The Sad Truth About Chasing Status - David Pinsof

why is everything bullied oh well uh for two reasons uh one is that we don't really know the true reasons for why we do things so we think that um we can just introspect on our minds and just and and the true reasons for why we do things just just comes to the surface uh we have full access to all of our underlying motivations and goals uh but there is a lot of research Decades of it in fact that shows that that is not true what we're really doing when we're explaining why we do things is we're coming up with a nice sounding self-flattering story a story that makes us look good that makes us look competent and rational and virtuous but we really don't know the truth about why we do things um and uh the other reason is that we are just as in the dark if not more in the dark about why other people do things that is uh we don't have access to their inner monologue or to the the sights and sounds that make up their Consciousness uh and yet we are uh often just as confident about the reasons we give for other people's behavior as we are about the reasons we give for our own behavior um so if you combine these two facts that we don't know why we ourselves do things and we don't know why other people do things and you combine those two facts with the fact that most of what we talk about ultimately pertains to the reasons why we and other people do things well then most of what we talk about is [ __ ] how is that different to lying well uh lying is when you uh deliberately misrepresent the truth so you know what the truth is and you are intentionally saying something different bullshitting is uh is when you don't really know the truth or when you don't really care about the truth the truth is just not your concern it's irrelevant you're trying to pursue a social goal whether that's looking good whether that's persuading someone whether that's uh you know making yourself uh look virtuous or competent or rational uh or getting a better deal in a negotiation that's the goal not truth um and you might occasionally say true things uh in service of that goal but whenever you do it's by accident it's not by Design the truth just happens to conveniently serve your purposes in that particular instance but when it doesn't serve your purposes you uh neglect it ignore it downplay it minimize it Etc so really what bullshitting is is a kind of Truth free communication you don't care about what's what's true and it's just not uh at the top of your mind it's not your your top priority sometimes I guess it may end up being that the thing that you are bullshitting about may also end up being true you might kind of like close your eyes throw the darts and it hits the bullseye on the truth dartboard and like hooray like I told the truth today um this can be quite disempowering I imagine for many people to hear that you you don't truly know yourself you don't truly know other people the things that you do believe that you're doing and not the you're not doing them for the reasons that you think that you're doing them uh how do you not become a despondent black pill that throws himself off a bridge uh given the fact that you've basically told everyone listening from your Insight of expertise as a trained academic in the world of psychology that truly understanding yourself and the people around you is a hopeless thankless impossible task well I don't think it's impossible I thought if it was impossible I wouldn't be uh researching it I wouldn't be writing about it I wouldn't have a sub stack called Everything is [ __ ] so it must be possible for at least somebody to be right about why we do things and you know it just so happens that I think I'm the one who's right I think we have I have the real reasons why we do things uh and I think those reasons are backed up by a lot of interesting uh research from psychology and from evolutionary biology and Game Theory um so I wouldn't say that the search for the true reasons for a behavior is hopeless um but that doesn't make it any less um flattering I mean it doesn't I mean I the thing is it's still kind of a bummer because uh even if we can say what the true reasons for our Behavior are those aren't going to be the reasons that we like um they're not going to be the ones that make us look good because obviously we have an incentive to uh give uh better reasons for our Behavior than the true ones so finding out the true ones uh is going to be a bummer necessarily it's going to make us look bad it's going to make us feel uncomfortable and it's going to disrupt a lot of the status games that we play with one another so uh you know it's it's a bummer but it's a double-edged sword I mean you can use it to attack your Rivals and attack you know status games that you see other people playing that you don't like it's going to be much harder for you to to call out the [ __ ] in yourself and to call out the uh the [ __ ] and the status games you're playing uh but you know ultimately I think that uh a clearer understanding of ourselves is going to lead to good outcomes I'm not sure what the exact causal pathway is between knowledge and good outcomes but I'm pretty confident the the pathway is there in Robert writes why Buddhism is true which I know that you're a fan of as well he's got this great quote that says uh ultimately happiness comes down to deciding between the discomfort of becoming aware of your mental afflictions or the discomfort of becoming ruled by them I know that happiness is something that we may end up getting uh uh into later on as well but I I do think that largely he's true and I asked uh Jeffrey Miller this I've asked David bust this um I've talked a lot about evolutionary psychology on the podcast over the last two to three years it's been a pet Obsession of mine I find it endlessly fascinating and it seems as close to me as uh a discipline that appears under the hood of human um motivation to work out the genuine reasons for why we do things and it doesn't always get that right um but it it tries to get close to it but as many of the people listening to the show and I have realized it can become disheartening to realize that you are essentially a marionette being played by the puppeteer of this ancient Millennia old programming uh you know anybody that's taken the proximate versus Ultimate reasons for Behavior red pill understands that even the best reasons that you can give for the things that you do are not the reasons why you do them uh so the the rabbit hole descends uh very deeply for the people that I have force-fed a lot of ep2 over the last whatever uh thousand days or so how would you advise them to ameliorate or absorb the insights that they learned that are fascinating from the world of evolutionary psychology or even behavioral genetics and stuff like that too um how do you deal with this the the fact that it's both interesting and enlightening and can make you feel less agentic and less sort of sovereign over your own behaviors as well how do you avoid that making you feel too despondent it's interesting uh the way I avoid it is by going one step even deeper and analyzing the despondency itself and where that comes from and uh and seeing that the despondency itself is another kind of uh marionette string that is you know being pulled by my uh deeper biological instincts so if you think about what that despondency is well it's it's the feeling that um your Collective projects that you're engaging in uh your goals that they're being exposed in some sense um and uh and and all of a sudden their value has decreased um because I mean this is something that I've written about recently uh we cannot play a status game if we're all aware that it's a status game because as soon as we become aware of it then we stop getting status for playing it um because wanting status is a cue of low status we don't like status Seekers we don't like social climbers we call them Vain and narcissistic and insecure and selfish and Petty uh and um we don't want to be seen in that way so this creates a paradox and that in order to seek status we cannot be seen as seeking status we have to somehow get status without making it look like that was the goal right uh and when I say it's the goal that can be destabilizing it can threaten to make our status games that we're all playing together collapse and we hate that that's scary because if they collapse then we could lose all our accumulated status that we've gained over many years of playing this game and practicing it and honing our strategies right that's very scary and very threatening uh and you know there's not much I can say to make it any less scary um it is scary but I think the upside of it is that being aware of the status games we play uh and the logic of how they work can help us choose between them a little more wisely uh some status games are clearly better for the world than others some status games lead to better outcomes um I ult I think status is ultimately or sorry I think science is ultimately a status game um you know scientists are you know competing for a Prestige uh just like any other human and any other industry right they they want to get that citation