Geoffrey Miller || Signaling, Mating, and Morality

It's great to have Jeffrey Miller on the podcast. Jeffrey Miller is the author of Virtue, Signaling, Spent and The Mating Mind, the co author of METE What Women Want, and the co editor of Meeting Intelligence. He has a

BA from Colombia and a PhD from Stanford. He's a tenured evolutionary psychology professor at the University of New Mexico and has also worked at the University of Sussex, the Max Punk Institute for Psychological Recas, Church University College London, London School of Economics UCLA, and NYU Stern Business School. He researches evolutionary psychology, sexuality, consumer behavior, behavior, genetics, intelligence, personality, creativity, humor,

and mental disorders. He is a long ass bio. He is over one hundred ten act publications, that's given over two hundred invited talks in sixteen countries. Sorry I'm laughing. His research has been featured in Nature Science. Ecuse me. His feature is featured everywhere, like you look, Jeffery, it's so good to have you on the Psychology Podcast. Finally, it's great to be on. Yeah. We've been kind of kicking around a lot of these ideas for a long time.

You were a contributor to that Mating Intelligence volume long time ago, so you know, we've been Powells and colleagues for ages. And it's great violently on your show. I have so much to talked about. When I was doing prep for this, I was looking in the archives that a lot of your auto work, and I was able to start to see these larger patterns and threads that have weaved through your career. And it's going to be very very interesting to talk to you about this and

also discuss things we might not agree on. But I don't think it'll get to to you know, in the ven diagram like non overlapping. But okay, so I want to just start off by talking about the ideas in The Meeting Mind. Because you're approaching a ten year anniversary, is that correct on that book, it's actually a twentieth anniverse twenty Oh my god, yeah, I know it's crazy.

So yeah, twenty years ago I published this crazy book called The Mating Mind, How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature, which I wrote in the late nineties, and it was based on my original Stanford PhD that I wrote way back and sort of ninety through ninety four, so it's it's ideas that have been out there for a while. So that book had a lot to do with signaling theory, and signaling theory seems to be a very prominent theme in your career, and you applying it

now in lots of really interesting ways. We'll get to regarding politics and ideologies and virtue signaling. But that idea of morality as signaling was on one tiny part in The Mating Mind, part of a broader framework. I mean, you talk about a lot of things, you talk about morality. You know. When I read that book, I started to see the whole world in that way. Everything everywhere I looked. I was like, oh my gosh, we're all just these

signaling animals and it almost drove me insane. So thanks, by the way for almost at a certain point in my life, almost had a nervous breakdown because I was like, what's real anymore? But I thought you could talk about your earlier work that led to the mating mind on signaling theory and the handicapped principle and all these cluster of ideas that led up to the maiding mind, because I think that'll provide a really good foundation for your

newer research. Yeah. I think signaling theory was one of the big red pills that I've had to absorb in life.

And I got into it a little bit when I started studying sexual selection way back in grad school at Stanford, and I was fascinated by sexual selection as a process animals choosing their mates for certain traits, and then the traits evolving not because they're useful necessarily for survival, but just because they're attractive and or they convey credible information about the individual's good genes or good behavior or good brain or whatever. And so in sexual selection, a lot

of the signaling is kind of sexual signaling. It's for sexual attraction. But then after I kind of wrapped my head around that, I got deeper into the kind of game theory of signaling. So I spent four years working in an economics department at University College London, where all of my colleagues did evolutionary game theory and they were trying to figure out in animal in humans between institutions, how do people strategize, How do group strategize? How do

you do things like signal? Maybe in geopolitics, if you, you know, violate our sovereignty in some way, we are going to do military force against you. So how do you saber rattle effectively? That's one kind of signaling issue. Or in morality, how do you signal that you're a good person, whether it's attracting a potential mate, or attracting a colleague, or signaling to professional colleagues that you're reliable

and trustworthy as a scientist, any of that. So, once you start seeing signaling, it's absolutely everywhere, and it kind of takes a while to regain your mental equilibrium. It really because you really start, yeah, you start seeing you realize at least half of what everybody is doing all the time is signaling in some way about some trait

to some audience, including ourselves. Yeah. Yeah, including signaling to ourselves about how great and smart, we can't really boost our own self esteem or or have those feelings that

evolved that good feeling when our ego is boosted. Yeah, well, okay, Son, can you connect signaling theory to sexual selection and talk a little bit about how the meeting mind offered an alternative perspective on the evolution of our cognitive characteristics and particular creativity that wasn't up to that point wasn't represented

in the literature. So the traditional thinking about, you know, the evolution of human intelligence and creativity and language and all these amazing distinctive traits that we have is that those traits were useful under prehistoric conditions, mostly for survival or for living in groups, for hunting, gathering, avoiding predators, making allies, or helping a group to compete against other groups. And I think there's a lot of legitimacy to certain

as respect to the human mind being good for those things. Absolutely, But I was struck that there's a lot of stuff that people do in many domains, like art and music and humor and creativity, and particularly in courtship, where it's really hard to figure out a kind of pragmatic survival payoff for a lot of those activities, like doing elaborate cave paintings, or dancing around a campfire for hours on end to a rhythm, or telling funny stories to your clansmates.

What's that all about? And it seemed from the anthropologist and also just from my personal experience, to be honest, that a lot of the payoffs for that were sexual. They were getting potential mates to pay attention to you.

And sexual selection theory is basically a theory of how those incentives for good courtship get compiled over hundreds of generations or thousands of generations into things like bird plumage or given song or whale song or bird song or all of these amazing signals that animals give to each other. And I thought humans must do a lot of this as well. And yet in the academic literature on human evolution, the signaling incentives for doing amazing creative things seem, I

thought to have been neglected. So that was kind of the genesis of the mating mind book idea. How did you come to that realization? I think the realization was a combination of, you know, my own personal experience in grad school. I've always been very safeio sexual. I've always been interested in smart women and smart women who appreciated smart men. And I you go very meta when you're

a psyche grad student. You've had this experience, no doubt, you know, you read all this actdemic theorizing, and then you think, how does this apply in my real life to my relationships? And I thought, you can read the sociobiology and the evolutionary psychology as it existed when I started grad school in the late eighties, and it was really great. On a lot of points. It was very We already had a pretty good idea about why certain

things are physically attractive. We had a pretty good idea about how people trade goods and services and do reciprocal altruism and why we scratch each other's backs. But it seemed like we're we had a huge gap where human courtship should be that was not being analyzed very well.

And I thought, we're good at explaining why people are initially attracted to each other in the first few seconds of seeing each other and assessing visual cues or assessing status, but we're not really good at explaining why people actually fall in love with each other. There once they talk, once they get to know each other, once they spend hours or days or weeks with each other, and when you feel like, oh wow, this person really gets me.

