Learn to LOVE Your SUFFERING & Live A Life of Meaning | Paul Bloom on Impact Theory

You know, control over ourselves is a prerequisite for just about everything in life for for emotional management, for um for sustained work, sustained effort, long-term projects, often being moral, not losing our temper, hold, you know, controlling things is just is just really really important. [music] Hey everybody, welcome to another episode of Impact Theory. I am here with Paul Bloom. Paul, thank you so much for joining the show. Oh, thanks so much for having me. This is great, dude. I'm really excited to talk to you, to talk about your book, Sweet Spot. To give people a little bit of context, so you're a psychologist. You're obviously an author. You're touching on some really, really interesting ideas. And I don't want to go too far back in terms of what we have to define to have a conversation. So, I want to set sort of an axiomatic floor. And if you'll give me that, then we can build from there. So, um, my axiom would be that there is such a thing as a life well-lived and that we should be trying to optimize for that. If we can set that is the one thing that we um can accept as true, what a life well-lived will be a very interesting conversation that I think will get into this pleasure pain dynamic that you have written about so interestingly. Does that sound fair? That sounds totally fair. I mean, every every book starts by assuming a sort of a set of axioms, a shared framework. And if somebody's listening and um and they don't think there's such a thing as a good life, and they don't think that you could compare different lives, well, you might find this interesting, but there's not enough common ground for for us to come to an agreement. But I think most people would agree with the axioms you set up. You know, you could live your life well, you could live less well. All right. So to me when I think about what is a life well-lived I would say that you want to minimize human suffering your own and others as much as is plausible maybe is the right word and I've thought a lot about what is it that people should be aiming at is it happiness and of course we would have to define that or is it something else you talk a lot in the book about udemonia but also make fun of the word is sort of ridiculous and so you keep it more um easy to talk about ideas, which I think is smart. But where I've landed is that optimizing for fulfillment, which is the word that I sort of hide the complexity or or use because it allows me to get at the complexity of this pleasure pain balance. Um, I'd be curious to know if what word you prefer if it's happiness or if it's the balance between pleasure and pain. How do you think about the thing that we should be optimizing for? So the book is is about pain, chosen pain, chosen suffering, chosen anxiety, chosen stress, why we choose it, and maybe why we we should choose it all in the service of optimizing something. But I'm curious whether whether this judges your own view. I sort of in principle refuse to give a one-word answer to what we're optimizing because as you know from the book, I'm a pluralist. I think that um that people there's a huge temptation all we want is pleasure. All we want is meaning. All we want is to be good. And I think we have a we have a family of motivations. It includes happiness, which as you point out could mean different things. It includes pleasure. It includes meaning, whatever that is. Um it includes morality, maybe includes beauty, includes truth. And so we have these many many motivations. And a good life is um sort of trying to maximize and balance them as best possible. Okay. So the reason that I feel comfort well so I actually normally will tell people and this has evolved. I used to just say fulfillment and I have a whole sort of formula of what that is and I'll go through that in a second. Now I talk more about joy and fulfillment because I let me define fulfillment and I'll tell you why I've started appending joy to that. So my definition of fulfillment is based on what I think nature has compelled us to do. So we have directives buried deep inside the brain that were things that were designed to keep us alive long enough to have kids that have kids. And so it's like okay if that's my directive and I you know have come up over hundreds of thousands or even millions of years of evolution sort of depending on where you start that clock. Um I have been in a very different environment than the one that I'm in now. But to understand how these things would have been useful to keep me alive, you know, on the the savannah, uh, it becomes very interesting as a way of recognizing why I feel compelled to do certain things. The people who were most likely to survive were the ones that got a positive feeling from working hard because working hard was going to be necessary to keep everybody safe and to hunt, gather, build shelter, deal with inner personal dynamics, all of it's very difficult. So for the person who gets a positive sense of oh wow like I really did something by working hard that's you understand why that would be incentivized from a an imperative perspective coming from the inside and why you might feel badly simply not doing it which is why I think one of the reasons kids that grow up wealthy end up struggling if things all things have come too easily for them. So you work hard, but you're working hard towards some goal that's exciting to you and honorable. And by honorable, I mean that it elevates not only you but the group. So basically, you become an individual contributor to the group. And if there's nothing that you uniquely can supply to the group, you will feel that absence and you will conversely be rewarded if you are individually contributing to that group in a way that's unique to you. And so you put that together, you work really hard to gain a set of skills that have value to not only yourself but to the group. That to me is fulfillment now because I think you can sort of get into a death spiral of just work work trying to be valuable that you end up not necessarily having enough fun and optimizing for the momentto moment pleasures in some sort of balanced way seems important. So that's why I put forward those two ideas. How does that jive with your research with your experience? Yeah, it's very well. I mean, we're we're Darwinian creatures. Um, to some extent, this reflects our own specific evolution as homminidists. To some extent, it reflects the fact that we're we're creatures. We're critters. And so, you know, we're not we don't clone. So, we have sex. And so, a sex drive, pleasure in sex is a natural thing, as does love for our children. Um, as does desire for food and drink and status, caring for the group. Um certainly aspiration of a sort because I think you're right. I think to some extent um sort of it's a a Darwinian foot race and the creatures that that that get out ahead are the ones that try harder. Uh it it's I think one explanation for the so-called happiness treadmill which is sooner or later you get things really good. You think you'd stop but we don't stop. We keep on going. We keep on striving. The only thing I would add and I'm not sure you disagree with this is we're also have an intelligence and we could we could come up with our own goals and my favorite example here is morality. So a Darwinian morality says I should care more for my kids than for everybody else. I should care about my group and not care about anybody. You know they could all die. But I don't think that I actually, you know, like a lot of us sometimes give money to people in far away lands and I care about strangers and everything because, you know, through a case of moral progress, the combination of our instincts and our intellect, we come to some moral truths and we want to be good people and what it is to be a good person for you and me uh differs from what it would have been to be a good person 500 years ago because we know more stuff now. So, we have a Darwinian foundation, but I don't think that exhausts our motivations. Does that drive up your views? No doubt. So now the where your book really goes into fascinating waters and and I'll there's two things that I want to talk about. One is juicier. So we'll start with that. But there's Man's Search for Meaning and then there's BDSM. Two things I never thought I would mention in the same sentence, but as they come up in your book, uh I will I will tie them together. So BDSM seems super surprising. And for people that that don't know, it's uh bondage discipline. ST masochism. Is that what it stands for? For sure. Um, okay. So, people who basically like to skirt that edge of pleasure and pain in sex. What do you think has led us to this? And what can we learn from it in terms of a life well-lived? It's one of the, you know, I was driven to write this book because of the sort of puzzles that emerged from you, you and I started with, which is we're Darwinian creatures. We have certain appetites. You know, we could work out why what kind of foods we like and how that all works, but and then there's no great mystery there. But then you look at we do all sorts of things that just just are inexplicable from that framework. And you could talk about horror movies, we could talk about hot baths, spicy foods, but you landed on BDSM, so let's let's go there. Um, the first thing to keep in mind is some people are probably listening or watching and saying, "Well, okay, that's that's a weirdo appetite." And in some sense if you do polling and you ask about BDSM it's a minority appetite but an interest in it and excitement in it and imagination is is very very common and popular. So 50 Shades of Gray was the most popular book not of a year but of the entire last decade. The second most popular book was the sequel. The third most popular book was the end of the trilogy. Did you read any of it? I did. I I actually as I was writing the book I I was talking about 50 Shades of Gray. So I read it. It is not it is not well written but it is compelling. It was far racier. So I read an excerpt because I remember when this happened and it was such a phenomenon and I'd be very interested to see how it broke along um gender lines. Certainly seemed to be far more skewed female. But my wife and all of her friends were reading this book and so I was like, "All right, I got to check this out." And I was like, "Whoa." Like that's that was racier than I expected. Uh so yes, you were just about to say what