count up they want to impress their peers and show off their uh their formidable intellects um and uh I think if we understand that that's ultimately how science works that empowers us to shape the institution of science so that scientists are incentivized to uncover more true things and if we're aware of how other institutions work we can shape the incentives to uh create better results and if we're you know young or having a midlife crisis and haven't yet decided what status game we're going to play understanding how they work is going to help us choose the status game that is ultimately going to lead to better results for all of us and so if we can make us all more enlightened uh more aware of the games we're playing we can be wiser stewards of those games and we can choose more wisely among those games I think the bottom line is there is no environment there is no situation in which more ignorance I can would create a better outcome you there are there are uh troughs of Despair whatever that thing of like Enlightenment is there's a path of Enlightenment and there's the the trough of Despair and the value of difficulty and the the peak of believing you know it before you descend back into the valley of Despair again um but there is no situation in which I can imagine more ignorance would actually be uh uh would be useful for this so I want to get into seeing whether we can squeeze the spiral of status and seeking it and then undoing it and then learning it again to see if we can actually get to the point of doing something which is good for us and why we do what we do but before we even do that like why is status so weird and random just high level why is it like that well it goes back to what I was talking about about the fact that uh we cannot play a status game while being aware that it's a status game so there's an inherent fragility at the heart of all of our status games there's a paradox there and the Paradox is we cannot know what we're doing while we're doing it right um so uh in order for us to successfully uh compete for status with one another um the secret cannot get out that we're competing for status right so if we're engaged in a self-important serious intellectual conversation uh it cannot be revealed that what we're doing is participating in an intellectual pissing contest you know if you and I found out that we're just you know we're pissing around and trying to show off our our impressive intellects well then all of a sudden we would lose all of our motivation to play the game we would we would not be having the conversation because the opportunity the potential to gain status from it would be gone why why is it why is it the case that thinking about the game destroys the game uh well because as soon as we think about the game we realize that it is a game and we realize that we're status Seekers and then we can no longer gain status because we don't like status Seekers why don't we like status Seekers for a number of reasons um one is that we see them as selfish um they they tend to prioritize their own status seeking over the well-being of others that's one reason um another reason is that uh they're probably low status if if you want status that means that you don't have it right so that's another reason uh we don't like them because we see them as disingenuate uh as manipulative as dishonest as willing to lie or backstab to raise their own status um so uh for all these reasons uh being seen as a status Seeker is going to lower your status that's that's the paradox um and so because we cannot let that cat out of the bag that makes our status games uh inherently fragile and prone to collapsing under the weight of their own recognition right yes so you you've got this quote in one of your articles where you say we pretend we don't care about status as a way of gaining status so the the point being that not only is the game undone as soon as you stare in the mirror or say Beetlejuice three times and then status all descends on you um you can also be more flippant or more casual about the byproduct of status you gain from doing the thing that is state of seeking whilst not recognizing it by playing it that way you gain even more status by avoiding looking like this Machiavellian manipulator that's Wheeling his way to the top exactly yeah so if I you know buy a Prius because I care about the environment that's a very different story that you could tell about me than me buying a Prius to show off my virtue right it's the same behavior in both cases but the intention is different the goal is different um and uh insofar as the status seeking goal is revealed it cannot be achieved so if I am just you know buying Priuses and uh you know avoiding plastic and and doing all these environmental things just to look good and just to show off how great I am well I'm not going to get status for doing that my heart has to be in the right place in order to get status in order to actually look virtuous in order to Signal by virtue I cannot know that I'm signaling my virtue and you cannot know that I'm signaling my virtue because if you knew you wouldn't you wouldn't award me virtue so I understand the why I can't know why other people shouldn't be able to detect but why is it important that you yourself aren't aware of this is it just because the best way to deceive others is to believe it yourself that's the idea yeah as George Costanza once said uh in Seinfeld it's not a lie if you believe it yeah I think we have to convince ourselves of these things in order to be more convincing to others yeah that makes that makes a whole lot of sense how is it the case then that in 2023 virtue signaling and performative empathy are two of the biggest Trends on the internet that to me on its face just seems like totally transparent what's happening there have you considered virtue signaling or performative empathy and and kind of some of the um facilitations that modern technology has enabled People's State are seeking and how it's molested and perverted that yeah so uh social media is a really weird and alien form of socializing that we have invented uh and it's it's alien in the sense that it's uh ex it's like uh shouting your opinions on a loudspeaker to a you know to hundreds or thousands of people uh you know socializing in the ancestral environment and small-scale hunter-gatherer societies um you weren't really talking to more than a few people at any given time uh so the fact that you can tweet something and have hundreds or thousands or even millions of people read it uh is a really novel situation and it makes the reputational consequences of our activity on social media way uh more important than they were in ancestral environments so in some sense our psychology is not equipped to deal with this and the other uh weird thing about social media is that there's a permanence to it so if I tweet something it's going to be really hard for me to get rid of all evidence of that tweet on the internet right uh the same thing goes for posting something on social media or saying something on a podcast like the information is going to be present on some computer somewhere right and that is of also a really weird thing you know if you're socializing with a bunch of hunter-gatherers uh and you say something offhandedly the fact that you know most people are probably going to forget that or or not know exactly what it was that you said that is to your advantage right because if they might misremember it you might be able to dispute what their interpretation was of what you said you know there's a little bit of ambiguity and room for negotiation uh in a free-flowing conversation where memory is the only means of recording it uh but where we have computers recording it uh all of a sudden that that that makes our words like set in stone uh and undeniable and I I can no longer like wiggle out of something I said on the internet 10 years ago like it's written in stone I can't change it uh and I can't negotiate I can't say oh you're just remembering it wrong you know like that strategy is not available to me uh so it's those two things I think the permanence and and the huge audience we have that are really alien to us and I think they're uh messing with our psyches in really profound ways going back to the fundamentals of how status works it seems to me that The Sweet Spot is to somehow find a way to Signal a trait whilst concealing the fact that you're signaling the trait but the problem here is that the signaling of the trait is ultimately the thing that's going to get you status so you can't completely conceal it because if you completely concealed it then it wouldn't achieve you any status in the first place that's right how do we balance this yeah uh well the the key is the word completely there uh so if we completely concealed it then we wouldn't do anything or say anything right we wouldn't leave the house we wouldn't be going on podcasts or writing sub stack posts um the trick is to conceal it maybe 90 of the way you know so that you know only the really attentive person is going to pick up on on the fact that uh that you're great you know or uh uh and and the thing is they cannot pick up on