What if much of human behavior—from everyday interactions to wider political and cultural dynamics—is driven by hidden “status games” we’re all playing without realizing it? In this talk with Cards Against Humanity co-creator and evolutionary psychologist David Pinsof, we explore his provocative idea that status-seeking is a fundamental human motive—but one wrapped in a paradox: we all want status, yet seeking it too openly makes us lose it, forcing us to pursue it in subtle, strategic, and often unconscious ways. We also talk about another interesting idea of David’s on the nature of humor: it’s possible that David may have solved the long-standing mystery of what humor is and why we laugh. Along the way, we talk about our capacity for self-deception, how his ideas might relate to mental illness and cult leaders, the nature of charisma, the Cards Against Humanity origin story, the Gazzaniga split-brain experiments, and more.
A transcript is farther down below.
Episode links:
- YouTube (includes video)
- Apple Podcasts
- Spotify
Resources mentioned in or related to this talk:
- David Pinsof’s Everything is Bullshit blog
- A Pinsof post on status and a post on the signals we send to others
- Pinsof’s paper “All mixed up,” on the evolutionary purpose of humor
- Pinsof’s post on the nature of charisma
- Pinsof’s paper “Strange bedfellows” on political alliances
- Summary of Gazzaniga’s split-brain experiments
- Peter Turchin’s idea of an overproduction of elites and elites becoming frustrated with insufficient high-status roles
TRANSCRIPT
(transcripts are auto-generated and will contain errors)
David Pinsof: “Humans are of course, hyper social and highly dependent on other humans for cooperation. So it, it seems to, it seemed to me that status was this huge underlying motivation in human psychology, this huge elephant in the room. And then to see that, wait a second, it’s this huge motivation, and yet we can’t talk about it. We can’t be overt about it. ’cause if we, if we are overt and we do come off as a status seeker, or we reveal to other people that we’re trying to seek status, we lose the very status that we seek. And I just became thinking about, I just got really ensnared with that problem and just thinking about what are the implications of, of this idea that we are a status obsessed species that cannot admit that it is status obsessed, right?”
“In working on Cards Against Humanity and in developing content for the game and working on copywriting for the game, uh, I developed this writing style. This voice, you know, Cards Against Humanity sort of has a voice. If you, if you, uh, read any of our, our stunts or our emails or our, any of our ads, like it all has a pretty clear voice that it’s like a blunt, cynical, smart ass character. Uh, and it’s really terse and it doesn’t mince words. And, uh, it’s just kind of really direct into the point and kind of edgy. Um. And I thought it would be interesting to try to just write in that style on topics that interested me as a psychologist. And it just so happens that I, I had been interested in a lot of topics that had pretty cynical implications.”
Those were a couple clips from my talk with David Pinsof, the co-creator of the game Cards Against Humanity, who is also an evolutionary psychologist with some very interesting and I think profound theories about status-seeking, group tribalism, self-deception, and the nature of humor.
I think you’ll find this a highly interesting episode if any of the following are true for you: you’ve played and enjoyed Cards Against Humanity; you’ve wondered about how much of our behavior and actions may be secretly motivated by seeking status and power; you’ve wondered about the mystery of humor – why we call some things funny, and why we emit strange sounds from our mouths when we find things “funny”.
Regarding the humor topic: I think it’s possible that David Pinsof has solved the ages-old mystery of the nature of humor. And as someone who read Freud’s Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious at a young age, and who has long puzzled at the nature of humor, this alone makes Pinsof’s work very intriguing to me. But the truth is David has some deep and intriguing ideas on a wide range of topics; things that’ll make you think deeply about the nature of the world and other people and yourself.
I’ll say that I only learned of David’s work recently. Alan Crawley, who studies nonverbal behavior and who I interviewed for this podcast, recently told me about Pinsof, saying that he thought Pinsof was doing some very impressive work and would be making some big impacts in psychology. I was surprised I hadn’t heard of Pinsof, as he works on so many things I find interesting, including Cards Against Humanity, which I was an early player of. Back in 2014, related to my poker tells work, I wrote a blog post on my readingpokertells.com blog about behavioral clues in Cards Against Humanity and similar games, like Apples to Apples.
If you have listened to this podcast before, you know I also work on political polarization-related topics, and David’s ideas on status-seeking have implications for group polarization. He and his colleagues wrote a paper titled Strange Bedfellows: The Alliance Theory of Political Belief Systems, which had some great ideas about the hidden motivations behind tribalism and us-vs-them conflict. This is just to emphasize that I was surprised I hadn’t heard of David, as he’s doing some fascinating work.
A little more about David:
He is an evolutionary social scientist at UCLA, from which he has a phd. He has researched political attitudes, status hierarchies, and social signaling. He is one of the co-creators of the popular party game Cards Against Humanity and director of The Pulse of the Nation public opinion poll. He explores the psychology of bullshit on his blog, Everything Is Bullshit.
Many people balk at David’s ideas on the hidden social status games we play; how we try to hide these status games from other people and also from ourselves. Many people, for understandable reasons, don’t like the idea that we may be much more driven by status seeking than we know. This relates to discomfort about similar ideas that say that we have less awareness of our motivations than we know; that can include a wide range of psychological theories all the way to the idea that we lack free will. So in this talk we get into the pushback people can have, and why it makes people uncomfortable, and we also talk about why these ideas are not nearly as cynical and dark and pessimistic as people believe; we talk about how they can fit into more positive or at least neutral and non-threatening ideas of human social dynamics.
Here’s a personal observation that might be helpful as an introduction to these ideas. I like to think of myself as someone who likes figuring things out; as someone who likes understanding the world and the people in it. I would say, and like to think, that even if I were on a remote island, by myself, that I’d like figuring things out; that I’d devote myself to many of the same things I currently work on. But is that really true? If I was indeed banished to a secluded island, or a secluded planet, and I knew with certainty that I would never interact with anyone else, and that no one else would ever learn about anything I did, what would I really spend my time doing? How much of what I spend my time on, that I think are things that I do because I am interested in them, are actually things that I do because I want to impress other people and gain status in some way? Or when I do something nice for someone or donate to a charity, how much of that is because I genuinely care and how much of that is because I want to be seen as someone who cares? It’s possible such questions are impossible to answer because, and I agree with David on this, it’s impossible to separate our views of ourselves, our self-definition, from the perceptions that other people have of us; these things are intertwined because we are inherently such social creatures. From when we are babies, we grow to see ourselves through other people’s eyes – that is the nature of socialization and of becoming a quote “normal” person; so it would seem impossible to separate our views of ourselves from our views on how other people see us.
Just a quick note that if you’re listening to this on audio, there is a video of this talk on youtube. Also, I’ll mention that my last episode of the People Who Read People podcast was available only on youtube; it was the most intense and time-consuming YouTube video production I’ve done, and I only put it on youtube as it was highly visual in nature; it’s about modern con artists and cult leaders and how they gain influence and followers in the modern digital age. It’s gotten almost 10,000 views at this point and has gotten a lot of positive comments, so you might like checking that out. And that actually relates to something David Pinsof has worked on; in this episode we talk about how his theories on status-seeking relate to people who are good at charming others, people who some would say have a lot of “charisma,” and this has implications for cult leader dynamics.
We also talk about how these ideas tie into self-delusion and our inability to know ourselves and our motivations. For example, we talk about the fascinating Gazzanica experiments on people whose left and right brain hemispheres were severed and how they learned that people will make up reasons for the actions they’ve taken, ignorant of the real reasons for their actions.
And in this talk, we also get on the topic of mental illness and mental struggles. Because as I have personally experienced, realizing that you are surrounded by status games can be demoralizing and can have mental health implications. For example, in Catcher in the Rye, you could view Holden Caulfield’s constant focus on people’s “phoniness” as partly being his awareness that he was surrounded by people playing status games, as being selfish and non-authentic. And we can see how that perception played into his mental struggles. And I’ll say that I myself have had personal experience in that, in that I dropped out of my first college due to some mental struggles that related to seeing everyone as selfish and inauthentic and being stressed out by that. So we talk about that a bit towards the end.
