The Joe Rogan Experience - #1073 - Steven Pinker

Episode Date: February 4, 2018

Steven Pinker is a cognitive psychologist, linguist, and popular science author. He is Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, and is known for his advocacy of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind. His new book "Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress" will be released in February 2018.

I can keep it in check. Four, three, two. And we're live. First of all, Steve, thank you very much for doing this. I really appreciate it. Oh, thank you for having me. I've been a big fan of your work for a long time. And you bring up some really fascinating subjects. social media and how weird it is that you got lumped in with the alt-right for a comment

saying something along the lines of that you find, what was the exact quote? Something along highly intelligent people seem to, which is not saying they're good people. No, that's right. And I think a lot of people who are ignorant of the alt-right equate them with the skinheads and the neo-Nazis carrying the tiki torches. But I was referring strictly to the alt-right from its origin in internet discussion groups. And I know some of them, some of them are former students, and some of them are highly intelligent and highly read. But that's not what people often think of when they think of the alt-right. And that's what I was referring to.

There are people in tech. There are some people in universities who stay undercover. And I made some remarks on how to starve that movement, not how to feed it. But so many people jumped on it as if you were endorsing the alt-right. What was the exact quote? You were just basically saying something along the lines of there's a lot of intelligent people that are involved in this. Well, it wasn't so much that. It was also that because of the various taboos in mainstream intellectual culture because of political correctness, there are certain things that are just kind of not discussable.

But then when people in the alt-right discover them, they feel tremendously empowered. Like we are now privy to the truth that the establishment can't handle. You can't handle the truth. And since it was never discussed in the open, there are no counter arguments to some of the most toxic interpretations. And so the alt-right can run with the, never having been in a forum where these things are debated and criticized and put into context, they take like one fact and then they draw the most extreme conclusions. If these things were debated in the first place, then you'd realize that those conclusions are not warranted.

An example is there are average differences between men and women in a lot of psychological traits. Now, if that's – and that's often quite taboo in intellectual circles for I think bizarre reasons. I think there are people who think that somehow women's rights depend on men and women being indistinguishable, which I think is a bad equation in the first place. I agree. But as soon as you come across the fact that men and women on average are different,

you also come across the fact that men and women overlap in a lot of these traits, that whatever trait you name that men on average are better at than women or vice versa, there are a lot of women who are better than a lot of men or vice versa. And so you can't really judge an individual from the average of their sex. Also, even though there are some traits where men score a little better than women, there are some traits where women score a little better than men. And that's the complete picture. But the thing is that if the entire subject is out of bounds, you never get to present the complete picture.

And some people run away with, oh, men and women are totally different. What are your thoughts on how the subject got out of bounds? Because it's very confusing to me that certain subjects, like the differences between genders, are so taboo when they seem so obvious. I mean, you just could go to a mall and just look at the way the men dress and the women dress. And you go, well, there's some obvious distinctions here. There's a history to it. Because there were a lot of cockamamie theories in the 19th century and a lot of the 20th century

that men were intellectual and women were not, and women were governed by their emotions, and if women thought too much, it would take blood away from their ovaries and their womb, and they wouldn't be fertile, and then they'd be all miserable. I mean, really, like, crazy stuff. And as a reaction to that, in the 70s, when the second wave of feminism became prominent, it became almost an article of faith that there were no differences between men and women.

And so if you say that there are differences between men and women, you're sending women back to the kitchen and the nursery. So this is a total non sequitur because fairness is not the same as sameness. So obviously women should have equal rights to men, whether or not they're exact copies of men or have a distinctive profile, as men have a distinct profile. So I think it was just a mistake to conflate the issue of women's rights with men and women being identical.

But that's the way it kind of shook out. And it became kind of an article of faith in a lot of, in some feminists, some kind of left liberal circles that men and women have to be identical. And if they aren't, that means you're a traitor to women's equality. Yeah, and articles of faith are always dangerous. Always dangerous. Especially in that regard. Articles of fairness are always important.

I mean, being fair to each other. But being fair is also recognizing differences. That's right. And not assuming that any difference is a deficiency. Right. differences. That's right. And not assuming that any difference is a deficiency. I mean, if you're really doing an honest comparison of the differences between men and women, men wouldn't come out looking so good. Yeah, right. Yeah, I have a whole bit about that in my act. When we're looking at the reaction to this, though, what was strange to me was how many people seemed like they wanted to jump on board and criticize you.

And I think a lot of it is almost like to take away some of the potential criticism of themselves. Like it's instant claiming of the moral high ground, virtue signaling. And it's just very disappointing when you see this from intellectuals and college professors and people that should know better. I mean, to be fair, I did not get into much trouble from my peers and among professors and grad students and so on. There are a couple of trolls who ran with it. But by and large, the mainstream reaction was that this is almost a sign of, as the New York Times put it, that social media is making us stupid. Yeah, that was the article, the title of the article in the Times. Yeah, so by and large, I came out of it okay, but it was a real indication of how these mobs of outrage can corrupt any kind of intelligent discourse.

Yeah, well, subtle discussions, discussions that involve nuance, like complicated issues that are complex. They require a long sort of description of the issue and a very complex sort of take on these various differences between men and women and the alt-right and the left and political correct. These are long discussions. I mean, these aren't something that you can smash into a very short soundbite and completely cover your take on things. All the more reason that they shouldn't be taboo because if you can't discuss them, then the only interpretation you're going to have is the simplistic one.

If you could bring them out in the open, then you can start to have that discussion. Yeah, I'm hoping that this is turning around. I'm hoping that what's happened is the outrage culture has become almost a parody of itself. It's gotten so ridiculous that people will sort of shy away from outrage, seemingly like the same reason why people are terrified of talking about the differences between men and women is because they don't want to be grouped into the people that literally or legitimately, rather, were sexist in the 1900s and the 1800s and these people that did have these terrible ideas. So now we're trying to go so far away from that that we've become a little bit ridiculous. And I'm hoping things – I'm hoping it's a swing and it'll just kind of bounce back towards the middle again. and they'll just kind of bounce back towards the middle again.

Yeah, and in fact, there's some hope that just what any medium is new, there'll be these excesses and it takes a while for the system to kind of re-equilibrate, to have an immune response that damps down the worst of it. I mean, I've been on the internet a long time. And in the 80s, when it was mainly academics and computer scientists who were on the internet, there were these discussion groups. This was before the World Wide Web, so it was all text. And there was this concept of flaming. Yes. I don't know if the word is used.

Flame wars. Flame wars, yeah. Those were great. Those were the good old days. Well, it came from the – there was an award given – I mean a jokey award called the Flaming Asshole Award. Oh, really? To the worst insulter in these intellectual discussions. And the trophy was supposedly an asbestos cork. But from the Flaming Asshole Award, there was the noun aflame, the adjective flame wars, the verb to flame.

The noun aflame, the adjective flame wars, the verb to flame. And then it did damn down. As people became aware of flaming as a phenomenon, in the discussion groups, it was, well, let's not turn this into a flame war or enough flames. And when people kind of realized that this was a thing, then they could push back against it. And let's hope that that happens with the social media again. Yeah, I hope so. It was a sport in like the late 90s early 2000s it was essentially like an online sport like someone would say something about you and you go okay all right how do i attack this all right and it was it was more fun than anything and i i felt like there was very few

people relatively speaking involved in discussion groups back then in terms of like the mass amount of people that are on social media now. It's seemingly like everyone is in some form of – or most people are in some form of social media now. Whereas back then, the number of people that were on message boards was so small. Oh, yeah. So small. That's right. And you're right.

There is an art form of ritual insults like in Shakespeare and African-American snapping. There, when people realize that this is a sport, then no one gets hurt. It's just like martial arts. It's part of the fun. But the thing is that when it goes out of control and it really does attack people's reputations, then you've got a problem. We have a thing in comedy called Roast Battle. Yeah, roasting.

Another example. Yeah, absolutely. And Roast Battle is this great show that they do at the Comedy Store every Tuesday where comedians will prepare insults against each other. But my friend Brian Moses, who hosts it, at the end of everything, they always hug it out. Right. Like, it's always like, no, this is a joke writing exercise and a a fun joke-writing show, and no one really means any of this. They're not really mean. So at the end, everybody hugs.

Yeah, just like professional boxing or ultimate fighting or so on. There are rules. There's an arena. And when you're done, it's over. You don't plot revenge. Right. But sometimes people can misunderstand it. There's that famous press roast where Obama had some fun at the expense of Donald Trump when he was still just a reality show. And you could see famously the camera zoomed in on Trump and he was not amused

at these jokes at his expense. And there's a theory that one of the reasons that he plotted his presidential run was to get revenge. Well, that's one of the reasons that he plotted his presidential run was to get revenge. Well, that's one of the things that Obama said during that roast. Here's one of the things that I am that you'll never be. President of the United States. And everybody went crazy and cheered him on. Boy, history could have turned out very differently if he hadn't made that one joke. Isn't that amazing?

Yeah. Well, apparently he had been thinking about being president for a long, long time. But that might have been the straw that broke the camel's back. Oh, Barack, what have you done? When you see social media today, like as a psychologist, and you see this thing that people do when they can behave anonymously in the absence of social cues, not in front of each other, not seeing how the cruel things hurt each other. How does that make you, do you think that this is just

an unnatural way of communicating? Well, there is something, the anonymity is certainly unnatural and the lack of face-to-face contact. And I think one of the big discoveries of psychology over the last couple of decades is that we're moral animals to the extent that we have reputations. Going back to Richard Dawkins' famous book, The Selfish Gene, where he posed the question, how could niceness and generosity and cooperation evolve, given that in Darwinian competition, you'd expect the most aggressive, the most selfish to predominate? And there's an answer to that question, and Dawkins worked it out back in 1976, based on work of other biologists, which is that if there's reciprocity, that is, if I remember the nice things that you did to me, and I feel compelled to repay them,

and conversely, if you do something that harms me and I threaten revenge, then people can kind of settle into cooperation because we really are better off if we extend favors to each other that do a lot of good to the other in response to a fairly minor inconvenience to the self. If everyone does that, everyone's better off. And that's only stable, though, if everyone has a memory for what everyone else did. Therefore, that sets up a pressure to cultivate your reputation as someone who is trustworthy and will reciprocate. But without the reputation, without the memory of who did what and how generous and trustworthy someone is,

the whole thing can unravel and you get back to what people think of as Darwinian competition, namely nature, red in tooth and claw, just a bloody battle. So reputation is really, it's not just a matter of kind of ego or burnishing your credentials. That's really what makes all cooperation, niceness, kindness possible. And so when you have an arena in which the, first of all, you don't have face-to-face contact, so you don't have the kind of evolved responses that we have to getting along. Namely, it's a big deal to insult someone to their face.

I mean, people do it, but you've got to do it very carefully. You take that away, and it's just typing a bunch of characters at a keyboard. And especially if the person doing the typing has a handle, they're just anonymous, then that kind of eliminates some of the constraints on civility and generosity and maintaining a reputation as a credible cooperator. maintaining a reputation as a credible cooperator. I also feel that there's a selfishness in being nice and being generous because the way I describe it, I think it feels good. It feels good to be nice to people. It feels good to be generous. When you give someone a nice tip at a restaurant and they get happy, that feels good.

It's good for you too. It's not just a one-way street. Well, it's kind of a benign selfishness. I mean, that is, although it's not, the irony is that it can't just really be calculating. If it's really that I just do exactly as much that gets me gratitude and recognition, then other people see through that. And so the paradox is that it's kind of got to be sincere for it to be credible to someone else. So the most effective way to prove to someone else that you're a nice guy is to actually be a nice guy.

Because if you're just calculating, if you're just doing the bare minimum you can get away with, then since we're all pretty good intuitive psychologists, we're always kind of thinking, did he really mean it? Is he just kind of kissing up? Is he trying to curry favors? And we see through that. It's the person who actually isn't doing that calculation that we really admire and respect.