is going on here and that is my exact question. I think in some way BDSM I'm very interested both in in suffering as part of a meaningful life. We get to talk about that a bit. That's the that's the other part. But also suffering as part of pleasure and BDSM is in some way a perfect storm. And it it brings together different ways in which suffering can bring you pleasure. And I'll mention two of them. One is um I I'll just mention one. I'll focus on one which is sometimes pain can be an escape from the self. Chosen pain in the right doses in the right time can be an escape from the self. And that sounds like really kind of hippie garbage, but but but you can make it explicit. If if we're often in our heads and it's uncomfortable, we're thinking about the future. We're mulling over the past. We're very conscious of our bodies. We're conscious of how we look. We're conscious of this voice in our heads and sometimes sharp and sudden pain can bring us out of it. It could just clear the mind. There's a quote from a dominatrix that people in the field like like to um talk about and quotes something like you know like when when the whip comes out all eyes go to it and you can't think of anything else. And there's something about capturing your attention your focus. It also liberates you. A lot of the sort of play acting in BDSM, the being dominated to dominate takes you away from your everyday life. And one thing to stress here which is really important. I wrote something uh a summary of this in the Wall Street Journal of my my book and I got an email right away saying you are the worst person in the world. I can't believe you were saying suffering is good. I I live in chronic pain. Suffering is the worst thing in the world. You're like a monster. And my response to that is I'm talking about chosen suffering. And this is really clear for the question you're asking. BDSM, which often involves sex and involves domination, involves constraints, um, is a source of pleasure because it's chosen and in some sort of second order way you have control over. Take the very same things that show up in BDSM, take them outside of the domain of consent and are the worst crimes ever, and give no pleasure at all. But something about receiving pain, pulling away from yourself under the proper sort of self-control we find really pleasurable. Talk to me about this idea of getting outside of yourself. This is very interesting to me. So to set this stage, a large part of my success is due to what I'll call obsessive thinking. I can't stop myself. And so once I get a problem in my head as being important to solve, I will loop on it endlessly. and meditation ended up saving my life might be hyperbolic, but man, it's so close that it's like I I don't hesitate to use that phrase. I will say that. And I think that's doing a very similar thing for me is it's quieting my mind. It's stopping that loop. Now, the loop is great and it finds all these solutions and maybe that's why it exists. But man, sometimes it's just it's so continuous and if it's continuing around something that gives me a positive emotion, amazing. But when it's looping around something that's a negative emotion, it's like all I can think about is is like how do I break this cycle? And one, I'd love to get your thoughts. Why do we loop so endlessly that we need outside of our minds? And then we'll get to the the second part of that in a minute. Yeah. And we'll talk a bit about meditation. Meditation is is an interestingly mixed bag, which is when you're good at it, it does exactly what you what you say. But when you're starting off on it, it actually makes everything worse in some way, which is if I'm sick of the voice inside my head and you say, "Okay, fine. So for 10 minutes, just sit there." That's just that's just that's just makes the problem and and then confronted with the voice inside man is why meditation is so difficult at first to get going. But you ask why we have the voice in our head and it's a good question. Um why do we ruminate? Why do we obsess? Why do we worry? And the answer is because it's good for us. It's it's good for us. No, it doesn't make us happy, but it's actually useful. I really worry when I send my kid off to school something will happen. And this worrying makes me extra scrupulous and extra conscious. I feel humiliated at what I said at the party last night. I mull it over and over in my head. And then and it's not it's horrible, but it means I won't do it again. And so, you know, natural selection did not evolve us to have a good time. It evolved us to, you know, survive and reproduce. And it's mulling over an obsession. It speaks to a broader question, which is everybody talks about, you know, when you think about anxiety, he says, "Well, anxiety is a bad thing." and too much anxiety, you're you're in a shrinks office, you're you're taking medication, you have problems. But this uh evolutionary psychiatrist uh Nessie, I think, says, you know, we never talk about too little anxiety. And you know where you find those? You don't find those in psychiatrist office. You find people like that in prisons and in morgs. Too little anxiety is not good for some degree of buzzing in your head is actually important. Not fun, but important. But we like to get control over things. We like to be able to to have it now but not not some other time. And so meditation is one is one technique to do. So do you meditate? I have tried so many times. I have so many friends you know including a friend who says you can't do it for five minutes. I want you to spend a week in a silent meditation retreat. That that strikes me as as the wrong way to introduce it to people. I would think so. I I think of meditation like sushi. So, my most terrifying food experience ever in my life, which I won't spend everybody's time on right now, but just trust that I really mean it's one of the more stressful uh things I've ever been through my life, and it was around sushi. And now I love sushi and have it almost every week. So, what I realized was everybody likes sushi. You just have to find the right the the kind of sushi that you like. Now, I'm not being literal in terms of, you know, raw fish on rice. I'm saying at a sushi restaurant, there is something that you can find which will introduce you to those flavors and things and you can then slowly work your way to seeing the joy in certain true sashimi or sushi. uh meditation is the same in that if somebody can find what I call a physiological hook, meaning breathing from your diaphragm is as far as I can tell for whatever reason, it is because the sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system are you're either in one or the other. You cannot be both calm and excited at the same time. So they, you know, they're opposites that breathing from your diaphragm will shift you, whether you want it to or not, into the parasympathetic nervous system, the rest and digest. The problem is that people are so in their own head that they don't stop to focus on breathing from their diaphragm, and so they stay in the the fight orflight mode. But every time, and I've been in some insanely stressful situations where hundreds of millions of dollars are on the line. I mean, it's just like I I have not been through things that are more stressful than that. And even in those moments, it was I was never more than 45 minutes away from total equinimity. And I have to remind myself because when you're going through something horrible, your brain is telling you meditation isn't going to fix this. But then if you do the process, it shifts your brain into that calm and creative state and suddenly you can see solutions. It's crazy. But like my own wife, so she's got me. I'm over here telling everybody in the world that they should be meditating, breathe from your diaphragm, the whole night. She hates it and thinks I'm out of my mind. So, I don't know if I'm like a hyper respponder to diaphragmatic breathing or if she really just isn't being consistent enough. But um I think meditation is the sort of thing like a lot of things which work for some people and not for others that um you know there's some evidence people have done these control studies and meditation by and large has positive effects but it's not like you know it it it's not it's not this magic thing where everybody can do it. It sounds like it sounds like some combination of your nature and also your experience and what you did with it has caused to be tremendously powerful for you. But in some ways a little bit like BDSM which is which is certainly that's not for everybody either. Um you know or or intense exercise or some degree of certain engagement. So I'm a little bit I point out that when I ever try to meditate I I kind of run I've run into problems. Um but I tell the story in my book of the first time I did Brazilian jiu-jitsu which was you know I was in a against somebody who was like everybody else in the room much younger and much stronger than me. And for whatever moment we did, we rolled, we did sparring. For those periods, I think later on like afterwards is that during that period, I thought of nothing else. I wasn't thinking, oh, I hope my book sells well and you know, and do my children love me and you know, and am I gaining weight and whatever. I didn't think any. I was totally immersed. And I'm told that people who are who are profoundly into meditation can do that. And I'm it it's it's in some way connects to a state of flow. And one of the great things about a state of flow is you're out of your head. And I don't doubt for a second that for the right person in the right way meditation can do exactly that. Yeah, there's no doubt. So my wife would fall into the heavy exercise category. And I remind her that that's your meditation. Like she gets into a zone. She's focused on music and the the physicality of the lift. And in the way that she looks at my meditation and wishes she could do it, I look at her exercise and wish like whatever you're getting out of that, I just don't get like everything when I work out, I'm like worried about getting injured. It's exhausting. I don't get any big sort of crazy endorphin rush. Um, so yeah, that's very interesting. Um, I want to keep going on this idea of getting out of one's head. It is it maybe I I will speak for myself. The ability to stop my thoughts is the single most useful skill I have developed in my life, bar none. And I feel like I've developed some pretty interesting skills. But that one is it it's