We also talk about Peter Turchin’s ideas that there is what he calls an “overproduction of elites”; basically a successful society produces many people who expect high status, and there aren’t enough high-status spots in society, and this leads to social destabilization as some of those people seek to undermine the system due to discontent and anger. This idea relates to non-conscious status-seeking and to political polarization.
Okay here’s the talk with David Pinsof, co-creator of Cards Against Humanity and an evolutionary psychologist with some highly interesting ideas.
Zach Elwood: Hi David. Thanks for joining me.
David Pinsof: Yeah. Glad to be here.
Zach Elwood: So maybe we could start with, um, how you came to work on, uh, cards Against Humanity, be part of that endeavor and also, uh. Engage in the, uh, academic psychology research. That seems kind of an interesting, uh, combination of things. Maybe you could talk a little bit about that backstory.
David Pinsof: Yeah, sure. So, uh, cards Against Humanity is kind of an unusual business in that, um, none of the business owners really expected it to become a business. So I just made that game with my friends in high school, uh, and we made it to play with ourselves for fun. And then, uh, we brought it with us to college, uh, and it sort of became viral as an underground thing.
People were printing out copies of it and cutting it out with scissors and paper. Um, and eventually, like it just started to dawn on us that like, this is. Really a thing like this could become a major business. This is becoming a phenomenon. We should try to capitalize on this. And so we, uh, were one of the first Kickstarter success stories.
So we put the game up on Kickstarter. We, we, uh, collected money to print out the game in like a nice box with nice cards so that people wouldn’t have to like, cut it out and print it. Um. So, uh, yeah, we, we raised a ton of money on Kickstarter and then, um, the rest is, as they say, history. It just became, uh, a successful business.
We were repeatedly selling out in the early years of the, of the game. Um, and then we eventually
Zach Elwood: just, yeah, I was, I’ll say I was an early, I was an early, uh, my ex-wife and I were early buyers of Cards Against Humanity Right when it was coming out. Yeah.
David Pinsof: Oh, cool. Yeah. You’re with us from the, from the start.
Yeah. So, uh, we just gradually got our shit together and, and realized that it was a business, but like none of us, we were all kind of, you know, under the expectation that this thing would collapse at any minute and it would become uncool very quickly. And we just continued to be surprised that it just continued to gain momentum and popularity.
Uh, and so, like I, at the time, like, I, I did not think that Cards Against Humanity would be my career and, and I would be able to make a, a livelihood with it. Uh, I was working toward my PhD at the time that cards like really started taking off, uh, financially. And so I had to choose like whether I, you know, should.
Work full-time at cards or keep pursuing my PhD. And what I ended up doing was just doing a combination of the two and sort of working, uh, part-time on both, uh, at the same time. Um, and I, and that’s sort of what I continue to do. Um, I, I still work part-time for cards doing stuff like data science and play testing.
Um, and so I’ve been able to use the skills that I’ve acquired in my PhD analyzing data for, um, uh, analyzing data with cards, um, and with understanding the statistics and the psychology of humor. So. That has been helpful and, and I still sort of have those two sides of myself in part because I wasn’t expecting cards to, to be a side of, of myself until it was too late and I was already kind of too deep into my PhD.
So, um, I am really glad that I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to continue to have those two sides of myself. Um, it’s been really fortunate for me because I haven’t had to deal with the bullshit in academia, for lack of a better term. I have a financial stream that allows me to do research on the topics that I find interesting without having to worry about, um, administrative stuff with universities, without having to worry about publishing or perishing and getting a certain number of publications.
I can just work on stuff that I inherently find interesting. Uh, I can Oh, that’s awesome. Yeah, so it’s, it’s been a really cool, um. Situation for me that, uh, you know, I’m, I’m really lucky and a lot of people don’t have that. So, yeah.
Zach Elwood: No, that’s, uh, it’s, yeah. I have a lot of questions, uh, but I I, I’m curious, was there, is there a relationship between your interest in creating Cards against Humanity and your interest in psychology?
Do you see those two things as linked in some way?
David Pinsof: Um, perhaps, uh, I, I did not intentionally or consciously link them, but, um, I’m sure that they arose from similar impulses within myself. I, I like understanding how people tick. Um, I like getting inside people’s heads. Um, I think being a good, uh, comedy writer, uh, necessarily involves getting inside people’s heads.
Uh, you sort of have to be a good psychologist to be a good humorist. Um, so. They were sort of inadvertently intertwined in that they sort of arose from similar sides of myself. Um, but beyond that, it was just kind of a lucky accident that they happened to collide, you know? Mm-hmm.
Zach Elwood: Do you think, uh, would you have ended up writing, uh, working on the, uh, psychology of humor, you think?
If it wasn’t for the Cards Against Humanity part of things,
David Pinsof: it certainly made it a more appealing topic for me. ’cause it was, um, an opportunity for me to combine the two sides of myself in an interesting way. Um, maybe I still would’ve come upon it naturally, I don’t know. But it certainly increased the likelihood that I, that I would discover that topic.
Mm-hmm. Um, and I think I, I’m, I’m pretty happy with, uh, the work that I’ve done on that topic if for a while. So I study evolutionary psychology. That’s, um, my, uh. Special interest. Uh, I am really gung-ho and enthusiastic about applying principles of evolutionary biology to human behavior, to understanding humans as animals, to understanding the mind as an evolved organ.
And I’ve been constantly perplexed by humor as an outgrowth of the evolutionary process. It, it’s Darwinian function always seemed really puzzling to me, and it was always something like in the back of my head that I had been wondering about. It was always like kind of a pebble in my shoe of like, I feel like I understand a lot of different aspects of the human condition really well when I apply Darwinian principles to understanding things.
But humor is just the last thing that I just, I don’t think we really have a good answer to it. And so it had been in the back of my mind for a while. And I just sort of gradually, uh, I, I, the, the solution to it came to me by accident when, when I was studying a different problem. So I’m, I’m really interested in coordination games and the game theory of coordination and common knowledge.
Uh, so common knowledge is this idea that everyone knows that everyone knows something and it’s really important for us to have common knowledge if we want to coordinate, if we want to show up at the same time and place, if we want to communicate such that we can agree on, which sounds coming out of my mouth, correspond to which things in the world.
Um. So I, I’ve been, I was really interested in that. I was looking at the game theory of coordination and it, and it occurred to me that, uh, when you have a mix up in a coordination game, say I say one word intending, one meaning, and you hear a different meaning, or we’re trying to pass each other in a hallway and we both go left, or we both go right, and we keep sort of dancing back and forth that these are mix ups in coordination games and they can be mathematically modeled quite precisely.
And that maybe that is the essence of what humor is. And so I started thinking about that as a potential solution to the Darwinian mystery of humor. And I realized that it’s actually a really elegant and profound solution to the problem of humor because coordination is our superpower as a species.
Language depends on us coordinating, you could think of language itself as just a massive coordination game where we’ve all agreed that these particular sounds correspond to these particular things. And we would be unable to communicate if we did not. Solve that coordination problem. And you can think about norms and conventions and social roles and leadership are all solving this problem of coordinating, of putting our heads together effectively so that we can work together and communicate and solve challenges cooperatively.
So, uh, given that we’re so good at coordinating and our survival as a species depends so much on coordination, it really is not mysterious at all that we would, that, that, um, coordinating would be a major selection pressure and avoiding mix ups in coordination games would be a huge selection pressure.
And so I started pursuing that idea. Now I have this academic paper that’s, that’s now pre-print, uh, exploring this idea as, as a solution to the evolutionary mystery of humor.
Zach Elwood: Yeah. And I, I, uh, I have to say, yeah, I read your. Your work on that. And, uh, I mean, I’ve been, I also have been interested in the psychology of humor for a long time.
