Prof Robin Hanson | Are People Really Good? Hidden Motives In Everyday Life

Thanks again for joining us. Today I am sitting down with Robin Hanson, who is an associate professor of economics at George Mason University and a research associate at the Future of Humanity Institute of Oxford University. He has a doctorate in social science, masters degree in physics and philosophy and nine, or probably more, when I pulled this bio, a significant amount of years of experience as a research programmer and artificial intelligence and Bayesian statistics with over 31 hundred citations and 60 academic publications. He's recognized not only forest contributions to economics, especially pioneering the theory and use of prediction markets, but also for the wide range of fields in which he's been published. He's the author of the age of M work, love, and life when robots rule the earth as well as several other pieces, but most importantly, the piece that he released December 2017, the elephant in the brain hidden motives in everyday life. Thank you so much for joining me. You have an incredible resume. You speak on so many topics when you asked me what to talk about. I didn't know because you've done a lot over your career, so I really, really appreciate it. Thanks so much. I'm looking forward to a conversation. No, likewise. So let's tee up for listeners who don't know your works, don't know your origin story. Walk through your life a little bit. How did you get to where you're at right now? Well, I've always had intellectual ambitions like high school or college on, but I wasn't very good at focusing. And so I would study a topic for a while and then decide I had seen sort of the key powerful topics in it and look at another topic lustfully from a distance and say, look at all the interesting things over there. And so I moved from subject to subject as I sort of ran out of the most interesting things I've learned about in each subject and saw more important things off on the next subject. And so I did that several times. I started engineering and went to physics and went to philosophy of science. Then went to artificial intelligence and went to basic statistics and finally went to social science and more specifically than political science and economics. And I've managed to find ways to sort of do a little bit of economics over that since then. So I'm luckily a professor of economics, but I still do a pretty wide range of things. I almost really didn't get tenure because I was doing two wide range of things. So I managed to focus just enough and had a lucky break so that I could get tenure. And then after tenure, I've allowed myself to do a wide range of things. So the world doesn't reward that sense of breath. It might be admirable or impressive, but academia and other parts of the world just want you to focus and be the world's best at some particular thing. Either the most amateur intellectuals want to spread widely and in some sense, that's one of the main failure modes of people who don't become professional intellectuals if they fail to focus enough. And yet you've managed to become a professional intellectual while simultaneously failing to focus on multiple topics. So I still expired the edge and got lucky that you know, you can't expect to get the same results as you tried. I wouldn't even, I don't have the courage to try to try and tackle some of the topics that you've written books on, let alone even really have an absolute understanding of. So what, you know, I think that's just sad that is I wish everybody would just take on the biggest most important topics regardless of their ability. Yeah, it's true. You know, they're important. Like, you know, there's this old question people are often asked, you know, what's the most important stuff going on in your field? And of course, the follow-up question is why aren't you working on it? And many people really, most people honestly admit that they're not working on the most important stuff because, you know, they're working on the stuff that they have a personal advantage in or they stumbled into, I mean, the world is rewards certain topics. And those aren't obviously the most important topics. And so people go where the rewards are, rather than what's important. I'm sure there's, and I'm going to, I'm going to just coat this entire interview with layman's terms. So I apologize, but I'm, I'm prefacing with that because I know that I'm not going to have the, the insider, the deaf. But I actually want to go into why people gravitate towards certain topics, certain mindset. I think that's a really good topic that we can sort of explore. But before I really just jump into the meat of this, what I'm curious, you're upbringing your, your family. Um, what prompted this curiosity with the world that allowed you to be this way? Or is it just inherent? It's just something that you felt your entire life? I mean, it's inherent, but I think it's inherent in a lot of people. It's more get beaten out of people and the world failed to beat it out of me. And so the more you want to ask why I'm different, the more the world is good. Why the world failed to beat it out of me? And I think it was in part my arrogance that I was doing well in school. And I thought because I was doing well that I could therefore do what I wanted, rather than what everybody else was rewarding as I thought I could get away with it, seeing as I was doing so well. So let's, let's speak about, let's speak about, um, you know, we can speak about the elephant in the brain. So let's speak about what humans are rewarded for doing what they're enthusiastic about doing. And perhaps even buy a season what they understand to be real. All these different topics that I think are covered, but a lot of people aren't aware of their own brain, how they think, how they come to assumptions, how they make decisions in what they do. All these things. So, so for me, the key context is I spent many years decades really learning and becoming a social scientist. And over those years in each different topic area we have a certain way we think about the subject and analyze it. And I didn't realize that most of the ways we analyze subjects like schools or politics or medicine or even conversation, we're taking most people out their word for why they do it. It's a very natural thing to do because it's what we would say. It's what other people say. And so most social scientists simply take people out their word that say politics is about helping the world and education is about learning the material and medicines about getting healthy. And it feels so natural and obvious that we just accept that and then we build on that. We take that basic assumption and we overlay other data and other theoretical assumptions and try to build up a superstructure of explanations for what goes on there. And the key thing to notice is that a lot of those don't work very well. We find surprising puzzles and disconnects in big areas of life where the simple predictions we make based on the story of what people say they want in each of these areas don't really fit very well. What's actually happening there. And so we struggle a lot. I was just trying to get a big insight that I think other people in history have known that we're not original but that's being neglected now. It's this idea that if you would just go back and change the basic assumption about what something is for, you can explain that a lot of these puzzles much better. A lot of things make sense in light of that. If only will simply set aside your conception about what something is for what you think it's for and ask well what could it really be for. To back up the initial story as to why politics want to do good for the people, education in a certain way, all these different stories that we're told and then we just accept. Explain to me from an organizational point of view or perhaps a psychological point of view, why are these stories that I guess the higher ups or the people that want to portray a certain narrative feel that they need to teach us. Why can the complexities not be understood by the average person because? It is natural to presume there's some authorities pushing this but this really isn't about authorities pushing. This is us naturally presuming and our ancestors for the last hundred thousand years doing similar things. These are just all natural ways, all humans have always tried to portray themselves and so I mean there's this puzzle we can get into why would people be wrong about what they do and why they do things but the story here is that we are all wrong and we've all been consistently wrong for pretty much the same reasons for a very long time and if not authorities pushing it or some new cultural change it's just human nature to be wrong about these things. Is that an evolutionary or a safety mechanism that prompts us to be wrong? So the key idea is we are wrong because it's in our interest to be wrong because we want to project a good image or a safe image to the people around us and these wrong mode of descriptions are safer and nicer looking. So that's the key point. Your conscious mind likes to think of itself as the king of the president of your mind. It's running things. It's the CEO, it's handing out directions and listening to feedback. It's not. It's better to think about as the press secretary. Your conscious mind doesn't actually run things and decide what to do so much as it justifies them as it explains them. So what your conscious mind is in charge of is telling about yourself to other people and justifying yourself to other people and defending yourself to other people if they were to accuse you of things. So in that role your conscious mind isn't just to know what you actually do and why your conscious mind's job is to come up with a good explanation for what you've done so that you look good to the people around you. So that's like say the president's press secretary. The president's press secretary doesn't actually know what the president did or why but when asked a question their job is to come up with the best sounding explanation to make it sound likely it was okay or even good whatever was done and that's your mind. So the key thing that understand is for your distant ancestors they lived in a very social world where there were these norms rules about what you were supposed to do or not supposed to do and that was really important not to get on the wrong side of these norms that is if somebody could credibly accuse you of violating a rule that was a lot of trouble for you and if you could credibly accuse a rival of violating a rule that was that was great because then you could get rid of a rival. So your mind is all about all over trying to make sure that you're on the right side of all these rules and that's what your conscious mind is looking for. So a key point is a lot of our norms are connected to motives. So for example if I hit you and I meant to hit you I'm in trouble. I'm not supposed to just hit you that's why I laid the norm. If I accidentally hit you well that can be quite okay as long as I apologize and try to make up for it I haven't violated a norm norm for accidentally hitting you unless I sort of was extremely negligent in what I went about to hit you right. So you can see the norm is important right there. So if I hit you and somebody says hey you hit them my conscious mind job is to come up with a story about how that was accidental. How I shouldn't be blamed for it because it's not my fault. And so that's an example of your conscious mind trying to come up with good looking motives, safe motives, protective motives rather than accurate motives to know what you actually did and that applies to all of the rest of your life. Your life is full of things you do and full of motives you attribute and excuse to explain those things and the main claim of our book is that you're just wrong a lot about why you're doing things. Why are you consistently and consistently about why we do a lot of things and that messes up social science including economics which was my field. We are just confused about how to explain social behavior and how to do good policy if we don't know the basic reasons why people are doing things. So understanding that understanding that we are wrong a lot in the actions that we take or the presumptions that we internalize. How is it even possible to model different outputs or different ideas if the test group is flawed. How do we ever predict anything. How do we ever improve anything. Well so you're designed not to see your motives, you're designed to see the motives you want to say. So if you just try to look at yourself and try to see your real motives that's not going to go very well. Your subconscious is ready to divert you from that. What you'll have more successful doing is looking at just humans in general, looking at their average behavior and trying to come up with average typical motives to explain average typical behavior. Your subconscious mind is not very well set up to defend against that. It doesn't care so much against that. As long as it's not directed at you. So what we do in our book is to go through 10 different areas of life and in each area we say what's the usual stated motive and then what are a bunch of things that don't make sense that don't fit very well with that story and then offer an alternative motive that fits better with a bunch of the puzzles that we described. And that's our method of analysis to say here's a motive that makes more sense of these various puzzles. And most of these puzzles might not even be things you you have noticed or if you notice thought we're very interesting or important. And so usually they didn't interfere with your usual story about what's your motive but now after hearing about this podcast or reading our book you will be more in a tougher situation pretending to have to use a motive. So we'll have to warn you right up front. We're going to interfere with your ability to pretend to have the usual motives. So that might put you at a disadvantage in the usual evolutionary faking in games because usually your subconscious mind just does a great job of pretending to have a certain motive and getting away with making you think that's lovable because you haven't noticed these contradictions. So sorry about that. