Paul Bloom is a renowned psychologist and writer specializing in moral psychology, particularly how moral thoughts and actions develop in children. But his interests and books explore a wide range of topics, including the science of pleasure, the morality of empathy, dehumanization, immoral vs moral punishments, and our feelings about animals and robots. Bloom is a professor at the University of Toronto and previously taught at Yale for over 20 years.
Together Paul and Tyler explore whether psychologists understand day-to-day human behavior any better than normal folk, how babies can tell if you’re a jerk, at what age children have the capacity to believe in God, why the trend in religion is toward monotheism, the morality of getting paid to strangle cats, whether disgust should be built into LLMs, the possibilities of AI therapists, the best test for a theory of mind, why people overestimate Paul’s (and Tyler’s) intelligence, why flattery is undersupplied, why we should train flattery and tax empathy, Carl Jung, Big Five personality theory, Principles of Psychology by William James, the social psychology of the Hebrew Bible, his most successful unusual work habit, what he’ll work on next, and more.
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Recorded May 13th, 24024
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TYLER COWEN: Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Today I’m delighted to be speaking with Paul Bloom, who is a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and emeritus at Yale University. Paul is also one of North America’s best-known public intellectuals on children, the psychology of children, empathy, human emotions, and various features of cognition.
He has numerous excellent books. I’ve enjoyed all of them. The most recent is called Psych: The Story of the Human Mind, but again, you can read all of them. He has a new Substack, which is excellent, Small Potatoes. He is a bit still on Twitter and is more generally a force of nature. Paul, welcome.
PAUL BLOOM: Tyler, it’s very nice to talk to you.
COWEN: I have just some very general questions about psychologists, and I’d like to hear your take on it. They run along the lines of, how much do you people understand anyway? Your partner, I believe, is a psychologist. You’re a psychologist. If you’re sitting in a restaurant and you’re listening to a couple talk at the other table, do you two feel you understand them better than two smart non-psychologists?
BLOOM: No, not in the slightest. Not in the slightest. We have no special ability to manipulate people, to understand people. You could say that that reflects a weakness of the field, and maybe it does, but I don’t think psychologists are any savvier about human nature in that sort of day-to-day, on-the-spot way than anybody else.
COWEN: So you don’t think, say, that you’re better parents, on average?
BLOOM: No, I don’t. I think we tend to be good parents because the sort of person who becomes a psychologist is probably more sensitive to other people’s feelings, well-educated, and tends to be affluent enough to provide kids with good stuff. But no, not any more so than an anthropologist or a biochemist.
COWEN: Let’s say I took two economists, and I flew them to a poor nation that they didn’t really know anything about, and I asked them to make some guesses about what might be wrong with the economy. They would do better than equivalently smart people who are not economists. What’s the feature of psychological research that stops it from translating into higher understanding? How do you model what you all produce?
BLOOM: I think we understand certain subdomains. I think I have a better understanding of memory and the fallibility of memory than a lot of people. I think I have more of a grasp of mental disorders. I know maybe a bit more about child development in the sense of what ages things will come about. I can say, I think, some reasonably intelligent, maybe surprising things about social movements and how people behave in groups.
It’s not like we don’t know anything about the world. It just doesn’t translate, for whatever reason, into day-to-day contact. Talking with you now, I’m no better at figuring out what you want from this conversation than anyone else would be.
COWEN: Let’s say we took a batch of you and trained you for two years to do that translation. The people who are the most insightful, who, let’s say, are not psychologists, but they’re astute observers of human nature, and they train you all for two years. Would you then be better than others? Are you trainable?
BLOOM: Maybe. It’s a good question. Are people trainable? Phil Tetlock talks about super-forecasters and talks about, how do you get people who could better predict the future? You could imagine training people, either by weeding them out in some program where you try to find the most naturally gifted and understanding people, or training them in certain techniques which probably are available that would make them better at understanding other people. It just brings us quite a distance from psychology as is normally studied.
COWEN: I commonly hear the view that psychologists have more neuroses than non-psychologists. Is that actually true? Is there data behind it? Or is that just a poke people want to make?
