What Do BDSM & Meditation Have In Common? | Professor Paul Bloom | Modern Wisdom Podcast 120

Paul Bloom is an author and a Professor of Psychology at Yale. Why is suffering a cause of pleasure for some people? What do BDSM, being robbed, extreme sports and meditation have in common? How does pleasure work? Why is empathy bad and what is the case for rational compassion? Why do we love people who have died? One of my favourite conversations this year, do not miss this. Extra Stuff: Follow Professor Bloom on Twitter - https://twitter.com/paulbloomatyale Buy Against Empathy - https://amzn.to/32G5SD3 Buy How Pleasure Works - https://amzn.to/2CHRteQ Starting Therapy Video - https://youtu.be/jK-mw8rXziY Check out everything I recommend from books to products and help support the podcast at no extra cost to you by shopping through this link - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom #psychology #empathy #paulbloom - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Paul Bloom?

  Some people think that the the modern notion of race isn't something we've had for that long, but certainly breaking the world up into us versus them. Um, and liking us and really hating them is is natural. There's there's now tons of studies, including from babies, but also from young children, cross-cultural studies, computer simulations of biological evolution. If there's one thing we know, my field knows, is that a propensity to break the world up into us versus them comes natural. So there's even these very clever, so you get 100 people in a room, you know, like you and me, and we all have a coin. We all flip

• 0:42Paul Bloom?

  our coin. So roughly half is heads, half is tails, going to different parts of the room. Then we ask, so what do you guys think your tails? What do you think of tails group? You think we're smarter? Even putting putting myself aside, it so happens, the tails group is smarter. The heads group, you seem to have like a bunch of dicks over there, like who likes that? And and even, you know, the most arbitrary ways of cutting us apart sets up psychological mechanisms where where we where we split the world.

• 1:14Chris Williamson?

  I'm joined by Professor Paul Bloom. Paul, welcome to the show.

• 1:19Paul Bloom?

  Thank you so much for having me.

• 1:20Chris Williamson?

  It's a pleasure to have you on. I've been listening to a lot of your work recently, some fantastic interviews with Sam Harris and podcasts that you did a little while ago, but um, some super interesting stuff. We've been talking about empathy and about resilience a lot on the show. Recently discussed Elliot Kipchoge's sub two-hour marathon performance, which was a very resilient uh, physical feat that people have seen. So we got a lot, a lot to delve into today. But how would you describe the work that you do if someone hadn't met you before and didn't know you?

• 1:54Paul Bloom?

  So I'm interested in, I'm a psychology professor at Yale and I'm interested in human nature. And so my work goes from topic to topic and they're kind of related. Broadly, I'm interested in pleasure, what we like, why we like it. I'm really interested in morality. How do we explain our intuitions about good and evil? How do we explain our, who we hate, who we admire? And what kind of moral judgments are good for us? Like, how should we think morally? And there my work kind of blends into, into philosophy. And that was my most recent book, Against Empathy. And I'm interested, I'm clustered, I'm interested in the self.

• 2:39Paul Bloom?

  I'm interested in how we think about things that aren't like us, like robots or non-human animals. Interested in religion, where a religious belief comes from. Most recently, I've been interested in suffering. So I have a kind of dream job where I, you know, I get, I get paid perfectly fine to just ask some really cool questions and my students and my colleagues work on them.

• 3:02Chris Williamson?

  It must feel nice to be able to indulge your intellectual curiosity on a yearly basis and just keep on changing that up every so often.

• 3:09Paul Bloom?

  Yeah, they haven't fired me yet and it is, it is, it is very nice.

• 3:14Chris Williamson?

  So you touched on a word there, morality. And I think a lot of the stuff that you're talking about are questions that people take for granted or their appearance that is something that people just take as fact. Do you often find when you begin to look at the first principles or real strip things back to basics, do you find a bit of a disconnect or people just looking at the questions that you're asking and thinking, well, why are you asking that? Why are you asking what is morality or why are you asking what is empathy?

• 3:48Paul Bloom?

  It's interesting. It's a good question. My work tends to fall into one of two extremes. So I'm sometimes interested in things that are honest to God puzzling for a lot of people. Like you ask people, you know, what do people get out of sadomasochistic sex? Or hot saunas? Or watching movies that terrify them? And people say, I don't know. That's really cool that we do. But some of my questions, and this is what you're getting at, involve questioning things that we take for granted. And William James, a long time ago, a great psychologist, you know, said, it's only to a scholar can you ask a question like, you know, why do people get flushed when everybody's looking at them? Why do we get hungry when we smell something delicious?

• 4:33Paul Bloom?

  And these are questions like, you know, why does the apple fall from the tree? You know, you've got to be in some way step back and be a scholar. And so they say, well, okay, sure, that happens. It's obvious. But but why do we work that way? And so for morality, you know, if you right now, you walked outside and you saw somebody slapping a child, just beating the crap out of a four year old, you would be shocked. You'd probably spring to action. Why? And it's not enough for you to say, well, of course, it's just natural. It's obvious. Okay, let's spell it out. What's bothering you? Can you imagine a person who would find this funny? Or have no interest at all? And those are sort of the questions I ask.

• 5:13Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I imagine that that must get you into some interesting, interesting situations. Thinking about some of the times, some of the people that I spend my time with and talking to. And every so often you do, you posit a question or make a point about something. And half of the room sort of turns and looks and gives you this.

• 5:33Paul Bloom?

  Yeah. Yeah. When they discover you're really not one of them.

• 5:38Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 5:40Paul Bloom?

  They're sort of looking at things from the outside perspective in our business.

• 5:44Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I think to fly a flag for the outsiders, I definitely find those questions more interesting than than not being able to look at them with perspective.

• 5:53Paul Bloom?

  Yeah.

• 5:53Chris Williamson?

  So let's talk about empathy. It's something that we've discussed recently on the podcast. I often use the cliche that I have a crippling level of empathy. But then.

• 6:04Chris Williamson?

  I don't actually know if I do have a crippling level of empathy, or if I have a crippling level of compassion. And I'd quite like to work out whether, which one of those it is.

• 6:13Paul Bloom?

  So, some days I regret calling my book Against Empathy, because the word empathy has a lot of meanings. And I don't care what you call it. It's, so if, some people just take empathy to mean kindness or goodness. And I think everybody should be kind and good. And I don't think there's such a, a thing as a crippling level of goodness. You should be as maximally good as you can. I'd be great. You just, to have a lot of goodness means you're a good person. But there's a more folk, there's a set of more focused meanings that I'm more interested in. And one sense of empathy, which is what I'm at, targeting in my book, is putting yourself in another person's shoes, feeling what they feel, absorbing their pain. And a lot of people describe this as a very good thing.

• 6:55Paul Bloom?

