The Jordan Harbinger Show - 593: Steven Pinker | Why Rationality Seems Scarce

Episode Date: November 30, 2021

Steven Pinker (@sapinker) is a psychology professor at Harvard, one of the world's leading authorities on language and the mind, and an author of several bestsellers. His latest is Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters. What We Discuss with Steven Pinker: Why, by most metrics, older generations are mistaken when they proclaim: "Things were better back in my day!" Alternatives we might consider if Universal Basic Income can't sustainably solve the problem of housing and feeding a workforce increasingly unemployed by automation. Why nostalgia is overrated, and how criticizing the present is very often a way of criticizing your rivals. If we're really living, as Steven says, in "the most peaceable era in our species’ existence," how does he explain why we still have wars, famines, uprisings, and genocides? What sentiment mapping shows us about the power of the media to manipulate us into seeing the world in a heavily negative light even as it's improving constantly on every measurable level. And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/593 Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course! Miss the last time we had Navy SEAL leadership authority and Extreme Ownership co-author Jocko Willink on the show? Make sure to check out episode 93: Jocko Willink | Leading on the Line Between Extreme and Reckless! Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger Show. Language allows us to share all kinds of new ideas, and among them could be ideas of how we reduce war and crime and racism and oppression. It's possible that we can improve our lot, even though we're stuck with human nature. And then in Better Angels of Our Nature, I show that it's not just a theoretical possibility. It's happened. War has come down and rape and child abuse. You just, whenever you have the data, you plot them over time, and the graphs go down.

Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets and skills are the world's most fascinating people. We have in-depth conversations with people at the top of their game, astronauts and entrepreneurs, spies and psychologists, even the occasional legendary Hollywood director, mafia, enforcer, or neuroscientist, and each episode turns our guest's wisdom into practical advice that you can use to build a deeper understanding of how the world works and become a better critical thinker. If you're new to this show or you want to tell your friends about this show, the episode starter packs are a good way to do that. These are collections of favorite episodes organized by popular topics to help new listeners

get a taste of everything that we do here on the show. Just visit jordanharbinger.com slash start to get started or to help somebody else get started, and of course I always appreciate it when you do that. Today on the show, Stephen Pinker, author of many books, including The Better Angels of Our Nature, Enlightenment Now, and Rationality, his newest. Stephen Pinker and I have been trying to have this conversation for years now, glad we finally made it happen. Today, we've got a wide variety on the table. For example, why is now the best time in history to be alive? Not just because of advanced technology,

but because things are actually better for almost everyone in nearly every category and by just about every metric that really matters. It doesn't necessarily feel that way to a lot of us, so I'm looking forward to hearing what you all think about this conversation as well. We also discussed some big issues today like Syria, Afghanistan, the Uyghur genocide, even universal basic income. So this conversation is really all over the place. I think we did a great job of keeping everything with the through line here.

I hope you enjoy this conversation. And if you're wondering how I managed to book all these great authors, thinkers, and creators every single week, it's because of my network and I'm teaching you how to build yours for free over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. And by the way, most of the guests on the show subscribe and contribute to that same course. So come join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong.

Now, here's Stephen Pinker. So if you listen to most, let's say, parents, because picking on boomers is not cool, right? It's not cool to generalize. But if you listen to parents, they'll be quick to tell you that things were better when they were younger than they are today. But this isn't actually true

by pretty much any reasonable measure, right? That is correct. The graybeards, the older generation are always saying that the kids today are no good. But it is, first of all, there are features of human memory that lead us to think that, such as we confuse changes in ourselves

with changes in the times. When you get older, you're a little bit slower, you don't remember things as well, and things in some ways do seem worse. Also, our memory tends to filter out the negativity of our past experiences. So I remember what life was like in the 70s, but I may not remember how bad it was to go through it at the time. When you actually look at more objective indicators of how the world has changed, then we are much better off today than we were decades ago. And by we, I mean the species, the entire planet. Extreme poverty has...

plummeted. Rates of war have gone down. Crime has gone down in the United States until an uptick in the past year. Infant mortality has gone down. Literacy has gone down. So pretty much anything that you measure about human well-being has improved. And this is to say nothing about the advantages of streaming video on a flat-screen TV as opposed to fiddling with rabbit ears on a little black-and-white 12-inch set. Yeah, of course. I mean, technology aside, we seem to be in this, Is it a lucky time period or is there some countervailing force that's working against these trends that were so common in history? You mentioned war and crime are down, and that's just the beginning, infant mortality. Is it just technological innovation or is there something else going on?

It's a combination of technological and innovation and other know-how. And there are changes in values. There are currents toward a more humanistic value system that would privilege the well-being of humans and other living things over things like national glory, the pre-eastern, eminence of the race or the religion, following the laws of scripture. Those are all sources of morality in the past that are, they're still alive and well, but there are trends, especially among elites, toward a more humanistic mindset. But you're right that our default, what people tend to forget is that it's not as if we were ever in some Eden from which we deteriorated. Rather, our natural state of nature is, you know, disease and hunger and conflict. And we've gradually applied

our ingenuity to make life a little better for ourselves. Yeah, when I read history, or there's some anecdote in a book, I was reading something yesterday. I can't remember what it was, but basically London had horsemen who were piling up so high in the streets that people couldn't use the roads to get to work. And then they had something called, I'm going to get the year wrong, but it was like the great stink of 1858, right? Where the river, the Thames smelled so bad, and people were dying of cholera. There was like a thousand people a day or whatever it was, that they thought it was the smell that made you sick. So of course, they're like, oh, get far away from that, but, you know, go ahead and drink it with your meal. And yeah, the miasma theory of disease

that it was the foul-smearing air that made you sick. Yeah. I mean, it's kind of intuitive, but it's wrong. And, you know, the germ theory of disease, which is second nature to every school trial today, it had to be discovered and proven. Yes, exactly. And of course, looking at a lot of things in history, I'm married to, uh, into a Chinese family, right? So They're like, you have to drink tea. It's healthy. And I'm like, I'm pretty sure that 3,000 years ago, they thought that tea was healthy because it was boiled.

And it was the only water that didn't have seven bajillion deadly amoeba living in it at any given time because it had been boiled. It's not like there's something healthy in tea leaves, but people still believe all this. And it's kind of funny that we'll look back at something like that and just reverse engineer the fact that a lot of these wives tales are alive on the, what's the opposite of a wives tale where something's good for you? But now we're thinking something's bad. It's like a superstition, right?

