Steven Pinker

00:00I 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 you bring up some really fascinating subjects and we were talking right before the podcast about 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 seemed 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 motika torches yes but when I was referring strictly to the alt right from its origin in internet discussion groups right and I you know I know some of them some of them are

00:56former students and some of them are highly intelligent and and I highly read so but but that's not what people often think of when they think of the alt right that is referring to Isis or people in tech there are some people in universities to stay undercover and I was 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 it was it was the exact quote you were just so basically saying something wrong once of did a lot of intelligent people that are involved in this well it wasn't so much that it was also that that because of the the various taboos in mainstream intellectual culture the because of political correctness there's certain things that are just kind of not discussable but then when people only alt-right discover them they feel tremendously empowered like we are now

01:43real 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 not warranted oh it's from an example is there are average differences between men and women and 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 I think it's a bad equation in the first place it's

02:32green 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 there's their sex also even though there are some traits where men score a little better than women there are some traits where I wouldn't score a little better than men and that 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 all men and women are totally different what are your thoughts on how the subject got out of bounds because it's it's very confusing to me that certain

03:19subjects 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 all there's some obvious distinctions here there's a history to it right because there were there were a lot of cockamamie theories in the 19th century and a lot of the 20th century that that that men were intellectual and women were not in women were governed by their emotions and their 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

04:09and women you're sending women back to the to the kitchen in 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 cop exact copies of men or have distinctive profile as men have a distinct profile so I think was just a mistake to 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 you to women's equality and the articles of faith are always dangerous always dangerous especially in that regard it's the articles of fairness are always important I mean fair being fair to each other and but being fair is also recognizing

04:59differences that's right I'm not assuming that any difference is a deficiency right yeah well if you're really doing an honest comparison of the differences between men and women men wouldn't come out looking so good right you know 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 it should know better I mean to be fair I I did not get into much trouble from 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

05:52mainstream reaction was that this is almost a sign have as the New York Times put it that social media is making us stupid yeah that was article the cover the name of the art title of the article in a time yeah so it was so by and large you know I 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 the discussion that involved nuance like complicated issues that are there they're 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 - all right in the left and political director these are 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 you

06:50can't discuss them then the only interpretation you can have is the simplistic one if you 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 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 difference between men and women is because they don't want to be grouped into the people that literally or legitimately rather were sexist yeah in the the you know 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 so I'm hoping it's a swing and it'll just

07:40kind of bounce back towards the middle again yeah and in fact there's some hope that that just what Eddie medium is new better there'll be these excesses and it takes a while for the system to kind of react will berate have an immune response that that damps down the worst of it I've been on the internet a long time and in the in the 80s when it was mainly academics and computer scientists who are on the internet there were these discussion groups this was before the the world wide web so it was all text and there's this concept of flaming yeah I don't know if the word is more slavery days well it came from the there was an award given you know jokey award called with a flaming award oh really and the the to the the the worst you know insult are in these kind of intellectual discussions and the Theia the trophy wasn't supposedly an asbestos quark but from the flaming award

08:38there was the the the now a flame the adjective flame wars the verb to flame yeah when it did dam down as people became aware of flaming as a phenomenon it in the discussion groups as well let's not turn this into a flame war or in ruins yeah and when people could have realized that this was a thing then they could push back against it and let's hope that that happens with this 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 alright how do i attack this 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 certainly like everyone is in some form of so most people are in some form of social media

09:32now whereas back then the number of people that were on message boards was so small yeah so small that's right and you're right there there is an art form of ritual insults yeah I can Shakespeare and you know African Americans snapping there when people realize that this is a sport then you know no one gets hurt it's just like you know right like martial arts it's part of the fun by the thing is that when it goes out of control and it really does attack people's reputations then you got a problem we have a thing in comedy called roast battle yeah hosting another exactly and roast battle is this 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

10:22exercise and a fun joke writing show and no one really you know no one means any of this and I really mean it just me just like like like a professional boxing or Ultimate Fighting yes I mean you can there are rules there's an arena yeah when you're done it's over you don't plot revenge right but you know 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 a reality show and you could see famously the camera zoomed in on Trump and he was not amused and no jokes his expense and there's a theory that what are the reasons that he plotted his president forerun was - it 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 the United States and I put crazy and cheered oh boy history we

11:14could have turned out very different he had made that one joke amazing is that well apparently he had been thinking about being president for a long long time but that might might have been the straw that broke the camel's back yeah so Brock 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 not seeing that 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 last face-to-face contact and I think one of them the big discoveries of psychology from over the last couple of decades is that we're moral animals to the extent that we have reputations the going back to Richard Dawkins his famous

12:15book 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 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 the nice things that you did to me and I feel compelled to 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 favours 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

13:11cultivate your reputation as someone who will is trustworthy and will reciprocate and but without the reputation without the memory of who did what and and how generous and trustworthy someone is the whole thing can unravel and you get back to you know 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 to getting along namely it's it's a big deal to insult someone to their their if their face and people do it but you got to do it very carefully you take that away and it's just you know typing a bunch of

14:09characters at a keyboard and especially if the person doing the typing has a handle there just anonymous then that kind of eliminates some of the constraints on civility and generosity and maintaining a reputation as a credible cooperator I also feel that there's there's a selfishness in being nice and being generous because the way I describe what I think it feels good yeah 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 like that feels good like it's good for you too like it's not just a one-way street what kind of a benign selfishness yeah it's the kind I mean that that is although it's not the the irony I said it can't just really be calculated if it's really that I just do exactly as much that gets me gratitude and recognition then you know other people see through that right and so the

15:03paradox is that it's kind of got to be sincere for it to be credible to someone else yeah the most effective way to prove to someone else that you're a nice guy is to actually be a nice guy yeah because if you're just calculating if you're just doing the bare minimum you can get away with then since we're pretty good we're all pretty good intuitive psychologists you're always kind of thing did he really mean it is he just kind of kissing up is he trying to get you know curry favors and we see through that yeah it's the person who actually isn't doing that calculation that we really admire and respect right and that's very unusual it's one of the reasons why we admire like look at this a completely altruistic person yeah market the market place of reputations kind of selects can select for true niceness and goodness yes you've got enough information and enough interactions I mean here's a

15:54crude analogy so in the business world you can have cutthroat fly-by-night businesses that just try to you know squeeze everything out of the customers and then you know take off as soon as the cheating is discovered you know 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 yeah that's kind of an analogy to the way that being honorable even if you have little losses yeah 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 other people want to hang out with if the reputations can skin' spread yeah it's kind of amazing if you think about how cherished true generosity and

16:41kindness how cherished they are like it's it's an amazing thing like you see people that are truly kind and truly generous and we we value that so much it's kind of amazing there aren't more of them because such a virtue that we admire and you you if someone does behave in that manner like people gravitate towards them it's like it's a real trait that is attractive to people it is and there's you know there's a misunderstanding of the evolutionary explanation of the of 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 could 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