the fact that you were trying to look great they have to pick up on the fact that you are great so you have to make your signal look like a cue so it's probably important to backpedal on the distinction between signals and cues so a signal is something that uh is intended to convey information right so if I say hey look at me that's a signal in evolutionary biology we talk about signals as being something that evolved for the purpose of conveying information a cue is something that is not intended to convey information in an evolutionary biology we say it's it evolved but it the the reason it evolved was not to convey information so for example if I'm sweating a lot or if I'm stammering a lot during this interview that's a cue that I'm nervous but it's not a signal cues are important in that observers can use them as valuable sources of information to guide their behavior uh but they but they weren't intentionally emitted uh by the by the person right um so the thing is we're constantly looking for valid cues about a person's character right um but we're not looking for signals because we know that signals uh are are uh can be dishonest in some sense we know that there's an incentive to fudge and distort signals to make ourselves look good right and so we really we want to we want to catch someone in in their in their true form as if they weren't being watched you know uh we want to gain deep insight into into you know what they're what they're really like and how they're really going to behave when no one's looking right and so that's the game that we play as we try to make our signals look like cues we try to uh make it look like we're we're going to behave this way when no one's looking uh when people are looking or when we think people are looking or or maybe we're not even aware of it at all but but in any case that's the game we're playing because we're ultimately looking for Reliable signs of a person's character so that we can count on them uh to behave in certain ways when we're not judging them when we're not looking them uh when they might have the opportunity to backstab us uh we we really that's that's the key thing that we're looking for and we want to try to signal that without making it look like we're signaling that uh and in some sense we may not even know ourselves that we're signaling that it may be better for it to be unconscious it's got me thinking about the uh common held piece of dating advice which is look at how they treat serving staff and waiters when you go to restaurants and I think that that I might be right in saying that that is something people think of as a cue that is indicative of a signal that is indicative of something that's deeper it's you know it's like the sweating or the stammering that it's seen as such a normal everyday interaction that it should be people that they're least encumbered right this is their true your true self comes out on YouTube between 10 p.m and 11 pm at night and when you're dealing with a serving a serving staff person or a waiter in a restaurant that's got your order wrong like those are the two times that you're at your truest um you're most transparent and I I'm thinking about different examples of that what about you you wrote this great article on your sub stack that everyone should go and check out about status was there anything that popped up that you thought was a particularly interesting example of uh the weird ways that status can get hijacked that people use it and abuse it and and kind of get confused by it yeah um so uh actually it was an interesting piece in the New York Times uh I was reading um about how wealth signals have become concealed um so I don't know if you noticed this but in succession uh one of the main characters was wearing a baseball cap but if you actually zoom in on the cap and do some research you find out that the cap is like twenty thousand dollars or something like that right so it might look like a normal baseball cap that sort of conveys his you know working class nonchalance and yet it is just a covert uh status signal uh and then the article goes through many examples of these things that are designed to look cheap and mundane and commonplace but on closer examination are actually wildly expensive uh and that sort of what we call that in game theory is a buried signal that is only some people can can uh detect the signal so wealthy people are going to know that it's that it's expensive but ordinary people aren't going to know so you're trying to Signal the trade to a specific type of audience whom you really value uh while maybe not caring so much about other audiences so that's that's an interesting uh example of it and the other interesting example of how these status games work is um what I call sacred values and I think uh what a sacred value does is it allows us to play a status game uh without realizing it's a status game and that basically what they are is they're their cover stories their narratives that we all share and we all tell ourselves about the true reasons why we're doing things and they're often altruistic and Noble uh and idealistic uh and overly abstract um so that they can potentially accommodate uh any anything we're doing um you know stuff like authenticity self-actualization happiness equality Justice honor um these are all sacred values that are uh designed to protect our status games from collapsing uh and and the way they uh protect our status games is by uh appearing as though they are the opposite of status so insofar as status is uh Petty and small-minded and selfish uh sacred values are high-minded and altruistic and larger than ourselves we want to try to engineer the concept to be as distant from status as possible so that it's not confused with status because as soon as it's confused with status the status game collapses um so that's what a big part of what I think sacred values are and and I think if you look at any cult any tight-knit group their status hierarchies are bathed in sacredness uh sacredness is is saturated uh in their culture the it's not even a status hierarchy it's it's a it's a Justified great chain of being you know it's you know these people are are genuinely wiser and more virtuous and that's why they have power over us you know we're not submitting to a dominant Alpha the alpha you know the person is is shepherding us toward wisdom and Transcendence um and so I think uh having a nice sacred ideology or belief system allows a status game to really persist and remain stable for a long time uh and uh and protect the members of that Community from from the kind of collapses that I'm talking about what do you say to the people who reply eat [ __ ] David on a and integrity and telling the truth and Ultra and empathy and hard work and all of this stuff those are axiomatically good things and you trying to pull the wool from my eyes and say that this is actually secretly me trying to get laid uh you need you need to get in the sea um I would say that you know I actually have some sympathy for for that reaction so I'm not saying that because these sacred values are [ __ ] that they're necessarily bad um I think you know some [ __ ] is better for the world than other [ __ ] you know uh if you look at science you know it's it's bathed in sacred values of knowledge and wisdom and disinterested truth seeking um and and in some sense they're those values are [ __ ] uh but in another sense it's really good that those are the values that are you know being pursued or at least you know being pretended to to be pursued um because uh the institution of science needs those values in order to persist and in order to uncover genuine truths um for the same reason you know uh status games around success in business or Athletics or whatever um they can motivate genuinely good behavior uh and yes you could say that uh at the end of the day it's motivated by by status but uh you know at some point you got to shrug your shoulders and just say that's human nature and we got to deal with that and we got to accept it uh and if we want to change the world for a better we for the better we have to recognize that because if we want to create a better world there's no way to do that other than by changing the social norms which ultimately means changing what gets us status and what doesn't like that's that's what social change is at the end of the day it's changing what gets us status and what doesn't and if you don't realize that that's how social change Works you're not going to change anything and so I think being realistic about how this works is going to make us wiser uh uh both consumers of culture and producers of culture yeah what should people take away given that you've just spent 20 minutes deconstructing potentially what everybody is motivated to do their behaviors due to how should this inform the way that they see the world and move forward yeah um I think it can give you um a little more compassion and empathy honestly um and that you realize that everyone out there is just as scared and insecure and and self-conscious and lonely as you are and that's ultimately what's driving their behavior um and you know it can help us you know have a little