Some of that is still very much alive in the form of nostalgia in a way. Yeah, right. Beer and tea, anything you boil or anything with alcohol, that by a lucky coincidence, killed the bacteria and the parasites and the single-celled organisms, and we've inherited them, which is just fine, because I like tea, I like beer, and the fact that a hundred years ago they made them the only sterile sources of liquid is a happy coincidence. Yeah, I remember my mom telling me years ago, I was like, why are pirates always drunk, right, typical little kid question. And she, I think, actually found the answer, which was,

you can't really keep water on a ship, but you can keep rum. And they're like, well, we got to drink something, right? So they just, the only thing we have is this rum and spoiled stuff that turned into fermented stuff that we can now eat and drink. So, all right, better access now to education, sanitation, working hours seems like it's kind of the next thing. Are you examining current trends at all, or is that kind of too hard to do? No, I do have a graph in my previous book, Enlightenment now showing working hours in the United States and Europe, which have gone way down for more than 60 hours a week to fewer than 40 hours. And that's probably an area in which there could be, there should be more progress, probably people work more hours than the economy demands. And it could

be that with advances in artificial intelligence, a lot of the boring and repetitive jobs will be automated, taking some of the pressure off human labor. In the past, as we've automated, we found new things for people to do. So there used to be elevator operators. I still remember elevator operators when I was a kid in the big department stores, you know, guys who just stand all day with a lever making the elevator stop at every floor. We don't have them anymore, but we do have your tattoo removal technicians and pet psychiatrists. So there is a certain turnover, but probably, and it might take some legislation to help push it along, reducing the number of work hours, expanding the number of holidays would certainly be a humane development. I remember learning

about the working hours in Europe. And when I lived in Germany, it was like, we work more than anyone in Europe. And it was like 37 hours or something like that or up to 50. And I thought, huh, I'm pretty sure my dad works like 10 hours a day at Ford and he's gone on Saturdays, you know, when I was younger.

And then you look at France and it's like, I'm going to get the number wrong, but it's significantly less than you would work if you were here. And people who don't take the entire month of August off in France are considered kind of, oh, work a hollet. Mr. Workaholic over here. Well, no, that's right.

America in this and a lot of statistics is something of an outlier. As far as affluent Western democracies are concerned, we really are underachievers. Our crime rate is higher. Our school achievement is lower. Our life expectancy is lower. Our happiness is lower. Of course, it's better than poor countries in Africa and South Asia. But we're not number one.

When you compare us to New Zealand and to the Netherlands and Switzerland and Canada, and so on. Yeah, but no huge surprise there, just given the gap. Progress always leaves some people behind, which actually kind of has me a little bit worried, right? You mentioned automation later on AI. In light of this, I'm wondering what you think of universal basic income, because really, once we get to AI, and I've talked about this with a few AI experts on the show, like Kai Fu Lee, one of his greatest concerns is you just can't retrain people fast enough for jobs that are at the rate that they're disappearing because things are automating. Yeah, I think we don't know, and I know that that is a position. Labor economists themselves are divided, whether there will be new occupations like video game costume designer that will, you know, which couldn't have conceived of, cybersecurity. So that's an unknown that is whether the elevator operators will be replaced by pet psychiatrists, so to speak. Another is whether the universal basic income is actually the workable solution. There are calculations that the numbers just don't add up.

You divide the tax revenue by the number of people, and you can't support them if no one is working. And it's going to be a while. I mean, the fact that today, despite promises from a long time, we can't get a fully autonomous vehicle where you can open up a magazine and let your car drive you to a location that you tell it to go to. It turns out that a lot of AI problems are a lot, lot harder than we thought. The human brain has a, you know, it's got a lot of limitations, but it does a lot of things better than any robot can do now. So we don't know when the will arrive when that many occupations will be fully automated. And it could be that there'll always be some that not only are humans best suited to do it, and things like elderly care and child care,

and perhaps teaching are examples, maybe even planting trees and reforesting areas. And it may be better to have the government create jobs that the private market won't support, but that are good for the country, good for people. And so people would still be working. but the jobs wouldn't necessarily be those that the marketplace provides. Interesting. Plus, also, I think what we'll have to have is more redistribution. That is a more progressive income tax. Whatever the advantages are of the free market system, and there are a lot of them,

we're just seeing that there's much less pressure at the lower part of the income scale to keep incomes up. There are many opportunities for the wealthy to get still wealthier. And it may make sense to, instead of paying people, to do nothing for the government to top off their salaries for doing something. Yeah, I think, well, I won't disagree with that because it's better to get paid for doing something than nothing. But I would imagine you take a lot of flack for the viewpoint that the government should create these jobs. And I don't know if you check Twitter, but I would imagine if you did

your Twitter feed is full of people calling you a communist or a socialist for having these types of ideas. That hasn't been my problem because I, you know, kind of I live in academia. Yeah. I have my workplaces in the People's Republic of Cambridge in Massachusetts. I'm on sabbatical right now in Berkeley. The kind of people that I hang around, that isn't my problem. Yeah, that makes some sense. Yeah. I don't look at the Twitter comments too carefully, but if I did, the problem would not be that I'm accused of being a communist. Right. Although I do have some, I have libertarian friends and, you know, I'm probably, by their standards, I might be a socialist, by the standards of academia. Yeah. I'm on the far right. Yeah, pinker the pinko, I guess, right?

Wouldn't that be they call you by your back? Yeah, maybe the fever swamps of make America great again. But in the kind of circles that I hang out, and I've, if anything, I have the opposite problem. Yeah, that may make sense. But it sounds like what you're saying at its base is not really that controversial, right? You don't protect jobs, protect the interests of people instead. Absolutely. That's perfectly put. Protect people, not jobs. Yeah. I think the honest answer is we don't know what's going to work. Now, actually, as it happens, we've had a huge experiment in universal basic income in the past year and a half with the, you know, kind of COVID relief payments. that's probably not sustainable indefinitely.

But it was an interesting experiment and probably too soon to tell. There is a mismatch at the moment that you and I are speaking between a lot of available jobs, a lot of people, unemployed people who don't want to take those jobs, whether this is the geographic region, the skill level, or people's just changing willingness to do things that they're no longer willing to do. But markets will adjust. There's probably a lot of learning ahead of us as to what we need to, do to have a humane economy in the face of all of this automation.

Agree. I think we also need to take the stigma away from blue collar jobs and actual, I'll say actual work because I'm trained as a lawyer so I can get away with that. Because actual work is like a plumber, right? I was talking with Kai Fulie about AI and he goes, we're not going to automate plumbing anytime soon. No, that is right. We're electricians. Right. And if you've built a house any time in the last few years, which I have, you can't get a roofer or a contractor because they're going, I'll hire anyone. And they can't. They can't hire people to stand on a roof in the hot sun for three hours because nobody, everybody wants to push paper

like I did on Wall Street and get paid and, you know, go out at night. They don't want to get sunburn. Well, also things like, you know, swinging a hammer is a really complex computational problem. Yeah. And much more complex than, you know, turning a steering wheel like that and then pressing one of two pedals. That's just three things you got to do to control a car. And we do not have robots that can do it, not yet anyway. Something like snaking a wire through a wall is much more demanding than driving a car, and we don't have self-driving cars yet. Right, yeah, it's interesting to see because I think when people, like you said, on the right, or not even the extreme right, are saying, like, this is ridiculous, don't protect these jobs. A lot of it has to do with cultural