17:37is 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 it's but if I have a choice between who I'm gonna hang out with who's gonna be friend there's one person who's gonna do exactly from what for me what will help him in the long run there's someone else who's really is generous and he's really gonna help me and he's not gonna keep a long memory of who did what for whom well I'm gonna pick the second guy right and so he's gonna 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 and so there's kind of a trade-off in equilibrium between you know not being a total sucker or not giving so much a way that you just harm yourself in the long run and being the

18:26kind 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 though some of us are nor are we total sane self-sacrificing Saints we're somewhere in between and different people are different points in that continuum when you look at social media and you look at this this the nastiness that's so common and obviously in some ways it's got to be connected to the ability to be anonymous but I feel like and I thought of this more and more lately that this negativity is is probably a temporary thing I feel like people are realizing that this is an unnatural way of communicating and that it's so relative really relatively recent in human history and such a small window I mean 1994 is essentially when people started getting online and here

19:25we 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 I think we're talking about it on a regular basis oh man I I just get email I check it once a day and that's it like wow yeah no I think that's right when there whenever there's a new technological innovation it takes society awhile to adjust to it and I mean you say people got online in 1994 with social media or even worried and it's more probably like you know as smartphones started to become ubiquitous No No maybe 2011 and Facebook took off in the 2000s but yeah I think that's right and similar things happened in when other media were introduced like there's 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

20:17ever again even before that when telephones were invented it was you know families would never sit down together because the phone constantly be ringing and attention spans would be disrupted because the phone could ring any time was there similar conversation about books yeah absolutely there was yeah and about writing going back to the ancient Greeks where when when writing was considered to be kind of you know degenerate and decadent because you know you'd let your memory go to pot you know how are people going to cultivate their memory like you just write things down and look at them that's crazy it's not interesting why do you think we're always looking to dismiss some new fantastic technology it's good partly cuz we don't understand it yet I mean it's new and and also a lot of the adjustments that you were just talking about you know you can't really predict

21:06them beforehand a lot of what happens in a society is there 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 gonna 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 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

21:55where's this where's this going like what's gonna do to our children we've walked on the street and everyone's just staring at their phone really is I said this that imagine if there was a drug that came along that this drug made you only think about the drug you were you were likely more likely to get into car accidents because this drug you are more likely to sleep late cause more anxiety and and soak up immense amounts of your time with very little reward for it you would go wow what kind of crazy drugs 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 the time on my phone I try to spend off social media but reading things I tried to read articles and I try to I try to in some way justify like oh I'm doing something

22:47productive on my phone but a lot of ways I'm just addicted to checking that thing yeah you got you have to develop habits of self control with balance in life I had a student so I teach at Harvard and one time a freshman came into my office and beginning the semester so she looked at the Shelf of all the books that she was it 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 Becker how do you have time to read so many books and she paused for a second he said I bet you're not on Facebook I mean there's gotta be some good that comes out of those communities as well throughout the baby with the bath undoubtedly yeah absolutely and you know I confess I mean I you know I I'm on Twitter and I sometimes look at my Twitter feed and I learned in really

23:36interesting stuff from it no I also say okay enough get back to work get back to reading go outside yeah see some friends spend some time with with with your family yeah I will go down a Twitter hole I went down a Twitter hole yesterday about these menthe new Mayan ruins that they found in Guatemala how amazing yeah crazy thousands of structures swallowed up by time and they're just now realizing like oh my god this is a city yeah that stuff's good yeah they did no absolutely hate manners question of are all finding the balance but you're getting the advantages or disadvantages well it's just so new yeah when you when you see all so much negativity though and there is a big problem with anonymous accounts in particular you see it in facebook with but in facebook there seems to be repercussions like if you're Tom Smith and Tom Smith writes something horrible like Tom Smith

24:29could 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 be outraged mobs yeah where someone will post something and it's taken out of context and they didn't realize well they mentioned is a joke like they thought the woman who went to take that trip to Africa yeah 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 I just thought she was being funny cuz kimete look I'm a comic and I have a lot of comedian friends

25:13that are not racist but they will say hilarious racist things because it's funny yeah it's not because they're racist but what was her name justine sacco thank you this was the yes I hope I don't get AIDS but why lol that's what she wrote woke up twelve hours later after a xanax and wine hangover I'm sure and her life was a living hell yeah I mean she's still to this day is I mean Jamie knows her name is not racism nugget ironically she meant it yes she herself was not racist didn't she become controversial after that as well yes she was like the PR person for draftkings or fan dorsum when they were going through some issues couple years yeah draftkings is an online gambling thing it's kind of controversial gambling on sports and stuff like that yeah I just we look for people also we were talking about this before without getting into details about who we're talking about but there

26:09are 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 virtual signaling right like a big part of going after people in outraged mobs as long as mob is attacking someone else they're not attacking you that's right yeah that's right and there is there's an interesting question over history is how do how do some of these sometimes called extraordinarily extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds mmm zero tulip bulb mania in Holland in the 17th century what's that oh there's this this kind of bubble where people started to outbid each other on tulip bulbs and you know the price of a single tulip bulb went like through the roof and then it suddenly crashed people lost fortunes cuz everyone was expecting

27:05everyone else to keep bidding up the price but there Wow yeah the tulip bulbs toolable mania just way nutty but then they're also you know witch hunts where when a woman would be accused of sinking a ship or causing a crop failure or making someone's child get sick there the pogroms in Europe where Jews were accused of poisoning the wells or killing Christian boys to make matzo out of their blood near the lynchings in the American South where African Americans were accused of raping a woman and I based on just a rumor spreading and then they'd be tortured and hanged there's the McCarthy era there were there's the the daycare satanic ritual abuse mmm mania of the 1980s where these daycare workers were accused basically by coaching kids to embellish these fantastic stories of how they were essentially molested and tortured and forced to take part in satanic rituals I

28:04mean all totally nonsense and people went to jail yeah so the 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 yes denouncing people who call the whistle on 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 the Stalinist a Soviet Union is another exam let Mao is China and that's somehow some one of the ways in which dictators could often enforce their power by have is 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

28:57North 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 government's it can happen spontaneously too it's a weird human trait isn't it it is it's a combination of a kind of human trait and a kind of dynamic when you have kind of a network of people and 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 what do you think 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 and certainly yes it's hard

29:45to tell but I you mentioned the possibility that there's been such growing recognition at the problem that we will mount a response that it'll just seem ridiculous if the outraged mob once it's recognized that there are outrage mobs and virtual signaling fanatics and 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 well there's just such a flaw in there there's a real issue in writing things and one of the issues especially if you're writing about a subject where there's a lot of people involved or perhaps and 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

