#980 - David Pinsof - This is Your Brain on Bullsh*t

Modern Wisdom

Chris Williamson

Society & Culture, Health & Fitness

4.7 • 4.6K Ratings

🗓️ 14 August 2025

⏱️ 72 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

David Pinsof is a research scientist at UCLA, co-creator of Cards Against Humanity, and an author. Everything is bullshit. Your opinions, your arguments, even your thoughts. Most of it’s manufactured, borrowed, or absorbed without question. So if all that’s fake, what’s real? And if we can’t trust our own minds, or anyone else’s, what can we trust? Expect to learn how we can use incentives more efficiently and how to look at incentives more accurately, if other-thinking and worrying is complete bullshit, why we have opinions, and if our preferences are just even more bullshit, why arguing is bullshit, why most arguments are actually pseudo arguments, why so much advice mostly bullshit and why we take it and why we give it, and much more… Sponsors: See me on tour in America: ⁠⁠https://chriswilliamson.live⁠ See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Get the brand new Whoop 5.0 and your first month for free at https://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom Get the best bloodwork analysis in America at https://functionhealth.com/modernwisdom Sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period from Shopify at https://shopify.com/modernwisdom Timestamps: (0:00) Is Happiness Bulls**t? (7:48) Incentives are Key to Human Behaviour (12:33) Why Do We Have Opinions? (19:36) Exposing the Status Game (35:08) Are Opinions a Way to Test Loyalty? (40:50) How Does Arguing Relate to Opinions? (46:44) What’s the Difference Between an Argument and a Pseudo-Argument? (52:43) What is a Deepity? (01:01:14) The Differences Between Vague Bulls**t and Deep Bulls**t (01:08:18) Find Out More About David Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: https://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: https://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: https://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - Get In Touch: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	A desire for happiness is not what is driving our behavior.
0:03.8	It is a terrible way to predict our behavior.
0:06.1	It is a naive way of thinking about human psychology that will lead you into a morass of confusion, contradiction, and infinite regress.
0:14.0	Why?
0:15.8	Well, I wrote a very long post on this called Happiness is Bullshit.
0:20.5	And then I wrote a sequel to that post called Happiness Really Is Bullshit.
0:25.0	No, I'm just joking.
0:25.7	It was Happiness is Bullshit.
0:26.9	Revisited.
0:28.0	People really get hung up on this.
0:29.6	I think it's one of the biggest confusions we have about how the mind works is that we have this really misguided idea that what we're pursuing in life is inside of our heads.
0:40.0	That is a really weird and implausible idea from an evolutionary perspective,
0:45.6	that we would be animals that are driven to seek stuff inside of our heads makes no sense.
0:51.3	It makes way more sense that we would be driven to seek stuff out there in the world, you know, like food, sex, status, praise, inclusion in groups, all this stuff that would have correlated with biological fitness and ancestral environments. These are the sorts of things that would make sense for a primate like us to want. It makes no sense for us to want something
1:12.6	inside of our heads. Now, the common response to this argument is that, oh, well, happiness
1:18.7	sort of motivates us to go out and get what we want. It's sort of like the carrot that's dangling
1:24.4	in front of us, and we need happiness to, to motivate us to get out,
1:28.3	to go out and get the, get the stuff in the world, right? This view also makes no sense.
1:34.5	Because as soon as you posit that we need happiness to motivate us, well, there's a
1:39.8	awkward follow-up question, which is, how does evolution get us to want happiness?
1:45.6	If you need happiness to get us to want stuff, then how does evolution get us to want
1:49.7	happiness? Does it have to give us happiness when we get happiness? And then happiness
	...

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