JOSH: Hello, and welcome to Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg, the podcast about ideas that matter. I'm Josh Castle, the producer of the podcast, and I'm so glad you've joined us today. In this episode, Spencer speaks with Nick Gray about strategies for hosting great events, and how to help people engage and feel welcome in unfamiliar social spaces.

SPENCER: Tyler, welcome.

TYLER: Hey, thanks for having me.

SPENCER: I think that a lot of people feel like they don't have as much community in their life as they'd like. In the past, I think a lot of people got their communities from religion or church, and today, I think many people don't have something like that that's acting as a replacement, and they might feel disconnected, like they don't have a group of their own.

TYLER: I think that's right. I sense that, or I know directly that most of my friends living either in cities or outside of cities are feeling pretty alienated, and even those who do have something that you might call community, it's typically the sort of thing where maybe they go to ecstatic dance once a week and they see the same sorts of people. But I guess when I use the word 'community,' I'm typically talking about something that your entire life is saturated by.

SPENCER: Besides the saturation, what are the aspects that you think make a good community?

TYLER: What I think makes a good community — for me, I should say — is that it's organic. I think a lot of people who are (What would you call our demographic? Urban idealists or something like that, [laughs] young urban idealists?) I think when they think about community, the first thing that pops into mind, for instance, is coming up with a set of values or making it about a mission, that type of thing, like explicitly, we are about XYZ, whether it's a hobby or some kind of service project or whatever, like an intentional community. That's the thing that people normally think of. Or like a commune, where it's about an ideology of sharing or that kind of thing. Or even about an identity, like, "We are a Jewish community." I think all that is great, and I think those should definitely exist alongside the types of communities that I'm mostly interested in being a part of. And those are, I guess I would call it something like communities of chemistry, where the main thing uniting the people is just that they're drawn to one another. It's not a legible thing, like a flag or a profession, but rather just people naturally wanting to hang out and be around one another and sharing maybe a similar sort of ethos. But in my experience, as soon as that ethos starts to get documented and become like a flag that you wave, then there becomes this problem of (I don't know), it becomes less about the interactions themselves, and more about upholding some kind of almost religious attitude, if that makes sense.

SPENCER: Would you say that's a critique of the way people used to get community a lot of times and still do in many parts of the world where they get it through their religion or through their church? Or do you think that there's something about those communities that actually were more organic?

TYLER: I'm not sure because I've never really been a part of any of those. I guess it would be a critique for someone in my position where — this is part of it — I've never felt like I could belong to any of those unless I share their beliefs. Let me just take being a graphic designer. I used to belong to something that wasn't exactly a community of graphic designers, but maybe more like a network. For instance, I was part of The Type Directors Club, which is a group of people obsessed with typography, as I used to be. And when I moved on from that particular activity, a lot of those connections faded. They weren't resilient enough to transition to a different stage of life. And then, likewise, I love going to specific Christian churches even though I'm not a Christian, because I like the spirit that's created. But I was worrying the other day as I was singing alongside this woman who I'd kind of made friends with to my right. She seemed like some kind of grandma or something; that was the projection that I had. We were clapping and singing along. I was worried that as soon as I would tell her, "Hey, I'm actually not Christian," that she would stop being interested in me. And so, I suppose that's a critique in terms of communities that you want to travel with you throughout different life transitions. If it's not founded on chemistry, then it's likely to stop being your community once you do make that transition.

SPENCER: Does chemistry work though, from the point of view of transitivity? I find that if I have chemistry with someone and I have chemistry with another person, that will increase the chance that they have chemistry with each other, but it's far from guaranteed. And so, can you really have a community with a whole bunch of people that all have chemistry with each other? [laughs]

TYLER: No, I don't think so. One thing I will say in terms of the strength of identity- or activity-based communities is they often do have this transitivity; that's why I really hope they continue flourishing. I was a part of the effective altruist (you might call it) community. I think it's a little bit more like a network. It's just semantics, but it would be the sort of thing where, since someone knew I was an effective altruist, that meant that I could sleep on a couch in almost any country in the developed world — which was wild — and then I did. I would go around to different conferences, I would also work with student groups and get them off the ground. Just because I have this identity of this belief set — or you might say practice of effective altruism — other effective altruists let me crash on their couch. Now in communities of chemistry, that's not as much necessarily the case. There is some transitivity, but it only goes so many cliques out. Let's say I'm friends with Bob, and Bob is in my community, and Bob has a friend named Sally, and Sally has a boyfriend named John. I don't know how far that trust necessarily travels. If Bob trusts me and Sally trusts me, that doesn't necessarily mean that John will trust me and want me on his couch.

SPENCER: It seems to me that deep belief systems, whether they're religious or they're political or they're about effective altruism, they create this binding glue that makes people say, "Oh, yeah, you can sleep on my couch even though I know nothing about you other than that you're part of my group." [laughs]

TYLER: Yes, although, that said, let's take Effective Altruism. Now I'm on Fernando's couch in Spain or something like that. Actually, Spain is a bad example because Spain has a very special culture. I used to live in Spain. Let's say I'm on (I don't know) Steve's couch in Finland or something like that. And all that we have in common is that I'm an effective altruist. It would be a little bit strange then for that guy to hear about my problems with my girlfriend, for them to support me with thinking about how I would address a piece of conflict within my family, or all sorts of much less formal things, like even going out for a night on the town. Probably we would do that but, since it's not based on chemistry, it might be a little bit awkward. It's a less rich set of things that are possible in these communities of belief, I often find. Now that's different if it's a more local community of belief; let's say you're part of a Christian church. I think at the start you probably join because of sharing a belief. But then, gradually, you just form natural human relationships with people, and then that web of relationships starts acting like one of these communities of chemistry.

SPENCER: So maybe the community of chemistry is something that emerges rather than being there at the beginning, once people have enough ties to everyone else now, that chemistry is created?

TYLER: Yeah, and one big difference between these types of communities is speed. Right now, I'm a part of a community of chemistry, but it took a really long time to develop. I would say it took a year of throwing different friends together until the topology of the network changed where previously it was like a star topology where I'm the common node and everyone is relating through me. But then gradually it turned into one where everyone's friends with everyone; it looks more like a mesh network where there are lots of interconnections that I'm not even mediating. So that sort of network which I think is characteristic of a lot of communities of chemistry, takes a long time to develop, because relationships and trust take a long time to develop--really rich trust. Whereas, for a community of (let's say) belief or activity — like let's say effective altruism — you can form that really fast. Let's say no one's ever heard of effective altruism, and I'm to reintroduce it; all of a sudden, if a bunch of people read my essay online, they might suddenly be down to form a community, and we might start sharing resources, we might coordinate. And that's really awesome, how fast those things can move; although, I will say, those things tend to get built faster than interpersonal trust gets built. And so I suspect that a lot of the drama you see in popular movements or religious things or what-have-you are because you built a community out of this belief. But that doesn't necessarily mean you can trust one another, every aspect of the other person. Just because you're an effective altruist doesn't necessarily imply that you're going to help me move. In fact, you might not, because you have more important things to do, you think. [laughs]

SPENCER: Well, it seems like communities, by their nature, tend to trust the people in the community more than people outside the community. And there may be ways in which the people in the community are more trustworthy. That's definitely possible. Certainly, there are ways that the people in the community are more value-aligned than they are with people outside the community. But at the same time, any community of reasonable size is going to have some not very great actors and maybe some very, very bad actors. And so if that trust extends too far, that actually seems pretty dangerous.

TYLER: Although this term, "value-alignment," I think, is really interesting. Just going back to the example of Effective Altruism, just because we were both a part of it, possibly me a little bit more than you, but you're very familiar with it. So value-alignment in the context of Effective Altruism, for instance, means that we're very likely to be utilitarians; or at the very least, we're both very likely to believe that we want to make a big impact in the world using resources as effectively as possible. That actually, in the way that I think about the world now, is a pretty narrow type of value-alignment. The type of value-alignment that you can just state in a sentence like that, I think, is quite narrow; whereas, the value-alignment I might feel with a friend is often implicit, non-verbal, a lot richer, and it would be hard to put into words. I could say that it has something to do with the films that we share in common. I could say that it has something to do with our goodwill toward other people. But often, it has tons of different pillars. And I think that's what chemistry is. It's very broad value-alignment but in a way where it would be hard to articulate because of how it's more like a web of value-alignment, rather than like a single rope. And I think often in communities united by beliefs, that value-alignment is that one narrow thing that does a lot of work, but then it's really tested, a lot of tension is put on it, and so you end up with often a lot of drama. But with friends, let's say, it's almost like you have many different ropes, and it's harder to tear apart, at least in my experience.