30:35thinking actually I was looking at it this way and the other person 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 fill in the blank some celebrity or some politician or whatever and you can define them and some really horrible nasty way and they just have to sit there and read it like it's just your thoughts but that's not an accurate method of communicating ideas with a person it's just your one uninterrupted take on things absolutely so I second to last book the one just before my current

31:32book enlightenment now but the previous book was called the sense of style it was a writing manual where I began to 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 you know academics and intellectuals trying to show off how profound they are my how I'm incomprehensible they are if people could understand it it can't be that complicated so I write this stuff that no one will understand then nothing I'm really smart that's why I'm theory and you know there might be some truth to it but I think that the main theory is that that writing is as you just as you described it's a one-way channel of communication it's very unnatural when we speak you and I were having a conversation we're looking each other in

32:17the eye and our eyebrows go up and they get knitted and if I say if I start to become too obscure you're gonna give me a quizzical terrified expression in their face or you can interact yeah when you're writing you're none of that right and so I think part of the skill in writing what I 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 it because you have no way of determining that as you're writing because you're just sitting there you know tapping away whoever's gonna read what you write there you're never gonna meet them it might be you know three years from now there might be halfway across the world and it's just one way and so and there's another kind of psychological problem that we all have it's just part of being human

33:07called the the 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 your your understanding is everyone's understanding and so you right away you know graduate right right right 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 at least know that it's a problem and think what can I read it would be reasonably expected to know and because we're not even that good at that I mean none of us remind readers just showing someone a draft of what you've written you're often surprised at how

33:59often they'll say I don't know what you're talking about maybe that's what we should force people to do with Twitter maybe we should have like a team of people that you send your tweet to yes like a circle of confidants well they I mean that's the way it works in publishing you know you got you have an editor right I in academia you got peer review before it's published they send it out to other people just like you and they they write a little review and you 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 want no don't don't write down I'm sorry I'm on a plane I'm drunk yeah I'll call you from Africa well this is you know it what are the big themes in my new book enlightenment now is how is it that we're simultaneously many ways getting smarter but also seem to be getting stupider what society so I think

34:49part of it is that none of us is individually are that smart we all and and cognitive psychologists have shown that humans have all kinds of biases and fallacies we 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 of a hundred people who died in the past week because they texted while driving suddenly a lot of fallacies so but the thing is we as a species have done some amazing things I mean we discovered those Mayan buried cities some you know science is amazing and because 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

35:44where all of the excesses of one person get kind of balanced out by 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 a worry about the legislature and the courts and the judges and you know an impeachment and so on in science instead of having one genius announcing the way the world works he or she has to subject himself to peer review and get led other sciences critter 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 idiocy zuv any individual person hmm that's fascinating I completely agree with that that makes so much sense I've also felt that there's not a lot there's not that we have difficulties

36:48obviously people have difficulties in this life there's social difficulties economic difficulties but when in terms of survival difficulties it's 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 there they're less present today than ever before and 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 the people are doing where 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're making Tim witted children and

37:46I'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 voice I'd 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 it's it's a hundred percent that one is going to be a that leaves you with three million morons in the United States of America if you're being really kind and three million geniuses yes yeah well probably I am an optimist I thank you dealing with probably six million changes okay but my book is is often described as a book on optimism of enlightenment now because I have 75 graphs almost all of it show the world getting better including what some people think is the most incredible graph in the book on a phenomenon called the Flynn effect which

38:41is that believe it or not and I know most people do not IQ scores have been rising for most of the last hundred years but three points a decade now this I know it seems totally unbelievable but yet they discovered it when Flynn a philosopher discovered it when he realized that the people who make IQ tests had to keep renormalize the average because the average kept creeping up it was like gee 110 well we keep that that's what most people score we say that the average is 100 we gotta adjust the scale downward and Flynn realized hey wait a second they keep doing this over and over again that must mean the populations 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 health care and so on but a lot of it is just that a lot that

39:31ideas that used to be kind of sophisticated and restricted to professors and scientists and statisticians I'm kind of trickle down to the population and so we things like a 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 you know a subway map on a smartphone hey watching TV you know you 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

40:29and the Flynn effect is starting to level off but there has been this this 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 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 like sounds blows yeah but most of it is like lol I just went to the mall a lot of nonsense in there but the sheer amount of interesting information like those newly discovered Mayan ruins and Guatemala and things along those lines or you know some there was some interesting new information on the history of human beings because they found some new teeth and some that throw back the the date of

41:28modern humans and they keep moving that back which 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 no as idiotic as a lot of public debate is today there's a lotta DC in the past - sure I mean in the you know as recently the 19 he says that that movie on the first interracial couple in Virginia where there was a court a judge who said God didn't mean for the races 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

42:24even even people that we you know think of as kind of racist they'd be embarrassed and too stupid and people on the 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 intellectuals saying well this is you know you got to forgive them because Latin America was such a sexualized culture and there were prostitutes and those decadence that of course it was a little bit of an overreaction now you know today I don't think anyone on the on the left or the right would say it's okay to send gay people to concentration camps right 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 - so it's a way free assuring ourselves whenever we see debate getting seemingly

43:13getting stupider and stupider you got to remember there's a lot of stupidity in the past - oh yeah a massive amount and I think and I think you're right that they you know it's hard to tell day by day especially when your attention is concentrated by the worse things that happen and again it's 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 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 accumulates over time and one of the things that 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

44:07day but when you think that in the 1960s there was debate over whether there should be racial segregation whether african-americans should drink out a different cup water fountains of stay in different motels there's debate over whether women should should be allowed in the workplace that what's gonna happen to all the kids if they 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 deep as information flows as people start to meet each other as ideas proliferate I 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

44:58of attitudes towards women attitudes towards gays as was George 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 yeah I mean it kind of feel modest former progress kind of hilarious that's hilarious but you know the progress but but it shows I mean they just could not live in this absurd situation forever my world really did drag them kicking and screaming out of the Middle Ages in this in this way and that kind of tends to happen over the long run yeah I'm an optimist and I I really do look at all the friends yo-yo you like the book then 7575 optimistic graphs Oh excellent yeah I think that if we you look at just the overall human race I mean one of the best in indications of that is go and look at media representations of life from the 1950s and 1960s watch movies

45:51especially from the 50s and just see how people behaved I mean it's you're getting sort of a time stamp of human interaction from 1950 means it's obviously an artistic representation of a time doesn't it at 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 yep remember the scene where you know junior would misbehave and mom would say wait till your father gets home and comes home and he pulls the belt out of his pants so he could use it as a weapon so yeah buckle would really hurt the child yeah and the child would you know tie a pillow on his behind and it'd be stars and go off into the corner yeah you know now you'd call social services they'd take the child away or something yeah well I mean III think this idea of being dragged kicking and screaming into