stigma. Like, my dad grew up, mechanical engineer before that was working blue collar jobs to pay his way through school. My mom was a public school teacher. And even they were like, you got to get a good academic degree because otherwise you're going to trade time for money and do these. And now they're like, why don't people do the trades? And I'm like, because every parent told us that we shouldn't do that. That's why. Yeah. You know, a bunch of dumb kids like me spend 200 grand on college and then get out and go, I don't know how to do anything. No offense. What am I going to do with my degree in French literature? Yeah, should have thought ahead. And also, where I'm going to do anything? And also, We're not getting rid of, look, we're getting rid of elevator operators, that's fine,

but we're not, I don't know how many elevator operators are going, well, that was such a fulfilling line of work that I was in for that time being, right? I mean, it's not that they weren't happy or anything, but very few people are going to say that was fulfilling and stimulating, and we can keep those types of careers and those types of jobs open, caring for elders and things like that, as opposed to automating those, and we can automate, yeah, building roads or whatever. nostalgia is overrated. I think you wrote something along the lines of criticizing the present is very often a way of criticizing your rivals. And I thought that was insightful. I can't take credit

for it. Thomas Hobbs said it first. Okay, fair enough. More than 400 years ago. Well, he does, yeah. He was a keen observer of human nature. But yes, men compete with the living, not with the dead. That makes sense, right? It's easy to complain about how the leadership landed us here. Afghanistan's a great example. You know, a lot of people want to forget about the long line of crappy decisions and leadership that led us to a very predictable disaster. What was the quote, nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory? Am I close? Yes, Franklin Pierce Adams, yes. So what about big issues today like Syria, Afghanistan, Uyghur people in China? Like, surely these are outliers, but we also can't really dismiss

these massive conflicts and genocides as blips or aberrations in the data as far as things getting better around the world, right? Oh, absolutely not. No, no, absolutely not. And, And of course, we've selected those examples because they are the cases in which oppression or genocide or war still occur. The thing is that if you were to go back 30 years, for every one of those, there'd be another three all over Africa and Latin America and Southeast Asia. So we can be glad that the list you just gave is short, shorter than it would have been 30 or 40 years ago, but still be very concerned for the people who are suffering in the

midst of those crises. And I think that when people will say, well, isn't it callous to say that things are better than they used to be. I would argue it's the other way around. Knowing that the rate of wars and genocides and autocracies can come down, kind of emboldens us, gives us the gumption to try to reduce the ones that are still around. It's not utopian, it's not romantic, it's not hopeless, it's not, you know, seeing the glasses half full, just as a matter of having a, you know, sunny personality. It's looking at the past and saying, well, geez, if wars could be ended in the past, they could be ended now. And indeed it's not, even though I'm kind of a pretty dark view of human nature,

no one could call me a romantic when it comes to what makes people tick. But I actually don't think it's at all romantic to think that the world could put an end to war, at least war between nations. Civil wars would be a lot harder because it doesn't take much to have a militia, get their hands on some weapons and call themselves the People's Front for the liberation of whatever. But in terms of two countries facing each other in a naval battle or in a tank battle or bombing each other cities, it's quite possible that that'll go the way of slave auctions and throwing virgins into volcanoes. It hasn't happened yet, but it's moving in that direction. Yeah, suppose even when I think about it, 41 years old, I look back at the Cold War and when I read, again, when I read history

about it, because I was too young during the time to understand, I mean, we had Kim Il-sung in North Korea. That place hasn't improved a ton, but the reason it's so well-known now is because it's a completely ridiculous outlier and there isn't of another place like it. Well, also in that era, South Korea was a military dictatorship. It's now a democracy. I think Taiwan was also, too, or was that earlier? No, no, you're right. Taiwan, South Korea, Indonesia, Philippines were all military and right-wing dictatorships,

as was most of Latin America, to say nothing of Spain and Portugal, which when I was a college student, were literally fascist dictatorships. Oh, yeah, Franco, right? Yeah, exactly. Franco and Salazar, not fascists in the sense of, you know, somewhere to the right of me, but really fascist. I mean, they call themselves fascists. Wow.

That was in Western Europe. It is crazy when I look at Spain. I remember looking at a book a couple of months ago, and it said something like, yeah, the Franco regime, the fascist Franco regime lasted until 1977 or something like that, or 82. And I was like, that's a typo. That must be 1962 or 1950. And I looked in very... No, no, no, no, that was not a typo.

Yeah. When the series Saturday Night Live originated, a running joke was General Franco is still dead. He had just, just died, which marked the trip. transition from fascism to democracy in Spain. And so it's within the memory of Saturday Night Live. That was a recurring laugh line in a weekend update. That is so crazy to think about, like, imagine announcing the death of Hitler in 1975 and going, wait a minute, no, no, no. Like, that can't be it, right? It just... Well, and Franco was an ally of Hitler. So yes, that's just talking about Western Europe, which is not nearly as bad as Eastern Europe. You drew a line through present-day Germany,

and everything to the east was a totalitarian communist dictatorship. It was barely different from North Korea today. Yeah, I lived in the former East Germany when I was in high school. It was, you know, West Germany at that point again. But my host parents, it was an exchange student, they were in the army and they were rolling tanks into outside Prague for the, I can't remember what that was. The Prague Spring, Prague Summer. Yes, that's right, 1968.

Yeah. Called the Rape of Czech Slovakia was the way they used magazines referred to it at the time. Wow. Yeah, that was 1968. Yeah. It was before you were born. It wasn't before I was born. And I remember it very well. It occurred around the same time as the famous Democratic convention, the Chicago police riot, recently immortalized in the trial of the Chicago 7. But yeah, which by there was also a reminder, the domestic violence, political violence in the United States, as much as everyone thinks that it has reached new heights today. It was much worse in the late 60s and early 70s. When there were bombings every week, there were urban riots in which the police could shoot. 10 or 15 people in a night. Wow.

Again, the best explanation for the good old days is a bad memory. Yeah. As bad as things are now, they were worse then. And despite the reputation for, you know, peace and love and flowers and hippies, the reality was that the murder rates are going through the roof, rates of rape and assault, political violence, including bombings, police shootings, all of them worse than. It's good to hear that, but also depressing because we look at how many we see now. And wait, so that was happening all the time?

like that, I don't know how I feel about that. Well, no, no, it's happening less now than it did then. Yeah. That's really the way to think about it. Now, of course, it's happening too much now, but less than then. And thank goodness for that. So when, because one of, of course, when I open social media, it's hard for me to believe that we're in a good place as a civilization. But that's me falling into the trap of thinking that things are bad or worse than they were before. So I guess the question becomes, has the media gotten more negative? Or is that also an illusion of memory? Yeah. And it's something I deal with in Enlightenment now. Because if I'm just saying, well, Leo, look at the way the New York Times sensationalizes this

story this morning. Some could say, well, you're doing the same thing. You're just cherry-picking anecdote. So I actually have a graph showing the results of an algorithm that did sentiment mapping in stories in the New York Times and in a sample of world media going back to the 40s. And it's really true. The media have gotten more negative. The tone of news coverage has gotten more negative. And there's some built-in biases in journalism that have been exaggerated. Part of it is just that, as with violent movies and violent dramas and war movies and murder mysteries, negativity, negative emotions engage us. We're morbidly interested in what can go wrong, and that affects the selection of news items. But also, it's in the very nature of news.

if you're presenting things that happened, you know, since yesterday or since an hour ago in the case of media today, bad things can happen quickly. A building can collapse. A riot can break out. Someone can shoot up a school. But good things tend to build up gradually, a few percentage points a year, which then compound. And so if there's a reduction in global poverty, it's not like it happened on, you know, last Thursday, and so it could be a headline. But if the news followed the trends, they could have had, had the headline, 137,000 people escaped from extreme poverty yesterday every day for the last 30 years. But they never ran that headline. And so a billion people escaped from extreme poverty, and no one knows about it because it didn't happen suddenly enough to count as news.