  I actually think in many ways it could be a very bad thing. And you actually put your finger on one aspect of it, which is, you look at the people who help other people, face to face, day to day. Um, people who work, uh, firefighters, comps, nurses, doctors, shrinks, people who, who, who are ER workers. Here's what they have in common. They're pretty low empathy. They, they care about people. They understand people, they wanna help people. But they could be with somebody who's screaming in agony, and they're cool with it. They don't feel it. And then they, you know, then they, they, they treat people for nine hours, and then they go home with their family,

• 7:40Paul Bloom?

  and they order sushi, and they watch TV, and, and, and they don't get upset. Now, if you have a crippling level of empathy, you could not do that. You may not last a week doing that. Because the pain of others might get to you too much. This is on way of answering your question, whether it's empathy or something else. So, I'll ask you. If you with somebody who's very depressed, or very upset, or very angry, does that affect you in a way that you're not comfortable with?

• 8:06Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 8:07Paul Bloom?

  Then you have high empathy, my friend. And there's nothing wrong with that, as long as you keep it under wraps. But it means that there are certain things you probably are not as good at doing as others, other people would be. You would not do well as a therapist. Because a therapist, you might spend eight hours a day, nine hours a day, dealing with people who are anxious and depressed and weeping and deeply upset. And if you can't, if you absorb their feelings, if you feel what they feel, you will be run through a wringer each day. So I have a friend of mine, and she's a shrink. And so she tells me, she works like 50 minute session, pause, 50 minute session, pause,

• 8:49Paul Bloom?

  50 minute, and I say, that must drive you up the wall dealing with those people who are so upset. And she says to me, um, no, I actually find it fascinating. I love solving their problems. I try to work, try to figure this out and everything. I find it exhilarating. And she's wired up differently than me, and it's why she could do the job and I can't.

• 9:09Chris Williamson?

  What's your disposition?

• 9:11Paul Bloom?

  Um, highly empathic in that way. In that, and so in some way, when I talk about the problems of empathy and say there are better ways to do things, better ways to be good than getting caught up in the pain of others, to some extent, it's a sort of self-therapy thing. Like, you know, I'm talking to myself here.

• 9:36Chris Williamson?

  For a couple of hundred pages?

• 9:38Paul Bloom?

  Yeah, well, I put in some jokes, I tell some stories. I mean, it's also, it's also, just to make sure it's not, I don't want people to think my work is entirely self-therapy. It's that a lot of people, even people who aren't empathic, think that empathy is the way to go for morality. And I discuss in the book all sorts of reasons why not. So one is the reason that you raised, which is the extent of a personal connection impairing your role as a helper. But the more general thing is that empathy is powerfully biased. We know this from everyday life, we know this from a thousand experiments. So I'm looking at you, you know, you're a guy is same rough, same skin color, ethnicity as me,

• 10:22Paul Bloom?

  English speaker, similar background, whatever, so I could feel for you. You're my kind of guy, I could feel your pain, if I heard you were in trouble, I could get upset by that. That's how empathy works. But what if you were different? What if you were different skin color, different gender, you didn't speak English? What if you were disgusting? In your front, like you were a homeless person or something, you hadn't washed for a long period of time? What if you were frightening? All of those things shut down empathy. And so the extent we can say intellectually, I think that a middle-aged white man from my city, his life matters just as much as somebody I will never see in Sub-Saharan Africa.

• 11:05Paul Bloom?

  The extent I could acknowledge that, it means I have to transcend empathy. Empathy pushes you to the close, to the similar, and as moral reflective beings, we say we could do better than that.

• 11:20Chris Williamson?

  So what's a purer version of empathy? Or what's a less biased version of empathy?

• 11:27Paul Bloom?

  So I think by its very nature, empathy is biased. Empathy is impure. In some way, your question is like saying, I complain about racism, and you say, what's a purer form of racism? Oh, racism.

• 11:42Chris Williamson?

  Do not answer that, please.

• 11:44Paul Bloom?

  Racism is gonna be racism. But I think the gist of your question is, what should we replace it with?

• 11:49Chris Williamson?

  Correct.

• 11:50Paul Bloom?

  So I have a book against empathy, and the subtitle is The Case for Rational Compassion. And so rational is part of it, which is that you should sort of, as you go through the world, if you're a country, if you're an industry, if you're an individual, and try to make the world better for people, and use your head to do so. Try to figure out what's the best thing to do. But compassion is, I think, the answer to your question, which is you should care about people.

• 12:15Paul Bloom?

  You see this distinction in Buddhism. So Buddhism is very clear. It says, you know, you want to be a good person. You want to be a helper. Don't get caught up in other people's pain. Instead, love them. Fill your heart with good cheer and happiness. You know, you see these Buddhist monks and they're radiating joy. Even when dealing with people who are in horrible pain and live in squalor. And that's the way to do it. Compassion and love, but not empathy.

• 12:46Chris Williamson?

  How do you define the difference, the specific differences then between empathy and compassion? Is it simply not putting yourself in somebody else's shoes?

• 12:55Paul Bloom?

  That's at the core of it. So maybe here's a good example. Suppose we're really good friends and I'm anxious. I'm coming to you and I'm upset about something. I'm just anxious, I'm upset, maybe I'm in tears and everything. If you were to feel empathy for me, you would feel my anxiety. You would share my anxiety with me and you would be anxious too. But if you were to feel compassion for me, you would see I'm in distress and you'd want to make my distress go away. And you'd help me. And this could lead to two very different responses. If you felt empathy, you'd kind of be there, maybe crying a little bit with me and so on. And it wouldn't make me any better. In fact, in some extent, it makes me worse. I now have two problems, not just one.

• 13:37Paul Bloom?

  But if you felt compassion for me, you might try to cheer me up. You say, dude, calm down, take a deep breath, it's not as bad. You would be a model for me with your calmness, with your authority. This is an old insight. What we want in friends, take sadness. What we want in friends is not something to multiply our sadness, but somebody to replace us with happiness.

• 14:01Paul Bloom?

  Now, I don't want to overstate this. There are things I think I wrote in my book that were a bit too strong. And I think there are some cases where we do want empathy. So a good example of this is anger. So suppose I come to you, my friend, and I'm furious at somebody. Said, you know, this guy did this and he did that. And how would he treat me that way and everything? And I want you, as a friend, not to say, huh, I really appreciate your perspective and I hope you... I want you to say, he said that to you? Let's go to his house and beat the crap out of him. And you'd get angry too. That's what pals do. If I'm, if I'm watching a TV show and I'm really into it, I don't want you to sit there next to me.

• 14:44Paul Bloom?

  You've seen that, I want you to be into it too. I want us to share the feelings. And there's actually psychological work showing that just two people silently, sharing each other's feelings while watching a movie or show and everything, there's a pleasure in that. And there's a connection in that. So I'm not against empathy in general. Empathy can do a lot for us, can do a lot for relationships, can be a great source of pleasure. But as a source, as a moral guide, who should I help? Who should our country go to war with and everything? It is, I think, very limited.

• 15:16Chris Williamson?

  It strikes me that both empathy and compassion can't exist in isolation. If I was the only person on the planet and the planet was completely whitewashed except for me,

• 15:28Chris Williamson?

  is there such a thing as, well, I suppose there's self compassion, but there's not such a thing as self empathy, is there?

• 15:35Paul Bloom?

  No, it's hard to imagine what it'd be to put yourself in your own shoes.

• 15:40Paul Bloom?