46:44this 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 meet to movement is it all this this mass public shaming of sexual harasser Xand 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 is that a giant impact on culture yeah and and like a lot of social changes it happens really quickly yeah oh he mixes some good things and some not-so-good things right and it's really good that men have no longer have a license to just expose themselves or harass women who work for them yes treat them in these crude and ugly ways you know and there's also a legitimate concern that you just can't

47:42really believe all accusers I mean we kind of learned that through history from from from you know witch hunts and lynchings and pogroms and there's got to be proportionality not all infractions are the same you know the punishment should fit the crime so we haven't quite settled in how to balance the very necessary corrective to two 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 understand who they are knowing their name knowing things about them but as our circle of people that we interact with grows and

48:41expands 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 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 yes 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 too few hundred thousand years or whatever I wonder if this is I wonder if we're changing and I wonder what what we're going to be like if this continues to grow and and it continues to be a part

49:38of our life this if we're gonna adapt our abilities well it you know we can't we're not going to change the neurobiological structure of the brain you know very much because you know even though we all learn through our lives there are limits as to what our brain brain can do but what I think happens is there's a back and forth between our brains and technology so the technology adjusts to take into account how the how our brains work so the the the restriction of a can't know or feel that you know more than 150 people I mean kind of that's helps define the the set of top 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

50:36just all text and or use a computer and they're just 80 characters and aligned and you the letters of the alphabet and that's all there was and 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 user interfaces I mean the Apple was the first to commercialize it but it had been developed beforehand at Xerox but it's 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 you took a huge amount still that 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

51:29and 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 the modern human brains if there was an article that was published recently that was trying to read the timeline of the modern human brain and I think they were pointing to about 35,000 years ago now and see if you 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 I mean or interesting I'm not surprised yeah well I would have guessed a little bit older than that but yeah but you know in the tens of thousands of years yeah so with the they're one of the big mysteries right is the doubling and the human brain size over a period of what it was like 2 million years mhm this something had to happen to cause that like some change in our environment

52:23some change in our behavior and our what has been a bigger change in the internet like what has been a bigger change than the access to information that people have today and I'm wondering if like we're not experiencing when you're talking about these Rises steady rise of IQs obviously it's not just the Internet education the cumulative data that people just keep piling on to and more people learn more things and people get wiser and you know our 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 per decade if this is going to lead you extrapolate you go a hundred years from now two hundred years from now what are we gonna be looking at yeah I mean well the thing is that what

53:10happened over the last few tens of thousands of years is not gonna be replicated anytime soon because that was driven by Darwinian natural selection which just meant that smarter people had more of surviving babies that's a process that happens as a speed limit measured in generations and it's it may not be that coping in a modern society makes you have more babies might be the other way around right you know 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 with in childhood you're going to a lot of these skills become second nature how to look things up how to how to use these devices efficiently and then that will can reach limits there only so many hours in the day and there's only so many neurons in your

54:05brain but in conjunction with that the technology becomes more human-friendly and there are new ways of getting information into the brain you know as I mentioned we've gone from just lines of characters to graphic user interfaces and video and 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 of getting our puny brains to experience more information yeah I was gonna 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 at all if you use like an HTC vive or any of those no I've used more kind of

55:01lower tech kinds of like you Google cardboard and yeah that's kind of interesting it's still pretty good yeah but the vibe will freak you out there's there's one of the things and I I used several years agos 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 get nauseous no I didn't but it was it's it's buzz I 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 like oh it'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 gonna be like in 10 years what is it gonna be like in 30 years it's gonna be and how much better

55:57is the interface going to be I'm really concerned that there's going to be a 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 yeah well although putting things into perspective there they were that those fears when television became popular right before that with movies it's a question of what kind of balance people will find I mean clearly it's gonna be more of exactly what you described but you know people do people do like reality too you know people in huge numbers go to the national parks yeah it's just seeing a you know a picture book isn't the same thing and people care whether you know

56:52when they buy a work of art they care whether it's real or fake there's a lot there's one part of the human mind that as much as we're seduced by just sensual 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 be fine 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 they're 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 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 yeah I understand no so much

57:52rose-colored but bad at description no it's I do I know exactly you mean no but have a kind of problem-solving mindset namely we have solved problems in the past or at least we've we've reduced them and that I think in Boldin's us to look at the problems we have now and think well we can handle those two 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 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 we then there's a reasonable hope that we can solve the problems facing us it doesn't happen by itself there's not you know magic escalator there's no you know arc of history or dialectic or any mystical stuff that just makes us better and better

58:50there's recognizing problems and figuring out how the world works and doing our best to solve them so that was 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 my I have a friend my friend Ian Edwards has this bit about the news about renaming it to the bad news and he says he goes on this whole rant about the news 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 seven billion people with seven billion stories you

59:44know so you're you're gonna 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 the Bill Hicks used to have a bit about CNN about you watching CNN it would be def aides pit bulls you go outside birds are chirpin weird happening there's a lot to that that's a great great examples but why do we contact 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 dress that we dread losses more than we enjoy gains and criticism hurts much more than praise makes you feel better where are our minds are attracted to possibilities of death and danger and so

60:42on 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 a implication of the law of entropy there's a tiny fraction of the ways the world could work that works works out well for you and an awful lot of the 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 things that can go wrong that we may have forgotten and so the the news tends to gravitate to the negative and they're actually studies to 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 there's how often are

61:32there positive words like you know improve move better how often they're 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 ah good question I don't know the answer I suspect it is I don't know I don't know the answer for sure there and there are there fluctuations there ups and downs but overall the trend has been downward so partly it's all even though by the way all the other graphs on the book show that in reality the world is actually been getting better there are fewer deaths from war there's fewer homicides we're making some progress in in pollution there's less poverty than there used to be more education but the news is been getting more and more morose part of it is also that there's a there is an ethic of journalism that to be responsible is to point out what's

62:19going wrong what one editor said good good news isn't news its advertising mmm and it's also because of the time scale 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 if as Max Rosa an economist pointed out newspapers could run the headline 138 thousand people escape from extreme poverty yesterday every day for the last 30 years that they never ran that headline even once because there's never a particular day in which the hundred and thirty-eight thousand people were different than 138 thousand people the day before and so the 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

63:15future of humans well it's as the 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 possiblest so what happens in the future it depends on what we do now right there are their real threats and dangers sure there's a possibility of nuclear war there's a possibility of catastrophic climate change so we can't gonna sit back and say well things have gotten better let's I'm continued by sheer inertia or momentum that's not gonna happen but what it does indicate is well we face crises in the past and we we have made things better let's figure out how to deal with a crises now that's a great way of looking at it to 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 yeah that's

