psychopathy has its own embedded positive.

feedback mechanism at large scales. So the basic dynamic is that through symbolic evolution, the successful behavioral strategies are encoded into the operating system in legal frameworks, incentives, objective functions like productivity, efficiency. And the actual bones of the organization essentially gets reinforced. And so these objective functions and these rules become crystallized because think of profit, right? I can't go into a company I want to work for and say, you know what, fuck profit, right? Like, I don't care about profit. People go to school for years to learn accounting principles

that talk about profit. They learn profit. They go to school for seven years. So it's not just the symbolic objective functions that are dominating here, but the symbolic infrastructure creates tentacles around the operating system. And it's like a solution architecture, right? And so adapting away from this trajectory becomes increasingly difficult because the objective functions get crystallized. The successful behavioral, instrumental behavioral strategies become crystallized because they solve very specific problems, evolutionary problems. And so across evolutionary time of the institution, people coming into the game are what's being transmitted. It's the game dynamics. It's not the norms, the values, and the rules.

The game dynamics actually produces the norms, the values, of the rules of the people are surviving based on consequence avoidance. You go into the company, you don't absorb all of the norms and the values of the beliefs of the company. You know you have to hit a number. And if you don't, you get fired. Right. So at the end of the day, people are adapting to this game. And either they adapt or they go extinct. And those that rise are the individuals who can adapt most effectively.

who are most willing to deploy these behavioral strategies and who are most willing to deploy those strategies. I have a few more clarifying questions before I get to the, where are we headed and where's the hope and what do we do part of the conversation. Sure. I know this is depressing. Yeah. Well, it's depressing, but also clarifying in a got down to the lowest size of the Russian dolls that we've been pulling apart here on this program. So in my work, I frame human civilization in its current state as sort of a metabolic economic superorganism that I mentioned earlier with incentives and momentum beyond that of the intent of any individual person.

So my question for you, two-part question, and I think I know the answer to the first, is is it possible for not only institutions to have instrumental behavior like you said, but for for an entire civilization to be psychopathic? And what does that look like in practice? And I guess the second part is, could our entire civilization appear psychopathic, even if a very small percentage of individuals in the system were actually psychopathic?

No, it's a good question. And we've kind of been circling around this, Nate. And, you know, I think, you know, your whole analogy of the superorganism, I did look at it. a little bit before we jumped on the call today. And I think it's really powerful. And I think there's actually an intersection between your work, my work, and so on. Right.

But, you know, I want to, again, I'm like very cautious because I'm always grounded in the science and the research. And I would say that I'm careful with the word psychopathic because I don't think civilization is, you know, literally a psychopath or clinically a psychopath. But I do think it's possible for a civilization to become organized around psychopathic, like strategic logic for all the things that we just talked about, right? I think the reason is that once the behaviors, like, succeed inside institutions become encoded into the institutions themselves, you no longer need those behaviors to originate from particular people, right?

Because the institution itself becomes an evolutionary field. Right. So even if there are no actual psychopaths in charge, the structures and the incentives and the institutions have already kind of hardwired into this path. They're crystallized. Yeah. And so the system can essentially reproduce them, right? So that's what I meant by institutional mirroring when we talked about this earlier.

And at civilizational scale, I would define it as a distributed behavioral architecture, right? So like markets, corporations, states, legal systems, bureaucracies, technology platforms all become partially coupled. game boards. Each has its own objective functions, but they, they're interactive, right? Growth affects tax revenue. You know, tax revenue affects state capacity. State capacity affects military power. Military power secures resource access. You know, resource access supports industrial production. Industrial production supports financial markets, financial markets reward, symbolic growth. So, you know, you begin to get a self-reinforcing system with what I think is important here to say momentum and velocity, right? Because no single person controls it, right? That's where the superorganism analogy kind of becomes powerful, right? And so individual actors can become, you know, we can be deeply compassionate and still occupy roles inside larger architecture, whose aggregate behavior is detached, consequence, right? But the coupled systems that we just talked about can produce a global