So that's how we can view the news cycle, right? We have to look at our negativity bias and our natural inclination towards alarmism. It's really the lion rustling in the bushes, right? Negative emotions are more powerful than positive emotions. That's a an old finding in psychology. Things that happen suddenly are more often bad things than good things. I mean, this is kind of a theme of my last book, Enlightenment Now. I also go into the psychology in more detail

in my new book, Rationality, which is, among other things about how our sense of risk and probability and prevalence are driven by images and anecdotes and narratives and not by data. And so it can be surprisingly you think, well, what could be more boring than looking at your data and graphs?

actually it can be kind of cheering, encouraging. Uplifting, encouraging, yeah. It is, and I find that to be, well, that's one of the main reasons I wanted to make this conversation happen other than it's been so long, right? Because this should change our behavior and our beliefs because there's something, I wish I didn't have to bring out this really dumb example,

but in the movie Men in Black, right? Will Smith is running around, he's got this tiny little gun, he's blowing things up with it, and Tommy Lee Jones says, calm down, what are you doing? and Will Smith is like, there's a level for alien running around New York. And Tommy Lee Jones is like, calm down. There's always a level for alien running around New York. And the reason that people don't panic and burn everything down is because they don't know about it.

And I look around now and I go, ah, so many people are burning things down because they think there's a level for alien running around New York when really we got rid of most of the bad aliens. And the ones we have now are smaller and smaller and smaller. And everybody is just acting like we have this crazy invasion going. on when really we should be kind of looking at the bright side instead and behaving accordingly. Yeah, we should have a view of the world that's accurate. It's not like we should have a rose-colored glasses or see the glasses half full. We should be aware of problems and we should also be aware of progress. And the thing is that the conventional journalism is a non-random

sample of the worst things that happened in the last day. So it's not as if journalism gives you an accurate view of the world. It gives you an overly negative view of the world. You don't want an overly positive view of the world either. You want an accurate view of the world, problems and solutions. You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Stephen Pinker. We'll be right back. Thank you for listening to and supporting this show. Your support of our advertisers is what keeps the lights on around here.

And to learn more and get links to all of the great discounts you heard so you can check out the sponsors for yourself, we put them all in one place. Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals is where you can find it. Please do consider supporting those who make the show possible. And don't forget, we've got worksheets for many episodes of the show. If you want some of the drills and exercises talked about during the show in one easy place, that link is in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com slash podcast. Now, back to Stephen Pinker. I read a particularly terrible story in the New York Times about a guy who just kind of snapped and killed this

entire family that he didn't even know. And my wife was like, this is terrible. We have to figure out a way to secure our house. And I was like, yes. And then two minutes later, I was like, wait a minute. Our house is as secure as any other house, anywhere else, and what are we going to do? This is essentially more random than a lightning striking, this is like lightning striking you while you're getting eaten by a shark, right? It's never going to, it's just, it's so rare that planning for it is completely irrational, even if the stakes are high. And writing books like Enlightenment Now or Better Angels rationality are inherently encouraging,

and it's almost contrarian because of our propensity to focus on the negative. why do we need an accurate view of the world? Why is this important? Well, it's for the same reason that it's better to see things than to wear a blindfold or hallucinate. Namely, the more you know about the world, the better equipped you are to act on it, to solve problems when they arise to figure out what works and what doesn't, to protect the institutions and the laws and the practices that have made life better, get rid of the ones that have made life worse. The more you know about the world, the better equipped you are to act on it. Don't get me wrong. I agree with the idea that we should keep our eye on a positive view of the future, because I think it also encourages us to

solve the problems that we do have instead of, I see a lot of this online. I throw our hands up in the air. It's hopeless. Everything is screwed. There's no point. We're all going to blow up in a heaping fireball because of, well, anything, climate change or extremism or pollution, just about anything can be thrown up in the air and discarded. And that's obviously not how we got to where we are now. We didn't get to where we are now by having people go, screw it. There's no way we're going to solve any of these problems, right?

Exactly right. And I think that is the value of appreciating the progress that we've made so that we know that problems are not an excuse to leave difficulties to our grandchildren, to enjoy ourselves while we can, to burn everything to the ground and the hope that whatever rises out of the ashes is bound to be better. It's a way of understanding what can be done, and it's empowering in terms

of what we do in the future, and this includes some of our toughest problems now, including climate change. If we decide that it can't be solved, then it won't be solved. If we decide that it can be solved, it won't necessarily be solved, but it certainly won't be solved if we don't even try to find the solutions. How did you get interested in this topic? And, you know, my gut sort of says, well, Jewish parents, probably not super optimistic, maybe a really, or raised to feel extremely lucky because, you know, all jokes aside, a lot of our Jewish relatives didn't make it very well in the 20th century, you know, especially in the middle. Yeah. Indeed. I was raised to appreciate how lucky I was. My parents were born in Canada, fortunately, but my grandparents were

born in Europe. They all emigrated to Canada, for which I retroactively thank them. But I had relatives who perished in the Holocaust. My father lived through the Great Depression as a child. He was briefly homeless. My grandmother had two-cloth diapers that she would have to wash and dry and turn. My father was dirt poor, and many of my friends were children of Holocaust survivors. Others were children of refugees from the Hungarian Revolution in 1956. So you think of the Great Depression, you think of World War II, you think of the Holocaust. Here I was lucky to grow up in a middle-class suburb. My parents' generation couldn't understand why we were so rebellious, why we were what we were complaining about, about the unjust racist system. They said, you want unjust racist

system? Go to look at the Germany and Poland when we grew up. Yeah. I did have an appreciation, at least from my parents' generation, of the relative good fortune that I had been brought up in a liberal democracy. For me personally, it was a kind of circuitous journey. I'm a cognitive psychologist. I'm interested in how the mind works, what makes us tick. I'm interested in human nature. I'm interested in how evolution prepared the brain to allow us to do what we do, to learn language, to see, to move our limbs, to form alliances and friendships and romances. And the existence of human nature is kind of controversial. It's historically been associated with the political right because you can't change human nature, so we need strong police, we need strong military,

we need strong moral codes. The left, more or less, is more sympathetic to the view that were a blank slate. Just change the culture, change the programming, change the teaching, change the parenting, and you can bring up kids with any traits you want. I tend to lean more toward the existence of human nature, although I'm not a political conservative. And that's because there's scope for one of the things that nature did give us, one of the parts of human nature, is an open-ended ability to come up with new ideas and share them via language. That's one of the things that language, which is the thing I study the most, allows us to do.