  Mental gymnastics is hard to imagine. You would of course feel much empathy and compassion for people, but they would just have to be from your imagination. People from your memories or people you imagine and, and you know, if there's books left in this, this apocalyptic world, you could feel plenty of empathy for characters in books.

• 16:00Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 16:01Paul Bloom?

  And, and again, I think, I think that, you know, I, I love stories and I read a lot and, and the feeling of empathy and, and that sort of imagined a pleasure is, is super important. I wouldn't want to do that.

• 16:17Chris Williamson?

  It's what immerses you in the story, right?

• 16:20Paul Bloom?

  Exactly. There are other things that could immerse you in a story, but you know, you, often the story has engaging character. And you put yourself in his or her shoes. And then you adopt their perspective and you go through life as them. So, you know, I'm, I'm reading a Stephen King novel now, The Institute, and a lot of it is this boy who's trapped, who's been kidnapped and you really see the world through his eyes. Now, that's not such an interesting case. To me, the cooler case, and again, now this gets back to the problem of empathy, is that even a, a bad character, if you get connected with him, you could adopt his perspective. I don't know, you ever watch, um, uh, like, uh, Breaking Bad or Sopranos?

• 17:05Paul Bloom?

  So, so both of these shows at the core had Walter White, Tony Soprano, guys who are actually not good guys. You're not supposed to take them as like these wonderful superheroes to follow. But once you have them on the screen and you think about them and you get absorbed in them, all of a sudden their interests become your, your interests. There's no problem, you know. One of my favorite books is Lolita by Nabokov. You know, and, and, and the, the main character of that, Humbert Humbert, is a pedophile. He's a pedophile pursuing the affections of this young girl. But by the time you're 10 pages in the book, he's your guy. It's a first-person narrative, you're in this head.

• 17:47Paul Bloom?

  Part of you says, you know, this is wrong, but part of you cheers them on. And so a good storyteller can use empathy to, to cause you to have a connection with characters who are just awful.

• 17:59Chris Williamson?

  And I suppose that manifests itself in the real world as bias.

• 18:03Paul Bloom?

  Yes, yes, all of this manifests itself as bias. As soon as one person steps out of a crowd and says, "Put yourself in my shoes", the whole world changes. And there, there's an, there's experimental research on this. So, um, Dan Mattson, this great psychologist at Empathy, has a study where, um, where he tells you about a little girl and she needs an operation. And, and if she doesn't have an operation, then terrible things will happen to her. But she's on a, there's a, a lineup, a list, and she's low down on the list. And it's a fair list. Other kids are ahead of her. Should you move her up? And you say, "No, if it's a fair list." But then he adds a, a little twist. He says, "Try to feel what it's like to be her. Put yourself in her shoes."

• 18:47Paul Bloom?

  Now things flip and you want to move her up the list. You know, "I have a hundred people applying for a job and I'm looking at their files and da-da-da, and then one person comes up to me and says, 'Let me tell you my story.'" And all of a sudden, that person, he or she is, is my person, even though the other 99 also had stories. It's just that, that by accident, the one who got to tell me theirs got to sway me.

• 19:16Paul Bloom?

  And and I think that these things are morally corrosive. I think they're very natural. But the amount of bias they incur in the world is terrible. And it sets up empathy in a very tight connection of something like racism. I mean, whose stories are you likely to hear? Whose whose whose lives are you most likely to get connected with? Well, people around you, your group, your friends, your family. And those people are your psychologists call your in-group. Empathy favors the in-group. But as a moral person, you might say, look, even if somebody doesn't have the good fortune to be one of my friends or to look like me, still, that person has as much moral value as anybody else. And that's what empathy misses.

• 20:01Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. It's totally removing rationality, isn't it? That rank rank order of whatever it is, first come, first served, or people who need it the most of a of a group of one hundred. Did you have a look at how empathy and compassion would have been used evolutionarily by our ancestors? Did you think about that?

• 20:21Paul Bloom?

  I did. It's a very interesting question. So the idea of caring for others, some sort of compassion for others.

• 20:30Paul Bloom?

  It used to be thought that this is crazy non-Darwinian, like, why would we ever have that? And there's a great puzzle for Darwin, like, if if nature is red in tooth and claw, if survival of fit of of the fittest, why would we ever care for another? It's must be a miracle, some people said. Or other people say, we don't really care for other people, can't, you know, just cynics all the way down. But the neo-Darwinian view got really sophisticated about a hundred years ago. And then people began to make sense over time of how you could evolve caring for others. So, for instance, one simple way is that if you take a sort of, if one simple genetic

• 21:10Paul Bloom?

  understanding, there's no hard and fast division between myself and my children, who share half my genes, and my siblings, who share half my genes, and my cousins and nieces and nephews and so on, who share different fractions of my genes. So it behooves me, from an evolutionary point of view, to care about them as well, to really have the matter.

• 21:33Paul Bloom?

  So that's one thing, they call it kin selection. A second thing is reciprocal altruism. So suppose you and I work well together. You know, when we, when we kill an animal that's too big for either one of us to bring back, we work together and bring it back. We do this repeatedly. We both gain from our interaction. Well, then it makes sense for me to care about you. And so these mechanisms, which aren't infinitely broad, but specific, uh, I think, I think can help capture where compassion comes from. Empathy is a little bit different. Nobody really knows why we have empathy, feeling the pain, feeling the feelings of others. One theory, um, is that, um, it actually has to do parenting.

• 22:17Paul Bloom?

  That your connection with your young child or your young baby, uh, helps if you have a truly empathic bond. And one reason to take this seriously is that the hormones that connect up, um, with empathy are also involved in breastfeeding and childbirth.

• 22:39Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 22:40Paul Bloom?

  So empathy may be an adaptation for dealing with babies.

• 22:43Chris Williamson?

  Have you defined how empathy physiologically manifests itself in someone then? Um. You mentioned hormones there.

• 22:51Paul Bloom?

  There's, there's studies of hormones. There's way in which hormones, um, can, can elicit empathy and drive empathy. What's interesting is you get a dissociation, um, with a separation from compassion. So for instance, if in some studies, they raise people's empathy, but then these people become more racist. And there's no contradiction. When you raise people's empathy, you're not ratcheting up their goodness. What you're doing is you're making them more connected to those they're connected to. Well, by the by, they'll be less connected to those they're not connected to. There are studies, there are brain imaging studies, um, some lovely work done in Germany, um, where they get people to be empathic, to put yourselves in shoes of others,

• 23:36Paul Bloom?

  or to get people to care about others. And these show very distinct neural profiles.

• 23:43Paul Bloom?

  So I think there's by now, good reason to believe that empathy and compassion run on different brain circuitry, are connected to hormones in different ways and are kind of separate. And this is important because if empathy and compassion were inextricably linked, then me telling you to give up on empathy would be kind of crap advice because then you also wouldn't care about people at all.

• 24:06Chris Williamson?

  So it's important for us to try and work out where the rubber meets the road between these two?

• 24:11Paul Bloom?