pattern characterized by extraction, acceleration, dominance, consequence displacement, and weak reciprocal obligation, meaning, you know, we see that a lot, like, when we see asymmetric power, like, so for example, if, like, I'm doing my taxes one year and, you know, the, you know, the tax, the tax system makes a mistake on my taxes. And I try to get my money back. It's really difficult to do so. But on the flip side, if they need money for me, it's the day of, right? It's the same with banks. They need the money from you. They have direct access to your account. They're opaque. We are visible. Shoshana Zubov talks about it in her book, Surveillance Capitalism. It's like the elites, they know everything about us. We know nothing about them. Well, let me ask just a quick question on that. topic and then I have a few more questions. Would a normal high level executive, not not CEO level necessarily, but a reasonably high level executive at a Fortune 500 company watching this podcast, would they be like, no, no, that's not what's going on? So again, people who are highly, have high salience for reward in the sense that they,

You know, again, their ventral seriatum, their nucleus accumbens, it just lights up. They get a dopamine dump because of reward. And a side question there, if you have time, is the people that have high salience for reward, is there a correlation there with they didn't get the appropriate reward from their mother or their parents in their childhood? Yeah, there's a genetic component to psychopathy, right? It's about, I think it's a 40% heritable trait. That's the neuroscience that supports this, right?

that the amygdala is muted, the, you know, the other architectures in the brain that are responsible for, you know, in the limbic system. The hippocampus is probably expanded. Yeah, the parahepicampal regions are also responsible. The ventrometal prefrontal cortex does all of the accounting when it comes down to decision making. So basically the way that a psychopath would think is, okay, high reward salience, I'm lighting up. I really want that thousand bucks. A pro-social actor goes, okay, maybe, right? Like whatever.

A pro-social actor will say, well, maybe I can cooperate to get that $1,000. The instrumental actor will say, well, how do I make this person's behavior predictable so that I can... And they look at the person who's like, how do I cooperate, get that $1,000 thinking, well, what a knucklehead. Why would they be trying to do that? 100%. Because they solve uncertainty differently. Just evolutionarily, they solve uncertainty. differently, right? And so, you know, they solve the problem differently. And so they, they, their viewpoint is that when they're making, they're doing the calculus and in the decision making, they're saying, and then what actions to take, they're saying to themselves, hey, I want that thousand bucks. What's the probability of being detected? What's the weight of fear? What's the probability of this individual retaliating? Do I care if I hurt this person or harm this person when I deceive them and manipulate?

Of course, these are all lower cost strategies. And of course, all those things, they're not just actually asking themselves those question. It's just there's neuronal impulses and hormones and neurotransmitters that lead them to those decisions. They're thinking about it because they are, they're instrumental, they're strategic, right? So another feature of psychopathy is that, you know, most of us, if we're emotional creatures, you know, we get angry about something we react in the moment.

Psychopaths are not defined by violence. They're defined by instrumentality. They're manipulative by their nature. And so they are strategic. They think about these things and they process this information. And so when they get aggressive, they're not, it's to stabilize extraction. They kick in other strategies to stabilize extraction, like name calling. David Graber talks about institutional mirroring of psychopathy to an extent. He doesn't name it, but it is, is that. administration is violence, right? It's an instrumental means, like if I get evicted, I get an eviction notice. I get that unempathetic email when I get fired, right? It's basically administration turns into violence. And so they think differently. But going back to the CEO question, people do what's in their nature. They gravitate to professions that align with what they're trying to achieve.

It's out of life. Right. And so CEOs are crazily represented in psychopathy. Like many, I don't know what the number is. It's something like 15% or something. It's ridiculous. It's a really high number. And police, police officers are highly represented. Surgeons are highly represented with psychopathy and so on and so forth. But, you know, long story short, I have talked to several CEOs about the work and it resonates. And they say this is what you're describing in your book and your papers. It's completely on point in terms of what we see and what we experience. And I think anyone who, and I've run this by buddies of mine who I worked in financial services with, and they just said, like, dude, this is, yeah, this speaks to our lived experience. It's fascinating. So a key part of the superorganism framework is that this has all been enabled and snowing.

