What Do BDSM & Meditation Have In Common? - Professor Paul Bloom - #120

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Oh, hello, friends. Welcome back to modern Wisdom. Before I go on to today's guest, I need to give you a warning that you will only be receiving one episode per week for the next couple of weeks. I'm jetting off again to Bali, which means that you will unfortunately be left with just one modern Wisdom episode every seven days until I get back. But today's episode will make up for it. Professor Paul Bloom is a psychologist from the University of Yale. He's just a crazy, interesting guy. Someone that swims in the circles of philosophy and psychology and looks at the first principles of why we are the way we are in the way that Professor Bloom does is, it's just an absolute dream for me. So I mean, we get to talk today about why empathy is bad, the case for rational compassion, how pleasure works and why we like what we like. We talk about racism, how to have a productive conversation, why we love people who have died. I mean, these questions are just so cool. Very, very interesting for me to sink my teeth into. Hopefully will be the same for you as well. Before we get into it, I recently released a video talking about me starting therapy. Might not be quite what you expected, but that's on the modern Wisdom YouTube channel. So you should go and check that out as well. But for now, please welcome Professor Paul Bloom.
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back. I'm joined by Professor Paul Bloom. Paul, welcome to the show.

**Paul Bloom** (1:46)
Thank you so much for having me.

**Chris Williamson** (1:47)
It's a pleasure to have you on. Been listening to a lot of your work recently, some fantastic interviews with Sam Harris and podcasts that you did a little while ago, but some super interesting stuff. We've been talking about empathy and about resilience a lot on the show. We recently discussed Eliud Kipchoge's sub to our marathon performance, which was a very resilient physical feat that people have seen. We got a lot to delve into today, but how would you describe the work that you do if someone hadn't met you before and didn't know you?

**Paul Bloom** (2:21)
I'm a psychology professor at Yale, and I'm interested in human nature.
My work goes from topic to topic, and they're kind of related. Broadly, I'm interested in pleasure, what we like, why we like it. I'm really interested in morality. How do we explain our intuitions about good and evil? How do we explain who we hate, who we admire, and what kind of moral judgments are good for us? Like, how should we think morally? And there my work kind of blends into philosophy. And that was my most recent book, Against Empathy. And I'm interested in cluster of things. I'm interested in the self. I'm interested in how we think about things that aren't like us, like robots or non-human animals. Interested in religion, where religious belief comes from. Most recently, I've been interested in suffering. So I have a kind of dream job where I get paid perfectly fine to just ask some really cool questions and my students and my colleagues work on them.

**Chris Williamson** (3:29)
It must feel nice to be able to indulge your intellectual curiosity on a yearly basis and just keep on changing that up every so often.

**Paul Bloom** (3:37)
Yeah, they haven't fired me yet. It is very nice.

**Chris Williamson** (3:43)
So you touched on a word there, morality. And I think a lot of the stuff that you're talking about are questions that people take for granted or their appearance is something that people just take as fact. Do you often find when you begin to look at the first principles or real strip things back to basics, do you find a bit of a disconnect or people just looking at the questions that you're asking and thinking, well, why are you asking that? Why are you asking what is morality? Why are you asking what is empathy?

**Paul Bloom** (4:15)
It's interesting. It's a good question. My work tends to fall into one of two extremes. I'm sometimes interested in things that are honest to God, puzzling for a lot of people. Like you ask people, what do people get out of sadomasochistic sex or hot saunas, or watching movies that terrify them? People say, I don't know. That's really cool that we do. But some of my questions, and this is what you're getting at, involve questioning things that we take for granted.
And William James, a long time ago, a great psychologist, said it's only to a scholar can you ask a question like, why do people get flushed when everybody's looking at them? Why do we get hungry when we smell something delicious? And these are questions like, why does the apple fall from the tree? You gotta be in some way, step back and be a scholar. And so they say, well, okay, sure that happens, that's obvious, but why do we work that way? And so for morality, if you right now, you walked outside and you saw somebody slapping a child, just beating the crap out of a four year old, you would be shocked. You'd probably spring to action. Why? And it's not enough for you to say, well, of course, it's just natural, it's obvious. Okay, let's spell it out, what's bothering you? Can you imagine a person who would find this funny? Or have no interest at all? And those are the sort of questions I ask.