  It really is. It's important for us, it's important for somebody like me as a psychologist to understand it, but it's important for everybody to realize as they make it through their regular life, where do their moral thoughts and feelings come from? You know, if you say, oh, you know, same-sex marriage is horrible, it's an atrocity.

• 24:34Paul Bloom?

  And I say, no, it seems fine, it's perfectly fine. I think each of us should be able to look and say, well, why do we feel that way? Where's our arguments? We should be reflective about these things. You think this is just what a sort of psychologist philosopher would say, but I think a lot of our moral instincts, let's do this, let's punish these people, let's reward these people, are based on sort of brain processes and psychological processes that if we reflect upon them, we wouldn't trust them as much.

• 25:09Chris Williamson?

  There's a lot of things that people take for granted about our nature that, as you've identified, perhaps not even isn't optimal, is detrimental or is damaging. And I think, I honestly do think that these sorts of questions, I can see how they're inflammatory, I can see how the suggestion that racism for someone who's empathic might actually be natural, that they have to work against that because immediately, it's such a slippery slope with bigot at the bottom, as Douglas Murray says, a bog of bigot at the bottom that you slip down to say, well, racism might be natural. It's like, okay, well, let's think about that.

• 25:51Chris Williamson?

  We've spent the vast majority of our evolutionary history in tribes of, what, 25 to 50, something like that, absolutely terrified that there's some pathogen one valley away that's going to infect us and kill us, or a tribe that'll come and take all of our food and rape all of our women, or, do you know what I mean?

• 26:10Paul Bloom?

  Yep. It's extremely, like, whether or not racism is natural, it's kind of a fraught topic. It depends what you think races. Some people think that the modern notion of race isn't something we've had for that long. But certainly, breaking the world up into us versus them,

• 26:30Paul Bloom?

  and liking us and really hating them is natural. There's now tons of studies, including from babies, but also from young children, cross-cultural studies, computer simulations of biological evolution. If there's one thing we know, my field knows, is that a propensity to break the world up into us versus them comes natural. So, there's even these very clever studies. You get a hundred people in a room, you know, like you and me, and we all have a coin. We all flip our coin. So roughly half is heads, half is tails, going to different parts of the room. Then we ask, so what do you guys think, your tails? What do you think of the tails group? You think we're smarter? Even putting myself aside, it so happens the tails group is smarter.

• 27:15Paul Bloom?

  The heads group, you seem to have like a bunch of dicks over there, like who likes them? And, and even, you know, the most arbitrary ways of cutting us apart sets up psychological mechanisms where we, where we split the world. And you're entirely right that it's, that it's natural. Now, of course, you know, being natural, it could still be terrible. And so much, it's a bizarre fallacy to say, since it's natural, it's good.

• 27:46Paul Bloom?

  I think so much of what we do in the world with great success is we use our intelligence to sort of transcend our natural instincts.

• 27:56Chris Williamson?

  Hundred percent.

• 27:57Paul Bloom?

  We do this physically, you know, I'm wearing contact lenses because my eyes are bad. We take antibiotics to fight infections and none of this was natural. But we also do it psychologically. We also say, like, for instance, we have, we say, some forms of bias are wrong, so we make them illegal and we try to work around them and so on.

• 28:16Paul Bloom?

  Some sort of, you know, vengeance, revenge, appetite for revenge is, I think, profoundly natural. But we say, don't have it, offload it to the cops. And, you know, a guy, a guy cuts me off, no, I can't kill him. You know, I could.

• 28:32Chris Williamson?

  But what about, what about something that's very natural that would be jealousy-induced stealing?

• 28:39Chris Williamson?

  If you were to see someone else has something, why wouldn't you, why wouldn't you just take it? Like, well, I want that.

• 28:45Paul Bloom?

  It seems that that sort of impulse, I think, would be very natural. But you can imagine, as we all get together in society, we all sit around as a war. This is like a reconstruction of things. And you say, you know, all that jealousy induced stealing, we're better off about it. And some hands go up and they say, I really like it. And then you say to a person, okay, um, what do you like more? A world in which you get to steal from everybody else, but they get to steal from you? Or a world where everybody gets to keep their stuff? And presumably, people will say, on balance, let's all keep our stuff. You know, an example I use in one of my books is hitting people. Like, you know, um, sometimes it just feels great to hit people. I wish I could hit people.

• 29:24Paul Bloom?

  But the, my dislike of someone smacking me in the head is greater than the pleasure I get from hitting other people whenever I want to. So, so a no hitting rule on sort of flat out utilitarian grounds is pretty good.

• 29:39Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, and then you have, I suppose, the um, social enforcement. If there's some people that are hitters and some people that aren't. And then the ones that are hitters get found out by the ones that aren't. And then all the ones that aren't can then say, you're one of the hitters. You're not allowed to be in our group anymore. And then it goes back to tribalism again, and we're in the them and us group.

• 30:00Paul Bloom?

  Yes, yes. I mean, so much of modern evolutionary theory and cultural evolution focuses on exactly these questions. So, so as you know, you can't develop a good society without some way of punishing people who aren't good. If we're all no hitters and you run around and smack everybody you want, your life is so much better than the rest of us. So we have to have some way of putting you in your place. And maybe we punish you, maybe we shun you. Um, and then there's complexities. Like, for instance, suppose, um, suppose you do bad stuff and so you should be punished. But punishing is costly.

• 30:42Paul Bloom?

  What do we think about people who could punish but don't, who choose not to? Do we punish them? And there's a, there's a recent study finding that we tend to punish people who don't punish people who deserves to be punished.

• 30:58Chris Williamson?

  It's so complex, isn't it? It's so complex. One of the things that I was thinking there, again, rolling it forward to sort of the real, the real sort of worst parts of human impulses is how the development of pushing people to have consensual sex and saying that unconsensual sex is something which is absolutely not allowed, because I'm going to guess that for the vast majority of our evolutionary history, that that also might not have been the case, not naturally. And all of these things, you know, when you, when you think about it, it is, when you look at it from a first principles perspective, it really is a, an interesting sort of question, a set of assumptions to, to look at as to why these things happen.

• 31:44Paul Bloom?

  Yeah, I mean, there's a general argument that Steve Pinker and many others have made, but Steve Pinker makes it in the strongest form, that in a lot of ways, the world has been getting better and better and better and better. You know, you think the world sucks now, and in many ways it does, but I would rather be, this is the best time in history, take last, you know, last, say, 30 years, I think, to be an ethnic minority, to be, to be physically disabled or mentally disabled, to be, to be a woman, to be a sexual, you know, to be, and, and a large reason why this is so is that we've been better at working out the very problems you're talking about. We're trying to understand consent.

• 32:25Paul Bloom?

  We're trying to, to figure out how to balance all sorts of things, but also a growing respect for people's rights and autonomy. You know, when I was, when I was young, nobody cared about bullying, you know, just considering, you know, kids smack each other, who cares? And now, when my kids go to school, people are just really concerned about it. They say, you know, no kid should be bullied. And I'm thinking about it, yeah, that makes sense. It's kind of, it's kind of messed up, that kids like punch each other, nobody minds. And similar thing, issues about sexual harassment and sexual assault, I think, I think we're learning to become better to each other.