BLOOM: A joke we make within the department is that it’s the clinical psychologists who are all a bit crazy. The ones who study memory and development and neurotransmitters are normal. I don’t think it’s true. I think it is mostly a joke. It could be true in some degree in clinical psychology, where people might go into the field in order to address issues and problems that they have. It’s hard to distinguish some issues of cause and effect here.
I know a lot of people who are really into mindfulness meditation, and some of the people who are most into it are people actually the most troubled, but maybe they’d be much more troubled if they weren’t into mindfulness meditation.
COWEN: Now, on infants and children, there’s a question my daughter — who’s a big fan of yours — wanted me to ask you, and that’s, “What is the most misunderstood thing about children that most parents could practically use to improve their relationships with kids?”
BLOOM: Oh, that’s nice. Probably the most misunderstood thing, period, is that they’re blank slates. A lot of people walk around thinking that babies know nothing, and that’s not true. There’s a tremendous body of evidence now showing a quite sophisticated understanding of the physical and social world was there from the get-go. It’s some research I’ve been involved in, but researchers like Elizabeth Spelke and Renée Baillargeon have really charted the baby’s mind and found some extraordinary things.
Now, that’s the way to enjoy your baby, watching those things develop. From a useful standpoint, it might be useful to know that some of the negative aspects of humans are present early on, and so you shouldn’t be too surprised when your child has an us-versus-them psychology. It’s very quick to split the world into the people that they care about and the rest of the people, and you should take that in stride. It’s not because you taught them anything bad.
I think certain sex differences are largely hardwired, and so, parents shouldn’t blame themselves if they find their son is walking around pretending to fire guns at people, and their daughter’s doing more maternal play. I think knowing that some of this is innate — that does not mean it can’t be changed — that if some of this is innate is actually pretty useful for a parent.
COWEN: Let’s say two people are having an argument, and one is being a jerk and the other is not being a jerk. At what age are young children old enough to figure out who’s being the jerk? Does a two-year-old know? A three-year-old?
BLOOM: [laughs] Well, if you take the notion of jerk broadly enough, the nine-month-old knows. In some experiments that I’ve been involved in at Yale, you show babies little one-act plays where you have this little thing trying to get up a hill, and one character helps it up the hill, and the other one shoves it down.
Later on, when exposed to these two characters, the helper and the hinderer, babies prefer the helper. Under that very broad notion of a jerk, they get it pretty early on. I think, in other ways — I think that that’s actually a very emerging ability, the ability to tell the good from the bad.
COWEN: What’s your theory of how they tell the difference?
BLOOM: Well, the origin of this, I think, is natural selection. I think some part of our moral capacity is hardwired.
Then the question is, what do they view as the cues to goodness and badness? I think it tends to be physical acts like helping or hindering. They recognize that creatures have goals and some facilitate the goals, some block the goals. It could be something like hitting or caressing. There is some work that says that babies, maybe not surprisingly, prefer caressers to hitters.
COWEN: What else might they be aware of that we don’t necessarily know about? You might know about it, but I don’t. Who’s a jerk, who’s not a jerk. What else?
BLOOM: Well, there’s some lovely work by Katie Kinzler on how children break the world up into us versus them. You might think that they do it like adults do, on the basis of race, which is very, very common in some way, and sooner or later, they do that. But early on, they take language very seriously.
Children at a very young age, as an American child, prefer to affiliate with an English speaker than a French speaker and also prefer to affiliate, to give toys to, to play with somebody who speaks English without an accent than someone who speaks English with a faint accent. The importance of language as a marker of group affiliation shows up very early.
Children at a very young age, as an American child, prefer to affiliate with an English speaker than a French speaker and also prefer to affiliate, to give toys to, to play with somebody who speaks English without an accent than someone who speaks English with a faint accent. The importance of language as a marker of group affiliation shows up very early.
COWEN: At what age do you think children can “really believe in God”?
BLOOM: With a student, Konika Banerjee, we wrote an article a while ago called “Would Tarzan Believe in God?” Will somebody who, without a cultural support, come to believe in God? We came to the conclusion that he’d end up being polytheistic, that he’d see gods everywhere. He’d see them as triggered by nature and everything.
I think children early on believe in invisible agents causing things. They have that sort of bias. When it rises to the level where you coherently say, “Oh, that kid believes in God,” I think that probably is a bit later. I think you need some cultural support to make it into a God, as opposed to just some sort of strange stuff is happening that you can’t explain.