You know, she laughs at my joke, she makes me laugh, she's cool, she has talents, and she feels the same way about me. That to me is the heart of romantic courtship. And I thought, we are not the first generation to do this. This has been happening thousands of generations, and it's left its evolutionary imprints on our brain and that must have had an impact and sculpting our traits. And yeah, and in our motivation to express those traits.

Can we talk about some common misconceptions of your theory, because I think that's almost as important as discussing your theory itself. So can you talk a little about the difference, because this is a lot of people don't talk about this. This distinct takes me proximal and distal causes. Yeah, I think it's really important when you think clearly about signaling, to understand that sometimes the best signals are not the

most self conscious signals. Sometimes it's important to have plausible deniability about what you're doing So, for example, imagine you're you know, a prehistoric man or a woman, and you're already kind of sort of in a relationship a little bit, but you're not fully committed. Maybe you want to keep your options open, maybe you want to trade up, maybe you want to mate switch. Okay, so you want to broadcast to anyone who will listen. I'm a cool person,

I'm creative, I'm artsy, on musical whatever. It's really important when you're doing that not to be consciously aware that the function of all this behavior is sexual, that the potential payoffs are a new relationship. Why because your existing mate is going to challenge you and go, why are you doing this? Why do you have to keep Like I fell in love with you because you're a great drummer, a musician, singer, whatever, Why do you have to keep

doing it now that you have me? Well, the right response is, I don't know, man, I just feel creative. I feel this burning desire to share my genius with everybody because it cheers them up or whatever. You can't say you're pretty good, but maybe I think I could do better. I might want to mate switch. Let's see how it goes. That's a terrible. That's a terrible mission to articulate. So it's very very important in the sexual courtship domains for us not to be conscious about a

lot of the you know, the true functions of these behaviors. Well, do you think that underlying every creative motivation, even at a subconscious level, the meeting motive is active, because I would challenge that, I guess. But first of all I want to see is that would you say that is true? No? No, I think a lot of the functions of signaling are you know, have a big overlap between kind of the sexual domain and broader social domains. So this is not

to say that all the signaling is sexual. Signaling I'm smart or I'm creative brings many social benefits. Right. You can attract friends, you can attract allies, you can help your group to signal. We in general are very competent and creative and you know, have our act together. So those signaling benefits aren't restricted just to forming new sexual relationships. It might even be you know, kids signaled to their parents, hey mom, look at me. I'm artsy, I'm creative, i

can do things I'm worth investing in. Or we can signal to existing mates. I'm still a valuable mate, I'm still competent. It's worth staying in this relationship with me. So it's not all about acquiring new short term mates.

You know, the same signals that are impressive to new romantic partners can also be impressive to existing partnerss allies, anybody, and not everything is signaling either, right, So for unders thinking of what about the painter who has a great intrinsic motivation for what they're doing, gets such joy from painting, is not actually interested in even sharing it with the world. Let's say they keep it in their cupboard for years now. It doesn't seem to me in that situation there's either

a meeting motive active nor a signaling. Yeah. I think this really is a case where it's crucial to understand this proximate versus ultimate distinction. That the evolutionary reasons why we're able to do something. You can track what were the fitness payoffs for that over the last few thousand generations, and the proximal motives are why am I doing this right now under these particular conditions, And the proximal motives are going to be mixed up up with a lot

of other things that are going on. So you might have, let's say, a high degree of creative genius, but also a high degree of introversion and shyness, and you would kind of love for people to appreciate your creative displays, but you don't quite have the social outgoingness or the social skills to convey them in public effectively. And this is the tragedy of the introverted genius, right. And that doesn't mean that you know, the capacity for creativity wasn't

shaped for signaling. It just means you're not a very good signaler. Is it possible that, even from an evolutionary perspective, that some of those behaviors that you're seeing weren't even shaped by signaling or meeting. I've been working on a paper which my gosh, I wish I was published already so I could send it to you and we could nerd out about it, arguing that the need for exploration is a need in and of its that evolved not

through the meeting motive. Even from an evolutionary perspective, it's the neat for expiations. I think they can be reduced to the meeting or the status motives, and that that underlies a lot of what we see in terms of creative motivation, like the openness to experience, demean of personality and stuff like that. I just want to get some

of your thoughts on that. Yeah, So when I teach my undergraduate seminar and human emotions, we spend a whole week on the so called cognitive emotions like curiosity and awe and all these things that seem to be there to motivate exploration of new landscapes, new social relationships, new ideas, new worldviews, and so forth. And I think a lot of those cognitive emotions do drive a lot of creative behavior.

They drive a lot of scholarship, a lot of research, And yeah, you're right, they're not necessarily there for signaling. They're there because, you know, imagining, you have two different brains. One brain is highly motivated to explore the world of ideas and level itself up and get better as a brain. The other brain is complacent, not curious, doesn't give a shit about ideas. That second brain is going to stagnate and it's not going to be ultimately as competitive or attractive.

That's exactly right. And you know we're looking at too. Dopamine systems and the reward of value of information seeking, which is not the same thing as me acquiring more meats. Acquiring more information. Information doesn't always lead to acquiring more meats, and you can decouple those. So I'm really glad that we're on the same page about that as well. And

these things aren't mutually incompatible theories obviously. Yeah. Yeah, I think a lot of the intellectual curiosity, of course that people have is partly ooh this is really cool, and I'm kind of unconsciously motivated by the realization that if I master this particular set of ideas or this story or this domain or this bit of history, then it's shareable. Right then I can tell people this fascinating stuff and get the status and the attractiveness for knowing these things.

And you know, anybody who's active on social media kind of knows how mixed up these motives get. Like, am I checking Twitter every morning because I want to learn stuff just for pure curiosity? Or is it partly I kind of want to retweet stuff that sounds cool so I can get you know, some status from doing that. Absolutely,

And it's amazing how quickly we can get derailed. It's the motive for that virtual singing is so strong that even despite our best intentions, we get the morning like, I can't wait to dive more into that journal article I was reading last night. The second we get on Twitter and we get engaged in that motive is active. It can override every all our best intentions and we get we get kind of caught up in this. So

I think that's right. Yeah, yeah, We're just we're such deeply social creatures that even when we feel like, you know, I'm passionately pursuing this arcane part of academic research or this arcane intellectual worldview, there's always the possibility and we're kind of semi aware of it that this makes me

a more interesting person to others. So this is interesting, And I always found this interesting about your work, even many, many years ago, the connection between social rewards and sexual selection? Now do they always do those two? Do those tools have to be compable with each other? Because we are social animals, we are Roy baumeistart to show this brilliantly in a lot of his writings, and he doesn't necessarily

link it to the meeting. Ultimately, from a from an ultimate, ultimate, ultimate perspective, does all do all of our social interactions from an evolution perspective. Oh, you're arguing their sexual selection benefits. I think the bottom line is often sexual selection. So and I do push a little bit on the people emphasize things like social competition or status. Right, And the thing to ask always is how exactly do you cash out your alleged fitness benefit into survival or reproduction? Okay,

so status is not an intrinsic evolutionary reward. You don't automatically spread your genes just because you get status. Okay, it has to cash out into higher status people survive better where their blood relatives survive better, or they get more mating opportunities and more kids, you know, or their kuld survive. Yeah, it has to you know, go down to the bottom line, just in a corporate earning statement. You know, that's reproductive success is the bottleneck and evolution.