empathy for the people we might disagree with politically you know we we like to think that they're in pursuit of some you know evil Wicked agenda but really they're just they're in pursuit of the same agenda we are you know they they want to be loved they want to be praised and respected uh and that's ultimately what's behind them and you know we have the same human nature as them uh and the more we understand that I think the more we can better work together with those people uh under the recognition of our own shared Humanity yeah I uh a couple of things that definitely most people that did heinous awful despicable things in the past believed that they were doing good there's very few people who actually do evil things in full recognition that it's evil because that's not the way that we're wired what would be the motivation to do that there has to be something on the other side of it um and yeah I think the acceptance of the fact that status games aren't going away ultimately it's very difficult to even conceive of a world in which genuine altruism bereft of any sort of um reflective glory on the person the the altruist uh how what that would even look like how that would even work and and how you would motivate someone to do it so the bottom line being that you need to work with the world the way that it is as opposed to the way that you would have it be it's not this first principles pure rationality this is you know long term is a meets effective altruism thing bro like that's just not how we're wired and the the way that we are wide and the most effective way to do this is to say okay we have kind of like the thermodynamics of human behavior going on here yeah we need to be able to play Within the rules of this game and there's another another sub stack post of yours which I absolutely loved which was to do with desires our desires and how they work so what is it what is it that most people don't understand about how desires work do you think yeah uh the thing that people don't understand and perhaps aren't willing to admit because it's it's uncomfortable to admit is that our St our desires are relative uh they're competitive we don't just want to get an education we want better educational credentials than our Rivals you know we don't just want people to like us they want we want people to like us more than they like other people we don't just want to have opinions we want to have better opinions and smarter and Wittier opinions than other people you know the list goes on I list I think like 10 or 12 of them in the post but uh the idea is that uh uh we're constantly comparing ourselves to other people um because ultimately we are evolved creatures we are products of darwinian natural selection and biological Fitness is an inherently relative concept so I could have you know all the food I want you know I could I could have a nice a nice house access to water you know I get everything I want but if my neighbors are doing way better than me uh then that's not going to matter eventually my genes are going to dwindle uh relative to the genetic uh representation of my neighbors right so ultimately from a darwinian standpoint I want to have higher Fitness than my rivals than my competitors that is the only way to maximize my genetic representation in future Nations so it's con it's comparative it's competitive natural selection is the competition between the stuff that's selected and the stuff that's not selected which means that we our brains are collections of the stuff that was selected right which means that that stuff had to be better in some sense than the stuff that wasn't selected which means that our desires are ultimately revolving around being better than our competitors being better than our Rivals I do think that it's to a significant extent built into our nervous systems um and there's a problem um I I don't think that uh we can we can change that fact I think I think it's I think Evolution wired us to uh uh out compete our Rivals because the most competitive Among Us were most likely to out-compete their Rivals and were most likely to pass on their genes to the Next Generation right we are descended from the most competitive and successfully competitive of our ancestors we weren't we're not descended from the uncompetitive losers right um but of course the irony is were descended from uh competitive people who successfully concealed their competitive nature because in order to win the competition you cannot look competitive right we compete to reassure each other that it's not a competition yeah okay and there's a problem yeah so the problem is that we can't all get what we want right if what we want is inherently relative to what other people have then we cannot get what we want at the same time right uh and that that is the problem so that what that means is that we're just going to keep competing with one another until the end of time we're never going to achieve some Utopia where there's no more social hierarchy or where everyone is happy for all time uh because no matter how much stuff we get we're always going to be comparing ourselves uh and our stuff to our neighbors and the stuff that they have right and we could all be you know have Intergalactic time traveling uh pods uh we could have you know immortality elixirs and yet we're still going to be jealous and envious of our neighbors who have better immortality elixirs and better Intergalactic time traveling pods than we have right it's never going to go away there's no um there's no happy ending to the human drama we're just going to keep jockeying for status until we obliterate ourselves or go extinct but there is some hope I don't want to be completely depressing here I know that I tend to lean in that direction with my sub stack and I'm trying to work against it but I think the one way we can sort of outsmart evolution is by uh success successively out competing older Generations so if if status and living standards keep rising from generation to generation then uh we're all better than somebody and that's always going to be the previous generation and that's great because ultimately what we want is to be better than somebody it gives everyone what they want but here's the loophole is that the previous generations actually want future Generations which include their children and grandchildren to be better off than themselves it's and then if it's in their darwinian Fitness interests uh for future generations to to do well right so everybody wins when we when we out compete our elders you know when we say Okay Boomer that is that is the slogan of human progress right we we want old people to become more and more irrelevant uh yeah that's brilliant so I I've got it in my head um Gene twangy's work uh on Generations looked at how from whatever it was the Gen x's and the one before it the not the boom what was the one just after the Great Depression anyway that group all the way through and she talks about um this uprising of the middle class the ease of access to cars the ease of access to households etc etc and then you see this pivot and you can even see you call it intergenerational competition Theory you can even see the reverse of this at work or when this goes wrong and I think that Millennials and specifically gen Zed have a b in their Bonnet because they look at their parents generation and they see that they were able to buy a house by the age 30 and they were able to support a family just on one living wage and they were able to afford two cars and two holidays per year on on a normal job uh and they don't think that that's the case and yeah there are children who are upset that they're not doing better than their parents but there are very rarely parents who are upset to see their children doing better than them and I think that that seesaw asymmetry uh explains your ICT idea yeah absolutely I think you can explain a lot of the problems we're having by the inability of some segments of the population to out-compete their elders um and if you look at you know uh the research on uh what's called deaths of Despair um it's it's primarily happening among groups of people who think of themselves as failing to out-compete their Elders or among Elders who view their children as failing to out-compete them um so wow that's one as well that parents of of dispossessed children yes yes um so I think what happens is when we fail to uh compete our elders and we're all on the same playing field well then the zero-sum competitive tragedy of The Human Condition catches up to us and now all of a sudden we all have to be better than each other again right we were all happy when we could all be better than old people right we all win you know but if we're not better than old people then oh no who are we going to be better than now we have to compete with one another you know we have to we have to form coalitions and tribes to to get more stuff than other people and all of a sudden the competitive ugliness of human nature kicks in so I really do think that the the key to Prosperity is is intergenerate successful intergenerational competition it might be the one thing that is preventing us from killing each other