[Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] conversations with Tyler is produced by the mercada center at George Mason University Bridging the Gap between academic ideas and real world problems learn more at arcades.in conversations withth tyler.com [Music] [Applause] welcome back to conversations with Tyler
today we have my colleague Robin Hansen and with Robin we go meta so Robin if politics is not about policy medicine is not about health laughter is not about jokes and food is not about nutrition what are podcasts not about as you know in my new book the elephant and the
Brain hidden motives in everyday life we have a whole chapter on conversation which I expect you have perused and the claim we make in there is that although we like to talk about conversation as if it was about imparting information and finding out useful things more plausibly it's about
showing off your backpack of tools and skills and contexts so what am I trying to signal with the first question in a podcast well you are showing your versatility here that you are showing uh lots of things you're showing how well you know me and uh that's this is the sort of question I like and can engage
or showing the audience that uh you have an unusual perspective on things and as usual apparently people like your conversations because you have some magic sauce some special way that you can show that you get to people in a way that uh other people can't so in your
wonderful new book The Elephant in the brain you outline a theory of human behavior where signaling has a great deal of explanatory power if you had to in as crude or blunt terms as possible how much of human behavior ultimately can be traced back to some kind of signaling what's your short quick and
dirty answer in a rich Society like ours well over 90% now the Minneapolis Institute of Art will be spending $750,000 to measure whether looking at art boosts empathy what's your prediction they probably found the right people to give them the answer they wanted which is yes and what are they
signaling well people like art for relatively mundane reasons but we like to think we like it for Grand reasons so I've actually had friends of mine from a while ago who are musicians saying we should subsidize music because we'll have more World Peace the world will have less war and more peace if we
subsidize music and I suppose other people probably say that about art and it's just one of those Feelgood sort of things art is a thing you're supposed to feel good about and that's so it's supposed to produce all the good things it probably produces health and empathy
and long life and faithfulness to your spouse so if one goes to the Minneapolis Institute of Art as I've been you'll notice there are a fair number of elderly people there as is also the case at the Opera as people get older why is it that biologically they've evolved to keep on signaling there's some signals
they send much more of high culture signals uh a lot of learning classes are done primarily by the elderly what determines that the cross-section Here We Exist at older ages for some reason biology could have just killed us off at a younger age presuming that it's keeping around us at all there must be
some reason we're kept around we we have some useful purposes in order to serve those purposes we need allies we need Associates we need people to trust us and and relate to us and deal with us and so signaling is an instrumental way to get all those other resources you need to do most anything but isn't there
a disconnect here between how we've evolved and how technology has changed our society so we didn't evolve for a world where say 74 year olds would visit the Minneapolis Institute of Art so could it not be that a lot of human behavior it's a kind of accidental interaction of very broad features of
human character that evolved for very general purposes but the actual particular detailed instantiations of what happens in US OFA are in a sense not really the result of signaling in any direct way at the margin generically Evolution created a set of Behavioral
responses where we look at some sort of cues in the environment and we respond to those cues in different ways and obviously our evolved environment did not have the modern environment to detail specific cues there is no evolved queue for the Minneapolis Museum of Art right so the question is what cues are
we using what what are we looking at in the environment that we are using as cues to make this sort of behavior and I actually think Evolution did a pretty decent job of noticing you know basic functional things in the environment is there a potential mate is this expensive is this cheap uh
is this difficult to do uh and we're using those sorts of cues and mapping on to our evolved instincts in that way and so I think art is roughly impressive things that are hard to do and that don't seem to have much other function or purpose and our evolutionary cues for that are pretty good if you had to name
a few of the human activities that have the least amount to do with signaling but nonetheless are voluntary what would they be well I'd pick very simple things like scratching your butt something that is not at all impressive or appeal to people around you that you never L do from time to
time because you have some other need the degree to which nobody would find it impressive or appealing to see you that you do that now there are some things we do that like bother some people other people like it they find it endearing so sometimes we can do counter signaling or
signaling to a particular group to show them that we are focused on them and trying to impress them as opposed to everybody else which is fine but some things we do like scratching our butt basically nobody's impressed by and nobody's very endeared by so that would be the kind of thing but say I'm an
introvert which by definition is someone who's not so much out there why is that signaling isn't that the opposite of signaling and if you're enough of an introvert it doesn't even seem like counter signaling there's no one noticing you're not there I've sometimes been tempted to classify people as egg
people and onion people onion people have layer after layer after layer you peel it back and there's still more layers and you don't really know what's underneath whereas egg people there's a shell and you get through it and you see what's on the inside so in some sense
I'd think of introverts as going for the egg people strategy they're trying to show you this is who I am there's not much more hidden and uh you get past my shell and you can know me and trust me and there's a sense in which we can form a stronger Bond because I'm not hiding that much more let's say we've bought
into this Vision where so much of the world is about signaling let's think about what our Act practical options are so one would be that we tax signaling and subsidize non- signaling Behavior such as example you mentioned earlier what would that actually mean in terms of public policy
like what gets the subsidy and what gets the tax yeah once you think about it it doesn't make much sense it just doesn't seem like a very viable option honestly to to subsidize the non- signaling almost everything we're doing has a big signaling part so it really would be a
very difficult task to subsidize n you'd have to basically pay people to like be alone for an hour or something every day perhaps with nothing they can use to communicate or use to generate something else and even then they could just be trying to show the world how many layers they have right exactly so
another way we could think about signaling in terms of public policy we're all trying to show to others that we care but it's usually a select group of others and maybe the group of others we're signaling to isn't a broad enough group and so rather than signaling only say to our fellow Americans we should be
signaling abroad the United States government should be signaling to potential enemies that we love them that we're all one big broad Caring World Community is the real problem with signaling not the waste and the signal but that we signal too narrowly in that framing the key issue is the
externalities but war is Big negative externalities right without War we grow and everything's wonderful so to the extent you can say a certain kind of signaling would reduce War that's a great thing obviously but I'm not sure that's the main effect of focusing on a larger or smaller group with your
signaling but you want more signaling then right the main problem is to reduce War you've got to show everyone you care most of all your enemies so you want to sub to I signaling well but what you're often doing when you're focused on a very large scope is showing how much
better we are than them so it's not necessarily great when America gets really focused on showing the rest of the world what America is because in the past that's often meant we're trying to show how much better we are than everybody else and how committed we are to fighting to the end should anybody
challenge us Etc not necessarily going to reduce War but isn't then the nudge you want to be less nice to people who are on your side and to be more open and welcoming and generous to potential enemies and maybe that's hard to get with tax policy or public policy but in an ideal first best that's the hansoni