Like I read Freud’s, uh, what is it called? The whatever, something of, of humor or comedy, whatever his book on comedy was a long time ago when I was a kid. And then since then I’ve thought about it, probably like you, but not in a as thorough way as you obviously have. And when I read your work on it, I really thought, I mean, it appealed to me so much.
I was like, this guy, I think you figured it out. Like I, it made, it makes so much sense to me. Just like when you laid it out, I was like, intuitively. I’m like, yeah, I think you are correctly. Right. And, you know, humor is, we’re, it’s showing that we’re signaling that we understand these mix up and of, and and, and it has a social, um, yeah, it has a social value.
A real social value. Yeah. I think it makes so much sense.
David Pinsof: Yeah.
Zach Elwood: Yeah.
David Pinsof: I’m glad to hear you say that. Yeah, so hopefully, hopefully it’ll get, uh, published on a nice journal soon. We’ll see.
Zach Elwood: Are you getting a lot of, um, uh, positive feedback on that, the humor
David Pinsof: so far? Yeah, no, people, I, I’ve, the reactions that I’ve mostly gotten from, uh, people and from fellow academics is it just, it makes a lot of intuitive sense.
Um, and, and it’s, it’s hard for anyone to have like a serious objection to it, just ’cause it fits the empirical facts of humor so well. So I’ve been really encouraged by that. Um, hopefully there’s, there’s not a math error or something in my analysis, but, uh, yeah, so far it’s, it’s been well received and, um, I have high hopes that it’ll be, uh, published in a good journal and hopefully make a major contribution to the field.
Zach Elwood: That’s awesome. Um, and one more Cards Against Humanity question. Sorry. Um, do you see, you know, and I realize some of this may be just me reading into looking for links between it, but, uh, cards Against Humanity has this kind of, you know, dark and edgy. Aspect to it, which I think you’re, uh, everything is bullshit, kind of status seeking examination also has an edgy, you know, kind of cynical aspect to it or, so it would seem to, to many.
Uh, do you see a link between kind of like a, your, your interest and, uh, delving into some, you know, darker, edgier parts of things?
David Pinsof: Yeah, I definitely do see the link there. I think, you know, my, my blog is against humanity to a certain extent. It’s kind of, uh, misanthropic, uh, it’s, it’s pretty dark and cynical.
Um, uh, it, I think they both stem from the fact that I have a, a dark sense of humor that I enjoy playing with and cards against humanity, and I also enjoy writing about, and, you know, uh, a lot of my posts while very dark and cynical, often have jokes in them that people, uh, occasionally find funny. So yeah, it, those two are, are merged.
Um. Coincidentally, um, I actually sort of strove to tie them together, uh, because in working on Cards Against Humanity and in developing content for the game and working on copywriting for the game, uh, I developed this writing style. This voice, you know, cards Against Humanity sort of has a voice. If you, if you, uh, read any of our, our stunts or our emails or our, any of our ads, like it all has a pretty clear voice that it’s like a blunt, cynical, smart ass character.
Uh, and it’s really terse and it doesn’t mince words. And, uh, it’s just kind of really direct into the point and kind of edgy. Um. And I thought it would be interesting to try to just write in that style on topics that interested me as a psychologist. And it just so happens that I, I had been interested in a lot of topics that had pretty cynical implications.
You know, I’m an evolutionary psychologist. I like looking into our deeper motives that we’d be hap we’d perhaps not want to admit to, um, like, for example, social status. And I found that trying to marry those two sides of myself actually worked out really well. That, like, you know, writing about these topics in sort of the cards against humanity voice, um, it, it, it, it worked out and, and it allowed me to sort of be more open about the, the cynical implications in a way that I wouldn’t have otherwise.
So I feel like a lot of evolutionary psychologists, when they write about ideas from evolutionary psychology, they try to sort of tiptoe around the cynicism and apologize for it and put, you know, caveats around it and reassure people that this isn’t really as cynical as it seems. And, you know, there’s so much dancing around it and.
Personally, I got kind of frustrated with that. I thought that, you know, it really does have cynical implications and we should be honest about that. We should be forthright about it. Uh, and I, so part of the, the impetus for writing the blog was just to explore, you know, what it’s like if we just embrace the cynicism of these ideas and just see how far they go, see where it takes usintellectually.
Um, and it seems like, you know, there, there has been a demand for that kind of honesty. You know, you don’t really get that perspective a lot, uh, in think pieces in the media and it seemed like, seems like people are kinda hungry for it. So I’ve been really pleased by the, the response I’ve gotten, uh, in the blog.
Zach Elwood: Well, so related to your, you know, status seeking and status games work, it seems like maybe some people can be kind of afraid to be, um. That openly cynical, or at least seem that openly cynical. So they hedge it in various ways, whereas maybe you have, you know, you, you, you’re not as afraid to, to do that maybe, or maybe, you know, getting to the status seeking games.
Maybe there’s value in being, in, being that direct from a status seeking, uh, perspective. But, um, maybe that’s a
David Pinsof: Yeah.
Zach Elwood: Good segue into the status, um, you, your, your elevator pitch on the status, uh, games ideas.
David Pinsof: Sure. Um, it basically, this idea came to me when I was reading an empirical paper showing that people who are judged as status seekers lose status.
And that really fascinated me. Uh. That people who overtly try to seek status such that other, other people see them as a status seeker. They’re judged as mean, cruel, manipulative, disingenuous. They’re judged as assholes, basically assholes, douche bags. We have a variety of colorful terms to describe status seekers that elicit disgust, which suggests that we’re kind of grossed out by overt status, seeking it’s gross, and that.
Was really puzzling and profound to me as an evolutionary psychologist because my entire career studying evolutionary psychology, the idea had been drummed into me that status was hugely important to humans. That it was one of our central over, you know, under underlying motivations to so much of what we do, and that there was this huge link between status and reproductive success and ancestral environments.
You see these links in other animals. Humans are of course, hyper social and highly dependent on other humans for cooperation. So it, it seems to, it seemed to me that status was this huge underlying motivation in human psychology, this huge elephant in the room. And then to see that, wait a second, it’s this huge motivation, and yet we can’t talk about it.
We can’t be overt about it. ’cause if we, if we are overt and we do come off as a status seeker, or we reveal to other people that we’re trying to seek status, we lose the very status that we seek. And I just became thinking about, I just got really ensnared with that problem and just thinking about what are the implications of, of this idea that we are a status obsessed species that cannot admit that it is status obsessed, right?
What, what are the cultural implications of that? And so I just started just, you know, thinking about what follows from that idea. Well, one thing that follows from that idea is that when we all play a status game together, when we compete for status, we cannot become aware of the fact that we’re playing a status game.
Because once we become aware of that fact, then we all start to lose status. And the, and the social hierarchy almost starts to invert a little bit like those who won the most status. Well, they’re the most icky status seekers. And those who are at the bottom of the social ladder, well they were less, they were the least interested in status.
Uh, and so. The top of the hierarchy gets lowered and the bottom sort of gets lifted. And everyone who is involved in this IY v glorious pissing contest becomes gross. And everyone who is not involved in it, or who is distant from it, they begin to look cool and, and that the outsiders begin to gain status for not caring about status.
And so what that creates is a kind of cultural dynamism where status games can collapse and invert and then take the opposite form as as the form that was taken previously. So if we’re playing a status game, that’s all about making money and insulting poor people and, and, and encouraging ideas of social Darwinism, if we’re all, if we all realize that we’re playing that status game, that we’re all just, uh, puffed up, uh, greedy status seekers, and the social Darwinism idea is just a rationalization for us, preserving our privilege, if we all become aware of that fact, well the status game collapses and you get a kind of opposite status game that emerges.
Out of the ashes, like, well now we, we don’t care about money. Greed is icky, greed is bad. Uh, we, instead of being a social darwinists, we want to, we want to be in favor of social justice. And so the opposite status game sort of arises, uh, and, and replaces it. And I think we see a lot of this happening, you know, throughout history across cultures.