Right. It's very unusual. It's one of the reasons why we admire. Like, look at this completely altruistic person. Yeah. altruistic person. It's very rare. The marketplace of reputations can select for true niceness and goodness if you've got enough information and enough interactions. I mean, here's a crude analogy. So in the business world, you can have cutthroat, fly-by-night businesses that just try to squeeze everything out of the customers and then take off

as soon as the cheating is discovered. They don't last very long. They don't actually make a lot of money. It's often the companies that will take back the product, no questions asked, even if they lose a little bit of money, but they earn the loyalty of their customers. Those are the companies that often do the best and stick around the longest. So it's kind of an analogy to the way that being honorable, even if you have little losses, well, I did a little bit more for him than he did for me. But over the long run, that's what makes you desirable as someone that other people want to hang out with, if the reputations can spread.

Yeah. It's kind of amazing if you think about how cherished true generosity and kindness, how cherished they are. Like, it's an amazing thing. You see people that are truly kind and truly generous, and we value that so much. It's kind of amazing there aren't more of them because it's such a virtue that we admire. And if someone does behave in that manner, people gravitate towards them. It's a real trait that is attractive to people.

It is. And there's a misunderstanding of the evolutionary explanation of the appearance of altruism and generosity, a misunderstanding of the message that Dawkins conveyed in that book, that it predicts that we're all just kind of calculating favor traders, that we do just enough to get a favor in return. And if we don't think someone can help us in return, then we just cut them off, kind of a cynical view of generosity. But it's actually, the reason that that's not true is that as soon as the game begins, you kind of get to higher and higher levels of people psyching each other out, seeing through them.

Because if I have a choice between who I'm going to hang out with, who I'm going to befriend, there's one person who's going to do exactly for me what will help him in the long run. There's someone else who really is generous and he's really going to help me and he's not going to keep a long memory of who did what for whom. Well, I'm going to pick the second guy. And so he's going to actually be better off for being the better person. Now, that – I mean you can take that to an extreme and predict that it means that we're all infinitely generous, which of course we're not. total sucker or not giving so much away that you just harm yourself in the long run,

and being the kind of person who is generous and honest enough that other people want to affiliate with them. And the reality is that all of us are probably mixtures. I mean, we're not cutthroat sociopaths, most of us, although some of us are, nor are we total saints, self-sacrificing saints. We're somewhere in between and different people are at different points in that continuum. When you look at social media and you look at this – the nastiness that's so common and obviously in some ways it's got to be connected to the ability to be anonymous. to the ability to be anonymous. But I feel like, and I've thought of this more and more lately, that this negativity is probably a temporary thing. I feel like people are realizing that this is an unnatural way of communicating and that

it's so relatively recent in human history and such a small window. I mean, 1994 is essentially when people started getting online and here we are in history and such a small window. I mean, 1994 is essentially when people started getting online and here we are in 2018 and you're seeing people switching to flip phones, deleting their Facebook. It's a very common thing and almost a chic thing to do. Like people are talking about it on a regular basis. Oh man, I just get email. I check it once a day and that's it. Like, wow. Yeah. No, I think that's right. Whenever there's a new technological innovation, it takes society a while to adjust to it. And you say people got online in 1994,

but social media are even more recent than that. It's more probably like, you know, smartphones started to become ubiquitous around maybe 2011, and Facebook took off in the 2000s. But yeah, I think that's right. And similar things happened when other media were introduced. Like there was a big panic when television came in that families would never talk to each other. They'd all be staring at the screen like zombies and you'd never have a conversation over the dinner table ever again. Even before that, when telephones were invented, it was,

you know, families would never sit down together because the phone would constantly be ringing and attention spans would be disrupted because the phone could ring any time. Wasn't there a similar conversation about books? Yeah, actually there was, yeah. And about writing, going back to the ancient Greeks where – when writing was considered to be kind of degenerate and decadent because you'd let your memory go to pot. How are people going to cultivate their memory? They could just write things down and look at them. That's crazy. Isn't that interesting? Why do you think we're always looking to dismiss some new, fantastic technology? It's partly because we don't understand it yet. I mean, it's new. And also a lot of the

adjustments that you were just talking about, you know, you can't really predict them beforehand. A lot of what happens in a society is there are like hundreds of little adjustments that people make, like not spend too much time on Facebook or email and leave this platform for that platform, where if you were starting from scratch and asked to kind of imagine how it's going to play out, you can't really anticipate these things. It's like thousands of adjustments that people make. They happen when they happen with millions of people making decisions. But you can't just deduce them beforehand like a logical proof. And so we just don't know.

We know what the threat is. We don't know what society's response is going to be. We just don't know. We know what the threat is. We don't know what society's response is going to be. Well, this is a fascinating time when it comes to social media and just human interaction because this is so new and because it's uncharted territory. I mean, I think this is one of the reasons why so many people have so many concerns about it. Like, where is this?

Where's this going? Like, what's it going to do to our children? You walk down the street and everyone's just staring at their phone. treat and everyone's just staring at their phone. It really is. I've said this, that imagine if there was a drug that came along that this drug made you only think about the drug. You were more likely to get into car accidents because of this drug. You were more likely to sleep late, cause more anxiety, and soak up immense amounts of your time with very little reward for it.

You would go, wow, what kind of crazy drug is this? It's robbing people of their lives. Well, that's cell phones. That's social media. I mean, it does give you something. I mean, if you use it correctly, most of the time I try to spend on social media, I try to spend, or most of the time on my phone, I try to spend off social media, but reading things.

I try to read articles and I try to, in some way, justify like, oh, I'm doing something productive on my phone. But in a lot of ways, I'm just addicted to checking that thing. Yeah, you have to develop habits of self-control and balance in life. I had a student, so I teach at Harvard, and one time a freshman came into my office at the beginning of the semester. So she looked at the shelf of all the books and she said, wow, Professor Pinker, how do you find time to write so many books?

And then she looks at my office and sees all the books on my shelves and says, wow, Professor Pinker, how do you have time to read so many books? And she paused for a second and she said, I bet you're not on Facebook. I mean, there's got to be some good that comes out of those communities as well. Oh, there is. I don't want to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Undoubtedly. Yeah, absolutely.

And, you know, I confess, I mean, I'm on Twitter, and I sometimes look at my Twitter feed, and I learn really interesting stuff from it. But I also say, okay, enough. Get back to work. Get back to reading. Go outside. Yes. See some friends. Spend some time with your family.

Yeah, I will go down a Twitter hole. I went down a Twitter hole yesterday about these new Mayan ruins that they found in Guatemala. Oh, amazing, yeah. Yeah, crazy. Thousands of structures swallowed up by time, and they're just now realizing, like, oh, my God, this is a city. Yeah. Amazing stuff. So that stuff's good.

Yeah, absolutely. And it's a question of are all finding the balance between getting the advantages without the disadvantages. Well, it's just so new. Yeah, exactly. When you see all – so much negativity though and this is a big problem with anonymous accounts in particular. You see it in Facebook. But in Facebook, there seems to be repercussions. see it in Facebook, but in Facebook, there seems to be repercussions. Like if you're Tom Smith,

and Tom Smith writes something horrible, like Tom Smith could get fired from his job for it. We've seen that. People will write something racist or sexist or whatever, and we'll see them get fired from their job because of something that they put on Facebook, because your profile represents the actual you. Yeah, it's not anonymous. Yes. I feel like there's benefit to that. Yeah, that's right. There's some, I mean, the problem is there can also it's not anonymous, yes. I feel like there's benefit to that. Yeah, that's right. I mean, the problem is there can also be outrage mobs where someone will post something and it's taken out of context and they didn't realize, well, they meant it as a joke.

Like the woman who took that trip to Africa and made a kind of a self-facing comment kind of about racism and people thought it was racist, but she was actually making fun of racism. I think she was drunk and she was being racist was racist, but she was actually making fun of racism. I think she was drunk and she was being racist. I just think she was being funny. Because look, I'm a comic and I have a lot of comedian friends that are not racist, but they will say hilarious racist things

because it's funny. It's not because they're racist. What was her name? Justine Sacco. Thank you. This was the, I hope I don't get AIDS, but I don't have to worry. I'm just kidding. I'm white.

LOL. That's what she wrote. Right. She woke up 12 hours later after a Xanax and wine hangover, I'm sure. And her life was a living hell. Yeah. I mean, she still to this day is, I mean, Jamie knows her name. Oh, yeah.

Right. And she probably is not racist. No. She meant it. Ironically, she meant it. I mean, she herself was not racist. Didn't she become controversial after that as well? Yeah, she was like the PR person for DraftKings or Fandor,

when they were going through some issues a couple years ago. Yeah. DraftKings is an online gambling thing. It's kind of controversial, gambling on sports and stuff like that. Yeah. We look for people also. We were talking about this before without getting look for people also we were talking about this before without getting into details about who we're talking about but there are certain people that

are very flawed individuals that look to find people and attack them to take away some of the the spotlight on their own flaws absolutely this is a thing this is a big part of virtue signaling right like a big part of uh going after people and outrage mobs. As long as the mob is attacking someone else, they're not attacking you. That's right. Yeah, that's right. And there is – I mean there's an interesting question over history is how do some of these – sometimes called extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds. So tulip bulb mania in Holland in the 17th century.

What's that? Oh, there's this kind of bubble where people started to outbid each other on tulip bulbs. And the price of a single tulip bulb went like through the roof and then it suddenly crashed. People lost fortunes because everyone was expecting everyone else to keep bidding up the price. Wow. Yeah. Tulip bulbs. Tulip bulb mania.

Just went nutty. But then there were also witch hunts where a woman would be accused of sinking a ship or causing a crop failure or making someone's child get sick. There are the pogroms in Europe where Jews were accused of poisoning the wells or killing Christian boys to make matzah out of their blood. There are the lynchings in the American South where African-Americans were accused of raping a woman based on just a rumor spreading and then they'd be tortured and hanged. There's the McCarthy era. and then they'd be tortured and hanged. There's the McCarthy era. There was the daycare satanic ritual abuse mania of the 1980s where these daycare workers were accused basically by coaching kids

to embellish these fantastic stories of how they were sexually molested and tortured and forced to take part in satanic rituals. I mean, all totally nonsense. And people went to jail. So an interesting question is, how do people kind of lose their collective minds every once in a while in history? And part of the answer is, if you start a kind of vicious circle of denouncing people and then denouncing people who don't denounce people, of denouncing people and then denouncing people who don't denounce people or denouncing people who call the whistle on other people denouncing people, then you can get a kind of circle of terror where no one wants, everyone is so afraid of being denounced that they want to denounce

first. Stalinist Soviet Union is another example and Maoist China. And that's somehow one of the ways in which dictators could often enforce their power by turning the citizens against each other. So everyone's denouncing everyone else out of fear that they'll be denounced first. That's going on right now in North Korea, right? Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. In North Korea, they have this thing where they each have to report on each other. Like when people are together, they report on each other for different things that they did that were violations of whatever code that they follow. Absolutely. And so governments know how to exploit it, but it isn't just governments,

it can happen spontaneously too. It's a weird human trait, isn't it? It is. It's a combination of a kind of a human trait and a kind of dynamic when you have kind of a network of people. And they all are kind of trapped and no one can be the first person to escape from this vicious circle because they don't want to be the one who is denounced and imprisoned and tortured or whatever the consequence may be. Where do you think, if you think at all about this, where do you think this is all headed? Like especially in terms of social media?

It's hard to tell but you mentioned the possibility that there's been such growing recognition of the problem that we will mount a response that it'll just seem ridiculous. The outrage mob, once it's recognized that there are outrage mobs and virtual signaling fanatics, once we have a label for them, once we know that it's a thing, it'll seem so ridiculous that people will be less tempted to do it. I mean, that's the optimistic outcome. a subject where there's a lot of people involved or perhaps even an individual, is that you're the only one that's writing. Like if you were having a conversation with that person, they would be able to say something back.

Like you'd be able to say something and they would go, well, that's not exactly how I was thinking. Actually, I was looking at it this way. And the other person would go, oh, okay. So your take on it was, you know, and they would go back and forth and exchange information, hopefully come to some sort of an understanding of what's going on in each person's mind. Absolutely. Whereas you can define someone in a tweet or in a Facebook post or a blog post. You can define someone without them having any ability to respond in the moment.

