The Exchanges

Q Does that sound like a fair, a fair way to describe the art?

A If you can just do two terms, I'd say, yeah, evolutionary biology meets the problems of modernity, but if we can add in evolutionary psychology meets anthropology and cultural psychology, um, with a little smattering of sociology in the head of a guy Who is just really bothered when he sees systems and institutions screwing up, messing up, and he thinks to himself, wait, if we just did this, it would work better. And so I get deeply involved in, in what's going wrong with our democracy, and that's, that's the righteous mind. What's going wrong with our universities? That's the coddling the American mind and my project at Heterodox Academy. And now what's going wrong with family life and children and people born after 1995? So, I would just put a few more terms in there, but yeah.

AI assessment note: “I would just put a few more terms in there, but yeah.”

Q you're talking about socially, which is now what happens to that girl? What happens to her family? Is she going to kill herself? Is she going to become a reality TV star? I don't know. I mean, we're in uncharted territory. No human in evolution did not anticipate a billion people, a million people, Understanding one person's or digesting one person's most candid, worst, embarrassing, or thrilling moment, did it?

A No, that's right. We, we evolved for small group interactions with a lot of gossip, um, and when you, you know, so when kids are talking in small groups and someone says something stupid and others make fun of them, people laugh and then you move on. But when you put kids on a stage where potentially millions of people could be laughing at them, and they could be the internet topic of the day and it might last for the whole week, um, a lot of those kids are considering suicide because when you are being shamed and it seems like you're out, Um, a lot of kids will think of killing themselves, because that's a way to relieve the pain. Um, so, however, and the thing is, look, almost all of us as adults, we see this stuff. We, you know, if you've, if you post stuff on social media, and then you read the comments, and then, you know, you're, you can be upset by the comments. Imagine if you were 12 or 13.

AI assessment note: “No, that's right. We, we evolved for small group interactions with a lot of gossip”

Q and conservatism should look, looks like? Because a lot of people in our public audience, a lot of people I talk to, they're confused now about the terms because so much of traditional liberalism feels illiberal because of your point about far left behavior. Traditional conservatism feels illiberal because of far right behavior. What is the difference between the two and kind of help us bring balance to the force?

A So I'll answer your question as a, as a psychologist, which is, um, one of the amazing discoveries in psychology since the eighties is that, is that almost everything about our personality is partly heritable, and if you have an identical twin separated at birth, you never met, but if you're very much on the left, your twin probably is too. Something about our brains make us predisposed to the right or the left. And it goes back to openness to experience and conscientiousness, a few personality traits, but basically there's a, there's a liberal or progressive sentiment that says, it's captured by this Robert F. Kennedy quote, some men see things as they are and say, why? I dream things that never were and say, why not? So progressives historically are the people who look at existing institutions and say, you know, why do we, you know, why don't we change this? Like, why don't we have some other thing, uh, which might be more just? So progressives are always pushing for progress, for change. Um, but then the, the, um, the wisdom of the right is to say, you know what? We may not understand our institutions, but if we just go changing them willy nilly, it's gonna be a disaster because we don't understand what we're doing. In fact, I opened our conversation with that. That's actually a conservative, one thing I learned from reading the conservative intellectuals, uh, going back to …

AI assessment note: “a good liberal democracy is one in which you have some people pushing for change”

Q Can you just hit on why, from an evolutionary biology perspective, we are wired this way? What, what, what caused, what is the wiring that's being tapped into here?

A So we have to go back before humans, because the brains change very slowly. And whatever was built in by the time you get to mammals and primates is the basic architecture of our minds. So we have a reinforcement system which has worked really, really well for other animals, and it is when certain things happen, when there are signals that this is advancing your evolutionary project, which is survive, eat, have sex, leave offspring. Um, so if, if something happens, you're making progress towards, say, finding a mate. You get a reward, and it feels good, and that doesn't make you say, ah, I got my reward, I'm done. The way dopamine works is the, the, the, the neurons, I think it's in the nucleus accumbens is one of the main reward areas, um, those circuits that use dopamine, the dopamine says, ooh, that was good, keep going, get more. And that's why potato chips are the way they are, because you don't eat one and say, oh, that was good. You eat one and say, now I want one more than I wanted the first one. So, This worked really well for other animals, and by the time you get to humans, that's what we're stuck with, is this, it's very much based on a few, kind of, a few, sort of, imperatives. Um, another, but another thing which is a little more uniquely human, is the need for reputation. And so chimpanzees do have a whole lot going on about status. I mean, so these systems go ba…

AI assessment note: “whatever was built in by the time you get to mammals and primates is the basic architecture”

Q likes on their photo. I don't have a million likes on my photo. So I suddenly want that. Like that creates a new, a new emptiness in my spirit that didn't exist before, or in my brain that didn't exist before, that then I'm on this constant circuit Looking for, how do I do something that creates a million likes? Because that's something that others have that I don't have.