by a massive energy and material surplus. You said you're friends with Bill Reese. He obviously understands and maybe has communicated that to you. Do you think that your hypothesis of a psychopathic or instrumental civilization is also similarly enabled by such an energy surplus? And part two, do you think a reduction of such an energy surplus, which is my general theme in coming decade or so, would that accelerate or dampen our psychopathic trajectory? The energy surplus part matters, but I'm not going to make it the root variable. I think the deeper variable, like as far as the superorganism and the psychopathic selection

hypothesis is concerned, is really the boundary condition of the game board. So what I mean by that is, you know, psychopathic are highly, instrumental strategies don't require a modern fossil fuel civilization to become adaptive, right? We see dominance, manipulation, coercion, strategic deceit, exploitation, or exploitative institutions throughout history, right? Like, you know, I think Rome's a pretty good example. Large empires had hierarchy, anonymity, you know, administrative distance of the action between distance and consequence. They had slavery.

They're, you know, a lot of them were symbolic, hyper competition, information hoarding, and then like big disparities in rule writing power, right?

So I don't think the question is like, is there enough energy? It's more, did the social architecture make exploitation cheap enough? Reward large enough consequences, were the consequences distant enough?

and retaliation weak enough for instrumental strategies to scale. So exploitation, instrumental strategies, and energy surplus kind of co-evolved. There's a co-evolution. Yeah, there's a co-evolution. That makes sense. So have we arrived at a instrumental civilization today, and does the logic of your model in any way deterministically tell us that a completely psychopathic civilization is our destiny?

Is that where we're headed or there's still degrees of freedom? I would say personally, I don't think science can say, allows me to say that outright. And I don't want to say it's a deterministic model. It's a mathematical model that makes particular predictions. But what I would say to be safe here is that there appears to be a directional dynamic, right? that we should take very, very seriously. Because the central argument of the psychopathic selection hypothesis is that

psychopathic or instrumental strategies are not inherently adaptive. Their fitness depends on the boundary conditions of the game board, right? Under conditions of strong reciprocity, repeated interaction, like we talked about, all the things that NOAC and other game theorists showed, we see that cooperative strategies can be remarkably stable. That is one of the leverage points then is build those conditions and strengthen those conditions, strong reciprocity, repeated interactions with other humans so that the instrumentality, that psychopathic behaviors have less of a stronghold to grab. Yeah, because instrumental strategies become very cheap when systems scale under those boundary conditions of anonymity, low probability of detection, etc. et cetera, et cetera, right? And so, yeah, and under those conditions, the, you know,

instrumental strategies become cheaper to execute relative to reciprocal alternatives. So they just out-compete them, right? So what are the things that the non-psychopathic pro-social pockets of life and society and activity can do now and in the near future to slow or even reverse this trend? And what would that look like? What recommendations would you have? Increase transparency at the, you know, at the level of elites and attribution. Like who's causing harm?

What are they doing, right? Shorten feedback loops. What I mean by that is there's a distance between action and consequence, right? So the feedback loop means if you cause harm, you should be punished, right? There has to be meaningful punishment. Like, look at 2008, right? You know, you had traders, trading options. They knew the risk was low.

They knew that they could offload the costs of the social body if they were wrong. They knew the rewards were high. They had impunity through abstraction, legal frameworks and complex products that no one understands, right? Like options and things like that. So if you cause harm, you should be accountable, right? and make actors experience more of the consequences they generate. It should be proportional, right? Reduce information irregularities,

meaning I talked about the asymmetry. Shoshana Zubov talks about in surveillance capitalism around. We never see what people who are in power doing. We have no visibility into their bank accounts, their private equity. Everything's in, you know, Panama Papers and all that kind of stuff. There's complete lack of information. And if you call them out, if you like Snowden or Julian Assange and people like that, for truth-telling, the immune system kicks in and they're arrested, right? And it makes no sense. It's like people who have power have, it's like the Spider-Man thing, have great responsibility.