So what frustrates me about a lot of the social selection theories about the evolution of the human mind are they don't actually connect the dots fully from making friends and influencing people and attaining social status into dot dot dot, how does that cash out into reproductive success? Well, you could you could see how it cashes out in terms

of natural selection or or survival. Yeah, so right, and absolutely yeah, higher status people do tend to survive epidemics and and famines and natural disasters better because they have better social networks that are more supportive. And absolutely you can. You can connect those dots in that way. But I haven't seen as much work on that as I would like, even from an evolution perspective, and all you're saying, yeah, even even among evolutionary like people, Yeah, let's let's do

more work on that. That's we are. We are such a social species. And I've been interested in Mark Leary's work showing that our feelings of self esteem track our

perceptions of social value, like the sociometer theory. I've always wanted to see more of an evolutionary tie into the sociometer theory, and I think it's so naturally connected, right, It's so important clinically also that if people are depressed or anxious, so they feel like they're losers, or they're not valuable, or they're having suicidal ideation, a lot of that is feeling like I'm not being valued sexually or

socially in a group. That matters to me. And I think a lot lot of clinical psychology could really benefit from a clear understanding of that sociometer idea that people really are trying to track how much value do I add to my family and my local group, and if I feel like I'm not adding enough, like that sucks and I feel like a burden. And conversely, happiness and self esteem and self respect are they're kind of hard

to fake to yourself. You know, this is another issue of reliable signaling that if you're getting credible cues of adulation, appreciation, respect from people who you in turn respect, it's kind of hard to stay depressed if you're getting that on a consistent basis face to face. For me, throughout my whole academic career, one of the best antidepressants is always going to conferences and giving a good conference talk. If it wasn't a good talk, that's pretty that's like even worse.

But you know this, just meeting people and finding people who read your stuff and appreciate it, it's a huge boost. It's a huge boost, but you still I actually saw a Netflix special with Neil Brennan, who was one of the cauthors of the Chappelle sh and he gets really personal in that show. I don't know, did you see

that special by chance? No? I didn't. I'm pretty familiar with the Dave Chappelle's stet up comedy, but but Neil Brennan in particular, he really got personal and talked about how he's suffered from depression his whole life, and how he even he would use those ego boosts as a way of overcoming his depression. But there became a point in his life where even that anymore didn't didn't didn't hold it, didn't do it for him, and that really

made him rethink his life. I guess when I think about, ultimately the most sustainable way to a well being, I don't think about finding ways of pursuing the feeling of self esteem. I think ultimately of intimate connections. I think of things like finding meaning in things that don't necessarily bring you an ego boost, but that give you meaning in it of themselves. I think of other things. But but your point is still very valid that we still

can get these momentary boosts. We evolved in such a way, but ultimately they're fleeting right. Well, I think there's ego boosts and then there's ego boosts. Right, There's different kinds of adulations. So you know, if you're in a long term relationship with someone you respect a lot and they give you an ego boost, that's kind of a qualitatively different thing than just a big crowd clapping after you give a cloak whim, right. And I think to some degree,

everybody needs a healthy mixture of those. They need the respect from intimate relationships, from blood relations from their own kids, from their parents, from their neighbors, but also from the broader community. And I think if you have that sort of healthy mixture of you know, adulation that's kind of a mile deep from people who've known you for years, but also a mile wide from people who are just getting to know your ideas and like them, that's really powerful.

But a lot of people kind of over specialize in like getting just one or just the other. I love that. That's a mean point of my new book, Transcend. Sorry to be the guy who just plugged his new book, but it really is. It really is relevant in the sense that my argument in that book is really for integration of these evolved needs and what does that mean,

integration of the need for self esteems. I argue the need for self them is a real need, but it's best when it's folded into real, authentic mastery, real intimate connections, not just for the sake of the pursuit of it, which is what narcissists or those discovery narcissm get addicted to. And I talk about the addiction model of self esteem that I really like, So it sounds like we're on

the same page about that. Actually, yeah, yeah, yeah, And I think a bad thing that can happen, Let's say with I've just been watching a Waco series about you know, David koresh And and the branch Vidians. It's amazing, it's really good. It first came out a couple of years ago, but it's having a moment on Netflix. And cult leaders have always kind of fascinated me because, you know, they often have a pretty high degree of sociopathy and machiavelianism

and ability to influence people. But I think what can happen is you get in this trap of finding followers who you manipulate very effectively, but who you don't really respect. So you're getting cues evatulation from people who kind of suck, and that can actually be very alienating. I think the same thing can happen with stand up comedy. That if you've done a routine dozens of times and you know exactly how to time the punchline to get exactly this

kind of laugh, it's like playing a keyboard. It's like you're not even interacting with real humans. You just have created a kind of stimulus response loop, and you end up with a kind of contempt or the audience because you know how to play them and influence them and make them laugh almost too well, and it starts to feel kind of fake. Does that make sense? One thousand percent?