Every sentence that you and I have uttered in this podcast, even though I've been on, talked about these themes before, but I can guarantee you that if you looked at a transcript, none of the sentences would have been repeated verbatim. My memory isn't that good. So language allows us to share all kinds of new ideas, and among them could be ideas of how we reduce war and crime and racism and oppression. Now, there's no guarantee that it will. But, you know, the argument that I made is if, on average, we keep the things that work, try out new ideas, criticize bad ideas, then it's possible that we can improve our lot,

even though we're stuck with human nature. And then in better angels of our nature, a term, of course, that I stole from Abraham Lincoln, but it fits the idea perfectly, I showed that it's not just a theoretical possibility. It's happened. War has come down and rape and child abuse. You just, whenever you have the data, you plot them over time and the graphs go down. And then enlightenment now I broadened that to other measures of human well-being, such as poverty and illiteracy and work hours and happiness. So it's partly fending off the accusation that a belief in human nature is depressing and fatalistic and reactionary and means there's nothing we can do. to improve our lot. It's kind of pushing back against that idea that led me into the idea of human

progress. It's funny you should mention you're not a political conservative because I looked at something. I can't remember what it was now, but you got lumped in for just a minute with the sort of alt-right for saying, look, a lot of these people are educated and well read. This is not just sort of like teaky torch wielding neckbeards, which was the image that a lot of people in the left wanted to create and they felt empowered by things that are not discussable in public. And I think you're almost like in a can't-win scenario because even though you're basing your opinions on data and science, people are constantly trying to paint you, especially for whatever reason, with a brush of one side or the other. Have you found that to be true? Yeah, it is an increasing danger in an era

of political polarization. And academia, which you would think ought to be the arena in which you could deconstruct this and just analyze each issue with the best tools available, is danger of becoming something of a political monoculture to be kind of captured by a left-wing tribe. And I know the case of, you know, I'm about as far from the alt-right as you could possibly imagine, you know, not only in Enlightenment now do I present the case for liberal cosmopolitan humanism against nationalist populist reactionary thinking. But, you know, I'm on record as the second biggest contributor to Hillary Clinton among Harvard faculty. But yes, there is that danger that just analyzing things objectively. In the case of the alt-right, I can tell you that it's true that not all of

them are teaky-torch-wielding skinheads, because at least one of my former students at Harvard University gravitated to the alt-right to my horror. But he was one of the smartest students I ever had. And the point of that discussion that ended up on YouTube and selectively edited is that if you have an atmosphere in which, as we increasingly do in academia, in which there's some things you just can't say, well, there are going to be people who aren't part of the tribe who are going to say, well, geez, what are they afraid of? If you get punished for saying something, that must mean we should take a look at it because if it was so preposterous, no one would bother suppressing it in the first place. Maybe there's something to it. I think that academia has become something of an incubator of the

alt-right by having such an atmosphere of repression that people think that there are truths that are being suppressed. That terrifies me a little bit, right? Because I did a bit of a debunk. of this fake documentary called Plandemic, which was something like an anti-vaxxer or magnum opus. And I went through the first half of it and I just deconstructed a lot of the so-called experts and things like that. And people, one of the primary comments on there was, if it's not true, why isn't it allowed on YouTube? And that's hard to argue with in a lot of ways.

I mean, it's hard to argue effectively. Obviously, there are reasons for not disseminating misinformation and disinformation, but it's very hard to convince somebody that they're not allowed to watch. something because it's not true when usually they're going to assume the opposite is the case. Yeah, there has to be, and there's no easy answer to what you do about material that is both false and harmful, because as you say, simply censoring it can make it all the more appealing. On the other hand, you don't want ideas that are demonstrably dangerous to proliferate, but in general it's probably better to flood the zone with refutations.

than to suppress the original claim. I definitely agree with that. I'm sort of an anti-censorship type when it comes to that. What's the common phrase is you sanitize these bad ideas by shining a light on them, not by hiding them away? Sunlight is the best disinfectant, and I think it was a Justice Lewis Brandeis who said that, perhaps. Wow, you're good at remembering who said what. I'll tell you, I'm terrible at that.

I didn't just make that up, but that's my best guess. It seems a bit unusual in many ways, just as far as humans are concerned, right to have an optimistic view of human progress. Am I mischaracterizing your work? Because to me, it seems very optimistic. I like to say that it isn't optimism in the sense of having a certain frame of mind. It's being aware of facts that most people aren't aware of. You ask people as a global poverty increase to decrease. People say it's increased. They're just, they're wrong. Not that they're pessimistic. It's not that they're seeing the class is half empty. They're wrong. And so what people often characterize as optimism in my books just consists of data that no one is aware of.

Very few people have seen the graph showing the estimated battle deaths since 1945. You ask people, what would the curve look like? I think it would be all over the map if you asked people to guess, but we do have that graph, and I reprinted that graph, and it's a striking graph, because it shows that the rate of death in warfare has crept downward. Not in a straight line. There have been ups and downs. Most recently, the Syrian Civil War was something of an uptick, but it was reversed.

and the overall trend is unmistakably downward, and people just don't know it. So it's not optimistic to say, here's a fact that you just were never aware of. And the reason you're never aware of it is because newspapers tend not to print graphs. They tend to print stories. And if there is a war, then you will see the footage. If someone has counted all the places that don't have wars, all the zeros that go into that fraction, then there's no place to find it in the papers. Now, there is, increasingly, people have become more interested in data. There's an excellent website called Our World in Data, where you can look up data on pretty much anything that you're curious about. When people say, well, what can I do to have a sunnier outlook on the world? Part of the answer is there are

news feeds for positive news, and some of those are excellent. But even better, just being aware of trends as opposed to headlines is a way of getting a better appreciation. And as it happens, it gives you a more positive appreciation, although it's not designed to do that. That's just the way the facts are going. It shouldn't be that surprising. I mean, there's nothing magical about human progress. It's not as if there's some mystical force that's carrying us upward. There is no such force. It's just that, you know, our iPhones get more features and our TVs get better, and our cars get more fuel efficient and have better sound systems. And when that same kind of human ingenuity is applied to reducing violence against women or reducing war deaths.