But in some sense, the Epstein files as one example. Yeah. Is it is a good thing for this dynamic because it did exactly that. It reduced the anonymity. And it showed. information. But, you know, it's true, but look at the immune system. It's so powerful, right? Because yes, okay, some people were held accountable, right? But not everyone was, right? Not everyone was. There are still actors. Clearly that didn't happen. But I think the general public now sees what's going on behind closed doors. It's out in the open now. I think it's a positive, it's definitely a green flag. I think people are are getting exhausted, right? There's exhaustion bubbling. Yeah, I feel it.

And so that is a good point. You know, prevent extreme concentration of rule writing power, right? When you win the game, you shouldn't have all the power to rewrite the rules, right? Reduce unnecessary, so unnecessary dependency and exit costs, right?

What I mean by that? Here's an example, right? You know, what if we lived in a world where people, again, most people live in precarity, right? They have two or three jobs. Some of them do gig work. Some of them are Uber delivery people, right? Think about those dynamics. They're completely dependent on the system and those jobs. And they do them 15, 18 hours a day. And if they lose those jobs, they experience through the dependencies that form in the institutional level, they face cascading risk. And so imagine a world where you lose your job and you don't have to worry about continually paying your bills. Because not, Nothing pauses, right? You lose your job. It wasn't your fault necessarily. It's just the system kicking in. And, you know, it's funny. Like, if you ever read On Liberty by John Stuart Mill, he'd recognize the problem with concentrating power, the problem with inheritance, you know, tax the rich, right? Do these things. There's nothing wrong with that. And then we're getting into a political thing, but at the end of the day, a political regime is a symbolic system. So, and so wherever possible, the last one I would say is internalized costs that are currently being displaced onto other people, ecosystems and

future generations. Why, you know, stop dumping waste in the oceans. How about you dump it on the first floor of your company, right? Then you'd think twice about offloading costs or deferring the costs elsewhere and you'd take responsibility for your psychopathic actions. Those five are great directions. And individually, community, culturally, politically, we probably need to head in that direction. But each one of those directions is a microcosm of the example of the two companies you gave earlier. Yeah. That the one that doesn't do those things will out compete and therefore have more power. What are your thoughts on that? Yeah, no, and that's why I'm saying that this is where all of my research suggests because of the fact that the institutions

select for instrumental strategies, and those strategies get encoded. And because temporally, the entire operating system of the world is now a neoliberal operating system for the most part, it's going to be a very challenging thing to reshape the game board

because many of the objective functions, many of the rules, the incentives, the legal frameworks, the accounting principles, the software components, they're crystal. right, they're crystallized. And in a hyper-competitive environment where symbolic reward is winning inside the game, well, and you have this lost dominant equilibrium where people just keep participating in the game because it's cheaper to stay than it is to leave. No one wants to be a

martyr. What if there's an abrupt shock to the system? Yeah, that's what impacts. Usually when we see in collapse, right, you know this. The collapse is nonlinear. Typically, what I think is really going to happen is that material reality is going to impose the constraints. And it's going to impose the change in the game board itself. But that could mean the instrumentalists are even more in control than they were, or not necessarily. It can happen. Yes, it can happen. It depends. What likely will happen is that our systems will remain symbolic with the same boundary conditions.

and it will be on the communities to recognize that we shouldn't create these massive game boards. We need to create tightly coupled communities, smaller tribal communities, like cooperatives and things like that. This is all super fascinating. I mean, I have some time constraints and we're going to have to wrap it up. But I'd love to have you back on, especially on a roundtable on responses and thinking, ahead on what to do, especially as you do more research on this. But before we head to the closing questions, Greg, if you're comfortable, I would like to ask you a bit about your indigenous background and initiation.

Specifically, I'm curious about how your indigenous experience and learnings, how they integrate with your formal mathematics background and how that is together shaped your worldview and hopes for the future. Yeah, my, my dad has. is a Mohawk, he is Iroquois. My grandmother was born and raised on reservation. I'm based in Canada, I'm based in Toronto, and she was born and raised on Six Nations-Brandford Reservation.