And I think it gives rise to a lot of the seemingly arbitrary variation in status games and status symbols that we see throughout cultures or across cultures. Because if status games are constantly collapsing and reemerging in antithetical forms, then it creates a, a, an engine of arbitrariness that can arise.
It’s a, um. It, it, it creates a, a kind of dynamism. So I, I saw it as a really cool explanation for why status symbols were so variable across time and space. I saw it as also providing insights into the nature of cynicism itself, cynicism and idealism. Because if you think about a status game as having the potential to collapse and invert, well, who wants that status game to collapse and invert, presumably the people who are not playing it, who have, who are less invested in it, the people who are at the bottom of the social hierarchy in that game, and those people have a, a vested interest in trying to make that status game collapse by exposing it.
As, as hollow, as vain, as narcissistic. And if they can succeed in casting the players as status seekers, then uh, as the game collapses, their status will rise. Right? And so it, it creates an incentive for a kind of strategic. Cynicism and also strategic idealism because if I’m really winning in this status game, I wanna make sure it doesn’t collapse.
’cause then I could lose all the status that I’ve accumulated. So I wanna make sure that I spread idealistic narratives about my pure hearted motivations and the pure hearted motivations of everyone who’s playing the status game. How none of us really care about status. We’re pursuing this higher noble end.
And this leads to the invention of what I call sacred values. That we’re not pursuing status, we’re pursuing higher ends, like, uh, authenticity or self-actualization or egalitarianism or, uh, uh, authority or diversity or tradition. These sort of high-minded ideals that we can all rally around and we can agree that that’s what we’re seeking and not status that protects our status game and keeps it from collapsing.
Zach Elwood: So I, I was curious, um, to get your take on, how much of this do you see as unconscious? Like do people in your view, you know, when people think that they have. Like something that they’re doing that they believe is highly righteous and morally pure. Do you see, you know, is there an aspect where they may not even be aware that they’re seeking status, but that is in, in many cases what they’re doing?
David Pinsof: Yes. I think for the most part it is unconscious. Um, and I think there are a number of reasons why it might be, for one thing, if we have a strong incentive to convince other people. Of a fact about ourselves, then we are likely to convince ourselves as a side effect. And so insofar as we are strongly motivated to convince other people that we’re motivated by high-minded ideals and not by status, we’re going to start to convince ourselves as a side effect, and, and that will involve a certain amount of self-deception.
Another idea is that I’m gonna be more convincing if I truly believe the stuff that I’m saying, right? If, if I have to hold the false information and the true information in my head at the same time, and I have to be aware of the fact that one’s true and one’s not, and, and keep them from being mixed together in my head, it’s actually really hard to lie.
But if I don’t have that problem, if, if I only have the lie in my head and I see it as the truth, I’m gonna be much more convincing and, and effective. And so this is the idea from Robert Trivers, um, the evolutionary biologist. His idea is that self-deception evolved, uh, as a way of more effectively deceiving others that we lie to ourselves to more effectively lie to others.
So that’s another part of this. Uh, and another part of it is that we may not really even need to know, or it’s, and, and it, and it’s possible that we, we can’t know our underlying motivation to a certain sense, and that there was no selection to truly delve to truly, um. Perceive our own deeper motivations.
’cause we don’t really need to know them. We need to know where the stuff is in the environment. We, we need to know where the tables and chairs are. We need to know where other people are and where the predators and prey are and what, what other people think of us. But we don’t really need to know our true underlying motivations, or we don’t really need to know what’s happening at the unconscious level.
And, and to a large extent, I don’t, I think we don’t know what’s hap what’s going on unconsciously in our heads. We are strangers to ourselves in, in, in relevant respects. Um, so I think that’s another big part of it is just we just, we don’t really know the answer to the question of what’s driving us. And that allows us to more fluidly and effortlessly make up a story about what’s motivating us and believe that story as if it were real.
Zach Elwood: Yeah. I that I was gonna say that, um, that’s the, one of the parts I really liked about reading your work was, uh, talking about how it’s. Pretty much impossible to separate the thinking about what others think of us and trying to manage and manipulate that aspect. It’s, it’s very hard, if not impossible, to separate that from what we ourselves are thinking or our views of ourselves.
And I’ll, I’ll quote something you wrote in a recent essay. It said, humans have a filter in their heads screening out for botin impulses in nearly every waking moment. The what will people think filter practically everything we do passes through this filter, even when we’re in the pr, even when we’re in the privacy of our own homes or in an anonymous, uh, situation.
So I think that, I mean, I think that’s a really key point because I think a lot of people who would balk at these ideas, I think if they saw the point that from the moment, you know, our personalities ourselves were created at, at a young age. Everything we did was filtered through this filter of how other people saw us.
You know, we were going through various socialization processes, you know, where we learned to be embarrassed about various things. So like, it’s really hard to separate how we see ourselves from how others see us. And as you say, it may not even be possible to really do that because they’re so intertwined.
And I’m curious, am I getting that right? Am I explaining it right?
David Pinsof: Yeah, you’re absolutely getting it right. So an idea I’ve been thinking about is that it’s probably much easier to deceive ourselves about the contents of our own minds or the, the motivations that are driving, guiding our behavior than it is to deceive ourselves about reality.
So if I’m trying to, so I have an apple in my hand and I’m, I’m holding it behind my back, if, if, let’s just assume for the sake of argument that that’s true, and I’m trying to convince you that there’s no apple behind my back. That’s gonna be really hard for me to do because I’m gonna feel the apple in my hand.
Right. But if I’m trying to convince you that I truly care about authenticity or equality or diversity or self-actualization or whatever, I have no equivalent of the apple in my hand. I have no direct access to the true reasons for my behavior. I have, I’m a stranger to myself. So in that sense, it’s gonna be much easier for me to convince you and, and to convince myself than it is for me to convince you of something that I have direct sensory access to.
’cause I have no sensory access into my true motivations. I’m gonna have a much easier time convincing myself of whatever story I come up with to explain my behavior.
Zach Elwood: Mm-hmm. Yeah. One, uh, when I was started reading your work because of the crossover, one example I started thinking of for myself is when I play, when I’ve played, uh, Kurd Against Humanity or other silly, you know, social games that are, that are fun, I sometimes find myself, you know, I, I know that there’s a drive in me.
To want to do well at the game, even though I know it’s very silly and it’s a very trivial thing, but there’s a part of me that’s like, well, I wanna do well in the game. I want to perceive to be doing well in the game. ’cause you know, for example, I’ve worked on games, I’ve written books about poker tell, so there’s a part of me that wants some sort of status, even for doing well in a silly game, like Cards Against Humanity.
There’s another part of me internally that’s like, what are you thinking? It’s just a stupid game. Like, take it easy. You know? Like, why are you, why are you trying to imp impress, you know, why do you wanna impress people about a silly game? You can’t, that you can’t really, you know, there’s always so much skill in it, obviously.
Uh, so I have this conflict in my brain. So that’s just to say like, that’s a conscious conflict. And then you have. Theoretically in, in your view, you have that kind of conscious conflict going all the way to more, like you’ve convinced yourself that it’s entirely altruistic or that it’s, uh, you know, there’s, there’s no, there’s no, uh, you have no motivation to seek status.
But I thought that was an interesting example that popped to mind for a very trivial aspect.
David Pinsof: Yeah, no, totally. That’s an interesting example. Um, and even there you have the part of yourself that doesn’t want to be seen as a status seeker.
Zach Elwood: Right. It’s part of yourself that doesn’t Yeah, it part’s perception.
It’s, it’s a big part of the perception. You’re like, and, and, and part of the getting back to like the difficulty of separating how others see us from how we see ourselves. It’s like, I don’t even like the part of myself that wants to seek the status for, for such a silly thing. You know, it’s kind of like this internal thing of like.
Why, you know, so just to say we, I, I, I very much liked your points about how we can be con conflicted and maybe not even see aspects of ourselves that are, that are seeking the status. Yeah. Yeah.
