PRE-ROLL: Businesses all over the world right now are trying to reinvent how they connect with the world. Whether a business is delivering packages, treating patients, or running a global customer support center, their customers need them to invent new ways to stay connected. Twilio is the platform that Fortune 500 companies and startups alike trust to build seamless communications experiences with phone calls, text messages, video calls, and more. Really, the only limit becomes your developer’s imaginations. It’s time to build. Visit twilio.com to learn more.

DAMIEN: Welcome to Greater Than Code, Episode 214. I'm here with panelist, John Sawyer.

JOHN: Thank you, Damien. And I'm here with our guest, Rylan Bowers. 

Rylan Bowers currently lives in Niwot, Colorado. He has been consulting since 2012 on a variety of front-end and back-end client projects for start-ups and established companies.

In his free-time, Rylan manages the open-source software that supports Boulder Food Rescue volunteers and helps organize Boulder Ruby. In his 'free' free-time, he rides bikes, reads, travels, hikes, camps, snowboards, and collects too much vinyl. He also attempts to play guitar and keep an energetic pup tired out.

Welcome to the show, Rylan. 

RYLAN: Thank you for having me. Excited to be here.

JOHN: Excellent. And we'll kick it off the way we always do with the first question, which is what is your superpower and how did you acquire it?

RYLAN: Great question. I think it's really interesting to answer because I don't like to brag about myself, but I think probably the best answer I could come up with is helping people. I grew up volunteering with my parents, especially for folks who are a little more underprivileged than I might've been, and that sort of feel good, give back to your community really inspires a lot of what I do around that, like mentoring. I'm a firm believer that the rising tide lifts all boats and so, it's just really important to me and I've actually dropped what I've been doing to help people out with job searches, or any struggles they may be having, personally or professionally, fairly regularly. 

So it feels good to do that and it's just nice to be an asset to your community in that way and the acquisition, like I said, it was growing up volunteering with my parents and I saw what that enabled and what you're able to do by giving back to your community in all shapes and sizes.

JOHN: I like that you focused on the community as the recipient of what you're doing versus individuals because I feel like it gives a higher-level look at what you're doing because it is, it does have a broader impact beyond just the individual that you may be mentoring, for example, like that has affects following on to other people. 

RYLAN: Correct. You kind of hope to cascade down a little bit and hopefully you don't even see all of the effects of what you're doing, but it pays it forward in ways that you don't know.

DAMIEN: It sounds like it's incredibly well-connected to the thing you wanted to talk about today.

RYLAN: The transition is actually pretty seamless. I didn't really intend that, but it did, as I was thinking about it, have some nice parallels. So I was reading recently The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt. It's Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion and I think no matter where you are on the spectrum, if you analyze the country that we all live in, it's a little divided and trying to figure out why that is and how we might be able to improve it. Very interesting book. He's a moral psychologist based in New York. I believe he works at NYU now. So I’ll need to give this exact biography, but he's a very interesting person, a lot of videos online as well to follow-up if you find this topic interesting. 

I’ll just, I think give a brief overview of what moral psychology is. I think maybe some of us could know what it might be, but it's a field of study that uses a little bit of philosophy and psychology to look at the moral development of humans and how we make choices in our lives. That's applicable to pretty much everything. So I think it's an interesting sub-genre of psychology, which was also really fascinating to me in college.

 So this book really pulled me in as I was reading it, because there was a lot of studies and he kind of frames these stories that are provocative in a way to suss out how people might make choices, morally speaking, and then rationalize those places. So that was just fascinating on its own to parse through like how would I respond to those stories and I can give some examples if you would like, maybe one or two, but generally it's just asking for responses that trigger some moral intuition that's coming up.

DAMIEN: I really love that framing that our morals are intuitive, they're not something rationalized by about or create rationally. 

JOHN: Yeah. I think that's a great insight.

RYLAN: Right and so, he builds this up and sometimes you feel like, I think you're begging the question, but then you're like, “Well, you did the research so I guess you're just reinforcing your beliefs and your model that you're proposing here.” But like I said, it's very interesting these stories he takes and he has a model that came out of his book, the happiness hypothesis, that he's reinforcing here as well and it's this idea of a rational writer who is writing a very large elephant and the elephant sort of embodies your intuitions. 

The brief summary is that the elephant makes all of your choices and then the writer sort of tilts you a little bit and then reinforces it with rational reasoning. And it's kind of, actually it's not kind of, it is controversial based on the reading I've done about responses to his hypothesis and model here. But I think you can also feel that when you make choices, if you look back like, “Yeah, I didn't really rationalize that. I felt it and went with it.” 

So you're talking about the gut feelings that a lot of us have and a lot of that exploration – his model is called social intuitions and it proposes that—I'm reading it from the Wikipedia— moral positions are often nonverbal and behavioral. It's based on a moral dumbfounding where people have these strong moral reactions and then they try to rationalize it after the fact.

So I think that can make a lot of sense and I want to reinforce hypothesis in science, this is not absolutely true, but it's a tool to really think about in everyday life and when you're even thinking how you're working through a choice at work or interpersonal relationships is a really interesting way that people could potentially be responding to things.

DAMIEN: Yeah, it definitely fits – anybody who knows me at all those that I'm a trained hypnotist and trained in neurolinguistic programming and that this model absolutely fits into that that people are not rational. I love the elephant metaphor because then I can talk about the rider on top of the elephant holding reins and pretending like they're directing the elephant.

RYLAN: Right and we all want to be. I know, especially as I'm a computer programmer and you’re sort of like, “Oh no, I'm very rational, very, very rational, I think through everything.” I can't overthink things, but it really comes down to you make these snap judgements all the time and then you try to rationalize it. And I think a lot of us, we'll overthink or rethink and reassess, but that's really what the model is saying is that you make a lot more gut choices than you even think about. 