So, yeah, that part of my identity is very strong. I think just being involved in community. In general, I would say that it has had a significant influence on my life, and I think the way that I see the world. I think that in Native culture, you know, you think about, you know, seven generations planning or things like that. You know, I would say indigenous culture is very focused on nature, very focused on bonding with, you know, we do something, you know, like Thanksgiving.

We have a belief that, you know, everything in nature is our relatives, like the trees, the plants, the, and there's a belief that our minds are one, right? And, you know, one thing that stands out to me is, you know, I became a really big fan of John Trudell, who's a very very, very, very, very, famous or infamous a poet, a native poet. And he just was such an inspiration to me because he has such great poetry and he's a bit of an anarchist, to be honest. And I do, I really love that about him. And there were, there was something that he said one time. And actually, I'm quoting a movie that he was in. It was a movie called Thunderheart that was made in 1992. But he basically said something like, you know, sometimes they have to kill.

us. They have to kill us because they can't break our spirit. We know the reality of freedom and we know the illusion of freedom. There is a way to live with Earth and there is a way not to live with Earth. We choose the way of Earth. And so that really just has always sat with me as something that I take with me in my day-to-day life. And do you have any corollaries between your work and psychopathy and instrumentalist behavior in the tribal setting, either modern or historic. I mean, I just did, frankly, where I brought up the concept of Watiko, which I think is Algonquin, and there are themes like the monster archetype, and is there a relationship with all that?

Yeah, there certainly is. I mean, it's a very fascinating thing, and I think it stems from the fact that, you know, I think a lot of indigenous cultures, I don't want to speak on behalf of all indigenous cultures, but I will say that like, you know, Iroquois and, and other cultures are very tribal and very, you know, very much respectful of nature and things like that. And I think there is a deep, I think a deep understanding in the community around, you know, especially around colonialism and all of these things. But there are certainly many parallels made. Well, I just wonder if in today's tribes, if there is an aversion or if there's strong reciprocity and repeated iterations with your tribal members so that at the tribal level, that psychopathy is muzzled and squelched.

I think in the traditional sense it is, right? It's always there. There's still the effects of colonialization, right? There's the intergenerational trauma for a lot of natives in North America, and I think there's still the resistance of becoming incorporated as part of the machine. However, we see the effects of the machine on indigenous peoples in general, right? Like, there's the, they're trapped. They're trapped. They're trapped by the system, and they're subjugated to, to a lot of racism, a lot of negative effects of colonialism, alcoholism, drug addiction. And again, it's the system that has even wrapped

its tentacles around the tribal beliefs. They're losing their language, right? They've lost their language. They've lost their beliefs, their values, right? And they're trying to retain that. And it's very important to them to do so. But you do see the tentacles entering those communities. And it's sad.

It really, it really is sad. Thank you for sharing that. So I don't know if you've ever watched any of my episodes. Oh, you said you watched the Reed-Miloy one, but I asked these questions, these closing questions of all my guests. So you're aware of the Metacrisis, taking off your evolutionary biology game theory, psychopathy expert hat on or you can keep it on if you want.

What advice do you have to someone watching this episode what can people do to help address the things discussed in this podcast or is it all up to politicians and leaders? No, it's not up to them. We outnumber them, right? So the bottom line is that you have the power to resist the game. You have the power to change the game. You have the opportunity to be a better person. You have an opportunity to be a pro-social creature in a game that wasn't designed for, for cooperation and pro-social behavior. The powerful thing about the game itself is that it becomes very self-regulating. Domination doesn't feel like domination. And that's why it works so well.

It's like a magic trick, right? Domination doesn't work when it's experienced as domination. It works when it's experienced as, you know, self-regulating, when failure feels personal, right? And so on. And I give people the advice that don't be afraid. You've got nothing to lose, right? we can all work together to create a better planet. The fact that what you just said really resonated with me that if it was clear that it was

domination or psychopathy, it would maybe cease to work. There's a little bit of a magic trick there. Thank you for that. Do you teach or are you just a research professor? I used to teach way back in the day. I used to teach way back in the day. So I have experience doing it, yeah. So what specific recommendations do you have for young?

young humans in their teens or 20s who become aware of the economic and environmental constraints to the global economy. Yeah, one of the things I would say for the younger generation, I have a, you know, I have a niece and a nephew that are younger and a twin brother. And one of the things I try to tell them is to not become so dependent on technology, to think for yourself, to read books, to, you know, reinforce good behaviors, right? we have the opportunity to teach her kids good things, right? The community can step in and really make an impact on kids today, right?