COWEN: Say, if you were to give it a number, how many years old?
BLOOM: Four.
COWEN: Do you think that’s the same age at which a kid can really believe in Santa Claus, or there’s a difference? Is God a tougher climb or is it the same?
BLOOM: [laughs] There are fundamentalist parents who don’t want their kids to believe in Santa Claus. The logic is, once they hear that Santa Claus isn’t real, they’ll jettison God as well.
I think in some ways, Santa Claus is an easier climb because he’s just a big guy who looks like a big beard and who climbs down chimneys and gives gifts. It’s a small step from a very capable and kind person to Santa Claus. Well, God, in the sense that we’re talking about it, is invisible and omniscient and all-good. So, I think God is a much bigger climb. I’ll say Santa Claus at two or three.
COWEN: Okay, and you may see Santa Claus in a department store, right?
BLOOM: Exactly.
COWEN: That’s going to make it really easy.
BLOOM: You don’t sit on God’s lap, but Santa, you do.
COWEN: Now, if you think Tarzan is going to start off polytheistic, why is it, in the world, we see so much monotheism? There’s a billion Muslims, over a billion Christians. Now, maybe they’re not all very strictly monotheistic, but still, monotheism has been the trend for a long time.
BLOOM: It has been. It has been.
COWEN: Why that? Why something that runs counter to instinct that would be dominating?
BLOOM: One idea — and this is Robert Wright’s claim, but I think other people have argued this — is that polytheism is the default. Society starts off polytheistic. Even in the Hebrew Bible, it might begin rather polytheistic. When God talks about not worshipping other gods instead of him, he’s literally talking about other gods. But you’re right, monotheism has won, and there has to be some sort of design features that allow it to win even though it may not be our natural default.
The answer is I don’t know, but one argument that I have heard is that these singular big gods actually serve moral purposes. They hold communities together. If you believe in a single omniscient God that looks at you and looks at me, it could govern our behavior in certain ways, coordinate it, cause us to be nicer when we’re not being observed, and so on. The claim is that societies that have that have an advantage over societies that have a hundred mischievous little gods running around.
COWEN: That’s enforced through some kind of group selection mechanism?
BLOOM: Cultural group selection would be the idea, yes.
COWEN: In general, how bullish are you on the notion of group selection as a mechanism?
BLOOM: Very critical of it as an evolutionary mechanism. I’ve been convinced that it could happen in principle. I’ve been convinced, as Dawkins viewed it, that it doesn’t happen in practice. But it seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to talk in terms of cultures, to say that some cultures do better than others, those cultures thrive. Now, we’re not talking about genes; we’re talking about communities of people.
COWEN: At what age do infants, on net, actually start enjoying life? That on the Benthamite calculus, they’re a plus rather than a minus?
BLOOM: I did a Twitter poll asking people, “Are babies overall happy or sad, based on your experience?” It came out happy won. It probably depends on the baby.
COWEN: But averaging. Average 100 babies.
BLOOM: In our society, I think the life of a young baby is probably pretty difficult if your needs are not immediately satisfied. You have a lot of needs. You’re in a lot of pain all the time. You have gas pain, you’re hungry, you’re struggling, you’re afraid. I would think that roughly around the age of two, you get much more autonomy, and then life starts looking up, and then it just gets better and better.
COWEN: I would think at one and a half, on net, they’re happy, based on my limited data sample.
BLOOM: Do you think it corresponds to the burgeoning of language?
COWEN: No. I just think in wealthy countries, they’re fed enough and they just smile more. It seems to me they take pleasure in more things. Seeing a dog on TV or seeing a car go by — they seem to enjoy in a way where I, at least, don’t witness them enjoying that at seven months.
BLOOM: Yes, that makes sense. There’s a sense in which wealthy countries might be at a disadvantage, where in a lot of wealthy countries, babies sleep apart from their parents. There’s a separate room with a crib. You cry it out and so on. I’m not judging. I did that with one of my kids a long time ago, but it’s very hard on the kid. In less wealthy countries, the kid co-sleeps and sleeps in the same room. I think that’s better off for the kid. Rough on the parents, but better for the kid.