SPENCER: I suspect a lot of those bonds between friends are not things that I would call values. They're things like trust and experience with the person, and ability to predict the person's behavior and a deep understanding of the person's personality, and all those things work together. And values, I just think of as one subset of that. Maybe you were using the term more broadly.

TYLER: Yeah, I guess I'm using the term in a way that it's normally not used. But I think with a friend, you can often turn to them and be like, "You really get it," and what's meant by 'it?' It would be really hard to put into words. 'It' includes honor, plus utilitarianism, plus belief in God, plus... Do you know what I mean? It's hard to articulate.

SPENCER: Well, there's a lot of things that we can't state analytically, but that we understand on some level, and maybe on an important level.

TYLER: Yeah, it almost reminds me of something. If you had asked someone, "How do you ride that bike there?" They would give you a very coarse description of how they ride the bike. "I put down one foot, and then I put down the other," but they're actually doing possibly dozens of little things, such as adjusting their weight and so on. And I suspect there's something similar going on with the bonds between friends where you could put it into words but it would be very difficult; whereas, coordination and trust between two people who are in the same ideology, you can state in much more simple terms, because less is going on.

SPENCER: There's so many things our brains are doing that are not routed through the words in our mind or the analytic processing. I think about this with martial arts where, if a friend asked me to show them a martial arts move, I literally have to do it and then watch myself do it and then say, "Ah, that's how I did it." [laughs]

TYLER: Right. Yeah, similarly, with a friend, someone's like, "You guys, what are your shared values?" I feel like I'd have to do it. I'm like, "I don't know. Friend, let's have an interaction." And it's like, "Oh, it seems like we both value liveliness, I guess." But I'd have to do it first.

SPENCER: This reminds me of discussions about the rationality community. Some people, I think, critique the rationality community and say, "Well, they try to make everything analytical. They are trying to do things without vibes, without the low-level processing." I'm curious what you think about that.

TYLER: Well, I think a lot of true rationalists will hear that feedback and say... For instance, there's the Spock critique where it's like, "Rationalists, do they just want to be like Spock?" And then rationalists will have to come back where it's like, "Well, no. Emotion can be rational. It can be instrumentally rational, for example, if it motivates you to do things in a more rational way." Let's take an example. One person is Spock-like going about their project, and another person is motivated by something swelling up from their chest. The second person, I would expect to do probably better or to endure longer on that task; whereas, the first one might end up dropping it or getting burnt out, or something like that. So I think rationalists will say that you can have non-analytical sources of rationality, where instrumental rationality, at least, is if you have some goal you want to meet, and you're just trying to get to that goal in the most effective way possible. That said, despite that comeback, certainly my experience of a lot of segments of the rationality community is just that it feels kind of Spock-like [laughs]. And so it's a good defense in theory, but not in practice. And this is often the case for a lot of communities; you'll have some critique, and the community will have a retort to the critique that is well-reasoned but not actually enacted.

SPENCER: Well, there are some people, I think, that are just much more naturally analytical rather than intuitive in their nature. I put myself in this category. And I think a lot of rationalists are in this category. And then there's the question of, "Do you go all in on, 'Okay, we're different in this way? Let's just keep emphasizing that and get even better at that?'" Or do you say, "Oh no, the better thing to do is, actually, to incorporate the stuff we're not that good at and say, 'Oh, you know, we want to become more holistic.'" I think one way that I'm a little bit different than a lot of rationalists is, I think I'm much more in the, "Oh no. I need to try to incorporate that stuff that I'm not naturally good at but become more intuitive, because that's actually kind of a missing piece, rather than just trying to double down on the part that comes naturally to me."

TYLER: It's interesting, though. Let's say you're a rationalist and you realize there's something you're missing. Let's say you think you're missing this intuitive piece, and that the intuitive piece is actually important, even for achieving certain ends that you care about as a rationalist. One could be to become more well-rounded and to start learning intuition, and that's where a lot of "post rationalists" find themselves these days. Another would be to dig in and specialize, but make sure that your rationalist node of people is playing a role in a broader ecosystem full of different talents. So if you're coordinating with other groups, then maybe you guys can specialize in the analytical type of attitude, and then someone else can specialize in the intuitive thing, and then you can coordinate. I don't see that happening much, and I don't have high hopes that it will happen. Rationalists tend to seem to want to stick to their own world, and likewise for a lot of intuitive people. And so, becoming more well-rounded seems to be the solution that people who are dissatisfied with state affairs end up gravitating towards.

SPENCER: I'm a pretty terrible dancer, and I was trying to get my friend, who's kind of a natural dancer, to just help me, give me advice. [laughs] And so he was watching me dance, which is very, very awkward, and whenever he noticed that I was using my system two analytic thinking — he would notice it somehow in my body language — he'd be like, "Stop thinking! I can see you thinking." I'd be like, "Yeah, how did you know that I was thinking?"

TYLER: Did it work? Did it make you a better dancer? I'm really curious.

SPENCER: Well, I think it was helpful. It was helpful. And now I try to get his voice in my head when I'm dancing, and I'm like, "Okay, channel what he would tell me and use that."

TYLER: Sounds very system two to do this. [laughs]

SPENCER: It is very system two. But then it pushes me back into system one. You know what I mean? It's kickstarting that mode. I'm still a terrible dancer, but I do think it's a nudge in the right direction.

TYLER: That's really interesting. Yeah, I never danced until I was 18 and — kind of like you, it sounds like — I learned how to dance from scratch.

SPENCER: Well, unlike me, you sound like you learned how to dance.

TYLER: [laughs] Give it time. Have you taken (what is it called?) Ayla's dance hell thing? I hear it's pretty successful.

SPENCER: No, what's that?

TYLER: Somehow she gets people who are very in their heads to get completely outside of their heads. And I have many friends who are just raving about having participated in her dance workshop. I'm not sure how she does it, though. I think a lot of it is kind of esoteric. From what I've heard, maybe esoteric instructions like: imagine you are possessed by the music, or something like that, little thought experiments where you're entering different worlds and simulating what that person would do in that world, which is something I'm thinking a lot about these days, because I think you can gain a lot of extra abilities and little superpowers by almost playing pretend like a kid would.

SPENCER: Yeah. That makes me think about this really interesting book, Impro. Have you read that?

TYLER: Mm. I love that book.

SPENCER: Yeah, where it's all about improvisation by one of the original creators of many improvisation techniques. And one of the techniques is giving people masks and having them essentially act like they're possessed by the masks, and taking that very seriously as, "No, you are not yourself anymore," really leaning into that "You are not yourself anymore," and then seeing the way that that changes people. And it has pretty dramatic examples and stories about that. I'm wondering, how do you incorporate those ideas?

TYLER: Yeah, I have kind of a crackpot theory of human psychology. I'm not quite sure where I got it other than experience. I have, for instance, a gut condition. And I've noticed that when I inhabit other identities, like say when I'm playing roles. Recently, I was in an immersive theater thing, so I'm playing some role for that, and then I notice my gut condition has kind of gone away. All the symptoms have gone away. Similarly, I know a guy who had a terrible stutter, and likewise, when he would play a character without a stutter, the stutter would just go away. I also know a voice teacher and she is a coach. She has people who come to her thinking that they can't sing, in the same way that you mentioned that you can't dance. So this is something you might try, actually, for dancing. And she says, "Okay, well, forget about being a good singer. Let me hear your impersonation of Whitney Houston. Okay, cool. Let me hear your impersonation of Frank Sinatra; sing this song as Frank Sinatra," and they treat it as a game, very low stakes. Their identity is not at stake because they're being someone else. If there's an off note, it's because of the impersonation; it's not because of them. And lo and behold, a lot of people end up being much better singers if you have to pretend to be some kind of famous singer. And so, my thinking is that a lot of people, when they're trying to solve some psychological problem or gain some new skill or (let's say) some advance spiritual technique — like meditation — will often take this incremental approach where it's just like, "Okay, let me practice and get better and better and better as me." I have this tangled psychological issue that was caused by my relationship with my uncle, who I was close with when I was a kid, and he was always saying nasty things about me. So let me go in and deal with the limiting beliefs around that issue, and it takes a really long time. However, let's take that person with the limiting beliefs. I bet that if they were to suddenly just be thrust into a theater-like role of (let's say) some kind of hero who doesn't have those limiting beliefs, they would behave as if they didn't for as long as they were required in that role. This implies to me that, if they were forced to just stay in that role for the rest of their life — let's say if they didn't, then they would have to lose a million dollars or something like that — well, they probably just wouldn't really have to deal with those limiting beliefs much anymore. And so that reminds me a lot of this approach that is in this form of Buddhism that's Tibetan — or historically, in these days, in the hands of the Tibetans, but came from India — called Vajrayana, where one of the practices is deity yoga. You don't meditate as yourself; you become one of these deities that are seen as, not exactly metaphorical, but it's like the deity isn't outside of you. It's an energy that you find inside of you, and you meditate as that thing, because that thing is much more capable of meditating than you are. And so it's this approach that's called a fruitional approach, rather than an incremental approach. And I suspect that this can be applied to just so many different areas of life and be much faster if people really are able to commit to it.