remedy for all that Al us it's not a crazy intuition I just think it's not the two main things the two main things I'd say is one just positive externalities so obviously reducing War would be good but Innovation is one of the things in our world that we just have huge lack of of incentives for so
all sorts of kinds of innovation I think that would be great to promote and the other thing I think is it's less about the scope of the audience and more about how well informed they are I'd say the our main problem is our audiences are too ignorant we're impressing people who
who can be impressed by things that are kind of stupid and if if they weren't so gullible we would try harder to impress them with more difficult things that made more difference so so for example in medicine we are trying to show off that we care about other people by get
pushing them to get medicine and buying medicine for them and we don't actually know which medicines work very well and we don't much care because the people we're helping don't know and the audience doesn't know and so since none of them really know what works we don't care that much about what works when we
push them to get more medicine the more that the audience that we were trying to impress knew which kind of medicines were infective and which were not the more we would pay attention to that and try to impress people with how much we care about them by getting them stuff
that worked but this is striking you're in a way going back to Matthew Arnold's elitist idea that the real problem is we need to elevate who is watching the critics the audience the Philistines and in a funny way you're flipping back to a very important role for education education may be signaling but if part
of what it does is help turn you into an elite which you're doing because you're signaling but then you become an elite audience haven't we in a super roundabout way found the hansoni and third best argument for why education is still underrated I think you can take
your proposition and make an interesting science fiction novel where there's a great future where there's there's a good kind of school and then the good kind of school the right kind of people are the elites and that makes a great world there but I don't think that's very close to the world we're in in our
world the people who are running schools and facing students are not really the kind of Elites that I'm focused on here they don't necessarily know much better about the things we're talking about so here's another response to the notion that everything's about signaling you could say well that's what people
actually enjoy so if signaling is 90% of whatever surely it's evolved into being parts of our utility functions it makes us happy to signal so signaling isn't just wasteful resources what we really want to do is set up a world that caters to the elephant in our brain so to speak
and we just want all policies to Pander to signaling as much as possible maybe make signals cheaper but just signals everywhere now and forever what says you yeah I think our audience needs a better summary of this thesis that I'm going to defend here so the elephant in the brain
main thesis is that in many areas of life perhaps even most there's a thing we say that we're trying to do like going to school to learn or going to the doctor to get well and then what we're really trying to do is often more typically something else that's more selfish and a lot of it is showing off
and so that's true then we are built to do that that's the thing we want to do and in some sense it's a great world when we get to do it uh my complaint isn't really that most people don't acknowledge this I accept that the world may people may be just fine leaving the
elephant in their brain and not paying attention to it and and continuing to pretend one thing while they're doing another that may be what makes them happy and that may be okay my stronger claim would be that policy analysts and social scientists who claim that they understand the social World well enough
to make recommendations for changes they should understand the elephant in the brain they should have a better idea of hidden motives because they could think about which institutions that we might choose differently to have better outcomes so if in a world where say we're all showing what strong veral men
we are by fighting battles every day physical battles we may enjoy that until the day we die at 25 but from a larger social point of view there's a huge loss and so the focus here is on the coordination failure on the equilibrium being inefficient because we have these huge negative externalities so it's
negative externalities that are the problem and The Fault With The signaling not so much the fact that you like to show off and you get to show off and hey isn't that great I never start a podcast by asking for a book summary and that is deliberate signaling a reader writes in
and says well ask Robin is he actually a moralist after all and if so what's the moral value he's defending ah well so I've described myself what offends you deep down you see it out there what offends you it offends me when uh the things I try to do for high motives other people pretend to do and get just
as much credit as me so that's relatively selfish and personal but that's more plausibly where my emotions would be so yes I see myself as a trying to be an intellectual who looks at the difficult questions the Deep questions grapples with them focuses on coming up with uh hidden but
powerful explanations and then looks for reforms institutions mechanisms we could use to make things better that's a noble cause in my mind and so there are many people out there who other people are giving credit to them for doing that sort of thing and I don't think they deserve it because they're not actually
doing it that that's a very person that's not my broad scope for all morality but if you want to pick a thing that just makes me mad or something okay does your implied model hold more for individualistic or collectivistic cultures as they are classified in sociology I'm not sure I have an
implication there I don't know okay as closed circuit television becomes more and more common and more of our lives are taped already the case in the United Kingdom and parts of China and facial recognition technology is coming how will this change our behavior in your model we know something about what
people used to be like when they lived in small uh villages or even before that in small bands and they were basically almost never alone they were almost always somebody watching them sure and in the last few hundred years we've gotten used to having more privacy so used to be rooms didn't have doors uh
used to be people slept together with other people in the same room when it used to be when people read they read out loud people around them could hear them today we can read silently we can be by ourselves and we've gotten used to a lot of privacy and but more scrutiny
are we going to Signal less or signal more the trend will be to go back to the historical norm and is that more or less signaling the historical Norm it's it's a different kind like I said we're maxing out mostly all the way maxing out we're basically all the time doing things to signal in various ways let's
say you're on a date and rather than being completely explicit you give the classic line do you want to come up and see my etchings classic but a bit dated but a bit dated but at least ever why has this line ever worked or indeed has it how can we explain why the line Works since
it seems really quite transparent transparent isn't the same as clear sure in our book we give the example of the person drinking alcohol in public in a paper bag it's illegal in most places to drink alcohol in public and police if they see you with a bottle of clear
alcohol drinking in public they feel OB oated to arrest you but if you go through the excuse of putting it in a paper bag they aren't fooled they are pretty sure you're drinking liquor out of the paper bag but they feel they have an excuse now they don't have to arrest you they can claim they didn't know
similarly uh if you invite someone up to see your etchings they're not entirely sold yet they would like an out and they'd like the out to say uh they never intended to go anywhere close to where you were suggesting to go and so you need to give them that excuse until the very last moment they to commit you need
to give them the excuse not only to not commit to pretend they had no intention of ever going close to committing so in general do you personally do you prefer to be in settings where the message space is quite finely grained and you can send all kinds of subtle hints or do
you prefer it when there are only core signals where you can State outright what it is you have in mind let's go to the Afghan Restaurant rather than hinting hm Kebab I sure love Kebab in case it's not clear to people who have listened so far I am really nerdy I was uh relatively pretty socially
unskilled through most of my life and that means I am one of the people who it gets taken advantage of by other people when they are more socially skilled and they talk indirectly to each other in ways that I can't figure out what they're saying or what they mean Etc so we socially unskilled people tend to