JOHN: Yeah. I've always been fascinated by that model that our brains are so good at instantly rationalizing a decision that was already made to make it seem like we had some sort of deep understanding of why we made that decision. But when you dig under, it's just like no, the decision was made and then we figured out why that we could verbalize later.

DAMIEN: And this is entirely scientifically proven. We can do it with MRI studies where you can see in a functional MRI what decision was made and then you can see the actual rationalization of that decision. There was another experiment done with a bit of a sleight of hand. They show the subjects two photos and have them choose between them and then do a sleight of hand and switch the photos and say, “Okay, here's the photo you picked. Why did you pick that one?” and get all these wonderful explanations about why they picked the photo they didn't pick.

RYLAN: Right. In the studies, as he's walking through this, it would be an off-putting story that you have this gut feeling response to and then you try to rationalize it. People are really pretty poor about doing that. You're like, “Well, why do you think that this is wrong?” and they're like, “Well, it's because…” 

But see, most people instantly respond to this in a very similar way, but then the rationalization is a lot harder to do and this is getting into human psychological development from birth on up, but the general idea is that you're born with a chalkboard that has some buckets ready to be filled up as you learn and you get built up through the environment in your experiences to then have these intuitions as you get older as a very rough summary there.

JOHN: I think it might be helpful for you to go through at least one of the examples of one of these stories and how that played out a little bit.

RYLAN: Okay. So here's the kind of challenging story and it's even a little awkward to repeat. So a man goes to the supermarket once a week and buys a chicken, but before cooking the chicken, he has sexual intercourse with it and he cooks it and eats it. It's awkward for me to say it, but it's very interesting because it’s a private, personal thing. You can't really – like it's not something that affects you, but you probably had a moral reaction to it like, “Excuse me, he's doing what?” and then you're like, “Wait, why? Why is that wrong? Is it wrong?”

DAMIEN: No, absolutely. I had a very distinctive disgust reaction to that story and it's great because I can see how difficult it is to rationalize that disgust.

RYLAN: Right. So that's what kind of this elephant is responding like, “Oh, no, like that is so wrong,” and you're like, “But why?” So in the book, there's these studies that people are just like reaching for all of these things in response to these stories to rationalize why they feel so strongly about why it's wrong.

DAMIEN: You mentioned earlier that moral psychology is about the development of morals and humans and I wanted to ask you then, do you mean humans as individuals, or humans as a species, or both?

RYLAN: It's a bit of both actually and he dives into that in an interesting way and it's a little bit later in the book, but it's about, he calls it—actually, I don't think it's him. I think it's a psychologist named Durkheim. I'm maybe attributing that wrong, but it's a homo duplex. So we're not one or the other, there's a little bit of both. You’re individual and you have selfish desires, but you're also group-based and a lot of our development, as a species, can be analyzed as a group-level selection mechanism. Does that kind of help answer the question a little bit? 

DAMIEN: Oh yeah, the answer is both. That's great.

RYLAN: Yeah and some he dives into that a lot, which is fascinating. And in one of his talks, I think it's to the American Psychological Association in 2016, if I'm remembering and attributing this properly, he talks a little bit about that and uses bees and termites, which are all siblings and sexless. They don't engage in anything like reproduction and so they get to build these huge structures—hives, and a termite mound is massive—based on that. There's not a lot of other examples besides what humans have been able to build through group-level interactions. 

He also makes note that almost every time that you see large things like Babylon he references, the Aztec Tenochtitlan, which I always mispronounce, as very large societies and structures that were built and it's based on these group-level dynamics that have brought people together like bees and termites, but in a very different sense of the interactions that humans have. 

But the idea though, was that there were temples always in these societies and it was like, that's a tough thing to wrap your head around that temples and religion always create these situations that have built our society and civilizations throughout the ages. Slight tangent there, but I wanted to throw that out there related to the group-level idea of how we as a society and civilization have progressed.

DAMIEN: Absolutely, yeah. I've seen a very practical and very present example of this in the city of Los Angeles, the mayor's office had, I think a Department of Resiliency or some resiliency and they built this entire project of how to keep the city resilient. I read the executive summary, it's a giant, giant science document that they generated, and my realization from that was everything that's in that document can be achieved if all the residents went to church every Sunday, which is a fascinating way of bringing people together.

RYLAN: Right and that's what the book ends up diving into is how do you increase that group-level cohesion and there's a lot of balance of in-group, out-group ideas as well. 

One of the things that was really challenging for me. So in computer science and our general science and tech industry, there's a lot of problem with diversity and we're trying to increase that and then he goes on to say, “and don't emphasize diversity, emphasis your sameness,” and I was like, “Well, okay, what does that mean?” Because I want other viewpoints, I want other people to weigh in with different perspectives from me, but you also want to increase your connection as a single organism so that you're cohesive and you evolve together and in a corporate sense, you might achieve your goals for Q1 together, kind of thing. 

DAMIEN: I love that and you personally are focused on helping people and helping people via systems and I think we're all computer programmers here. So how do you create those systems and coherence among people to make that sort of thing work?

RYLAN: Multi approaches that you can take and one of the ones I found interesting, and this dives down in the book a little bit more, but it's about in a corporation sense. There's a transactional leadership, or you just pay someone for their selfish work ideas like, all right, I'm going to pay you a lot and using carrot and stick, we'll get you to work towards the goals of the corporation.” 

Then there's something called transformational leadership and that involves creating cohesion, pride, loyalty, increasing social capital or moral capital if you wanted, that's less important in a corporation, but you're trying to do things like group exercises. So you might have, especially in Asian societies, morning group exercise activities. 

There's a lot of studies that say in the military, that's one of the reasons they do so many training exercises because you start to, by doing the same motions and activities in sync, increasing your hive mentality, which is fascinating to think about because a lot of us, especially in a pandemic are solo. So you're just isolating yourself due to the outside world and it's a lot harder to do that over video calls. 