SPENCER: Do you think this could be used for something like social anxiety? Like, "Okay, go to that party and act as this super socially confident person that's not you, and just be that person." Obviously, don't lie to people, but just take on that role?

TYLER: Well, I know it can, because my first experience with this stuff was when I was 13 or 14. I think it was 14. I'm not sure, I was 13 or 14. I was wracked by social anxiety. In the ecosystem of my school, I was definitely considered one of the losers. You know, there's the skater kids, the theater kids, the jocks, the popular kids — who, in my school, are also the jocks — and then the losers, and I was one of those. And back in the day, everyone was on MySpace. So I got contacted on MySpace by this girl who used to be a part of my school and had since been in a different school, but she didn't know that I was loser status, essentially. People these days consider me to be kind of charismatic and socially pretty fluid, but back then, I just could not have a normal conversation. I didn't quite stutter. It was more like I mixed words. I never quite knew what to say. So if someone asked, "How are you doing?" I would say "Grood," as a mix of 'good' and 'great' by accident, that kind of thing. And my timing was always off. I never knew how to get into a conversation, so I'd always be at the edge of a group conversation and then just disappear. But this girl who contacted me was, in the mind of my 13-year-old self, she looked like a hot, popular girl from her photos. That's not who I knew her as, previously, but that's how I would have thought of her if she had been part of my school. We struck up a conversation, and she invited me to hang out at the Jefferson Valley Mall with her and her friend. I remember I was walking up to them outside of the movie theater, and my palms were getting just insanely sweaty, and I felt this tingle in the back of my neck and my throat closing up because I knew I was going to blow it, and they were going to find out really quickly that I was this kind of misshapen loser dude. But then somehow the demand of the situation made me be open to a bolt from the blue, and I suddenly just got possessed by some kind of alternate personality. And that alternate personality was very charismatic, had really good timing, could tell jokes really well, and had a lot more confident body language. And they were amazed by it, [laughs] and so was I. And after three hours or something of hanging out, the girl who had contacted MySpace, Agnieszka, told me that her friend wanted to make out with me. [laughs] Actually, I'm censoring myself a little bit; she told me that her friend wanted to take my virginity. And at the age of 13, 14, this was an absolutely mind-blowing thing, to the extent that that personality just got so entrenched in me all of a sudden because of the reward signal, that it continues to kind of be my personality to this day. And these days, actually, the thing I struggle with is returning to an older version of myself before I adopted this more socially adept personality. But, yeah, my social anxiety just got cut at least in half, and these days, I don't really feel social anxiety in the same way at all. So to answer your question, yeah, it's for sure possible for social anxiety. I'm pretty certain it's possible for dance. I think any sort of thing where you can imagine a person with their characteristics but some other attribute and that person still feels realistic, I think it can work for that.

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SPENCER: It's interesting to think about what actually inhibits someone in these kinds of situations. No amount of imagining you're Michael Jordan is going to cause you to be able to slam dunk a basketball if you literally don't have the physical capability. That's just not going to happen. But you were able to be funny, you were able to be charismatic, you literally were physically able to do it. It's just that psychologically, there were some limitations. Maybe it's the nerves, maybe it's the self-doubt or something. And then maybe taking this persona on is somehow like doing it and running around those blocks. Or how do you think about it?

TYLER: Well, let's take dancing. By believing that you're the best dancer in the world all of a sudden, and you don't have any practice, you're not going to become like Baryshnikov or something like that. There's just some physical limitations on that that you can probably only get through practice and genetics and so on. That said, maybe you're doing something in your head normally, where you're paying attention to something other than, for instance, the rhythm of a song, like the bassline. And maybe instead, you're paying a lot of attention to how people are looking at you. Or maybe instead, you're paying a lot of attention to the melody, which might be harder to dance to. Let's say maybe you've just never really tried paying attention to the rhythm. Well, you might take on this alter ego, and built into the belief complex of the alter ego is this belief like, "Oh, I should pay attention to the rhythm." So you naturally start doing that, and you can see a huge jump in progress right away, just from shifting patterns of attention, just from having different beliefs inside of this mind that you're inhabiting.

SPENCER: It seems to me, there's also this inhibiting thing that happens where — as someone who's a bad dancer — I'll start dancing, and I'll think about, "Am I dancing the right way?" And then I'm thinking about the dancing I'm doing, which is actually a really, really bad strategy for dancing well. [laughs] And maybe in social situations, that actually could be even worse. During the conversation, you're like, "Am I doing a good job? Okay, I've got to be interesting right now." That's absolutely a terrible strategy. Whereas, maybe when you're acting, you're like, "Oh, no, I'm playing this character." Maybe it's a very different kind of mental maneuver you're doing. You're not thinking about the fact that you're doing the thing. You're just trying to embody it?

TYLER: Sure, unless you're playing a character who is thinking about doing the thing. Let's say you think you're a bad dancer, and you are, because you're always thinking about what moves to do. Well, let's say you develop an alter ego named Razzle Dazzle Chad, and nobody needs to know. But you hit the dance floor and you're like, "Okay, one attribute of Razzle Dazzle Chad is he doesn't think about what moves to do. He just knows." And it turns out that I think, unless you have some motor disorder, our bodies know how to respond to rhythm. And so since you're playing Razzle Dazzle Chad, he's not doing that thing that you are normally doing.

SPENCER: Right, and it's interesting to think about where do you hit a limit with this. Obviously, as we talked about, there's a physical limit. You're not going to suddenly gain physical skills you didn't have. But surely there must be some kinds of blocks that this won't get around, or maybe others that will. Do you have a theory about that?

TYLER: I don't, but I think people should test it. When you feel limited, I feel like people want to blame, often, some kind of fixed thing. So then that means that they don't have to feel bad about it, like, "It's just my genes. It's just my muscles. I don't have the right kind of fast twitch muscles to dance like that." But I think, more often than not, there are psychological reasons for limitations, and I don't think people have explored the extent of that. It makes me think of Richard Feynman, the physicist. Apparently, once upon a time, he was curious about bloodhounds and their sense of smell, and he was curious about the limits of the human sense of smell. We normally don't think of ourselves as having a very good sense of smell as humans. But he started running experiments for himself, where, for instance, at a party, while he was out of the room, he would have a friend touch a few different books — take them off the bookshelf, go through the pages, and then put them back on the bookshelf — and then, according to him, — and we have to trust him on this, because I haven't tried the experiment — he would come back into the room, and then he would start sniffing the books, and lo and behold, he would be able to figure out which books were touched and which weren't. Now that's a case, right? If I told you, you could become a dramatically better smeller, a lot of people might not believe me, because they would think our bodies are just not made to do that. But I think there are a lot of cases where we just don't know how sensitive we are, or we just don't know the extent of the skill that we could have. I find this often when I'm on a run — and a lot of runners know about this — there's a point at which you think, "Oh, I just can't run anymore." But let's say you believed that a giant monster was chasing you down the street, or someone with a gun, then probably you would be able to run a lot more. [laughs] You're just limited by your sense of what's possible in that case.

SPENCER: It's funny; I also overcame social anxiety, but in a very different way from you, where I went through exposure therapy with a therapist, and he would give me homework assignments of going to bars at night alone and talking with five strangers, which I found absolutely terrifying. My heart would pound in my chest. I thought my head was gonna explode. And rather than adopting another character, what I learned to do is to just say, "Well, no matter how afraid I am, that's not an excuse to not do it." And it really, really worked. Not that I have zero social anxiety now, but I think I actually probably have less than the average person now, which is kind of crazy given that I had really intense social anxiety when I was young.

TYLER: That's wild. Yeah, I think for anything motivated by fear, we underrate the exposure therapy approach. I've gotten over a lot of stuff through exposure therapy, too.

SPENCER: Yeah. And similarly with giving talks where I just would give talks even though they terrified me and my heart would pound in my chest. I'd feel like I was losing my mind sometimes. But I would just do it anyway. And eventually, it just became calmer and calmer. Still, every once in a while, if I have a talk in a really weird setting that I'm not used to — a really different kind of situation — the anxiety will come back. But if it's a situation I've been in before, generally, I'm pretty calm about it.