it is directly correlated to my ability to um not get overwhelmed and to reach for big things in my life because there were times where I was heading towards overwhelm just like anybody else or burning out or whatever. And I just learned different tactics to be able to get my physiological symptoms to zero. So my blood pressure back down, my heart rate slowed, my mind not racing. And those things end up becoming incredibly important and I think are exactly tied to getting out of negative rumination. So, sticking on the BDSM theme, when I was reading your book, have you there's a documentary called Sick, the Life and Death of Bob Flanigan, Super Massochist. Have you seen it? I have not. I do not have much of a stomach for these things. Yeah, th this one was pretty tough. I saw it when it came out in the theater and just if you have kids in the room, now would be the time to plug their ears or whatever. I'll tell you something that actually happens in the movie. So, this is a guy with cystic fibrosis and when he's very young, he he's in pain constantly and he said one day he went into the bathroom and he put needles into a belt and he whipped himself with it and he was like there was blood spraying all over the bathroom and I, you know, ended up spending like 30 minutes cleaning it up. My family wanted to know what the hell was going on. And he said, "For the first time in my life, I felt in control of the pain." And that changed everything for him. And so he becomes a massochist and he marries his dominatrix and they have this very complex relationship that is explored in graphic detail in the movie. Um, but at one point, and I can't tell you how until I read your book, I could not have contextualized this movie in that way. But again, if you have kids, now is definitely the time to um put them away. In the movie, they show this. I c I have never been unable to watch something without putting my hands in front of my eyes before. I couldn't I couldn't do it. I had to have my hands in front of my eyes. It was crazy. He puts his penis on a board and hammers a nail through it. And I was like, "What is happening?" It It was insane. I I literally couldn't believe it. And but then you hear him like explain why he does all this stuff. And it is and I'm putting words in his mouth now. I'm definitely paraphrasing, but after having read your book, it's very much somebody who needs to choose their suffering. They they just simply cannot let it be in somebody else's hands. And in the act, he's out of his own mind. And when he revisits it, he was in control. And that combination seems to have like some pretty profound results. You know, I never thought I'd be saying this sentence, but um there's a world of difference between putting a nail through your own penis and having someone else put a nail through your penis. There's a world of difference. Um and and part of what we're talking about here, which makes the connection with meditation as well, is mastery. You know, there's um there's a line from CS Lewis. We're going to go right right into sort of faster theological stuff after that. That's kind of bit of a contrast, but like he talks about about um fasting. He says there's such a difference between somebody who says I'm not going to eat today versus somebody who can't eat today because he has no money or someone took this food. The second is just suffering. You're just hungry. The first one and CS Lewis being who he is is kind of says is a bit disapproving. But you feel pride. Look what I'm doing. I'm controlling my appetite. I'm a master of myself. And you know, the guy you're talking about in the movie, it's it's not a direction I would take it, but but but there's a sense of I'm doing it to my look look at look at what I'm doing. Look at my control over things. And and sometimes the the the purposeful self-infliction of pain, usually a lot more mild than that, is a way of asserting control not only over your environment, but also over yourself. What do you think about the pride of mastery in that? Um, I'm not I I don't I'm not I'm not a Christian in the way CS Lewis was. I don't actually think there's such a problem with prime. I think I think mastery is is a is a very useful skill. It's it's actually you were talking how proud you were of your own meditative skills. That's one example of it. It's worth being proud of. It's worth being proud of and we're talking about it and it should be and it and it should be respected. Um I think you know control over ourselves is a prerequisite for just about everything in life for for emotional management for um for sustained work sustained effort long-term projects often being moral not losing our temper hold you know controlling things is just is just really really important and so the mastery we find when we deal with self-imposed pain is yet another instance of it And sometime we're talking about pain, self-imposed pain as if as if it's some sort of, you know, weird freaky separate thing, but but it includes somebody who who's training for a marathon, who's climbing a mountain, who's engaged in a long and difficult musical performance where maybe the pain isn't so physical, but it's effort, it's difficult. Um, and I think if if you can't do that, then your life is to a large extent incomplete. So to that point, how do you deal with this is one of the reasons I chose not to have kids. Um, it seems necessary that kids suffer in order to grow up strong and resilient. And I worried that I would find so much discomfort in either having to create artificial ways for them to suffer or that I would want to make that suffering go away at all costs. Um, so how do you deal with that? How do you or do you agree that kids need to suffer to to grow up? Well, maybe that's the right way to ask it. The evidence in that is unclear. There there's some reason to believe and I review this in my book that the lucky minority of people who grow up without any strife or any difficulty um in some ways turn out a little bit worse. They have lower pain tolerance or tend to catastrophize. They're um it's it's um there's just a few studies on this. I mean, here's one way to look at it, which is no matter how wealthy, pampered, protected we are, life is going to contain a lot of suffering. You're going to love somebody who doesn't love you back. You're going to try for something and fail. You're going to be humiliated. Um certainly, I'm not being a relativist here. If you're if you're born in poverty, if you're going to start if you're starving to death, that's much worse than being than being wealthy and protected. Even the most pampered, protected people, their lives are full of suffering. We're mortal. Our bodies, our minds fail us. So, so your kids, no matter how loving and protected you would have been, would have found your suffering most likely. Yeah. How do you deal with that though? Do you give them the space to suffer? Do you try to come in to mitigate the suffering? It's really hard. I you know my book before this was called Against Empathy and it was about the problems of empathic connection largely. Can you go into that a little bit? I'm super curious about that. I haven't read that book yet. Yeah. Um well the subtitle is the case for rational compassion and the idea is empathy putting yourself in other people's shoes. It might seem like the right thing to do and a lot of people think it's a force for good. But basically one problem is that empathy is uh we naturally feel empathy for people who uh who look like us who speak our language who you know I'm feel empathy for you'll feel it for me. We'll both be a lot less likely to feel empathy for somebody far away someone whose skin is a different color who speaks a different language maybe who who um who threat who who we're frightened of in some way. We're much better as moral people when we don't try to get into other people's shoes and apply more abstract impartial principles. And in the case we're talking about now, my worst moments as a father, I have these two sons I'm deeply proud of and they're both adults and out in the world and great great guys. But when I but when they were young, my worst moments weren't when I was indifferent. It's when I got too caught up in things. you know, my kid would be freaking out that, "Oh my god, I have so much homework due tomorrow." Or, "I like this girl and she doesn't like me." And I get, "Oh, no." And I get really upset. And I think good parents and I when I try to be good parents, I say, "Okay, well, no, it'll work out. You can handle it." And step back and you need some sort of distance. You can't solve all your kids' problems for you. They'll they'll hate you if you try. But it is it is one of the many many many many anxieties about being a parent that you're that you're nicely sketching out. I can imagine. All right. When you were writing the book, you said there were two books that you really held in mind. One, we've talked about flow, chicks at me high, the idea of getting out of your head, but the other was man's search for meaning, which man, the older I get, the more I think about life, I guess, the more I come back to that book as just this profound insight into the human condition. Um, why was that book important to you? What what is its role in this idea of the pleasure pain sweet spot? Yeah. Um, I mean this my subtitle of the sweet spot is the pleasures of suffering in a search for meaning. And that's like a shout out to to Frankle. Um, so so Frankle was um you got to tell us have to tell the story. He was in Austria. He was a psychiatrist working with actually suicidal adolescence and depressed adolescence. And then um the Nazis came to power and he didn't leave. His his elderly parents were there and he couldn't get out without abandoning them. and oh the whole family ended up in concentration camps in Hwitz and back and Frankle tells the story in man's search for meaning and the thing about it is he's a scholar and so he's in the concentration camps under the worst of human conditions and he asks himself this question he says um some people give up either they kill themselves or they simply stop eating or they run away so they'll get shot and some people don't and he says what distinguishes them and very informally but later on he built it up in books and his therapeutic practice. He said the people who are resilient are those who have some sort of meaning and purpose in life. It could be uh their profession, could be a long-term project, could be a love, but