prefer things to be out in the open and clear where we can read them and understand them and react at least at some very basic level so that's who I am I am nerdy person and so personally I prefer things to be more out in the open where I can have some idea what the heck's going on and will notice them but
I think that has given me some advantage and being a social scientist in that when you're really socially skilled and you move about in the social world you just intuitively do all the right things and you don't think explicitly about it and so you don't really notice that your
theories that you might write on the chalkboard about social science don't actually fit your behavior or the people around you uh you can just not notice that conflict whereas if you are a nerd like myself you go through the social World noticing that you don't understand
what's going on and your theory of what people are doing doesn't fit what they're doing and you're just puzzled by that and you bring in social science and it try to help and you also realize it's not helping you that much either social science is not giving you a lot more progress to help this strange behavior
of the people around you so full Hypocrites right so so that means you are more explicitly thinking about social behavior and so you might notice puzzles ways in which people's behavior deviates from what they say and that could give you more of an edge in digging into those puzzles let me try to
slot some of your results into what is sometimes called personality psychology so so most people are quite willing to report that they think they are morally Superior to others in your framework I mean what other variable about people best predicts who's the most willing to
report this moral superiority is probably some degree of confidence in their social group and their support of their social group that is people are especially willing to express moral superiority when they're expressing the superiority not of themselves individually but of the group of people
they're within together and so they are feeling a bonding they're saying we are right they are wrong and they are showing a loyalty to their group by expressing that moral superity to other people expressing moral superity to the other people you are most closely related immediately next to is probably
uh not something people do a lot and nor is it really that wise there's also a quality and personality psychology called Maki of alienism it's a kind of willingness to manipulate other people in in a large number of papers actually machiavellianism is not correlated with measures of IQ does this fit your
framework violate your framework how do you make sense of this well I think it fits the idea that we have all these subconscious capacities to be hypocritical and to engage cleverly socially and those aren't connected that much to our explicit conscious reasoning so a smart IQ person who can do an SAT
test and do a math problem they are good at using explicit conscious reasoning to calculate things that doesn't much involve their subconscious social calculations of in which context they can you know manipulate somebody or ask them to do something do it that sort of
thing which is just a whole separate cognitive capacity so it's almost as if in your model we're all equally makavelian and personality psychology is mismeasuring true melanism as a variable is that how you think about it no I expect some of us are just better at being makavelian they have better social
skills so we social nerds for example are not so good at that and but I'm just not sure that correlates much with of higher acute it's it's somewhat different set of skills the one thing machiavellianism seems to correlate with best as I understand the literature is
flexibility does that make sense in a Honan framework I don't have a good answer I don't know thinking also personality psychology social strategies are very diverse in personality psychology depending on what you're like as a person what your opportunities are and in your book if you talk about say
spending money on Health Care to show that you care or education not always being about learning uh jokes being about in group bonding and so on to what extent do you see your book as explaining the diversity of strategy choices or do you think you're telling us you know what's the modal or median
choice and explicating that definitely the latter okay that is the first thing to understand about anything is is the middle of the distribution right if you've got that wrong you're just way off and you need to get that roughly right before you can start looking at the variance in the distribution and
which all along which Dimensions it's higher lower variance and I I do have the sense that there's an enormous more to learn than we have uncovered so I feel that across my career I was really quite surprised I figured you know social scientist would mostly have the basics covered and I would be making a
few minor adjust adjustments on various margins because surely we must have understood the social world really well by now we've been social for so long and I was surprised to find that it seemed I could find big deviations where people have been saying one thing and that that
the truth is really quite different and I'm happy if I can just make the case that the typical case is really quite different than what people have been saying but of course the actual case has huge variation around the typical case in a very high-dimensional space and no
doubt there's enormous complexity to figure out and discover there and I'm just scratching the surface of figuring out this basic difference that just the middle of the distribution is really far from what people say let's say you've perfectly explained the median and the mode in what direction would you even
look if you wanted to write a SQL book explaining the diversity in the distribution if 90% is signaling it seems the signaling concept doesn't give you a lot of room to explain the diversity when you don't know where the middle of distribution is finding out is really pretty valuable sure so I I I
think that's there's value to do that and honestly in our book we give the first third of the book to a rough summary of the basic Theory and this last two-thirds of the book go over 10 different areas of life trying to make the case our motives are different I think you could easily do 20 30 or even
more areas of life it seems to me the priority is to go figure out more areas of life and see if the middle of the distribution is is anywhere close to what people say that seems to be much more valuable than trying to go figure out the variant because all this behavior is really high dimensional
right there's not just one point to go find out to find out the variance you have to look across many dimensions and figure out which way whereas the middle of the distribution that's more canonical you can just say what's the most common motive what's the typical case and that's just a lot easier how
much health insurance should a person buy the Rand health insurance experiment which is still some of our best data showed that when people paid full price medicine then they got less medicine than when they had free medicine that extra free medicine apparently had no net health benefits so that suggests
that one metric is you really only want to get the sort of medicine get the sort of medicine you would pay for if you had to pay up few out of your pocket so say I'm an independent contractor there's no mandate and I earn $100,000 a year and I have no employer who gives me anything
how many dollars should I actually spend you should get a relatively minimal plan of the sort that might cut back medical spending by a third or a half compared to what most people do and you'd like on the margin or you know either you make a conscious choice or you have a financial
incentive that on the margin you face a price and you therefore just don't do things because they're free you again try to follow the heris stick would I pay for this out of pocket if I had to and if you wouldn't pay for it out of pocket skip it maybe unless there's an especially strong reason to think that's
one of the exceptions which there are some a recent New York Times article indicated that in 1966 3ars of all Americans had a lot of faith in their medical leaders and now it's only 34% but of course we're spending much much more on Healthcare either in absolute terms or is a percent of GDP I mean does
that go against your theory if there's now so much cynicism why you spending more on Healthcare showing that you care as you just said I'm focused on the middle of the distribution middle of the distribution across time and across space so I don't Focus that much on explaining Trends I've actually a
somewhat uh disapproving of trend tracking because the middle of the distribution of human behavior is so poorly understood and there's so many huge opportunities there I resent the distraction of people who focus on the difference between this in a neighboring country or this decade and the decade
before or after that's all the sort of thing you'd want to get around to once you've understood the basics of what was happening and I don't think we do will the onset of social memes and cues mean that we will evolve to be stupider over longer periods of time so Society will