TYLER: Are there any particular situations that throw you off?

SPENCER: For sure. When it's video recorded and live — I know this one take, this exact thing I say is going to be permanently recorded — that still freaks me out. I don't like that when it's video. When it's audio, actually, I'm fine. But if I'm standing on a stage and it's live and it's one take, I don't like that at all.

TYLER: Is that why this podcast doesn't have video?

SPENCER: No, I thought about having video. Maybe we will eventually, but largely it doesn't have video because I just find it more enjoyable doing audio. And also my audience only hears the audio, so if I'm seeing something they're not seeing, then it might be easy for me to assume implicitly that they have information that they, in fact, don't.

TYLER: Right. Plus, in the meantime, you can be looking at Pinterest while making coffee with no pants on.

SPENCER: Well, you know, honestly, I tend to pace around [laughs] while I'm recording and then I just return to the microphone whenever it's time to talk again. So I'm just walking around in circles, which I like; it clears my head.

TYLER: I like that, too.

SPENCER: Going back to this idea of alter egos and (I guess you use the term) 'identity play,' is that kind of the same thing?

TYLER: Yeah, 'identity play' is the term me and my co teacher came up with. We teach this sort of thing in an experimental course for Fractal University, which is this experimental university I help run. But the term 'alter ego,' I actually got from this guy, Todd Herman, who everyone kept telling us to check out once they heard about our course. It turns out there's this guy who lives in New York, Todd Herman. I haven't met him yet, but he's been doing this for 15 years in coaching celebrities and what he calls top performers in this art of coming up with an alter ego to get over a bunch of limitations that they feel like they have. And he has a whole book and a whole course and everything like that. So we've been super inspired by his framework and even adopted some of his terms.

SPENCER: When you teach people these ideas of how to have alter egos for their own benefit, how do you actually teach that?

TYLER: The first thing that we actually teach people is, strangely enough, clowning. And you might ask what does clowning have to do with these alter egos. It's my experience that if you try to teach someone to pop into an alter ego, often the thing that they'll start doing is very artificial. When you see someone impersonating a Star Wars character like Darth Vader or something like that, it doesn't really feel like it's them. And if you want a really robust alter ego, you ideally want it to be authentic in some way. It might not seem like you, but it comes from a deeper source of authenticity. Otherwise, you're going to feel weird while you do it, and people watching you are going to be like, "Who the fuck is this guy?" And it's going to seem very unnatural.

SPENCER: Yeah, most people are not good actors, myself included. So if you put them into the 'go act' mode, that probably doesn't seem to hit the nail on the head.

TYLER: Exactly. And so there's a type of clowning, which is about anti-performance. Instead of clowning as an acting exercise or as a thing you do to entertain people, there's this type of clowning called Pochinko clowning or Canadian clowning, that is mostly inspired by, apparently, Native American clowning, where in a lot of Native American tribes, the job of the sacred clown was to have as honest reactions as possible to what was going on. And now that often ends up being clownish or looking hilarious because, as adults, we spend so much of our time suppressing our authentic reactions to things. So let's say you're in a sales meeting and you're extremely bored, it's highly inappropriate as an adult to just go, "Uhhhhh," or fall asleep. Or let's say you're in a conversation with someone, and they're just talking over you the entire time and hogging all the conversation time; it's more like a monologue. As an adult, you're a little bit trapped. You just let them go on if you're trying to be polite, in at least our culture; whereas, the clown might just be like, "Ugh! Shut up! Enough!" or something like that, or slap them or something. And that was essentially the function — as far as I understand from my teacher, Sue Morrison — of the sacred clown. And a lot of these Native American tribes, they would have the permission to, for instance, take a crap on the chieftain's headdress if that chieftain was getting too big for their britches, or if, during a religious ritual, people were just doing it by rote and phoning it in — so to speak — they might start looking around like everyone was behaving extremely strangely, like they were aliens. Because these are the sorts of things that we are feeling inside but we're not demonstrating. So we train people in that form of clowning, and then we try to transition that sense of... Often when people go into this mode, they are accessing this deeper form of authenticity. They feel like they're behaving like someone else, but that someone else is also very them. So it's this paradoxical feeling of like, "I'm acting in a way that Tyler normally wouldn't, but it feels so right and high integrity." And so if you can find that form of integrity, then we try to bring that into alter egos. So now, if you're not taking my class and you're trying to find that form of integrity, it's pretty much how you would act around someone that you feel 200% comfortable with, where you can say anything to them, act in any way. If you're feeling stressed, you can just flop on the couch and you don't have anything to hide. It's that kind of authenticity of personality that you ideally want to bring to the alter ego. It should still feel like you, and if it doesn't feel like you, I would keep iterating until you find one that can feel... A big part of it is also that it's coming from your body. It's not just an idea. It's something that's animating your limbs. This is another exercise we walk people through, where we have them think of their alter egos, and we have them send it through every single part of their body. So it's in your toenails; it's in your armpits. You feel the energy of the alter ego in your nose, in the air that you're sucking in. It's going through your blood, and it's in every single hair, every single cell. And through that, people can typically find a way to inhabit something that was previously just an idea, in a way that feels like a living, breathing, actual human.

SPENCER: I wonder if a lot of people have nobody in their life that they will fully put down their social guards where they're not, on some level, thinking about how is the other person going to react to this, or what are they going to think of me for doing this? What do you think about that?

TYLER: I think that's sad if you lack someone like that. I would say, if I lack someone like that — which I did for most of my life — knowing what I know now, I would say that should be one of the top priorities in life, next to getting enough sleep and having a job that doesn't burn you out. Yeah, I think it's a basic need to have someone like that in your life.

SPENCER: Do you think that it's true that a lot of people don't have that?

TYLER: For sure. Yeah.

SPENCER: One thing I also wonder about, basically your description is whether part of this is about making an increased awareness of what you're actually feeling. I suspect a lot of people might also find it difficult because they're not in tune with how they're feeling about what's happening.

TYLER: Yeah, I suspect in large parts of modern culture, what we're doing is cutting off how we feel in order to get ourselves to, for instance, sit still in a classroom. I think that's the foundation of a lot of it. In the classrooms I was in, it's better if you don't even feel that you have to go to the bathroom, because the teacher might say no. And then we go from that to a work context eventually where, similarly, if you were to notice how you felt sitting in a fluorescent-lit cubicle, the answer would be, "Very bad," and then it would be hard to work.

SPENCER: So you think people were taught to ignore their emotions or just suppress them?

TYLER: Yeah. This is another crackpot Tyler Alterman theory, but I think essentially the way we do public school is like mass training to ignore how you feel. And the kids who are not ignoring how they feel are often, ironically, the class clowns.

SPENCER: I think that my main emotion at school was just extreme boredom a lot of the time. And maybe you can get away with feeling that, because you can just sit there with a dead face and just do nothing. [laughs]

TYLER: Well, I don't know. As long as I was sitting in one of the back rows, maybe. But if the teacher can see you with the face of boredom, you might get feedback on that, like, "Hello. Are you awake?"

SPENCER: Switching topics a bit. One thing that you and I both have in common is we both like to throw social experiments. Could you tell us a little bit about what kind of social experiments you throw and why do you throw them?

