Robert Wright — Non-Zero-Sum Thinking on the World Stage
The Glenn Show
Glenn Loury
4.8 • 2.3K Ratings
🗓️ 20 September 2021
⏱️ 56 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
For this edition of The Glenn Show, I’m joined by someone who may be familiar to long-time viewers: Bob Wright. Bob is a distinguished journalist and the author of many books, including The Moral Animal, Nonzero, and Why Buddhism is True. He also happens to be the co-founder of Bloggingheads, the platform on which The Glenn Show was born and has flourished.
In our conversation, Bob walks us through the early days of Bloggingheads and the flash of inspiration that led him to create the site. We then move on to discuss Bob’s ideas about evolution and international relations, and how they’re influenced by game theory (something I know a bit about). Bob’s ideas about the nature of conflict and cooperation have a number of implications for combating the sort of nasty political tribalism that we see so much today, both domestically and internationally. Of course, more non-zero sum thinking could possibly help us turn down the temperature in conflicts over race in the US, which would be a welcome change. And finally, we turn our attention to new developments in the relationship between The Glenn Show and Bloggingheads. Both Bob and I are excited about what’s to come!
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0:00 Subscribe to The Glenn Show on YouTube
0:26 The origins of Bloggingheads
11:30 Non-zero-sum thinking on the global stage
20:30 Bob: We’re not focusing on the most pressing foreign policy dilemmas
29:13 Bridging the globalist vs. nationalist divide
34:13 Could more cognitive empathy ease racial tensions?
45:00 Changes afoot for The Glenn Show and Bloggingheads
Links and Readings
Bob’s Substack newsletter, The Nonzero Newsletter
The Nonzero Newsletter, “The Last Word on GWOT”
Bob’s book, The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology
Bob’s book, Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny
Bob’s book, Why Buddhism Is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit glennloury.substack.com/subscribe
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | All right, we're underway here. This is Glenn Lowry at the Glenn show at bloggingheads.tv. |
| 0:07.3 | I'm proud to be able to say and also at Glenn Lowry.substack.com, I'm with Robert Wright, |
| 0:14.2 | who is the one of the founders, the co-founder of the bloggingheads enterprise with whom I've |
| 0:20.3 | been working for over 14 years. It's been 14 years since I recorded my first video blog |
| 0:28.3 | here at bloggingheads. We're just reminiscing about all that's gone on and going to be talking |
| 0:35.0 | a little bit about where we're going from here. So welcome, Bob. Well, thanks for having me, |
| 0:41.5 | Glenn. You've turned this into a big platform. I'm honored to be here. Oh, well, that's kind of |
| 0:48.6 | you to say. So old man, 14 years, 15 years. You guys have been doing it? Actually, blogging heads |
| 0:57.5 | itself is will be 16 in November, the platform itself. I started with Mickey Kouse, |
| 1:06.6 | and I'm doing again a regular weekly thing with him on Fridays and with a tech-guiding |
| 1:12.6 | Greg Dingell in November of 2005. Long time ago. Wow, 16, 16 years. So I mean, I moved to ask |
| 1:24.1 | with that perspective, with that length of experience and whatnot, what do you make |
| 1:32.2 | of what's going on now in this kind of bloggy space that we occupy? How do you evaluate your |
| 1:44.6 | own contribution and where do you think things are going from here? That's a gender for a conversation. |
| 1:54.1 | Let's see. Okay. So I mean, you know, we are seeing, you now see versions of what was once |
| 2:07.3 | blogging heads alone. In other words, in 2005, there was only one split screen video conversation |
| 2:15.0 | place online where you heard political discussions. I think we were the first. And you know, |
| 2:21.8 | see that everywhere, but I'm not under the illusion that had I, you know, died in the crib. It |
| 2:26.3 | wouldn't have happened. I mean, it was inevitable. It was inevitable given the technology. What |
| 2:33.1 | you know, I got there a little early because I found a work around to get around the bandwidth |
| 2:41.2 | problem. This was before broadband was at all pervasive. You couldn't do what we're doing, |
| 2:46.3 | actually have a conversation where you can see the person, unless you went to some kind of studio, |
... |
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