yeah I I dropped my insight about this uh to do with the fact that because of this comparative game that I think is relatively inescapable and definitely at a macro level individually you know enough meditation psychedelics might be able to dissuade you of this but that's that's not going to work for the populace I said to Sam Harris I think it's a reason that Universal basic income fundamentally doesn't work because you end up flattening the income hierarchy down we've got robots to do everything now and we believe that everyone's just gonna lie under a tree totally blissed out doing [ __ ] poetry and and playing the acoustic guitar what's more likely going to happen is that people are going to find weird and wonderful ways to accumulate status again they're going to start this competition game all over again okay so we've flattened income you've read will stores book uh the status game where he talks about that uh group that has yams they they build but grow the biggest yam and then they give it to their enemy um like it's just going to be a society of people growing massive yams or or crocheting or whatever it is that's you know an arbitrary not that much more or less arbitrary than accumulating resources or buying a Ferrari or a Rolex or getting boob job but you know largely just a different status game and I think that it's it's one of the problems that you get when you look at um at Ubi and also uh if you're right and I feel like you probably are and this intergenerational competition theory is one of the domesticating forces that keeps people feeling uh happy and insane that I might not be doing better than my next door neighbor but I'm doing better than my parents on average across across a civilization if we are about to face a population collapse in which you're going to have negative GDP growth for a sustained period of time and we can't offset that with Automation and AI you are locking in uh you're locking in pan generational recession right and I think that you know for all that you can say objectively living standards should be able to be ameliorated because we've got all of the Automation and the blah blah and it's like yeah but how do people feel they're doing like what's the mental state of the 2060 born child compared with our generation now what what how do they how do they feel about this and if they look back and they see a golden era that we think is some awful version of the actual Golden Era that was the Boomers and they look back and they think you it's despondency all the way down yeah no I I agree with you um in some sense uh and that we cannot get rid of our status games and I think a lot of toxicity comes from the misguided notion that we can that we can achieve a status free Utopia I think that's a dangerous idea uh and a fundamentally unrealistic idea I think you know uh you mentioned will store's book the status game he's got a wonderful chapter on the rise of Communism uh and how it was a competitive dominant movement that uh appeared to be against competitiveness and against dominance you know it was an egalitarian anti-agalitarian movement that created enormous balances enormous imbalances of power and inequalities of power and Status among the more you know the loyal members of the regime got all these benefits and Privileges and perks you know the disloyal members of the regime were excluded marginalized sometimes killed uh subtype sent to who forced labor camps so if you think about the Communist Utopia where everyone is equal it is in fact the opposite where it has some of the starkest and ugliest uh and most brutal forms of inequality known to our species so I certainly agree with you that um uh utopian theorizing is misguided um I agree with you that uh getting rid of our status games is impossible um and I also agree that it's and in some sense we need to choose among the status games that are the best for our species and insofar as status games go I think competing to offer people goods and services at more and more affordable prices is not that bad of a status game you know like it incentivizes us to do things that are generally helpful and to give things give things to people that they generally want so I think markets are a pretty good status game as far as status games go and I think that they are uh sadly underrated uh by a lot of people on the political left um that isn't to say that they can't co-exist with with the basic income um perhaps they can as you know as as a sort of safety enough for you know uh the direst forms of poverty but um I do think that we need to appreciate the benefits of markets as incentivizing the right kinds of behavior and I think often times the reason why we don't like markets is because the status competition is too out in the open for us yeah it's too icky you know we don't like to be seen as greedy or as uh materialistic uh and so in order to signal that we're not greedy and we're not materialistic we often oppose capitalism and oppose markets and we try to create anti-consumerist consumer cultures where we consume anti-consumerist books and and t-shirts and and podcasts um but at the end of the day I think it's it's it's misguided and we need to appreciate that that markets are are one of the one of the engines of human progress I'm not going to say it's the only engine but but um it's it's a pretty damn good status game that we should uh keep playing as long as possible what do you say to people who claim that their fundamental goal in life is to be happy uh I would say in the nicest uh and most polite way possible that that is [ __ ] um you know I'm not trying to be mean but I do think it's [ __ ] uh I don't think we want stuff inside our heads if you think about the way that Evolution programmed our brains it doesn't make any sense for evolution to program us to want stuff inside of our heads it makes sense for evolution to program us to want stuff in the world stuff like food sex status resources right the things that correlated with biological Fitness and ancestral environments those are the things that we are wired to want and to seek out um we don't want the idea of that stuff we don't want the story of that stuff we want the real stuff in the real world we don't want to be misguided or mistaken we don't want to be deceived about it we want the real stuff um so I find the idea that we evolve to one happiness to be fundamentally evolutionarily implausible I don't think it makes any sense especially when you think about what happiness is from a functional evolutionary perspective and in my post happiness is [ __ ] I give a theory about what I think happiness is uh and what I think it is is a a predictionary her it's when your brain expects something to be at a certain quality and it ends up being better than you expected right the food is tastier than you expected the sex is better than you expected you know uh you you thought that the paello would taste like [ __ ] but it ends up tasting amazing um you thought that everyone would roll their eyes at your dumb joke and everyone's rolling on the floor those are the types of things that give you happiness they are unexpectedly good outcomes and what happiness is is your brain recalibrating itself in light of an unexpectedly good outcome so when uh when you have a prediction error your brain sort of lights up and kicks into gear and does all these things to reprogram yourself so you can get more of that thing in the future so it um it plays the happy scenario in your head over and over again analyzing it uh figuring out what might have caused the good thing to happen what you got wrong it's revising your beliefs updating your expectations shifting your priorities all these things are happening uh when we experience what we call happiness but that doesn't mean that we want to be happier that's not the thing that we're seeking when you play a guessing game you're not looking to maximize the number of times you hear the words getting warmer no you want you want to guess the thing that's the point of the game if you guess the thing on the first try without any getting warmers you've won the game you've done a great job right you shouldn't uh cry that you failed to get into getting warmers because the getting warmers are irrelevant they're just there to help you they're there to push you in the right direction and I think happiness is ultimately there to push you in the right direction but it's not the thing we actually want it's not the thing we're seeking uh and even if we did want it uh we couldn't get it because it's impossible to get right something that is intrinsically unexpected is impossible to pursue pursuing happiness is like planning your own surprise party right you can't do it so I think in fact I think insofar as people do pursue happiness or try to pursue happiness as a status seeking tactic uh they are setting themselves up for depression and misery um I think we oftentimes what we don't we don't want to be happy but we want to appear happy we want to appear like a happy person like we're well adjusted we're healthy we're healthy we're self-actualized you know we're nice we're happy go lucky um that's what we really want we want to convince