David Pinsof: Cool. Yeah. No, I, I agree. Yeah. Do
Zach Elwood: you have any, do you have any, uh, examples from, from your life that come to mind that you maybe you’ve written about in your blog that are granular examples,
David Pinsof: uh, examples of people not wanting to be seen as a status seeker
Zach Elwood: or you, you yourself in your, your own, uh, da daily life or examples from that?
David Pinsof: Um, yeah. I mean, I often, uh. Get a reaction from my blog posts where people will, uh, apply my cynical lessons to my writing itself. Um, they’ll say, well, is this essay just another bid to gain status? Um, and my answer to those replies is always the same. Yes, it’s, I don’t exempt myself from these processes. I, I wanna be intellectually consistent about my ideas.
Um, I think that it is all too easy for cynics to drift into a selective. Cynicism that exempts themselves from their cynical views. It is very easy for cynicism to drift into solecism where everyone else is a phony. Everyone else is in it for themselves or selfish, or status seeking or whatever. But me, I’m the authentic one.
I see the world how, how it truly is. I’m the only one who really cares about these high-minded things. A lot of cynicism is like that, and I really try hard to resist that urge as much, much as possible. I want to, uh, include myself in my explanations of the human condition because if I can explain myself as well as I can explain any other human, then that’s a really good sign that, that I’m onto something intellectually, that these explanations are powerful and they’re not just a, a self-serving strategy for gaining status.
I mean, they also are at the end of the day. Right. I gain status from having ideas that seem insightful to people and that seem to Yeah. Are smart ideas. Yeah. They’re smart ideas. Right. So I ultimately gain status for it. Um, but I al but I also, you know, uh, I, I gain status in so far as the ideas are right and people are aware of the fact that they’re right or that they’re, they’re revealing something important about the world.
So that’s ultimately, yeah. Ultimately what, what, what’s guiding me? Yeah.
Zach Elwood: I mean, I think you would say to such accusations about, you know, I, I, ’cause I don’t see in your, in your view of things, I wouldn’t see such accusations as even, you know, as being insulting in any way, in any way. Because even if you, you know, even if you embrace that view, your view of, of things, it’s like clearly there are some ideas that are more correct than others.
Clearly there are some, uh, approaches that are less narcissistic than others. So it’s like, I, I, I think you would say that there’s a, there’s a, there’s a spectrum of accuracy and goodness even within the, the status seeking realm.
David Pinsof: Yeah. Yeah. Some status games are better for the world than other status games.
It, it would be, uh, absurd if that wasn’t true in, in pursuing our ends of, of trying to gain prestige and admiration and esteem. It would be surprising if every attempt to do that had the same consequences on the world as any other. Like some status games are really good for the world, like the scientific method.
I think science is a status game. At the end of the day. Scientists are competing for prestige and notoriety just like anyone else. Uh, but it’s a, a status game that’s really good for the rest of us, right? They’re, they’re competing to generate important discoveries about how the world works, and we all benefit from that.
Um, so I, I think it’s, it’s good to, um. Be honest about which status games are good and which status games are bad. And the only way we can really evaluate which ones are good and which ones are bad, is if we admit to ourselves that they are status games. Right. That at the end of the day, these, these things are status motivated projects, which is uncomfortable for us to admit, but I think if we want to be clear about which ones are good and which ones are bad, we have to, you know, begin with the starting point of, of being clear-eyed about how these games work.
Zach Elwood: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Um, yeah. Getting back to the, uh, to other, um, views of these ideas as cynical one SAU wrote talked about how, you know, a way to see these things as less cynical is that many of them are defensive in nature. Do you care? Talk about that a bit.
David Pinsof: Sure. So, um. We have motivations to ascend a social hierarchy, to gain status, uh, even if it means stepping on other people.
And we have motivations to avoid a dissent to the bottom of a social hierarchy. We, we want to avoid losing status or looking bad. And I think if you reflect on your personal experience. It should be pretty clear that the motivation to avoid losing status and avoid falling in status is stronger, more intense, more urgent than the goal to gain status or to gain superlative status at, at other people’s expense, or to look superior or better in some way, which makes a lot of Darwinian sense because if you sort of map any of our goals, if you, if you, if you plot them on a graph, let’s say, and uh, the x axis is biological fitness and the y axis is any other goodie like, um, status, food, sex, whatever.
Almost always what you’re gonna get is a sharp drop off. It’s zero. Followed by an increase and a curve of diminishing returns, right? Um, if you have zero status, your genes are going nowhere, you’re not gonna get a mate, you’re gonna get excluded from the group. You’re dead, right? Um, as you start to get a bit more status and you start to get a bit more attention from the opposite sex and a bit more resources and social support, your fitness is gonna increase.
But at some point, like your fitness is the, the, the increases of additional status are gonna be smaller and smaller and smaller, right? Because of diminishing marginal returns. So, because increases in status, um, are less urgent from a Darwinian perspective than than decreases in status, we’re gonna be more attentive.
To the decreases. And that’s, this is true. I think in general of all of our motivations and emotions, the negative aspects of our, uh, uh, emotions, the negative aspects of our motivations are gonna just take a much stronger hold of us than the positive emotions. The fear that we feel is gonna be more intense and pervasive.
It’s gonna guide us, uh, more effectively than, say, happiness or joy or playfulness. Right? Like negative emotions are just more serious. They, they grab a hold of us much more strongly. This is a very well replicated finding in, in psychology, you know, bad is stronger, right?
Zach Elwood: Excuse is loss or much more pertinent.
Yeah,
David Pinsof: exactly. It’s called loss aversion. So, um, if you just apply that to status and to signaling, it becomes clear that probably most of our status seeking, most of our signaling is of the defensive kind, where we’re trying to avoid a loss in status more so than we’re trying to gain status at someone else’s expense or, or to look superior.
And once you start carving up our motivations in that way, it, it begins to, uh, be clear that. What we really don’t like is the offensive signalers, the offensive status seekers, the ones who are motivated to be superior to us and to look better than us, and to outdo us, outshine us, insult us, diss us, upstage us, whatever.
That that is the stuff that we really find icky and gross and defensive status seeking. And defensive signaling is really not as icky or gross. It’s more sympathetic. It’s more relatable. Um, and so what I began to realize is that when I was writing about status seeking and signaling, a lot of people would interpret me as saying that all of this is offensive.
And they would draw the wrong implication, which is that the world is just more full of assholes and narcissists than they thought. And so what I want say very clearly is that I’m not, I’m not saying that, um, there are roughly as many assholes and narcissists as you thought there were. Right. We’re usually pretty good at, at picking up on these things and other people.
And I’m not saying you’re wrong about that. What I’m saying is that, uh, as soon as you realize. That defensive signaling is probably playing the bulk of the role here in these status and signaling processes that you don’t, you no longer have to be extremely cynical to agree with me that status and signaling, you know, plays a huge role in human life.
You only have to be moderately cynical, and hopefully that will make my views an easier pill to swallow.
Zach Elwood: Yeah. Getting to the, um, I mean, another way to see it as less cynical is that, you know, we’re, we’re talking about status, but you can also see, I mean, status is another way to achieve connection with people, right?
It’s like we, we seek status. I think, and correct me if you think differently, a big part of it is. Not just getting power over other people, but being able to influence people so that we can gain connection. And because we’re social creatures, you know, from an evolutionary Yeah. Especially from an evolutionary psychology, um, perspective.
And I am, I, am I getting that right? It’s talking about the connection aspect?
David Pinsof: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I think that’s another way to avoid being extremely cynical is, is to also understand that a lot of these motives are driven by connection, uh, getting along in addition to getting ahead. Um, and of course, I think status and connection are deeply intertwined in many different ways.
You are much more likely to achieve connection if you’re high status than if you’re a low status. And the more connections you have, the higher your status becomes, sort of by definition. So I think they’re, they’re deeply intertwined, but at the same time, um, connection is seen as less icky, less cynical.
And I think a lot of our motivations ultimately come down to that and reminding ourselves of that is also a way to avoid being too cynical about these things.