tell you you should signal you you won't need whatever darwinian programming you might have and will tend to lose it or not the trend that I'm aware of is that when we have tools to help us do something like remember phone numbers we get worse at that thing because we
offload the task onto the tool and then we get better at other things we put more investment into other things so plausibly in whatever category we get better tools we will simply reallocate our mental resources to other tasks that we don't have tools for so there is a way of reading your book where you're
actually teaching us how to do it so kind of the reverse of Maia Valley who pretended to be teaching evil rulers but actually was complaining about them and straussian terms what you're doing is complaining about hypocrisy but the straussian or makavelian reading of your book is you're teaching us all how to be
better at it but with the very long-term goal that eventually will evolve into beings that don't do this at all I think you'll notice that it's almost impossible to talk about hypocrisy without people presuming you're complaining about it that is we all just presume that any mention of hypocrisy
must be a complaint it is such it is the overwhelming context in which mentions of hypocrisy come I think we tried pretty hard in the book not to really be complaining about hypocrisy we were trying to say it's there and it's important and if you miss it you're you're going to be unhappy and and just
not understand the world but we're not really recommending wholesale changes in human behavior and since if I say 90% of human behavior is signaling then we're pretty much accepting that's going to continue and we we are try to be really clear we like people in case it's not
clear the vast pretty much every other living creature on earth is much less admirable and interesting than humans humans are where it's at humans are the people you want want to talk to you want to interact with you want to form relationships with humans are great humans aren't what they pretend to
be but what they actually are is spectacular a reader writes into me with a question and I quote what about the lyric voice the Aesthetics of narration not grounded in logical sequence but allusion circularity unexpected connection where does poetry which doesn't predict anything fit into the
hansoni world I am human nerdy human but still human so I have the the full usual range of things that I can be enjoy and like and so poetry and music and visual arts they're all part of that they are part of things that I like because I'm human but when I choose an identity in a sense which I have and I say what's
important to me and where I want to focus that gets low priority and another way to think about this is so Tyler and I over the years have talked about the value of reading the classics yes and there's there's a critique of the classics which says that if all these people have read the
classics before and they haven't been able to extract from these Classics some explicit statement that now you could put in a textbook and read somehow you have to go back to the classics and get it yourself by reading their original words you might say well yes you might
get it but then you'll never be able to tell anybody else that either so what's the point other than your personal enjoyment so I put a priority on discovering things intellectually that I could explain to other people that I could transfer to other people to be part of this Collective Enterprise where
lots of us work together discover things tell each other and then we all know more as a result over time I think that's a wonderful thing to be part of and that's what I hope to be part of and these thing experiences I could have that would give me some sort of insight
in a way that I couldn't communicate to other people I figure like well what's the point then that's not part of this Grand Enterprise that I'm trying to be part of in your earlier book the age of M people upload their brains into computers and then make many copies of themselves is is this your solution to
fa's Paradox namely where are all the aliens have they all done this uh no so my book about the age of M is about this future uh scenario where brain emulations become feasible and cheap and then basically take over the economy and that economy would grow much faster than
ours and so it would even more quickly become visible on a cosmic scale unless it destroys itself so emulations are they see themselves in virtual reality and so they experience that in virtual reality but they are made out of real resources they are made out of real computers with real energy and real
structural support and all those things and they grow their economy very fast by making more of those things and on a cosmic time scale they would grow very fast and be you know take over the Earth take over the solar system grow out farther become a big visible thing that
we don't see so the fmes Paradox is the question if we seem to have this bright future to grow and become visible why don't we look see anything out there that's visible that's the key question and it's a hard and somewhat scary question and when people upload is that itself an act of signaling or are they
going against their instincts to Signal well fortunately I can just analyze this world without knowing why individuals make those choices so there are a lot of places in economics where we can say look there's just if some people do this there'll be all this activity there and
then we can talk about it and people can just do it for all sorts of reasons and we don't necessarily need to know why but won't signaling keep us out of this Grand Ant Farm if the age of M is 99.9 9% of universal GDP as it would be over time with all this multiplication then signaling doesn't explain 90% of
everything it's whatever gets people to upload that has the explanatory power of the whole sum of world history you could say that today accurately you could say the fact that humanity is vast and Powerful compared to all the other animals on the Earth is not primarily explained by signaling we as rich people
with this Society we are using and building on we use much of our resources in time for signaling but the existence of all these resources that we can use for this purpose that's not explained by signaling that's explained by whatever makes humans special and Powerful as far
as I can tell there are no aliens from other worlds in the audience for this talk water wear is the great filter that prevents the emergence of Life everywhere alien visitors all the time different civilization dropping down every day oh who's next hi welcome to the party so the great filter is
whatever causes ordinary matter to eventually not become a visible thing on the universal scale so so that's what by definition so the the two main categories for the great filter are stuff before our point in the along the path and stuff after our point on the path and the problem is anything that
gives us evidence that things before us on the path are easier is evidence suggesting it's harder farther on the path which is bad news for our future like if it's mitochondria we should throw a party because we've already managed that but if we thought that was the hard part sure and we we see
mitochondria elsewhere in the universe then we go well that wasn't so hard and maybe now our future is the hard the obvious easy answer is to say the hardest step was the very first step because it's the one we know the least about it's the one that does look really hard and so you can breathe a somewhat
sigh of relief saying well that's our best answer the best answer was the very first step was really hard and because of that our future could be bright what that predicts is wherever that happened in the in the Galaxy the only other life we should see in the galaxy is other
life that came from that same origin point now our Stars started in a cluster of stars that were all born about the same time and in the last four billion years that cluster has spread out to a ring around the center of the Galaxy and there's you know roughly a hundred other stars out there plausibly that might
have life because they had the same origin of Life as we did but if we find life anywhere else then that says no that's not the hardest the hard step and given all that what's your best candidate for the great filter the very first step the very first step okay but just don't think you should rest easy on
that that is it's the best guess but how sure can you be of that okay if you think there's only a 20% chance that it might not be that that you have to say well there's a 20% chance that there's the rest of the great filter and it might be in front of us and a 20% chance
of dying soon is is it something to worry about now in an age of M world I take it you're of the view that to some extent you identify with the copies of you within the computer I predict that the M's themselves will identify with other copies of themselves CU that's very straightforward they are very
similar to each other they've been through that process many times before and their culture will select for that attitude so that's an easy win but you're upload would to what extent would you will you identify with your upload I don't know the answer to that what I can say is there's you thought about this