but this is um this is what is so central to our lives. And again, it's not the only thing. Let's not give up on pleasure and morality and truth, but this meaning is is very central. And the funny thing is as I was working on my book, I came across this tweet by Greta Thunderberg um the the young climate [clears throat] activist and she just said she said the same thing. She said you know my life was miserable and empty and then I discovered this cause and it transformed me in so many ways. And I think Frankle's insight is the importance of meaning and purpose to life. So, one thing I get asked a lot is I think people understand it intuitively and it makes sense, but they don't know how do I find my meaning? How do I find my purpose? Um, how do you think about that? I try to move people away from the idea of finding it, but I'm super curious what your approach is. I don't know. It's a good question. Um, I think there's something a little bit weird about somebody waking up one morning said, I got to find find a purpose in life. you know, I gota I'm gonna do the next couple of hours really working out that purpose in life. To some extent, it tends it tends to fall out from other things you're doing. Um Freud said, actually Freud never never said this, but it's often attributed. It's a great line, which is the two the two aspects of a mentally healthy, rich, good life are love and work. And by love, he meant relationships, deep committed, not non-supficial relationships. And by work, he didn't necessarily mean take 815 into a city. He meant like um a sort of any long protracted projects that have difficulty. And I think that's where people tend to find meaning. I mean, some people find meaning in a spiritual realm, some people find meaning in other ways. Some people find meaning in sports or in hobbies, but I think for the most of us, it's in relationships and in work. And um and so one should try to find relationships and work that would give one a sense of meaning. And certainly a lot of people find it in children. That to me is a great punchline of life. So I often so I try to be cognizant of the you know quote unquote advice that I give people and one of them is okay I've chosen a certain path in my so if relationships and work if we can you know say those are two different paths that you have and maybe you should do both uh but certainly they are different paths that you have to meaning and purpose. um kids seem like an inbuilt way to get that. Um whereas doing it through work is maybe a more high-risk endeavor. It's certainly going to take a lot more out of you. It's not necessarily guaranteed to give the kind of lasting results that you want. Um it's a it's what I will call a very very high-risisk path to meaning and purpose. Um, so that to me is really interesting and it ties into why I'm obsessed with Victor Frankle, which is I think ultimately this comes down to, you know, going back to ruminating thoughts. The reason I tell people not to try to find their meaning and purpose is I want them to realize they're going to define it. You have to decide that. And this may seem even weirder to you than finding it, but ultimately to me it's there is no I was put on this earth to do this thing. There is given the time that I'm living in, given my genetics, given my experiences and you know all of that, I could find great fulfillment in the way that I defined it at the beginning of the episode by pursuing this end. So my last company, my mission was to end metabolic disease. But when I left that company, I didn't carry that meaning and purpose with me. It sustained me beautifully while I was there and thought I would be there forever, but that's not the way that it ended up playing out. And so when I moved, it was, well, now I need a new meaning and purpose. I could have either built another food company and stayed on that same path, but it seemed so clear to me that I could now reattach myself to a new mission as long as I found it as exciting as I found the previous one, that I could continue to pursue it and it would be wonderful. And that has played out um perfectly in my life. But making that decision and applying yourself to something seems to me the like great takeaway from Frankle's book. And I remember in that period where he talks about people with meaning and purpose, they are the ones that survive. And if I remember right, he outright says that you could predict with almost perfect accuracy within 72 hours of when somebody would die because it would be 72 hours after they gave up. And he said once they no longer told themselves a story about why they were suffering. And so now it was just meaningless that there there was no reason to keep fighting. But if you said, "Hey, I'm doing this because I'm going to survive so I can go find my family and bring them back together." And of course, this is a man who lost his entire family. But but saying that to himself, that's why I'm going through this. Assigning meaning and purpose to it was the thing that got him through. That's right. That's right. Um, you know, I think one of the dumbest questions and it's almost a joke question right now you could ask is what's the meaning of life? Um, and because it's not it's it's just it's it's like saying what does a bicycle tire worry about? You know, life isn't the kind of thing that has an intrinsic [clears throat] meaning. People can choose meaningful activities that are meaningful because they meet certain criteria, objective criteria, but also subjective one. What might be meaningful for you, meaningful for you might not be for me and vice versa. Um and yeah, we we we have to discover it and some of us it's right there. Um people in poor countries report more meaningful lives than people in rich countries and that may be because helping you and your family survive is of course a very meaningful and important activity and if you're forced to do that that solves that problem. Um, all I would say to add to what you're saying is, um, I think a meaningful activity typically involves pursuing some sort of goal, some sort of end in mind, but it doesn't require satisfying it. Mountain climbing for many people is a very meaningful activity, but you don't have to actually get to the top. You could fail and it's still a meaningful activity. Starting a business with a certain goal in mind, most businesses fail, but that doesn't mean it's not a meaningful pursuit. And so there's a bit of meaning is more in a sort of process than in the end. I agree with that violently. Uh I think that that is the big mistake people make is they tie their identity to whether they achieve the outcome or not. And to your point, most businesses or most grand pursuits are probably going to fail. Uh certainly most businesses do fail. Um so how do you think about helping people conceptualize that idea? I imagine in writing the book um you want it to be a framework that people can think about and use to some uh advantage in their own life. So how do you now that people have this information there's like pleasure and pain there's you know this balance in here meaning matters a lot um how do people use that in their life what is what is the utility of that idea I wouldn't mind if people find my book useful I hope they do but I'll say something sort of uncharacteristic for a book author who wants people to buy his book which is this isn't a self-help book this isn't a book that you'll read and will you know tell you what to do. I'm more kind of interested in what's going on with people and what just out of raw fascination. Yeah, for the most part, yeah, I just I this is my whole career, I study what I find cool and I try to sort of explain stuff, you know, and like all goals, I often fail in that goal, too. But that that's large part of my meaning. Now, having read about what people It's like it's like the book Flow by by Chic sent me. sadly passed away a couple weeks ago and he taught me flow experience and described them in detail and studied them and he didn't in the end have here's a checklist of 10 things and whatever you know uh it was before books were supposed to do that but but you read about it you say wow you know I I didn't know that you can make a good life this way and then it's valuable and so the the connection I have is I think people some people I think think they're just supposed to be pursuing pleasure and maybe my book is a reminder that there's other ways to Oh, but the question as to how to find meaning, I don't know. Or or or the question of in all of these priorities we're talking about, the Darwinian ones, the pleasure once, hard work, meaning, morality, truth, how do you properly balance them is a question I think each person has to struggle with. Maybe the service that my book does is reminding people there is this question. And if you're not consciously thinking about it, you're answering the question just by default. maybe what other people tell you. And do you seek out things in your own life that are hard or do you just let the suffering come to you? Um uh well none of my kids are out of out of the house. Um suff less less suffering uh comes to me. Um I do I do choose my own suffering. Yeah. In fact um every morning I I write I try to write for like an hour and I don't there's some people who writing is bliss and wonderful and everything. For me it's agony but but it is good agony. Um I'm curious why is it agony? Oh you know because struggling through you know why it's agony because right next right in the same computer that has that it has Twitter and email and YouTube videos of adorable cats and I just am drawn to that just sitting and and just enjoying this stuff. production, trying to be creative, trying to be clear is work. And work is both immensely pleasurable and satisfying and also really miserable. And so I I do that. I um I try to I since writing this book, I've sort of been trying to say to realize that the temptation is always to lie on a sofa and watch Netflix. The real satisfaction is doing things that are difficult and complicated and and taxing. And what do you think about that duality? I find that duality equally fascinating to pleasure and pain of the like I want to do something rad, but I also just want to sit here and do nothing. Yeah. Yeah. You could you could graph it on a timeline which is you know the doing something rad is this is really good but in order to get to the rad space uh you have to go through a a valley. You have to you have to get up and put on your running