So I think for the kids, it's really just kind of trying to keep them away from becoming and trapped by the game itself, right, trying to find their own way, having their own voice, trying to be independent, but at the same time being very community focused. I think that's one of the goals of the system in that magic trick is it's easier to dominate people who are atomized than it is to dominate groups of people, right? And I think reinforcing community is so important for kids, I think, and to learn self-love and to appreciate themselves. And again, don't lead with fear. Don't be afraid to be yourself. Thank you for that. What do you care most about in the world, Greg? I care about the world. I know this is so cliche.

But I really care about nature. I really care about people. I really care about animals. And I just want to see a better world. And I want to be a part of that. But I'm not looking for prestige. I'm not looking for acclaim. I just want to be a cog in the wheel to help.

And I want to be part of that process at the end of the day. And I'm not afraid to do that. I'm not afraid of the institutions. I'm not afraid of the elites. I'm not afraid of any of these people. I think we need to all work together because the time is now. There's no other time to act but now. So that's what I really care about.

That was a beautiful answer. If you could wave a magic wand, strange question, and there was no personal recourse to your decision, what is one thing you would do to improve the future of humanity in the biosphere? Oh, man, that is such a hard question to answer. I think I would love to just go You know, sometimes I think about this I was talking about a good friend of mine

And I said, wouldn't it be nice just to be able to like time travel And live as our ancestors lived off the land You know, I think, I don't know Maybe I'm romanticizing the whole thing But I think that's what I want to do I think it was, yeah, it was possibly harder But, you know, was it? I can't really know until I go back there

To see what life was like, you know? I just, there's something about that. Yeah, time traveling back then. And to avoid getting into the current predicament we're in right now is probably what I would want to do if I could. Well, okay. So then as such a time traveler, what would have been the things that you could have changed the incentive structures and the institutions from becoming psychopathic? And I don't know. It's so hard because it's just like, I think when we look back on just, you know, again, I always think about this evolutionarily. I don't know if we could. There was anything that we could do.

I think we're here because we're supposed to be here. I sometimes get that feeling as well. Yeah, there's something deterministic about it, right? That's the way, that's the vibe I kind of get. Deterministic to get to this point, but not necessarily deterministic going forward. I'm wishful thinking and I'm hopeful. So this is an all doom and gloom. I think we can still do great things.

This has been eye-opening and I learned some things, as you predicted. Do you have any closing comments? or thoughts for the people watching and listening who feel in their gut, what you've laid out is is directionally valid. In closing, I'm just grateful for all of the, you know, all of the, the attention the work's getting, and I'm eternally grateful for that, and I hope that it can help in some way. And I just want to be part of the solution.

Well, if your work gets a lot of attention, the lot more people are going to look to you for a solution. And I would love to be part of that ecosystem. That's my end goal is to be part of that community to help, right? And I'm grateful to you, Nate, for having me on the show. I'm grateful to Zach and Bill and all of these great people who are just, you know, pro-social. There's a lot of them out there. Thanks again for your work, Greg, and to be continued, my friend.

Thank you. It's great to meet a new friend. If you'd like to learn more about this episode, please visit The Great Simplification.com for references and show notes. From there, you can also join our Hilo community and subscribe to our Substack newsletter. This show is hosted by me, Nate Hagen's, edited by No Troublemakers Media, and produced by Misty Stinnett and Lizzie Siriani. Our production team also includes Leslie Batlutz, Brady Hyan, Julia Maxwell, Gabriela Slaman, and Grace Brunfeld. Thank you for listening,

and we'll see you on the next episode.