So you have this whole uninterrupted chunk where you could, you know, talk about, you know about fill in the blank, some celebrity or some politician or whatever, and you can define them in some really horrible, nasty way. And they just have to sit there and read it. It's just your thoughts. But it's not an accurate method of communicating ideas with a person. It's just your one uninterrupted take on things. Absolutely. So my second to last book, the one just before my current book, Enlightenment Now, but the previous book was called The Sense of Style. It was a writing manual. The way I began it is, I said, why is so much writing so bad? How come there's so much writing where you just

can't understand what the person is talking about? And I mentioned some theories. Some people think that it's academics and intellectuals trying to show off how profound they are by how incomprehensible they are. If people can understand it, it can't be that complicated. So I'm going to write the stuff that no one will understand. Then they'll think I'm really smart. So that's one theory. And there might be some truth to it. But I think that the main theory is that writing is, just as you described, it's a one-way channel of communication. It's very unnatural. When we speak, you and I, we're having a conversation.

We're looking each other in the eye, and our eyebrows go up, and they get knitted. And if I start to become too obscure, you're going to give me a quizzical look. I'm like, oh. You're terrified to see someone with that expression on their face. Or you can interrupt and say, well, what the hell was that about? When you're writing, you have none of that. Right. And so I think part of the skill in writing, at least what I argue in the sense of style, is to become a kind of – enough of an intuitive psychologist that you can try to anticipate what your reader knows and what your reader doesn't know.

And that – because you have no way of determining that as you're writing because you're just sitting there tapping away. Whoever is going to read what you write, you're never going to meet them. It might be three years from now. They might be halfway across the world and it's just one way. And there's another kind of a psychological problem that we all have, it's just part of being human, called the curse of knowledge. Namely, when you know something, it's really, really hard to imagine what it's like not to know it. You just assume that everyone knows it, that your understanding is everyone's understanding. And so you write away, you know,

write, write, write, write, write, and it never occurs to you that the reader doesn't know your abbreviations or your jargon or can't visualize what you're describing. It's just so clear to you, the writer. And a lot of bad writing comes from the curse of knowledge that is a writer not getting into the heads of his reader. And a lot of the cure is either to at least know that it's a problem and think what can my reader be reasonably expected to know. And because we're not even that good at that, I mean none of us are mind readers, just showing someone a draft of what you've written

and you're often surprised at how often they'll say, I don't know what you're talking about. Maybe that's what we should force people to do at Twitter. Maybe we should have like a team of people that you send your tweet to. Yes. Like a circle of confidants. Well, I mean, that's the way it works in publishing. You have an editor.

Right. In academia, you've got peer review. Before it's published, they send it out to other people just like you, and they write a little review. And you've got to modify it if it doesn't make any sense. Right. So if Justine Sacco had sent that to a team of confidants, they would have went, no, Justine, don't write that. I'm sorry. I'm on a plane. I'm drunk. I'll call you from Africa. Well, this is, you know, one of the big themes in my new book, Enlightenment Now, is

how is it that we're simultaneously in many ways getting smarter but also seem to be getting stupider as a society? So I think part of it is that none of us individually are that smart. We all and cognitive psychologists have shown that humans have all kinds of biases and fallacies. We reason from stereotypes. We assess risk by how easy it is to imagine something. So, you know, we're afraid of getting on a plane because it's very easy to imagine a plane crashing and plane crashes make the news. We don't worry about texting while driving because there's never a headline on page one of the hundred people who died in the past week because they texted while driving.

So there are a lot of fallacies. But the thing is, we as a species have done some amazing things. I mean, we discovered those Mayan buried cities. I mean, science is amazing and democracies are amazing. And it's because none of us solves a problem all by ourselves. We're part of a kind of collective brain that works by rules where all of the excesses of one person get kind of balanced out by other people. And that's why you have, you know, things like checks and balances in a democracy, where instead of having a supreme leader who just runs the country the way he wants, he's got to worry about the legislature and the courts and the judges and impeachment and so on. In science, instead of having one genius announcing the way the world

works, he or she has to subject themselves to peer review and let other scientists criticize him or her. And whenever you get people acting intelligently, it's often because they belong to these institutions with rules that are designed to make up for the idiocies of any individual person. That's fascinating. I completely agree with that. That makes so much sense. I've also felt that there's not a lot – we have difficulties. Obviously, people have difficulties in this life. There's social difficulties, economic difficulties. But in terms of survival difficulties, it's way easier to get by today than it has ever

been in human history. And I wonder if human beings have a need for adversity and complexity and problem solving and all these things that are less, they're less present today than ever before. I think things are just almost too simple. We've made it too easy. We've nerfed the world. And in doing so, it's easier to just kind of be dull-minded and drift through and follow the herd. The herd is so big, and there's so many people in the herd. If you just do what most of the people are doing, wear what most of the people are wearing, say the things most of the people say, you'll survive. And you'll survive, and you'll find some other dim-witted person to breed with and you'll make dim-witted children And I'm being dead serious

I think there's a certain when you're dealing with this massive pack of humans 300 plus million on a continent There's just there's so much I've always said like if you have a group of people if you're being very generous And you have a hundred people in a room. What are the odds that one of those people is a moron? It's 100%. That one is going to be a moron. That leaves you with 3 million morons in the United States of America if you're being really kind. Trevor Burrus And 3 million geniuses.

Peter Robinson Yes. Well, probably – I'm an optimist. I would like to think you're dealing with probably 6 million geniuses. Trevor Burrus Okay. Well, my book is often described as a book on optimism and enlightenment now because I have 75 graphs, almost all of which show the world getting better, including what some people think of the most incredible graph in the book on a phenomenon called the Flynn effect, which is that, believe it or not, and I know most people do not, IQ scores have been rising for most of the last 100 years, about three points a decade. Now, this, I know it seems totally unbelievable. But yeah, they discovered it when Flynn, a philosopher, discovered it when he realized that the people who make IQ tests had to keep renorming the tests to keep 100 as the average, because the average kept creeping up. And it was like, gee, 110, well, that's what most people score.

We say that the average is 100. We've got to adjust the scale downward. And Flynn realized, hey, wait a second. They keep doing this over and over again. That must mean the population is getting smarter. Now, not biologically smarter. It's not that people's brain power has somehow magically been increasing, although probably a little bit of that through

better nutrition, better sanitation and healthcare and so on. But a lot of it is just that ideas that used to be kind of sophisticated and restricted to professors and scientists and statisticians kind of trickled down to the population. And, things like placebo effect or trade-off or cost-benefit analysis or win-win situation, all these things that actually came from pretty fancy schmancy theory originally, but they kind of are loosed on the whole population and they become part of everyone's conventional wisdom. Also, we have to think more and more in abstract ways just to deal with things like a subway map or a smartphone, watching TV.

It used to be you'd turn on the knob and your TV would be on. Now you've got to kind of program the bloody thing. So the demands of life have become more sophisticated and ideas spread more quickly. And so we are quite literally getting smarter, up to a point, things that can't go on forever don't, and the Flynn effect is starting to level off. But there has been this drift upward in intelligence. I don't think that's surprising at all. I think if you look at the amount of information that people are subject to today,

and just the sheer raw data, I mean, there's a lot of the data is are subject to today and just the sheer raw data i mean there's a lot of the data is just nonsense and twitter and that what is the quote that we produce more content in two days than an entire human history every two days something crazy like that is that right it sounds something almost like it sounds plausible yeah but most of it is like lol i just went to the mall. You know, there's a lot of nonsense in there. But the sheer amount of interesting information, like those newly discovered Mayan ruins in Guatemala and things along those lines, or, you know, there was some interesting new information on the history of human beings because they found some new teeth and some – they throw back the date of modern humans and they keep moving that back. But the point is we're constantly getting more information, more data, more things to think about.

And I've just got to assume that the amount of information that comes to a person in 2018 is just vastly larger than the amount that came to them in 1978. Oh, absolutely. And there are, as idiotic as a lot of public debate is today, there's a lot of idiocy in the past, too. I mean, as recently as the 1960s, there's that movie on the first interracial couple in Virginia, where there was a court, a judge who said God didn't mean for the racist to intermarry.

That's why he put black people in Africa and yellow people in Asia and white people in Europe. The judge. The judge. Hilarious. The judge said this in his decision, eventually overturned. Loving versus Virginia. Now, I mean, no one would make that stupid an argument today.

Right. Even people that we think of as kind of racist, they'd be embarrassed. I mean, it's too stupid. And people on the left made some pretty stupid arguments as well. When Castro sent all of the gay people to concentration camps in Cuba, you had Susan Sontag, a respected left-wing intellectual, saying, well, this is, you know, you got to forgive them because Latin America was such a sexualized culture and there were prostitutes and there was decadence that, of course, it was a little bit of an overreaction. Now, you know, today, I don't think anyone on the left or the right would say it's okay to send gay people to concentration camps because there were a lot of prostitutes in Havana. But that's the kind of

idiotic statement that we kind of forget that people used to make in the past too. So it's a way of reassuring ourselves whenever we see debate seemingly getting stupider and stupider. You got to remember, there's a lot of stupidity in the past too. Oh, yeah. A massive amount. And I think you're right that the, you know, it's hard to tell day by day, especially when your attention is concentrated by the worst things that happen. And again, this is a big theme of Enlightenment now, that your picture of the world, when it's – because the human mind really is driven by anecdotes and images and stories, and that's what the news gives us. the news gives us. But if you look at trends, if you follow the trend lines and not the headlines,

you see that a lot of things really are getting better gradually, but that kind of accumulates over time. And one of the things with the flow of information, we are actually getting more, we meaning Americans, but also worldwide, there is this trend of getting more liberal, more tolerant, more progressive, you know, hard to tell day by day. But when you think that in the 1960s, there was a debate over whether there should be racial segregation, whether African-Americans should drink out of different water fountains or stay in different motels. There was debate over whether women should be allowed in the workplace, that, oh, what's going to happen to all the kids if they're all working?

Debate over whether gay people should be allowed to be teachers. And we've kind of forgotten these because the progressive side kind of won and the debate has moved on. And that happens worldwide as information flows, as people start to meet each other, as ideas proliferate. People start to meet each other as ideas proliferate. There is this gradual trend toward more tolerance, even in parts of the world where it seems to be totally absent, like in a lot of the Islamic world, which world surveys show this is the least progressive part of the world in terms of attitudes towards women, attitudes towards gays, attitudes towards child rearing. But even in the Islamic world, there's been a drift in the liberal direction. We just saw it two weeks ago when Saudi Arabia allowed women to drive.

I mean, kind of modest form of progress. Kind of hilarious. Kind of hilarious. Statement of progress. But it shows. I mean, they just could not live in this absurd situation forever. I mean, the world really did drag them kicking and screaming out of the Middle Ages in this way.

And that kind of tends to happen over the long run. Yeah, I'm an optimist. And I really do look at all these trends. You'll like the book then. Oh, beautiful. 75 Optimistic Graphs. Oh, excellent. Yeah, I think that if you look at just the overall human race, I mean, one of the best

indications of that is go and look at media representations of life from the 1950s and 1960s. Watch movies, especially, from the 50s and just see how people behaved. I mean, you're getting sort of a timestamp of human interaction from 1950. I mean, it's obviously an artistic representation of a time, of that time, but you get a sense of how people thought it was okay to behave. There was a lot of smacking women. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Really common in movies, right? And children. You remember the scene where Junior would misbehave and mom would say,

wait till your father gets home. And then dad comes home and he pulls the belt out of his pants so he could use it as a weapon. So the buckle would really hurt the child yeah and the child would you know tie a pillow on his behind and there'd be stars and go off into the corner yeah you know now you'd call social services and they'd take the child away or something yeah well i mean i i think this idea of being dragged kicking and screaming into this new age, I think we're all doing that. And I think you're seeing that in so many different parts of our culture today. You know, I think that's one of the things that's happening with this Me Too movement. Is it all this mass public shaming of sexual harassers and sexual assaulters and all this different thing?