And I think I see it natural linkage there between that and the pickup artist community and why so many of them have reported feeling depressed after getting to that community. And I know you've done working this, So I was wondering if you coul talk about it about this a little bit. You wrote a book with Tucker Max, right, you know, I thought you could talk a little bit about that. What is the pickup art community, what is

a better route to sustain sustaining it? And yet and why might it be linking to what you just said if you do go through all the motions, and yes, maybe you can attract meats, but you start to lose your soul at a certain point in a more poetic way, then maybe you would frame it. But do you see what I'm saying? Yeah? Can you talk about that? Yeah? I kind of first got fascinated with the whole pickup

artist manisphere, red pill community maybe fifteen years ago. My first exposure, I guess was David Angelo aka Evan Pagan, who's still a close friend of mine, who did a book and video series called Double Your Dating. He actually flew to Albuquerque, I don't know, fifteen years ago to talk with me, and he was very keen to learn about evolutionary psychology and mating and courtship and dating and romantic love and how do you apply all these Darwinian

insights to attracting women if you're a single guy. And I talked a lot with him and some of the other pickup artists about these issues. First of all, what is a pickup artist? Many of our listeners might actually be like, what's that? So pickup artists are kind of a subculture that flourished from maybe about you know, the

early two thousands until maybe a few years ago. I mean, they still exist, but they kind of had a cultural moment around two thousand and five twenty ten, and there were guys who figured out that there are some life hacks in courtship and romance that are very effective and that can be taught, and that can make desperate single

guys who want girlfriends dramatically more attractive to women. And it doesn't require cosmetic surgery, it doesn't require going to get a PhD. These are often very simple things that increase your parent confidence, your status, your sense of humor, your sense of being in a desirable group of other guys, YadA YadA, and that women reliably respond to in kind of predictable ways. So they figured out some ways to kind of hack human courtship, and they shared this information

and it worked. A lot of it worked pretty well, but a lot of it seemed incredibly superficial, and I think it led to a lot of these guys kind of getting what they wanted in the sense of, like they attracted women, they got girlfriends, but they lost a lot of esteem for women in general, just the way stand up comedians can kind of lose esteem for the audience if they get too good at making them laugh

right exactly, It seems like a natural analogy. Yeah, I think that's that's really a danger that faces anybody who's an effective influencer, whether they're a stand up comedian, a politician giving the same damn stump speech, you know, two hundred days in a row, a marketer trying to sell stuff and facing the same the same objections, manipulating the

same pain points over and over. Once you understand human nature well enough to influence it, it starts to seem like this kind of weird alienating game that you're playing. You know, if you teach, this even happens if you're a professor teaching courses. Right the fifth or seventh time you teach something, you know what students are going to be interested in, what they're going to laugh at, what

they'll find interesting. So what is a broader lesson from that we can learn about the nature of well being and what leads us to to deep fulfillment in life? Is part of it? That because I found in my research, I looked at the Dark Tride, and I looked at Macavalienism, and I found that those those of couverhind Macavalienism aren't report lower levels of life satisfaction. So I was wondering if there's if that's relevant here at all for me personally.

One thing that protects against that kind of cynicism is understanding, Hey, the parts of human nature that you're kind of influencing or manipulating if you're doing effective courtship or if you're doing effective salesmanship or marketing, these are not trivial things. It's actually deep evolutionary logic to the responses that you're

kind of influencing. So if let's say you're a pickup artist and you think, oh, women are really superficial for caring about resources and money and status, right, you can rapidly go down this very kind of blackpilled cynical rabbit hole that says, yeah, women are just these simplistic, superficial creatures that just go around scanning for alpha males, and I just have to look like an alpha and then

life is good. That I think is a recipe for despair, because you end up not respecting the people you're spending all your time with your girlfriend. If instead, you take a step back and you get this evolutionary perspective that says, here are the reasons why in interest in status and popularity and fame and genius are actually really deep and

not at all superficial. And there's a hidden logic to why women care about this and they embody, you know, their own form of genius in their mate choice for caring about these things. And once you really get that, I think it's a powerful way to counteract that cynicism. Yeah, does that makes sense? It does? And I think more needs to be written about that. Okay, So out of the four hundred and thirty six thousand topics identified we could talk about today, I'll just pick how about this one?

Humans are ideological animals? I thought that was a really interesting statement you said in your book. Can you talk a little about how humans are ideological animals and how that relates to virtue signaling in politics? I know that's a topic. You've been a source since the nineteen nineties. Well, yeah, ever since I got fascinated by signaling in the late nineties and talked to economists and also talk to political scientists.

It seemed like they had a model of like citizen behavior and voter behavior that didn't strike me as realistic at all. Right, Like, one big question in political science is why do people bother to vote at all? Given that your individual likelihood of like influencing an election outcome is negligible. It's like winning the lottery. Your vote is

really doesn't matter. And yet people whose votes don't really matter statistically spend huge amounts of time gathering news information, forming political opinions, talking to their family and friends about their political ideologies and their values, and signaling I really care about gun rights or abortion or Biden or Trump or blah blah whatever China. And we're just full of these ideas. We love to develop them, broadcast them, argue

about them. That's really weird. And so when I talk about us being ideological animals, it's this idea that we are so much more ideological than we need to be. If we had just evolved to like survive and find food and avoid predators and like, why would we care so much about national partisan news. I think that's one of the major questions in the social sciences, actually, is

why are we so ideological tribal partisan? You know, it's it's easy to spend a story about why we're tribal beings, why we care about our local group, and why we care about competing with other growth groups, But why do we do that? At this level of political beliefs or religious beliefs. Why not just do it at the practical level of like we want more territory and food and you know, better barricades and fences and more local military power.

Why do we make it ideological? Is part of that the fact that human individual differences and personality exist, which can sometimes create different clusters of beliefs and ideologies that stem from that. I mean, you do see that conservatism tends to be related to certain aspects of the Big Five, and Democrats tend to be more interested, they tend to score higher, and certain aspects of agreeableness both score high, and agreeableness just in different politeness versus compassion and things

like that. And I'm just wondering to what extent is that a natural outgrowth of the fact that individual differences exist. Yeah, I think a lot of it is signaling our personality traits rather than signaling any sort of deep political philosophies. So I set you up for that one. Yeah, A lot of what I learned about scientific collaboration incidentally came

from playing volleyball in grad school. It's all about to bump the set and the spike, like you want a collaborator who can like kind of dig down and save you from, you know, a terrible objection to your theory. You want somebody who can set you up for the call shot, and then you want the person who can

take the col shot. Anyway, my whole book spent about consumer behavior is basically the idea that a lot of the goods and services that we buy end up being signals of our personality traits like how open minded are we versus how conservative are we? How agreeable? And you know, how big a bleeding heart do we have versus how assertive and aggressive and dominant are we? And I think

the same goes for political ideologies or religious ideologies. But a lot of what we signal if we get furious about something on Facebook or Twitter is we kind of have this passionate desire to signal I'm more open than you are, or I'm more agreeable, or I'm more assertive, or I'm more conscientious and have higher will power or whatever. And sexual ideologies, right, I mean, isn't that Do you see that too? Someone might feel a certain way, I

have a certain interest, but they had the signal. Oh, that's disgusting that people who are into that right, isn't that another demean where you see that? Oh yeah, A lot of political ideology really boils down to different sexual strategies.