It doesn't always succeed, but sometimes it does. It seems like we tend to think of Western society is always on the brink of collapse, but people have been saying that for centuries, right? I kept thinking, because I remember having this thought sometime in college and going, man, we're just, everything is just going to hell in a handbag right as I'm becoming an adult. And the more I researched it, and of course later on found your stuff, because I kept telling people like, aren't you concerned that everything is going into the toilet? It's like, you've got to read this book, right? We're safer than we've ever been. The world has been coming to an end for a long time

indeed. And there's a good book by Arthur Herman called The Idea of Decline in Western Civilization, which shows that starting probably with the romantic movement in the mid-19th century, there's been a whole parade of people saying, we're on the verge of collapse. It's our society is decadent and corrupt. And by the way, and these are the all-stars of of the academic curriculum. You know, you major in the liberal arts, and you're going to read Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and W.E.B. Du Bois and one sourpuss after another, convinced, and they were convinced, you know, back in the 19th and early 20th century that everything was on the verge of collapse. You touched on this a little bit earlier. All right, so safety and quality of life is on the rise.

Why does it seem like rationality is in decline? There's no correlation there. Or is that the same type of illusion, is that observation even accurate? Yeah, it's not clear that it's in decline. And in fact, I sometimes think that there's greater inequality of rationality. There is a lot of idiocy out there, conspiracy theories and fake news and quack cures, paranormal woo-woo. On the other hand, biomedical science is astonishing in what it is accomplishing, electronics, nanotechnology, and the application of rationality to domains of human activity that were formerly just ruled by hunches and experts in intuitions, like evidence-driven policing, moneyball in sports, looking at data instead of folklore, evidence-based medicine, feedback-informed psychotherapy.

There are a lot of areas in which we really are getting smarter. And there are some things like conspiracy theories where we've always had conspiracy theories. One attempt to quantify them over time, Joseph Ushinsky, seemed to suggest that the level of conspiracy theoryizing hadn't changed in almost 100 years in which he looked at evidence for it. This only went up to about 2010. So if it all went south in the last 10 years, then they aren't in his data set. But at least up until then, there was the protocols of the elders of Zion, there were the Illuminati, there was the trilateral condition in the 1970s. We're always vulnerable to conspiracy theorizing. We're certainly vulnerable to paranormal. That's kind of what religion is all

about and superstition. And fake news, what are the miracles in the Bible, but fake news about paranormal phenomena. It's probably the default in human affairs that unless you have a well-established scientific and journalistic infrastructure, archival records and government agencies keeping data, and scientists trying to prove or disprove hypotheses, and editors trying to filter out fake news, That's just what we naturally backslide to. It's good that we do have this beachhead of rationality, but the natural condition of humans, at least in the public sphere,

in ideas that we share, is an awful lot of nonsense. There's a lot to unpack here, I suppose. Do you think we're getting smarter as a society? Is that a question that's possible to answer? Let's see. There's one sense in which we have been, namely the so-called Flynn effect, named after the philosopher James Flynn,

where IQ scores have increased for about a century. I'm starting to level off in the countries where it's been going on the longest, such as Northern and Western Europe, but it's still taking place in poorer countries of the world and probably still in the United States. So there's a funny sense in which we're literally getting smarter in terms of measured IQ. And again, as I mentioned, in certain domains, we've been getting smarter in technology, in biomedicine, in the best of journalistic practices, in evidence-based policy. We're getting smarter, but there's still an awful lot of stupidity out there. This is the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Stephen Pinker.

We'll be right back. Now for the rest of my conversation with Stephen Pinker. Yeah, I wonder, because certainly we're gaining knowledge and science is moving forward, etc. Do you think we're acting more intelligently? I mean, thankfully, we have systems, checks, balances, whatever, to make up for the bad thinking of individuals like science, but those almost seem to be breaking down. a little bit. Like, authoritarian regimes love to dismantle those because they don't want those checks

and balances. That's exactly right. And authoritarian regimes thrive on disinformation and propaganda and getting people so confused about what reality is that they may as well accept what the government tells them. That is, they try to disable the mechanisms of independent fact-checking. If everyone's saying whatever they want, then the people with guns who say things are the ones that everyone has to listen to. Yeah. So progress isn't necessarily inevitable, though, right? I mean, what about something like the Dark Ages, or is that just a total anomaly? No, no, no, progress is not inevitable. In fact, progress is precious, and it only comes about when you have the results of an enlightenment. That's why I called

my previous book Enlightenment Now, calling for the ideals of the Enlightenment to be cherished and savored and safeguarded and extended. Our natural condition is for there not to be progress. Actually, progress is kind of a weird, unusual state of affairs, and we've got to nurture it for it to continue. I mean, it depends on science, it depends on knowledge, it depends on humanism, that is, on our setting as our goal, the well-being of people. If we fall back into tribalism and nationalism, then progress may not continue. And there have been reversals. All of the graphs that I present, very few of them are just a, you know, as I say, a monotonic line with no wiggles. There are always local reversals in the case of war, for example.

There was a Belgians corresponding to the Vietnam War, the Iran-Iraq War, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Syrian Civil War. Things can get worse in the case of crime, violent crime. The country had a freak out from the 60s to the 90s where there was a big spike in violent crime. We've just lived through, and we're still living through, a reversal of the decline of crime in the last year. and a half or so. There are reasons to think it'll be temporary, that it will be a blip and not a permanent reversal, but it has reversed in the last year and a half. What about some of the imminent threats to our progress here, such as climate change, AI joining us here at some point? It seems like we can't just rely on human thinking at some point. Well, we do have to rely on human thinking.

What else are we going to rely on? Right. Aliens aren't going to save us. God's not going to save us. Enlightenment now have a discussion of fears of runaway AI, which I think are displaced. We could worry about what we're going to do with the jobs that get automated by AI, what are all the truck drivers going to do in forklift operators? But I don't think we have to worry about an AI turning us into raw materials as collateral damage, which is a kind of science fiction scenario that some people do worry about. Climate change we do have to worry about. It is, it's a serious threat. It's one that we have not solved. We're not right now on track for solving it. I think we could solve it, but only if we discover a lot of things that we have not yet

discovered and try to implement them. Scalable, unlimited, clean energy, ways of making steel and fertilizer and cement without CO2 emissions, ways of flying planes without net CO2 emissions. All of these are unsolved. I don't think they're unsolvable, but we haven't yet solved them. back in the day, you know, hundreds of years ago or maybe even more recently, smarter people maybe succeeded more in a Darwinian sense and had more children that were also smart and had resources and succeeded. Society is changing. I don't know too many folks that would argue now that it's the smart people and the most educated, the most resourced, having the most kids. And this might be a ridiculous notion, but do you think this could reverse the collective intelligence of

certain societies? And I'm waiting for the emails implying that that was a not thing to say, but I should be able to ask this question, right? You are correct in noting that this is one of the taboo topics. Someone's called dysgenics, the opposite of eugenics. That is the fear that as the less intelligent have more offspring, the mean intelligence of the population over many generations will go down. I'll leave it by saying that in theory it could happen. I think I'll leave it at that. Yeah, I also don't mean to imply that people who have more kids than are lower on the socioeconomic scale are all dumb or genetically inferior. What I mean is... Well, no, there's a big difference between poverty and lack of intelligence, yes.