shoes and start running. You have to go buy the plane ticket. You have to go get a COVID test. You have to go do all this stuff. Well, the the easy stuff is less and less satisfying, [clears throat] less part of a good life, but it's right there. It's just at your keyboard. And um and so and you know Chick Sami says there are some people in their lives maybe a majority under some studies who never achieve flow. They never achieve intense focus and concentration because getting there is a pain in ass. You got to get really good at something. You got to struggle and so on. It's much easier just to to to zone out. Um and I think there's a great value in getting there in doing the incredible things or the difficult things. But but I'm not going to pretend it's something which comes natural to us. We just uh it requires a degree of motivation and to some extent going back to what you were saying before. It's one thing for kids um and she sent me I was very into this that for kids to get in the habit of intensive difficult work. Uh my younger son really was sort of struggling at school a little bit dissolute and he got into rock climbing bouldering actually and just it just transformed him. he began to devote enormous energy to bouldering and then it spilled out to everything else. This exactly happened to me with um lifting weights, but what's going on there? I don't know. There's a metaphor that psychologists hate because it's probably not true and not good. And that's the willpower is a muscle. So, it's a confusing metaphor in your case. You're lifting weights. You're building up not only physical muscles, but the willpower muscles. And then your willpower muscles are then free to help you write books and do podcasts and and stay up all night and do other things. Most psychologists say this is nonsense. There's there's limited the idea of willpower is like a muscle just simply isn't true. It works in different ways. And yet I think there's something transferable about the skills required to say train for a marathon um and the skills required to write a book. simply you get used to denying yourself immediate pleasures. You get used to setting yourself a schedule. You get used to to saying this is unpleasant, but in the long term it's right. And so, so I'm one of these people who think at least anecdotally getting kids into sports or I don't know reading Russian literature or whatever something hard is actually good for them in general because it's developing that discipline, that willpower muscle. Yes. Yeah. Let's not call it a muscle. I hate that. But but but it's developing something that's transferable. It's interesting. I So, while it clearly isn't literally a muscle, uh, would you hackle in the same way if I said that willpower is a skill? Yes, that's actually No, I wouldn't hackle. Sorry. Okay. I would nod. Yes. Thinking of it as a skill is actually a very a very good way of doing it. There are people around say kids certainly kids. I I'm a developmental psychologist. My day job, so I study kids. there's many kids who have no idea what it is to sort of get to work on something. It's just not it's just and it's a and it is a skill. You have to learn it. Um and um and then there are also I've seen adults who are really good at it who have a sense of discipline and it's easy to to to dismiss it and say, "Oh, they have this gift like they're taller than me or better looking or stronger. That's just the way they're born." But but it's actually they have a gift like being good at the piano which is you know you genetics probably plays some role but then you you work on it and you practice it and I think discipline is like that and and part of it brings you into an intimate relationship with pain and difficulty and anxiety and struggle and feeling good about it. Like we talked about this earlier. I know CS Lewis doesn't want me to be proud of it but it's like here's a reality man. Like you cannot just tell yourself that you love yourself and then you suddenly respect yourself. It doesn't work like that. I wish it did. That'd be a lot easier. But the reality is if you want to have self-respect, you have to do things you think are worthy of respect. And I don't see a way around that. Same with selfworth. If you want to have self-worth, you have to do things you think are worthy. And so knowing that all of that is like a real thing, I don't see how people get around doing things, unless you can convince yourself, which I doubt because of the evolutionarily implanted uh directives that we talked about earlier, unless you can convince yourself that laying on the couch and watching Netflix is like the ultimate existence, I what ends up happening is it's fun for a while and then that that directive in your brain is just like, yo, you're going to die. Like you have to go out and do things. You have to contribute. You have to work hard. You have to do things that are are are worthy. And for Darwinian reasons, what you said at the beginning, that's just definitely true. We are not wired up so that we can simply feel good about ourselves just by wishing it. So there's a lot of sort of weird weird movements that have tried to to get you to feel this way. But the truth is that your sort of self-esteem is exquisitly calibrated to how well you're doing. And this is good. It would be as if the alternative is like I say, gee, when I don't eat for long periods of time, I get hungry. That sucks. I'd rather not be hungry ever. Well, I might rather that, but it's stupid. Being hungry is really good because it motivates you to eat when you run it when your body's running out of food. Well, same with with your sense of self-esteem and self-worth. It's good that it that it's calibrated to the world because otherwise you think, I'm terrific. I'm just going to stand pat. And standing pat is is is awful. Tell me in what way is our self-esteem calibrated to the world? That's interesting. So people talk about it in terms of as we psychologist conceptualize it really literally as as a scale in our head or as a as a dial. And we're we're we're primates. We're we're very geared to um to our status and where we stand in the world. And some of this could be a bad thing. like status in some way status could relate to dominance and some people bully others and terrorize others and threaten others and become try to become high status in the sense that other people are frightened of them but there's other ways to satisfy the sort of sociometer the sort of how am I doing scale one is becoming good at stuff becoming really good at stuff everything from you know from rock climbing to Pokemon Go to to and and and you get say this and that and another is being behind. You can get status because people look at you and say, "You're a mench. Good to have you around. You're a good member of my group." But if you do none of those things, if you do not do not dominate, do not help, do not show expertise, you're probably not going to feel good about yourself. And you know, an oldtime shrink would say, "Oh my god, you got to learn to love yourself." But maybe the advice is you got to learn to do something that would make yourself, you know, more makes your self-esteem more deserved. Now, as I'm saying this, I realize it sounds kind of kind of harsh. You know, we're all God's. I think it's true. I was like really I was waiting to see if you would say you have to do things that are worthy of love. I'm not saying that it should be that way. I won't fall prey to the naturalistic fallacy or whatever it's called, but I will say it is that way. like the way that your brain is wired. If you aren't doing things that match the directives that are compelling you, which my guess as a non-scientist is that a big part of that is contributing to the group. So you're doing things being a mench certainly a great way contributing skill set a great way but you're if you're not doing something that the group values and by the way that the group is telling you that they value so that you're actually getting feedback that hey the way in which you are contributing you're great at the guitar you're a fantastic chef you're a loving mother whatever if the group isn't giving you that feedback of like word thank you for this there uh in internally it starts to become a problem and it. If you've read Lisa Feldman Barrett's book around how emotions are made and that a lot of this stuff starts in the body and then your brain tries to explain why you feel this way, you get into people just have this sense of malaise. They don't know what's going on. They feel terrible and they have no idea why things are going wrong. And my thing is go do something hard. Go contribute to the group. If you do those two things, the odds of your sense of well-being moving up are extraordinarily high. But like you, I've gotten negative feedback on that of like, hey, if you know this is a depressed person, these are such flippinid answers. And you know, they didn't say you're a monster, but that was certainly the idea, right? Like this is such fundamentally flawed advice. And while look, clinical depression is a real thing. And I am in no way, shape or form saying all you need to do is but I'm saying if you go do those things. It's why they tell you to go exercise, you know, it's why they tell you to look at your diet. Uh and then I will add to that contributing to the group in some way. I think it nails down those directives that we all have in our mind that there's just no way to strip out. I would agree. I would I would add to this that some people have their systems miscalibrated. So on one extreme you have the narcissist who has enormous self-esteem though maybe has nothing not much to warrant it. Um on another hand you do have some depressed people and and this is actually not uncommon who actually are their lives are are really good. They're contributing to the group. They have people who love them. They're making a difference and they feel like they're garbage. And what's going on there? I don't know what causes depression. It's um it's some people say depression is the result of uh seeing the world that way. But then that pushes back the question why are some people seeing the world in such a mistaken way? Some people say it's it's the other way around. You get depressed for some reason maybe just in some general sort of brain disease neurochemicals or something at a broader uh more systematic level hits you. Can I make a prediction? Yeah. I'm not a scientist. This is a layman's