I'm wow, that's unpack that one. Well. Basically, political conservatism is highly correlated with belief that long term monogamous marriage is good, promiscuity is bad, polyamory is bad, nuclear families are good, and anybody who deviates from kind of monogamous nuclear family norms is an existential threat to Western civilization blah blah blah. And then on the other hand, people who are a little more sexually adventurous tend to end

up being politically liberal at least with regard to certain issues. Right. And people like me who are kind of patchwork centrists who have like I've got a libertarian streak, I've got a new reactionary streak, I've got a progressive streak. We are extremely confusing to most people, and what they really want to know is, yeah, but what's your sexual strategy. That's so interesting? What kind of mating system do you advocate?

And so like, on Twitter, I have a lot of conservative followers, and yet I'm polyamorous and I'm in an open marriage, and this is extremely confusing to them. They can They're like, butmiliarly, you like traditionalist representational art, you like traditional architecture, you love Western civilization, you like the ancient Greeks and Romans. How on earth can you be polyamorous? Because they're seeing politics through this sexual strategies lens. I

keep in my head. I keep going back to the idea though, that not everything is signaling, and it can become a bit maddening trying to if you're someone who's generally good faith, you care about this, what am I actually signaling versus what is really because I believe it. So, for instance, and I'll tell you something that that quite frankly does annoy me. Sometimes I will genuinely feel anger over something that really does upset me. Right, Not everything

is virtue signaling, Is that right? Oh no? But I mean the thing is that this kind of goes back to the approximate versus ultimate distinction, right that if you're virtue signaling, and you're signaling a genuine conviction, a real virtue, right, it feels indistinguishable from genuine moral outrage, because the function of moral outrage is to signal these are my values. They're rock bottom non negotiable values. I'm going to stand up for them. I'm going to challenge people who don't

agree with them. And you know it, it really comes full circle, like the most effective signals are the most offen and reliable and heartfelt. I see. That was a great answer to my question, and it did make me realize that it is important to distinction between cheap talk

signaling and reliable virtue signaling. Yeah, and also to make the point, as you do in your book, that virtue signaling explains a lot of good of humanity and it and the kind of virtus you're talking about, you're you're not doing it is a pushdown or an insult, which is how it's almost exclusively used amongst certain political circles to say, oh, that person's just virtusing, so we're going to dismiss It is possible to have reliable indicators in

the sense that you generally have that trait. So I could be virtue signaling compassion and still be actually be a compassionate person just because I'm virtue signing doesn't need to be a put down in the sense that, oh, that person is fake, doesn't actually have that be what you would put in the more the cheap talk category. Is that right? Is that fair representation? Oh yeah, this is a huge theme also throughout my little Virtue Signaling

book and all the essays there is. There's cheap talk on the one hand, where you just like slap a bumper sticker on your soubrew that expresses your political ideology, but you don't actually do anything about it or donate any time or money just to supporting it. And then there's extremely reliable, heartfelt virtue signaling where you're dedicating your entire life to solving some huge problem of human or animal welfare, and it's it's crucial for us to understand

it can all be signaling. That's not to diss it. Some of the best things in life are genuine, heartfelt, reliable signals. So something it looks to be like something you're trying to do is strip virtue signaling from its political context just to play under the microscope as the phenomenon exists. That's a wonderful but hard thing to do

when you're living in this political question. Confusing to people, right, because I know, I know, yeah, virtue signaling is a term from the right to critique the left, and I kind of I've been trying to remind people for years that there is a signaling theory that is relevant to understanding virtue signaling, and that not all signaling is bad. In fact, some of the best things in life are

a result of signal evolution. And in fact, some of the best things in human ethics and morality and ideology have to do with signaling genuine values in a way that's hard to think exactly. I found the quote from your book virtue signaling includes the best of human instincts and the worst of human instincts, So it's quote unquote. So let's talk about I think the natural segue is to effective altruism and how can one, even sometimes if they are not feeling the emotion, still compute what will

be the maximum benefit to people? So effective altruis in some ways decouple the feeling of empathy sometimes from the rational calculation of what would actually do the greatest good. Right. Yeah, it's the distinction that Yale Psychology as or Paul Bloom the Bloom makes between empathy versus rational compassion. So empathy is sort of, you know, it's a relatively easy state to get into, where like, oh, that person or animal

is suffering. They're cute, they don't deserve to suffer. I feel bad for them, I want to do something okay, and that's nice. That's that's a nice response, and it

can lead to good things. But it has a lot of systemic problems, which is that, for example, you tend to overfocus on isolated examples of like cute, sympathetic things that are suffering rather than broader, you know, systemic problems like let's say, factory farming or the coronavirus pandemic, or you know the risk of nuclear war or other things that could affect billions of sentient lives. And so rational compassion is something that the effect of altruism movement tries

to cultivate. It's something that we talk a lot about in my I have a Psychology of Effective Altruism seminar that I've taught three times now for undergrads, and we talk a lot about all these different emotions we come into play when you're trying to do good, and that you know, humans are not very well adapted to doing good effectively in large scale modern civilizations that face weird new you know, global catastrophic risks like viral pandemics or

artificial intelligence or nuclear war or you know, climate change or stuff like that. Yeah, I did find your linkage between effective altruism and existential risks and threat very convincing,

very interesting. I went down a rabbit hole of taking your course from the comfort of my home the last couple of days and read all these papers, and one paper I thought was really interesting I read was about how cognitive biases in a lot of ways can explain why we're not really good at thinking about existential risks logically. Could you please talk about some of some of the cognitive biases and the economy Tiversky sort of things like

availability heuristic, things like that. Yeah, so this is one paper I assign it's actually not by a psychologist, is by this rationalist guy, Eliezer Yudkowski has written a lot of brilliant, brilliant things. He's been involved in the rationalism and effective altruism community, and he knows this cognitive biases

literature pretty well. I think a key thing is what the effect of altruisks called scope insensitivity, that we're insensitive to the scope of suffering in the sense of like if you see one kitten suffering, we know that's bad. If you try to think about one hundred kittens suffering, that's really hard, hard to do. It's hard to visualize. If you think about a million kitten suffering, that's bad. If you think about ten billion chickens a year being

killed in factory farms, it's literally inconceivable. You can't wrap a human mind around that kind of number, and so

you need help. You need cognitive augmentation. You need grafts and charts and math and science to take you from a place to see human mind with all its voibles and limitations and emotions, into being a kind of good rational citizen who can think clearly about the true scope of certain challenges, like just how bad nuclear world would really be, or just how bad a global pandemic would be. And it's hard, it's really hard to do. It takes years of training to do it. But I think it's

extremely important, you know. I like to think if a student takes the psychology you have effective altruism. Of course, that the end up I hope being much better citizen. Is he able to think more clearly through a lot of these political issues. That'd be nice, and by doing so they would also think more like an effective altruist. More generally, those are skills that can be applied to not just existential risk. I think this is your point as well. You know, we can apply it to making