more than anyone else in the entire world and my answer is that I don't know so that should be an acceptable answer to a question after thinking about it for a long time is there are some things you don't know the answer to So my answer there is I can predict with confidence that out of 7 billion people
some people will identify enough with these uploads in order to create them and so that the age of M would happen that seems like a really safe guess because there's so many people in the world that have so much variation I at the moment believe that I would identify with it but hey you turn it on in front
of me and I chat for a while and maybe I will say no I guess I don't that's the possibility you toy with believing in many worlds interpretations of quantum mechanics so there are nearly identical copies of Robin Hansen out there in most of these theories how much do you
identify with them well in a theoretical sense I will to identify with them but in an emotional sense I almost never think about them that the subject almost never comes up so emotional identity only happens when people you know challenge the Identity or call it out in some way that you have to choose and
their consumption Behavior doesn't predict yours so you never say well some other Robin Hansen is having a chocolate ice cream cone so I can pass on this one the many worlds these other worlds you just have no way to interact with and so you can basically ignore them and so
that's why socially they have very little effect on us but you can still identify with them you could say well I feel very Diversified so in my life I can take all kinds of risks because I know in the other lives out there they're meeting different Fates I don't know anyone who behaves that way I don't
think that makes sense as a decision Theory point of view if there are many versions of you you still care about how many there are and the more the the more the better so if you take stupid risks that kill a lot off that's bad in the same way that if you look down an ordinary decision tree but it's less bad
than if there's only the one you the way Brian Kaplan would say right ordinary standard decision theory has you looking down a game tree and very quickly the game tree has millions and billions of copies of you down the game tree of almost any game there's vast numbers of
you down there and that doesn't mean you you're willing to take more risks about the more distant future because there's so many versions of you there you're still worried to have more of them and not less in all of these conversations or as they're sometimes called re-education camps there's a segment in
the middle overrated versus underrated please feel free to pass but I'll toss out a few candidates and you tell me if you think they're under or overrated first Tolstoy the Russian author correctly rated following professional sports overrated why because it's not something I
like other people seem to enjoy it just fine and I'm not saying they should stop per se but doesn't do that much for me I did watch the Super Bowl but you have a reason for thinking it's less interesting than what other people seem to find well if we go to my core values which are about insight and and being
part of a process that produces more insight there's just not much Insight being generated there the recent movie three billboard in ebing Missouri I think it deserves best picture so I guess mildly underrated because it's hasn't gotten best picture yet and what's interesting in the movie it makes
you think it's going to be one of these preachy things where it's got the good guys and the bad guys with the usual labels and then it swaps it around and takes you somewhere else and that's refreshing the prospect of quantum Computing underrated or overrated in its
importance overrated why well because it's it's one of these things that's a really big potential change and there's a lot of futurists out there who just eager for anything that looks like a really big potential change but once you look at it you realize you actually can't do that much with quantum
computers that's more than you can do with ordinary computers there are just a few things you can do you can factor numbers which means you have to change cryptography you can do some Quantum simulations which hardly anybody ever does anyway so honestly it doesn't make that much difference straussian readings
of books looking for their possibly hidden or alternative meanings correctly rated how is it rated it's disapproved of explicitly but indulged in constantly Okay so you know and and there are I mean many authors of many things do have hidden meanings that's that is extremely
correct that hidden meanings are all over the place in fiction non-fiction even talks like this people constantly have more than one level an example I give on my talks on the elephant in the brain is saying if you're an actor and you are given a script and the script is
basically a scene at a restaurant where you and your lover are telling each other how much you love each other and how great your relationship is the actor will throw up and say I can't act this because it needs to have more than one level and they will look for the hidden motive of this character why they are
here being so nice am I going to break up with them am I afraid they're going to be break up with me and only when they find the hidden motive can they actually do the scene which is just more evidence that we are just constantly expecting multiple levels of meanings in
fiction non-fiction and everywhere the movement known as effective altruism suggesting we should be more rational about how we give away our money mildly underrated that is it still got legs to grow it's never going to be a an overwhelming movement for the whole society but why not this is going to the smart
how informed the audience is for signaling we talked about before so when people are giving to charity or doing nice things they act as if they're trying to help that's the thing they say they're doing right what they're really doing is trying to show that they feel empathy that they feel a vulnerability
to to pain around them and so if they were you were in pain around them they might feel vulnerable to help you so people do things to appear like they're trying to help but because their audience hardly knows what actually helps they don't pay much attention doing things that actually help they
just do something that looks like it would be a reaction to someone who felt like they wanted to help the more that people knew what actually helped or not then the more that would pressure people who were trying to help to show that they have this feeling to do stuff that
really helped which would be great so overall that would be a way to create a more informed audience is to have more people who are effective alterist but of course you have to be pretty aware and smart and pay you know dedicated and paying attention to actually be someone who knows which Charities are how
effective that's just can't be that large fraction of the population for a while at least let me ask a few questions about Robin Hansen the doer a significant aspect of Robin's work and thought why aren't private companies more interested in prediction markets when you're in an organization and
you're doing much of anything you are concerned that people might challenge what you're doing and say why are you doing that and a great favorite excuse for anybody in any organization is I'm collecting information I'm analyzing and so there's just the standard thing that
it's it's a favorite excuse about for most activities and it gives you the impression that people in organization think they want more information and they want more analysis is that's what they're using as this excuse for lots of things they're lying that it's they're actually more
often playing politics that is a lot of corporate activity is about creating coalitions and getting support for your Coalition and undermining other rival coalitions and so that's what people are actually doing but they want to give lip service to the information things so when you say hey there's a great new
Institution for information they're kind of put in the corner saying well of course I want that don't I and so sometimes they even adopt it as a way to show off but they find of course they don't actually want the information a concrete example that I think makes but a lot of managers are willing to take
their companies public and then they'll have a contract with options where the value of the options is determined by a stock price traded on publicly Market on on public markets maybe that's become more rare today but there's plenty of it managers don't in general manage to
defeat it when the idea makes sense oh sure but but that's not the main reason they're doing it you know they take a company public to get the revenue from the sale of the pump they're not doing it because then there'll be a price later that they can follow I that's a side effect right I would say if you
have a project with a deadline today quite often uh that goes badly that is you have reviews of the project and people will say oh yes of course we're going to make the deadline and then finally the deadline comes and you don't make the deadline and you fail and this happens a lot and if you ask people what