TYLER: Sure. I don't know why I throw them; I'll have to find that out as we talk. But some examples of social experiments that I've thrown include, I ran this one party called the "Extreme Awkwardness" party with my friend Bridget McAvoy. The goal of that was to get you to experience as much awkwardness as possible within the range of the party. So we had people do things like we would have the room vote on who they felt was most incompatible with you in the room, and then you would get paired with them in a slow dance. And then that slow dance would be to the background music of Slipknot. [both laugh] As another example: as you would walk into the awkwardness party, you would open the door, and everyone would be silent and staring at you, oh, and pointing at you also. And then they would follow you with their fingers as you went and sat down somewhere in the room until the next person arrived. And if you tried to talk to anyone, then you would get shushed. So it was just scenario after scenario like that. Another one, this one, I think both of us felt a little bad about afterwards, because it was the bad kind of awkward. We try to stick to the kind of awkward that was uncomfortable, but not exactly mean. But one exercise that kind of crossed that line is that we had people organically order themselves in the room by how high status or low status that they felt. So like, if you feel high status, go to one side of the room. If you feel low status, go to the other side. And then we had that broken up by gender, and then the opposite gender would reorder you by how high or low status they actually felt you were. I would not run that one again. I think that one was just kind of painful for people in a bad way, whereas the others, we got the feedback that it was kind of healing. And then the point of that, for instance, this whole awkwardness party was, I think awkwardness plays this role in really controlling who we are and what we can do in the social world. And if you're able to decondition your response to awkwardness, then you have so much more freedom in what you can do. Like you were talking about before, you can just go up to someone and strike up a conversation in a bar. You can sit down at a bus stop and, you know, ask the person next to you what book they're reading. And then if it's awkward, then that's just okay. So that's one example. I've done a bunch of other things. For instance, for my birthday party, I broke up the three hours of my birthday party into 10 minute increments. And every 10 minute increment was a slot for people to have their wishes fulfilled. And so you have this whole room, it was like maybe 40 or 50 people. And the idea is you can command everyone in the room to do exactly what you want. So for instance, one person used her 10 minute slot to enact her fantasy of finally getting to dance the hora, which is that Jewish dance where you're in the chair and like everyone is hoisting you up and like celebrating you. And the background is like Hava Nagila. She never got to do that despite being Jewish, because she never had a Bar Mitzvah. So she used her slot for that. Someone else used their slot, like she's always wanted to turn people into sculptures to dramatic French pop music, so she played that in the background, and then people paired up, and they would shape the other person into some kind of strange pose. And then eventually the sculptures started interacting. So there's a wide variety of random social experiment parties I do like that. And as for why, I think it's similar actually to my motivation that I talked about for the 'Identity Play' stuff. I just feel like the range of possible, very fruitful behavior that we can engage in is much greater than the range that we actually explore. We typically end up railroaded onto one track of a way that you can act. And I suspect that through exploring both identity and then also like new social situations, we can just uncover new ways of life and test them out in this kind of evolutionary way, where some of them will test out, and it will fall completely flat, like the thing I mentioned before, of ranking people by status in the room. That was not a great exercise. But there were other things that we found in other formats of interaction that me and my friends still continue doing, even if they're just over my house, like taking clowning as an example, that's just something me and my friends have started doing for fun. So I think that's kind of my main motivation: it's to, you know, I think of kind of utopian social technology, not just hard technology--like AI and plant-based meat and things like that--that we can innovate, but also, what are new ways of life that we can create by orienting toward one another differently.

SPENCER: One thing I find shocking is how strong the social scripts are. You could have a bunch of people in a room, let's say 30 people who could get along really well, could have a really good time, and they'll just immediately fall into a normal social script of polite conversation in small groups. And then you can introduce some constraint, something they're not used to, and they'll behave completely differently. It'll completely break the social script. And some of those breaking of social scripts will be worse, but some of them will be better, and they'll actually enjoy it more, they'll bond more. And that, to me, is the kind of shocking aspect of that, that sometimes just injecting something there will get people out of this like not very good local minimum that we're just used to engaging in.

TYLER: Right. And is that why you throw experimental parties?

SPENCER: I think I do it for two reasons. The first is that I want to give people novel experiences that are meaningful to them. And when I first started the group many years ago, we did a lot of kind of normal activities, like intellectual discussion groups, lectures and so on, and I was feeling like it just wasn't having the impact on people that I wanted. I was disappointed. It felt a little bit boring. It felt a little bit like everything else. It felt like every one of the formats, I was kind of unhappy with for different reasons, like, if it's a lecture, it's like, "Well, why not just go watch it online, right? Why not just go watch the best lectures online in your pajamas at 2x speed, if you want," right? If it's a group discussion, it was like some people would hog more of their time, other people wouldn't talk at all. The conversations would get derailed. And so, we started experimenting with new formats, and we eventually just made a rule: we're never allowed to repeat the same format. And that became a creative pressure, to say, if we can't repeat the same format, we always have to push the envelope and try new things. And that, I think, just made it so much more fun and interesting, and I think, more beneficial to the group members as well.

TYLER: What did you find were some of the most successful formats?

SPENCER: Well, we only ever do each one once, so it's a little bit interesting because you don't get a full picture on any of the formats. But one that I thought was really interesting and had a big impact on some of the attendees was one on social status. And actually, funnily enough, I mentioned Impro earlier. This was one directly inspired by the book Impro, where when people arrived, we assigned them a social status as a number from one to 10.

TYLER: Oh, that's cool.

SPENCER: And they had to wear it on their lapel so everyone could see it. So if you were assigned a 10, you'd have to act like you're the most important person on earth, whereas if I was a one, I'd have to act like I'm the least important person on earth. And people got to experiment with different social statuses throughout the night. And so for the first half of the evening, we just let people do their own thing, like try to figure out how to make that work. Halfway through the event, I then gave a presentation on ways to signal higher low status, to give people a lot of specific ideas of what they could play with. And then they got to do that for the rest of the night, like trying those ideas. And it just had a really shocking effect on some people. Like, there were people who always project low status. It came up to me afterwards, and their mind was blown about the energy people gave them is something they never experienced, right? And there are people who always project high social status. They came to me and were like, "That's impossible. You can't act differently. There's no way to project a different status." And it was just really interesting to see them incapable of doing these kinds of low status kind of behaviors. So, yeah, that's just an example. I think it was particularly successful.

TYLER: Did you experiment with high status or low status? What number did you have?

SPENCER: I was more in a moderating role, which is, I like to be part of the activities, but sometimes they just need some moderation. So it was harder in that one to kind of get engaged. So that was one example. Another example that I thought went really well was we did what we call sensory deprivation socializing. So for the first part, when people arrived, we blindfolded them before they even entered the apartment, so they couldn't even get the layout of what it was like. [That's cool.] And so the first part of the event was socializing, but you couldn't see anyone. Although we have a lot of repeat attendees, most people don't know most other people. So it's mainly people socializing with strangers. And so people were meeting each other without knowing what each other looked like, and without having a lot of the normal social cues, it was just really fascinating to see how that completely changed social dynamics, not being able to see each other.

TYLER: What did you notice? Was it like love is blind, where people were just falling in love with one another?

SPENCER: No, I would not say that. I would say that a lot of things that people wouldn't necessarily think of as being visual are actually visual. So, for example, how close you stand to someone. People are completely miscalibrated on how close they stand to people. Also, how do you enter a conversation? Right? People had no idea how to enter a conversation. They would awkwardly be standing there, and nobody would know they were part of the conversation.

TYLER: [laughing] They'll be like, "I'm here."

SPENCER: Just the distribution of people in the room was really weird and not like it didn't look like a normal social event. And then after that section, everyone took off their blindfolds, but now they were no longer allowed to make any sound. And so the next half was interacting with most strangers without sound. And can you guess what happened?

TYLER: I guess people started flailing and using body language a lot more.

SPENCER: Yeah, good guess. At first they tried to communicate with like, "Oh, let me write something down." And essentially, well, it turned out these are just really bad, because it's like normal socializing, but just WAY less effective and more boring. So then, they started using bilinguals a lot more, just like you predicted. And strangers started dancing with each other. Strangers started exchanging massages. And then, one person invented some kind of physical improv game, and then other people saw them playing it and started copying them. And it started kind of spreading them medically throughout the group. So, I thought it was just really delightful, like it completely changed social interaction. Like, you know, what's the chance at a cocktail party two people start dancing with each other just randomly that just met, right? Or changing messages? Approximately 0% and yet we just, all we did is out of constraint, like no talking, and suddenly completely different dynamics emerge.

TYLER: That's really cool. It makes me think of contact improv, where you know talking is not banned, exactly, but strongly discouraged. And the amount you can learn about someone just through — oh, for context, contact improv is this dance style, where the main thing is contact. So you're pretty much always staying in contact with your partner, with some exceptions, and you're kind of like rolling over one another. To an outsider, it looks weirdly intimate, and it is, and it's terrifying. But it's become a dance form that's been around since, I think, the 1970s. And in almost every major city in the world, you'll have one or multiple weekly contact improv jams. In New York, there's like four or something like that. But because you have this constraint of not talking, and also, I think another constraint is just like not dancing in stereotypical ways. There's no music, by the way, so that's a huge constraint. And so it's like, what do you do with another body when there's no music and no talking? — It turns out that you can just learn an insane amount of stuff about someone through making physical contact with them in this non-romantic way. And I don't know how to talk about it. But everyone who experiences contact improv is like, "Whoa. There's so much more to people than I would have thought." Like, you can tell things about how stressed they are, what emotions they're feeling, their attachment style and like lots of other things that I don't really know how to put into words, something like the way that they hold their mind, or the way that they pay attention to the world, you can kind of absorb through osmosis. But, you know, it makes me think that my hope would be that some of these experimental parties would find a form like that, like now that contact improv was discovered, you can have this thing spread across the world that's like this really cool mode of communication and intimacy that we didn't have before, but it probably took a lot of experimentation.