Right. Good. I wanted to put that on the record for the people that are like warming up their keyboard fingers right now for the... More like pitchforks and torches. Yes, yes, that. But on Twitter. The Twitter equivalent, yeah. On that same token, when we politicize issues, we get dumber and less intellectually honest, I guess, is probably a more accurate way to phrase this, right? When I see the stuff out there about climate change or vaccine misinformation or just about any politicized topic, it's like we can't communicate anymore. It doesn't work because we tend to disagree with somebody and then be like,

well, you're evil and an idiot instead of having any sort of rational discourse with these people. Yeah, it's not clear how much worse it's gotten, because, It was always something that was true of people that the back in the 70s, in fact, back in the 50s, there were, in fact, back in the 50s, experiments showing that you show a video of a football game between Harvard and Yale, and you ask people to count the number of dirty tricks and infractions and penalties and the Harvard students see loss of infractions by the Yale team and vice versa. And that also happens now with violent demonstrations.

If you say it's in front of an abortion clinic, then the left sees a lot of violence. if you say it's in front of a demonstration for admitting gay people is in the military. Now the right sees a lot of violence from the left. That's kind of remained. But yeah, politics makes people stupid in the literal sense that we flub logic problems if the content goes against our beliefs. The experiments, if you, if racism has been eliminated, then affirmative action is no longer necessary. So this is a syllogism. I want you to, it's a logic test. I want you just to answer

based on literally implies what? What is a sound inference, not what's true or false? So I give you the syllogism if racism has declined, affirmative action is not necessary. Racism is declined, therefore affirmative action is not necessary. Is that a valid inference? And liberals will say no, and conservatives will say yes. In that case, conservatives are actually correct. It is a valid inference. It may not be a sound inference. That is, the premise may not be true. But in terms of its sheer logic, yes, P leads to Q. But you flip the content to say it's about your gun control, and now it's the right-wingers who are in the Dunsts caps and the left-wingers who are the Einsteins. And so on with statistical problems as well. Depending on the content, people will

misread the statistics to go in their preferred direction. It's often the most, the savviest, who are most likely to be seduced by the answer that they want to be correct based on their political inclinations. So yeah, politics does make a, quite literally make us stupid in that we're more poorly equipped for statistical and logical reasoning. So if people today are basing their beliefs on tribal affiliation as opposed to reason or logic or even science, and in fact, the belief in science at all might even be seen as one form of tribal loyalty by members of other tribes, how do we get people to form beliefs based on reason and logic and rational thinking as opposed to a group thing and tribal affiliation? I mean, is it?

even possible to do this? Is it just contrary to all human nature, period? I mean, it is. Human nature pushes against it, but that doesn't mean that resistance is futile. Human nature makes us believe in, you know, in magic and human sacrifice and ghosts and spirits, but we can unlearn them. Part of it is schooling. That is, the tools of rationality, I think, should be taught. They're prerequisite to everything else, so just in the same way that we teach arithmetic and reading, because if you don't know how to read, then you can't learn anything else. If you don't know how to think probabilistically, to not confuse causation and correlation, you're going to be confused in everything you do. And so I think that should be part of the educational system.

I think it should be part of our norms in terms of what counts as acceptable discourse that in political debates, in academic debates, in newspaper op-eds, there should be less of a ethic that you've got to win at all costs and more acknowledge your uncertainty, listen to contrary evidence, don't base your argument on anecdotes, don't confuse causation and correlation. That should be just sort of part of the norms of just everyday sensible conversation, the same way that no one, people don't tell ethnic jokes or homosexual jokes the way they did when I was a kid. It's just kind of mortifying. It wouldn't be a member of polite society if you still did that. We should try to make a conversation more rational, but also we should make an

effort to depoliticize science and policy and other debates. And I've had this given a hard time to people say the National Academy of Sciences where their official pronouncements just sound like right out of a left-wing postmodernist English department. It's just the verbiage that you expect from the political left. And I point out you're just branding science as a left-wing enterprise, and people on the right are going to say, well, why should we trust anything coming out of science? It's just another political faction that I think there should be an effort to make science give it less of a left-wing brand if we want it to be taken seriously by the right. Making science political is actually one of the biggest problems that I'm seeing right now in

communication online. I'll speak more about that after the show for people who are interested, but this seems extremely dangerous because now we can't, science used to be like the one thing where everybody went, well, the experiments have been run, and here we are, and hydrogen and oxygen make water. And now you have people being like, rerun the experiments, I don't believe it. and we just kind of can't regress that far safely. Yeah, I hope not. And I got to say that my fellow scientists are not helping things. I wonder if, speaking of science and society getting smarter or not,

I wonder if you think we have too much brainpower and talent wrapped up in, for example, the financial sector, the legal sector. When I worked in the legal sector, there were so many very, very, very smart people. And I thought, wow, and all we're doing is like managing really big spreadsheets. and, you know, it's financial law. We're making these, we're trying to get financial info half a second faster than the competition. We're suing companies.

There's people that are patent trolling. It's just an inefficient waste of human capital, in my opinion. And I would love to see more top minds, solving real problems, frankly, instead of creating imaginary financial entities to shuffle financial instruments around. Oh, tell me about it. I'm part of the machine, the factory that turns out the supposed intellectual elite and they get snapped up by the finance. I hear I'm referring, of course, to Harvard undergraduates.

Yeah. We crank them out. They may even know diddly squad about business and finance as a result of the courses they teach, but they get snapped up by Goldman Sachs and McKinsey and how much good their brainpower contributes to society. Truly is debatable. I agree with you that there is a misallocation of intellectual capital

in both the financial and legal sectors. And it's desperately needed a lot of other sectors like green energy, like Alzheimer's, research like vaccines. Anyway, we're in the same wavelength there. In closing here, how do we deal on a very practical level with folks that just seem absolutely impermeable to some of these enlightenment ideas? Factfulness, right, intellectual honesty. It seems important that people understand the progress we're making so that we get less of these just want to watch the world burn types of folks, radical extremists, catastrophists. Is that a word? It should be a word. Yeah, it is a word.

It is a word? Great. Good. Perfect. How do we deal with those folks? Yeah, I think there's no turnkey solution, no algorithm. There's some that we probably can't deal with. We can try to create fewer of them in terms of ideas that people get exposed to in school so that they're not replenished as the older ones die. There are always people at the fringes who are like died and the wool committed to the conspiracy theories or the need for chaos that maybe on the fence and they can be picked off one at a time. The people who are in the midst of the movement, sometimes when their influencers change their mind, if they do, or if you can find people who are considered to be heroes within a particular movement and recruit them to spread the message, then people will go with what their leaders tell them. I think it would have been great if the left had allowed Donald Trump to claim credit for vaccines for Operation Warspeed. And like, he's a blowheart and he's bragging and finally let him have it to get all of his followers vaccinated. Yes, 100%. Yeah, 100%. Because you'd have a lot of people who,

who trust science, they would just get vaccinated, and they would sort of say, well, Trump didn't do anything. He might have funded it, but grumble, grumble, grumble, and they would have gotten the shot. But then we wouldn't necessarily have this massively politicized reaction to the vaccine, which is... Yeah, at least we should be aware of politicization as a major driver of science acceptance or denial. And again, my fellow scientists have been very, very slow at realizing it. One person said it's like the way that American tourists sometimes deal with foreigners. in another country, they just speak to them very slowly and then distinctly, hoping that somehow it'll get through.