why does that happen you you often say well because they they wouldn't listen to us about the problems with the project and all the things going wrong and they kept saying it would work now if you turn it around look from the guy running the Project's point of view they're thinking I might fail on this
project it might not make the deadline what will my excuse be I need a good excuse and their favorite excuses usually okay everything was going fine until all of a sudden something came out of left field no one could have seen it coming it'll never happen again it knocked us flat but you don't need to
hold anybody accountable or prepare or change in any way because hey this is a one-time event in order to make that excuse work you need everybody to say it's going fine until all of a sudden it doesn't a prediction Market gets in the way of that it shows everybody that from
an early point people knew this wasn't going to work and so then people will hold you accountable for like well why didn't you do something about it now you started your career in the hard Sciences you also worked some number of years at Nasa how has this affected how you approach economics and social science in
many ways one way related to this book is that in physics and software and the hard Sciences it was obvious and expected that people were eager for Innovation that uh people were looking for new kinds of transistors new kinds of software organization new kinds of things and they were they knew that
changing would be expensive and hard they knew it would be risky they knew that most Innovations would fail and nevertheless they were still really eager for Innovation and my first you know connection with social science was seeing that in social science there appeared to be a lot of really big
powerful innovations that had great potential and that was a lot of what made me want to go into social science I said look look at all the impact I could have by going to social science and doing these Innovations and it wasn't until a little while I realized well the
reason why it's so easy to find big improvements in social science is we almost never apply them we don't actually make the improvements that we could and that set up this puzzle for me but but in part you my initial social science career was all about Innovation I.E new mechanisms new institutions
studying the institutions we have what variations could work better all with an eye to try to make it better and it took me a while to realize that that wasn't working because we don't actually apply much of this whole literature about how to make things better in Social so that's one big way I'm influenced by the
and you're working now on blockchainbased prediction markets is that correct I Consulting with some companies doing that I have some criticisms of them but uh I hope they succeed and the idea of doing prediction markets on a combinatorial basis that's largely your contribution is that
correct one variation on how to do combinatorial prediction markets so I I wrote you know first paper talking about combinatorial prediction markets and and I and I was part of a project to produce basian network-based combinatorial prediction markets and that we did that
we succeeded in making ones that were computable and uh accurate tell us in a sentence what the word combinatorial means in this context context billions and billions as Carl Sean would have said lots and lots of variables so an ordinary prediction Mark you might bet on the election which candidate will win
or something then you've got a handful of of things you're betting on you know will this candidate win or not what will be the vote share if you take a lot of these questions you can create combinations of them and if you have 10 questions each of whom has 10 answers you can make 10 to the 10 possible
questions which is 10 billion you might think that would be impossible to actually do but we can do that we can not only create all those questions we can allow people to effectively manage it so that they are making all of those billions of numbers reasonable a reader
writes in quote ask him his 12 rules of life just one end quote just one rule or one instead of 12 one of the 12 wow that's that's a tough one early in life you're a seller not a buyer okay now you've written about this notion of a view Quake book A book you read it it changes how you think about so many
different things and you go around thinking about talking about it for weeks months maybe years hey do view Quake books dwindle as you get older and if so how should this alter one's intellectual diet I was very selfish as a young person and I had very little career sense or sense of how to you know
succeed in life I just was really interested in things and so I would go into an area and read about it as it had all these interesting insights and as those ran out I got bored and switched to other things and it took me a while uh actually till the age of 34 to go
back to school to get my PhD where I had a a little more career sense to realize I would have to be a seller not a buyer to make things that other people would want I think if you're eager for these big Innovative changes in how you look at things I think there's a peak somewhere in the middle perhaps there
there's two contrary effects one is that the more you know the more you can learn the more you know about many different fields the more intersections you could make the more easier it is to read each new textbook the E easier it is to understand each new thing they're presenting and so there is a scale and
scoping economy of just knowing more over life but they won't be view Quakes well many of them can be but over life you're also doing the diminishing returns of jumping to the easy obvious wins first right and those slowly run out so I'm not sure if in my life I'm seeing a trajectory overall of view
cakes going down I may be an exception I think when you're really young you you don't know very enough to even have a view Quake because a view Quake is you have to have some way of thinking about things that then changed when you don't really have a way of thinking about
something you don't know enough to have a way you you aren't changed so there's a sense which you can really only surprise or shock someone who has a theory who has an opinion about something uh and so it takes time to acquire these expectations such that you could then be surprised that you have a
masters in the philosophy of science from University of Chicago why did you do that well I was a physics undergraduate and one of the things people kept saying was that there was this science thing and they credited it for all the great things I was learning in physics and and I kept the more I
heard about that the more I wondered well what's that that sounds really important and and it doesn't make much sense what they they kept saying contradictory things about it so I wanted to get to the bottom of like what is this science thing that's supposedly so great that that we have all this
stuff called science because of it and what I found is there is no such thing it's it's a myth it's just like a name for a whole collection of you know idiocratic detail in different areas that has very little in common or coherent and so once I realized that there it was one of these myths that I
lost interest I do think learning philosophy is useful mainly because it inoculates you against other philosophy okay and there is a lot of philosophy loose in the world and uh unless you can find a world where you won't be exposed to it later you you may find it in your
interest to be exposed to it on purpose early so that you are inoculated for intelligent human beings collectively what would be the best way for us to improve rational thinking well gee that sounds like a really easy tossup for prediction markets so to listen to to look at prediction
markets and to believe them if we had a lot more prediction markets then you could just look at the prediction Market on any particular question and just believe its answer that would be the usual way to just decide what to believe on a very wide range of topics and it would be a rational answer and now
assume I'm a wnab be Trader and I go to Robin Hansen I say Robin how should I think better learn to think better about when to trade in these markets when to believe the correct price ought to be something other than what I observe this isn't you know anything you shouldn't already know but I'd say specialize many
people especially in ordinary conversations and even in financial markets they feel this obligation to have an opinion about everything and that's it's actually one of the reasons I'm somewhat wary about a format like this I'm I'm wary of this expectation that you should just have an opinion
about everything that you're willing to defend and go far with right you will you will be better a contribution to the world will be better and your financial portfolio will also be better if you focus on knowing some things and on other things you you might like practice
thinking about them because they connect and it's useful but just don't have much confidence in it certainly don't go betting on it because you don't know for God's sake you don't know but keep in mind you told us before that as we get older Making Connections across different fields which is a bit removed