interpretation of what is going on. I want to be very clear, but I'm deep enough in the world of what I'm about to prognosticate on that it's at least mildly informed. I could not be happier to be proven wrong. I am only interested in finding out what is actually true. But my prediction is this. If Lisa Feldman Barrett is accurate and emotions start in the body and then the brain puts a story on top of that and then the way the brain works we ruminate. Neurons that fire together wire together. So the more you think about something the more likely it is to become part of the default mode network so that it becomes the easiest thing for you to think and feel. Now inject into that modern life. So you get a diet that is causing dispiosis. So you get this sense, you literally get a gut sense that something is wrong, which PS is what you're eating. There's, you know, whatever glyphosate on your food, the um lining of your gut is breaking down. So it's it's not that there is something wrong in your life, per se. It's that what you're eating is causing a bodily sensation that your brain interprets as whoa, something's wrong. I don't know what this is. Dispiosis at so far seems to be linked to increase in anxiety and depression. So if you then exacerbate that a thousandfold with either real bad things happening in your life that would give you reason to be in a very dark place. So now your body is saying yo something is wrong. Your brain is like I know exactly what it is. It is this thing and you then ruminate repeat repeat repeat. So now you get into it becomes the easiest thing for you to think and feel. It is part of the default mode network. So when you're zoned out that's exactly where you go. you don't have the ability to either through uh meditation, BDSM, extreme sports, whatever. You have no way to get out of your mind. Now, your body is constantly sending you this impulse that there's a problem. You have a ready-made story. You've repeated it a bazillion times and now it's like it really does feel intractable. So, my prediction is it is this terrifying confluence of events that will not be easy to just oh, change one thing because even if you fix the gut, if I'm right, that that's a contributor. I don't think it's the only thing. It may not even be the start, but it's a contributor. Even if you fix that, if you've still got that depressive state move to the default mode network in your mind, you're going to have to address that. But this is why, again, lay person, not a scientist, just want to know what ends up being true. Merely a hypothesis I am presenting. But when I look at the data coming out around um taking hallucinogens and how impactful that can be on intractable depression, it makes sense because it's such a profound pattern interrupt around that story that you've been telling about why you feel this way. Regardless of the cause of depression, you're right, there's multicausal in all sorts of ways and there's genetic vulnerabilities as well which could cash out to one of the things you're talking about. Um the thing about hallucinogens is promising you know you I think you got to be cautious because if you've been around for any amount of time oh there's enormous enthusiasm something [clears throat] and then it's never so exciting but but your story of what it does the the claim about hallucinogens I find most convincing is it resets your priors it kind of your priors so so a lot of people think this in terms of of uh it's called Beijian probability but the idea is you look at the world and you see it in a certain way not as the world is but filtered through your expectations and your beliefs and your and your um your your background and some and that that's necessary otherwise you wouldn't perceive threedimensional objects. You wouldn't be able to see the world properly but but for some people it gets skewed and in some way depressed people almost literally see the world as They because they see the world, they see everything as negative, everything is terrible. And it's like hallucens. And to the extent we're possible of as of doing this, we're capable of doing this as physical beings, it sets everything. It sets it sets everything to zero. And so it sort of resets. It reboots the whole system. And and in some way, it's a factory reboot for better or worse. Now most of us experience that temporarily if we take hallucinogens but um I would I would put by the way I'm I'm a huge fan of Lisa Felman Bar's work. I think she has a lot of real good insights. I think to some extent emotions start in the body but plainly in some sense emotions are often much more Darwinian than that. So you know a good example is embarrassment. Some people blush when they're embarrassed but the embarrassment comes first and then the blushing a lot for anger. You feel your you you you register your situation causing then the anger comes but once you have the feeling you could interpret it in all sorts of ways. Yeah. That that's what's interesting to me and agreed and one of the key takeaways of your book is hey things are a little more complicated than any of us want it to be and you talk about the pluralism of like what's causing it I think very well. Um, and to make matters more complicated about how emotions are formed, you can think yourself into a problem. You can actually think yourself out of a problem. Uh, which isn't easy. I'm going to say something. I've never said this out loud before. I have no idea if you're going to understand what I'm saying or if this makes any sense. It's maybe too early in my own figuring out of what this is. I have for a long time believed that one of the things that has helped me um be successful in life because I don't consider myself gifted. I'm not unusually bright. I've had to work really hard um to to achieve the things that I've achieved. I've had to fail a lot, embarrass myself constantly. Like it's just a litany of mistakes and and problems that I have just done one thing well on which is self soothe. And what I have found is I don't have a better analogy than the following. So I'm not yet at first principles, but I feel like I can shift gears in my brain. And I've heard the basil ganglia referred to as the gear box of the mind. And so that was like, oh my god, that's exactly how I feel. Now whether this is true or or purely at the level of analogy, I don't know, but I can feel myself going to a place like overwhelm is a perfect one. I get asked about overwhelm all the time. Tom, how do you avoid getting overwhelmed? And my answer is always the same. I refuse to let myself get overwhelmed. So, when I feel myself going and I feel that same sense of escalation that everybody feels and it feels like it's winding up. It's a self-reinforcing loop, I just tell myself I don't do overwhelm. And in saying that, I shift into a different gear. Now, that's what it feels like in my mind. It feels like I'm letting go of an emotion. I'm moving myself over to something different and and I don't the feeling that I'm getting I don't know if that's a sudden shift in neurotransmitters and that's the because it is so fast and so I suddenly feel different. I can feel like my blood pressure lowering. I can feel my anxiety lowering. That sense of things ratcheting up dissipates almost instantly. It's very interesting. Now, that doesn't mean that I can just say that and then take on more. In fact, when I say that, what I do instantly is remind myself, ah, what this means is I have to let something go. I'm going to have to push something away. I'm going to have to chunk things up into smaller pieces. So, it isn't an, oh, I can carry an infinite burden. Though, that is part of what I have to tell myself to get into this different space. But, I know that's a bit of a lie. So, I don't want to confuse anybody. But what I'm I'm interested in is that how fast that feeling dissipates and I feel like I'm able to move over into a different gear for lack of a better word. And I don't know if any of your uh developmental psychology like is there something there? Uh what is that? Well, it's you know it's somewhere north of the neck, right? So it doesn't matter whether I totally if I said oh no it's not the basil ganglion it's the hippocampus or hypothalamus you would legitimately say who cares like it's it's something it's something that goes on in your very physical brain. Um and it sounds like um it sounds like just extremely useful skills of which there's a lot of variation on how good people are at that. For many people emotions are best controlled by changing your environment. You know that's interesting. Can you give me an example? Yeah. Um, well, it it's it's um I don't know if if I'm plagued by uh by temptation to eat junk food, I keep junk food out of my house. Now, but there's some if if if I'm uh prone to anger in such a situation, I avoid that situation. Uh you you set up um you try to set up your life so as it's sort of in a second order way so as to listen the best self you want to be. Other people are good at emotion regulation and and you're giving some wonderful examples of it. They're able to sort of exert top down control over their feelings and um and I think it's probably related to your meditative practice. I don't know if that if that which came first but um but a lot of med is is that sort of control over your thoughts. Meditation for me was far more mechanistic. the ability to regulate my emotions was more based on perspective. So I learned very early on that there are certain axioms that you can put in place in your life and in moments of extreme duress if those axioms have proven to be true you can reach for them. So I'll give you the most Buddhist one of all time that that has come to my aid just more times than I can count. this too shall pass. And in the depths of feeling like everything in my life is broken, I'm never going to get it back on track. I just remind myself, you know, that this feeling is transient. And just remembering that that feeling is transient. And no matter how horrible of a feeling it is, that feeling will go away. Now, meditation is often the thing that I use to make that feeling go away, but that's mechanistic. And so part of why I can't help but be a crusader for meditation is the following. I use video games to get out of my own head sometimes and it's deeply pleasurable and it's a really fun way to get into a flow state when you're going because I play against other real people to get into a state where you're just in the match and it's it