A Yeah, that's right. The, there's a, there's a great thinker who I, I know has talked about in Silicon Valley, René Girard, Frenchman who taught at Stanford. Uh, I read, I read some of the chapters of one of his books, and, you know, I read some summaries of his work, and I think it's, it's brilliant. And the key thing is this, we kind of naively assume that young people copy what they see other people doing, but that's not true. You know, if my, if my kid sees me doing something, they're not going to copy me. I mean, when they're two, they do, but not older. Um, if they see some other kid doing something, they're not necessarily going to copy that just because the kid is doing it. Gerard's point is what we copy is what they want. So if someone, we don't know what to want. I mean, yes, we, you know, for hot, we want cool, but beyond that, we don't know what we want. And So we're incredibly attuned to what everyone else in our reference group is wanting, and that's always been the case, and of course advertisers in the eight, in the, well, 19th century began to pick up on that. How do you make it seem like everybody wants this product? So advertising has always been about appealing, about trying to hack, trying to really activate this René Girard mechanism that we're copying each other's wants, and, um, and that's where I think influencer culture represents The, what, not reducti…

AI assessment note: “Gerard's point is what we copy is what they want.”

Q money on and which company I should not spend money on, and that this notion extends its way into feeling oppressed, meaning there's a system in place that's keeping me from having Something that someone else has. And maybe you can talk a little bit about, has this changed? Has this always been in human psychology? Is this changing because of modernity and why? Um, would be, would be great.

A No, good. No, that's right. And that's another point of continuity from the coddling. Uh, so the, the central idea of the coddling was that there are three great untruths, ideas that are so bad that if any young person believes all three, they're almost certain to be depressed, anxious, um, uh, not amount to much in life. And those three are what doesn't kill you makes you weaker. So avoid stressful experiences, avoid speakers who are going to say things that you hate. Don't, don't expose yourself. Always trust your feelings. Your feelings are right. If you feel offended by something, someone has offended you. Um, and, and someone has to do something about it. Someone has to punish that person. And the third, to your point about duality, is life is a battle between good people and evil people. And this is the distortion that's caused the most human misery. I mean, this is a normal thing people do. This is part of being a tribal species. We're very, very good at coming together to say our side has been hurt or cheated or defiled by their side. Um, they're the evil ones. We're, you know, they're perfectly bad. We're perfectly good. Uh, so it's that third distortion is really the most pernicious from a societal level. Now what you just said before about the haves and the have-nots, that's what the left used to be about from the time of Marx or the French Revolution even, um, until…

AI assessment note: “This is a normal thing people do. This is part of being a tribal species.”

Q I want to accumulate likes and views, and I think that, like, and I want to come back to this point about status that you made earlier, because, uh, and I want to kind of relate it to human history as well, because it's really important to understand where that, where that comes from, where does status as a desire come from?

A Yeah, absolutely. Let me just finish up the narration of Gen Z, and we'll go right to that. Um, so Gen Z had the bad luck That they went through all of puberty. If you're born in 2000, you are, and let's say you're a girl, 20 11, 20 12 is when everyone is changing in their flip phones for smartphones. 20 10, you get the first front-facing camera on the iPhone, and then Samsung copies that right away. So, 2010, you get the front-facing camera. 2009, we got super viral social media. Of 20 12, Facebook buys Instagram, and, and that's when it really becomes popular. In this period is when everyone's getting high-speed internet. In 2010, most people didn't have it. So the point is, the millennials in 2010 on their flip phones could not spend all day on their flip phones. What are you gonna do? That difficult texting on the number pad all day long? Nobody did that. Um, but by 2015, Gen Z, you can be on your phone all day long, like, and half of them say, literally half of American teenagers say that they are online almost constantly. So if they seem to be talking to you, they're thinking about what's going on on their phone. If they're on the bus next to other kids, they're on their phone. If they're in class and the teacher's talking, they're on their phone.

AI assessment note: “Let me just finish up the narration of Gen Z, and we'll go right to that.”