• 33:07Paul Bloom?

  Now, you know, plainly, there's a million ways in which we're crap to each other, but we're getting better, I think. We're getting better in part by, by smart people struggling with these questions.

• 33:19Chris Williamson?

  I suppose as well, I don't want to go down this road because I've swam down it too much recently, but I suppose that people who take complex issues like these, plant a flag in one side of the ground or the other, and reduce them down to their most simplistic forms, and then attach them to a Twitter bio, are really, really doing a disservice to the development. And I do think, as I've seen posted more recently, like within the last year to six months, concerns about where our real intellectual integrity and our real intellectual power is being placed. Recently went to go and see Douglas Murray give a talk with Lionel Shriver, literally two days ago for The Spectator. And his primary concern

• 34:01Chris Williamson?

  at the moment is that some of the best minds on the planet are spending their time thinking, including him, his most recent book, The Madness of Crowds, is about this, about socially constructed differences between gender, race, sex, sexuality. And I do, I do wonder how, how much further along we might have been in 30 years. Obviously, we don't know how, how much more time is going to be embroiled in some of these discussions. But yeah, when you talk about some of the things that you're doing, which are really uncovering the first principles of our nature, trying to work out real hard questions about why we are the way we are. And yet, some super smart people, Douglas, Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, you

• 34:46Chris Williamson?

  know, Sam Harris, they get embroiled in these things. That one tweet that he sent could have been sent about something else that wasn't that. Do you get what I mean?

• 34:55Paul Bloom?

  I, I do. I mean, you're raising a lot of issues here. So personally, I find questions of, of gender and sex to be absolutely fascinating and underexplored. But I see a broader point, which is that, you know, my experience, I spent too much time on Twitter. And, and so much of it is people defending outlandishly extreme positions. And then, you know, a sense of ideological purity on both sides, very strong. And then, you know, nasty attacks that don't bring us anywhere closer. And, and I'm kind of an optimist about things. I think outside of social media, there's actually some excellent discourse and, and

• 35:37Paul Bloom?

  progress. But for a lot of these questions about human nature, particularly questions revolving around sex, revolving around ethnicity and race.

• 35:48Paul Bloom?

  They connect very much with our identities. And so they're not abstract theoretical questions to be bandied about. Maybe nor should they be because they affect people's people's real lives. I understand the point that Jordan Peterson was making about wanting to have the freedom to describe people as he chose. I also understand anger he got by people who felt that their identity was being belittled by somebody who had power over them. So this is not getting it one way or another. But but these issues are, as you say, complicated. And and to go back to what we were talking about racism, you know, everybody I know would say, oh, well, racism, that sort of in-group, out-group is just morally wrong.

• 36:32Paul Bloom?

  It's morally atrocious. But other forms of in-group, out-group division, it's less clear. I love my children much more than I love you. More than that, I care for them. I would give them resources much more than I would give to you. Is this morally wrong? Well, maybe an extreme utilitarian like Peter Singer might say, well, it's kind of, it's human nature, but we could have done better. But I'm I'm inclined to think that some some sort of in-groups, like in-groups of family and in-groups of friendship, are actually intrinsically valuable. So I would draw a distinction between me saying I only care, I care the most about white people.

• 37:15Paul Bloom?

  That's a kind of a crappy way to live your existence. Another, and if I was to say I care the most about my family and friends, that doesn't seem as odious. And what do you think?

• 37:25Chris Williamson?

  I agree. I think the interesting question is, where does the group of family and friends extend out to? At what point, at what point does the rubber meet the road?

• 37:36Paul Bloom?

  Yes. And and our affiliations are complicated. I think I I think, you know, we all have multiple ones. I'm I'm a Canadian, I'm Jewish, I'm a professor, I'm a man.

• 37:50Chris Williamson?

  You support a football team, you support, it'd be a hockey team, maybe it's a hockey team in Canada, wouldn't it?

• 37:55Paul Bloom?

  That's right, that's right. Well, actually, I am, I am wearing a Toronto Blue Jays t-shirt.

• 37:59Chris Williamson?

  Nice.

• 38:00Paul Bloom?

  If you got a. But but we have multiple affiliations, to some extent are harmless. I think sports teams actually just give the world more pleasure than any suffering. And sometimes they're they're, you know, when it comes to religion and race, they're the most serious things in the world.

• 38:19Paul Bloom?

  And and to go back to it, we recognize it's natural. We should never ever infer that that means it's good. But it does mean that we have to be very prepared for an uphill battle when fighting it.

• 38:33Chris Williamson?

  You're literally combating human nature or combating what most people take to be natural?

• 38:39Paul Bloom?

  Yes, and, you know, there's different responses. So you mentioned Sam Harris before. So I do think there's a powerful impulse or set of impulses leading us to be religious. One way you do is like Sam does, deal with it head on. You know, don't be religious anymore. It's stupid. Do something else. Another hand are other people who say, no, we're never going to get rid of this. So let's try to make religions more reasonable and more kind, defang them a little bit, a little bit less religious, more spiritual, tone them down. I think this guy, Alad de Botton, argued it once in a talk I saw.

• 39:16Chris Williamson?

  He's so I have the listeners will be familiar. I've been reading his most recent book, which might interest you, An Emotional Education.

• 39:25Paul Bloom?

  And Thank you.

• 39:26Chris Williamson?

  It is, I'll link it to you once, once we're done. It's absolutely fantastic and very bizarrely, sorry to interject there, very bizarrely, one of the things that strikes me about his writing, and I went to go and see him speak in London the other week, is how I said I had crippling empathy. He has world stopping compassion, like that guy, oh, unbelievable. The his ability to make you feel to not only show his own vulnerability, but to make you feel like the failings that you have or like the things that are going on are as natural as can be. It's just, it's just a lovely, a really lovely guy. And his most recent book, anyone who's listening that needs something that's an easy read, but something that's nice and reflective and emotional education, linked in the show

• 40:09Chris Williamson?

  notes below, along with all of Professor Bloom's books, of course.

• 40:13Paul Bloom?

  Of course, of course. When you've done all my books, go check out

• 40:16Chris Williamson?

  Go check out that one, yeah, for sure.

• 40:19Chris Williamson?

  So one, one question, actually, that I've been thinking, I wonder, have you considered why we still love people who have passed away?

• 40:31Chris Williamson?

  It's a question that got brought up in Interstellar. Actually, if you if you've really sort of listened, because it's a tiny, it's like two lines, three lines long in this tiny little bit. And they're talking about one of the astronauts is is saying, I know this person is alive. They're saying, should we should we make the rational utilitarian choice about what we do with the mission? Or should we do this other one? And they're talking referencing a tiny little bit of evolutionary psychology and a few other little bits and pieces. And one of the things that she brings up is, why is it that we love people that have passed away? I wonder whether you'd considered that.

• 41:11Paul Bloom?