JOHN: Yeah. That actually ties in with something I was reading on Twitter recently. I don't remember who it was from, but they were saying that a powerful trauma healing activity is singing together because singing is the thing that you can only do when the group is safe. You're breathing deeply and freely from the diaphragm. It's only something you're going to do when everything is okay and that being part of a singing group is incredibly healing for traumatic events.

DAMIEN: Wow. That's really amazing. 

RYLAN: And probably triggers the parasympathetic system response, right?

JOHN: Yeah, I know. 

RYLAN: That okay, everything's all right. So we're good. He brings in a lot of collective dancing and religious ceremonies. White Europeans came to America and saw Native Americans doing these sorts of things and they were like, “Oh, barbaric,” but you're actually creating a sense and a feeling in society of cohesion by doing these things and singing is the same kind of idea. You're triggering those responses and a feeling of well-being in large groups. Those groups are generally more successful when compared to other groups who don't do those things. That's a whole other topic about colonization and things, but yeah. 

DAMIEN: And European cultures were doing that, too. They gathered together in cathedrals and sang and chanted and sat and stayed [inaudible] and then all sorts of crazy rituals that developed and maintained group cohesion. But the thing I want to know right now is how do I do this? I'm not going to do PT with my team. I don't think they'd appreciate that. So what can we do?

RYLAN: It's a really great question. His notes on how to build a hive, or like I had mentioned earlier, increased similarity, not diversity and so that's more in-group, out-group ideas. It doesn't have to be along racial lines, it can be just along we have similar goals, let's find things that we share. 

The next point, synchrony, probably said that one wrong, morning group exercises where you move together is hard, but you could potentially do that over video calls if you wanted and then you start creating—and this is related to competition between teams, not individuals. 

It depends on how large of a company you are at, but if you were in a company you could, there was somebody customer-focused engineering and then sales engineering, that's where you would start having these kinds of competitions that weren't negative in nature between your groups, but just to create a group that would move forward with goals in mind.

Then personally speaking, even just for studying for this kind of podcast, I found a lot of joy in book clubs, and then getting on a video call and talking about them and especially relating it to the outside world and what's happening as we try to rationalize everything that's going on. That actually felt really nice and for me, I also helped organize a meetup in Boulder for around Ruby, the language, for software development and that helps a lot, too. 

So just anything you can organize along those lines can help a lot and I'm no expert here, I'm sure there's many other ways to do it and the pandemic that we're living through is makes that a lot more challenging right now, especially going into winter. It's challenging and I think a lot of us are dealing with isolation, especially right now, and then how to fix some of those issues.

JOHN: It reminds me of the T-Group concept that came out of Stanford, I think it was in the middle of the century. It's not something I'm super familiar with. I think one of our earlier guests last year mentioned being at a company who was founded by people who had been part of that and they kept that tradition going within the company. 

I actually wish I had more detail I had to tell you all about it, but it's focused on psychological and emotional sharing so that you build that cohesion because the membership and everyone is doing that sharing and building up that trust with each other as a way of, again, yet another way of forming a cohesive group. I’ll find a link to post in the show notes.

RYLAN: That'd be great. Super interesting as well. There's so many different ways to do this through hobbies or things that you can do at work, taking a break together to stretch or something like that. Then that's a whole another subject to study. 

Getting back to that social intuitionist model and the rider and the elephant. As we're working through how the mind and body create these snap judgements and then rationalize them. You’re also looking, especially in the United States, which is strongly divided, I think we would all agree right now along political lines. It's like, how do you bridge that gap and so, working through this is you can't obviously, I mean, obviously, but come in confrontationally, when you're trying to appeal to reason, debate somebody who's different from you in their views here. Because that causes the elephant and then likely, the writer to lean away from you and so immediately, you're throwing up a wall there instead of saying, “Hey, let's think about this in a rational sort of empathetic way.” 

What happens is a lot of people are going to have to take that and you're not really going to change their mind if they're going to take it home and think about it and then rationalize and maybe make some small course corrections later on. So I think it's super important to think about personal interactions and professional interactions in that way, an empathetic way where you're saying, “Hey, I need to think about your point of view and how you're coming to these decisions that you make in your life, professionally and personally and then we'll kind of work on that.”

Part of Haidt’s idea is that we're actually selfish and more likely to be self-righteous in our ways of thinking about things, because we want to improve our lot until we realize which part of the group we're in. So empathy can be an antidote to that self-righteousness or even the righteousness for my group and if you don't approach a lot of interactions in that way, you're going to have a lot of trouble reaching across any divide like, political, social, et cetera. 

JOHN: Do you have a sense of how to like start someone down the path of recognizing the value of empathy? If they come to it without that, how do you start getting someone to value it so that they can then start empathizing with you and then others?

RYLAN: I think that's what the book kind of gets into a little bit with this social intuitionist model and the different ways that especially conservatives and liberals see the world and the different aspects of how they make those moral judgments. So I think that could be one way and I'm not a professional peer in psychology or in conflict management. I'm not very good at confrontations myself, but I think it's really, if you find yourself in a situation where you're just running into walls, talking with people is take a step back, maybe some physical separation, calm down and then rationalize and all right, let's try it again. 

That's an anti-thesis approach, both when you're arguing like, “Hey, maybe think about this,” and then you go away from that, rationalize it a little more, and then you can come back to those things. I’m starting giving any real solid recommendations, but I think that you have to recognize what you're bringing to the table and how you may be pushing other people's buttons. Take a step back and then try again.

DAMIEN: Yeah, pushing other people's buttons. You mentioned earlier that taking the confrontational approach will cause the elephant to lean away from you. This metaphor is now mine. I'm going to own it forever and use it every other day. Because if there's a man and an elephant and you want to change the direction the elephant’s going, you don't address the man, you address the elephant. 

Just to show how incredibly effective or ineffective it is to address the man; I've known this for 5 years or 10 years. I've looked at the science behind this and how we are not rational creatures. We rationalize and despite knowing all that rationally, it did not change my behavior to the point where I was rationally trying to convince people that they were irrational and being shocked, amazed, and annoyed that they didn't understand!