other people that we're happy and even convince ourselves that we're happy uh and perhaps convince ourselves that we really do want to be happy and we're the type of person who seeks happiness as opposed to status or Prestige or something that's ultimately what we're seeking but insofar as we seek that we're making ourselves miserable because we cannot get the thing that we're seeking um and so I think a lot there's a lot of toxicity around the pursuit of happiness and self-actualization I think we would do well to stop pursuing happiness because the more we pursue it the less of it we'll get what's better to pursue instead [Laughter] oh man I guess our [ __ ] sacred values uh assuming that we picked the right ones yeah I mean it's it's a great question I wish we had uh a say in the matter I don't know that we do have much of a say I think Evolution has chosen our desires for us and we just we do the best we can to to fulfill them and we can't really do anything else I don't I I'm skeptical of the idea that we can remake ourselves uh and and fundamentally redesign our basic desires uh I think that's a pipe dream um the best we can do is choose among the desires we have that Evolution gave us and try as best as we can to prioritize the ones that are uh better for us I guess better for the world um you know ones that we can that we're more proud of um you know I I have a 15 month old daughter I try to prioritize that desire over my other desires and that's you know it's it's an evolved desire you know my DNA is shaping me to to care for my Offspring but I don't care you know I'm still proud of that desire I still want to uh fulfill it and uh and that's that does that's a desire I can get behind and I think you know if we if we're more wise about all the desires we have and choosing among them I think we can choose better ones or at least shift ourselves a little bit towards the better ones you've got a number of Hama blows uh that's a list of problems with the idea that humans want to be happy so I'm going to read a few of these off just in case people were not feeling too completely broken yet we know that if we savor every moment every smile every meal every ray of sunshine we will be happy yet we Savor maybe one percent of those moments we know that if we appreciate what we have from the roof over our heads to the clubs on our backs we will be happy yet we appreciate maybe one one percent of what we have good news makes us happier than bad news yet we consume way more bad news and good news even though we can't do anything about the bad news and even though there is plenty of good news available anger feels bad yet when we're angry with our loved ones we think about all the times they made us angry which just makes us angrier why don't we think about all the times that made us happy we can delude ourselves into believing pretty much anything the Earth is flat the world is run by a cabal of satanic pedophiles Etc yet we never deluded ourselves into believing that everything is perfect and wonderful as it is if we were actually pursuing happiness we'd be very good at it by now given our many years of practice yet studies show that we suck at it we're incredibly bad at predicting how happy things will make us or how long happiness will last there are vast bodies of scientific evidence that could stop us from sucking at happiness like positive psychology the science of Happiness yet most people aren't very interested in this research because it's kind of boring we work too much and some of us literally work ourselves to death even though we're well aware that this makes us unhappy having a child makes us less unhappy and more stressed and we know this yet we do it anyways often multiple times we maintain relationships with [ __ ] even though it would be clear that we would be happy without those [ __ ] in our lives we constantly beat ourselves up but almost never give ourselves compliments And We complain about Twitter on Twitter well you know it sounds so much better when you read it Chris it's the British accent um but yeah you know all of those it's so right and you kind of lay out a bunch of objections oh well it's hard oh well I I want to do it or I try to do it even though I can't do it um you know there are a number of um potential barriers that people would put in place about why it is that they would want to do that and they don't manage to achieve it either mean to do it even though they're not good at it I don't know what replaces it though you know peace of mind is the closest approximation I found to something that's scalable as like a mental state that I think that people should really really try and optimize for I think meaning is probably not far off as well but meaning can actually be perturbed by peace of mind um so you know from everybody that I've spoken to and it it often gets into just this semantic argument of like what do you mean by happiness exactly and what do you mean by meaning exactly and is it how long does happiness last so on and so forth um but it's my belief that if ultimately what we want is to live a life which in retrospect we are glad that we lived a combination of peace of mind and meaning peace of mind facilitates everything else because if you don't have peace of mind no matter how good the life is your Dan Bilzerian in a rocket ship surrounded by Playboy models like guess what you're having a [ __ ] time so that doesn't matter your moment to moment experience of the world is going to be tarnished and if you don't do anything which is Meaningful the second that you do begin to reflect on whatever it is that you've done you're going to be ashamed of it or at the very least you're just not going to be proud of it because I think you know meaning is doing the thing which you tomorrow would have wanted you to do right like that's that's a nice conception of it yeah yeah that was a that was a good a good choice for me to make I'm glad that I did that and that's why you know when you are faced if you are on a diet if you if you're you know tempted to cheat on your partner or whatever it is asking yourself what would me tomorrow want me today to do is such a lovely reframe it gives you a little bit of distance it makes you project you out into the future but between those two things like I don't really know what the [ __ ] else we're doing here like what what what what are we doing here we're playing these status games but ultimately our desires aren't our desires their desires that are manipulated by a variety of other things that we didn't get to use well hopelessly at the mercy of these Millennia old Marionette strings that are playing with our different preferences even if we do manage to do enough evolutionary psychology to learn why we do the proximate reasons for our Behavior the ultimate reasons for our Behavior come and smash Us in the face and then happiness the one thing that's supposed to be this Universal good that we were all chasing after maybe isn't actually that scalable and how would Evolution have programmed it into our brains in the first place so yeah lots of lots of nails and coffins I feel yeah you know Chris I wish I was better at poking holes or I sure was better at telling news stories than I was at poking holes in our existing stories because I'm clearly bitter at the whole poking than I am of of the the telling of the news stories maybe that's something you're better at than me uh but yeah no it's something that uh I've struggled with um what do we do uh if not pursue happiness um well I I like your idea of pursuing meaning um what I think meaning is is ultimately long term I mean sorry to bring it back to the depressing evolutionary psychology but what I think meaning is is long-term Fitness value so we have things that maximize our Fitness in the long run with uncertainty and with continued effort and persistence and we have things that maximize our Fitness in the short run uh immediately so things like you know food in your mouth right now that makes you happy or makes you feel pleasure but caring for your child that's more of a long-term Fitness maximization strategy you know your child isn't going to become a healthy adult all at once it's going to take many years uh and a lot of patience uh and a lot of um kindness and and support from other people um the same thing goes for starting a social movement forming a tribe that's going to be a successful tribe or it's going to compete other tribes that takes a long time takes a lot of effort and persistence and it might it might cause you pain in the short run you know my daughter can sometimes be a pain in the ass uh but what meaning does is it helps me weather those storms it helps me put up with with those temporary pains and discomforts and keep my eyes on the prize of the long-term goal of raising her to be a healthy adult the same thing goes for other meaningful projects like you know forming a stable community forming a strong tribe uh cultivating a valuable skill that gets you a lot of success that's something that takes a really long time and can be meaningful for people um forming a really good uh trusting relationship with with somebody can be meaningful uh those things