  Such a good question. I was I was talking to my my partner the other day, and we were talking if she were to die. And I said in some way, well, I would have loved you. And she caught me and said, why the past tense? Won't you still love me? Well, you don't exist anymore. Can you continue to have feelings for somebody that doesn't exist anymore? I don't believe in life after death. So so she'd really literally be gone. Maybe a kind of saccharine response, but one that might be true, which is if you know somebody well enough, in a in a non trivial

• 41:56Paul Bloom?

  sense, they continue to live with you. They live inside your head. They it's not merely passive memories. It's a way in which they imbue the world around you. You often see this in bad TV shows and movies, which I watch a lot of them, where where our guy, you know, ends up talking to his departed wife, something like that. But but I think to some extent, they continue to live with us. But I haven't I haven't thought of that deeper than that. It's a good question.

• 42:30Chris Williamson?

  It's a little bit like the the character in your book, right? Because you extrapolate out from that character, this person who doesn't exist, who actually never existed.

• 42:42Chris Williamson?

  But they live inside of your head, right? You, you think about what they would have done or could have done or should have done if they were in the situation that you're in.

• 42:49Paul Bloom?

  Yeah.

• 42:50Chris Williamson?

  It's a little bit like that.

• 42:52Paul Bloom?

  Yeah, yeah, we, we, you know, our heads are populated with all sorts of people. And, and, you know, I, I understand this is not universal, but I do spend a terrible amount of time having conversations in my head with people I know, people I wanna, you know, if I, if I'm experiencing something and I wanna tell somebody in the future, I'll sort of be narrating it as I'm having it. So, so, yeah, our heads are very crowded.

• 43:17Chris Williamson?

  I agree. Moving on to what you're working on now. At some point within the next two years, there will probably be a new Paul Bloom book out.

• 43:28Paul Bloom?

  Yes.

• 43:29Chris Williamson?

  What can you tell us about it?

• 43:32Paul Bloom?

  Its title may be The Pleasures of Suffering. It may be a sweet spot and then a helpful some, helpful subtitle like, uh, suffering, pleasure and the good life.

• 43:46Paul Bloom?

  And it will be about why we are drawn towards suffering.

• 43:50Paul Bloom?

  And we'll look at it at two levels. One level is the pleasures we get from certain forms of suffering. So I'm thinking of every sort of mundane things like we eat spicy foods that burn our mouths. We, we like saunas and hot baths and roller coaster rides. Uh, Halloween's coming and people are gonna go to haunted houses to have the, the, the, terrified to be scared. Uh, some people engage in consensual sex involving some degree of pain and degradation, humiliation.

• 44:21Paul Bloom?

  Why, where do all those appetites come from? They're so paradoxical. There's not a huge puzzle. To go back to sort of things that are explained, you know, somebody would look at you funny if you say, I wonder why people like ice cream? And they'd say, well, dude, ice cream is delicious. You know, okay, that's, it's not, you, you, the details need to be worked out, but that's, that makes sense. But then you ask, you know, why do people like eating spicy food so hot it makes them soaked with sweat and they're crying? Some people do. So that's half the book. The other half of the book is sort of asking a broader question, which is what do we want out of life? And I want to argue it's not just pleasure, or even happiness. It's a deeper form of meaning or purpose.

• 45:05Paul Bloom?

  And for that, suffering arises again. Because we know we're living a meaningful life when we're suffering, to some extent.

• 45:15Chris Williamson?

  Why?

• 45:15Paul Bloom?

  Any project, because any project of any value requires effort. It requires the possibility of failure. It requires difficulty, often conflict, often anxiety. You know, having kids is the pure example of this. Which is, you've got to be an idiot. Everybody knows, if you're gonna have kids, it's gonna be tough. But this toughness is tied in so tightly with its reward. If you told me about something you did, and you said, "It was easy peasy. No pain at all, no suffering at all." I would guarantee you, you're not gonna take much of value from it. How hard could it have been? How significant could it have been?

• 46:00Paul Bloom?

  So, so I think meaningful, difficult life pursuits will require suffering. It's wrapped in a very notion of difficulty.

• 46:11Chris Williamson?

  I think there's some really broad implications for how people live their lives there. Talking about overcoming obstacles and, and suffering. Certainly, I know for me that when my life gets too comfortable, that's the only time that a little existential sort of tick at the back of my head starts to, starts to appear. But when I'm constantly working on something that is both challenging and worthwhile, that really doesn't occur.

• 46:40Paul Bloom?

  Yeah, that's a, that's one aspect of what I'm interested in. So, um, this guy, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, developed the concept of flow, which is what you're alluding to. And a flow state is when you're just really into something. And it's just perfect, it's just right. If, if it's too easy, it's boring. It's just fun, it's boring, whatever, like watching TV, watching bad TV. But if it's too difficult, it's frustrating, and you're just sick of it. Flow state is just this Goldilocks state, right in between, where if you do it right, you lose track of time. You struggle, you, the level of difficulty is such, it captures you and it captures your consciousness.

• 47:23Paul Bloom?

  People in these states say, you know, you go for a long time, you're working on your book, or, or, or some project, and then you forget to eat. You forget to eat, you lose, you lose track of appointments, you don't sleep, whatever. And that's, that's sort of, that's one aspect of what I'm talking about. But you don't have that unless you have difficulty.

• 47:42Chris Williamson?

  Because that needs to be a challenge.

• 47:44Paul Bloom?

  Needs to be a challenge, that's right.

• 47:47Chris Williamson?

  I'm trying to relate that to people that like to get spanked with leather things during sex and wear ridiculous outfits. I wanna see, I wanna hear the flow state for BDSM.

• 48:03Chris Williamson?

  I was gonna say sufferers there, but it's not, is it BDSM fans?

• 48:07Paul Bloom?

  Well, I'll make, I'll make the connection for you, actually. I think that-

• 48:12Chris Williamson?

  I can't wait to, I cannot wait to hear this.

• 48:13Paul Bloom?

  They're not gonna be quite the same story, but here's, but here's a connection. It's not my own, it's by the psychologist Roy Baumeister. Which is, one theory of what goes on with BDSM is that it liberates you from your consciousness. So, if you're like a lot of people, I'll speak for myself, I won't speak for you. But I'm in my head all the time. My kind of, my, my anxieties, my nerves, my self-talk, my memories, my responsibilities, things I'm ashamed of, things, you know, all stuff is in my head.

• 48:48Paul Bloom?

  One way to empty your head of all of this is to, um, to get really good at meditation. And maybe after 10 years of meditative practice, you can empty out that head of yours for a while. But here's a way somebody could do it really quickly. They could slap you in the face really hard. Now, you're not gonna like being slapped in the face, but I'll tell you, when that slap hits for a second afterwards, your head is clear.

• 49:17Paul Bloom?

  You're a, you know, there, there's this great quote by, um, you know, by a dominatrix saying, "Nothing captures a one's attention more than a whip." And so, the idea is, of BDSM, is that at the physical level, on some extent to psychological level, it's an escape from yourself.

• 49:38Paul Bloom?

  It's in some way, it's the opposite of meditation. Meditation, you sit, you've kind of, you know, you're stuck in your head, observing and trying to deal with it and like that. The BDSM, along with things like intense exercise,

• 49:55Paul Bloom?

  some drug experiences.

• 49:57Chris Williamson?

  Extreme sports?