RYLAN: Exactly, and that's the challenge that we're running into. Some of the points he makes around that is it's easy to see the fault of others, but it's difficult to see our own faults. I think once you can start looking inward a little bit like, “You know what, I could be wrong about that,” you can start seeing that other people think about you in that same way. So that's where the empathy comes in is let's take a step back and think about the ways we're doing things and approaching the world compared to other folks. 

One of the things that really kind of drove this home for me is that most people aren't really going to go search out things that disprove their beliefs, or expose your fault. It's very uncomfortable and so, I think that's something to really think about because you're making other people uncomfortable when you expose their faults, or cracks in their beliefs, or just challenge them. So you have to be careful about doing that, especially when we're as divided as a nation as we are. I think that's a really interesting thing to keep top of mind when you're going into these situations with people who may not believe the same things that you do.

DAMIEN: So then that introduces a new question for me, now that I'm finally able to maybe getting closer to doing this actual thing, to addressing the elephant, rather than the man pretending to hold the reins. How does one address the elephant? How do you approach? How do you have empathy with the irrational person you're dealing with and how do you work with that?

RYLAN: That's a great question and I think we've asked it a little bit. Some of that empathy, removing emotion from arguments because then you're getting the elephants lean away from you, be less confrontational, more kind. 

There's a site, civilpolitics.org, which I have briefly been on and some of their recommendations are improve your interpersonal relationships and emphasize cooperative goals versus competitive goals, which is that in-group, out-group idea there. So I think that helps a little bit. 

I don't have perfect answers on this. I'm still kind of exploring what that might look like, but I think that's really – the heart of what I'm taking away from the book and the idea is be less confrontational and more empathetic with other people because then you can start getting on the same page and especially if you're emphasizing cooperative goals. So let's say, that's climate change on a national scale. How do you say, “That's actually a cooperative goal, but we want to improve from national security perspective as well as earth survival perspective”? So you could potentially phrase something like that in that way and then say, “Oh, I see what we're talking about. We want national security and also, not to have fires burning all over the place.”

DAMIEN: Yeah, that's a real thing. I can hold onto cooperative goals. Where can I find that you and I, or me and someone else are looking to achieve the same thing?

JOHN: Yeah. It reminds me of Daryl Davis. I’ve read a number of stories about him over the years. He befriends members of the KKK and through making friends with them, slowly changes their minds over time to get them out of that world. I would imagine, I don't know the details of how he does it, but I'm assuming that there's a tremendous amount of empathy involved in being able to approach these people and become friends with them and then get to that point where you feel like they're both on the same side with shared goals about moving forward and slowly, those beliefs erode in their minds to the point where they eventually decide not to remain members.

DAMIEN: And I want to call out just point out how amazing those stories are. That is a Black man you're speaking of, right? 

JOHN: Yeah, yeah.

DAMIEN: Yeah.

RYLAN: Yeah, and that's got to be one of the hardest things. I think it's come up in national politics where folks who were like, “Why would I work with the other side if your main goal is to disallow me from existing in society?” So somebody like that who can go into the KKK will obviously, does not want their existence to be normalized in society and then change their minds and that's really working on finding similarities, not differences and then pulling them out of a group that is emphasizing those differences. 

So I'm going to try to transition here into part two of the book, which part one was really working through how we rationalize reason and create these intuitions about just everything that you deal with in life. Part two is an explanation about morality based on more than harm and fairness and how the liberal and conservative mind, not just the United States but overall, looks at morality. His analogy is that morality is like taste sensors, tastes with different receptors and so, the liberal mind has some things that they consider when making these judgments and the conservative mind does others. 

When I was introduced to this book, it was like well, the liberal mind is limited. They only consider two of these five or six foundations of this theory that he has and I was like, “I feel attacked. I only have two and conservatives have five, how dare they?” But when you dive into it, you realize oh, okay, this is a way to see the other side; the arguments that people make. 

And especially I want to emphasize that some of this is can be very different in what he calls is the Weird culture, Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic, and he compares it to other cultures which are Asian cultures. There's a lot of differences in the way that those two cultures will interact with each other and make these sorts of judgements. 

So if you're more WEIRD, you're going to see the world more as full of separate objects than relationships and you're going to be more into independent and autonomous thought and actions compared to in an Asian culture. I don't mean to generalize too much, but trying to Western versus Eastern culture, philosophies, and religious things, I think we can see a lot of how that works, if you know anything about your culture. 

An example is like, “Hey, what do you like?” and you're like, “Oh, I like jazz and being happy and going hiking.” In an Eastern culture, it might be more, “I'm a father, I'm a son.” “I am part of a group,” like, “I work at this company,” and just the way that they represent themselves is different. So it's interesting to think about those and it's just a tangent I'm talking about, but when he was doing his studies, he ended up going to India for a while and it really changed his mind on some of the ways that people interact with the world and make these judgements. 

The political side of it is that people tend to bind themselves into groups around these moral narratives and these foundations that he's talking about. So there's a lot of that that you need to think about if you're going to go into political conversations and deal with a fractured country like we have now, but I want to reemphasize that this is a liberal conservative mind outside of the scope of the United States. It's not specifically focused on Republicans versus Democrats and some of it was like oh, that's where my attacking was as a more liberal leaning person. I was like, “Oh my gosh, the Republicans are seeing the world in all these different colors that I'm missing!” and that's not exactly what it's like.

So the five main foundations are care versus harm so. feeling protection for those who are more vulnerable and then revulsion against harm. Fairness and reciprocity like cheating so it's a mutually beneficial cooperation you're looking at. On the left, the liberal mind that implies equality, but in the right, it means proportionality and so that comes into our country welfare. So the left would be like, “We want everyone to have an equal footing in the country,” and then the right is like, “Hey, I don't like that I do all this work and then other folks get this for free.” That's a very touchy subject that I don't think we want to dive into, but I just wanted to illustrate, it's like karma in a sense is that they want proportionality like, more work means more reward and liberals are more like, “Hey, I think everybody needs – we need to spread the wealth a little more.”