decisions like what charity should I donate to? Or should you know who should I help? But a lot of that though, and this is another part of the rabbit hole I went down yesterday. A lot of it goes down to utilitarian reasoning, which is something that we may be innatly predisposed to find disgusting. And I thought that was very interesting too. Is another potential barrier to this form of thinking is not just the cognibiases we have, but also our gut reaction to utilitarian thinkers. Could you

talk a little about that. Yeah, So there's a lot of fascinating work now emerging from social psychology and moral psychology,

from people like Molly Crockett who analyze our research. Yeah, just how disgusted we are by utilitarians and that humans have this sort of person perception bias to say, if a person is a good deontologist, that is to say, they believe their rights and duties and responsibilities and absolutes and black versus white, you know, moral judgments and that certain things are to boo and you can't do them and you can't even talk about them. We tend to

like that. Actually, we trust those people, we respect them as ethical, stand up people. Utilitarians present all these kind of social red flags, which is they're willing to contemplate to boo trade offs, like they're willing to quantify, Hey, if we keep the economy in lockdown, how many lives does that save versus how many jobs we do we lose. Most people aren't willing to contemplate those trade offs rationally, dispassionately, publicly effective altrus are. They strike a lot of people

as sociopathic. But I think it's really important to do that, I think, and I've tweeted about this. I've said, look, you know, a good leader, a good politician, is someone who's willing to publicly talk about heartbreaking trade offs and like, this policy is going to be good for these reasons and bad for these reasons, and on balance, I think it's good, but there are going to be bad side effects.

And in contrast, we get politicians who know that that kind of reasoning is sort of discussing to voters and aren't willing to engage in it. So I'm trying to do the Venn diagram in my head right now between psychopathy and effective altruists, and I want to draw it. I feel like it's a be a productive. It be a productive based on the research I've conducted, because I have shown a very correlation between the dark triad traits and utilitarian thinking and a very strong correlation between my

new light tria. I don't know if you're aware of my light triad research I've initiated recently and non utilitarian thinking more personalized thinking. To me, it seems pretty clear the difference between a psychopath and a effective altruist, and some some effect in this vent diagram. Some effective altrus are psychopaths, so that has to be acknowledged, but a lot aren't, and the ones that are in the category

of that aren't. It seems to be that it's very possible to be an effective altruist to not necessarily score very high in compassion or empathy, but do a lot of greater good and not have the lying, cheating, thrill seeking characteristics of the psychopath. So this was just my on the spot way of trying to I want to draw it, so badly now. But you see what I'm

visualizing right this van diagram. Yeah, it is. It is very confusing because, like descriptively, you know, the effect of altruism movement as I've been involved with it now for five or six years, involves a lot of neurodiversity in many directions. It involves a lot of a lot of asbes, a lot of people with kind of Aspergers traits, who a little socially awkward, but who love thinking systematically and

dispassionately about things. It does involve some people who can come across as a little bit cold hearted and yet who are rationally devoting their entire lives to causes like reduce animal suffering or reduce the risk of bad AI taking over dusky net scenario. So I think, you know, in contrast, the sort of normies, normal people who aren't sort of neurodivergent. They tend to be constrained by whatever society says is kind of a respectable way to think

about certain issues. It involves respect to you know, the taboos about which trade offs you're not allowed to talk about, and it involves you know, a fair amount of virtue signaling about like oh, I like you know, my dogs rescue and so I'm a good person. And yet I still eat factory farm chicken, you know, five times a week, and I don't care about the suffering of the chickens. So effect of altruism is a weird movement that attracts

weird people. But I love them because they're willing to step outside societies kind of normal ways of thinking and to kind of harness their neurodivergent traits for the greater good. Can we talk about neudiversity because this is an area of high interest. Maybe out of all the other topics we could talk about today, maybe with the exception of intelligence, the idea of neurodiversity, and well exception of intelligent creativity, maybe nerdiversity is the one we have the most common

interest in. So very I'm an advocate of the big advocate of nerdiverse movement. I was misplaced and misdiagnosed in special education as a kid and was bored out of my gorg and and had to actually fight my way out to show them that I was smart enough of eventually you know, getting to Yale, for instance. But it was very frustrating to me as a kid being this quirky what was my charge When I looked at I looked at all the ips. What was the thing that they kept me out of the classes for? It was

essentially my awkwardness. I mean that was it. Like my social awkwardness and my just asking weird questions. That was that was my That's why I was in special education as a kid when I actually look at it, because they didn't know what to really diagnose. I mean when I was really young, I had an ear infection and central Aultroye crossing, but that I outgrew that, so they kept me in because that. I loved reading your work linking the neuro diversity movement and people who think differently.

Quirky asked be people and speech codes and why maybe we're discriminating against a lot of people who are nerve who are neurodivergent. Can we talk about that? Yeah, I mean, apart from the mating mind, I think the thing I've written that I'm kind of proudest of, to be honest, is this collect magazine article called the Neurodiversity Case for Free Speech. Can I just say it's one of my favorite articles thanks I've ever read in my life, like in my and I really mean that Yeah, you know,

no versure saying me, I mean that yet. No, that means a lot to me because a lot of people who you know are kind of aspy or nerdy or geeky or nerdi virgin in some way read it and really resonated with it. Because my key argument there basically was if you have a kind of system of internalized censorship and speech codes and things where like everybody knows you're supposed to have certain views and certain opinions and

you're not supposed to say certain things. But you know what, we're not going to write it down explicitly what you're allowed to say and what you're not allowed to say. It's all going to be implicit. It's all going to be like in codes, and you from, well, that's fine. Most normies can kind of learn those codes and euphemisms and taboos by the time they get in college maybe, But people who are a little aspy literally can't read

between the lines in that way. They literally can't understand, like, well, why is this taboo? Why can't I talk about this? And that means if you have a system of kind of expected self censorship and speech codes and like things, you're not supposed to say because otherwise it's hate speech, or it's offensive, or you should be canceled if you

say it. That is intrinsically discriminatory against asbies and other people who are neurodivergent because you're literally asking them to do something they can't cognitively do, which is understand your ideological euphemisms and taboos that you never even state explicitly. And it's very important to point out that we're not saying and I don't believe you're saying that anyone can really use their neudiversity as an excuse for being an asshole,

but you're saying something different. You're saying there's a lot of unintentional confusion, unintentional that And I suspect with a lot of the me working. I've worked with a lot of people on the spectrum as well as other spectrums, and in the neudiversity movement. This is a big part of my work I do now these days. And and I noticed that the second you explain to someone maybe why that hurts so and out, they feel horrible about it.