It's like forcing human beings to reassess the way they interact with each other. And like this really radical, very quick sort of a movement over just a short period of time has had a giant impact on culture. Yeah. And like a lot of social changes, it happens really quickly and probably mixes some good things and some not so good things. Right. And it's really good that men no longer have a license to just expose themselves or harass women who work for them and treat them in these crude and ugly ways. And there's also a legitimate concern that you just can't really believe all accusers. I mean, we kind of learned that through history from witch hunts and lynchings and pogroms. And there's got to be proportionality.

Not all infractions are the same. The punishment should fit the crime. So we haven't quite settled in how to balance the very necessary corrective to men harassing women with the rule of law and standards of justice. Correct me if I'm wrong about this, but this is one of my theories is we, our brains, our capacity and our understanding is relative to what's necessary at the time. And one of the things that I use is Dunbar's number. So the Dunbar's number is this idea that you could only have these intimate relationships with 150 or so people,

or in terms of intimacy of understanding who they are, knowing their name, knowing things about them. But as our circle of people that we interact with grows and expands, I wonder if that's going to expand as well. When you think about the amount of information that people can hold in their brain and what people are used to knowing about, this is a radically different world in 2018 than it was in 1960. The amount of things that you were aware of in 1960, just by virtue of not having social media, the internet, Google, all these different ways that you could get information from. It's just so different.

I mean, it's, I don't know what, how many times more information you're getting, but it must be much more, much more. And over an incredibly small period of time, when you think about the, you know, the relative time span that human beings have been here, a few hundred thousand years or whatever, I wonder if this is – I wonder if we're changing. And I wonder what we're going to be like if this continues to grow and continues to be a part of our life, if we're going to adapt our abilities. Well, we can't – we're not going to change the neurobiological structure of the brain very much

because even though we all learn through our lives, there are limits as to what our brain can do. But what I think happens is there's a back and forth between our brains and the technology. So the technology adjusts to take into account how our brains work. So the restriction of you can't know or feel that you know more than 100, 150 people, and kind of that helps define the set of top-ranked friends in a social network. The fact that we're visual creatures, you know, we're primates. We get a lot of our information through our eyeballs. It's one of the reasons why computer

technology has changed so much since the 80s and 70s. Like when I first learned to program a computer, it was just all text and or use a computer. I mean, they're just 80 characters in a line and you have the letters of the alphabet and that's all there was. And it soon became clear that that's not a very efficient way of getting ideas into a brain. It's really laborious and tiring. And so you have graphic user interfaces. I mean, Apple was the first to commercialize it, but it had been developed beforehand at Xerox. But it was really exotic at first when you saw a screen with these windows and pointers and icons and a mouse. And computers don't work that way naturally. It took a huge amount, it still does, takes a huge amount of programming to get a computer to pretend that there's a sheet of paper up on the screen. But that, because we're visual creatures,

the technology adapted so that we could feel comfortable using it. So some of it is how much do we adjust to the technology and how much is the technology forced to adjust to us? I'm thinking in terms of the actual capability of the human mind. And when you read about modern human brains, like there was an article that was published recently that was trying to remap the timeline of the modern human brains. Like there was an article that was published recently that was trying to re-map the timeline of the modern human brain. And I think they were pointing to about 35,000 years ago now.

And see if you can find that. Trying to figure out what exactly they were saying. But essentially they were saying that the human, the modern human brain was far more recent. Oh, interesting.

I'm not surprised. Yeah. I would have guessed a little bit older than that, but yeah. But in the tens of thousands of years, yeah. So one of the big mysteries, right, is the doubling of the human brain size over a period of what was like 2 million years. Something had to happen to cause that, like some change in our environment, some change in our behavior. What has been a bigger change than the Internet? What has been a bigger change than the access to information that people have today?

And I'm wondering if we're not experiencing, when you're talking about these steady rise of IQs, obviously it's not just the Internet. It's education, the cumulative data that people just keep piling onto, and more people learn more things, and people get wiser. And the way we interface with information is better than it's ever been before. But I wonder about the capacity and the capabilities of the human mind if it's happening right now. It's just a very gradual thing, this 10% tick or 10-point tick per decade. If this is going to lead, you extrapolate. You go 100 years from now, 200 years from now.

What are we going to be looking at? Well, the thing is that what happened over the last few tens of thousands of years is not going to be replicated anytime soon because that was driven by Darwinian natural selection, which just meant that smarter people had more surviving babies. That's a process that happened as a speed limit measured in generations. And it may not be that coping in a modern society makes you have more babies. It might be the other way around. As you're more educated, you have fewer children. And so I think a lot of the – there's going to be a certain amount of plasticity of what you can master in your own lifetime, especially if you start in childhood. You're going to – a lot of these skills become second nature, how to look things up, how to use these devices efficiently.

And then that can reach limits. There are only so many hours in the day and there's only so many neurons in your brain. But in conjunction with that, the technology becomes more human-friendly, and there are new ways of getting information into the brain. interfaces and video and more like creative data graphics where you see moving colored graphs as a way of getting a bunch of variables into a human head more efficiently. And virtual reality might be the next step where we've got 3D environments that we can explore. And that may be a way of getting our puny brains to experience more information. Yeah, I was going to bring that up to you next because that's one of the things that concerns me the most, is how good virtual reality is now, but how relatively crude it is in comparison to the potential.

And have you experienced it at all? Have you used like an HTC Vive or any of those? No, I've used more kind of lower tech kinds of like Google Cardboard. Yeah, that's kind of interesting. Which is still pretty interesting. But the vibe will freak you out. There's one of the things. And I used several years ago's version.

I think my friend Duncan Trussell had one two or three years ago that I used. And I was blown away by that where you're underwater and there's a whale that swims up to you and you know and it seems so real and you didn't get nauseous no I didn't but it was it's it's bizarre it it's obviously fake like I'm looking at it and I can make a distinction quickly like when you see a movie and in the movie there's like fake dogs or something like that, or fake monsters. You're like, oh, that's a fake thing. It's fake, but it's really good fake. And I can recognize it as a fake, but I was like, wow, what is this going to be like in 10 years? I mean, what is it going to be like in 30 years? And how much better is the interface going to be? I'm really concerned that there's going to be just a giant section of our population that completely checks out of the regular world and lives in some strange fantasy land most of the time.

They just consume food and water and figure out a way to feed themselves and spend most of their time locked into a helmet living in some fantastic artificial environment that people have created. environment that people have created. Yeah. Well, although just putting things into perspective, there were those fears when television became popular. Right. And even before that with movies. So it's a question of what kind of balance people will find. I mean, clearly, it's going to be more of exactly what you describe.

But people do like reality, too. People in huge numbers go to the national parks. Yes. and just seeing a picture book isn't the same thing. And people care whether – when they buy a work of art, they care whether it's real or fake. So there's a lot – there's one part of the human mind that as much as we're seduced by just sensory experiences, we also – we have a sense of reality and we value it. And, you know, we don't like being fooled, you know, too much. And the question is, what balance will we find between the desire for authentic experience and the pleasure of these cheap artificial ones? When you chose to write a book about enlightenment and you chose to write a book that's showing all these positive graphs and all these trends that seem to be optimistic, are you writing that, obviously you feel this way and this is the data and this is your interpretation of where we're headed. But are you also kind of like encouraging people in a way

to have a more rose-colored view of the world and just understand that? Not so much rose-colored, but... It's a bad description. No, no, no. I know exactly what you mean. But have a kind of problem-solving mindset. Namely, we have solved problems in the past,

or at least we've reduced them. And that, I think, emboldens us to look at the problems we have now and think, well, we can handle those too, if we decide to do now what our ancestors did in the past that led in the right directions. And I credit this to the mindset of the Enlight enlightenment, namely that with reason and science and a concern for human welfare, we can gradually make people better off. And as long as we maintain that kind of philosophy of living, then there's a reasonable hope that we can solve the problems facing us. It doesn't happen by itself. There's not a magic escalator. There's no arc of history or dialectic or any mystical stuff that just makes us better and better. There's recognizing problems and figuring out how the world works and doing our best to solve them.

So that was the message. And the fact that we have had progress, contrary to the impressions you get from the headlines, shows that this is not a crazy, idealistic, optimistic pipe dream. It's happened, and so more of it can happen. Yeah, that's where I was going with this, is that why do we have this desire to concentrate on the negative? Like, I have a friend, my friend Ian Edwards has this bit about the news, about renaming it to the bad news, and he goes on this whole rant about the news. I got to check this out. But he's right.

And it is a thing that we, is it because we have this concern, like we have to recognize danger and we want to know what's happening so that we know that we're safe. But the reality is we're dealing with a world of 7 billion people with 7 billion stories. You know, so you're going to be able to see negative stuff all day long if you so choose to do that if you so choose to concentrate on negativity and it gives you this bizarre portrait of the world that the world is just this horrible place and bill hicks used to have a bit about cnn about you watching cnn it'd be death aids pitbulls you outside, birds are chirping.

Where's all this shit happening? There's a lot to that. Those are great, great examples. But why do we concentrate? What is our desire to concentrate only on the negative or mostly on the negative? Well, there is a phenomenon in psychology called the negativity bias. That bad is psychologically stronger than good. So we dread losses more than we enjoy gains, and criticism hurts much more than praise makes you feel better.

Our minds are attracted to possibilities of death and danger and so on. I think it's because we are really, as you say, we are vulnerable. There are many more things that can go wrong than can go right. And that's kind of an implication of the law of entropy. There's a tiny fraction of the way that the world could work that works out well for you and an awful lot of ways that things can go wrong. And so our minds are attuned to things that can go wrong. And that kind of opens up a market for experts to remind us of things that can go wrong. And that kind of opens up a market for experts to remind us of things that can go wrong that we may have forgotten. And so the news tends to

gravitate to the negative. And there are actually studies that show this. You give editors two different framings of an event, an optimistic one and a pessimistic one. They pick the pessimistic one. And that's a trend that's actually increased. I have a graph in the book, one of the 75 graphs that shows an automatic analysis of the tone of the news. That is, how often are there positive words like, you know, improve, better? How often are there negative words like crisis, disaster, catastrophe? The news has been getting more and more negative for about 70 years. Is it uniform on both sides, right and left? Good question. I don't know the answer.

I suspect it is, but I don't know the answer for sure. And there are fluctuations. There are ups and downs, but overall, the trend has been downward. So partly, it's all, even though, by the way, all the other graphs in the book show that in reality, the world has actually been getting better. There are fewer deaths from war. There's fewer homicides. We're making some progress in pollution. There's less poverty than there used to be, more education. But the news has been getting more and more morose.

Part of it is also that there is an ethic of journalism that to be responsible is to point out what's going wrong. One editor said, good news isn't news, it's advertising. And it's also because of the timescale that it's very easy to destroy something really quickly. I mean, something blows up and that's news. Improvements tend to be gradual, day by day. And there's never a Thursday in March in which something happens that, as Max Roser, an economist, pointed out, newspapers could run the headline, 138,000 people escaped from extreme poverty yesterday, every day for the last 30 years. But they never ran that headline even once

because there's never a particular day in which the 138,000 people were different than the 138,000 people the day before. And so a lot of the good things kind of creep up on us, and they're never reported in headlines, whereas it's easy to blow something up. And that does happen on a Thursday. So you have a very positive view of the future of humans. Well, it's – as the great Swedish doctor and TED Talk star Hans Rosling put it when he was asked, are you an optimist? He said, I'm not an optimist. I'm a very serious possible-ist. So what happens in the future, it depends on what we do now. And there are real threats and

dangers. There's a possibility of nuclear war. There's a possibility of catastrophic climate change. So we can't kind of sit back and say, well, things have gotten better. Let's let them continue by sheer inertia or momentum. That's not going to happen. But what it does indicate is, well, we faced crises in the past, and we have made things better. Let's figure out how to deal with the crises now. That's a great way of looking at it, too, to be realistic about it, because the possibility of positive things is a real, that's real, but also there's a reason why we find those ruins in Guatemala.