64:14right those people are there anymore I mean in a thriving culture thousands of structures and now it's a jungle like what happened yeah no 11 it's it's wise to remember that that can't happen yeah it didn't become an hatton yeah 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 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 like nuclear war like climate change but there is a there are mechanisms in place that if we concentrate them if we are determined to keep doing it and then there's a

65:14reasonable expectation of success again but not automatically we got to decide to me we got to make those choices yeah the the the 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 it going to last like how long is this one particular nation going to keep it together and if you look at how many different countries have been around that just how many you know would do a dominant culture is 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 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 about our boundaries and our borders of the way we have online this

66:12ability to communicate with people all over the place everywhere it seems to me to lessen the necessary or the need rather for for borders and for for these the walls that we're now literally and figuratively talking about putting up yeah I think there's gonna be a kind of balance it's I mean an interesting thing about nation-states now is that there this is a sense of which they're treated as immortal I mean at that whereas as he mentioned for most of history they were conquering Emperor's and nations were wiped off the map and engulfed and conquered and you know 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's some big states like Soviet Union that broke fragmented but the borders in between the ruisseau Viet republics are now borders between nation-states and no

67:09nation has gone out of existence through conquest since since 1945 at least record internationally recognized state by by the UN so there's this norm even though the borders are often you know crazy they were arbitrary lines drawn on a map but one of the reasons that again it's counterintuitive that wars have gone down and deaths and wars have gone down is that borders are now treated as sacrosanct by the kind of international community not a hundred percent of the time you had Russia annexing Crimea but those are our 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 you know Texas and Colorado and Nevada and and California you know that doesn't happen anymore and so the borders could have been grandfathered in and it's one of the reasons why they the the the world has been more stable in terms of the the

68:05map on the other hand as you mentioned there's another sense in which we have this global community that transcends borders we have the 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 our global migration terrorism climate pollution rogue states and the fact that people even if they even if you grow up in France and you consider yourself a French citizen you want to be able to spend a summer in you know 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 so

69:03there's going to be some kind of compromise I think between keeping the 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 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 the 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

69:59entire world being free and connected and you know we've talked about some of the problems that Paris has with immigration we showed some of the videos of these these immigrants that have just littered all over the street and it taking this place apart and we're looking at a go man that is a that is a real tragedy but what it represents is a bunch of people that really don't have anything like real tragedy is that these people live like this if 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 move to Paris looking for a better life and now they're stuck in the situation where you know there's not a lot of sanitation the 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

70:53because 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 that the world has caught up and surpassed it yeah there's a number of really complicated issues that the mobility is in general good thing in countries do well when they welcome in the immigrants but you know not not on the short term yeah not too many too fast yeah faster than they can be assimilated and integrated into the new country so you're just opening the doors right probably it's not a good idea no country really does that but building the wall is a terrible idea too and of course the the the best way to prevent massive amounts of migration is to make life better in the countries of origin right that is happening slowly and unevenly but it's been noted that even

71:50in the United States and Mexico more people are going or the same number of people are doing the reverse migration from the us back to Mexico now that the economy of Mexico is so much my own parents 25 years 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 the if you look at the cutoff for extreme poverty its kind of define defined somewhat arbitrarily is a dollar ninety per person per day kind of the bare bare bare minimum to feed your family it's down now from 50 percent a few decades ago to ten percent now and the United Nations has set the goal of bringing it to zero by the year 20:30 and what street what is causing that what's causing the change so a lot of it is globalization that I mean even

72:46though that's kind of a villain in many people's eyes but when you have a huge global market then and the introduction of factories and industrialization in China in India and Bangladesh sometimes the conditions are grim but the conditions being a peasant in the rice paddies was even grimmer and when when you have people integrated 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 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

73:45environment Brian and leaders that think of their mandate as how do I get my country to be richer in the most dramatic case was China where you know Mao had these Harebrained Schemes of called huge collective farms and people were smelting iron in their backyards and you know anything that occurred him in the middle of the night he would force on hundreds of millions of people and it cost these massive famines then you know Deng 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 a welfare of their citizens when you have leaders who have that mindset then their country can can get wealthier and their citizens better off now but are you concerned I mean I agree with you that it is probably is one of the reasons why these people are

74:42experiencing this greater quality of life is because of globalization because these factors 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 they're 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 and hunting and fishing and doing what they had normally done for thousands and thousands of years rather than making $1 an hour a Nike factory right and it's certainly true that of indigenous peoples who are living in hunter and

75:33horticultural lifestyles that there are no real crimes in displacing them often not so much by factories but by miners and loggers but the the they're a very tiny fraction of the world's population you know tragically the vast majority of poor people are more our peasants not horticulturalists and right and you know they're kind of agricultural laborers and for them just based on the their own choices often the factory life is an improvement it's gonna be not just because they're not kind of in 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 off it means liberation that they can start a business and it kids to school be out from under the thumbs of their husbands and husbands family their kind of a can be a liberation just just as what our aunts our ancestors did when they left

76:37the farms for four cities 150 years ago so there's not a 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 in charge or 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 yeah but you know we look at our Ansem you know my grandparents worked in a clothing factory and when they emigrated from Poland to Canada and it often is a route up word mobility yeah it's it's hard for us to accept that and even think about it that way because it was saying well why how come

77:33they 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 just seems cruel yeah there's no doubt there is cruelty but though the relevant comparison is not so much the difference between working in a factory there and working in an office in you know in Berkeley or Manhattan it's the difference between working in a factory there and and we bring in the fields there and the people run often given that choice they they line up to the factory jobs do you anticipate a time where there is no third world and there is no it was a massive economic disparity it's it's conceivable you know it's it's it so 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

78:28ago that was the third world I mean they were 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 places parts of China now that are pretty much middle class that were squalid not so long ago a 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 well back in the in the 1940s Singapore is now one of the world's richest countries yeah so it can't happen it is happening the most remote poorest parts of the world are going to be the hardest to bring up to middle standards like no 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

79:32just politically correct thinking of a sort of a rebound effect where politically correct thinking is actually causing more extremism a more more radical thinking in in terms of response to that like an overcorrection yeah so we at the top of our conversation we talked about the the possibility of sex differences as being kind of taboo from polite company and in a lot I'll give another example and this is kind of connects to our this conversation isn't a lot of academia there's just capitalism is just a dirty word you know or sometimes now called neoliberalism mmm-hmm 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 not just a fact I mean just comparing we would rather live in South Korea or North Korea which rather live in the old

80:31East Germany or West Germany to 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 now 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 we 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 up put a price on

81:33the 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 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 one of 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 if as soon as you have social security then we're gonna be like Venezuela Venezuela or or carbon pricing and the rational way of organizing society with just the right balance of

82:28free markets regulation and social spending is just something that doesn't get discussed out in the open you get these polarized extremes that's the argument what's the origin of that thought process in academia like why has capitalism been demonized and socialism being 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 you know the government kind of implements them whereas there's certain phenomena in in social life like market economies where the intelligence is distributed across millions of people no one actually knows how to make the