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, I mean it's serious. I know, I read our book. Why learn this stuff? It might not be in your system of the stuff. So we do think say social scientists and policymakers have more of an interest and proxy and an obligation to learn this stuff but ordinary people may not really want to know. It might not be in urges to know. What would what would so let's let's again let's bring it down to layman's terms when you start to understand. So the 10 areas that you cover body language laughter conversation a consumption or charity education medicine religion politics. Those are the the 10 areas that you touch on in in the book. Correct. Just want to make sure that we're. Yes, those are them and we could have done another 10 or 20 areas and it had we had a longer book but these are the ones we chose. We think this is enough to make the point clear. There's a lot that I didn't notice in your life. So walk walk me through when somebody does understand something like that. Let's let's pick an example. Whatever one is is top of mind for you. What would what would be brought to light when somebody understands hidden motives in any of these topics. Perhaps politics is too easy for most people. I don't know if they. Well, it starts early in the list. So the things later in the list are some often harder swallow because people have more passions about them but let's start right out with say laughter. Okay. One of the earliest chapters. So you laugh other people laugh. We're all laugh a lot. And if you ask why do people laugh? What are we laughing? You might say because it was funny. If you think about it, it's not much of an explanation. And you might say, well, you look at the literature and say, well, what are the theories people have and they say, well, it's incongruous or it was sort of a benign violation or other sorts of things like that. And these work a little bit but not that well. And so the first order of business is to collect these policies. What are the sort of features and data points that we know about laughter, especially ones that are puzzling? Well, one thing that's puzzling is that speakers laugh more than listeners. And people laugh a lot more when it's social than when it's a social enormous range of times more. And we laugh about a lot of things that would be actually pretty embarrassing to say straight out loud without laughing. So for example, we might laugh at the joke and don't drop the soap in the prison shower. Aha. Now if you think about it, it's literally laughing at prison rates, which in most people's conscious mind isn't the sort of thing you should be making a lot of fun of because it's a terribly serious sad thing. So why would we laugh at that joke? Our standard theory that we're just taking from literature is that laughter is a play signal. You do many things for real and then you also do things in play. So children and play in small animals will play, we'll fight, play run, play chase, play climb. And in those play modes, they don't quite do the real thing. They don't have the claws out for example. But they'll try to go through the motions in order to practice what they would need to do later for real. Humans are very social, so we do a lot of play. A lot of our play is social. And since we have these norms in their very important, a lot of our play centers around violating norms or not violating norms or enforcing them or not. So laughter among humans is often about doing something that would seem to violate a norm, but doesn't really hurt us. And so the key thing is that when we're playing, the thing that can go wrong is that somebody actually gets hurt. So even when small animals are play fighting, one of them might actually get bit, one of them might start bleeding. And at that moment, they need to stop playing. So playing animals and humans all need to be watching out for whether anybody's really getting hurt and checking to see whether we're still playing. And so they need a way to say, oh, stop. We need or not playing. And also a way to say, we're fine. Let's keep playing. And laughter is basically, we're still playing signal. You are doing something that looks like it might hurt, but it doesn't hurt. And you're saying it doesn't hurt. And so similarly, in the prison shower joke, the other person are not in prison. You're not in the prison shower. You don't know anybody in prison. It doesn't let threaten you personally. You feel safe. So even though you're acting like you're violating this norm, you're not actually getting hurt. And nobody around you expects to get hurt. Nobody expects to get called on for this violation of a norm. And so you're safe. And so we're doing this all the time with laughter. We are playing violating norms, going up to the edge of things and checking that we all feel safe. We're okay. And it feels very good because it bonds you to people. You realize, well, they could call me on this and they could, you know, rat me out and report me for this violation, but they won't because they're my associates and we're all having good fun here. I was just reading a point that you mentioned as well about it also in line with laughter. You mentioned that babies laugh more with their mothers. How does that, and I'm just curious as to why you indicated that piece in particular? Well, I was probably just lifting a lot of little correlates that we know of. I mean, you know, but the key point there is, you know, it's a signal of feeling comfortable. And so you do it with people you are comfortable with. And so for example, people often say, I fell in love with him or her because we laughed or he or she made me laugh, right? Well, what is that saying? It's saying you're uncomfortable with somebody who you are comfortable with, right? Who you can violate norms, who you can break rules or pretend to break rules and they will be okay with that and they will protect you and they will not, you know, you can do play fighting with them and they won't really hurt you. Now, now the, when you engage with that and you start to laugh, does it mean that you're coming from a place of feeling uncomfortable and then the laugh brings that brings you together or allows you to feel psychologically safe? Well, it has to be a plausible violation that might hurt you, right? It's not, it has to have a bit of a tooth. So, you know, you can see this from standard comics or something. If they, if their jokes are all about cereal boxes or putting on socks, it wouldn't have much of an edge, they call it. And so it wouldn't be as funny, right? So they have to go to an edge where there seems to be some risk of somebody getting hurt. Yeah. Otherwise, it's not edgy. And then it's not funny. It's funny. It's reassuring me, funny when you go to that edge and then you say, aha, I'm still safe. I mean, of course it's like even being on an amusement park ride, right? You go on a roller coaster or something else like that. What's the fun? It's because it's feel dangerous, but you're not hurt. If you actually got hurt on the roller coaster, well, that wouldn't be fun. It's not funny anymore. No, no. It's not fun, right? No. But if you just sat in the park bench, that's not fun either. You have to go up to the edge of danger, but not go past the edge of danger. And then it's fun, similarly for humor and enjoying comic, we have to go to the edge of seeing that we, in fact, could have been hurt and see that we aren't. And then we are knowing that the other person have our back that they're protecting us. We are safe with them because they could have hurt us. I'm also curious about your point on conversation. And I don't mean to just go through the entire list, but I was reading a segment on the piece of conversation about how conversation does not usually involve the exchange of useful information. It's more meant to show off our mental ability, which I thought was interesting. See, now we're laughing because it's uncomfortable. Back or maybe it is comfortable. We're trying to make it comfortable, but it's an awkward topic. It's not a fun thing to think of. We are now vulnerable because this topic is applicable to what we're doing right now. And so we're vulnerable to the accusation that we are showing off right now, which is a no-no. You're not supposed to show off. And so we laugh because we are somewhat confident that we each won't actually attack the other person on this ground. We feel safe enough there, but we feel enough at risk. So it's to make it funny. I like that. Now, after I can see how that could be an eye-opener for someone, but I don't think that's going to change their entire world. Whereas conversation is something we do every single day. So the structure of our book is first, the first third, we try to make it plausible that people could have it emotive. And we actually have some examples of the animals and other things with humans. And we just try to make it really plausible that in general people could not know about the amongst. And then we have some relatively easy softball chapters where we have descriptions of hidden motives that people will mostly be able to accept. Body language after things like that. And then we sort of move up the scale, the things that people will get more upset about and be more resistant to concluding that their motives aren't what they think they are. And by that time, hopefully we'd convince you, look, there's a lot of hidden motives. It's plausible there could be a motive here. That might not be enough to convince you that there is in fact one, but it means it's not crazy. And so that's sort of the structure here is to first tell you, it's not crazy to have hidden motives. It's not crazy to believe people do not know why they do things. And we can go through some of those other examples if you want. And then we're moving to things more sensitive. So out of these 10 chapters, most people will have like an area that's more sacred for them. And they will be resistant to believing hidden motives in their sacred area. But in the other areas, they'll be fine with that. So for example, if you're really into art, you'll find it hard to accept our story and art. If you're not into art, you're a STEM grad or something, you'll find it quite easily to accept that those artists have hidden motives because that's not you. Same way for religion or politics, you know, that's central to your life, you will find it harder to buy a story. Now the question I have that sort of permeates all of these is if somebody is very self-aware and they do want to truly understand hidden motives even in the topics that they hold so dear and they're so passionate about how do they, I don't know if it's an easy answer, how do they open up their mind a little bit to understand things that run contradictory to their own beliefs? As I said, the key idea is to not think about yourself. That's true. Okay, you did my answer. Just focus on other people. Yeah. And ask on average humans out there, what are they doing when they're doing politics or religion or art or something? And you know, talk about people far away from yourself, people in history, people in other cultures, and try to come up with a story that fits the pattern of what they've been doing. And then if you have to think about yourself, just assume you're like them. Let's figure, okay, so I want to, I want to speak a conversation, but give me one, give me one body language example. So we just