That's right. Those people aren't there anymore. I mean, they had a thriving culture, thousands of structures, and now it's a jungle. Like, what happened? Something happened. Yeah, it's wise to remember that that can happen. Yeah, it didn't become Manhattan. That's right. I mean, there is, you know, I think there is a difference between modern,

all modern societies and all of the ones that did collapse, namely that after the Enlightenment, we developed a kind of a scientific network and community. We developed the habit of free speech and open debate and accumulation of information in written and electronic records. I mean it is not the same now, which doesn't mean that we're out of danger because we've created new dangers, you know, like nuclear war, like climate change. But there are mechanisms in place that if we concentrate them, if we are determined to keep doing it, then there's a reasonable expectation of success. Again, but not automatically. We've got to decide to make, we've got to make those choices. Yeah, the history of the human race is so weird in terms of the rise and fall of these civilizations and cultures that we're always at least i am always looking at like what how long is this going to last like how long is this one particular nation going to keep it

together i mean if you look at how many different countries have been around that, just how many, you know, dominant cultures, Rome, for instance, like just now it's just Italy. It's just normal. You know, it's like a normal European country. It used to be this conquering nation. Like how, how long can we kind of keep this thing up? And what are your thoughts on the future of just even the idea of nations? It seems like our boundaries and our borders, the way we have online, this ability to communicate with people all over the place, everywhere. It seems to me to lessen the necessary or the need, rather, for borders and for these walls that we're now literally and figuratively talking about putting up. Yeah, I think there's going to be a kind of balance. I mean, an interesting thing about nation states now is that there's a sense in which they're treated as immortal. Whereas, as you mentioned, for most of history, they were conquering emperors and nations were wiped off the map and engulfed and conquered. And now you look at a map of the world and it's actually not that different from what it was 70 years ago.

I mean, there are colonies that achieved independence. There are some big states like Soviet Union that fragmented. But the borders in between the Soviet republics are now borders between nation states. And no nation has gone out of existence through conquest since 1945, at least internationally recognized state by the UN. So there's this norm, even though the borders are often crazy and there are arbitrary lines drawn on a map. But one of the reasons that, again, this is counterintuitive, that wars have gone down and deaths in wars have gone down, is that borders are now treated as sacrosanct by the kind of international community.

Not 100% of the time. You had Russia annexing Crimea. But those are exceptions. And by and large, unlike, say, in the past, in the 19th century, where the US had an unpaid debt from Mexico, so it conquered Texas and Colorado and Nevada and California, that doesn't happen anymore. And so the borders have kind of been grandfathered in. And that's one of the reasons why the world has been more stable in terms of the map.

On the other hand, as you mentioned, there's another sense in which we have this global community that transcends borders. We have things like the European Union. We have the United Nations. We have trade agreements like NAFTA, which try to get simultaneously the grandfathered borders, but this extra layer of cooperation that transcends the borders. And we need them more and more, despite the fact that our current president is pushing back against the global community. But because there are problems that are global, migration, terrorism, climate, pollution, rogue states, and the fact that people, even if you grow up in France and you consider yourself a French citizen, you want to be able to spend a summer in Italy or in England or in Belgium if that's where there's a good job.

And there's a desire among people to be able to move to wherever the opportunities are best. able to move to wherever the opportunities are best. So there's going to be some kind of compromise, I think, between keeping the nation state borders, just so you don't have constant wars of conquest and border disputes, but allowing the world and allowing the people of the world to take advantage of a true global community. Yeah, I feel like that's one of the things that people were most upset about Brexit was that this is uh even though they the people that were pro brexit felt like this was in the interest of the uk and the interest of england to be separate from all this because they were doing better and because they didn't want all the negative possibilities from all these other places coming into their environment but what would I think that people what they

didn't like about it was the idea that this is a regressive move and that the progressive move is that we would all move towards this idea of a global community of this entire world being free and connected. And we've talked about some of the problems that Paris has with immigration. We showed some of the videos of these immigrants that had just littered all over the street and taken this place apart. And we're looking at it going, man, that is a real tragedy. But what it represents is a bunch of people that really don't have anything. Like the real tragedy is that these people live like this.

The real tragedy is not that they've done it to Paris. The real tragedy is that these people exist at all and that they moved to Paris looking for a better life. And now they're stuck in the situation where there's not a lot of sanitation and the garbage is all over the place. They're littering everywhere. garbage is all over the place. They're littering everywhere. And it's, I wonder if we ever will have a world where there isn't a place where you can go and ship a factory and pay people a dollar an hour because they don't need

a dollar an hour because it's just like living in Los Angeles or just like living in Phoenix. Like you would never be able to pay someone a dollar an hour because there's too much opportunity. The world has caught up and surpassed it. Yeah. I mean, there are a number of really complicated issues. Mobility is in general a good thing, and countries do well when they welcome in immigrants.

But not in the short term. Yeah, not too many too fast. Faster than they can be assimilated and integrated into the new country. So just opening the doors probably is not a good idea. No country really does that. But building the wall is a terrible idea too. And, of course, the best way to prevent massive amounts of migration is to make life better in the countries of origin. That is happening slowly and unevenly, but it's been noted that even in the United States and Mexico,

more people are going, or the same number of people are doing the reverse migration from the U.S. back to Mexico now that the economy of Mexico is so much better than it was 25 years. Okay. Yeah, my parents live in Mexico. Okay, there you Okay. Yeah. Yeah. My parents live in Mexico. Okay. There you go. Yeah. And there is a hard to detect, but there is a huge improvement in the standard of living

in what used to be called the third world, the developing world, where if you look at the cutoff for extreme poverty, it's kind of defined somewhat arbitrarily as $1.90 per person per day, kind of the bare, bare, bare minimum to feed your family. It's down now from 50% a few decades ago to 10% now, and the United Nations has set the goal of bringing it to zero by the year 2030.

And what is causing that? What's causing the change? So a lot of it is globalization. I mean, even though that's kind of a villain in many people's eyes, but when you have a huge global market and the introduction of factories and industrialization in China, in India, in Bangladesh, sometimes the conditions are grim, but the conditions, being a peasant in the rice paddies was even grimmer. And when you have people integrated in the economy selling their products on a world stage, they can get richer. And so a lot – also better policies.

We have governments that are no longer communist or like really heavy-handed forms of socialism where everything is defined by the bureaucrats and you need 50 licenses to do anything and you have a little bit more economic flexibility. That tends to make countries richer. It doesn't mean that you could do away with regulations on workplace safety and environment. And as countries get richer, they tend to be more protective of their workers and of the environment. And leaders that think of their mandate as how do I get my country to be richer? And the most dramatic case was China, where Mao had these harebrained schemes of huge collective farms and people smelting iron in their backyards and anything that

occurred to him in the middle of the night, he would force on hundreds of millions of people and it caused these massive famines. Then Deng Xiaoping took over and he said, getting rich is good. And he said, black cat, white cat, as long as it catches mice, it's a good cat. So much more pragmatic, much more concerned with the welfare of their citizens. When you have leaders who have that mindset, then their country can get wealthier and their citizens better off. Now, but are you concerned? I mean, I agree with you that it probably is one of the reasons why these people are experiencing this greater quality of life. It is because of globalization, because these factories are moving in. But they're living lives that are very different.

And maybe perhaps it's by our standards that their lives are better. That maybe if these indigenous people were living this sort of subsistence lifestyle, that even though on paper they would be existing in extreme poverty, but if they're perhaps like living in the jungle or somewhere along those lines where you have access to all these natural resources, that even though they'd be living in extreme poverty, they'd be living maybe perhaps even a better life by just eating the fish and eating the plants and hunting and fishing

and doing what they had normally done for thousands and thousands of years rather than making a dollar an hour in a Nike factory. Right. And it's certainly true that of indigenous peoples who are living in hunter and horticultural lifestyles, that there are real crimes in displacing them, often not so much by factories, but by miners and loggers. But they're a very tiny fraction of the world's population, tragically. The vast majority of poor people are peasants, not horticulturalists. And they're kind of agricultural laborers. And for them, just based on their own choices, often the factory life is an improvement. It's an improvement not just because they're not kind of in the fields knee-deep in muck, pulling up seedlings and

getting bitten by disease-carrying bugs. But for women, being able to move from a village to a city often means a liberation, that they can start a business, send their kids to school, be out from under the thumbs of their husbands and the husband's family. There's a kind of, can be a liberation, just as what our ancestors did when they left the farms for cities 150 years ago. So, which is not to say there isn't exploitation and cruelty, which ought to be opposed, and in the case of native peoples, often, you know, criminal displacements. But, you know, on the whole, globalization has led to this escape from grinding poverty for literally hundreds of millions of people. So, even when they move these factories into these places and charge or pay them a dollar an hour, rather, it's still a dollar more an hour than they would have gotten if the

factory had been there. In many cases, that's true. Which is not to say there isn't exploitation. But, you know, we look at our ends. I mean, my grandparents worked in a clothing factory when they emigrated from Poland to Canada. And it often is a route of upward mobility. Yeah, it's hard for us to accept that or even think about it that way

because we say, well, how come they don't have to pay these Mexican folks minimum wage just like they do in America? Like, well, why don't they have the same sort of setup that we do here? It just seems cruel. It does, and no doubt there is cruelty. But the relevant comparison is not so much the difference between working in a factory there and working in an office in Berkeley or Manhattan. It's the difference between working in a factory there and laboring in the fields there. And the people often given that choice, they line up for the factory jobs.

Do you anticipate a time where there is no third world and there is no like a massive economic disparity? It's conceivable. You know, it's a ways off, but it's happened in huge parts of the world. I mean, we forget that places like South Korea now, you know, this rich upper middle class society. Not so long ago, that was the third world. I mean, we forget that places like South Korea now, you know, this rich, upper middle class society, not so long ago, that was the third world. I mean, they were hungry. They were, the children died young. A lot of them living in squalor. And that was true in certainly in China, lots of parts of China now that are pretty much middle class that were squalid not so long ago. Singapore.

I have an anecdote in the book, in Enlightenment Now, of my ex-mother-in-law who grew up in Singapore. And she remembers a childhood meal in which her family split one egg four ways. Whoa. That was back in the 1940s. Oh, my God. And Singapore is now one of the world's richest countries. So it can happen. It is happening. The most remote, poorest parts of the world are going to be the hardest to bring up to middle class standards, like Congo, like Haiti, like Afghanistan.

But in large parts of the world, there's been a huge increase in the standard of living. You talked recently about the dangers of overly politically correct thinking, of just politically correct thinking, of sort of a rebound effect, where politically correct thinking is actually causing more extremism and more radical thinking in terms of response to that, like an overcorrection. Yeah. So at the top of our conversation, we talked about the possibility of sex differences as being kind of taboo from polite company. And in a lot of – I'll give another example. And this kind of connects to this conversation is in a lot of academia, there's just capitalism is just a dirty word, or something now called neoliberalism. And a certain percentage, surprisingly large percentage of academics are actually Marxists, probably about 15%

in the social sciences. And to say the obvious fact that capitalism is better than communism, I mean, that's just a fact. I mean, just compare, we would rather live in South Korea or North Korea. We'd rather live in the old East Germany or West Germany. We'd rather live now in Venezuela or in Chile. And it's just obvious that capitalism makes people richer and freer and better off in pretty much every way. Now, that's a fact that's almost unmentionable in academia. But if you say it by itself, and suddenly people discover it for the

first time, then you can get the extreme right-wing position that any amount of regulation is bad, any amount of social spending is bad. We need the most extreme form of almost anarcho-capitalism like radical libertarianism. And that's because I argue that if you never have a discussion of the relative advantages and disadvantages of different economic systems, you never hear the arguments for why some mixture of a free market with regulation of things that have to be regulated because the market won't take care of them, like pollution. I mean, the market just won't put a price on the atmosphere because no one owns the atmosphere. And so having a combination of a free market with environmental regulations gives you the best of both worlds. Likewise, gives you the best of both worlds. Likewise, social spending for the elderly, for children, for the sick, for the unlucky, that's not incompatible with a free market. And in fact,

some of the countries with the strongest social safety nets also are the ones with the most economic freedom. So that argument that I've just given you right now just doesn't take place because there's just such a commitment to the idea that capitalism is bad. Opening up the possibility that someone discovers, hey, capitalism isn't so bad, then they leap to the strongest possible conclusion. Well, as soon as you have social security, then we're going to be like Venezuela or carbon pricing. Venezuela or carbon pricing. And the rational way of organizing society with just the right balance of free markets, regulation, social spending is just something that doesn't get discussed out in the open. You get these polarized extremes.