are good I like those things I think we should pursue those things but the thing is we already were pursuing those things and when we you know we never were pursuing happiness it was just a story we told ourselves uh to begin with so it's not so much what should we pursue now that we can't pursue happiness we were never pursuing happiness to begin with we were already pursuing uh the goals that we already had right we're already trying to form good relationships and be good parents or you know cultivate a valuable skill or or whatever and now it's just a you know making us more aware of those goals that we actually have right that's that's what poking halls in our [ __ ] does is it it makes us more familiar with the stuff we're already doing and the stuff we already want um so uh the question of what to pursue instead of happiness I think is the wrong question the right question is what story are we going to tell ourselves now that the happiness story is [ __ ] uh and unfortunately I don't have a great answer I mean maybe you can come up with a better answer but I think there are plenty of other better stories available we can tell ourselves you know we're we're trying to seek the truth we're trying to understand ourselves we're trying to make the world a better place we're trying to be effectively altruistic and perhaps we're trying to see through the [ __ ] of effective altruism to make it even more effectively altruistic there are plenty of uh good stories we can tell ourselves uh and I think we just got to choose between them the conflict is where a lot of discomfort arises so when people believe that they should feel happy and they don't and you you're battling against this I would be interested to know if we had an anti-happiness happiness movement um that kind of help to relinquish people from chasing it I wonder whether more of it would happen first off I've seen some evidence that people who actually work on happiness or that they purposefully try to be happy they read books on happiness they result in having lower levels of well-being moment to moment in yeah in self-reports um but also the the the the pleasant emotion that you get when you do things that you know are good because you've designed them in advance to be good because you know that spending time in nature makes you feel better than spending time on the couch therefore you spend time in nature and oh [ __ ] is a byproduct of doing this I I feel this sensor well that that's suspiciously like happiness that thing that's just happened to me is roughly proximate to What happiness is supposed to be so yeah yeah I wonder whether um but again you know we spiral it one one layer deeper and naval's got this great quote where he says uh desire desires are a contract we make with ourselves to being happy until we get what we want and I don't think that that's necessarily untrue that as soon as you posit an ideal you then begin to compare yourself to that ideal and up until the point at which you reach it there is a sense of dissatisfaction um you know if you want the car you are ruminating about the car you're researching about the car you see it on the street all the time you work and you work and you work and then you get it and then you just flick onto the next one so it is a uh an agreement that your level of Life satisfaction will be capped up until the moment at which another thing happens and you reach it and then very quickly you do that that ratchet of ever uh difficulty increasing uh achievement doesn't seem like a scalable solution for call it what you want well-being human flourishing new demonia whatever um I think there needs to be something something a little bit more uh reliable than that something a little bit more scalable than that that you can find day to day yeah so the question isn't you know what are we going to want because we cannot choose what we want Evolution has already chosen that for us the question is what are we going to pretend to want you know what are we going to socially reward ourselves for appearing to want right that's the the one thing that we have control over we have control over the stories we tell ourselves and those stories are powerful those stories actually do change our Behavior right um so what story are we going to tell um I like your peace of mind idea and I think you know in some sense we do want peace of mind if if you frame peace of mind as the feeling you get when you get what you want and you no longer want other things then yeah I guess we do want that because that's just a different way of saying we want what we want you know where we we want to get what we want right uh and nature is an interesting example um I I do think that being in nature is another evolved preference we have you know we you know we evolved from nomadic hunter-gatherers who you know went from place to place and camped out at different places and settled down and nicer habitats that were more Lush and full of life and easier to navigate with you know water sources and animals and uh navigable landmarks like mountains you know so I do think we have evolved appetites for for beautiful natural environments and I think the modern world has interfered with that desire to a great extent and I think it is perhaps responsible for a lot of our unhappiness is our inability to be in nature because that's basically that's the place where we're supposed to be from an evolutionary perspective and it does make us feel good I think when you get relaxed and you feel a peace of mind when you're in a beautiful environment I think that's your brain telling you hey take it easy spend some time here yeah you know maybe move here you know you know we we meaning your genes we want you to uh to stick around here as long as possible this this is a good place I remember I remember reading uh an article a while ago that explained why vast spanning views finally I've got the house of my dreams and the balcony looks over the perfect Vista of in the distance and so on um is that do you think that there would be a an evolutionary reason for that given that we would have greater um view of potential Predators potential warring tribes risks prey etc etc is that why we have this preference for big Landscapes it's why you know no one very few people very few people have a kind of messy bush Thicket image painting on the wall lots of people will have a beautiful mountainous Vista with spanning fields and a sunset in the distance yeah no I buy that I think they're they're definite adaptive advantages to having Higher Ground to overlooking a vast landscape you have you know as you mentioned strategic advantages over potential Invaders you get to it's much easier to navigate when you can see the whole landscape in front of you it's basically just like having a map splayed out on the table you know and getting lost was a major selection pressure for our ancestors you know if you got lost you're dead you can't find your tribe you're dead uh and so being in a place that's easy to navigate where you know where everything is there are clear landmarks you know where the water is you know all the different animals there you know which places are safe to hide which places are safe to camp out I think that's you know I I certainly buy your your reasoning there good what makes stuff interesting why do we find things interesting hmm well I think you might know where I'm gonna go with this but I'll I'll take you through the Journey anyway um so you might think that we're interested in stuff that's useful for us yeah stuff that helps us make better decisions live better lives pursue happiness even or you might think that we're interested in in the truth stuff that's uh insightful and accurate that reveals the subtle Contours of reality really at the end of the day we're just we're Seekers of knowledge you know we we want wisdom you know that's that's what we're after when we're we're clicking through blog posts and and tweets and Facebook posts were ultimately looking to gain useful knowledge truths about how the world works right that's the conventional story about the conventional story is [ __ ] unsurprisingly uh I don't think we want any of that stuff or at the very least it's very low on our list of priorities I think uh too often we tell the story about ourselves that we're the Smart Ones in the animal kingdom that the reason the human brain is so big is so that we can use tools and build impressive machines and Conquer nature I think that story is wrong I think the reason why our brains are so huge is because our groups are so huge and we need to navigate those groups I think the human brain is a fundamentally social brain I think the brain evolved not for Tool making and practical decision making but for gossiping politicking rule following covert rule breaking rationalizing uh self-deception I think uh you might call us homo hippocrites as uh Robin Hansen calls us I think if you know if you reflect on what you actually use your brain for it's almost completely about people and people related stuff right you don't spend your time thinking about home repair and and auto parts right you know tools are a very small part of the the stuff that