touch on that one briefly before we keep going to the more sinister topics as we as we move down the list. So in, since they two people like us talking together in person, I'm not sure how well translates online, we do what are called status moves. We synchronize our eyes and our gate and who talks and who interrupts in ways where we basically agree on our relative status. And it's usually medical. Someone's higher status and someone's lower status and the lower status person has basically agreed to that relationship by accepting the interruptions or accepting that they follow the gate, et cetera, of the other person. And that makes sense except it's not at all something people are aware of and they recently deny it if you point it out. That is, most people when they're talking to say a close friend or associate, they will say they are equals. And that there is no one higher status and therefore they couldn't be doing these status moves were by they're accepting one person as higher status than the other. But in fact, they are. Is there a way to take that position? Take it that you are equal? Well, you, I mean, no, no, sorry, no, two, is there any benefit rather to having a higher status position? And if there is, how would you assume? Well, of course, I mean, social status is very important to humans and in general, people would like to be higher status. But people also like to agree on the relative status. And if you are in fact lower status than someone who is higher status than you, it's often valuable to you to create a positive relationship with them whereby their higher status reflects well on you because a higher status person gains to interact with you and seems to respect you. So, you know, unless you want to fight them for higher status. So sometimes when people are interacting in conversation, it looks visibly awkward because they have not agreed on a relative status and they are fighting over that higher status. And that happens sometimes, but somewhat rare. But that shows you that what happens when you are not agreeing on a relative status. It's not smooth. It's not natural. Very interesting. Very interesting. The only reason I brought it up is because I've interviewed a few other sales individuals that walked through the psychology of selling and the status and the framing of status is important in that aspect as well. And that sort of a business context. But I just let us know. Oh, sure. I'm sure it is. I mean, sure, and the status is just important in lots of context. But you have to be careful. Some people have this idea that because status is important and being higher status is on general good, that you should just always act high status. And that's just not true. You want to find a way that you can agree on some relative status and that may well have you be lowering status, but that could still be better than fighting over the status because we often want to have productive relationships with people who are higher status. It might be, for example, in sales that you want the person you're selling to to feel like they are higher status than you. That might be the way to sell, or it might be that you want to be higher status. It could depend on the product or service you're selling. And you should understand that. I know that. It might just fall into the individual. That's much the product. If you're selling to a high status individual, it might be important that you acknowledge their status. In part of your relationship, if you are fighting for status over them, they say, well, why should I buy a product from yours and listen to you if you're going to be fighting unreasonably for status? I mean, clearly, you're lower status than me. Why not just acknowledge it and we'll continue on with your discussion. Now, let's, so I appreciate that. So let's move to, let's move to conversation. So we're chatting. Apparently, we're not exchanging much useful information. I would argue, I think, because I think you are exchanging a lot. Well, it's less about useful. I mean, it's more about the word useful, unless about the word information. So, I mean, clearly, when people are talking, it's information, right? I mean, they could just babble, and it would be different, right? The distinguishing feature of conversation is it's not babble. The particular symbols have a particular sequence, and they correspond to some meaning. So there is information there. The question is, what's it of and what's it for? So, if you ask, now, sometimes people are talking for very concrete useful purposes. You call up an order or pizza, you know, you knock on a door and ask if they've seen your cat. I mean, you know, it's pretty clear that in those contexts, there is concrete useful information being exchanged. But we also have this common mode, and in fact, most of our words are probably in this alternative mode of just talking conversation. And the question is, what are we doing there? Because if you look at ordinary conversation, you'll notice a number of striking features. What is we talk about pretty trivial things? We don't talk about our most important topics. We are more eager to talk than we are to listen, which goes against this idea that we're sort of trading information. Because if we were trading information, I'd want to be quiet a lot and get a lot of information from you rather than giving away a lot. And we don't seem to keep track of depth. I've told you three useful things, your turn to tell me some useful things. And we have a strange norm of not even sticking to conversation topics very long. We're supposed to bounce around from topic to topic. And, you know, not really be able to predict where the conversation goes. Somebody who's too directly trying to control the conversation topic, well, that's just the more. So what explains these strange features of conversation? Again, they're not very consistent with the simple theory that I'll start. You have to cut that out. Listen, I've had kids jump in. I've had dogs jump in. Like, listen, a phone is not the end of the, this is the new world. This is what we live in right now. All right. All right. So that's what I was saying. Where was I? About exchanging. So the simple theory of conversation is that it's about exchanging information. That would be that the theory would most often offer if we say, why are you talking to someone? And it's a plausible theory. I know things you don't, you know, things I don't. And we can trade and we can both end up knowing more. But it just doesn't fit the details of conversation very well. And the alternative theory we offer, which again isn't that original, is that we're showing off in conversation. So the idea is I have a backpack of tools and resources and so do you. And we're both going to play this game where the conversation goes to random places and wherever it goes, each of our job is to pick out something from our backpack that's relevant. And the more I can pass that test, having interesting relevant useful things to say about whatever topic shows up, the more I must have a pretty good backpack. And if you were to be my associate, then you would have access to that. Anytime you wanted to know something about something, you turned to me and asked him, I could pull something out of the backpack and help you out. And the idea is we are playing this conversation game where we're just supposed to show off our tools and resources on whatever comes up. And so we're not supposed to talk about the most important things to us. And we're not even supposed to be able to predict where the conversation goes. We're just supposed to be able to show off whatever comes up. Now do you feel when that because I that resonates with me immensely because when I'm doing these particularly these podcasts and I'm speaking to all these different experts in their own fields, the all that's running through my mind is what the hell am I going to say that is even a remotely intelligent when they stop going off about, you know, whatever specific industry is or niche or whatnot that they've been doing for the past 30, 40 years. And that's that's my job. So I'm always thinking like, what do I take out of my backpack? But is that something that you feel is even necessary to add to a conversation or do you feel it's mostly just in your own head? Well, we are mostly when we are listening, thinking about what we're going to say next. Yeah. Because we are more focused on our talking than other people, you know, listening to other people and that suggests it's more about us showing off than about getting information from other people. But of course, the people around us, this is a conversation beyond two, they want to see us show off too. They want to see all the people showing off. And so if somebody just sits there and never says anything, that's a bit awkward because we can judge them and we don't know, you know, how good they are and whether they deserve to be in the conversation. So everybody should be sticking in sometimes even if they don't have much useful to say because it's not about useful things to say. It's about coming to this judgment about our relative abilities. And hopefully, once after we agree on relative abilities, we'll agree enough that we like to be with each other. I mean, that's sort of the key meta message. When I'm talking to you, the meta message is, you are worth talking to. You are worth being with. And, you know, after the conversation, we all would like that message to continue, at least for ourselves and with for the other people who want to judge, are they worth keeping around? Should they be in future conversations? Should we not invite them? Do they have enough stuff in their background? Now I understand when we're speaking and we're talking about, well, there's a little bit of negative in the book. I get it because it's difficult to hear this because you don't want it to be true. You don't want to admit to the fact that, for example, you're trying to peacock in a conversation so that you have something intelligent to say, but it's almost like you can't escape the construct that society fits you into, right? You can't escape, you can't escape what that norm is, which is a little bit sad because you're right when you do something smart. I want to say something smart and people listening want to hear you, but they also want to hear me. And that's not a fun thing to always have on top of mind. Well, it's kind of fun to be winning and doing it well, but it's still not fun to admit that that's what you're doing because of the key norms. So part of this understanding always is understand sort of key human norms. If the norms are different, your attitude of behavior would be different. And so one thing to understand is humans have this norm against showing off. Now, that's actually kind of hard to believe if you look at what humans are doing all the time because they're showing off all the time. And it's done pretty transparently, but it's still done a little bit under the surface. You know, somebody goes on the vacation, and they come back and told you all the wonderful things they saw, they're still on the surface pretending that they just have a good time and they want to share that with you. Of course, we all know they're showing off about where they went on the vacation and what they were able to afford and what they were able to do, but we don't call them on that usually. And all through other sorts of conversations we have, we know people are showing off in all other areas of life. I mean, people get a degree. They're using it to show off. They have a nice car and a nice house, nice clothes. They went exercising. They were doing a lot of things to show off, but nevertheless, we have this norm that you're not supposed to admit to directly doing things to show off. You're always supposed to be having some other motives. You like to play sports. You love this thrill of activity. No, you're not trying to be healthy or impressive. That's a side effect that you don't mind, but it's not your purpose for doing it. Why is that? I have no idea why everything you're seeing is 100% correct. And it all makes sense. And you think about all those use-case-use methods. But why do people have an issue showing off? Why does society not accept it? So to understand our core human knowings, you have to know what foragers' lives were like. So we can think of the era of the humans as three hours. There were foragers, farmers in the street. Where in the industrial era? Before us were farmers, but before farmers were foragers. Farmers stay in one place and they plow the land and they work hard and things like that, but foragers wandered the wilderness, the jungle, the forest. And they didn't stay in one place that long. They moved one place to another, which is why they're called foragers. They lived in small groups of, say, 30 to 50. These groups would run out of food in one