SPENCER: These things you learned about someone in contact improv. Do you think you learn them in other ways, like if you become friends with a person, or do you think you actually pick up on some things you would just not learn some other way?

TYLER: I don't think you learn them by becoming friends with a person. I've danced contact improv with friends, and I've been shocked by — this happened recently, actually, with a friend named Devlin, who's an actress — and we have a lovely conversational dynamic, and it tends to be just, you know, it's almost always very positive and chipper. It's not surface level, but it's kind of limited in range, with some exceptions. When I broke up with my girlfriend, she was really there, or when my girlfriend I broke up, it was mutual. She was there to hold me basically, while I wept. So that's a different mode. But we danced contact improv recently, and we had this experience that involved rage and aggression, but also something really caused, like, some kind of crazy cosmic element, and it was also melancholic, and it was all these sorts of emotions and moods and vibes that we had never shared, to the point where at the end of it, we were staring at each other in awe, like as if we were watching the solar eclipse. We were like, "What?!" And we told each other that it was like meeting for the first time. So I don't think it's something that's covered by normal friend contact. It might be something that's covered with some people by sexual intimacy, but the sad truth is a lot of people have sex in a way that's kind of stereotyped and not very present. So, I think for a lot of people that I introduced to contact improv, it's a really revelatory experience, because it's just not something that has ever been felt before.

SPENCER: Before wrapping up, I know that you used to be pretty deep in the Effective Altruism community, and now, I guess you'd say you're not an effective altruist. I'm curious about that transition and what caused you to leave and how you feel about the community now that you're not part of it?

TYLER: Yeah, well, I suppose to clarify. I don't know if I would say I'm no longer an effective altruist, because I still am a believer in the raw philosophy, which is very lightweight. It's just kind of the statement of believing in doing good better using reason and evidence. If that's what makes an effective altruist, I would say that's still a huge part of my life. However, I don't feel very close to the movement that implements that philosophy anymore, despite still being pretty good friends with dozens of effective altruists, and it's people I often talk to weekly. So, I would just say I don't identify with the movement anymore, despite still feeling pretty connected to a lot of the people and the core philosophy.

SPENCER: And what was it for you that started to make you feel less connected to it?

TYLER: I would say burnout was the first thing. I don't feel like it was really by choice or some part of the movement that I started having skepticism about. It felt like at some point my body basically just started rebelling against the way that I was treating it, and that started bringing me into depression and illness in a way where I couldn't really participate in the movement very much anymore. And that was mostly due to an attitude toward my body and my mind that I would call something like instrumentalism, where the only reason that I as a person and this vessel that I'm inhabiting are valuable, are to do good in the world. I would say instrumentalism is actually broader. Instrumentalism is like treating things as a means to an end or as a tool for something else, and I was regarding myself as just a tool or a vehicle for making good stuff happen in the world. And I think that attitude could be okay in theory, but in practice, I would start chopping off all the different parts of my life that gave me any sort of nourishment. I stopped participating in deep friendships and pretty much only wanted to relate to colleagues. Likewise, I disavowed romantic relationships and any interest that I had in having kids, which was like a huge interest of mine. And also, I cut off a lot of my passions, like I stopped making music. If I played Magic The Gathering, which I really love, it was a kind of guilty thing. And then eventually I realized the error of my ways. And then I was burning myself out by cutting off all these other parts of me. And I tried reintegrating them, almost as fuel. Like, you know, if I was playing Magic The Gathering, I had to learn some abstract principles about strategy that I could apply also to my effective altruist ends. But that actually ended up even making it even worse, where all these things that normally provided me with nourishment as like ends in themselves, kind of got drained of their color because I was orienting toward them differently. I wasn't orienting toward them in a way where I could savor the activity in the moment, but rather, I was just regarding it as kind of like something to refill my health bar, like in a video game.

SPENCER: Like "I'm allowed to have fun because having more fun will make me more effective later" kind of thing?

TYLER: Exactly. I remember I would even think that there's a sound that your health bar makes when it gets refilled. And it goes [makes the sound] like, I sometimes make that sound in my head as I was doing one of these things. But then, as a result of this attitude toward myself, I just kind of destroyed my...I mean, I like to say it like I did damage to my soul. And that made it so that I just couldn't work very effectively anymore. And then I started figuring out some philosophical and ideological, and strategic as well, differences that I had with the movement. But that kind of came later, and really only after I started recovering. Mostly, I was just lying in bed most days unable to do anything other than really go to the bathroom. And even that, would take a lot of effort, and be chiding myself or really torturing myself for being so ineffective, and to the point where it's like the only reason I was staying alive is on the hope of recovery, and also to not disappoint my friends and family around me. So, yeah, I would say my alienation from the movement in an intellectual way came much later, and it first came in a physical way.

SPENCER: Wow, that sounds really intense and extremely upsetting. I mean, to go through that. Do you think that this is something that you were taught by the movement? Or do you think there's something that is somehow interacting with your psychology in a way that did this to you, but it wouldn't do this to most people?

TYLER: I think it was a mix. I do think that I'm the sort of person who is just particularly hardcore with whatever I throw myself into. So, for instance, when I became a graphic designer, I joined the Type Directors League (Club), and it was graphic designing all day, every day, and was constantly looking for design inspiration from signs around the city. And it was just endless. And I think that type of person is a lot more likely to incur harm, not just from Effective Altruism, but just really any social environment that they throw themselves in that might have a toxic element just because they commit so hard. And that's just my pattern. That said, I do think the Effective Altruism movement attracts that sort of person. You know, a thing that was commonly said in my more hardcore circles of Effective Altruism was this phrase that we were like "trying to save the world." And that's you know, that's a not-normal thing. That's a very hardcore thing to think that you're doing. I can't think of many cases in Effective Altruism where there's something explicitly written like, "Don't go to the movies." In fact, there are writings to the contrary, like, I remember there's an article from Nate Soares. I forget the name of it, but Nate Soares was the head of MIRI at the time. He might still be, I forget. And it was about how you might need to do things like go to the movies to feel inspired in order to do the kind of work that you're doing, which I guess was my eventual attitude that was also poisonous. But I think it wasn't very common for people to say anything out loud about like, "No, you shouldn't play Magic The Gathering, because that's not being an effective altruist." But I do think a lot of movements and communities have implicit social norms which do kind of train you to be a certain way. Like, going back to what I was talking about with the rationalist community. I think a lot of rationalists would say we're not promoting becoming like Spock. However, when you have an interact like — a lot of friends who I have introduced to the rationalist community, which I love, by the way, I don't like dissing the rationalist community too much, but, you know, — I'll introduce a friend who's just more of a normal person to the rationalist community, and they'll be like, "Wow, those people are so in their heads, and I can't have a normal conversation with them. It's like they were rationally checking everything that they were going to say before they said it in a way that made it unnatural." And they would experience people like Spock. So, you can have implicit teachings in a social community that are never made explicit, but I think which could have just as much power, if not more.

[promo]

SPENCER: So what was your day-to-day like when you're kind of in the middle of that treating yourself like an instrument for the good?

TYLER: It was so intense. Everything was optimized. So I would wake up, and then I would develop this habit of trying to get myself into a productive mode as quickly as possible. So these days, I'll wake up and I'll give myself some time getting out of bed and walking into the coffee shop or whatever. But this was like, as soon as your alarm goes off, (I'll speak for myself) I would jump out of bed and then instantly start doing jumping jacks. And then the next thing I would do is run outside — I was living in Oakland at the time — and I would run outside and go to the nearest super steep hill with my running shoes, and I would sprint up it as quickly as possible. And a lot of this was based on, I based a lot of my life on scientific studies back in that day; I still do, but not as neurotically. And I think there are a lot of limits to academic science. But I would be reading about how, out of all the different types of exercise you could do, cardio seemed to be the best for mental work. So I would try to get the most intense cardio in the shortest amount of time, which I decided was sprinting up this hill every day.

SPENCER: Because you didn't want to waste any minutes that could be spent doing something to help the world. Is that why?

TYLER: Exactly. Because any minutes wasted could result in like...to be completely honest, I was in this mindset of like "Minutes wasted could mean millions of lives lost." Because at the time, I was a believer in the possibility of (I guess I still am, just in a different way of) for instance, a friendly artificial general intelligence, or a super friendly superintelligence that could, once created, solve all different sorts of diseases around the world, solve food crisis. It would just be thousands of times smarter than us so it could figure things out that we wouldn't be able to normally as humans. And that means that that thing, once it was created, could save so many lives and prevent so much suffering that any delay in creating that thing would result in adversely, tons of millions of lives lost, if you think about also just the billions of years that could exist in the future. So that was like the stakes that I was dealing with at that time in my life.