I mean, that's just not gonna work. We've gotta be clever and we've gotta stop making the problem worse by branding ourselves as part of a political faction. And to try insofar as it's possible to recruit spokespeople from a diversity of political stances who are still scientifically illiterate and willing to spread the messages.

Stephen Pinker, thank you so much for coming on the show. This has been as wonderful as I hoped it would be, and I really appreciate your time. It's been my pleasure. Thanks for having me on, Jordan. If you're looking for another episode of the Jordan Harbinger Show to sink your teeth into

with Navy SEAL and veteran Jocko Willink, like you've never heard him before. Leadership is the most important on the battlefield. Every characteristic that you can have for a leader can be taken to an extreme. Even the most important characteristic that I talk about all the time, which is humility.

You've got to be humble as a leader. You've got to always look, okay, how can I improve? Why I need to listen to other people. Well, as a leader, you can actually be too humble where you don't stand up when somebody's telling you to do something that you don't think is right,

but you're like, hey, I'm humble, so I'm going to do it anyways. Well, if you don't think it's right, you actually shouldn't do it. Every positive characteristic can be taken to the extreme that it becomes a negative, and that is why, as a leader, you have to be balanced. Be humble or get humbled is a term that I love.

Can you tell us what this means? The nature of the world is if you're not humbled, you are going to get humbled. humbled so that's a good attitude to have and it's a good attitude to always think you know I need to stay humble but this is the dichotomy this doesn't mean that you're completely passive and there are times as humble as you should be there are times when you need to stand up and say no you know Laif and I joke about it sometimes the most we'd get to sleep was when we were in the field there's a funny picture of myself and Dave Burke on a rooftop it's probably

It looks like it's about 11 o'clock in the morning, and we're both sitting there. We're both asleep. 110 degrees. It's 110 degrees, and we're both asleep. And clearly, this was the first time we had to rest in 24 or 48 hours. You learn to sleep anywhere on concrete and floors and stairwells and whatever else. For more with Jocko, including why we should stop being the easy button for those we manage and lead, and the concept of leadership capital, how to build it, when to use it, and when not to use it.

Check out episode 93. right here on the Jordan Harbinger show. Glad I was finally able to make that happen. Him and I've been going back and forth for years trying to make this conversation work. As mentioned on the show, we are tilted towards processing negative information, the negativity bias.

We've talked about it on the show many times. So we do notice it more and remember it more. But this also leads us to process risk poorly. We err on the side of caution. Kind of goes back to the old lion in the bushes evolutionary theory, right? If our ancestors heard something Russell in the bushes and got scared,

it didn't matter if it was a bird or a lion because they reacted with fear. But if they didn't react at all, well, they got eaten, right? So this is evolved in us, but it does cause us to process risk in an inefficient way. Of course, this is also aided and abetted by the availability heuristics. So the news focuses on negative events, mostly because of negativity bias, which is a self-reinforcing cycle, right, a vicious cycle. So we end up thinking that the world is much worse than it is because of these types of bias. And of course, declineism or declinism looking at the past and thinking, wasn't it so great and looking at the future and thinking, oh, it's going to be so awful, right? These are all human cognitive biases that come into play here that causes to view our world in a way that, frankly, just isn't accurate. I was glad that was Stephen, and we talked about this a little more offline, if he had any thoughts on the quality of our communication these days, right? It certainly does seem like that is worse than it was in the past. In the past, it seems like things were more civil. Now, online discussion is horrifying, even if we sort of know what to look for in terms of Russian bots and trolls and the regular folks we were talking to every day.

now can be pretty horrible online. I think Mike Tyson said that online communication is made worse by people who would never have the guts to say something like that to your face, or if they did, would get punched in the phase. You know, now we just have people letting out their anger with innocent strangers online, in part due to anonymity. Clinton Emerson, who was on this show,

who studies Russian and Chinese influence operations online, he has a policy of not engaging with anonymous accounts at all. If it's a fake name or a non-real name or the account doesn't have background info, he will just block and ignore. Not a bad policy for those of us that have trouble dealing with folks online, especially trolls.

You know, I feel like me not using Facebook anymore, limiting a lot of online contact in certain places. It helped me learn more about how to stay sane using social media. And frankly, it's helped me integrate this stuff into my life in a healthy way. I interact with all of you on LinkedIn, my Instagram DMs,

but I don't use the feed. I don't scroll through Instagram. I don't scroll through Facebook. I use it as an inbox, and that's literally it. We're just at the beginning of this curve. And as a parent, I think about this all the time. I used to hear that TV would make families never talk again,

and the telephone would make families never talk again. The ancient Greeks actually thought books were going to be toxic because people wouldn't have to memorize information. Imagine thinking that reading is going to be the undoing of civilization. So social media does have its ups and downs. I think we're early in the curve when it comes to this. So I haven't given up on it completely. But, man, does it seem like our communication has taken a nosedive?

and that's one of the reasons that I love podcasts, right? We can have deep, intelligent conversations that are longer than a few tweets long or a back and forth where people are trying to prove themselves on social media. So I hope you enjoyed this show. I enjoyed talking with Stephen, of course. Links to all his stuff, all his books,

especially will be in the show notes. Please use our website links if you buy books from any guest on the show. It does help support us. Worksheets for the episode are in the show notes. Transcripts are in the show notes, and there's a video of this interview going up on our YouTube at jordanharbinger.com

slash YouTube. Speaking of Instagram and social media, I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram, or you can hit me on LinkedIn. I'm teaching you how to connect with great people, online and off, and dig the well before you get thirsty in our six-minute networking course.

The course is free. I don't sell anything, at least not yet. Just go to Jordan Harbinger.com slash course and realize most of the guests you hear on the show, subscribe and contribute to the course. Come join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. This show is created an association with Podcast One.

My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Millio Campo, Ian Baird, Josh Ballard, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show is that you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. If you know someone who just thinks

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In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you listen, and we'll see you next time. This episode is sponsored in part by What Was That Like Podcast? If you're looking for a new show to add to your rotation, something that'll make you stop mid-dishwashing and go, wait, what, that actually happened? You got to subscribe to What Was That Like? It's real people telling the most surreal moments of their lives, and they're not just giving you the highlights. They're walking you through it from the inside as the person who actually lived it, which means you're basically getting a front row seat to the chaos. One episode is about Scott getting locked up in a foreign jail for a crime he didn't commit.

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