I mean they these are very well intentioned people who might do unintentional hurt someone's feelings, you know, but if they were just explained in a mature way, you know, and are just you know, it's very unintentional. So I just wanted to make that very clear. That's you're not saying that like it's a get out of free card to be an intentional asshole. Yeah. Yeah, it's not a

get out of jail free card. But I think, you know, the normies who are very good and navigating these ideological landscapes where there's a lot of sort of unstated assumptions and unstated taboos, it's really hard for them to understand just how much of a cognitive burden they're putting on. Ask the people, and so, yeah, if you're socially awkward, you're going to be socially awkward. You're going to say things that make people uncomfortable, and you're going to you know,

ask questions that you're not supposed to ask. And the normies are like, well, I can't even imagine why you do that unless you had a malevolent intent, So they kind of misattribute, you know, to the awkwardness a sort of ill will or psychopathy or whatever. And really it's just ask thes being like, I'm just asking the question, and and in a sense, it's almost like there, that's bullying.

I mean a lot of the same people that do that would would would say or virtues sing or whatever you're in your framework, you know that we need to stop bullying people who are nerdiverse. I mean they would say that, right. But then if we had its own nerdiverse in a classroom, who makes it a potentially insightful point, but which goes against the norms of what kind of questions you're allowed, what you're allowed to challenge, might be bullied for it. So in one sense it seems like

a form of potential form of bullying. Another sense, and this is another aspect of you, but your papers are rich. So I had lots of different sections and I kind of was salvating salvating at all those sections. But another one, which is a lot of research I've done showing some of the most creative geniuses people have really fundamentally moved our society forward. A lot of gifted children are on

the neurodiversity end of things. So by shutting that down, we may be shutting down some potential ideas that might actually move society forward, right, is that right? Yeah, that's the huge cost of a kind of sensorious council culture. You know, if you have a culture that says nobody is ever allowed to say anything offensive or else, we will we will, you know, eliminate their career prospects. Okay, that's a way of eliminating all creative genius from public culture.

That's the side effect of doing that. If you have a system, let's say, in stand up comedy, of saying if stand up comedian ever is quirky or weird or kind of offensive or you know, sexually misbehaves, they're not allowed to be a stand up comedian anymore. The result is stand up comedy will suck within five years. And if equivalently you say, uh, you know, we want to encourage people to get into stem science, tech, engineering, math.

The people who are interested in that stuff tend to be a little lasty, they tend to be a little socially awkward, and we're going to hold them to the same standards of inoffensiveness that we hold everybody else to think, I think that's a recipe for civilizational failure in science, because it means you're just not going to allow productive, creative eccentrics to achieve positions of influence or to mentor people, or to teach, or to engage with public culture. Thank

you for making that point, and I agree. Okay, So you teach a course on polyamory and open sexuality. How is that possible to get a course in college approved as a professor to teach such a course? First of all? Second of all, what has the response been from the students? Yeah? So I taught this course in fall twenty seventeen, and it was controversial. It was not easy to get it approved.

I think ultimately I was able to convince my colleagues that alternative relationships are increasingly common, particularly among younger people millennials and gen z, that they raise interesting scientific issues about the nature of intimacy and relationships and love and family dynamics, and that they're also clinically relevant because there is good research showing that, for example, clinical psychologists and doctors and social workers don't understand polyamory and don't understand

open relationships. And if people come in with problems and they say like, hey, I'm in an open marriage and we have this in this problem, many therapists will say,

obviously you have that problem. Open marriages never work, right, So I kind of made the diversity case that Hey, if we're training our clinical psychologists to be able to deal with alternative sexual orientations like a lesbian or you know, to deal with ethnic minorities, or to deal with people with different religious or political views, we should also be training our students to be able to deal with alternative relationships. We'll turn many ways even more stigmatized, you know than

being let's say gay or lesbian. I really see, it's so obvious to me, this this old arch and pattern of the way you think. So so you know, within that demean you know, you're like, well, if we say we care about these forms of diversity, we should rered these and the same thing with a neurodiversity. You're saying, like, if there's so much talk about racial ethnic diversity and hiring practices and as well as sex and gender and those things, yes they are important, but we let's not

neglect other forms of diversity as well, like neurodiversity. So so yeah, you're you're you're we're extending the and and and and I feel like I have the same mission, you know as well, and extending all these these different things. So that's that's that's great. So you have this time because I'm really curious is monogamy natural from an evolutionary point of view. I'm very curious about that question, and I picked out this quote because I think it's funny.

It's a funny quote in the sense it's true, but it's the most non romantic framing of marriage or long term as you frame it, long term sexual relations I've ever heard in anything I've read. But you say, in game theory terms, such relationships and you're referring to long term sexual relationships such as marriages are iterated mixed mode of games, with very complex conflicts and confluences of interest, many possible equilibria, and incomplete information about the other players,

possible tactics and preferences. So in game theory terms, how could those kinds of arrangements ever have been adapted from an evolutionary point of view, that's my question for you. Well, I do actually think that long term pair bonds run really deep in human evolution. I think we've been falling in love in forming pair bonds for millions of years. I think it's been one of the central reasons for humanity's success. I think it's enormously helpful in raising kids

together with two parents. It's just I don't think enough evolutionary history of long term pair bonds is exactly the same as an evolutionary history of life long sexually exclusive monogamy, right, And that's the crucial difference that, Yeah, we have pair bonding instincts, and then some civilizations kind of seize on those and go lifelong monogamous marriage that's ritualized and socially

accepted is the only way to do things sexually. And so, you know, most people I know in polyamorous or open relationships do have pair bonds, and they love pair bonds, and they love falling in love and forming pair bonds. It's just they might have more than one. They might have, you know, overlapping ones. They might expect some of them to be medium term rather than life long, And so it's it's not really a question of, hey, are we

fundamentally monogamous or fundamentally like promiscuous and polyamorous. I don't think either of those options are realistic. It's more like, hey, we like to form pair bonds, but how sexually exclusive do they have to be to sustain families and civilization? Monogamous people being in monogamous relationships works for them. For some people monogous work. I think individual differences come into play as well, And I'm very curious to know if there's any good studies or analysis on the big five

personality traits that predict those different things. Are there any studies in that. I think the existing studies have been extremely biased by monogamous assumptions. Huh, And I think that's a big problem. In fact, you know, my own writing about this until a few years ago was pretty imbued

with a lot of monogamous assumptions. So like when I read The Mating Mind again now twenty years later, some of it is kind of painful to read because I'm like, I would have written this real differently if I'd understand polyamory. So let's say, in evolutionary psychology, for example, you tend to get one dimension of individual differences we talk about

as socio sexuality. So if you score high on so called sosiosexuality, you tend to be more interested in casual, short term mating, shorter term relationships, more casual relationships, you don't tend to be as interested in long term monogamous relationships. You score low on sociosexuality. You tend to be a good, you know, monogamous marriage oriented, nuclear family kind of person. Well that's fine, but where do you put ethical polyamory

in there? Right? Ethical polyamorous aren't actually very interested in casual short term like tender hookups, but they're also not interested in sexually exclusive, lifelong marriage, So it's hard to shoehorn them into this single dimension of individual difference. That's a good point. And yeah, so I think we just need more research that kind of integrates, you know, the evolutionary psychology and mating strategies and the kind of growing

literature on alternative relationships. It's really that literature is really only about five years old on polyamory and open relationships. So what can monogamous people learn from polypeople and vice versa? I think a huge amount. And I'm actually working on a book that's kind of focused on this. Polyamory I think is real, it's growing, it's increasingly popular among young people.