SPENCER: I mean, the amount of pressure to actually believe that if you waste minutes, millions of lives could be lost, that would drive a person insane.

TYLER: Well, it did! [both laugh] I would say, I went a very productive form of insane, because then, after my run, I would (I don't know) eat some very health-optimized meal with greens and high protein and high fat. And then I would start doing pomodoros, which are like 25-minute increments focused on just one task. And I would just kind of go doing pomodoros for about the next 14 hours or something like that, occasionally taking breaks to jog in place or speak with a coworker. And then the more people I could get doing that with me, the more effective I would be. So I would try to find other people who are similarly hardcore and would do components of that with me. And I'd be working on projects like my friend Carrie Vaughn and I created EA Global, the Effective Altruist Conference that actually originally started as the Effective Altruist Summit from leverage, although it was smaller scale. And I was working on starting student groups, and CEA USA, which was the Centre for Effective Altruism, based in Oxford, and we made a version of it based in the States. But these projects felt so important to me that I just basically didn't make time for anything else. And so I was going like I was trying to squeeze as much productivity out of myself as I could in a given day.

SPENCER: How much was this driven by a kind of abstract philosophy versus a social environment where you felt the pressure to do this.

TYLER: I'm very weird, and I'm very philosophically driven. So I think it was more the first to be honest. By contrast, before this effective altruist phase, I was kind of more of a romantic soul and I looked very different, like I looked and acted — I mean, physically looked, like I would dress very different and behave very different prior to Effective Altruism — and the main things I was interested in life included romance and art and beautiful friendships and heightened experiences, basically. And granted, right before EA, I was also working on a cognitive science nonprofit. I was quite absorbed by that too, but I was doing that in an extremely playful, bright, creative way. And then, when I left that project and was figuring out what to do next, I started listening to all the iTunes University courses I could find on ethics and how to live a meaningful life essentially, and identified utilitarianism as being the philosophy that resonated the most. And then, my next question was, "Okay, who's doing this in the world? Is there a group of people basically living the utilitarian lifestyle?" And then it turned out there was, and it was effective altruists. And so, a few weeks after that, I ended up moving to the Bay, basically permanently, because the highest concentration of effective altruists were there, and I kind of just molded myself into this person that I thought I needed to be. I would say I went, if anything, I think a lot of social expectations around me were pushing a voice of moderation. Because I think people could tell I was going way too hard. But yeah, I'm generally a pretty philosophically motivated person, so I think it was my idea of how to best implement that philosophy is what did me in.

SPENCER: Suppose you could talk to you back then as you now? What do you think that you then would say to you now and then, how would you reply to that?

TYLER: Well, I wrote a whole essay for my former self a couple years ago called, "Effective altruism in the garden of ends" and everything that's in there is essentially what I would say to myself. It's a really long essay, but I think the main thing I would say to myself is, well, first, I think I would argue within the logic of the philosophy, because I think I, at that time, was not necessarily able to take in information that would make me think effective altruism was not the thing to rule every single aspect of my life. So I would say to that EA version of Tyler that the way he's going about trying to implement effective altruism is going to be something that is self-sabotaging. And I would tell him to just pay attention to whether that's true or not. And I think, if he did, he would notice, like, "Oh yeah, this is getting harder and harder, and I'm losing the original steam that I came in with." And I would argue that if you really wanted to be a good effective altruist, you should do some kind of strategy where you can endure for much longer, because it ends up being, even if you believe that the horizon for existential risk and the possible extinction of humanity or its salvation for superintelligence is within the next 10 years or whatever, that's still a long enough time horizon that you can't really work yourself like a dog every single day to meet that. I would say, to actually confront these big problems with your full intelligence, you need to soak up nutrients a little bit better--nutrients for not just your body, but also the psyche. And I would also warn him of the downsides of this approach, where it's like, "Okay, in your position, you're accruing a lot of influence and responsibility inside this movement. And if you were to burn out, all these people depending on you might be worse off than before, because you put yourself in this position of power with people depending on you. And then if you suddenly become depressed or ill, then people are going to have to try to find some kind of replacement for you, and that might take a while. In the meantime, a lot of the programs you're working on might start failing." So I would tell him to really start paying attention to that within the logic of the philosophy. And that's the first tack I would take.

SPENCER: Well, I just want to respond to that, because it confuses me a bit, because it still feels very instrumental, right? Or is that because you'd be trying to appeal to the instrumental philosophy without changing it at first?

TYLER: Exactly. Yeah, I don't think he would be open to other ideas without first dealing within the instrumental mindset.

SPENCER: Got it. And then after that, what would you say?

TYLER: Well, and then after that, I would get philosophical with him, because he was so philosophically led, I would say, "Okay, so let's take, for instance, the drowning child thought experiment. So briefly, let's say you're in a park. You're wearing really, really expensive, fancy shoes. Let's say they cost like over $2,000, and you see a child drowning in a shallow pond. There are people near them, but nobody's trying to help that child. Should you go into that pond and save the child, even if it would mean messing up your $2,000+ shoes?" And almost everyone would say, "Of course." And then someone like Peter Singer, a philosopher involved in the Effective Altruism movement would get back to you and say, "Aha, but that's how much money, roughly, costs to save a life somewhere else in the world. And just because that person isn't right in front of you, like the drowning child, you have a moral obligation to help that person in the same way that you would have a moral obligation to help that person right in front of you." And so that's the type of thought experiment that really brought me into the philosophy. However, there's an assumption in there that I would now question, which is this should part. On Twitter, I ran the same thought experiment with a poll, and then I said, "Imagine you're in a world where you don't have any moral obligation to save the drowning child. Do you still want to?" And it was something like 98% Yes, with hundreds of responses. And granted, that's like a bias sample. But first, I would question whether this should is actually necessary, because it seems to come with a bunch of behavioral entailments that we've soaked up in the cultural waters. Like, if you should do something, people just seem to go about it very differently than something that they just naturally want to do. And so again, this is maybe still inside of the instrumental frame. Like, it turns out that if you want to do effective altruist work and it's intrinsically motivating, then probably you're gonna go about it in a way that's less harmful to you than if you should do it. But I would also say, now, "Okay, question the philosophical backing of that should. Where does that should come from? Is your set of ethics delivered to you from a God?" And in my case, I'm not exactly an atheist, but I'm something adjacent. And so I would say, "No, I don't really believe what God is giving me this set of ethics." Well, is it somehow written into the moral fabric of the universe? Well, maybe, but I don't see a ton of evidence for that. Okay, well, is it something that you should do because society says you should do it? And I would say, "Well, no, because, if anything, society doesn't say that. That's why the Effective Altruism movement needs to exist, because people are not saving the metaphorical drowning children across the world that they could be saving." So where does that should even come from? And then once I started entertaining that, then I started getting very confused, like, where does — I mean, this is a very fundamental philosophical thing, it's like — where does morality or ethics come from to begin with? And I couldn't find a basis for that.

SPENCER: So what critique do you think you back then would give to you now, and then how would you respond to that critique?

TYLER: I would say, me back then would respond. Look, I don't know where morality comes from, but we all kind of agree that it exists. And we more or less agree that people dying is bad, people suffering is bad. So given that, effective altruism is just the philosophy for taking the most effective approach to reducing suffering and death. And so, I don't need to base this should in anything. It's just something that we all kind of agree is consistent with what we all believe, as the drowning child thought experiment demonstrates. Use the word want or use the word should; it doesn't really matter.

SPENCER: And what's your reaction to that?

TYLER: Well, my reaction to that is something that you've written about, and I'd love for you to talk about too, because I thought you wrote about it more elegantly than I did. But my reaction is, yes, that's true, which is why I still consider myself, in some sense, an effective altruist. The way I would want to go about doing good in the world is using reason and evidence to do it as effectively as possible, because that seems consistent with roughly, universally shared moral intuitions. However, it's not the only thing that you care about. And I think that's really the main kicker: I have other values, it turns out. And not all of them are just instrumentally using myself as something who only is trying to do good in the world. I also care about making art for art's sake. I care about intimate relationships just because I like them, and a variety of other things that seem to be ends in themselves. In the same way that me wanting to help people is an end in itself. You wrote a little essay on this. I would love it if you were to talk a little bit about that, if you haven't yet on the podcast.