83:22system 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 you know works pretty well here we are speaking in English and no committee ever designed it so according to Seoul'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

84:19to 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 Sol did and realize there is this phenomenon of collective intelligence but if your first impulse is what's the theory you know what are the set of principles then you're gonna gravitate to planned your hyper plan systems and be a little bit oblivious to distributed systems well but in academia for whatever reason looking at things in terms of from a social standpoint looking at things is 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 we'll know and we'll be able to distribute wealth completely equally across the board but it's sort of

85:21denying the the motivation that human beings have to succeed its design the denying this desire that people have to stand out and to overachieve or to to be 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 iPhone so you don't have most of the technological innovation that we have that that's been funded by these companies have done it in order to make money it is 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 like that that is one of the more bizarre ironies is unexposed well you know I think you put your finger in another phenomenon and I discussed this in my book the blank slate or I also discussed the kind

86:18of 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 wasn't it had nothing to with Darwin higher on eclis but the idea that the only way societies progresses 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 the progress of society and we need you know just everyone against everyone else for to advance now you know that that's really not a very good way to organize a society but there's such a 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 this the benevolent government to distribute everything in the fairest possible manner now the reality is gonna is

87:13something 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 and and it's good to harness that so that the 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 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 the the you know if the poor people dive and it's their own fault because they're lazy and stupid I mean that's right it's not true it's not

88:07humane and what we need to do is find the right balance between competition and freedom that makes everyone better off and recognition that just be there are going to be people who are you know 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 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 it makes things easier or but how bizarre is it that these kind of rational conversations about this very important subject is taboo in intellectual circles and and it's not good academia well how did that happen it's not good I you know I think some of it is a reaction to the excesses of the

88:58past some of it because people do tend to form kind of intellectual tribes the same you have sports teams and you root for your team and you know 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 and that's a human habit that we bring to intellectual debates where and and academia academics or as susceptible to it is anymore anyone else unless they take steps to recognize it and avoid it but you know 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

89:51bit 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 manmade climate change they think well the people just don't get enough information then we need better outreach and I think we do need better outreach but in fact and I talked about this in enlightenment enlightenment now if you actually do surveys of how well people understand climate science there's not virtually no correlation between acknowledgement of human-made climate change and sophistication and climate science so you get people who do believe in human-made climate change which I think it's an incontrovertible fact at this point but they don't really understand it I mean they may even think oh it's

90:47caused 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 the right side what happens is that in some politicized debates the people don't don't so much care about the truth they care about what belief will earn them esteem in their 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 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

91:39arriving 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 and force yourself to be and force other people to be as open-minded as possible yeah it's it's very fascinating to me these these sort of mindsets that there you see on the left and on the right that there's certain subjects that you if you support that subject you are automatically thought of as a left winger have you support the subject you're automatically thought of as a right if you were on the right you probably think yeah in some way like there's 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 you're a right-winger yeah you'd be right yeah almost always always always and if you think you know all gay people should be

92:30allowed to get married who cares oh you're probably left winger yeah that's probably true ten years ago and it's actually less true now that is are 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 I was like even people on the Left had misgivings about climate change I remember but gay marriage I'm sorry in the 90s it was still something that a lot of people on the Left were kind of had let's not go that far me was just civil unions or you know now the whole of the country is flipped hmm but you but in general so the these changes can happen but you're 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 with Donald Trump who is in many ways a pretty radical right winger in

93:24things like what do you think what 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 there you know 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 to the people on the right are more sympathetic to Russia something that would have been almost unthinkable a couple even ten 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 that I've where I've changed my mind I used to think they were these ideologies kind of like religious catechisms where these are the beliefs that follow from one another but a lot of us just draw tribalism it's just like

94:15you know in in sports there though the players you know churn through the teeth the rosters with free agency and you know we used to be a guy 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 rooting for clothing yeah and that kind of happens with political ideologies as well to everyone's shock yeah that the tribalism thing is very very confusing to me because you you could see it like it's such an obvious pattern and that when it when it plays out like you know the with a global warming thing like I was having a conversation with a guy in my jujitsu class and I'll never forget this and he was like that's been it's a cycle you know it's a cycle global warming and and then the climate change has always been a cycle and you know the people that say that it's not it's like how much we studied are you scientists oh yeah I

95:05don'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 this 25-year old guy who was in the military who's telling me it's this I mean do you have an education and it's like no I'm like well why don't you just automatically like decide that this isn't we're talking about the very temperature of the planet Earth that's 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 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 and how

96:00there 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 how can you what's going on that will get we seem to be getting less reasonable and I think the answer is there's reason could work in for different goals and here I'm using the ideas of a gale scholar named Danny Daniel kahan where he notes a is a perverse way in which there's actually a is a kind of rationality to that kind of belief namely when you vote what are the chances that your votes really going to swing the election yeah pretty close to zero on the other hand when you express an opinion in your 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 you know very high so if you're if everyone

96:54thinks 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 that the challenge is 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 are that have been have been overturned people don't believe in unicorns anymore or alchemy and few people believe in astrology and and a lot of scientific issues are there's no controversy new antibiotics work yeah I mean there's no you don't doesn't matter whether you're on the right or the left it's a part of the challenge is how do we get more and more

97:47of our beliefs to be yet 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 mm-hmm 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 lined that's the kind of social change we need to aim for right just almost a shaming of that kind of ignorance this distance desire that people have to subscribe to a predetermined pattern of thinking and behaving because it's 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 it's kind of hilarious I was watching this Kyle kuklinski secular talk podcast where he was talking about this these Christians who

98:40were 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 you know I don't have it but the guy was literally saying I don't have a past okay 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 four you're forgiven for all of your past sins and this is this is on the right there's a giant percentage of the people that are on the right that subscribed to I a religious Christian mindset it is fascinating and especially when it comes to our current president who by any standards is like the least Christian yeah leader that we've ever had a past except to Jesus oh he doesn't have a past well yeah but he's still you

99:33know I mean the Christian virtues include things like you no modesty passion for the weak sure temperance chivalry gentleman leanness and this guy is lewd and and vainglorious and arrogant and contemptuous for for losers but which shows again it kind of going back to our discussion it's just amazing how much of loyalty doesn't have to do with the actual content of the beliefs it's just whoever's on on my side and of course he promised a lot of perks for they for the religious right like the repeal of the amendment that tax-exempt organizations can't engage in in politics and in lobbying the so called the Johnson amendment 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