That's the argument that I made. What's the origin of that thought process in academia? Like, why has capitalism been demonized and socialism been praised, despite all the evidence that especially Marxist socialism or Marxism is just, it's never been shown to be effective, and it's been shown to be very dangerous? Yeah, it's a good question. One theory from Thomas Sowell, an economist at the Hoover Institution, is that intellectuals tend to like systems that where you can articulate a theory in a bunch of verbal propositions, and the government kind of implements them. Whereas there are certain phenomena in social life, like market economies, where the intelligence is distributed across millions of people. No one actually knows how to make the system work,

but people make things, look for buyers, they set the price where people will buy them. And then over the entire society, things kind of work out. But no one actually, no single individual has the theory as to how that ought to work. A language is another example. I mean, there's no committee that designed the English language. There's no theory of how the English language ought to work. It's like hundreds of millions of people just talking, and they invent new slang, and they slur, and they emphasize, and they borrow from other languages. And the language changes, and it works pretty well.

Here we are speaking in English, and no committee ever designed it. So according to Sowell's theory, I think he was influenced by Hayek, Friedrich Hayek, the Austrian economist, that systems of distributed intelligence where no one genius ever designed it, but millions of people cooperating give rise to a collective intelligence, kind of run against the grain of the way intellectuals often think. Not all intellectuals, because of course, you could do what Hayek and Sowell did and realize there is this phenomenon of collective intelligence. But if your first impulse is, what's the theory? What are the set of principles? Then you're going to gravitate to planned, hyper-planned systems and be a little bit oblivious to distributed systems.

But in academia, for whatever reason, looking at things in terms of from a socialist standpoint, looking at things as a distribution of wealth is a big common subject that keeps getting brought up, and class structures, that there's going to be a time if everything works out correctly, if we continue to evolve our culture, where we will no longer have classes, and we'll be able to distribute wealth completely equally across the board. But it's sort of denying the motivation that human beings have to succeed. It's denying this desire that people have to stand out and to overachieve or to be an outlier in terms of performance, which is just a natural part of human beings.

And also competition, that competition is fueled by reward. And without competition, you don't have iPhones. You don't have most of the technological innovation that's been funded by these companies. They've done it in order to make money. There's got to be some sort of a reason why they pushed all these things. It's so ironic when someone is talking about how capitalism sucks on an iPhone. I mean, Jesus Christ, that is one of the more bizarre ironies that is unexposed. Well, I think you put your finger on another phenomenon.

And I discuss this in my book, The Blank Slate, where I also discuss the politics of gender. That part of it is there's a history to it. So there was an idea sometimes called social Darwinism. It had nothing to do with Darwin, ironically. But the idea that the only way societies progress is through ruthless cutthroat competition and poor people are just dragging the species down and screw them. And if we're bleeding hearts, then we'll retard the progress of society and we need just everyone against

everyone else to advance. Now, that's really not a very good way to organize a society. But there's such a reaction against that in the 20th century that you got the opposite extreme that we are all blank slates. That is, we all start off identical and that any kind of competition is bad. You need kind of the benevolent government to distribute everything in the fairest possible manner. Now, the reality is something in between. We are – there's going to be inequality in any fair system simply because some people really are smarter than others

and some people have more discipline and more self-control. people really are smarter than others and some people have more discipline and more self-control. And it's good to harness that so that our competitive impulses have some people burning the midnight oil and racking their brains to how to make things better off because they anticipate some rewards. You don't want to sap all incentives, which is kind of what happened in the Soviet Union. You also don't want a central committee to decide that everyone has to have the same amount and parcel out every reward because that just gives too much power to a government.

But it also doesn't mean that you have the opposite extreme where if the poor people die, then it's their own fault because they're lazy and stupid. I mean, it's not true. It's not humane. And what we need to do is find the right balance between competition and freedom that makes everyone better off and recognition that there are going to be people who are not as smart, but they don't deserve to starve. There are people who are just going to be unlucky because a lot of wealth isn't distributed by talent and hard work, but there's a lot of luck that goes into it as well. And so we may want to kind of sand down some of the sharp edges of competition there. It doesn't have to be either or. And the thing is, if you make one position taboo, then that makes things either or. But how bizarre is it that these kind of rational conversations about this very important subject is taboo in intellectual circles?

It's not good. In academia. How did that happen? It's not good. I think some of it is a reaction to the excesses of the past. Some of it because people do tend to form kind of intellectual tribes. Say you have sports teams and you root for your team. And when you're a sports fan, when you acquire information, it isn't to become better and better informed in some objective way.

It's to kind of enhance the fan experience. You want to find out what's great about your team and what's awful about the other team. what's great about your team and what's awful about the other team. And that's a human habit that we bring to intellectual debates where – and academics are as susceptible to it as anyone else unless they take steps to recognize it and avoid it. But if you're on the left, you root for the left team. And if you're on the right, not so much in the universities but in the think tanks, you root for the right team and you tend to discount evidence that goes against your ideology. You kind of filter out the things that are a little bit embarrassing.

And people then adopt certain opinions as almost loyalty badges. And this is true of a lot of controversies that people often think are due to scientific illiteracy, like climate change, where you ask a lot of scientists, why do people deny the obvious facts of man-made climate change? They think, well, people just don't get enough information. We need better outreach. And I think we do need better outreach. But in fact, and I talk about this in Enlightenment Now, if you actually do surveys of how well people understand climate science, there's virtually no correlation between acknowledgement of human-made climate change and sophistication in climate science. So you get people who do believe in human-made climate change, which I think is an incontrovertible fact at this point. But they don't really understand it.

I mean, they may even think, oh, it's caused by a hole in the ozone layer, and we can fix it by cleaning up toxic waste dumps. I mean, like crazy beliefs, but they're still on, you know, what I would consider the right side. What happens is that in some politicized debates, the people don't so much care about the truth. They care about what belief will earn them esteem in their peer group.

Right, right. This is human psychology, but it's really bad when it comes to arriving at the best understanding of the truth collectively. And what we need, both in the left-wing academic departments and the right-wing think tanks, is kind of recognition. We're probably all wrong about a lot of things, especially if we talk to each other and act like kind of litigators, like lawyers who mount the best possible case for our side to prosecute it against the other side. That's just not a good way of arriving at the truth. You've got to kind of check the tendencies

in yourself to just want more and more evidence for your belief and force yourself to be – and force other people to be as open-minded as possible. Yeah, it's very fascinating to me these sort of mindsets that you see on the left and on the right, that there are certain subjects that if you support that subject, you are automatically thought of as a left winger. If you support this subject, you're automatically thought of as a right. If you're on the right, you probably think in some way, like if someone says to me that they think that climate change is probably an overblown thing and it's a cycle that the world has been going through forever, I go, oh, you're a white winger. And you'd be right.

Yeah. Almost always. Almost always. And if you think, you know, all gay people should be allowed to get married, who cares? Oh, you're probably a left winger. That was probably true 10 years ago. And it's actually less true now. That's one of these amazing changes.

So sometimes there can be these changes that just catch us all by surprise. And gay marriage is one of them. I mean, that was like, even people on the left had misgivings about climate change, about gay marriage, I'm sorry, in the 90s. It was still something that a lot of people on the left were kind of, let's not go that far. Maybe we should have civil unions or, you know. Now the whole country is flipped. Now, the country is flipped. But in general, so these changes can happen.

But you're right that a lot of opinions are just loyalty badges to a coalition. And they can sometimes change in very strange ways. So we've seen it in the last year or so with Donald Trump, who is in many ways a pretty radical right wwinger in things like, what's your opinion of Russia? Now, for decades, if you're on the right, you mistrusted Russia. And if you're on the left, they weren't so bad. They misunderstood. Now it's like totally flipped. And opinions on whether you trust Russia, just because of the influence of Donald Trump, have shifted so the people on the right are more sympathetic to Russia, something that would have been almost unthinkable even 10 years ago. Free trade is another example.

It was kind of a right-wing cause. And then Trump managed to flip it. So what it shows is – I mean where I'm going with this, and this is something where I've changed my mind. I used to think there were these ideologies, kind of like religious catechisms, where these are the beliefs that follow from one another. But a lot of it is just raw tribalism. Just like in sports, the players churn through the rosters with free agency. And he used to be a good guy. Well, now he's on the other team. Now he's a bad guy. You know, as Jerry Seinfeld once said, you're rooting for clothing.

And that kind of happens with political ideologies as well to everyone's shock. Yeah, the tribalism thing is very confusing to me because you could see it. Like it's such an obvious pattern. And when it plays out plays out like you know uh the with a global warming thing i was having a conversation with a guy in my jujitsu class and i'll never forget this and he was like ah it's been it's a cycle you know it's a cycle uh global warming and and then the climate change has always been a cycle and uh you know the people that say that it's not it's like whoa how much have whoa, whoa. How much have you studied this? Are you a scientist?

I don't know a lot about global warming. I don't know a lot about climate change, but I know what I've read. And it seems to me to be a very complex issue. And I'm talking to this 25-year-old guy who is in the military who's telling me, I mean, do you have an education in this? Like, no. I'm like, well, why did you just automatically, like, decide that this is it? And we're talking about the very temperature of the planet Earth. That's got to be a big deal.

This is complex. And what is causing it? Is it a carbon monoxide thing? Is it a – I mean, what – why do you just automatically subscribe to this? And it's because that's how his tribe communicates. Yeah. That this is how his tribe – and that it gives people comfort to be in these weird little groups where everybody has groupthink. Yeah.

And this is a – I talk about this phenomenon in Enlightenment now because it's a book that argues for the importance of reason and how there has been progress thanks to application of reason. and how there has been progress thanks to application of reason. And a natural pushback is, well, you look at things like that, we don't seem so reasonable as a species. What's going on that we seem to be getting less reasonable? And I think the answer is reason can work for different goals. And here I'm using the ideas of a Yale scholar named Daniel Kahan. He notes a perverse way in which there actually is a kind of rationality to that kind of belief. Namely, when you vote, what are the chances that your vote is really going to swing the election? Pretty close to zero.

On the other hand, when you express an opinion in your peer group, the people you work with, your family, what are the chances that holding the wrong opinion will lead you to be kind of condemned and ostracized and treated as a real weirdo? Very high. So if everyone thinks, what opinion is going to help my esteem and the people I care about, they can latch on to all kinds of beliefs if they've become kind of identity badges for their tribe. This is rational in terms of the world they live in. It's not so rational for the planet as a whole if people just subscribe to beliefs based on tribal loyalty instead of truth. And the challenge is how do we align beliefs more with truth and less with tribal loyalty?

How do we align beliefs more with truth and less with tribal loyalty? Now, it's not hopeless because there are a lot of beliefs that people used to have that have been overturned. People don't believe in unicorns anymore or alchemy, and fewer people believe in astrology. And a lot of scientific issues are there's no controversy. Do antibiotics work? Yeah. I mean, it doesn't matter whether you're on the right or the left. So part of the challenge is how do we get more and more of our beliefs to be – have our social norms be such that if you believe something just because you're on the right or on the left, then you're an idiot. What you should be doing is looking at the best possible study with an open mind.

That's what a cool person does and only an idiot just parrots the right wing line. That's the kind of social change we need to aim for. Right. And just almost a shaming of that kind of ignorance. This desire that people have to subscribe to a predetermined pattern of thinking and behaving because it's comforting. It's comforting that, you know, and also like they know that other people on their group will also think like that. It's like if you're in the right, one of the things about you see about right wingers is kind of hilarious. I was watching this Kyle Kuklinski secular talk podcast where he was talking about this, these Christians who were talking about Trump. who were talking about Trump.