COWEN: Now, as you’ve noted in your research, young children sometimes, maybe often, will think that the lives of 10 dogs are worth more than the life of a single human. Are they wrong?
BLOOM: Yes.
COWEN: Why? What’s the right number? A million dogs?
BLOOM: This is a challenge because if I say I’m wrong, you could just keep that . . . No, one human is worth more. You could keep upping the number of dogs. Your view aligns with that of Matti Wilks, who is my collaborator, an ex-postdoc, who ran this research, and she’s very much of a utilitarian and an animal rights person. She thinks kids are superior. She finds in this work you’re talking about, kids are less speciesist than adults. They even will favor 10 pigs over one human. Adults in our sample never do that.
Gradually the speciesism comes in until you get to a person like me, who thinks, “Oh my God, a person is so much more valuable.” Matti would say what happens is, this irrational prejudice creeps in that I have, and maybe you don’t have. I don’t know. I’m a troubled utilitarian, where for the most part I am; I just would find it very difficult to trade any number of dogs for a human life. What about you? If you would make the tradeoff, how many dogs?
COWEN: I don’t think we can make utility comparisons across species. I think we can make limited claims of potential gains from trade with humans and dogs a lot; humans and pigs quite a bit less, but still somewhat; and that ultimately, maybe we can apply some semi-Christian-like idea of mercy to how we should treat animals, and that we only have partial comparisons. That would be my answer.
BLOOM: Maybe we can’t, but in some way, we have to when we think about animal experimentation or, of course, using animal food. If somebody said, there’s a research we’re going to do which will save a child’s life, but it will involve killing a million dogs, I think people might balk at it, but if it was killing two dogs, people wouldn’t. But I also can’t fix a number.
COWEN: There’s that other question you’ve asked in your work — how much would you have to be paid to strangle a cat?
BLOOM: It’s not my question, but yes.
COWEN: But you can take that money and save human lives. I think Oxfam has claimed it’s a few thousand dollars well spent if it could save a human life. Whatever the sum is, it’s not ginormous, right? So, how much would you have to be paid to strangle a cat?
BLOOM: One reason why I have liked that question is, people want a lot of money. In fact, this was an experiment done by Thorndike, the great behaviorist, over a hundred years ago, and he asked that question. He also asked people, “How much would I have to pay you for you to take a pair of pliers and pull out one of your front teeth?” And people want more money to strangle a cat than to have this painful, agonizing, disfiguring thing, which, I think, says something nice about people.
But then the fact is that it’s not so nice about people from a strict utilitarian calculus. You should actually ask to be paid some amount of money for which you can then save many, many lives — or, for that matter, save many, many cats. Our morality doesn’t work that way. We have a visceral response to certain behaviors. It doesn’t translate to a cold-blooded assessment of pain and pleasure.
COWEN: Do you feel you should try to train yourself out of being unwilling to strangle the cat, or you’re going to double down on how you are?
BLOOM: I double down on a few things. My utilitarian friends tell me that my affection and the resources I put into my children are irrational, that I should not be favoring them over strangers, certainly not to the extent I do. I hold back on that. If you offered me a pill that would get rid of my favoring my children, I would not take it. For animals and treatment of animals and cat strangling, I think we should try to talk ourselves out of this. I think we should, in some way, try to reason to make the world a better place even if it involves strangling some cats.
COWEN: I have some questions about intelligence for you. If we think of large language models, should we let them feel disgust so that they avoid left-wing bias?
BLOOM: [laughs] Why would disgust make them avoid left-wing bias?
COWEN: Maybe we’re not sure it would, but there are various claims in the literature that for people on the right, disgust is a more fundamental emotion, and that a greater capacity to feel disgust encourages people in some ways to be more socially conservative. Debatable, but I don’t think it’s a crazy view. So, if you build LLMs, and you give them, say, a lot of empathy and not much or any disgust, you’re going to get left-leaning LLMs, which you might say, “Well, that was my goal.” But obviously, not everyone will accept that conclusion either.
BLOOM: I wouldn’t want woke LLMs. I think there’s a lot in extreme —
COWEN: You’ve got them, of course.