• 49:58Paul Bloom?

  Extreme sports, yeah. You know, I'm not a big martial arts guy, but the first time I ever did Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, I'm there rolling with somebody, first time in my life. And this goes on for a while and I'm like, you know, I'm no good at it, but just, you know, getting twisted in a press little bad guy. And, but I realized afterwards that during that, I don't know, three minutes, five minutes, I thought of nothing else. I thought, my head was clear.

• 50:28Paul Bloom?

  And, and, and that's, I understand, is what BDSM can do for you.

• 50:33Chris Williamson?

  There's not many situations now, you know, to the listeners that tuned in at the moment, think about the last time that you didn't have any thoughts other than the one thing that you were doing, or other than any one thing, for more than about thirty seconds.

• 50:49Paul Bloom?

  Yeah.

• 50:50Chris Williamson?

  If you held a gun to my head right now and told me when that was, I'd have to do a fair bit of work.

• 50:57Paul Bloom?

  And so, if you're ever fortunate enough to get mugged, there you go, maybe you'll have that. Something, now, now, obviously there's bad sides to being mugged, but...

• 51:07Chris Williamson?

  It's a wonderful, wonderful meditative practice, though, of being mugged.

• 51:11Paul Bloom?

  But the, but the one good side is during that period, you're in the moment.

• 51:17Paul Bloom?

  You know, and, and that moment of the slap. Now, you know, there's all other things going on and, you know, you're, this is in case your mileage really may vary. But, um, but I did some rock climbing. Again, I'm not, see, my son is a serious rock climber. I'm awful at it, but it's the same thing. The mixture of fear, the need to solve a problem, the physicality of all, you're not thinking of anything else.

• 51:42Paul Bloom?

  But you don't have that unless you have a task that's powerful enough to take away from your consciousness, to, to, to devote your entire focus. One way to do that is through extreme difficulty. Another way to add is extreme pain. And that's what they have in common.

• 51:59Chris Williamson?

  I tell you what, I did not, I did not think that you were going to be able to draw those two together, but you've managed to do it.

• 52:05Paul Bloom?

  Oh, thank you.

• 52:07Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, again, going back to the, going back to the extreme physical exercise thing. I'm a CrossFitter myself, I have a lot of friends that do it. And the place that I see my athletes, that my friends put themselves into on a weekly basis, a daily basis in the gym, there's Jordan, who's the owner of the gym that we have. And it's a yearly ritual that the final workout of the open, which tends to be a very particular kind of time domain, a power endurance workout, which is like a sort of a 2K row-ish kind of area, maybe a seven to 10 minute or five to 10 minute just go, full go.

• 52:49Chris Williamson?

  And every single year, there's a, it's almost like a meta meme now about the fact he's straight outside to go and throw up in the drain. But he does it every single year, he'll go and do it. And this guy is able to choose to put himself in that place, in front of a crowd of people who all know that he's going to throw up, and he knows that he's going to throw up, and he doesn't do it at any other time, and it's this workout. And you just think, why? But I know why, I know why. And that's one of the situations, I can say, when, when you haven't got anything left. And there is, there is something that's oddly so satisfying about that. So have you looked, again, to ask the same question? Have you looked evolutionarily, why, why that's the case?

• 53:33Paul Bloom?

  The evolutionary benefits of that kind of thing, I have looked, I am not really that close to finding an answer.

• 53:38Chris Williamson?

  I'm excited for you to find one. I think that'll be fascinating.

• 53:41Paul Bloom?

  It's a great question. I mean, there's something else going on in suffering that your story is bringing out, which is sometimes it's social.

• 53:48Paul Bloom?

  So sometimes it's social in that you're signaling something about yourself. Your friend is signaling that he got put in, all he has, that's something to be proud of. It's not a bad thing to show your, your friends too. You'd be signaling your courage, your endurance, your piety. There's all these religious rituals involving showing suffering, and it's meant to show your, your, your subservience to God, your love of your, of your fellow ethnic group, your fellow religious group.

• 54:17Paul Bloom?

  So suffering can serve many purposes.

• 54:19Chris Williamson?

  The Puritan work ethic, I suppose, like that.

• 54:21Paul Bloom?

  Exactly, exactly.

• 54:24Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, well, you see that as well in the hustle and grind culture of young entrepreneurs now, right?

• 54:32Paul Bloom?

  Mm hmm.

• 54:32Chris Williamson?

  The sort of Gary Vaynerchuk approach of sleeping five hours a night and when you want to succeed as much as you want to breathe, a lot of that's signaling.

• 54:42Paul Bloom?

  A lot of it's signaling.

• 54:45Paul Bloom?

  And then, of course, there's, I imagine, in these communities, there's always a counter signaling. Somebody who says, you know, look, yeah, I just got nine hours of sleep. I'm gonna work a bit and I'm gonna go for a walk in the park.

• 54:56Chris Williamson?

  Chill out.

• 54:57Paul Bloom?

  And what they're saying is, I am so good, I don't, you know, it's basically the equivalent of the young dot com guy going to a meeting, you know, wearing a hoodie and sweatpants. Which is, you guys have to wear suits to save their wealth and everything. I am, and, and, you know, there's no such thing as not giving a shit. There's just signaling you don't give a shit.

• 55:23Chris Williamson?

  That is, that is a fantastic quote. There is no such thing as giving a shit. There is just signaling that you don't give a shit.

• 55:31Paul Bloom?

  Exactly.

• 55:32Chris Williamson?

  I'm gonna, I'm gonna use that. Um, yeah, you know, I think increasingly about as I spend time speaking to guys like yourself and Robin Hanson from Elephant in the Brain and Rick Hanson. A lot of these people who think about William Von Hippel, guys, really do think about sort of why we come from that. And Robert Green was on recently and this, that and the other. Increasingly now, and I wonder whether this is the same for you, understanding people's motivations with at least a little bit more nuanced than I do, probably a massive amount more understanding than I do. I see people sometimes like WWE characters. You know, like they've got this persona that they're playing and this is the brand that they've attached their flag to.

• 56:17Paul Bloom?

  Yeah.

• 56:17Chris Williamson?

  And when you draw it back, you can see the lineage of why that happened, that, oh, well, this fits my particular ethnic group, body shape, background, working class, whatever it might be. Do you, do you find yourself becoming sort of fascinated with the people that you meet and trying to learn the backstory and the, and stuff like that? Do you try and apply a lot of the things that you learn to the people that you meet?

• 56:42Paul Bloom?

  I'm really interested in the people I meet and building what you're saying. I think on social media, there's a sort of narrowing down, stripping down on people's characters. So, people are always, always, without exception, much more interesting in person than they are in social media. It's not the same for writers, actually. I've met and loved writers who I admire, and I kind of wish I never met the writer. I like the books better. The books are sophisticated, gorgeous worldview, and you meet the writer, and he's kind of a schmo like you. Like me, I mean.

• 57:21Chris Williamson?

  I like both of us.

• 57:22Paul Bloom?