And when you are on the right, you must have a belief in God. You just have to. And when they were talking about Trump, they were saying, we're talking about the man that existed before he accepted Jesus. I don't have a – the guy was literally saying, I don't have a past. How about you? Because I've accepted Jesus Christ into my life. And that once you accept Jesus Christ, like you are now a believer in Christ and you're forgiven for all of your past sins. And this is on the right.

There's a giant percentage of the people that are on the right that subscribe to a religious Christian mindset. It is fascinating, especially when it comes to our current president, who by any standards is like the least Christian leader that we've ever had. In the past. He's accepted Jesus now. He doesn't have a past. Well, yeah, but he's still – I mean the Christian virtues include things like modesty, compassion for the weak, temperance, chivalry, gentlemanliness. And this guy is lewd and vainglorious and arrogant and contemptuous for losers. But which shows, again, kind of going back to our discussion, it's just amazing how much of the loyalty doesn't have to do with the actual content of the beliefs.

It's just whoever's on my side. side. And of course, he promised a lot of perks for the religious right, like the repeal of the amendment that tax-exempt organizations can't engage in politics and in lobbying, the so-called the Johnson Amendment, which meant that if you're a church, if you don't pay taxes, you can't be politically active. Well, they didn't like that. And he promised to repeal that amendment. And so he got their loyalty. And so it's just raw political muscle kind of overcame Christian virtue. So bizarre. So bizarre. Yeah. But it's fascinating to watch just these patterns, these tribal ideological patterns, when you see these groups that have this sort of one mindset and this very clear... The thing is I can flip. Another example, and people forget this, is – so take environmentalism.

You know, kind of quintessential, you know, left green cause. Not so long ago, it was the other way around. It was actually considered to be a cause of the right. Why? Well, if you were a left-wing activist in the 60s, you would say, well, the only people concerned with the environment are rich people who like the view from their country estates and they don't want them to be spoiled by being cut down for apartments for poor people. Or they're duck hunters who want to be able to go and hunt ducks. And if you're really socially concerned, you should care about Vietnam and racism and poverty. It's just a luxury to worry about trees and flowers and ducks.

Now, that flipped. And then environmentalism became a left-wing cause. But these connections between your coalition and your beliefs aren't set in stone. Yeah. Wasn't it in the beginning of the forming of the political parties, Democrats were very different and Republicans are more like Democrats? Oh, yeah. Well, starting with Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican president, and of course, they were the party against slavery. And in fact, even in my lifetime, through the 60s,

in the South, the Democrats were the right-wing kind of racist party. I mean, George Wallace, the governor of Alabama who said segregation now, segregation forever, he was a Democrat. He formed his own party in 68. Then back in 72, he ran for the Democratic nomination. And the Southern Democrats were kind of the right-wingers. It was often the Northeast Republicans who were the liberals. That's still partly true in Massachusetts.

We have a little bit of a remnant of that. We've had some liberal Republican governors. We have one right now. Charlie Baker is a Republican and he's a pretty moderate middle of the road. William Weld, who was then the libertarian vice presidential candidate, he was a Republican. Even when Mitt Romney was our governor, he was not particularly conservative. He was a Republican. So there's the remnant of that in Massachusetts. There used to be a little bit of that in New York where there were liberal Republicans. But yeah, that's a case where it's flipped and now Democrat equals left of center, Republican right of center.

Yeah, you've seen some of that also with some Republicans have tried to disingenuously connect the Democratic Party with the KKK because of the past. Well, and that was true of the past. It was true. But, you know, they're talking about the people in the present. You know, this is the party that supported the KKK. Well, sort of. Yeah, that was a long time ago. Yeah, that was the end. Yeah, different people. Yeah, it's just fascinating to me to watch these groups of people.

And we've talked about political parties, the right versus the left. It's always weird to me that there are these two sides and that people sort of like take comfort in in choosing this group that they identify with yeah that these identity issues where you know i identify as a right wing i identify as a left i identify as this that these these things are very rigid in their structure and they don't allow for nuanced thinking and they don't allow for being objective about issues and considering the other side, considering other people's points of view and the way they're looking at things and thinking if maybe there's some common ground. I agree. And in fact, Enlightenment now has the subtitle, The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. And so I have a chapter on reason.

I have a chapter on science. I have a chapter on humanism. But in the chapter on reason, I ask the question, why does it, on the one hand, it appears that we're getting smarter. There's the Flynn effect of rising IQ scores. And there are a lot of areas in life where you see just much more intelligence being applied than just a few years ago. So just for example, you know, moving in evidence-based medicine, a lot of what your doctor does is just based on kind of superstition and tradition. And now people are saying, well, let's just, you know, let's do a randomized control trial, see what works, what doesn't. So medicine's getting smarter. You look at policing. One of the reasons that the crime rate has gone down so much, another positive development that I talk about that people aren't aware of, is that policing has gotten smarter. which blocks on which neighborhoods, and they would concentrate the police forces on that day to prevent things from getting out of control with cycles of revenge.

Look at sports, moneyball, where you've got kind of smarter teams that can beat richer teams. You look at policy and you've got evidence-based policy. So all these areas where it looks like the country is getting smarter, but then there are all these areas where it looks like the country is getting a lot stupider. And a lot of them are, I argue, cases where people – where issues get politicized and then people just go with their own coalition. And the ideal would be – and this is an ideal that's in – at least preached in science and to some extent practiced. There's not left-wing science and right-wing science. It's what do the data say? What's the evidence say? Let's do an experiment. Let's see who's right, who's wrong. And either side might be embarrassed. And I think in the

case of these great political and economic issues, we'd be better off if we thought like scientists, kept an open mind and say, well, what works? Does a minimum wage lead to higher unemployment because labor becomes more expensive? Well, maybe it beats me if I know. Let's look at areas that have tried it and see what happens. Does too much welfare make people unambitious and lazy? Well, I can't figure this out from my armchair. Let's compare different countries, compare different states and lazy. Well, I can't figure this out from my armchair. Let's compare different countries, compare different states and cities. Issue after issue, I think we need to be much

more pragmatic and open to evidence. But when you do deal with these issues, much like you were talking about the difference between genders, when you deal with the actual raw data, that raw data, a lot of it gets very problematic for people that hold these ideas very rigidly in their mind. And they don't want to accept certain facts and statistics, and they come up with reasons why these things are either inaccurate or biased or racist or sexist or what have you. Yeah, no, that's really true. Because I think we're, you know, I think evolution didn't make us into intuitive scientists so much as into intuitive lawyers and preachers.

So the natural tendency is to amass the strongest possible case for your own side. Yes. And to boast that you are on the side of virtue, the people who disagree with you are idiots and evil. And we've got to push back against that tendency, I argue, in enlightenment now. Yeah, I try to recognize that in my own mind when it comes up. But it's so incredibly common, that tribalism that we see on the right and the left. We see it men versus women. We oftentimes see it even in gay versus straight. It's a very bizarre but incredibly common aspect of being a human being. It really is. And I started out as a psychologist. I'm not a clinical

psychologist. I don't see patients, but I'm a cognitive scientist, so I'm interested in how the mind works. And so a lot of my ideas on which way we're going, how to keep going in a positive direction, are influenced by kind of a recognition of what makes us tick and what are the pitfalls in having a human brain. I mean, I don't take credit for this. This goes back to, for example, the American founders and framers, Madison and Jefferson and Adams and Hamilton. When they were arguing, well, how should we set up this new country,

this new government? They were kind of intuitive psychologists and they pointed out that, well, if you just empower a leader, he's going to get drunk with his own power and he's going to be deluded. And what do we do about that? Because we do need some kind of leader. Well, you've got these checks and balances. What makes people better off? Well, if they can exchange things and each one produces something they're good at and trades it with something that someone else produces? How do we set up a country where it takes advantage of people's tendency to trade things?

So the connection between politics and psychology has been there for a long time. Now, the subject, enlightenment, that's a very loaded subject. It is, yeah. Especially in the world of weirdos and cult leaders and charlatans and people that are sort of promoting this idea that you can achieve this sort of zen state of bliss, of being above it all, of being wise to the point of being a sage. That's a weird concept, isn't it, in today's day and age? My editor actually was a little nervous about my choice of title. I went through a bunch of titles for it as I was writing it. He said, well, don't you think people are going to confuse it with Zen and Buddhism

and a higher spiritual state? And so there is that meaning for enlightenment. The meaning that I had in mind was the movement in the 18th century to apply reason to human betterment. The ideas of Hume and Adam Smith and the American founders like Jefferson and Madison and John Locke and Thomas Hobbes and the kind of 17th and 18th century. And I said, look, if some people are confused and they think this is a path toward, my book is going to be a path toward spiritual enlightenment, well, let them buy the book. They might enjoy it anyway. But I went to the dictionary to see which of the two meanings was listed first. And most of the dictionaries listed

the sense that I had in mind first, namely the movement in the 18th century toward greater reason. It's the spiritual distinction, right? Spiritual enlightenment is the one that people... That's right. And that's, to be perfectly honest, that's not what the book is about. Right. But, you know, well, if some people think it is, maybe they'll buy the book by accident. Do you meditate? You know, I don't, but I think I should. maybe they'll buy the book by accident. Do you meditate?

You know, I don't, but I think I should. But you're such a smart guy. Like, why would you, why would there be anything that you think you should do that you don't do? It's a really good question. Clearly I'm not that smart. It's not that. It's just a matter of like practice and, you know, habits, right?

I think so. Yeah. And I did. I was in Davos the week before last and was on a panel with Mathieu Ricard, the French Buddhist monk who I see eye to eye with on a lot of matters. He wrote the foreword to the French translation of the Better Angels of Our Nature. And he had me in the whole room meditating. And it was, yeah, I mean, I liked it. And I probably should do some more. It's probably some benefit to it.

Probably, yeah. Do you have any practices that you do do to sort of like keep your mind clean? Like do you exercise regularly? Yeah, I definitely exercise regularly. And I like exercise where scenery goes by. So I tend not to hang around in gyms, but I like jogging, cycling, hiking, kayaking. I like outdoor exercise and more aerobic than bodybuilding. Yeah, they say that's one of the best things for cognitive function, high-intensity aerobic exercise.

Yeah. I mean, I like to think that. And I try to sort of step back and exert some discipline on this social media suck and email more than social media. I try to spend time with my wife, Rebecca Goldstein, a novelist and philosopher, and we have a lot in common, and it would be kind of wasting life if I didn't get to, you know, enjoy time with her. Right. She feels the same way because she's also a workaholic.

So we both are conscious of, you know, let's get out and go for a walk. You know, let's see some friends. Let's be close to our families. Do you have a goal when you're writing a book like this? Or is it just you have an interesting subject and you just sort of follow it through? I always begin a book when I have – when I come across some really deep, exciting, interesting idea that I think has not been made public enough. So in the case of the better angels of our nature, it was the fact that by all these measures, violence has been in historical decline. And this is like a mind-blowing fact. And I came across it

by various historians, political scientists, psychologists sort of sent me their data. And I was kind of sitting on all these graphs showing the world getting less violent. And no one knew about it. So I wanted to, I thought I had an important story to tell. And I had a big intellectual challenge, namely, here I am a psychologist. I like to think I understand how the mind works. But there's a big puzzle. Why were our ancestors so violent? And

how come we're less violent? We're kind of the same animals that we were a couple hundred years ago. Likewise, with the new book, with Enlightenment Now, then I discovered that there was even more good news that if you look at other measures of human well-being, like poverty, like illiteracy, poverty, like illiteracy, like number of work hours, like disease. Graph after graph, looks like we've made improvements. Car safety, plane safety, workplace safety, pedestrian safety, death by fire, death by drowning, almost all of them are going down. And so that was a story that I thought I was excited by it because I knew that when people came across it, they would find it interesting. And it was, again, an intellectual challenge. How do you explain it?

And I attribute it to Enlightenment ideas. Do you encounter much resistance to this narrative from the doom and gloom people? Oh, you bet. Yeah. You know, and there are things that go wrong. There's the opioid epidemic. That's going in the wrong direction. There are big threats.