BLOOM: I’ve got them. I think Gemini is the one, if I wanted to go — the woke LLM of choice. Because I think the doctrine called wokeness leads to a lot of moral problems and makes the world worse in certain ways, but I wouldn’t mind left-wing LLMs.
In fact, I’m not a fan of disgust. You’re right that disgust is often associated with right-wing, but in the very worst instantiation of it. Disgust is what drives hatred towards gay people. It involves hatred of interracial marriage, the exclusion of immigrants, the exclusion of other races. If there’s one emotion I would take away from people, it would be disgust, at least disgust in the moral realm. They could keep their disgust towards rotten food and that sort of thing. That’s the one thing I wouldn’t put into LLMs. I’d rather put anger, pity, gratitude. Disgust is the one thing I’d keep away.
COWEN: So, you wouldn’t just cut back on it at the margin. You would just take disgust out of people if you could?
BLOOM: I’m conscious enough about the limits of our knowledge, which is that I would be very trepidatious before removing an emotion from people because you don’t know what the consequences would be, but yes. It’s hard to think, and maybe you could think of an example where disgust has made the world better.
COWEN: Well, disgust combined with other views might make people more cautious. If you take Canada — while I’ve been very positive on Canada’s pro-migration policies, there needs to be some limit. And maybe it’s some form of disgust, mixed in with other views, that will enforce that limit.
BLOOM: Your view is — and I’ve written on empathy, and I’ve heard a similar argument for this, which is, you could have a decision which you ground — you may be thinking about immigration on a rational cost-benefit analysis. You might say, “Look, for people to act towards this decision, your average person won’t do it my way. They would need some emotion. Maybe they need disgust or empathy to take them there.” You might want to argue that without disgust, Canadians wouldn’t be motivated to a policy that, on balance, would be better for them.
COWEN: Possibly. I just think back, and I figure, well, disgust must have been socially functional at some stage of development. Not perfectly functional, but it had some benefits. You might have a very detailed argument for why all those earlier benefits have vanished, but I think I would be skeptical. I’m surprised you think that, say, your views toward migration are not equally emotional as, say, the social conservatives. Yours might be correct, but do you think yours are that much less emotional and more rational?
BLOOM: I think, on a whole, some views are more rational than others. I’m the wrong person to ask. Everybody’s going to tell you their views are grounded in the rational equation, they thought them out, and everything like that. I’m sympathetic enough to Jonathan Haidt’s line that often we delude ourselves and we’re driven by these emotions. I don’t know.
I wouldn’t say that the person who says, “Black people and white people shouldn’t marry because it grosses me out,” should be thought of on the same level as somebody who says, “Eh, what harm does it do?” I think the what-harm-does-it-do person is being a better person.
COWEN: Your view that there’s too much empathy — you wrote a book called Against Empathy — what emotion in you does that come from? For me, it comes from frustration with other people. I hold that same view, but I feel it’s rooted in my emotions as much as my reason. I then rationalize it with my reason. I see, ex post, my emotions are actually somewhat correct, but it stems from my frustration with others.
BLOOM: Maybe, for me, shame and guilt. I think I’ve made a lot of mistakes and moral mistakes in my life by being too caught up in empathy. My argument against empathy is limited. It argues that empathy is a poor moral guide. It leads to bad decisions. If I have to ground in my own emotions, it might be regret over my own bad decisions. I think I suffer from an abundance of empathy.
COWEN: I think at the margin, I’ve moved against empathy more being a podcast host, that I’ll ask a question —
BLOOM: Wait. Why being a podcast host?
COWEN: Well, I’ll ask a question, and a lot of guests think it’s high status simply to signal empathy rather than giving a substantive answer. The signaling-empathy answers I find quite uninteresting, and I think a lot of my listeners do, too. Yet people will just keep on doing this, and I get frustrated. Then I think, “Well, Tyler, you should turn a bit more against empathy for this reason.” And I think that’s correct.
BLOOM: [laughs] Okay. Well, I appreciate where you’re coming from, and I feel your frustration.
COWEN: What do you think we learn about language from large language models being so good?