from specializing that's something we get much better at right that's the hard thing so it isn't just specialized in one thing you may specialize in a dozen or dozens of things but out of the millions of things there are that's still quite a specialization and so this is one of the hard things to judge
especially as you get older and have more potenti capacity is when do I know enough on something that it's worth for me getting in there and learning more and when do I think I have enough confidence in something that I'm willing to stand up and say I'm going to put myself up against the best and say I
know as much as they do and what's sometimes called the rationality community is that growing to insular is it mainly about virtue signaling what does it mean to have a true community of people trying to be more rational and what do you think of the rationality community today I think the impetus is
like the effect of altruism impetus you look at the world and you say the world is failing me uh let's make a group and be better now with effect of altruism you can say well let's identify good Charities and support them together with rationality you say well let's try to be
more rational together groups that form around a goal can work better or worse if depending on how well the goal can be verified by the group so if you're forming a group based on how dedicated we are say how much of what percentage of our income we're willing to vote well
that's a really easy thing to monitor it's really possible and and some of effective altruists have form subgroups so they say we donate 10% of our income to charity we've committed to that we can show you our tax returns Etc and that's something a group can do they could also somewhat commit to you know
following certain measures of effectivess of Charities randomized trial or something like that having a group identified around the concept of rationality it's harder because well how do you tell if we are being rational and we all self deceive as you've pointed out in your book right so I I I fear
that the typical case uh most people are looking for signs of rationality mainly so that they can see that some of the signs apply to them and tell themselves that they're better than other people and this is actually one of my complaint for a lot of the most popular discussions of prediction markets so I'm
mainly interested in prediction markets because it's a potential institution that we could create and then we could all be better off by having these prices but in fact most of the interest in prediction markets has come say through the book The Wisdom of crowds or super
forecasters where the content is mostly about which Among Us are better who are the people among us who are wiser and more rational and informed such that they could Crow and brag about it and other people should be ashamed and the institution itself that allowed people to do this prediction Market is a
secondary background sort of thing and so similarly in rationality I'm afraid there's just such a strong human tendency to want to collect these signs of I'm smarter than you that a a group that defines Itself by rationality ends up in practice just collecting the I know's based theorem I know about
overconfidence you know Etc and then showing off that in any one context they can invoke those things and so people like that very often say you're citing a psychology study didn't you know that psychology is all crap now because none of it replicates you know because that's like a thing that sounds sophisticated
and rational now you've encouraged people to think about this idea of futarchy a kind of prediction markets for governing you sometimes say well vote on values bet on beliefs if there were a prediction Market in futari itself what would the price of futari and its realization be selling at it
would depend on the time scale and scope of the application 100 years it's not about to happen soon over a 100 years say ignoring the AG of M say sure ignoring the age of M then uh it's plausible this is why they're combinatorial Market I think you know it's at least a 30% chance that it will
have some substantial scope in 100 years that's not huge confidence but I think the potential is is large enough to be worth trials and investigations so I talk about futari as a form of governance and it's just much easier to get people excited and interested if you
apply the example to the biggest possible things you could apply it to like governing Nations or even the world that's obviously not the place to start for initial trials sure but if it makes it harder to govern in companies is futarchy compatible with enough sense of some kind of community or nation
building or people having something in common to use it for a government which is typically harder to hold together than a company in some ways at least over historical spans well so there's two issues here one is a multiple equal so I'd say if you look at the example of
cost accounting you can imagine a world where nobody does cost accounting and you say on your organization let's do cost accounting here that's a problem because you'd be heard as saying somebody around here is stealing and we need to find out who so that might be discouraged in a world where everybody
else does cost accounting you say let's not do cost accounting here that's will be heard as saying could we just steal and not talk about it which will also seem negative so I think for with similarly with prediction markets you can imagine a world like ours where nobody does them and then you're
proposing to do it will look send a bad signal you're basically saying people are bullshitting around here we need to find out who and then get to the truth but in a world where everybody was doing it I think it would be similarly hard not to do it if if every project with a deadline had a betting market and you
say let's not have a betting Market on our project deadline you'd be basically saying we're not going to make the deadline folks could we just like set that aside and not even talk about it so that's one issue is it's potential that if we switch to a new equilibria then it
would be the standard thing just like cost accounting now cost accounting is that compatible with real organizations and emotions I mean there's a sense in which it it can't help really you're being very critical about people and then very negative trying to track all their money and where it goes and
suspect that they might be stealing nevertheless once it's the standard then you got to follow it along now decision markets with futarchy you might say have have more of a potential because um we often run organizations and communities via the myths and hypocrisies that we
have with each other about what we say works and what has what consequences so to the extent that these prediction markets were on those topics they might get in the way of those sort of hypocrisies but of course just as with cost accounting an organization that has good emotional bonding because they
don't use cost accounting could still function pretty badly because everybody's stealing and then you might imagine new organizations that show up that compete with them that do do cost accounting that don't quite support everybody emotionally as deeply as they might but actually function they could win out
similarly prediction Market based organizations that actually have accurate forecasts about what works and what doesn't could beat out other organizations that were more emotionally indulgent last question from a reader quote what common topics do you Robin feel you have your least considered
positions on end quote the ones that I don't think much about especially certainly art personal relationship advice you know career advice uh you know I basically have been trying to focus on Grand ideas and when I and I'm neglecting everything else that other people pay more attention to and so I'm
just not going to be very good at all the rest of that and is that contrary to signaling theory that you would have such supposedly poorly thought out positions on relationship advice doesn't signaling Theory predict the opposite and don't you in the book in fact have a
lot of opinions on relationship advice not always perectly there's what's called counter signaling sure and uh signaling to different audiences so sometimes people do try to Signal say that they aren't very good at relationships in order to convince you that you know what you see on the
surface is all there is to me and you don't have to worry about me having hidden motives and other layers that will try to you I'm just what you see is what you get and that's often of course not always true but it is a stance that some people can incredibly take I very much recommend to you all Robin Hansen's
new book with Kevin simler the elephant in the brain hidden motives and everyday life and thank you very much Robin Hansen thank you we now do have time for questions so I will call on you and we'll also bring the microphone over anyone please with a question when you give that over 90%
signaling share how would that change if you define signaling narrowly as conscious signaling as I generally do so it only counts as signaling if you actually are doing something that you don't want to do while say pretending that you do or you know you like you're enduring something like you like you are