Always a possibility of nuclear war. And we've got to be really careful not to do anything stupid and to, in fact, try to walk the world back from nuclear weapons in the future and climate change. And then there's some people who just don't believe it. They say, well, what about the terrorist attack yesterday? And I just say, well, you know, terrorism, they're kind of jerking us around, the terrorists, by doing an eensy-weensy bit of violence that gets a huge amount of publicity. So let's not let ourselves get jerked around by terrorists and rampage shooters, not give them so much publicity, concentrate on where the deaths really are, like in car accidents, like in ordinary homicides, like in opioid deaths.

Let's look at the numbers and not get fooled by the headlines. But yeah, I do get resistance. We have a, obviously we have a massive reaction to any mass tragedy, like a mass shooting or something along those lines. But this is a natural thing, right? Because this seems so strange that it could occur. It's a natural thing to have this reaction to this horrible tragedy. But we don't have a reaction to, you know, how many thousands of people die every day because of obesity.

Obesity. Exactly. and people die every day because of obesity. Obesity, exactly. Or even if we concentrate on violence, we forget about the guy who shoots his wife because he thinks she's been flirting too much or the two guys who have a fight in a bar over who gets to use the pool table next and one of them is lying dead on the floor. And there are far more murders of that kind than there are terrorist killings.

Every day, there are something like 25 of those homicides. And so it's like a Sandy Hill massacre day after day after day after day. And they don't make the headlines because they occur bit by bit here and there. But it's still incredibly confusing to people when someone does do something like the Vegas shooting. Like, what is this? So I have a discussion of that just because it is such a puzzle and because it attracts so much attention. And a lot of it is just the notoriety.

These are often, not always, but they're often kind of nobodies and their life has gone down the toilet and they're thinking, well, how can I do something that makes my life meaningful, go out in a blaze of glory? And so they think, you know, what is the, in fact, I would ask this question. Let's say you want to become, not you, you're already famous. But if I say to a typical person, what is the one thing you can do that's guaranteed to make you famous by tomorrow? And the answer is kill a bunch of innocent people.

And that's just a perverse fact about the world. And so for people where fame and meaning and mattering are more important than anything, including life itself, we've kind of given them this perverse opportunity to become a somebody because we just give them wall-to-wall news coverage. That's fascinating. Has there been an uptick in mass shootings and these sort of tragedies along with social media and more media in general? Probably some. And they do tend to occur in cycles. There's a copycat phenomenon until people get a little bit bored and then it kind of dies down again. So there is that.

And so there is a suggested policy. I actually signed onto this from some criminologists that the news media should not publish the names or the faces of mass killers. It may be newsworthy that it happened, but the particular name of the guy, why is that newsworthy? The problem is it gets clicks. Yeah, it gets clicks. You're right. I mean, there's so many articles that you see today that you look at the title of the article

and it has very little to do with the actual article itself. It's just because they come up. Yeah, I mean, these salacious headlines are just, they're so attractive. And it seems like today, especially, you're seeing less and less people reading the Washington Post, the New York Times, the LA Times, they're struggling.

And one of the ways they keep up is by giving people what they want. If it bleeds, it leads. Who is this crazy asshole that shot 58 people? Let's find out what's going on in his life. Who is his dad? Who's his brother? Exactly. And according to this movement, I mean, it's a case that's not so innocent. It's not like the kind of clickbait of, you wouldn't believe what happened to a 1970s actress,-and-so and they find a picture of her in her 70s, that kind of clickbait. But this is clickbait that does real harm. And there are other – you do have to balance it against, of course, freedom of the press.

You don't want there to be governments to tell newspapers what they can publish. newspapers where they can publish. But there have been some precedents where the press has voluntarily imposed some standards that do nothing to abrogate freedom of the press, but to make people better off. So I'll give you an example from sports. When the TV networks adopted a policy of not filming fans that run onto the field, people stopped running onto the field because why do they do it? So they can say, you know, hi mom to the, and be broadcast to 300 million TV sets. Right, of course, yeah. Canada had a policy of no longer publishing the names of juvenile killers.

And, you know, that was a voluntary restraint and it was socially responsible. And I think there is something to be said for not giving rampage killers the audience that they seek. Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense in terms of the greater good of humanity. But if you're a newspaper guy and your business is just to sell newspapers, you're a bottom line person. The whole thing is just to increase the amount of revenue that comes into your institution. Yeah, and not go bankrupt. Yeah, especially today, right? But journalists, especially in mainstream forums like the major networks and CNN and the USA Today and so on, they still have a huge readership.

And they do – they have to look at themselves in the mirror. They do have journalistic codes of ethics. That's kind of one of the things that distinguishes them from the fake news and the rumor mills. And that will always attract a large following. You want to be able to trust what you can read. And so they've got to, I think, balance that against raw bottom line because if they lose their integrity, then that's not so good for the bottom line in the long run either. Do you think that there's a – I wonder if there's room for new media today in terms of – I mean we obviously have these established places like the New York Times and like the Washington Post. But I wonder if these well-respected, long-standing, traditional venues, I wonder if that's really the right way to do it anymore. Well, there has been, simultaneous with the kind of bottom theaters

and the clickbait factories, there are a lot of really good new electronic magazines. Yes. You know, Vox and Medium and Pacific Standard and Nautilus and Quillette and Eon and, you know, there are others. So, and a couple of decades earlier, Slate. And these are really, really good.

And you often can read things that you're not going to find necessarily in the legacy papers. And they're responsible and they have fact checkers and they're not clickbait factories. So there is this funny almost inequality in intelligent media where there's a lot of real crap at the bottom. But there's also room at the top for new voices. When you look at a guy like the President of the United States who loves to use that term fake news, it's one of the weirder times ever is his attacks on the media and it seems to be very similar to like the way he reacted to Barack Obama mocking him during that

speech. It's like the media, when they criticize him and critique him, his response is to completely attack them and just say that they're useless and fake. And it's a weird time for news when it comes to that and for journalism. You know, I agree. It is a very disturbing phenomenon because there is a phenomenon of fake news. But fake news is not the same thing as coverage that criticizes the president. Right. Exactly. It's an example of a real lack of comprehension of how democracy works. Namely, if you're the president, you can be, will be, should be criticized. That's how democracy works. We don't have a supreme divine leader that we consider infallible and omniscient and that we bow down in front of

and anything he says goes. He's temporarily kind of a steward. He's temporarily overseeing the government. But if he screws up, if he says something that's not true, the people have the right to criticize him. And there better be that criticism. Otherwise, the people have the right to criticize him. And there better be that criticism. Otherwise, we're going to get a tyrant or a despot. And taking any

criticism and labeling it fake news, which is a real problem, fake news, is a genuinely anti-democratic impulse. And it's really disturbing. disturbing it is disturbing it's also disturbing his attacks on the the different intelligence agencies attacks on law enforcement yeah it's just it's real weird it's weird it's real weird that you know it if you boil it all down and you look at it like what's going on oh well anyone anyone that's after him anyone that's attacking him criticizing him like these people get demeaned, and he uses his influence and his power to kind of shut down all of these criticisms without any, seemingly without any concern for the long-term consequences of diminishing

the impact of these media companies. Yeah, no, it's a really important point. And again, this is a big theme of enlightenment now is what makes progress possible is that we have the institutions that are smarter than any of the flawed individuals that make it up. That, you know, we recognize that we humans are, you know, we're kind of smart, but we're not that smart. And we all like to think that we're good and decent and wise, but no one of us in particular is that good and decent and wise. But we can set up rules and institutions that make the society as a whole better than any of the individuals that make it up. And democratic government is the prime example. a cult of personality like Mao in China or Stalin in Russia or Hitler in Germany or Mugabe in Zimbabwe now or the Kims in North Korea, is that we don't worship a supreme leader who kind of embodies the virtue of the people.

That's the idea that the United States tried to get away from. The idea is you got a procedure, you got some rules, you have to have someone making decisions, but you kind of rein him in. And it's not about him. It's about the whole system. And the fact that we've now got a leader who just doesn't seem to understand that. He seems to think that it's all about him and that if you just, you know, I alone can solve it, trust me, let me do it. And all these rules and regulations are the deep state, the administrative state. Well, thank God for the deep state and the administrative state. It prevents some despot from foisting his crack brain schemes on the whole population. We do need rules and bureaucrats and checks and balances and a press that can criticize the leader.

As a psychologist, when you're looking at all this, is this a fascinating study to you or is it terrifying? I guess some of each. I'd rather not be as fascinated. Right. Yeah, because ultimately, you really don't want human psychology to be determining the fate of the world. Right. You kind of want, or at least you want don't want human psychology to be determining the fate of the world.

You kind of want, or at least you want one product of human psychology, namely what we collectively and rationally agree upon, to be embodied in a set of rules and procedures. Yes. And so it's not about, you know, that guy. There's also a way of behaving that we deem presidential. And Barack Obama, in my opinion, embodied that better than anybody. He was very composed, like one of the most composed leaders ever, in terms of like leaders in the United States, like the way he would communicate and the way he would respond to criticism. He just had a very sort of composed, higher level of his ability to communicate.

It was just, it was very clean in a way. I agree. And it was a kind of dignity and self-restraint. Yeah, and decorum and statesman. And there's a reason for it. It isn't just that it makes you feel good when you see it, but it actually is making a statement. Namely, it isn't about me.

I'm occupying this office not to prove what a big shot I am, what a genius, what a glorious, noble, divine figure I am. But I've got this big responsibility. I've got power to kill hundreds of millions of people or to make them better off or worse off. I take that seriously. It's not about me feeling really empowered. It's about me kind of serving the people that elected me. And that kind of self-restraint and respect for the office is a way of reaffirming that principle of democracy. reaffirming that principle of democracy. What also concerns me is that the person who's in charge is, this is how a lot of the rest of the country views the nation itself. Like, and if you have a

person who's measured, and objective, and well thought out, and well spoken, and that when you would hear, especially Obama's speeches speeches agree with him or disagree with him everything was very clean like the way he and i mean maybe i use the word clean too much but it was it was eloquent yeah i know you mean yeah and it it was smarter than most people you know it was more more articulate than most people you know. The way the sentences were formed were impressive in the intellectual capacity of the person that's delivering those words. And so that made us feel better about who we were as a country. We're being led by this very wise, smart person. Whether you agree with his policies or not, there's no denying that this is an

exceptional human. I agree. And again, I think there's a greater reason behind it too. The United States has the most powerful military. It's the richest country. What the United States does matters to the rest of the world. And to reassure the rest of the world that we're not just a bunch of cowboys who are going to do what makes us the most powerful. But we really think about our role. We don't do rash things that could really be bad for the world. That gets conveyed symbolically in the way that a leader comports himself or one day herself. Well, one of the things that I think of, though, when I see this whole thing going down, and I see also this reaction to this president, like the giant women's march.

You can call it the women's march all day, and it is a women's march, but it's also a march against the president. I mean, that's a big part of what this is. It's like the idea is that he is kind of against women in their eyes, whether that's correct or not, but that this march is to sort of show solidarity that they disagree with the way things are going. And I wonder if having a guy like this in power is going to, as we were talking about before, this sort of swing effect, gonna reignite more people to be politically active and more people to recognize the things that they don't like, like the calling the media fake news or like the attacks on the intelligence community, all these various things, these things that people deem to be racist, these things that

people deem to be hostile or silly that he says, and that there'll be some sort of a powerful reaction in response to that. That is the hope. Yeah. It's too soon to tell because there are two possibilities. And one of them is that he's sort of shattered some norms, created a precedent that means their successors could be even worse. Right.

Because norms can be fragile, like what you just don't do if you're president. Well, now you can do them. That's the pessimistic view. And the optimistic view is the country will say, oh my God, look what we've been through. We tried that. Let's get, we tried crazy. Let's get back to sane.

So those are the two possibilities. You're out of time. Yes. Listen, thank you so much for being here. Your book, one more time. Enlightenment Now, the case for reason, science, humanism, and progress. Thank you so much. It's been an honor and a pleasure.

Really appreciate you being here. Honor's been mine. Thank you so much, Joe. Thank you. Thank you. Steven Pinker, ladies and gentlemen. Bye. Wow.

Yeah, it was.