SPENCER: Sure. Well, it's not a little essay, it's a really, really long essay. [laughs] So I go back to my own personal philosophy, which I call "Valuism." And valuism is my attempt to say, okay, I don't believe that there's an objective right answer for what you should do. I don't think the universe has a built-in code that says "this is good." And I don't believe that utilitarianism is true in some objective, absolute sense, or anything like that. So then, well, how does one decide what to do with your life? And so, where I start to focus is on the self, rather than universal. It could be universal, but I don't think there exists universal. If there was, that would be really nice, right? That would solve the problem, but I just don't think it exists. So I think it's kind of an illusion. So then, what do you do without the universal? But also, focusing on the self can be very solipsistic or selfish. And so, what I look at is values, and I say, "Ah, this is interesting. When I reflect on my mind, I realize I actually care about a whole bunch of things, and some of those things I care about are selfish, but many of them are not selfish. Some of them are very, very altruistic, actually, like, I really care about reducing suffering in the world, and I really care about helping my loved ones, and I really care about truth, which is kind of an interesting thing, because it's sort of a universal thing, even though I'm not saying the truth is universally valuable. It's a universal thing that I care about." And so when I do that, I start to think, "Ah, well, maybe I can ground a meaningful life in this, in the sets of things that I deeply and fundamentally, ultimately care about." And so, Valuism simply says, "Figure out your intrinsic values — that is the things you care about for their own sake, not as a means to other ends. — And then once you figure out your intrinsic values, try to take effective actions to produce them in the world." So if you deeply care about your own happiness and happiness of your loved ones, and reducing suffering, and truth, like I do, that gives you things to aspire to do in the world, to try to achieve all those things. But you don't care about any of those infinitely more than the other, right? So you're trying to balance these different values, and a lot of the trickiest things in life are when they come into conflict with each other. But someone else might value a really different set of things, like they might have a really deep value around nature, or around freedom, or so on. And what looks like to have a good life for them could be quite different. So anyway, that's how I approach it.

TYLER: How do you think people should find these values that they have? Because I can imagine someone, especially if they're quite heady, you might have an idea of what your values are, and then that might be different than what your actual values are.

SPENCER: So we've done work to try to help people figure out their values. We created a tool called "The Intrinsic Values Test," so that's one place to start. But figuring out your intrinsic values can be pretty tricky, in part, because a lot of the things we value are things we value only because they get us other things--they're instrumental. But our brain doesn't naturally classify things as instrumental versus intrinsic. So an instrumental value might feel intrinsic to people, like someone might come to feel that money is just valuable, detached from the fact that they only care about it because it lets them do stuff. And so it takes, I think, quite a bit of reflection to kind of realize, "Oh, wait, no, this is just instrumental value. This is just instrumental. Ah, that's the deeper value, the intrinsic value that I care about for its own sake."

TYLER: Yeah, it's funny. I talked about this approach pretty often, and one of the complaints I get back about it from people who seem to be very focused on one value or a small portfolio of values, is, how could you possibly balance all those things that you care about? And my retort is often, well, let's take like a given day and how many...let's forget values, let's just take bodily drives, like you have to pee, you have to eat, you have to in as hot of the summer as this cool down. You have to entertain yourself, or do things that are keeping you reasonably awake, that just get you throughout the day. We have so many different things that we're trying to already have happen for us in a day. And we don't necessarily need a spreadsheet to try to figure out how to balance them or like a calendar just to do different slots. We just somehow make it work. And we've been doing that for millions of years.

SPENCER: Yeah. Well, I think that for a lot of people, they might have many, many values, but there's some that are especially strong, and so it can often be helpful to focus on those. But the other ones kind of get activated at natural times, right? Like, let's say you have a really strong value around honesty. Well, that's going to get activated when there's a reason to not be honest, and then that value of honesty is gonna say, "Hey, no, no, you need to be honest." But for a lot of the day that doesn't come up, right? There's not really a reason to not be honest. And so, I think, partly it's that they only come up at certain times, and partly they're not all equally important to us. Some of them will kind of be the strong ones that are guiding us a lot more than others. But it's also kind of a funny thing to say for someone who's like going all-in on one value. It's like, well, how do you balance them? Well, definitely not by going all-in on one value. That's like, the opposite. It's the opposite of balancing them. That's what I think me now would have said to Tyler then, if we had this conversation. I'd say, "Well, I would bet you, if you deeply introspect, you realize you care about a lot more things than just this one thing. I do think you care about this one thing a great deal, but you also care about a bunch of other things. So why are you absolutely sacrificing all your other values for this one value? Why not care about this value a lot and spend a lot of effort on this, but also let some of the other values in, let them breathe?"

TYLER: I still think it would have been tricky, because let's say you meet someone who's like a humanitarian worker in the Middle East right now, like in the Israel-Palestine crisis that's unfolding. Imagine saying to that person, "Hey, I know this is really important to you, and you're working these really long days delivering aid, but you also are a movie buff, and you seem to really care about movies, and so maybe you should spend a few days per week just watching movies." They'd be like, "Fuck off. It's a crisis." And I think at that moment in my life, with the stakes that I had in mind, I was essentially in crisis mode every single day.

SPENCER: Right, because you viewed it as very real, the effects that your actions were gonna have on the world, not just kind of hypothetical. Because I think a lot of people, you know, the humanitarian worker in the midst of war, shooting or bombings, would get it and be like, "Yes, this is a temporary thing. It's actually happening right there." But I think to someone in your state, like, it probably was just as real to you. Would you say that?

TYLER: 100% I used to very viscerally imagine everyone I knew and loved dying, like due to a synthetic biology pandemic and things like that, just to try to make it realer and realer, like I would do little rituals for myself.

SPENCER: Final question for you, Tyler. What would you say to people who are deeply rooted in a worldview right now that's taking over all their time, all their energy, only letting them think about one thing? Would you have something you'd say to them?

TYLER: The main thing I would try to communicate is what you already mentioned earlier: just introspect on what your values are. Don't determine in advance that these are what they are, just see what they are. Find the truth of the matter. If it turns out that you actually do really value artistic expression, and that's not having any place in your life right now, that's at least just a nice thing to know, and you don't have to take any action on the basis of that. There's no should there, but it's just a good thing to know that that's part of your makeup. But as I said earlier, I think a lot of people in this sort of situation that I was in wouldn't be super amenable to that. There's this feeling of cognitive narrowness that I was in that I see a lot of people in ideological zones be in, where it's like they struggle to entertain anything that isn't the life dominating ideology. So instead, I would have to take a custom approach to most of them, and I would try to figure out what the logic is of their ideology and see what the wiggle room is inside of that logic, and see whether it's good logic. But I would talk to them inside of that logic in the same way that — I hate to draw this comparison, but when someone has a schizophrenic break or psychotic break, the thing you don't really want to do is say, "Hey, these elves that you say are monitoring you from a satellite, they don't exist." Because the person is not going to want to hear that. Instead, you learn about their world, you immerse yourself in their world, you learn about the elves, you learn about the surveillance system, and gradually, you just give them the care and the attention that they need to come back to reality. And you demonstrate that there's a world beyond it, but gradually and within the bounds of this world that they're in.

SPENCER: Tyler, thanks so much for coming on the show. Thanks.

TYLER: Spencer, thanks for having me. Bye.

[outro]

JOSH: A listener asks: "What are your thoughts about the world's major religions?"

SPENCER: I think that the world's major religions contradict each other quite a bit. And from an epistemic point of view, this is a bit problematic. If one tells you that the way to get into heaven is a certain strategy, another tells you a way to get into heaven is to believe in this particular God, and a third tells you that there is no heaven and in fact, you're gonna be reincarnated. These are deep fundamental contradictions. And so, without having to say which religion is true, if any, we can at least say, it seems like the way that they're standardly interpreted by true believers, they can't possibly all but true. Most of them have to be false because there are many of them, and they seem too deeply contradictory to possibly be true. You either do this to get into heaven or that to get into heaven or there is no heaven or you're reincarnated, etc. That just can't all be true at the same time. It doesn't make sense. So that's on the epistemic front. And then you could talk about the effects on humanity, the effects on our lives, the effects on society. And those effects are way too complicated to really understand without being a deep expert on the subject. But it does seem like religion gives a lot of people comfort. It does seem like it's an important part of community for many people. There is some evidence that religious people are happier on average, and I'm not sure that's really well understood why that is. There's different theories, like maybe it's because they have less anxiety about the future or about death. Maybe it's because it just makes stronger community bonds or whatever. So there's kind of that empirical question of: Are people happier believing in religion? Of course, religion also has big downsides. Often people who don't fit well into a religion get really, really screwed. Like if you're gay in a religion that tells you that it's evil to be gay or it's impossible to be gay, you know, that can be incredibly difficult and cause huge damage. And so even a religion that actually works pretty well for most people, where a lot of people get some benefits from being in the religion, they might be really, really detrimental. Maybe extremely detrimental to a small number of people who don't fit well.