Zach Elwood: You had, uh, you’ve written too about how, um, you know, uh, cult leaders, people, uh, people that we might call cult leaders, cult of personality types, they, uh, successful ones can have kind of a superpower as you put it, in terms of managing, um, exploiting or, or manipulating others or gaining status without other people.
Uh, understanding that they’re being manipulated, making other people see them as, uh, altruistic. And when I was reading that, I was thinking of, uh, Keith Rani, because I was just watching a long documentary, the Netflix documentary, multi-part documentary about him and thinking about how, you know, he made people think that his motives were altruistic and that he was not seeking status over them, even as he clearly was.
And I’m curious if, you know, if you could talk a little bit about how, uh. Am I, am I getting that right? That those people have, you see them as having a kind of superpower over people?
David Pinsof: Yeah. So if we’re creatures that need to seek status without coming off as a status seeker, then by definition the people who achieve the highest status will be the, the people who are best at doing that.
The people who can hide their status seeking most effectively in order to better achieve status. And so what that is, is a kind of deception and that you are hiding something about yourself and your motives. And the result of that hiding is that you’re gaining more status. Um, and I view that as a big part of what charisma is.
Charisma is the ability to hide all of these unflattering motivations and hide these unflattering sides of ourselves, our desire to gain status. And the result of doing that well is that you gain status. And there’s something kind of weird about that. Because you would think that being deceived would be bad for [00:38:00] us.
So if you are actually just really, uh, interested and motivated by status, you wanna rise to the top, um, and you cover that up successfully, such that I think you’re just an authentically, selfless, humble person who doesn’t care about any of those petty things. And I really admire you. But deep down, you’re just a selfish status seeker.
If you’ve deceived me, you might think that’s bad for me, but in an important sense, it’s actually not, it’s actually good for me because if you’re likely to deceive all of my friends and relatives, and you’re likely to deceive everyone in my social group, uh, as effectively as you’ve deceived. Then it’s actually bad for me if I see through your deception.
’cause if I’m the only one who calls you out on your bullshit and sees you for the narcissist that you are, well then all of your friends and allies are going to come to your side and have your back. And I’m going to be the one who looks like an asshole. And you are going to use your tremendous status and influence to retaliate against me and make my life a living hell.
Right? So [00:39:00] it’s one of many examples where it is often better for us to coordinate on a falsehood than to fail to coordinate with other people. Right? So if we all agree that you’re awesome and we all have your back, if I’m the only one who disagrees with everybody, then I’m screwed.
Zach Elwood: You’re in trouble.
David Pinsof: Yeah. It it, I’m in trouble. So it, it, it, it weirdly benefits me to be deceived by you. And I think that’s a, a big part of, of what charisma is and why it’s so ineffable. Because if we realized. The deception that was being practiced, the charisma would disappear. If we could pinpoint exactly what it was about the charismatic person that caused us to admire them or to want to affiliate with them, then, then their charisma would disappear.
They would become a phony. It’s, it’s because we’re not aware of the magic trick being played on us, that the charisma is successful and it’s actually, uh, uh, better for us to be, to buy into the magic trick than to see through it. [00:40:00]
Zach Elwood: Yeah. It seems like, uh, people who are good manipulators of other people, it seems like they have, they’re really good at.
The theory of mind stuff, like understanding how they’re perceived by other people. So they’re constantly like thinking like, well, what would, what would, um, what would put this person’s mind at ease? I have to be very careful about how I word things, how I say things. And they’re able to, to, to foresee how saying something a different way or saying something in a different, uh, using different, slightly different words might trigger somebody else’s.
Um, you know, understanding that they might be manipulating, and I’m thinking of extreme cases of like Keith Rani, not necessarily like, you know, Ted talk people or something. I’m thinking of the, the extreme manipulators. It seems like they have a very good, just a very good radar of the, like, recursive mind reading about like, how, how is this thing I’m gonna say be perceived and how can I set this person at ease Right in, right in this moment, you know?
David Pinsof: Yeah, absolutely. They’re, [00:41:00] they’re very good at, uh, manipulating people without. Appearing manipulative. Right? And, and in fact, you know, you, you can’t manipulate someone if you appear manipulative. The only way to successfully manipulate someone is to not appear as as manipulative. Right? And, and, and Keith Rania was an expert at that as any cult leader is, is an expert at that.
Um, and I think another aspect of his success and a lot of cult leader success is being really tapped into the sacred values and the narratives that people use to disguise their status seeking. Um, because I think a lot of cult leaders will, will come up with a sacred narrative that portrays what the cult is doing in very altruistic and high-minded or utopian terms, you know, we’re saving the world.
Um, you know, Keith Ranier’s cult was, was very much steeped in, in these utopian ideas that they were, uh, at the vanguard of, of a utopian movement that was going to change everything and revolutionize, uh, human wellbeing and human happiness and, you know, whatever. Um, I think manipulators and, and charismatic cult leaders are also experts in the sacred and in sacred values and in utopian narratives.
Zach Elwood: A quick note here: in a previous episode, I talked to Ellen Huet, who wrote a book about Nicole Daedone and her OneTaste organization, which promoted what they called “orgasmic meditation” and which some people called a cult. Ellen made a great point that charisma is in the eye of the beholder; that some people will respond to different things. This helps explain why one person can think “wow, that person is really charismatic and charming and genuine” and another person can look at that same person and think “They’re fake and sleazy; they’re an obvious con artist and liar.”
There’s also Tim Levine’s Truth Default Theory, which says that by default we believe unless something raises our suspicions to question something.
When coupling these ideas with David’s ideas, we might say that people can have different views on what constitutes inauthentic and suspicious status-seeking. There might be a range of types of behaviors that could raise someone’s alarms and get them to distrust someone. And everyone will have different types of alarms for that.
Inside living beings, there are certain biological molecules that fit together with other biological molecules and chemicals to interact and unlock chain reactions. Things have to fit together in precise ways to trigger reactions and activations. We could view certain types of personalities as fitting together well and meshing well with certain other types of personalities. Someone like Teal Swan; her personality and approach and the things she says and the way she says them are going to interact well with certain types of people, while others with different types of guards and sensors and trip wires will be immediately turned off by her. Certain personalities unlock reactions in certain other personalities.
Anyway, just some thoughts that I think are relevant and that help explain why what we call charisma and charm are nothing real and intrinsic but are subjective… merely in the eye of the beholder….
A quick note here: I talk here about some tie-in I see with David’s ideas and mental struggles. I don’t think I did a good job communicating it here, as I’m not used to talking about such things, so I figured I’d try to preface it with what I was trying to say.
I think it’s true that we are surrounded by selfishness and status-seeking. I don’t say that to be pessimistic, I just think it’s the nature of being an independent, thinking entity, and therefore the nature of being human. And for people who don’t feel mentally well, for people who find the world and the people in it threatening in various ways, that can be a source of stress. One can feel that one is surrounded by inauthentic, selfish creatures. And to be a quote “normal” functioning person, one must be willing to play the “games” that most people in society play; one must be willing to play various status games and be selfish, in various ways. Being emotionally healthy and quote “normal” means accepting, at some level, being okay with… the various status games and status-seeking that ourselves and others engage in. And I think David and I’s discussion of some of the more positive and non-dark ways to see his ideas is pertinent here; seeing the understandable and more positive aspects of why status-seeking is common can be a way to combat the more pessimistic and threatening interpretations of that, which can have implications for mental health.
Hopefully that overview helps make my line of questions here make more sense. Back to the talk…
Zach Elwood: Uh, so this might be a little oversharing, but I’ve talked about this sometimes on this podcast. I, and in college I dropped out, uh, in my sophomore year due to, you know, a so-called nervous breakdown. And I was having all these, uh, panic attacks and, uh, you know, dis I was dysfunctional, couldn’t really function in college anymore, so, uh, went back home.