JOHN: Yeah. It reminds me actually of some evolution of thought process in my part as a person growing up in the US in a fairly liberal context and a lot of the myths and morals of the United States revolve around individual achievement and independence and freedom and all of these things. These are the myths that we tell ourselves all the time and we have a lot of stories about individuals fighting against groups that are holding them back or saying, “You have to do this for the good of the group.” No, no, it's better if you just do your own way. 

Those kinds of stories and that was a message I absorbed very thoroughly, but over time, as my thinking changed, as I've started to look out at the world, as it works and starting to develop empathy for other groups that I'm not a part of, I've started to realize the value of the group cohesion. Of the care for the group and the way the group can take care of the individual and how belonging to a group isn't a net negative. It's not just oh, that means you're trapped by all the roles and structures of a group and you don't want to be like that because that leads to so much isolation and loneliness. 

I think that's a problem we have in the US where everyone thinks they're on their own, even though they are in fact, resting on the work and the backs of a lot of other people. But despite having this privilege, still feel incredibly alone because they don't have any of those group connections. They don't go to church every week or they don't belong to a company where they feel any belonging or whatever it is. We're fractured into individuals rather than lots of cohesive groups and I can see the downsides of that, too. So like you're talking about, there's such a split there and finding the right balance, I think is probably impossible. But knowing that there's that split there and realizing which parts of that you want to emphasize in your own life, regardless of the culture you grew up and the stories that are told, I think is important.

RYLAN: Yeah, and that's a great bifurcation of we've reached the end of the liberal taste receptors actually. So it's care or harm, fairness or reciprocity, or almost entirely how Haidt the saying that liberals interact with the world. So what you're kind of saying, I think you just reinforced that, is that you grew up valuing those two quite a bit, and then you say, “All right, there's more to the experience,” the human experience. 

You queued up on that a little bit. The next one is loyalty/betrayal. So you can group loyalty versus out-group revulsion and the left, liberal mind leans towards universalism, I am a citizen of the world versus the right towards nationalism, I’m a United States citizen, or I'm a Republican. 

Then there's authority and subversion, which you touched on as well. Liberals are, if authority comes into play, they're like, “Hold on. Why do I need to respect your authority?” You start to question that a lot more. Whereas, a more conservative mind respects that idea a lot more comparatively. Then the last main one is purity sanctity versus degradation, which has a lot of religious connotations. 

And then there's a sixth one, which is liberty and oppression because as they were working through this and they have a site, yourmorals.org, where you can take quizzes around this, they felt like they were missing one. So this is a conditional sixth foundation which is liberty and oppression. People notice and resent any signs of attempted domination and especially related to a libertarian or classical liberal philosophy, that's where this really comes into play. 

DAMIEN: So it sounds like the really win here is bringing to conscious awareness, the intuitive sources of your moral responses that you make decisions off and have feelings about. 

RYLAN: Exactly.

DAMIEN: And then being able to understand other people in the same way or in contrast.

RYLAN: Exactly, exactly. So if you're like, “I'm a liberal and snap to, “It's not fair. It's not equal,” that's it. You're writing off a large part of the things that other folks are taking into account when they're making the same sort of judgements around the same sort of situations.

DAMIEN: So then again, going back to the elephant because I'm never letting that go. If you're trying to change the direction of an elephant, you need to know what that elephant is doing whether if it's somebody who's big on reciprocity and okay, well, this is where we have a shared goal in reciprocity versus somebody who's big on the other version of fairness I’ve forgotten.

RYLAN: Right, and that could be fairness and equality versus proportionality, if you're speaking to just the fairness taste receptor here. So that and that's kind of the huge chunk of part two of this book. One of the major tools that add to your tool chest when you're talking to people who have different views than you is like, “Okay, you're seeing things in a different way. I need to take that into account when I'm arguing, or empathizing, or working with you to figure out why you think this way versus why I think this way.” 

He has some interesting line charts that show this with a left-leaning liberal, a classical liberal/libertarian—and that's a United States versus Europe sort of distinction—and then conservative. It's just very dark lines for liberals on those two and then libertarian/classical liberal almost entirely liberty-based and then the social conservatives almost an equal distribution across all six of them. So they take it all into account and like I said, in different ways, especially around equality, harm/fairness situations. But it really lays out what he's found in his research about how the different alignments of these groups take things into account when they're making these judgements. 

One final point, too. In the book, he's worked through a lot of how those different moral foundations play into our evolution as a species, the sanctity and degradation foundation. If you think about that, it's like the omnivore's dilemma. How do I know that this is safe to eat? It's got to be clean. So you can see how that has helped us evolve to where we are now, because that was something that was very important when you didn't know if something was going to be okay for your survival.

The loyalty, betrayal, and authority subversion, he talks a lot about in-group and a strong man, in a tribal sense, trying to take over, change and bully the direction of a group and how as tools were developed, that became a sort of a zero-sum game. So if someone tried to bully or subvert the group in an authoritarian way, they would use the tools to take him out or her out, but it’s usually him because we know that's a little more testosterone-based, but that's a side note. 

So I thought that was really fascinating and I just highly recommend reading the book based on taking into account. I think it's just fascinating how humans develop in these ways. 

Now we'll get into the part three of things and that's the idea that morality binds and blinds and he really gets into in-group, out-group explorations here. That's where this homo duplex and it was Durkheim, who I’m probably mispronouncing his name, came into play here. So that homo sapiens are really homo duplex and so it's a 90% chimp, 10% bee idea.