actually doing something uh where your your true motivation is not the state of motivation so that what would that do to your signaling share probably drop to 30% or less fascinating next question so joining these two worlds of prediction markets and the signaling right so if if
investing in prediction markets is not about predicting policy underlying policy or or any of the uh things we are trying to understand by prediction markets would signal so if 90% of it what we do is signaling there would that impact the uh you know the advantages of having prediction markets did you think
about it or I I think many people favor prediction markets as a political signal of the kind of things they like in the world that is uh people want to prom want to take the stance that they're in favor of Truth and accuracy and they're against all those people out there who
are lying and hypocrites and so they might want to take the stance of favoring predict Mark predict markets even if they don't actually want to look at the answers or trade in them as a signal as a stance about the world but if I got to have a followup or prediction markets in essence going to
teach us how to signal better and thus waste more resources in economic terminology they'll push us more into separating equilibria and if we simply knew less we' we'd be more in pooling equilibria where you don't distinguish yourself but the prediction Market will tell you well what are the right clothes
to buy to impress someone on a date or how to spruce up your resume and if 90% of everything's signaling it will make signaling worse no well that argument suggests that all technological progress is a waste because anytime we can do anything better we'll just do it in the
service of signaling which is all a waste I think that in fact we're already mostly maxing out on our ener our efforts signaling all over the place so there really wasn't much more to spend uh but we can get more from it so uh when we have new technology we can get you know we can we might signal by
getting a faster car but new technology gets us a faster car so we get places faster similarly we might be signaling via promoting prediction markets and using them but then we might get more accurate answers on lots of topics that we want answers to so next question yes so we talked at the start about whether
a podcast is what form of signaling it is and it seems like it's go both going to be information for the backpack but also saying that I'm the sort of person who listens to conversations with Tyler so my question is how much of signaling is about sort of relatively objective
virtue things that everyone thinks are good and how much is emphasizing that you're part of a certain specific tribe or group when people talk about signaling initially they usually by default think about talking about signaling ability being smart being conscientious being energetic healthy Etc and people tend to
neglect signaling loyalty and so I'd say roughly half of signaling is signaling loyalty and so it's a big fraction a huge fraction and it's but it's not something we we would like to admit first of all we don't like to admit we're signaling at all but if we're going to be signaling we'd rather admit
we were signaling being smart and conscientious and hardworking and knowledgeable rather than signaling that we're showing this group that we're one of them next question what can those signal if some someone just commited suicide what kind of signal are they sending the question was what kind of
signal is someone sending if they commit suicide they are following you know the human package of feelings they aren't necessarily sending any particular signal just to be clear humans are enormously complicated humans have a wide range of motives for all sorts of
behaviors in each area they have a main motive they'd like to call your attention to if you if they have a choice and our main thesis in the book is that they're often wrong about what the main motive is and there's another main motive that's more important than that's commonly signaling but it's not
to say that signaling is everything or it's even or the only thing it's the big thing that people don't like to talk about that explains a large fraction of behavior if I have to just mention one thing but I do not mean to say that people are only always signaling certainly not consciously as was
mentioned and so I use the example of the dog ate my homework that works as an excuse because dogs sometimes eat homework and similarly all the other things we like to call attention to as our usual motives they work as excuses because they're sometimes true we sometimes do get healthy from going to
the doctor we sometimes do uh learn things in school we sometimes do help people with Charity this it's not true that this is all fake and all you know something else but the claim is that those things are more claimed than they actually are but they some times are what if I raise the question of there
being multiple levels of explanation so if you asked me well what percentage of world activity is ruled by the downward sloping demand curve I'd say pretty close to 100% maybe 100% right and there'd be wides spread agreement on that but that doesn't mean the downward
sloping demand curve explains 100% of what's going on there are many other levels of explanation what persons are expecting or the meaning a particular action has to them covered by other social sciences for instance the humanities and the downward sloping demand curve in a sense its explanatory
power is really quite small now would you agree to a comparable redescription for signaling that by one metric it is very large and significant but that's only one layer of explanation for social phenomena in general and there's another way in which signaling is really a pretty small percentage of what's going
on sure absolutely so anything you're trying to explain uh you're trying to explain in terms of causes and there are local proximate causes and there are distal far causes and there's a whole chain in between and you have to identify where along that chain you're
trying to talk about so we're talking about people's behavior and we're focused on the proximate explanation then you're focused on what was in their head a moment before and what sort of feelings did they have Etc whereas if you're looking for an ultimate explanation you have to go back to
physics and the creation of the universe and evolution selection Etc and then we're usually talking at some intermediate level but it's less clear which level so I would say for our book we're focused on relatively distal social explanations which are more about the the basic forces that shape our
common social institutions so why are schools the way they are why are hospitals the way they are but this one dimension it matters to you a disproportionate amount right you would agree or you you wouldn't have written the book and this ultimately in my vision ties into to Robin Hansen the
moralist so my straussian reading of this book is that it's presented as aoral but underneath it's really deeply moral rather than morally neutral and you're in a sense afraid to Signal your actual moral condemnatory stance agree or disagree I agree that we tried not to
go into the moral outrage voice in the book Out imagine a book that had that voice but we didn't think that would work so well we we think our first priority is just to convince you of The Facts of these motives that they really are there and we thought if we took on a really strong moral tone or connected
this to political factions or something you you wouldn't be persuaded by our arguments you would think that we are taking sides in some other battles and and so we thought we should take this more neutral stance with respect to the book and we also thought that we should try to be positive about humans so I
have this essay from a long time ago about uh the cynic conundrum sure it's on your homepage right and the cynic con conundrum is that the cynic is assigning low motives to people other people's behavior and the conundrum is that when you ask why is the cynic behaving as a cynic or speaking cynically the most
plausible explanation is that they have low motives for their behavior and in fact it does seem that on average people who talk cynically especially in the sort of whiny complainy cynical voice do have low motives for that and they are somewhat failures and people you don't
want to affiliate with so there's a sense in which most people don't want to seem cynical because the people who seem cynical are not the sort of people you want to seem and we didn't want to seem that sort of a whiny cynical complainy sort of person who plausibly is a failure and a loser and not the sort of
person you want to listen to or associate with we want to be honestly which what we are we like humans we like people we think people have great potential and even if they aren't what they seem we are happy with them with that I thank you all for coming Robin Hansen thank you very much thank you
[Applause] all thank you all thanks for listening to conversation with Tyler you can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes Stitcher or your favorite podcast app and if you like this podcast please consider rating it on iTunes and leaving a review this helps other people find the show