occupies your mind uh most of the time you're thinking about oh how can I uh make this person happy how can I resolve this conflict you're gossiping or you're thinking about uh conflicts with family members or you know you're worried about some snide remark someone made and whether they secretly don't like you or or whatever like this is the stuff that your brain is used for and if this is what your brain is used for it's hard to argue that your brain is ultimately a rational tool making machine it's clearly a gossip uh and and rationalization machine that's really what it's about it's about winning arguments winning social conflicts gaining status uh and so once you apply that lesson to what we find interesting you realize that uh what we find interesting is the stuff that fulfills our unflattering social goals that we do not want to admit either to other people or to ourselves for example I lost a whole bunch of them in this post uh it's called you will find this interesting uh for example uh we want attention uh we are interested in things that get us attention because when people pay attention to us that makes us feel smart and important and special uh and so we are attracted to the titillating uh the Gory the scary uh the sexy uh the gross um the paradoxical the confusing uh all these things help us get attention uh we're interested in things that uh almost no one else believes so strange beliefs weird beliefs counterintuitive beliefs because if we can prove to people that they're right well then we get to look smarter than everyone else so we're looking for for that uh for those rare beliefs that help us gain an edge over our competition uh you know same thing goes for moral beliefs uh we want stuff that makes us look morally Superior to other people we want stuff that casts our political Rivals and a negative light uh that makes our political allies look good we want uh information that justifies what we were going to do anyway or what we wanted to do anyway we want to fit in we read the news and and read about sports and celebrity gossip not because these things are inherently useful but because everyone else is talking about them and we don't want to be left out of the conversation if you think about what's true and useful you know the vast majority of it is old and yet we're obsessed with the news and I think that goes to show that we're more interested in being part of the conversation that people are having than we are at finding useful truths uh and you know the list goes on we want to you know signal our membership and and special clicks by uh you know name dropping people that proves that we're in the know and you know mentioning books that only members of our subculture would know like oh capital in the 21st century only really smart members of the intelligence will know that one and that helps me connect with fellow members of the intelligencia while subtly excluding dumb dumbs who aren't as cool as me um so there's all these signaling games we play these four you know these uh these clicks we form the subtle acts of exclusion um yeah lots of stuff like that I go into more ugly I understand that so give explain to me why then our brains are so interested in [ __ ] like if they were involved evolved by natural selection why do they seem to function so poorly why they're not actually trying to seek truth well uh if you think about the truths that we actually read about on the internet uh almost none of them are actually practically relevant you know if you if you think about like you know the policies that are going through Congress like you're not going to be able to affect those policies like you can vote yeah but you have what a 1 in 60 million chance of swaying the election like you can't really do you think you can't do anything about the the political uh events that are taking place in your country and yet we're fascinated by politics it's almost all of what we pay attention to right which goes to show that uh it doesn't make much sense for us to care about what's actually true in the political domain because what's true or what's false doesn't really affect us what affects us is our social standing among members of our community so yeah I might not personally lose out if I support a policy that makes the world worse but uh if I support that policy and it gains me status among my political allies well then I I win right so I'm going to Care way more about the status I get from my political allies and I'm going to care about whether the policy is actually make making the world better and so uh it really from an evolutionary standpoint it shouldn't matter to us what's true or what's false about these abstract uh distant impractical matters that we read about and talk about uh you know we're not talking about you know how to fix our toilets or like you know how to how to do practical things in the real world at least not most of the time uh most of the time we're talking about really vague abstract fuzzy political uh matters that have no bearing on our practical day-to-day lives and that's where these social motives come to the fore and dominate any other practical truth-seeking motives yeah I was going to say why is it then that we are so distracted by those things why is it that we care about Congress and and all the weird [ __ ] yeah I think they help us fulfill our social goals in a way that practical beliefs cannot so if I think that um let's say uh the sky is blue uh that's not going to help me to differentiate myself from other people it's not going to help me signal membership in a particular click because everyone believes that this guy is blue you know if I believe that there's something wrong with my carburetor and my car uh the other people aren't going to disagree with that I can't be I can't use that to gain status right so they're really only a specific set of beliefs that we can use to play social games with one another uh and they have to by Design be disconnected from the practically relevant ones because if they were if if we used our practical beliefs to jockey for status and form clicks well then our practical beliefs would be wrong and we would [ __ ] up all the time in our lives so we have to separate the intuitive practical beliefs that we use to actually make decisions from the vague area abstract political beliefs that we use to form groups and jockey for status and never the twain shall meet uh you know and uh that is by Design I think because if they did meet uh well we'd make bad decisions and we'd fail in our social goals at the same time so we have to have our cake and eat it we have to you know intuitively unconsciously know what's true for the immediate practical decisions we make while at the same time uh pretending to believe all sorts of other weird abstract vague things to Curry favor with our allies and with the people we want to uh impress what is the lesson to take away then is it the interesting stuff is overrated and that we should seek out more boring [ __ ] yeah basically uh I think uh that's that's one of the lessons I I take from it I think um we have this [ __ ] idea of ourselves that that we're you know high-minded knowledge Seekers and I think that it's healthy for us to see through that [Music] um I think we often ignore and neglect and look down upon the boring person at a party or a boring friend or boring family member we think we're better than them because we have access to more interesting tidbits you know we've read the latest think piece and therefore we're better than them um and I think this kind of intellectual status game is increasing our sense of loneliness and alienation you know uh if we're trying if we're constantly competing to be interesting and we're looking for the most interesting conversation Partners well we're going to spend more time listening to podcasts like this one to make virtual friendships with uh people who were who are who sound really interesting instead of talking to real people in the real world like our friends and family members who might not be as interesting but will offer us more fulfillment and companionship than the virtual friends that we try to I was on board I was on board until I realized it was going to reduce the listenership of the podcast sorry sorry Chris listen listen to this podcast but not any of the other that's right that's this is the only one that is able to thread the needle between evolutionarily what's adaptive and uh ethically what is optimal David prints off ladies and gentlemen David I love your work uh everything is bullshit.substack.com for your stuff uh it's phenomenal everybody needs to go and subscribe to that where else should they go to harass you and find your stuff online uh you can feel free to harass me on uh Twitter of all places uh the uh nadir of human happiness uh you can find me at davidpintoff on Twitter feel free to DM me if you want I'm very friendly much friendlier than uh than I might appear based on my beliefs David I appreciate you thank you mate thanks so much Chris it's been a blast if you enjoyed that episode then press here for a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last few weeks and don't forget to subscribe