100:28Christian virtue so bizarre so yeah yeah but it's it's fascinating to watch just these patterns these tribal ideological patterns when you you see these groups that have this sort of one mind set in this very creative things I can't flip another example and that people forget this is so take environmentalism you know quintessential you know left green cause not so long ago it was the other way around is actually considered to be a cause of the right why well if you are if you're a left-wing activist in the 60s you would say well the only people concerned the environment are rich people who like the you from their country estates and they don't want them to be spoiled by you know being cut down for apartments for poor people or their you know duck hunters who want to be able to go and hunt ducks and and if you're really socially concerned you should care about

101:21Vietnam and racism and poverty it's just a luxury to worry about you know trees and flowers and and ducks mm-hmm that I flipped and then environmentalism became a left-wing cause but it these 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 it was the Democrats are very different and Republicans are more like Democrats oh yeah well starting with Abraham Lincoln the first Republican president and they were they of course they were the party against slavery and in fact in even in my lifetime through the 60s they were in the South the Democrats were the right wing kind of racist party I mean with George Wallace the governor of Alabama who said segregation now segregation forever he was a Democrat yeah he formed his own party in 68 then back in 72 he ran for the Democratic

102:19nomination and the Southern Democrats were they're 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 who's a Republican and he's pretty moderate middle of the road William weld who is then the libertarian vice presidential candidate he was a Republican he didn't you know even when Mitt Romney was our governor he was not particularly conservative he's 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 they were liberal Republicans but yeah that's a case where it's flipped and now Democrat equals left-of-centre Republican right-of-center yeah you've seen some of that also with some Republicans have tried to

103:09disingenuously connect the Democratic Party with the KKK because of the past well and that was true yes well that was true but you know they're talking about the people in the present and you know this is the party that supported KKK well sorta yeah I think that all the time ago that was in yeah different people yeah it's um it's just fascinating to me to watch these groups of people and you know we've talked about political parties the the right versus the left it's always weird to me that there are these two sides and that people sort of take comfort and in choosing this group that they identify with get 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

104:06about issues and considering the other side considering other people's points of view and and and the way they're looking at things and thinking if maybe there's some common ground oh I agree and in fact in in so I Lightman now has the subtitle think the case for reason science humanism and progress and so I have a chapter on reason I had 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 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

104:57randomized control trial see what works what doesn't so medicine is getting smarter you look at policing one of the reasons that the crime rate has gone down so much another positive development that I talked about that people aren't aware of is that policing has gotten smarter they every day especially in New York they would gather data as to where the homicides were which neighborhoods which blocks on which neighborhoods and they would concentrate the police forces you know on that day and to prevent things from getting out of control with you know cycles of revenge look at sports sealed Moneyball where you've got kind of smarter teams that can beat reach richer teams you look at policy and you've got you know evidence-based policy so all these areas where it looks like the country's getting smarter but then they do all these areas what kind of carries getting

105:46a lot stupider and a lot of them are I 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 just having a stick practice you know there's not left-wing science and right-wing science it's what are the data what are the data say well you haven't 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've got we would be better off if we thought like scientists kept an open mind and say well what works just a minimum wage lead to higher unemployment because labor becomes more expensive well maybe you know beats me if I know let's let's look at areas that have tried it see what happens do does too much welfare make people you

106:39know unambitious and lazy well I you know I can't figure this out from my armchair Bryce let's look at different 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 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 ya know that that's really true because I think we're you know I think evolution didn't make us into intuitive scientist so much as into intuitive lawyers and preachers right so we the natural

107:33tendency is to amass the strongest possible case for your own side yes and you boast that you the you have are on the side of rich who the people who disagree with you are idiots and and and and evil and we got a push back against that tendency III argue in enlightenment now yeah I try to recognize that in my own mind when it comes up but it's 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 it's it's a very bizarre but incredibly common aspect of being a human being it really is and you know I started out as a psychologist 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

108:36recognition of what makes us tick and what are the pitfalls in having a human brain and I mean I I don't take credit for this this goes back to for example the American founders and framers you know Madison and Jefferson and Adams and Hamilton when they were arguing well how should we set up this new 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 gonna get drunk with his own power and he's gonna be diluted and what do we do about that because we do need some kind of leader well you got these checks and balances hmm how do what makes people better off well 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 that takes advantage of people's tendency to trade things so the

109:29connection between politics and psychology was has been there for a long time now the the subject enlightenment that's a very loaded subject yes yeah and especially in the world of weirdos and cult leaders and charlatans and people that are sort of promoting this idea this idea that you can achieve this sort of Zen state of bliss of being above it all of being you know wise to the point of being a sage you know like that's a that's a weird concept isn't it and did you know 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 you or so I will say and so you know and there is that meaning for enlightenment yeah the meaning that I had in mind was the movement in the 18th century to apply reason to human betterment right

110:35the the ideas of Hume and Adam Smith and the American founders like Jefferson and Madison and John Locke and Thomas Hobbes and the 17th and 18th century and and we I said look if if some people are confused and I think this is a path tour my book is gonna be a path towards spiritual enlightenment well let him buy the book they might enjoy it anyway right but I went to the dictionary to see which of the two meetings 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 is the spiritual distinction right spiritual enlightenment is the one that people that's right and that's to be your perfectly honest that's not what the book is about right but you know well 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

111:27well you're such a smart guy like why would you why would there be anything you should even you don't do it's a really good question I'm not that smart it's not that it's just a matter of like practice and you know you have this right I think so yeah and I did I was in in in Davos the week before last and was on a panel with Matt you recount the french buddhist monk who's 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 he had me in the whole room that and it was yeah I mean I liked it too I should do some more it's probably benefit to it probably yeah do you have any practices that you do do to try to sort of like keep your your mind clean like do exercise regularly I definitely exercise regularly and I like exercise my whether we're scenery goes by so I don't I tend not to hang around

112:27in gyms but I like jogging cycling hiking kayaking I like outdoor exercise and more aerobic then you know they've been bodybuilding yeah they say that's one of the best things for cognitive function high intensity aerobic exercise and yeah I mean I'd like to think that and I try to you know sort of step back and exert some discipline on this so social media suck no an email more than social medias try to spend time with you know with my wife rebecca goldstein of no novelist and philosopher and we have a lot in common and it'd be kind of wasting life if i didn't get to you know enjoy enjoy time with her she feels the same way she's also a workaholic so we both are conscious of you know let's let's get and go for a walk you know if let's let's see 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 you

113:30have an interesting subject and just sort of funnel it through yeah 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 declined and this is like a mind-blowing fact and I came across it by you know people 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 knew about it so I wanted to I thought I had an important story to tell and 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

114:27animals 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 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 today to enlightenment ideas do you encounter much resistance to this narrative from William bloom people oh you bet yeah you know and there are things that that you know that go wrong here there's the

115:25opioid epidemic that's also wrong direction there's there big threats always a possibility of nuclear war we've got to be really careful not to do anything stupid and to in fact try to world 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 said well what about that the terrorist attack yesterday and then 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 you look at the numbers and not get fooled by the headlines but you get resistance we have