place, which is why they moved to another place because they wandered a lot. They really didn't have much physical materials. They had to have very light things to carry with them. They didn't own property. They didn't own materials. They didn't even own spouses. The marriage was relative to the relationship's relatively short term. And they were fiercely egalitarian. They compared to, say, chimpanzees or other sorts of primates. Humans had this strong will that nobody was supposed to give orders. Nobody was supposed to act like they were better. Nobody was supposed to threaten other people with physical harm unless you did what they have. You weren't supposed to dominate. You were just supposed to have the egalitarian people, at least outside of the family groups. And they were so fiercely egalitarian that they were wary of any indication that anybody acted like they were better or stronger and more deserving. So, for example, once they had both in arrows, they often had the habit of, they would, before they went on a hunt, they would exchange arrows. And then, whoever arrow hit the animal could come back and deliver the unique. But it wasn't going to be the arrow of the person who shot it because they just exchanged arrows before they went out. And so they would brag about I was the one who brought back to me because I was the better hunter. And so you're not supposed to brag about being the better hunter. You're not supposed to brag about anything. You're certainly not supposed to implicitly threaten people that if they don't do your way, that you will hurt them or do something against them. And so this sort of created this norm against bragging because bragging is sort of one step before dominance. If you say, I could beat anyone in view of a fight, that's implicitly saying. So if you don't do what I say, I'm going to fight you and I'm going to win. And so humans have this strong norm against bragging for that reason. We have so norms for sharing in various ways. And a lot of sort of ancient human norms of say, human norms have this, ancient forages have this norm that if we made a big decision like moving to a new place when we're foraging or say punishing someone, we would all have a discussion that everybody could have their say. And nobody would be seen as dominant in that discussion. Nobody would take the attitude, well, you're going to do what I say because I'm the most you know, strongest guy here or the most popular. We would all appear to have our say. And then what would happen typically happened is the most prestigious person would wait and be quiet and then more near the end say something like, well, what I hear people saying is, which is of course a standard management technique even today. And other people would then accept their summary because they were in fact stronger. So of course another thing about humans is they are not equal, but they are not equal of prestige. And it's okay to treat someone as higher prestige, but not as higher dominance. So we see how we treat people as prestige even how we do why. So if someone who's dominant, you're supposed to look away, but if somebody's prestigious, you could look at them. And so it's okay to be admired and people want to be like you and people want to see what you're doing. So they can copy you. It's just not okay to be threatening with force. And so these are some of the common human norms. And so understanding these common human norms helps you understand why people are hiding their motives so that they can seem to be following these norms. They seem to be egalitarian, they seem to be not bragging, they seem to be sharing, seem to be listening to other people. Even though that's clearly not the case, that's why they that's why they try and mask. All right. And at some level we kind of know that they're faking it. Yeah. And so there's this interesting question about when there are norm violations, when do we feel compelled to act? And so what we actually have to do is just hide the violation enough that other people don't call us on it. We don't actually have to hide it enough that they don't see it. Look, we do see that people are bragging all the time, but we don't call them on it. That's the key point. So the question is when do people call each other on their violations? So an example we discuss in the book is in say the United States and many other places there's this rule against drinking alcohol in public, like walking the street and drinking alcohol. Police know about this rule and they're supposed to enforce it, but they don't want to. Not in their eyes a high priority rule. So they'd rather ignore it if they can, but if they see you visibly with the alcohol bottle in public they kind of have to do something because that's their job. So they're developed as norm that if you put the alcohol bottle in a paper bag and the bag covered the bottle and you were drinking out of a bottle in a bag in public that we couldn't see what the bottle was and that was okay. Now the vast majority of time anybody is drinking out of a paper bag in a bottle in public it's going to be alcohol. Nobody's stupid, but it gives you the excuse to not call them on it and that's how we act in a lot of our social behaviors in norms. We actually often see people by other men's arms where we're not stupid, but we don't have to call them on it if we've got this excuse. And so for example, we often see people flirting. Now as you know, like a lot of flirtation is not inviting norms. There's a lot of people people are not supposed to be flirting with, right? Yes they do. There's a lot of flirting in actual practice. So how does that happen? You might think well they're flirting so subtly that no one else can see, but the target of flirtation. That's not true. Everyone can notice and see. Maybe 14-year-old can't tell the difference or something or even college students who aren't very experienced can't tell the difference but most adults can tell who's flirting with who, but as long as you have foldable deniability they won't call you on it unless of course they want to call you on it. And so norm, you know, violations and calling is the combination of giving people an excuse not to call you, but also giving people a reason not to call you. So you know as we even today see with cancel culture for example. A lot of people do things that would violate cancel culture's rules but don't get called on it and then some people do and because in part no that's the ones they want to choose to call. And so that's you know again what we're trying to do with our hidden motives is to give friendly people an excuse and to protect ourselves from unfriendly people so that they you know aren't able to more maliciously call us on norm. Which of course many of us are always doing like speeding right. Most people are speeding most of the time on the road. Most people don't get pulled over for speeding tickets and so if you feel very unsafe you'll have to stay below the speed limit. If you don't, if you feel somewhat safe then you'll go over the speed limit not so much as to give someone an excuse to call you. Is there a psychological threshold that has to be passed before somebody feels the need to cancel you, call you, point out you violating these norms? Well I mean they will more fundamentally they need to have a coalition who will support them. Right and so it's less about whether they can see the violation than whether if they call on it whether they will get support. And so what we often see for example is small groups bond by violating larger norms but by seeing that they each other get away with it. So even like within a company you might have a set of managers who socialize together and then those things they might be more frank and admit some of the all things they wouldn't want to say in a larger group and the fact that they say those things privately bond them together more strongly because each of the other personnel heard it could quote them to other people and hurt them with those quotes but if they feel confident they won't then the fact that they're opening it up is showing a connection and showing that you are trusting and makes them better able to bond with each other and so you know that's also part of their human norm violation stories is that we try to avoid looking like we're violating norms in general but often under intimate connections we we go out of our way to violate norms just so that we can show each other that we trust each other and that's part of the laughter you know game is that you playfully violate norms in a safe space where we feel like we won't be called and this is all is this is this what is this what's signaling I'm sorry I'm thinking ahead of myself I was I was thinking of violating norms to a garner acceptance the next point you have in the book is consumption purchasing things that may not be for practical use and we can sort of touch on that briefly but you you really already did but is this all like is this what signaling is the so signaling is just a fancy heavy word for showing off yeah and so the question is what are you showing off now showing off only works when you show something that indicates something else like you win the foot race and that shows that you are strong and healthy or you use big words and that shows that you know a lot of big words right and so we are showing off a lot and we don't like to admit that and so when we're attributing motives to ourselves we rarely use the showing off motive as the motive we attribute to ourselves but it does influence a lot of what we do but there are many kinds of things we do want to show off so it's worth noticing how many things there are so you might want to show off how smart you are how rich you are how healthy you are how popular you are how how much how how many people know you how well good connections you have but you also want to show off loyalty you want to show that you are loyal to other people and they are loyal to you and even though you might think showing loyalty is a more admirable thing than showing off smarts or wealth people are more reluctant to admit that they are doing things to show loyalty apart because some often they're showing submission through loyalty rather than dominant they are showing that they are loyal to someone else and of course showing loyalty often shows differential loyalty you show more loyalty to one person relative to another you know if i've only got so many slots at the dinner party and by you then i'm showing loyalty to you relative to or or else i could have invited and we're of course don't want to publicize that fact to the other person we didn't invite yeah of course we're cautious about showing differential loyalty because the people we are showing left loyalty to are it's a negative message but we do spend a lot of time showing loyalty and a lot of effort and that's one of the main things that we signal or show off through the things we do but again if i ask you why did you invite this person at the dinner party and not that person you'll probably not want to give an explicit loyalty reason i'll say they match better something else they're available at the time you thought of them first you know something like that and then that obviously carries quite obviously over into consumption of actual physical goods so things that you things that you purchase and why you're purchasing them right so that's one of the early chapters because we think most people really are quite ready to admit that other people lie stuff to show off and do stuff to show off so i mean it's a part of our culture of this idea of conspicuous consumption and it's true and quite obvious if you look at say people richer than you and all the stuff they buy you ask yourself do they need all that stuff you don't know then why do they buy all that stuff well until they can show that they are more than I do make you look that which is in part true but it's also true to what you're doing it's not just showing that you're rich people show many things through their consumption purchases you know for example we show an example of an ad for a beer that all that does is show the picture of a beer on a beach and you think well how does that show it's a fee beer or a cheap beer or a safe beer or anything else it's not about the beer it's about this image that goes with the beer and you'd say well how does that sell the beer well it's you know this indirect process where once we associate the beer with the beach now other people who want to show that they are beach people can just wave the beer and so advertising and these products and services expand the language of things you can say about yourself you know how how otherwise would you say I'm a beach person you can stand up sandals and some trucks the weather might not be conducive to that but the weather might be conducive to the beer and you know so you can buy