A lot of young people are doing it badly, and they're doing it in a way that assumes we're blank slates and that jealousy is a social construct and that pair bonding is unnatural. I think there's a lot of delusional, horrible, bad poly out there, but I think there's also amazing examples of people who are really expert level polyamorists who have a lot to teach. Even if you hate polyamory, even if you think it's unethical, things like how do

you manage sexual jealousy in a relationship? It just taught to me. Some people might not even know what polyamory is. Polyamory is, you know, the theory and ethics and practice of having multiple ongoing relationships with the full knowledge and consent of everybody involved. Okay, so it's different from monogamy

and that you're having multiple partners. Realistically, usually it's only like maybe you have a primary partner who you're strongly paaramonded to, and you have a couple of kind of secondary partners and maybe another couple of people you see once in a while, like at conferences or when you're traveling. That's usually the way it develops. But the full knowledge and consent of everyone involved is what distinguishes it from cheating.

The fact that they're ongoing relationships is what distinguishes it from like casual hookup culture. So the ideal is you're having meaningful, committed, emotionally intimate relationships with more than one person, and they all know about it. And also crucially they're free to do the same in their own lives. They're

also free to have meaningful, ongoing emotionally intimate relationships. And so it's different from polygyny, where it's like one alpha male with a harem, or one cult leader marries multiple fangirls or whatever, because typically the cult leader is not happy for his female mates to have other male's a control Yeah, it's a control thing. And yeah, so that's

polyamory in a nutshell. So your interest in ethical polyamory and you're writing a book on that, How how will ethical polyamory book be different from the very famous book, the Ethical Slut. I like the Ethical Slut Book, and it's become kind of the bible of polyamory. But you know, it was first published maybe twenty five years ago. It's in like it's third edition. It's kind of outdated. And it also tends to adopt a fairly evolutionary, evolutionarily naive

view of human sexuality. Right. It tends to view jealousity as kind of a social construct, a cultural invention. It tends to be a little skeptical about long term pair bonds as an important part of human nature. It's shot absolutely through with leftist politics in a way that really

annoys me. And polyamory culture and general tends to be very very intensely political lefty, and I want to kind of raise the possibility that, like you could be a conservative or even neo reactionary or libertarian polyamorous and that could be okay also, So I just want to kind of separate the idea of polyamory as a as a genuine, ethical, alternative mating system from the kind of cultural baggage that it's inherited from books like The Ethical Slot that's basically like, well,

if your poly, you should probably live in San Francisco and definitely vote Democrat and definitely be like pro choice and antigon and blah blah blah. It's it's become a subculture that's a little bit culty politically. I totally get it. You're trying to do for POLYMERI what you did for virtue signaling. Yeah, strip it of its Yeah, absolutely. I'll just end with this question this topic. You know, what do you think is the greatest existential threat to humanity.

I know the answer, but I want to hear hear it from you. And why should we be more careful about reaching out to aliens extratrustrials? Why should I think that through more carefully? So? I mean, the big existential threats and most effective altruists talk the most about. Are nuclear war still an issue, We're kind of used to it, It's been an existential risk for sixty to seventy years, still an issue. Artificial general intelligence and machine learning could

be existential threats. And you know this if you watched any science fiction movies in the last twenty years. And then global pandemics, but particularly bioterrorism plus pandemics could be a much bigger, you know, risk than just kind of an accidental pandemic like we're seeing now. But I also wrote this kind of whimsic paper with my longtime collaborator and friend Peter Todd, where we argued that it's a really, really bad idea to broadcast messages to potential extraterrestrial intelligence.

And we were inspired by Chinese science fiction writer who did a novel called The Three Body Problem. Peter's wife read it, she got Peter to read it. Peter's like, you got to read this science fiction novel. It's really good. I read it and we ended up going to a conference on active Messaging to Extraterrestrial intelligence conference in Puerto Rico near the Arecibo radio telescope. Got to see the

radio telescope. Awesome, and Peter and I made the argument that on kind of evolutionary and game theoretic principles, it's a really really bad idea to broadcast that, hey, here we are. We're a planet, we've become a sentience species, we've developed technology. Here we are. Please be nice, you know, come visit us, play nice, or like, in what possible universe is this a prudent thing to do? Until you've spent at least a couple thousand generations thinking really hard

about is this a prudent thing to be actively signaling? Yeah, I've never heard anyone make that argument before, so I thought it was really really cool to think it through, thought through like a true effective altruist at the most existential level. Yeah, I think I think it's it's kind of an introverts approach to interplanetary signaling. It's like, unless you're absolutely confident that what you say is gonna you know, be taken in a in a benevolent frame of mind.

You should probably just stay quiet for a while and see how things play out. Why an introvert? Why are the introvert there is supposed to just intellectual? I think it's an introverts view of interplanetary communication because introverts are acutely aware of possible social costs of blurting stuff out and being embarrassed and being awkward and you know, being aspy. And yeah, I found a correlation between introversion and the

autism spectrum like zero point seven zero. I tweeted that out once and I got some yeah vitriol, But I mean I reported just a correlation that I found, so but yeah, I totally believe it. Hey, Jeffrey, look, thank you so much for the chat today, and I'm left thinking we should do a part two someday on intelli where we talk about intelligence. You know, we talk about all the other things we're interested in, but it'd be great. Hopefully this is enough to stimulate people's minds and hearts.

Dare I say it was a really great chime with you today. Thank you so much for your time, Jeffrey, you too, take care. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Psychology Podcast. If you'd like to react in some way to something you, I encourage you to join in the discussion at the Psychology podcast dot com. That's the Psychology podcast dot com. Also, please add a reading and review of the podcast on iTunes and subscribe to the Psychology Podcast YouTube channel, as we're really trying to

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