116:18a obviously of a massive reaction to any mass tragedy like a mass shooting or something along those lines but that this is a natural thing right because this is 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 or even if we have concentrated on violence we forget about you know 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 like what is the line dead on the floor and these are there are far more murders of that kind than there are terrorist killings every day there are something like 25 of those those homicides and so it's like a Sandy Hill Massacre day after day after day after

117:17day and they don't make the headlines because they occur you know 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 what is this like cool so I have a discussion of that just because it is such a puzzle and because it attracts so much attention and you know a lot of it is just the notoriety these are often you're not always but they're often kind of nobodies and their life is gone going you know down the toilet and there's 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 the answer is kill much innocent people

118:07and you know 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 but because we just give them wall to wall news coverage that's fascinating has there been an uptick in in mass shootings and these sort of tragedies along with social media and more media in general probably some and they do tend to be occur in cycles that if there's a copycat phenomenon yeah 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 on to this from some criminologist that the news media should not publish the names or the faces of mass killers that what's news may be newsworthy that it happened but the particular name of the guy why

119:12is that newsworthy the problem is it gets clicks yeah it gets click you're right I mean it's there's so many articles that you see today that you you look at the title of the article and it has very little to do with the actual article itself it's just cuz they come up yeah I mean this these salacious headlines they're 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 if they know who is this crazy that shot 58 people let's let's find out what's going on in his life so who's his dad who's his brother exactly and that is and according to this this movement I mean it's it's a case that's not so innocent it's not like the kind of clickbait of

120:03you wouldn't believe what happened to 1970s actress so-and-so in the picture of her in her 70s you know that kind of click bait but this is clickbait that does real harm right and there are other and you you do have to balance it against of course freedom of the press you don't want there to be you know government's to tell newspapers where they can publish but there have been some precedents where the press has voluntarily imposed some standards that do you know nothing to abrogate freedom of the press but they make people better also give you an example from sports when the the TV networks adopted a policy of not filming that run onto the field people stopped running onto the field because why do they do it so they could say you know hi mom to the and be broadcast at 300 million TV sets right of course or Canada had a policy of no longer publishing the names of juvenile killers

120:54and 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 hmm yeah I I think that makes a lot of sense in terms of you know the greater good of humanity but if you're a newspaper guy and you're sure your business is just to sell newspapers you're you're a bottom line person that the whole thing is just to increase increase the amount of revenue that comes into your institution yeah and and not go bankrupt yeah especially today right you know 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 and they do they have they have to look them at themselves in the mirror they do have journalistic codes of ethics that's kind of one of the things that distinguishes them from

121:50the fake news and the rumor mills and so and that will always attract a large following you you want to be able to trust what you can read and so they've got a 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 that these these like well-respected long-standing traditional venues I wonder if that's really the right way to do it anymore well there has been you know simultaneous with the kind of bottom feeders and they're the clickbait factories there are a lot of really good new health clinic magazines yes you know Vox and medium standard and Nautilus and Colette and

122:52Eon and you know there are others so and and a few couple of decades earlier slate I mean these are really really good and you often can read things that you're not gonna find necessarily on the legacy papers and they're responsible and they have fact checkers and they're you know they're not they're not quick big factories so there is you know there's funny almost inequality in in intelligent media where there's a lot of real crap at the bottom but there's also room at the top for 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 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

123:51they're useless and fake and it's it's a weird time for 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 an example of a real lack of comprehension of of how democracy works namely if you're the president you can be will be should be criticized yes how democracy works we don't have a supreme divine leader that we consider infallible and dominant and that we bow down in front of an anything he says goes he's temporarily kind of a steward he's temporarily overseeing the government but you know he screws up if he says something that's not true the people have the right to criticism criticize him and there better be that criticism otherwise we're gonna get you know a tyrant or a despot right and

124:52taking any criticism and labeling it fake news which is a real fun thing news is a genuinely anti-democratic impulse and it's really disturbing it is disturbing it's also disturbing his attacks on the the the different intelligence agencies tacks on a long force 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 oh what's going on oh well anyone anyone that's after him anyone that's attacking him criticizing him like that these people get demeaned and he uses his influence in his power to kind of shut down all these criticisms without any seemingly without any concern for the long-term consequences of diminishing the impact of these media yeah no it's a really important point yeah 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

125:51of the flawed individuals that make it make it out that you know we we humans are you know what kind of smart poor 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 was right 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 and the whole the difference between a democracy and a cult of personality like Mao in China or Stalin in Russia or Hitler in Germany or Mugabe in Zimbabwe now or the Kim's 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 yeah the ideas you got a procedure you got some rules you got a you know you have to have someone making decisions

126:49but you kind of rein it in and it's not about him it's about the whole system and the fact that you'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 you know trust me let me do it and the the all these rules and regulations are the deep state the administrative stage well thank God for the deep state in the administrative state it prevents some despot from hoisting his crack-brained schemes on the whole population we do need rules and bureaucrats and checks and balances as an oppressed that can criticize the leader as a psychologist when you're looking at all this is is this a fascinating study to you or is it terrifying yeah I guess 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

127:43determining the fate of the world Ryan 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 of 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 a higher level of his ability to communicate it is it was just it was very clean in a way you know III agree and and it was dignity and a statement and yeah and decorum and statesman and there's a reason for it isn't just that it makes you feel good when you see it but it

128:41actually is making a statement namely it isn't about me right I'm occupying this office not to 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 is about me kind of serving the people that elected me that kind of self-restraint and respect for the office is a way of 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 when you would hear especially Obama's speeches agree with them or disagree with him everything was very clean like

129:48the way he and I may be I use the word clean too much but it was it was eloquent yeah you mean yeah it was smarter than most people you know it was more more articulate than most people you know though this the way the sentences were formed were impressive in the the intellectual capacity of the the 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 you there's no denying that this is a it's an exceptional human you know yeah I agree and again it's it I think there's a greater reason behind it to the United States has the most powerful military it's the 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

130:46us the most powerful but we really think about our role we don't 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 being called the women's March all day and it is a woman's March but it's also 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 too short 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

131:40politically active and more people to to recognize the things that they don't like like the calling the media fake news are like the attacks on the intelligence community all these these various things these things that people deemed to be racist these things that people deemed to be you know hostile or silly that he says and that there'll be some sort of a powerful reaction in response to that that it you know that that is that is the hope yeah it's too soon to tell because there's two possibilities and one of them is that he's so shattered some norms created a precedent that means their successors could be even or 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 right that's the pessimistic view and the optimistic view is the country will say oh my God look what we've been through

132:34we try that let's get you tried crazy let's get back to saying right so those are 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 reason science humanism and progress thank you so much has been an honor and a pleasure really appreciate you being my husband mine thank you so much Joe thank you steven pinker ladies and gentlemen bye you