really is wonderful. But I don't use that if I'm stressed. So if because playing the game actually gives me all the same physiological cues that stress does. So if I'm stressed and I'm using that to get out of my own head, it actually will work and I'll stop thinking about the thing that was bothering me. But all the physiological things are still there and as soon as the match is over, boom, I'm right back to it. Whereas with meditation, because it's bringing everything down and getting myself out of my head because I'm just focused on the pleasure of the breath cycle, it's a very different outcome. So, when I think about my wife who uses working out, this really high intense thing, I'm like, uh, if you're already like at a heightened thing and you're kind of agitated, I'm not sure that's what I would reach for. In fact, she has another thing she does, which is drawing. And I would say in that moment probably better to go for the drawing. That's interesting. I never thought of that. Which is um you're right for some people using intense exercise as a way to get it to get away from stressors is probably the wrong idea because you get your body in a very aroused state and then when it's all over you're still in this anxious state and anxiety will come back to you easy easier. It then becomes an interesting question why it works for your wife. So one I may just be wrong and for her it just it is so because the I was just talking to a guy named Peter Ratia who's a a medical thinker. I'm not even sure the right way to categorize him. Super bright guy doctor very very educated on the body. And he's saying that even if you're a smoker that you there are certain exercise regimens that are so beneficial that they end up adding more years to your life than smoking takes away. And I was like, whoa, that that gives you an idea of how profound the right kind of exercise can be. And so it may be that for Lisa, the endorphins, the uh sense of control and strength are so powerful that they outweigh all the other stuff. Or that there's just a truly I maybe I'm just not working out hard enough and she's clicked into some other zone where the the physiological returns are so high that um that it outweighs the other stuff. I I don't know. Or it may be that she too would say, "Yeah, if I'm really feeling agitated, better that I draw than work out." I actually haven't asked her that. It's interesting. I tend to drink a little bit of whiskey. If I get into medit if I get into meditation, that would probably be better. Alcohol is fascinating because it so rapidly changes your neurochemical state. My problem is the next day then I my joints hurt and I'm just like uh like this. You can't do it if you get stressed 11 in the morning and you have a have a problem. Very good point that at at some point it is called alcoholism. Yes. Yes. That's right. That's right. So I'd love to talk more about the developmental psychology that to me is really fascinating. What in in the way that you engage with it? Are you purely taking a research perspective or are you looking for tools and tactics that people can use to um mitigate you know whether it's depression or anxiety or whatever the case may be early research perspective I uh I run a lab that studies uh morality moral judgments moral intuitions in children and adults you know why do we think some things are right why do we think some things are wrong oh man tell me what's the most interesting what's the most interesting insight around morality. Um, I would say this is this is work I've done with my colleagues at Yale. Um, and it's um finding that even six-month old babies make moral judgments. You show them uh one act plays where one person's helping another one, another one's hindering another one, somebody's being good, somebody's being bad, and they they prefer the good guy, they don't like the bad guy. Later on, want to punish the bad guy, they want to and this is across cultures. Um, the work's been done uh so far in North America and Europe. It hasn't been done worldwide. But one of the good things about testing six-month-olds is that culture plays less of a role. You know, you assume we're all roughly genetically the same. So now there's some differences in how people treat babies across different cultures and be good to get more data, but as far as we know, it shows that wherever we've tested this and there's some evidence with even younger babies. So, and this supports a very old idea, but an idea I think which is right and actually very Darwinian, which is some of our moral sense is hardwired and innate and universal. Do you think at all about how much of us is hardwired and how much of us is malleable? Yeah. Yeah. any psychology that thing but um you know there's sort of a joke line where somebody says is something innate or learned and answers yes which is you know plainly there's an enormous amount of what we know which is culturally determined we're talking English to each other so on um but I think we tend to underestimate how much of our natures universal aspects of our natures from perception memory language anguage, emotions is hardwired and universal. We look at at chimps or rats or dogs and we're very quick to say, "Oh, by nature they do this, by nature they do that." But but it's not that we have less nature in us. We have more. It's William James' insight. You know, take all the instincts other animals have. Humans have all of those and and a hundred times more. And so what a lot of development is is unflowering of these instincts. this innate uh hardwired quality as it interacts with culture as it interacts with our imagination and for me morality is a great case study of that where you know there's a core morality which is universal and innate and then here you and I are and we think slavery is wrong and racism is wrong sex wrong hell people 500 years ago didn't think that so plainly just learning and and change well that now let's ask a really hard question. Take slavery. I could be wrong. I've not studied the the um history of all of it, but it seems to me to absolutely require the othering of somebody else for whatever reason. Um that you could not view a slave as one of yourself, right? And that to me does not seem to have gone away. And so if I think about just hey it these quirks of the human mind will manifest themselves differently throughout time and space. But I heard once first of all that uh there are more slaves today than there have been at any other time in history. I really don't want that to be true. That seems just too startling to be believed. Um but it in some way wouldn't surprise me if I'm right that oh once a human being others somebody else forget it. like they all bets are off. They are a total just cruel animal at that point when they don't think of that other person as entirely human. That's where scares me. It's an interesting question. It's something I I' I've really been very interested. Just two thoughts. One thought about slavery, which is I think sometimes you're right. I think sometimes the people we enslave, they're enslaved because we don't think of them as people. We dehumanize them. Um but I think slavery has had different models. You look at the Old Testament and the kind of rules of the game were your your country and my country get in a war into a war. Whatever country won, they would keep others as slaves. And I think at the old time recognized, gee, if we lose this one, we'll be the slaves. If we win, they'll be the slaves. And that sort of suggests that it's thought of differently. It's not like, oh, they're subhumans, let's enslave them. It's like, could be us better win. But don't you think part of the reason they went to war is because they thought like they're the other, they're the enemy, they're beneath us. Like if if I were if I were researching speeches that wartime generals gave to troops as they were going into battle, I have to imagine that you're going to hear a lot of language of you you need to protect your own family and these people are animals and we have to slaughter them. They are not worthy of the same love of God. God is on our side, right? The phrase you hear all the time. And that seems like it would be pervasive. Again, I do not know. I have not researched this, but that seems fitting with what unfortunately I see in human behavior. I'm just as potentially horrible as anybody else. I will put the potential there as I like to think that I, you know, act in moral ways, but um looking at Go ahead. You're not necessarily wrong, but I think you're saying half the story and the other half might even be worse. It's true. It's true that for some groups, we dehumanize them. We think they're they're monkeys. They're vermin. You know, you look at a lot of the genocidal language like in the Third Reich towards Jews and other undesirabs. And it's often, you know, strictly dehumanizing. We don't think of them as people. But sometimes when we're in when we see an out group, it's not that we don't think of them as people. It's that we hate them. They're not like, "Oh, they're not like German to be exterminated. They're they're evildoers. They should be punished. They should be hurt. They should be humiliated." And hatred is a force that unlike the humanization recognizes the humanity of another one. If you don't think of me as a person, maybe you'll just want me exterminated or pushed away from my land or whatever. But if you hate me, you want me to suffer and feel pain. And sometimes there's that level of things too. Human right that is worse gets ramped up. Yeah. You know, and you see this, you see, you know, we're talking about this at the world historical level, but but think about um American politics and think about the the sharp divides between Democrats and Republicans, particularly in the Trump era, where sometimes there's dehumanization, but I think sometimes they people the different sides honestly hate one another. Yeah, that's scary. Like that's actually scary. Um, yeah, hatred is a powerful thing. Yeah, hate is a very powerful thing. So, as somebody who studies the morality and what we find uh to be moral, do you think at all like about at the sort of population level like how does this end up playing out? Is morality um super subjective and it changes wildly from time to time, from culture to culture, or are there sort of universal things that we can appeal to to get everybody back to the table with love would be amazing. Yes. So, there are universal foundations. Go anywhere in the world and slap somebody in the face for no reason and there's going to be hell to pay. we know, break a promise, try to have sex with a child, um walk in public naked, uh disrespect the dead, a long list of things that everybody views as wrong. And then there's variation. You know, again, 500 years ago, we you and I, I imagine, think slavery is horrible. We think sexism is wrong. 