Our minds contain a lot of these mental mechanisms that are adept at promoting our own interests in competition with our peers. But then you can also cohesively create groups that do the same thing in a group-level idea. I think that tribal, hunter-gatherer, and then agrarian steps that we've taken, you can see that as you develop societies and civilizations that are more than just these very small groups of people and these steps that we've taken along that path in groups. 

He does this really interesting I'm out on a canoe rowing by myself and then I get blown by two people in a canoe and then a whole rowing crew and as you can see, as you build up a more cohesive group, you can speed up your adaptation and success because you're working together toward a shared goal.

DAMIEN: I love that 90% chimp, 10% bees. It definitely connects with the story about the –I heard this from a speech from Adam Lyons, so I'll give him a name check there. He described the origin of the ancestors to humans and the separation from other primates being that they were driven out of the trees and had to forage in the fields. The thing about being in a field is that there's nowhere to go for safety. You can't climb up a tree and be safe from your predators. 

So they needed to develop an ability to work together to where somebody sees, “Oh, no, there's a line over there. I'm not just going to run away. I'm going to say something and we're going to all run away together.” This is what creates a species that is now driven towards communication and cooperation and being a social species much more than the other primates.

RYLAN: Exactly. He ties us into morality is an amputation for natural selection at the individual and group level, which ties into this high versus individual mentality. So this whole book just builds on these ideas and it's really, I think, a fascinating dive into that. 

We talked about that hive switch already, where we jumped forward and talk about collective dancing, religious ceremonies; ways to key into these moral foundations and increase your cohesion as a group. That can be increases in-group love, restating this here, so you make these collective groups that succeed better when they are more cohesive compared to a more individual focus group. 

So if you're going to use your analogy story of coming out of the trees into the fields, if folks are individually focused on collecting grain or food sources and then running back without working as a group, they're going to start being picked off by the predators. As you increase this group cohesion through whichever way you want to move forward with that, you start to become more successful compared to groups who are more individually focused. 

DAMIEN: And now you have an evolutionary pressure to develop this group cohesion, just like you have evolutionary pressure towards these ethics which are morality, which are not at all distinct from that, because that's what creates these groups.

RYLAN: Exactly and he queues into religion a lot, which as a liberal mindset, I think puts off a lot of people because you have a lot of negative connotation with religion. But I think it's very interesting to explore how that helped in our civilization. I think you mentioned in Los Angeles, where the mayor's office is like, “If everyone went to church, this would be no longer be a problem because you'd have that in-group cohesion based on those shared similarities.”

So he talks a lot about the development of religion to bring groups together from a hunter-gatherer perspective and then on, and it changes and appeals to different parts. So like hunter-gatherers punished bad behavior and the gods are capricious and malevolent. Then in-groups, as you take up back culture and go larger, they become far more moralistic and I think that's where these foundations developed to bring the groups together. Those gods are concerned with actions that foment conflict and division within the group like murder, adultery, false witness, breaking of hosts, sorts of things. 

That sacredness, and this goes back to the talk I referenced earlier where he said, “When you find these large developments of civilization like Babylon, Tenochtitlan, it's almost always where you find temples. The sacredness binds people together and then it blinds into the arbitrariness of the practice. 

To bring liberals back into the fold, I think one of the ways they sacralize things is say around the organic food movement. Things you put into your body need to be pure, or the experience of going into nature, which has brought the circle around for me towards the idea of creating an in-group binding of oh, I eat organic, or oh, we go out hiking together. So you sacralize nature in that respect. 

I hope I'm tying that together well, but it’s that sanctity idea and the different ways that we're trying. You do that without even really thinking about it. It's not a religious experience to put organic food in your body, if that's what you believe, or non-GMO, but that's really the body is a temple idea.

DAMIEN: Yeah. That sanctity can play with most group norms. I want to call out the value of religion. I was greatly influenced by Alain de Botton’s book, Religion for Atheists, which is not a great book. Sorry, Alain and I’m also probably mispronouncing your name so double sorry. But he does go very deep into what these things that religion gets us and how we can get those things, even if we no longer hold those beliefs about deities and gods.

JOHN: Correct me if I'm wrong here, but it seems like the liberal semi-post religious context is in search of in-group binding things that aren't religion, because religious in-group binding has been so problematic throughout history. Would you think that was correct? 

RYLAN: Exactly, and I think that's a full other thing we could dive into some other time, but it's like you're casting about at a deep, intuitive level for these things that increase your binding to other people in the group. So you may not be a religious, but you're still working towards that idea because everyone would like to belong to a group that has similar outlooks on life. It's that in-group motivation that I think we have innately.

DAMIEN: And also if you look at it from a systems of systems perspective, groups that don't have in-group binding no longer exists, if you just from a Darwinistic point of view, they disappear.

RYLAN: Exactly, and he makes reference to communes and the ones that were more religious space compared to just a liberal commune with individual focuses almost across the board succeed better when you're bound around a religious sacral idea, which is like, huh, wow. 

When you have a more individual focused group like that, they tend to question everything instead of coming together and that's an interesting parallel to democracy, a prefix to democracy potentially, where you don't respect authority that much and then you can splinter apart. I probably slaughtered the metaphor and reference there, but the idea of the commune being more successful when it was organized around a sacred or religious idea succeeding like, oh, that's super fascinating.

DAMIEN: Yeah. I'm glad you mentioned democracy because something I've learned recently. I thought that in the US, the concept of democracy was sacred and just coming from that perspective like, this is more democratic, this is a violation of democratic norms, these are bad things therefore, because of that. I've discovered that not everybody takes those as sacred and universal and not even in the US and not even in people involved in policy to US and so, that is not as persuasive as a point of view as I thought.

JOHN: Yeah, I think other values are superseding those. Other group cohesions are more important to people than those group cohesions.