  Like both of us, perhaps. But, yeah, there is, I think Robin Hanson is right about how pervasive signaling is. I think he's wrong with saying, and that's all it is, which he often says. I think that, but, but he's right to think that there's a backdrop in everything we do, online and in person, where we're not only doing it, we're also saying, and this is me doing it, I'm the guy who does it. So, I tell you, oh, Brexit frightens me, and I'm telling you Brexit frightens me, because it does frighten me, I want you to know it, but I'm also signaling, I am the kind of guy who would say Brexit frightened me. And, and, and there's that work, and for those of us who are psychologically healthy,

• 58:07Paul Bloom?

  I mean, only the mentally ill or toddlers don't do this. We're social beings, so we are sensitive to how we portray ourselves. And you're right, I think, that because of this, there's often a force for oversimplification. One of the, you know, I've, I've had the experience many times of getting in an argument with somebody online or something, and thinking, what a dope. And then you meet them, and they're far smarter than you would have expected, and they're far more nuanced. And, you know, it's, and sometimes it's their fault. Sometimes people's, what they produce to signal is a sort of dopiness.

• 58:49Paul Bloom?

  It's a service of some other goal, they want to appear to be true believers, or morally pure, or so on.

• 58:58Paul Bloom?

  You know, you go back to the moral thing, which is you tend to get stuck up and think everybody else has a sort of set conventional moral views of a sort, whatever your community is. My community is pretty liberal, so everybody has the same sort of liberal views. But you meet somebody close up and you become friends with them, and soon you realize everybody has at least one way in which their morality isn't what you'd expect. You know, they're extremely right wing, but yet they're very pro-trans. I was talking to you, I think they're trans, you know, they're extreme lefties, but they hate unions. And, you know, you find this, and it's always interesting.

• 59:36Chris Williamson?

  Again, that lack of nuance in conversation is not allowing people to be, take their ideologies or their worldviews piecemeal, that you need to swallow it wholesale.

• 59:51Paul Bloom?

  Yeah, that's right.

• 59:52Chris Williamson?

  And that's a shame.

• 59:54Paul Bloom?

  That's right. But nuance to some extent isn't something that you could display in front of a largely unfriendly crowd. And if you have any, if people are looking at you on social media, a lot of them are looking just to want you fail, and embarrass yourself, and contradict yourself, and perform some sort of heresy. And so, it's not a best time to fly your nuance. You know, you're better in the presence of friends or people who you trust.

• 1:00:22Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, because nuance to a crowd which is not on your side will probably come across like a lack of conviction.

• 1:00:31Paul Bloom?

  That's right. That's right. A lack of conviction, incoherence, you've been saying, "I don't know," to an unfriendly crowd is risky.

• 1:00:43Chris Williamson?

  Do you think so?

• 1:00:45Paul Bloom?

  Apologies, by the way, are famously risky, which is, you know, everybody says to politicians, really, "Apologize, apologize, apologize." And then when they do apologize, for the rest of their lives, they say, "Oh, he admitted he was wrong, it wasn't worth it."

• 1:00:59Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you can't do right for doing wrong there.

• 1:01:01Paul Bloom?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:02Chris Williamson?

  I wonder whether, because it's a cliche now to say, long form conversations are missed. This is the reason for the podcasting platform taking this growth because there is a hunger out there for people who want. But I do wonder whether it's less about the long form conversation and more to do with the fact that it is a open battleground to discuss ideas without an audience which is there immediately giving you feedback, which immediately biases you towards saying things that might get a laugh or get a whatever, because you're still going to have, want that at least a little bit from the other person, you're going to want to say things that make you sound X, Y, Z to the other person.

• 1:01:46Chris Williamson?

  But I wonder whether these, the increasing popularity of these sorts of conversations online is something to do with the fact that it is this nice Petri dish environment to have a discussion where nuances can be discussed in a way.

• 1:02:04Paul Bloom?

  I never thought about that, but I think you're right. I think you're right. I think one of the appeals of a podcast is just listening to a conversation where ideas could be sketched out. And, you know, as you know, podcasts come in different flavors. There's sort of a straight interview sometimes where somebody, as it were, has a list of 50 questions in front of them and they try not to be too obvious as they look down and they do that and like that. But then there's doing what you and I are doing, just talking. And, and when done right, I think that's very powerful.

• 1:02:35Chris Williamson?

  I agree.

• 1:02:36Paul Bloom?

  The, the topic itself might be interesting, but I think you're right that more generally, it gives me kind of a warm feeling to hear people talk about interesting ideas, like this is how we should be doing these things.

• 1:02:48Chris Williamson?

  I think so. And I think as well, as you've said there, and as everyone's seen online, right, like Douglas Murray has this line where he says, um, people can lose their careers for saying the thing, for not saying the thing that nobody said until yesterday.

• 1:03:07Chris Williamson?

  And

• 1:03:09Paul Bloom?

  Yes.

• 1:03:09Chris Williamson?

  The problem with that is that in a a sample size that's only thirty second segments, perhaps on the news, or that's whatever it is now, three hundred characters or something that's on Twitter.

• 1:03:20Paul Bloom?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:21Chris Williamson?

  It's very easy to take things out of context. Now, that's not to say that I've had clips from this podcast that get taken out of context. But when you spread it across the sample of a one hour conversation, someone can say something that's wrong or that isn't fully formed. And then the other person might press them on it. And then that allows them to, you know, I mean, it it's it's less, the peaks and troughs are more spread out.

• 1:03:50Paul Bloom?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is what that's I agree with that. It's another reason why podcasts of roughly this length seem like a good idea.

• 1:04:00Chris Williamson?

  Speaking of which, that's a round about the length that's right. So Professor Bloom, let us um, let us crack on and I will uh, I will let the listeners have a look at some of your work, which will be linked in the show notes below. If they want to hassle you online and send you tweets that are three hundred, three hundred characters long, where should where should they head?

• 1:04:22Paul Bloom?

  It's Paul Bloom at Yale.

• 1:04:24Chris Williamson?

  Cool. And is there a website or a blog that you that you have at the moment?

• 1:04:28Paul Bloom?

  Nah, nah, you're going to be to find my faculty website, but I don't I don't run a blog or anything like that.

• 1:04:33Chris Williamson?

  Cool. Well, Twitter now can be that, right?

• 1:04:35Paul Bloom?

  Twitter is kind of that. Yeah, that's right. Exactly.

• 1:04:38Chris Williamson?

  I love it.

• 1:04:38Paul Bloom?

  Hey, thanks for having me on. This was great.

• 1:04:40Chris Williamson?

  It was so much fun. I can't wait. I know you've got, as you mentioned before we started, you have some uh, some chaos occurring in on your side of the pond from like November twenty twenty. Um, but yeah, I really, as soon as you've got the the next book out, I'd absolutely love to have a discussion. I'm sure the audience will be thrilled as well.

• 1:05:00Paul Bloom?

  That'd be terrific. I'll be back.

• 1:05:02Chris Williamson?

  Amazing. Thank you very much. To the listeners, if you enjoyed the episode, you know what to do. Like, share and subscribe down below. Links to Against Empathy, How Pleasure Works, all of Professor Bloom's socials and everything else we've spoken about will be in the show notes below. But for now, thank you very much.