500 years ago, it was totally alien views. And you know you you you fly to different places attitudes about about um uh gay sex sharply different. So what you have is you have a universal foundation and then you have a lot of particulars and I think what you're saying reflects a real deep truth which is the way you can deal with moral differences between different groups [clears throat] is often going back to the foundations that which people agree on which is a lot and I think that's how sort of moral disagreements are often sketched out. You and I may disagree about, I don't know, about some law about who to vote for for president and everything, but we agree on enough because we're we're we're humans that this could provide a basis for us to sort of reconcile and work our way through. What ended up drawing you to morality? Why is that like the one that just really piqu your curiosity? It is in some way for the same reason why I just wrote a book on chosen pain and chosen suffering. So much immorality is surprising and puzzling. How is it that we care about people that you and I recognize the rights of people in far away lands or far away times even though there's no obvious advantage to be had for it? Why do people care so much about sex? Why is so much about morality about sex? Where does that come from? I'm actually curious. Why why is sex so tied up in morality? Cuz that one seems self-evident that I didn't even expect you to say it. Uh but now that you say it, yeah, we we have directions for answers. Some of it's cultural where for different reasons, say the major religions take sex very seriously. Um because sex is relevant to procreation and procreation is what the business that religions are in. Some of it I think is because uh we have a religion in the business of procreation. That is a an idea I have never heard before. Give me a little more juice on that. Major religions want to to this extent religions want anything in a metaphorical sense want to produce more of their kind and so interesting. So that means you got to mandate the the reproductive behaviors of people in your group. It means you may be dis you may be disapproving of of sexual behavior that's not linked to reproduction like gay sex or masturbation and the like. It will certainly mandate how reproductive behavior towards other members of a group uh that you shouldn't sleep with other people from other groups because that leads to kids and so on. And um and so in some way certainly Christianity could be seen sort of as an as a lot of these the strictures make sense if you assume the the the desired outcome is more Christians, not more sexual pleasure, not more variety, not more fun, more Christians. and so too for other religions. And so you could imagine um religions being very frowny about about gay sex and masturbation and the like. Um some of it is because I think an accident, a biological accident that we have a disgusted reaction to certain things and weirdly this extends to sex. A lot of sex that we don't like is disgusting. And a lot of times disgust transforms into moral disapproval. Uh Jonathan height has done some really nice work on this where he argues talks about the link between disgust and purity and so on. But honestly, and I could say this about a lot of things, we really don't know. We don't know why across the whole world people get so mad about gay sex. You might imagine, we're both good Darwinians here, that that that people who are not themselves gay should should want other people to be gay because that means they're not competing. I should be delighted to find another man in my group isn't pursuing. That's a really good point. So, I should like send him flowers, give him gifts. Way to go. Be gay. That's great for me. But that's not how it works. Instead, that's so weird. Whyird? That's such a great point. Yeah. As a puzzle and and I'm going to keep it a puzzle. Do you have a hypothesis? I'm so curious. I think some of it is an accident of discussed reactions, but I've never but I'm not sure if all of it um it would explain why people are tend to be more disapproving of gay male sex than gay female sex. Why? Um people find gay male sex for whatever reason to be more disgusting than gay female sex. Your mileage may just you just it's Yeah. No, it's just so interesting your point about you should be excited because it means that you're competing with less people and yet most people are not excited. That's uh uh that is that stumps me. I am actually now surprised that that wasn't the the sort of response and maybe right maybe it's just a sort of vestigial response. And then there's general puzzle which is I'm a believer in moral progress. I'm not a relativist. I think that uh now people many people I know maybe many people in in America, Canada, um think people should be allowed to do sexually whatever they want as long as it doesn't harm anybody. And I think that's a moral advance. They think we've gotten better. And how is it that that we've gotten better? How does that work? Is this really interesting puzzle? I've often wondered about that. So, um, I I'm not a historian of this stuff, but you hear enough stories that I remember as a kid, you hear about like Caligula and like the origies of the Roman Empire, and you think, but wait a second, that stuff doesn't fly now. And, you know, me thinking about this in like the 1980s and 1990s, I was like, wait a second, how did we go from orgies to this? Like, isn't this supposed to be, you know, a one-way sort of street of liberalization? And it just made me think there must be like reset points where where people come back and say, "No, no, no, that behavior is no longer approved." And so I was like, will it be this sort of grand circle of like I happen to be living through this time where it's not okay, but that it's going to come back and I'm going to hear about parties where people are doing like what what does that look like? Or are we just like there's a bias? It was it would have been crazy back then. It happened, but it was crazy. and it's happening now, but it's still crazy. Like h have you thought about like is it a one-way street? Is it a loop? Like what is this? I think um and this is one thing I'm drawing upon people who have done work on this like uh Steve Pinker or Robert Wright um that really it has been a one-way street but with occasional I don't know what you'd call it with the street metaphor but occasionally it dips back. So it's like um Pinker points out there's been this enormous decline through through history in the rate of violent crime and the rate of murder and rape and torture and everything. But this doesn't mean that each year it has to get better. So in the states we're seeing a resurgence of of violent crime for whatever COVID reasons or whatever. Um it doesn't and similarly you can imagine retrograde movements where for a while it becomes worse to be gay or for that matter worse to be Muslim in America or worse to be Jewish in America. But I think in the broad scope of things, at every point in life, it's almost always true to say it's better now for us if we're sexual minority, racial minorities than it was 100 years ago. Maybe not better than it was last year. Things get worse, but a hundred years ago. And in general, there is there is progress. Um, you know, as as you know, somebody who who is Jewish, I'm glad I'm living in this century and not 100 years ago, 200 years ago. If I was trans, I would certainly believe that and so on. Yeah. No doubt, man. It's really interesting. It's so hard to take an appropriately broad look at humanity and culture and society and how they grow. you can get so overly focused on the moment that you're living in. Um, but it is so intriguing. Humans are so fascinating with the just collision of wants and desires and level of awareness of what you want. Uh, it gets utterly fascinating. What is something that you've learned about humanity that you have um wanted to tell your kids about? Is a easy way to explain it? Oh gosh. Um, some of the stuff we um, we touched on before, but I I'll amplify something that you said a little while ago, which is for better or worse, um, I think an inescapable part of probably for worse, an inescapable part of humanity is breaking into world, us versus them. And to the extent I would give concrete advice to my kids or anybody else, it would be to realize this and try to be on guard for it to if you're immediate thought when somebody disagrees with you or it's from the other team in some way is, you know, well, screw them. I hope they die. You know, I am so much better than them. I'm so much superior than them. They are godforsaken. Maybe literally recognize where that comes from. You know, there's these studies with kids where they get everybody to flip a coin, heads or tails, and then um and then they ask the kids who flip heads, who do you like more? Well, I like the other kids who flipped heads. The kids who flip tails, they're jerks. Get people to put on different different teachers, red or blue, randomly organized. We immediately, it's called, you know, this guy Tajel a while ago called it minimal groups. And that's worth knowing about so we could try our best to fight it. Yeah, man. So bananas. Paul, thank you for coming on the show, man. Your book was so interesting to me. And the that whole collision of pleasure and pain, pluralistic motivations, all of that stuff I think is just endlessly fascinating. The morality stuff is also incredibly interesting. Where can people follow you, learn more about you? Um, my website's paulblum.net and I'm on Twitter at paul bloom atyale. Nice. Is it paul bloomyale or paul bloomale if I remember correctly? Uh, uh, paul bloomat yale on Twitter. Okay, word. There it is, my man. Sorry. Thanks for having me on. This was great. This was a wonderful conversation. Truly my pleasure, guys. The book is amazing. Uh, definitely check that out. But his ideas are farreaching. So, be sure to go drink in as much of this man as you can. And speaking of things that are worth drinking in, if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Peace.