a Prius to show your environmental and there's just so many other options here and this helps you understand why there's a lot of ads for things you can't afford that are shown to you why do you keep seeing Rolex ads you're not going to buy a Rolex well you know what the people who lie a Rolex what's the point of you aren't jealous and how are you going to be jealous unless you see the Rolex ads so you got to see the Rolex ads so they buy the Rolex and so when they wave it in your face you're jealous very interesting I forgot that you had a background in in marketing and that and you actually that was that was a large portion of your career as well you were working you were working I don't know that's not me I don't have a background of marketing perhaps my co-author does but no oh no I thought you had not not marketing in the traditional sense oh how did I I read it and I thought it was very interesting oh sorry prediction market excuse me now that's not marketing I apologize that was my okay that was a completely off completely off there I thought I thought you're using like data price to predict consumer behavior not I cannot market the field I respect in the sense that they know a lot of things we economists don't know and our economic tools are not very helpful at figuring out the things they know so it's this sort of mysterious world where we have yet to make progress to develop conceptual insights that will make more sense of the things marketers know no that that does that does make a lot of sense and I just I just when you mentioned that point about just about the ads and how they and how they actually invoke this feeling to an individual I thought the Rolex example is very interesting I find marketing to be incredibly incredibly interesting how smart some marketers are and what they can actually the feelings and the emotions and and also that you know why you're showing a Rolex that to somebody's never going to buy a Rolex is that even is that thought through or is that just by accident by chance that this is the result of the dichotomy I'm an academic and a professor so of course I focus on arguments that can be elaborated explicitly and that are elaborated explicitly as you know most people in the world are academics and professors they function in the world they get things done but they don't reason about it as explicitly or as abstract so you know they in some sense know implicitly how to do things but they put they are and then less able to give you an abstract reason what but you know that's obviously not very necessary for the role of function because the mass majority people can't give you abstract reasons why they do things they just do things it's our job as an intellectual to try to make sense of what people do and to give an explanation for it and of course even to explain how it is that they can do things even though they can't explain them so those are I guess that I guess that sort of tees up the four introductory chapters because after body language laughter conversation and consumption then you go into some very specifically art education charity medicine I would love to what what which one is your particular favorite that triggers the most amount of people medicine tends to trigger the most amount of people in our society so in the United States in our era we are especially respectful and even worshipful of medicine yeah it's one of the sacred things the U.S. tells itself that it gave the world so United States thinks it's a great place and part of why the United States says it's a great place to itself is that we gave the world some really big things that are really valuable that nobody else gave them before we gave it to them and one of those things is medicine I mean other things are of course we got rid of communism and Nazism and we gave the world civil rights and we have the world's best schools or things like that but it's it's medicine that's one of the most distinctive things we say we gave the world and so yeah it's in part because the United States is far beyond the average of the world in terms of how much respectfully you've medicine and how much resources we devote to it so our book is talking about trying to explain the average world-wide and history attitude towards medicine lots so much trying to explain why the U.S. is exceptional or different and again our book is first about just average typical human being but in the United States today because we give so much extra respect and attention to medicine then it is more sensitive to people it's sacred to many people many people say you know my grandpa would have died if not for medicine or my father would have died if not for medicine then so you know medicine is just terribly valuable and terribly important well so they're not they're gonna have trouble hearing our message about medicine so let's say I felt let's do it the usual story about medicine is pretty simple pretty well known you can get sick it can hurt it can kill you there are these experts called doctors and they can help they're expensive and they're kind of hard to judge their quality and so you need insurance to pay for it and maybe regulation to judge who's good but and you need to do what they say even if it doesn't make sense because that's the key to this powerful medicine thing and you know the powerful thing that science gives you which is why science is greater than the United States gave the world which is why the United States is great and you know things like that that's the story of medicine then of course the next step is going to be the puzzle the things that don't fit with this simple standard story about medicine and the biggest in your face thing right from the beginning is that we see almost no correlation between health and medicine which has got to sound like a crazy sounding claim so what that means is when some people in places get more medicine those people in places are not healthier now you might think oh well of course I won't go to the doctor unless I'm sick so you're gonna see a negative correlation between health and medicine and that the people who go to the doctor they're gonna be sick of an average right does that explain it well no as we're looking at say taking a whole population of people who are all well and then saying making some of them have more medicine and then tracking them over time to see whether over time they get sick and whether they get well and whether they're on average healthier and that's where we don't see the correlation we don't see this correlation not just in geographic regions like counties or hospital areas in the United States or even nations across the world we don't see it in randomized experiments we've had a few of those not so many where we take some people and we just give them more medicine by say giving them a lower price for medicine say free so if you take some people and say you guys get free medicine ta-da here you go then those people in response choose more medicine they say okay I've got set up an appointment then I'll be there on Tuesday and they go get more medicine and we track them over time and they're not healthier and that's got to be a real puzzler if you believe the simple favorite story that the reason we get medicine is to be healthy can I can I ask what what the definition of of healthy and what the definition of medicine is like are we speaking like like when you say healthy it would make sense to me that somebody who you know is clinically obese is not going to get healthier if they get more you know Benadryl or like like I want to understand like what that what that definition so the simplest way to find medicine is medical spending okay I mean obviously medicine has thousands of different things and we need a way to count among all the little different things we could do it by mass of medicine that I haven't said very good was they do it by hours that you spend with them that might be better but maybe the better economic measure would be spending how much are you spending on medicine and the usual measure of health is living or dying now yeah people are also even when they're alive can be more or less healthy and we measure that as well but honestly most variation in health is living or dying so living or dying is a nice first cut although in some of the experiments they weren't big enough to really see much variation living or dying and then we have to use measures of functioning basically we say what can you do in your world life that you want to do with versus healthy in your way and so some standard measures of that and so you know from health is either are you dead or it's can you phone me it's not a good litmus test for health right and for for amount it's mostly spending although it can also be hours your number of doctor visits that can also study based on that but the consistent results of power view that is basically not much correlation it's not the only possible so another key principle here is people are often tempted to take one puzzle and then come up with an ad hoc explanation for it and then go to the next puzzle and come up with a separate new ad hoc explanation for that that's not a very disciplined approach so our key discipline is to collect a bunch of puzzles all at once and then look for explanations to satisfy to explain them all together or as many of them as possible together that's already disciplined if we didn't have that discipline we really just couldn't be making much progress here to explain these things because everything you can explain with an ad hoc explanation probably explain them with an ad hoc explanation but can you find an explanation that explains several puzzles at once so that's why you want to collect multiple puzzles before you try to explain so what else do we find puzzling about medicine well we see that people are surprisingly uninterested in information about the quality of medicine we've had you know situations where people are about to undergo heart surgery and where they face a few percent risk of dying and we've asked them are you interested knowing the track record of your surgeon or your hospital in terms of the surgery and whether they die and no they're not you can give them the information and they don't act on it that's a puzzle there's also we have lots of things that affect health not just medicine we have air pollution we have sleep we have nutrition we have exercise and we find that people are vastly more interested in medicine than these other influences on health I've taught health economics many times in the past and health economics courses are usually overwhelmingly on medicine even though we can see a lot of other things that correlate with health much more strongly and clearly than does medicine so there's this question why is everybody so obsessed with medicine when other kinds of health correlates seem to matter more why aren't they very interested in those other health corrupt like people would really want there to be a nationalized health system or some important health system they don't really care about policy about exercise or nutrition or sleep they don't think that there should be any policies for those things that's just things for people to do why is that why is that though well that's one of the puzzles we want to explain here in this package of you know to explain the whole package of things and another puzzle might be people spend more on medicine when they get richer if you move from a formation of a rich nature and then you keep your income the same you'll spend more on medicine in the new place because people around you are spending more as they're keeping up with the Jones' effect in medicine okay so we give some other puzzles in in the book but our key explanation is that what medicine fundamentally does is it helps people show that they care about other people and a lot of people allow other people to show that they care so our analogy would be Valentine's chocolate so as you know on Valentine's is this tradition where you give your loved ones some chocolate now when you give your loved ones some chocolate you choose a quantity and you don't choose the quantity based on how hungry you think they are that's not the measure of how much chocolate you should give it's more about giving enough so that people who didn't care as much as you wouldn't be willing to give that much you're trying to show that you care by giving more and in doing about quality if you have a private opinion about the quality of the chocolate or they have a private opinion about the quality of the chocolate that doesn't matter so much for the gift it's primarily about commonly shared signals of quality if everybody thinks a certain brand of chocolate is great then if you give them that brand you expect them to give you credit and they expect to give you credit even as many of you actually like that brand of chocolate as long as