RYLAN: Right and so, that speaks to the idea of why we're becoming so divided in this country based on what we think is important. A conservative mind may look at this like well, there's not enough of what I prefer in an authority figure happening in the democratic process or a socialism-based process where socialism is the boogeyman and so, they're going to lean a little more towards an authoritarian organization of government comparably. Whereas, a liberal mind is like, yeah, everybody, socialism, equality. That's a far-left leaning view, but they're going to be more open to the idea of equality, everyone's on the same footing as an organization, which democracy in its purest sense is or should be.

So some of what we're building up towards here is all right, we're very divided and how do we fix that and he comes around to the idea, especially around Eastern philosophy with yin and yang or yin and yang, depending how you've heard it pronounced, where you need a party of order and stability and a party of progress and reform to have a healthy political life. 

It’s interesting because you're like, “Well, I want my group to succeed so we only need liberals,” or oh, conservatives like, “I want the social conservative order of society. We only need that viewpoint.” What I think is really eye-opening about that is you need both, antithesis and thesis fight back and forth where you have both ideas come into play.

In our society, in the talk I've already referenced about to the APA, he has some real interesting slides about the reasons for our split and some of that goes back to the Civil Rights Act. Lyndon Johnson has a famous quote where we just handed the South or Republicans, a foreseeable future. 

But then there's a liberal, conservative voter biofortification that's happening and then there's also changes in Congress. So in the mid-90s and I think this is Newt Gingrich, he instituted. So it used to be that when you were elected to Congress, you moved your entire family to Washington DC. You had social mixers with both sides of the aisle. You started to become friends. So you're seeing how that overrides your party loyalty and you're like, “Oh, I actually know this Democrat on a social basis. He’s a good person. Let's talk about things.”

So in the mid-90s, they were like, “All right, new Republicans don't move here, stay home,” and so what happens is they start to fly in, make these choices for all of these laws and things, and then fly home. So you stay in your in-group, which is likely to be conservatives at home instead of mixing with both sides and that's just created the – and I would watch this video. 

If you want to take anything away from this, watch the APA 2016 keynote that he gives. It's fascinating because he starts having all these charts showing just like all right, we're a little bit down and a little bit more separated, a little more separated. And then after the 90s, it's like these staggering drop-offs of how close we were working together and that's where he's getting into like all right, we need to take into effect how these different sides take these into effect when they're making these decisions and then figure out how to bring back that cohesion on both sides towards a more civil politics where we work together instead of only advancing our group ideas versus your group ideas.

As you can see from the reelection, there are millions of people who believe one or the other thing, and it's very divisive right now. He brings up the Persian prophet, Mani and Manichaeism as a battle of good versus evil and that's all there. It's a polarized view of the world and I think we've gotten to that state where it's my group versus your group and that's it, there's nothing in between. The shades of gray have been lost.

JOHN: Yeah. It's always been the concept in the back of my head that a 100% liberal and a 100% conservative are doomed paths because either change is going to happen too fast and you're going to start flying apart because you're spinning too fast, or you're going to lock things down and think everything is going to be completely rigid and never change and that's also going to break things. That balance between the two, it allows you to move forward, but at a pace that isn't going to radically destroy the structure of the system.

RYLAN: Exactly. It's like a large boat. It just takes time to move and so you have to do these small course corrections, both ways. Most Americans are great people and they are right in the middle. They just want a prosperous life, the American Dream or whatnot. They don't want this like oh, oh, massive socialism or ooh, Sharia law to overgeneralize the ideas here. 

But I think that's really important to keep in mind and the balance that we need both sides to weigh in on and work together. It's just really fascinating and I think our politicians no longer live in the same community and go back to their own hometown is a really big takeaway for me is that we need them to be encouraging more positive social connections so that they can work together to achieve the goals that most people want, which is somewhere in the center.

JOHN: Yeah. I wasn't actually aware of that change and that really does strike me as an important factor in things.

RYLAN: Yeah, and there's a total of ten different things he cites in that talk that are really interesting, that have been ramping up since the mid-60s, 70s and on, especially in the last 20 or 30 years. So I guess, I'd highly recommend that talk. 

He's a fantastic speaker and he also pokes fun at professional psychology and academia specifically, which brings back a little bit of the liberal bent that's happening in academia and he ties into coming out of the closet as a gay person, maybe in the 90s, to being a conservative in academia now where you don't feel like you could even speak up. It seems weird to think about, but they've been so shunted and made fun of in higher education that you don't think you can exist in that situation. 

I think you can see that where a lot of conservatives are like, “Oh, that's your education talking,” or “Oh, you're educated,” and that was really interesting to me because I like learning and being educated about things and knowing things. But if what you're seeing is a system that doesn't want you there because of how you align on the political spectrum, you're not going to want to participate and then you're going to shun that idea, which is super interesting to me. 

So he takes them to task like, “Hey, we need to be better especially in the humanities and psychology per se, about welcoming people with different viewpoints, not making fun of them.” It's hard because that's your in-group and you use that as a let’s make fun of the other side situation, but you have to stop doing that because you're preventing those cohesive connections from being made.

JOHN: Right and you're setting up the conservatives to be anti-intellectual, anti-education, anti-so-many-things.

RYLAN: And it does not have to be around education per se. There's, like I said, a lot of folks in the middle who believe in science and education or whatnot. But that's just one point I took from it was if we're creating these systems that are that divisive and make fun of anything that's out-group instead of promoting that cohesion, how do you move forward? 

One of the points he talks about is that we think the other side, this is a direct quote, “is blind to truth, reason, science, and common sense.” Like, you're dumb. It's like well, you can't move forward if that's how we're going to think about things, right? So everyone goes into a blind a little bit emotionally and rationally when they're talking about things that are sacred to them or the foundations, they believe the world is organized into.

DAMIEN: Right. So I want to connect those last two things because for me, education is another one of those of obviously, this is good. How can that possibly be bad? So to hear anti-elite intellectualism, anti-education systems messages come out, I get real like, “Well, that's completely wrong.” So let's apply this methodology to that as like what values are more important? What am I not seeing there? Is it really just about in-group, out-group is there something else?