But part of that experience was about, uh, kind of like the Holden call field thing and catch her in awry you, you seeing everybody as phony, seeing everybody as essentially greedy and out for themselves, and finding that very threatening and, um, so yeah. And then, uh, and I, I think, uh, so I’ve thought, thought a lot about the, um.
You know, [00:43:00] psychology and, and, uh, psychosis and, and mental illness things over the years since that experience. And it seems like to, to me, the, the isolating, the, the fears of isolation and the anxiety that comes from isolation is part of that. And I’m curious if you’ve thought about how your work can relate to, uh, mental illness.
Because it seems to me that a big, to me, a big part of reaching some, uh, mentally ill state or psychotic state is kind of being so stressed out by the normal, uh. Uh, normal interactions that are required to be a, you know, a normal human because there is just so much calculation involved. And if you, you know about thinking like, well, what does this person think of me, you know, how do I interact with them?
You have to keep track of your own, uh, uh, a model of yourself and model of other people and all these complex interactions. And it seems like, you know, if you’re not feeling well, if you’re [00:44:00] anxious, if you start going down a rabbit hole of feeling unwell, you kind of get to this point where these so-called normal interactions that are required of us to be, you know, so-called normal people, functioning people, that that kind of stuff can just become really overwhelming and we kind of like drop out of it internally where we just kind of give up on trying to manage all this, this complex calculus.
At least that’s the learnings that I think I’ve, I’ve gotten from my own experiences in reading a lot about psychology over the years, but I’m curious if you’ve thought much about. How your, your work and, and thinking relate to mental illness?
David Pinsof: Yeah, I mean, I haven’t written a lot about mental illness. Um, I’m, I’m not a clinical psychologist by training.
I, I, I’m more interested in, in basic research on, into how the mind works. Um, I, I, in terms of, you know, anyone listening who might be experiencing similar mental health problems about social anxiety, um, I, I wouldn’t have much to say beyond just the normal platitude [00:45:00] of, you know, seeking therapy, seeking psycho pharmaceutical treatments.
You know, these things are effective and, and they can, they can help. Um, but, uh, I’ve, I’ve been thinking a bit about how some mentally unhealthy patterns might be results of positive feedback loops. So the clearest example of this might be something like a panic attack. I’m beginning to think that what a panic attack is is.
A positive feedback loop where you’re afraid of your fear itself. So when you’re, uh, experiencing a fear response, there are a lot of physiological and bodily reactions that kick into gear, right? Your heart starts racing, your muscles tense up, your blood pressure increases. Um, and what I think can happen is when you interpret some of those physiological and bodily responses as scary in and of them themselves, then that creates a positive feedback loop where you get afraid of something, your heart starts pounding.
You start being [00:46:00] afraid of the fact that your heart is pounding. Maybe, maybe you’re having a heart attack, maybe you’re dying, maybe you know you’ve been poisoned or you’re sick or something, right? And once you start being afraid of your heart pounding, well, you, you get more afraid, and that makes your heart pound even more.
And then you get even more afraid, and then your heart pound even more. And it’s a kind of mental explosion. That can lead into a panic attack. Um, and I’ve been interested in the hypothesis that maybe some other mental illnesses might have that kind of flavor where it’s an emotional system where the snake starts to eat its own tail, where the output of the system starts to become the input in a way that can create a kind of mental explosion.
Um, and I haven’t thought about anxiety in particular as, as being an example of that, but it’s, but one possible way it could be. An example of that is if social anxiety prevents you from, uh, making connections with other people, um, and in so far as you are, um, less connected with other people, um, and you are [00:47:00] less affiliated with others, you’re gonna be more anxious, which.
Makes it even harder for you to connect with other people, which makes you even more socially anxious and so on in a kind of feedback loop. And I think a lot of people might fall into that trap where, um, they’re anxious because they’re not connected with people and they’re not connected with people because they’re anxious.
And the only way to break out of that is, is just to temporarily be really uncomfortable and anxious to try to break outta that cycle. And that’s really hard, right? I don’t, I don’t have a recipe for doing that. It’s, it’s the problem of, of the, the enduring the short-term cost for the long-term gain. And, you know, humans have been struggling to solve that problem for millennia, and I don’t have a, you know, a magic bullet solution to it.
But I do think that, um, I, people have to get over that hump of trying to make connections with people, even if it’s scary or uncomfortable or, or anxiety provoking, that getting over that hump can, can get you out of a, that vicious cycle.
Zach Elwood: Yeah, I think it’s pro, I think it’s like a lot of, [00:48:00] um, psychological.
Thing is there’s, there’s a lot of various feedback loop loops involved. I, I do see some, uh, I’d probably put it better in words writing it afterwards, but I do see connections between your work and, uh, so-called mental illness because I do think, you know, getting back to the way that we can see other people, as in very cynical ways, I think a lot of, uh, mental, mental illness can come down to seeing other people as very threatening and kind of being, being made dysfunctional by that in an, in an extreme, you know, pathological sense.
We just start seeing other people, as you know, we, we start seeing other people as so threatening, as so greedy, as so out for themselves. And, and you go down this, uh, pathological rabbit hole and you lose the sense that maybe I’m like other people, maybe I can connect with them, these kinds of things. And I see your, I see your, your work kind of related to that because it’s like, uh, to be a.
To be a normal functioning people, we do kind of have to accept that other people are like us, uh, that [00:49:00] other, that we are like other people. And that even, even if we all have, uh, you know, at, at at heart kind of self-serving, uh, motivations that that isn’t necessarily a, a horrible thing. You know, that, that there’s still positive things within that.
So that, that’s where I kind of see some relations there, at least from my own experiences and having read about a lot of people’s experiences of mental illness that are, that kind of have similar map overs. But anyway, just throwing it out there for, for you.
David Pinsof: Yeah, totally. I mean, I think another interesting aspect of this that my work touches on a little bit is our.
Compulsion to tell stories about our behaviors and about our motives and, and about our minds, and how we have very little access into what’s really going on in our unconscious mind or what, what we, yeah. What we’re really striving for in life.
Zach Elwood: Yeah. I wanted talk about the, I wanted to talk about the gica thing tied into that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah,
David Pinsof: yeah, sure. So the, yeah. The gica experiments, he has some pretty disturbing experiments where he looks at split brain patients, which they have their corpus callosum severed, and that’s the, the [00:50:00] set of nerve fibers that connect the left and right hemisphere of the brain. And what he finds is that the left hemisphere will often confabulate, uh, reasons for something that the right hemisphere did.
So he can actually, uh, isolate which hemisphere gets a particular piece of information, because the right eye is connected to the left hemisphere, and the left eye is connected to the right hemisphere. So he can show you something in your left eye so that only your right hemisphere gets it. He can show you a command, like get up and go to the door.
Right. And your left hemisphere, which is more involved in language and producing verbal responses, will not be privy to that. It will not get that sensory stimulation. So what you will feel if you are a split brain patient is a, a, an urge coming from your right hemisphere to get up and go to the, to the door.
And your left hemisphere will make up a reason why you got up and went to. Yeah. They they asked them
Zach Elwood: why, why did you do that? And they confabulate.
David Pinsof: Exactly. So, um, if, if you, so the, the correct answer of why they got up and got to the door is because, you know, their uh, [00:51:00] their right, sorry, their left eye got the command to get up and go to the door.
That’s the correct reason. But they don’t say that because they don’t have that. Instead they make up a reason like, oh, I went to go get a drink of water. I went to get a Coke, or I went to the bathroom, whatever. They’ll make up something that is not the correct reason, um, but is a sort of superficially plausible reason.
Right. And the disturbing implication is that we’re just doing this all the time. Right. We’re constantly confabulating. Superficially plausible reasons for why we do what we’re doing. Um, and you know, we, we certainly have more, uh, evidence to work with when we’re constructing that story. And we have to make it consistent with our sensory evidence and with the stuff that other people are aware of.
And so that constrains us, uh, to some extent to, you know, generate stories that are, you know, more likely to be true or have some truth to them. But we still have a lot of wiggle room to bullshit a lot about why we do things. Um, and we often bullshit in the direction of making ourselves seem more benevolent.