they you didn't know that fact and if on Valentine's day you don't have someone to give you chocolates you might buy yourself a box of chocolate and leave it on the desk it worked back when in the days of course when you went to the desk it worked why because you want people to know that you are cared for in the same way that other people are cared for is they are cared for with chocolate then you want chocolate because you want to see cared for so the analogy with medicine here is we give medicine to show that we care about people so the quantity of medicine isn't set by how much you need it's set by how much we need to spend to show that we care about you which is why we keep spending more as we get richer even if it's not especially effective and that's why we don't care very much about the private signals about the quality of medicine although we're very sensitive to public signals about the quality of medicine if I tell you privately some surgery is effective or not you really don't care but if we all have a perception about this hospital being high quality or something then you care to be given to the high quality perceived hospital because that's something that will indicate whether somebody cares about you and if you don't have other people the biomedicine for you you'll buy it for yourself I just find it fascinating um apology I didn't I'm just I'm just laughing as you as you go through this because everything you're saying is not illogical and is nothing that as you lay it out and you explain it is counter to what we could assume to be true right it's not so far-fetched you're not technical point or obscure details or something these are pretty basic features of your world but I can't see why people could be triggered because they are saying things about your motives that you don't necessarily want to admit to you don't want to admit that you're primarily focused on showing you care about people or having them show they care about you and that makes it awkward um but though you might you might think that researchers would be excited by this so you know our book isn't necessarily something ordinary people should read if in fact it'll make them harder to you know be have the usual illusions that are their benefit but you might think that economists social scientists policy makers they should be interested in the topics because it's less about them personally and more about the worlds that they're trying to study and uh health so you would think policy makers would be excited to read this book because it helps them understand this world they were struggling with that you know we so far struggled with good policy to help medicine or policy to help education or even conversation but once you have these insights you think well now I will be in a better position to make better policy but we have not really seen much in the way of policy makers excited about these insights mostly see ordinary people saying yeah that's true that makes sense and satisfies my curiosity about how the world works but much less we've seen social scientists like when I build on it so like we have these 10 chapters as I said you could do 10 or 20 more chapters what I hoped for somewhat is people saying okay I'll do another chapter I will take this basic idea and I will apply it to one more area of life and see how we can go with it we have seen almost none of that is that is that because the policy makers social scientists economists they they still have to sell the idea to the public and so we have the something our topic of when we discuss conversation we talked about ordinary person-to-person conversation but actually what we described also applies to media conversation and academic conversation and even policy conversation all these conversations pretend to be about sharing information but they're really more about showing off your mental toolkit so in academia for example people will write a paper and talk about how it's policy relevant as if some policy maker was supposed to like read it then do something with it but in fact it's mainly to show off their ability to do difficult things it's a pulling something out of the backpack and so academics don't really much care about whether their paper will be applied in any way and they don't really try very hard to make it useful they are just trying to show off their mental backpack of tools and see this again because there's fashions and topics they want to stay with the current topic and that's also true in the policy world there's a rule of thumb in the policy world there's no point in issuing a white paper on a topic that hasn't been in the news in the last two weeks there's no point nobody will care you have an idea about how some policy meets the difference but if the news media is not talking about it no other policy people are not interested either why because they only want to talk about what's in the news lately because they want to follow this usual conversation rule of talking about whatever the current topic of the conversation and so if topics that our next chapter of the book you could do isn't one of the current topics of news media conversation well then it will be of interest similarly if in the current topic the motive you would come up to explain is not a motive people want to hear about that will not be a welcome contribution to the current media conversation on the topic i want to do i want to do thank you for that i want to do one more on politics i just want to understand what a political decision is and what it isn't and why we come to those decisions and i think it's relevant given the fact that this is something that if you are involved in politics or political activism you will find it harder to accept about yourself although you might find it very easy to accept about your political right off and you so focus for the moment about your political rivals and what explains their behavior and i have this slogan politics is not about policy so if you ask people why are you involved in politics what's the point the usual answer will be well i am and do right a does they do right if you will i am trying to push political opinion in a direction so that political action will be pushed in a direction we will elect different people who will adopt different policies which will then have different effects on the world that's the usual story and that roughly explains for a distance why people would be talking about politics and why they might march or write articles about it and why they might vote for some people and why those people might take political positions and so again as in all these other areas it's not crazy on the surface you have to dig a bit the least the surface to see the puzzles that don't stick very well with this simple story oh well what are some of the puzzles then well we are not very attentive to information about politics we are actually quite gullible relative to other areas of life about our political opinions we're very emotional about our political opinions we care about politicians having positions that agree with ours even when those politicians can't do anything about that topic so we care about what the president thinks about education even if the president doesn't do much about education we like the people around us to share our political views even if it doesn't really affect what happens at the national level we choose to vote or not but that isn't very sensitive to how pivotal the election is and how likely it is to to turn on our vote we have these huge puzzling correlations where our political opinions on a wide range of topics all correlate strongly to this one main ideological or political axis we disdain compromise so when we talk about politics we overall only talk about what we would do if we were king we very rarely say what we would give up to get what else as a practical compromise although of course practically politics is all about compromise and politicians who are good at compromise do not get rewarded by voters because of that if you are good at setting up backroom deals and working out language of bills to get things to happen you don't get votes for that you get votes for taking positions on subjects that you can't do anything about so these are all dramatic public about our political attitudes and actions and the alternative story we have is that instead of a do right you are an aporetic which is specifically the name of an old Soviet political operative who was primarily focused on showing loyalty to the party loyalty to their associates in the political party so we tell the story in the book about how there was a meeting and lots of people were sitting in a meeting listening to someone talk and the speaker mentioned Stalin who was the leader at the time and everybody who was so eager to show that they love Stalin because people who didn't got killed shut up and started clapping loudly and they clapped for 10 minutes and of course near the end of that 10 minutes everybody's asking how much longer do we have to clap I don't want to be the first one to sit down because then I look last loyal to the other people who's gonna sit down first so eventually somebody sat down first and that might they got taken off to Siberia now the rest of us aren't in such a dramatic situation but we still face the same kind of incentives our effect on the national election or even the city election is minuscule but our effect on the people around us and what they think of us is large so we're primarily expressing political opinions and voting and doing political things in order to get the people around us to think well and relate well to us and we not cite some statistics people are really quite willing to be discriminatory about politics it hand out a scholarship on the basis of politics they want their family members to marry people agree with the politics they care a lot about political association and so the idea is that your actions of politics are mainly to show the people around you that you are with them and they're not so much to actually make a difference do you find that that that dogma that that people hold on so dearly to their political ideology is that an American thing or is that a political thing no this is a thing all through history and all through the world I'm just trying to show passionate they want to show that they are I mean we may be in the America added especially time of high conflict between different political fives but there's always been this idea to show your allegiance on political five it's just the consequences vary so I like in the fall on time the consequences were even now in the United States the consequences are that extreme but they might be hired and they were at other times in place I just noticed I've noticed it in particular when I understand politics and I look into what's happening in the states right now and the elections are coming up and I was just curious because I see people that picks almost seemingly non-political topics based on their party affiliation for example wearing a mask seems to be a political topic now which I don't really understand how that turned political but it is so that's just one-dimensional thing so it's worth talking about that when so politics is an eye-dimensional space right there's this whole space of all these different policies but there's a tendency to form an alignment along one axis and then to focus on the projection of other things along that axis because we're all looking at what you're doing and saying who side you want and as soon as we see a correlation with more people on this side wear a mask then on that side wear the mask now wearing a mask becomes a sign of being on that side and now people who are who do want to seem on that side are more pushed to do that thing so you have to see back mechanism where by things just get politicized because the eager thing is to show what side you're on and the incidental thing is which whether you wear a mask or all the other things but of course you don't say that you don't say well the reason I'm wearing a mask is I want to show my political loyalty you say I'm wearing a mask because it saves how dare you ignorant you know a moral person that wear a mask because you know you're talking about the mask itself as opposed to the more fundamental motive which is to be on a side and show that you're on a side very interesting I love I love these concepts I'm gonna you know listen I don't know if everyone would enjoy this book but if you if if you if you but by now you're put a lot of the basic concepts you probably have some idea whether you want to read the book yeah this is absolutely fascinating for me absolutely fascinating and now we haven't talked about what good is it though no we haven't I actually I avoided that topic because I was afraid you're just gonna say there there is none there's no happy story it measured it's it's moderate