RYLAN: I think the idea of anti-intellectualism is interesting to explore around education and one of the studies that he actually cites here is that as you improve the things you know about and improve, if you have a higher IQ, which college is sought for, you become better at arguing for points on your side, not points on both sides. So they find that as the smarter and more educated you are, you just become better arguing your own side. So you become a lawyer who's just quite good at arguing for the things you think are right, which I think is an interesting counterpoint. 

I don't want to promote anti-intellectualism by any means. I think that you should be educated about the world in lots of different ways, but it doesn't have to be that academia is the way you go. I think college is amazing; I think a lot of social development happens and critical thinking happens through that experience. But what I'm getting at is that if academia is going to have this huge liberal bent, you're going to exclude people and viewpoints that you need to have that balance in the system and so, it would become less an anti-intellectual thing and more of hey, we think about things in a different way, let's work together to learn together and think.

DAMIEN: Well, if you're not going to take the anti-intellectual stance then I will, how about that? Because I love what you said about a higher IQ, better education, they don't make you smarter. Smarter is not the word I'm looking for because that's exactly what higher IQ makes you. They don't make you better at being able to see the world for how it is, they make you better at being able to rationalize what you see. 

So perhaps one of the things we need as a culture and this is because our American culture is very intellectual and rational focused. So maybe what we need is the ability to see that intellectualism and rationality and reason are not our primary drivers, nor should they be, and that there are other things that are important that we probably should be focusing more on. I ended that sentence with the phoneme more on which… 

[laughter]

RYLAN: Right. I'm no expert on how to exactly move forward. Like I said, this is a tool to take into account when you're trying to explore these ideas in your ways that you navigate the world and other viewpoints. I just find it really fascinating and I think it's really challenging even as I align as a liberal. 

Speaking about these things and not denigrating a conservative viewpoint because that's not the point and so, you really have to take a step back and be like, okay, they have valid viewpoints in the way they've worked through the world, let's talk through that internally and between kind of viewpoints so that you get a better understanding of the nuance of the world. 

So that was kind of my huge takeaway there is be a little more, like we've talked at the beginning, be a little more empathetic to other people's views and ideas in the world.

JOHN: Yeah. I think one of the keys there with the empathy is understanding why they value the things, like what's behind it. Understanding it's about purity versus desecration or loyalty versus, or your authority. But if you know where that's coming from, it's much easier to relate to how they get to conclusion x based on that and then you can walk up the tree a little bit and maybe find where it branches away from your thinking about it and address it there and then come to, I think understanding on both sides.

DAMIEN: And to do that requires, because it's easier to see how other people make flawed decisions and this is how we do it ourselves and so, understanding how we are also riding an elephant and our elephant is spooked and focused on different things than other people's elephants and we're not holding the reins. So to understand that even if we are holding the reins, we're not directing the elephants and so it’s not to see them as holding the reins incorrectly or pulling the reigns incorrectly, but just to understand they have a different elephant.

RYLAN: Exactly. It’s really a perfect summation of the idea what's going on there with these. It’s moral foundations theory that he's working with. 

JOHN: So I think we've come to the time where we have to start wrapping things up and so we'll go to our reflections, which are the thoughts that are going to stick with us from this conversation, the things that we're going to be pondering for a little while after this talk. 

So Damien, what were yours?

DAMIEN: I've mentioned it probably four times already since Rylan brought it up, that darn elephant. I'm holding on to that elephant. The thing I want to reflect on that is that this was not a new idea to me, but being able to attach it to that visual image made it so much more powerful, both to explain and to apply to my life. So just I'm going to be reflecting on that elephant a lot and hoping that I can finally change my behavior with that image where I couldn't do it with the rational man on top pulling the reins.

RYLAN: I think that's my main reflection as well is be less sure that people are thinking about things in a rational way, more than an emotional or intuitive way. 

One of the quotes that he brings up in his talk in another one of the talks, the APA talk, I believe is from a 700 BC philosopher, Eastern philosopher and I'm going to slaughter the name. So it’s Sen-tsan, S-E-N-T-S-A-N. “If you want the truth to stand clear before you, never be for or against. The struggle between for and against is the mind's worst disease,” and that's that polarization situation. So that's really my reflection and approach that I would say, “Hey, take this into account. You should find that middle ground that works out for you.”

There's another quip that's there's my side of the story, your side of the story, and then the truth somewhere in between. And those are the things I'm taking away from this.

JOHN: Yeah, I think this is for me, it's reinforced some of my earlier thoughts about the value of conservative viewpoints versus liberal viewpoints, and how they function the society at large, and how, like you said, if we can get the culture to work together. Much like you were saying, if we can get the people in Congress to spend more time together and know each other and feel like they could work together on things rather than just resolute obstructionism, I think we would at least make some sorts of progress versus the jerking back and forth between one mode and the other. 

Definitely going to keep thinking about that, the motivations and the values behind, what someone, a belief that someone is espousing as a way of trying to understand how they got to what they're saying. I think it's going to be pretty important. 

Oh, also Damien, that you may have read this already. There's a book called Switch by Chip and Dan Heath that uses the writer and elephant metaphor pretty extensively as far as how do you get groups and individuals to change direction and things like that. I'll post a link for you.

DAMIEN: Nice.

RYLAN: Yeah, and Haidt really is, he's kind of carrying this flag. It's really interesting and trying to make this discussion a little more broad. So that's kind of my goal is just to spread the idea at least and hopefully, it promulgates out in some ways through this podcast and just watching these videos and thinking about these things. You take away that concept and then you think on it and then it broadens how you view the world and make you become a little more accepting, I guess is my hope. So it's a sort of additional reflection, I guess.

JOHN: Excellent. All right. Well, thanks for being on the show, Rylan.

RYLAN: Sure. Thank you so much for having me. I really enjoyed talking to you guys.

DAMIEN: Thank you for joining us. This was a blast.