Uh, more altruistic, more competent, more rational than we in fact are a lot of the time. [00:52:00] And connecting back to the idea about mental illness, it, it might be that this actually, uh, pours fuel onto the fire of mental illness in a lot of cases, and that we could have mental health problems, but talk ourselves out of the fact that we have them or be unaware of the fact that we have them.
So if I am, have a hard time connecting with other people, uh, one way to interpret that is I’m having some kind of social anxiety problems. Having some kind of mental health problem where I can’t, uh, my, my normal social machinery is just isn’t working well or I have anxiety or depression or whatever.
That’s one way to interpret it. And in a lot of cases, that’s the correct interpretation. But because our confabulation and storytelling minds, uh, are so active, they will off that, that answer will often not come to us. We’ll just rationalize why we’re having a hard time connecting with people and instead of giving the correct answer, which is I’m having, you know, depression or anxiety or whatever.
We’ll come up with an answer. Well, oh, everyone just must suck. [00:53:00] Everyone’s just a phony. Uh, everyone’s out to get me. Uh, everyone’s trying to hurt me or conspiring against me in some way. And we’ll cook up a superficially plausible sounding story to defend. We’re having a heart to defend ourselves too.
Yeah. To defend ourselves. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
Zach Elwood: Yeah.
David Pinsof: And we’ll often end up believing that story and, and that story actually prevents us from solving the mental health problem and in fact, makes the mental health problem worse. And so I think a big part of the solution to mental health problems is trying to see through our own bullshit stories that we tell ourselves.
’cause oftentimes those bullshit stories will get in the way of us actually solving our problems, uh, in a, in an effective way. And so I think we really need to be skeptical of the stories we tell ourselves. Uh, yeah. And because often they’re wrong and often they’re preventing us from actually getting better.
Zach Elwood: No, that’s great. I think that’s actually one of the, if I had to sum up one of my biggest tips for people dealing with, you know, mental health struggles, it’s like, be skeptical of your own certainty about your issues. Because so often we do reach. And not just, yeah, I would, I would say not even, this applies to everything.
Getting back to the confabulation aspect, I mean, when you, the gica experiments were so kind of mind blowing and, uh, counterintuitive and scary. It’s like we should, and getting back to your, what you read about in your, in your blog posts, it’s like, it’s a, it’s a good thing to be skeptical about what we believe our own motivations are, because that helps us cut away the, the dangerous bullshit or the harm harmful bullshit and, and try to get more to the heart of the matter, whether it’s societal things we’re working on, or whether it’s our own personal lives.
Yeah. I was curious to ask if you were a fan of, uh, Peter Turin’s ideas, or is it Turchin, I, I can’t remember how he pronounce it, his idea about the frustrated elites. Do you know much about that and would you care to talk about that, how it tie might tie into your work?
David Pinsof: Sure. Um, so Peter Turchin has some ideas about.
What’s called elite overproduction. And uh, the idea there is that there are a limited number of slots for elites to [00:55:00] fill. And these might be positions of power, uh, in either in government or in organizations. And when you have too many elites to fill that, those limited number of slots, then you have a lot of competition and rivalry within elites.
And what he thinks happens as a result is a lot of societal unrest that disgruntled elites will try to start, you know, uh, revolutionary political movements will try to, uh, disrupt the status quo in various ways politically. Um, and that leads to a lot of societal unrest. So I think there are, um, a lot of problems and things you could critique about this idea.
Um, it’s kind of unclear what counts as a slot. To fill it, it’s kind of hard to measure, like what, how do, how do we know if there are too many elites and like how, how does that result to like, what is societal instability? What does that even mean? Like there, there’s a lot of fuzziness here and a lot of things you could, you could criticize, but I am sympathetic to the [00:56:00] overarching idea that there is competition between people for status in one form or another.
Certainly positions of power in, in government or in organizations are one kind of status that, that people compete over. And I am sympathetic to the idea that those competitive dynamics really matter for society in shaping how society. Functions. So, uh, part of me is sympathetic to the idea and think that he’s on, I, I think that he’s onto something there, but in, in terms of the details and how you measure it and how you define societal instability, I, I’m, I’m a little more skeptical.
Zach Elwood: Mm-hmm. Yeah. I saw a little map over between the two. You’re in his ideas because I, I did, like, the thing I liked about his idea was I, I liked the idea that. People could be, could come to be very anti-establishment for reasons that were not obvious to them, similar to your work where it’s like they might be reaching for these ide things that they think are ideological, but it’s actually about them just kind of hitting the system because they haven’t achieved sufficient status.
And I, I [00:57:00] saw that as being connected.
David Pinsof: Yeah. I will say, um, probably what I think is the best defense of Turian ideas for, for lack of a better term, would be, uh, musa elgar’s work. Um, we have never been woke, so he has a book where he dissects the phenomenon of wokeness and where it comes from. And also I think he, he is a very skilled anthropologist of us, of ourselves and sort of defines.
Us, namely the people listening to podcasts like this as symbolic capitalists. We are people who are good at manipulating symbols, who’ve achieved, you know, high levels of education. We are, uh, to a certain extent elites. And he does a really good job of taking an outside perspective as an anthropologist would of that culture.
And why, uh, woke ideas, for lack of a better term, are appealing to that, uh, subculture. And he takes a very ian analysis of that, where he thinks a lot of wokeness stems from competition between elites for social status and he views wokeness as, as, as a product of that kind of competition. So I’d recommend that if, if, uh, if your listeners are interested in, in, in that lens.
Zach Elwood: Yeah. Yeah. And I’ve said with my work on political polarization, I often say that I thought moose is one of the, uh, most important contributors to understanding. American polarization with his work, and especially his paper that came out years ago, race and the Race for the White House. Understanding, you know, more liberal democratic contributions to polarization.
I think his work has, has been great. But yeah, this, this is opening up the polarization thing, which I don’t, I don’t wanna take up all your time, but maybe one day in the future we can talk about your polarization related work because Yeah. EE even there I was, I, I just really enjoyed reading your work on that, examining, um, the, the, the nature of the, uh, the shifting tribal allegiances that help explain, uh, you know, political conflict.
But yeah, we don’t need to get into that now. I’ll just leave that as a teaser maybe for the people listening and maybe we can talk about it someday in the, in the future. But, um, yeah. Yeah.
David Pinsof: Sure.
Zach Elwood: Uh, but I really appreciate you joining me, David, and find your work very interesting. And do you wanna talk a little bit about how, how people can stay in touch with your work and follow you?
David Pinsof: Yeah. So, uh, I write a substack. Um, it’s called Everything is Bullshit. Um, you can find it at, uh, everything is bullshit blog. Um, you can feel free to DM me if, if you’d like, um, either on Substack notes or on Twitter slash x. So I also have, uh, I’m on Twitter at David Soff. Um, those are two ways you can reach me.
Feel free to, to DM me. Um, you could also email me, me if you want David pins off at Gmail. Uh, I’m pretty easy to reach and pretty friendly. So yeah,
Zach Elwood: whenever I hear your name of your blog, I think you should make like the Lego movie. Uh, everything is awesome. Turn it into everything is bullshit, kind of theme song for your, uh, anyway, just an idea.
David Pinsof: That’d be awesome. Yeah, it’d be fun if maybe I’ll see if I can get AI to do that. That would be fun.
Zach Elwood: Yeah, there you go. Um, okay. Thanks a lot David.
David Pinsof: Yep, my pleasure.
Zach: That was a talk with David Pinsof, co-creator of Cards Against Humanity and an evolutionary psychologist who works on status-seeking, tribalism, humor, and more. I recommend subscribing to his Substack, which is called Everything is Bullshit.
This has been the People Who Read People podcast with me, Zachary Elwood. You can learn more about this podcast at behavior-podcast.com. You can learn more about my work on poker tells at readingpokertells.com.
Thanks for listening.