it's not overwhelming but there are several benefits here so some benefits are personal so many people like say me are somewhat nerdy our subconscious doesn't do social reasoning as well as other people so when my subconscious tells me what to do it's not as accurate at guessing what other people want me to do and what would go well here please so for many people they just act in the social world and it goes very smoothly because their intuition just tells them the right things do and they do it and so they don't actually know that their theories about the social world contradict their behavior because they're not explicitly thinking about their behavior but if you're a nerdy less socially skilled person like myself it may do you well to have more explicit theories about the world to help you act more intelligently socially I mean that'll come at a cost of your being less sincere in some sense perhaps the teaming to calculate but since you're already somewhat socially incapable and that I still be a net win for you you might also be a person for whom understanding other people's motives is especially important it might be a salesperson or a manager and in those jobs it's central to your job you get that wrong you get the whole thing wrong and so it might well be worth having a bit more conscious knowledge about how these things work because it's so central to your job and thirdly you might be a social scientist or policy makers where you're trying to make better policy for education or for politics or for medicine and then if you misunderstand the basics of the area you've been studying your whole life you will just go where you're wrong and your problem gets harder now so I would say the usual problem people think they have is take the usual thing people say they want them get the more of it but now you have to take the thing people say they want and know the thing they really want and you have to find a new policy that continues to pretend to give them the thing they say they want but now I actually give them more of the thing they really want then they will be interested in adopting your policy because if you just give them more of what they pretend to want without any indication to give them more of what they really want they won't actually be interested in that plausibly explain a lot of policy failures where we have consistently come up with on what looks like on paper better ways to give people what they say they want and people are just not interested probably because they know that's a level they are not interested because they're lying about what they want very very interesting I appreciate that you you got all the points I wanted to cover so thank you so much I want to I unless there's something else I think we covered a lot of elephant in the brain I wanted to ask just some personal life lesson questions if that's okay you just although I want to make one final statement which is yes I love people and you love people and it's fine to love people even knowing all this stuff right so you might think this is a downer and this is sort of a people hating sort of attitude and it certainly doesn't have to be I mean if you want to hate people maybe this will give you an excuse but you don't have to hate people I think humans are by far the most interesting animals on the planet or in some sense the most admirable plant animals on the planet in terms of how well we can cooperate in the nice things we do for each other and for other animals and so humans are great they may not be the angels they pretend but they can still be fascinating loveable creatures and a highly complex and a little bit confused all at the same time which can make some more loveable exactly exactly very good okay so now the only questions that I really have left are more to do with you what you're working on now and then I have some life insight questions like I mentioned life lesson questions so you've done so much over your career what what are you interested in now what's your next book like I always have been struggling I've struggled between lots of little interesting topics that come across every day versus focusing on a long-term project and setting those small things aside that's been my conflict all my whole life so my my plan for my next book is about paying for results how we can reform a lot of different areas of life by creating institutions where you basically measure what you want and you pay for it and we could reform medicine and law and a lot of other areas of life and politics in particular through paying for results it's a simple concept but it just hasn't been pursued as far as you can go with it and I wanted to just show how far you can go with the idea you know it's not something that I expect people to immediately adopt I'm sort of a setup for the long run I'm often like trying to create books that will sit on the shelf in the long run a later on someone will pull it off and maybe do something with it but that's sort of the idea the next book I want to be writing on and I have you know a lot of stuff already on it but there's all these little things that come up every day that tempt me away like eat just today I was tempted to think about paternalism because it's something I've written on the past and I just realized that I could say well the key thing to understanding paternalism is really about dominance and people are just pretending to care about other people and so I mean I realized I hadn't said that as directly and strongly as I could and it's relatively simple thing to say but paternalism is where we have policies that like tell other people what to do as if we were apparent and it's something of a theoretical puzzle because you could just give people advice instead of forcing them to do something but we don't just give them advice we do force them to do things and questions why are we bothered with that and lots of argument about why that but I think the simplest explanation is because many of us are control freak you just look at your ordinary lives and the people around you you know there are control freak surrounding what does that mean there are people who just push harder to get their way not just to make sure they can run their life their own way but to do shared things their way they make us all you group go to their restaurant or they have the vacation of their favorite time and they push even farther to get you to do things their way they may criticize your order what foods you eat or whether you exercise enough and things like that why do they do that well in part because it feels good and they win I mean they dominate humans have this tendency to sort of struggle for dominance and one signal of dominance is people do things your way and I think that's just such a familiar feature about personal interactions that I think we should when we look at the blood larger vote of welfare we should just say well that's the same thing going on there we should why do you even presume it's something different I mean people say it's different but I did this poll yesterday I guess the finished yesterday they basically saying in your world the people who are control freak do they correlate with do getters and they answer well yes for you one larger people who are do goters are also tend to be control freaks why because in some sense they weren't trying to rationalize they're pushed they're pushing they're trying to make you and everyone do things their way but they are saying they are doing it all for your own good that's a common thing people and managers do that of course people people fight to become a manager but when they are a manager they say they're doing it all for everybody's own everybody's collective good right so it's a very common thing to rationalize stroke the push for dominance the push for control in terms of trying to help everyone and that just makes to me is a very simple story about paternalism it it should be the devolved story doesn't mean that it's never useful because of course it's good to have leaders right just because people try to become leaders out of selfish reasons then they gain selfish benefits doesn't mean we don't need leaders but it doesn't mean we should have just a default suspicion that we need a higher standard than them claiming that they are useful for us to accept it right so we should have some say default presumption against paternalism and then allow in particular cases that to be overturned just like among our friends we have a default that other people can't just tell you what to do even if they're pushing and we're dominant you know it's your life and you should be able to do what you want and they'd have to overcome that presumption to push you out of it anyway that's something on my mind in the last day you were asking about something I am no I'm curious and to follow up with that it's a very interesting topic and again the book will obviously be another really really interesting read but when you when you put so much effort into thinking on a topic and putting together a work and speaking on it for a period of time do you not why do you not double down and and not want to further gain acceptance of a particular topic or further teach it or or see something to like through to fruition a little bit more than switching to something completely different if you like to be disservice to to your knowledge is a very basic deep question so first I'll say like ordinary people's basic reactions to intellectualism is to be a dilatant right if you just take an ordinary person you talk about interesting topics they will jump from topic to topic they won't focus their life on one topic right so it's just humanly natural to want to sort of have an encompassing use on everything and to not spend too much time on anyone topic that's just human nature okay and so you have to overcome that to make someone become a specialist they have to see these strong career rewards to be a specialist and to be induced to become a specialist and so you could say I'm lazy and of allowed by ordinary human nature to to influence my actions more than I should I'm not self-controlled or disciplined enough that would be one interpretation another interpretation might be to say that well maybe I've specialized in sort of the high level thinking and I'm not so good at all the details so you know there's there's room in the world for people who specialize at a more abstract level and a more making the connections level and sort of noticing the very basic points level and left on the getting into the details so I mean you know in some sense a lot of being a intellectual just being a worker of any sort is deciding what is my specialty what what will be the thing I put skills in and that I am good at relative to what other people are good at so it could be just a very particular topic that as I learn everything there is to know about medicine say and then I am the expert who talks about medicine and then I have this point about medicine that I know a lot about that I have a question as well so I say I have this basic point about medicine which I've just outlined before might ask well if I learned a lot more about medicine how much would that really help me makes that general point it might get me invited conferences more or into journals more but then I could be making that general point I'd have to be making all these other points and so what a lot of people do is they invest in credibility in area by doing a bunch of specific things and then they have a point that isn't very connected to all the things they use to get credibility that's just the thing that gives them a license to say something and a lot of academia and intellectual world is that way when people actually say the points that that most matter most of the rest of their intellectual world wasn't a preparation or support for that it was just credibility it just made you seem more authoritative and so that we would listen to you on this thing you said but actually all the other work you didn't actually make much difference on this point and so if that's a situation I might choose not to invest in all that credibility and more become a specialist in noticing these points and so if you want to like notice the high level point then you want to have an experience about seeing a lot of other high level points that are somewhat similar at that level of abstraction so I think that even though most people over their career they start to slow down at a certain age if your specialty is connecting things across a wide range you have the scale economy that the more things you see and the more things you can connect and so you will peak at a later age because you're still collecting so analogies right so the more I mean for each of these things I tell you about part of what's you know makes me feel more comfortable thing is that I can see a lot of things like it in other areas and so I'm focused more on the rather than say go into medicine in great detail go into other similar things than show by analogy so for example the chapter on education is script from my colleague's book the case against education Brian Kaplan so he died in education now the question is people are skeptical about his claim about education even though we're making the same claim in this book and part of the reason they're skeptical is that just seems like a crazy claim if all you ever studied was education then it would seem crazy it seems crazy to think education isn't about learning material because all your life that's been the whole topic you've been talking about in education I think you can only start to appreciate the hypothesis that education isn't about learning material when you see the same pattern in a bunch of other areas and that's the point of our book here is to say look there's this idea that makes sense and there's a whole bunch of areas where it applies to and I think they each strengthen the other in the sense of seeing all package of the same kind of pattern makes it more plausible that the pattern is there in any one area so I'd say our book makes it plausible that education could be about something else because look at all these other areas that are about something else that makes a lot of sense so there is there is a significant amount of understanding of the diminishing returns especially in your own career as well and that you see when or an academic sees when they take something on and that's that's sort of what's fueled your your career and I and I appreciate that I'm taking it finding more discoveries even if I can't support them with the much authority or you know gravitas yeah I'm not going to gravitas authority route because there if I wanted to see make the claim I'm at medicine I want to spend my whole life doing surgery or doing biochemistry or huge statistical databases or knowing the history of medicine and Serbia I mean and I'm pressing you with all the details I know and then I would be this authority who you might listen to about it but the point I would make wouldn't be any stronger for say in terms of the evidence it would just be yes I was a person you should listen to another question where is a resource that you go to or resources to learn new topics to understand new things well early in life I recommend textbooks honestly textbooks are our standard way to summarize a lot of important material all in a dense place so until you've read most textbooks in most areas just read textbooks don't even bother it don't look at the news because the news is the most recent stuff that changes it doesn't really last after textbooks go to review articles that's an attempt to take dozens or hundreds of papers in an area and summarize them all for an audience learn review articles and then once you've read lots of review articles you know at this point I mostly look for puzzles I just try to track different areas and look for things in the puzzle that stand out as going well my usual theory didn't predict that because that's my data puzzles are my data no no no no no no no let's just a bubble and try to explain them together and so whenever I notice a bubble but I'm here just so just this week I noticed a bubble it flags it away and I apparently most animals if you give them a choice between two kinds of food one that's just sitting there and one they have to work at they go after the one they have to work at except domestic cats apparently and of course you're right so that's a that's a puzzle right and I just came across this week and that I go that's gold I don't know the explanation yet I'm not trying to make the explanation yet I'm gonna put it in my pile of puzzles and later on I'll see what other puzzles are nearby and see if I can find something to make something do you delve into any non-academia works are there authors books that you enjoy or is that just pure pleasure reading there's nothing there that can really provide well I like many people I like movies and of course movies often depict a world and I'm often asking myself how believable is that world or if there's something believe about the world do my theories predict it and of course this is what I can do in my personal life as well but movies are give you a sort of set of more dramatic examples but just in general I'm constantly asking about the world around me did my theory predict that do our best theories predict that or is that a bubble and turns out there's just a lot of puzzles you'll notice in your ordinary life if you bother to look or just like we talked earlier about people being more eager to talk than the listen I mean most people know that but do they know what the bubble do they realize that their simple theory of conversation doesn't predict that that's the key is to notice a pattern and then wonder whether your theory predicts it because often people just see things they nod and it's familiar and then they have this theory about the world and they don't connect their theories as a behavior they see around them they just have an evil very else that out for you but it's not tested against the world very interesting very very interesting and now just I guess pulling out of your career and your success it's a very light question but I do ask it to everyone so I apologize if it seems very light but I always ask a simple lesson that you would tell your younger self based on your career a simple lesson I don't know if it's a lesson but there's this simple advice which is just lives are long so you can do a lot in most any area if you will just stick with it because often young people are they're in a rush and they feel like time's up and it's too late and oops they did the wrong thing and now it's okay and that's just not true we're rich and we live a long time and so you didn't apply to the right college or go to the right graduate programmer choose the right advisor or you quit and went to work or you made the wrong choice at some point fine you still have 40 years left in your life you could do a lot in 40 years even without permission or official endorsement you can just do it I mean another key point is a lot of people want to learn through school and you can just learn without school if you're smart and motivated you don't need school to learn you can just pick up books or articles or even just think for yourself and just work on it and so you know in some sense the main advice is if there's a topic and you want to it's important to you and you want to go at it just go at it you know as best you can get help find get help if you can get teachers to teach you great if you find a textbook great if you don't have those things you can just make progress by struggling at it as long as you will just keep going year after year or even decade after decade I mean the problem is people are often interested in something temporarily and then they lose interest and then they drop it right and then of course you won't make progress after that fight and then this is the this is the question that is in in line with the name of the podcast what does success mean for you well so for me I've always thought of you know Einstein or people like that as my heroes so I always thought of success as having insights that you communicate to the world that change how the world thinks and on big important topics so it took me a long time to realize that other people don't see success that way which explain why a lot of other people do different things than I do to me it was so obvious that that wasn't the thing you wanted to do that I didn't even bother to ask whether people around me were pursuing that goal I assumed that they were pursuing that goal in different methods and then I was wondering whether they were doing different things to me but again just as with the book it's simpler just think they have different goals for many people that's not the image of an intellectual they aspire to be they want to be a respected professor of Harvard or a person with a long beta or somebody with students come to or somebody who's invited to give prestigious dog that's the idea of what they would want to be and then they do the things that produce that outcome why do you think that that was your definition of success I'm trying to understand what that was yeah well I mean I was excited to see these powerful insights in physics that was one of the areas that really excited me when I was in high school in college there were all these powerful deep insights that really helped me see the world differently and seemed to have a lot of leverage on understanding the world and that so engrossed me that I thought well that was the thing you want to do you want these powerful deep insights and then of course I heard of heroes like Einstein or other people like that since it's roughly heroes and as I said before I was arrogant enough to think I could be one of those I thought well I was good at anybody I know and so that's the thing you want to be so let me try to be that and that meant I had to like think about things directly myself I couldn't just take people's word for it I had the things through things and I had asked myself what I believe and I had asked myself what was missing and I had the define for myself what was important I mean you know that's how you would think of Einstein or Feynman or any other being person you would say well they took on the world they said this is the world in front of me I asked myself what's important what's missing what makes sense and I have to make those judgments and I have to follow them by choosing to allocate my time to think and and looking for long shots looking for things that has at least a chance of being a big thing I mean you know you don't you don't want to go through a long shot but so long that like there's almost no chance on the other hand you don't want something that's so small that even if you do succeed who cares looking for that in the middle it's got a chance it could be really big there's it looks like there might be a way to do it and you take a bunch of little lottery tickets you keep trying and it turns out it's not actually that hard so what I didn't realize is that it would be much easier to actually have powerful insights that matter a lot than to get anybody to care what I didn't realize is those successful people who had the big insights they were a selection out of lots of other people that insights but keep the world cared about their insights and not all of the others and that's more the puzzle a lot academia well why does the academia only care about some of these insights and then once you understand academia better you can come to understand that but that was my misunderstanding I say I see these heroes and they're celebrated for their insights and I say I want to be like them I want those insights and of course they're really also insights packaged with you know well done internal academic politics but that's what not what they talk about when they talk about these heroes so I wasn't thinking about I need to have an insight and do academic politics well I was just thinking about I need to have the insight very good very interesting I love I love understanding how your mind works too I think it's very you've listen you know outside of just the the incredible career even the way that you thought about your own career and success I just find it's very interesting to unpack that because I think the people all look at success and career and growth in different ways so I appreciated the fact that you said life is long I think it's incredible advice and then use that long life to understand yourself your drivers and to you know take something and stick with it yeah and and and you can do it just just just figure out what that is and just go with it for and it's all right to make a mistake and make a misjudge and keep your judging you can go 20 years misjudging you'll still have many decades after that yeah but to finally fix something and stick with it all right the last last thing I got to do is to get all of your socials and your website but before I get that is there anything else that you want to just to close up closing thoughts on this no I've enjoyed our conversation I'm happy to do it again sometimes no likewise well next book considering it's going to be brand new we'll go through all of that I'll learn about a whole bunch more and we'll do another one when you know when that's going to be out your next book oh no I'm trying it first so so now you have some time right because you have some extra at home time so now you should you should have it through all right um okay so where do people go to connect with you online well my website is Hanson.gmu.edu and on Twitter I'm at Rob and Hanson and I have a blog called overcomingbyus.com so of course you can just search my name you'll find what's the thing.