BLOOM: The success of large language models is the biggest surprise in my intellectual life. We learned that a lot of what we used to believe may be false and what I used to believe may be false. I used to really accept, to a large degree, the Chomskyan argument that the structures of language are too complex and not manifest in input so that you need to have innate machinery to learn them. You need to have a language module or language instinct, and it’s impossible to learn them simply by observing statistics in the environment.
If it’s true — and I think it is true — that the LLMs learn language through statistical analysis, this shows the Chomskyan view is wrong. This shows that, at least in theory, it’s possible to learn languages just by observing a billion tokens of language.
It doesn’t mean that that’s how children do it. It’s possible. I do believe that kids have some sort of innate apparatus that helps them do it, but it’s no longer a logical truth. It’s something on which you have to do empirical research. If you gave an LLM — and I know people are doing this very research — gave an LLM the same speech that your average developing child gets, will it learn to talk?
COWEN: Now, the day we’re taping this, coincidentally, is the same day that GPT-4o came out, which probably you haven’t played around with yet. It’s only been out for about an hour. I was with it before taping. It seems to me amazing, but how good are LLMs as therapists?
BLOOM: There’ve been experiments which have pitted them against people in short-term interactions. You talk about your troubles, and then you get a person like me to give a response. Then you get GPT-4o to respond. Over and over and over again, people rate the AI responses more empathic, more understanding. Now, I think that this is impressive.
I think what we have yet to see is whether they could have a long, sustained conversation, holding in memory over multiple sessions. Part of me being a good therapist, and actually just being a good friend, is I remember what you’re worried about. I could go back to it. I could talk about it and so on. I don’t think they’re at that stage yet. I don’t see any reason why they can’t get there.
COWEN: There’s a version of GPT-4 which does have memory. It’s only been, I think, for about a week, and I haven’t tested it yet. I don’t know how good the memory is. Some people prefer to turn the memory off, actually, [laughs] but it’s very much on the verge of being here.
Say, two, three years from now, what percentage of therapy done do you think will be done with humans rather than LLMs? Because the LLM is free, and you can stay at home. You can with the therapist with Zoom, but the LLM is super easy.
BLOOM: If you include, by “therapy,” somebody just regularly talking to an LLM about their problems and getting some advice and everything, I think that human interaction within not too many years will be the minority of interactions. I think people will be very drawn to AI therapists.
There’s some evidence that we have a prejudice against AIs. There was a paper recently that gave the same sort of response, the exact same response to two groups of people. Told one of them it’s a person, the other one it’s an AI. The people told it was an AI said, “Oh, that wasn’t very empathic. That wasn’t very understanding.” But my feeling is, this prejudice will fade over time, and that it’s mostly people more our age than people who are 18 or 20.
COWEN: The people who are best at working with LLMs — what kind of psychological intelligence do you think they have? Who’s going to be good at that?
BLOOM: I think you need a certain flexibility, a certain degree of patience. You need to develop a theory of mind with LLMs that is different from the theory of mind you need for people. I recently asked Claude — I use it a lot — I asked it, “There’s a phenomenon in children I found. Does the same phenomenon show up in adults?” I plainly framed the question that I wanted the answer to be yes. They said, “Yes, it is. Here are three papers that show it decisively.” None of the papers were real. It hallucinated it because it’s what I wanted.
Then I went back and I said, “Look, I’ll lose my job if you give me papers that are false, that are made up. You’ve got to be accurate, or I’m in big trouble.” Then it did much better. You’ve got to game them to some extent, and in a very different way than you game a person. That capacity is something which I think is essential, at least, for the current models.
COWEN: Here’s a simple question. What’s the best test of whether someone or something has a theory of mind?
BLOOM: I think sustained conversation. There are technical tests, like the false-belief task or Reading of the Mind in the Eyes task, but those are easily gamed. LLMs will succeed on them because they’ve seen thousands and thousands of instances on them. I think in conversation, a lack of theory of mind quickly reveals itself. Success of solving a Turing test is success of theory of mind.
COWEN: Claude 3 can converse very well, but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t have a theory of mind, or do you think it does?
BLOOM: I’m using theory of mind, a word like theory of mind, meaning the manifestation as if it did. Does it really think that other people have minds? Does it have a model of people’s psychology? When it says, “I understand exactly what you’re feeling,” does it call back its own experiences? I doubt it. Maybe in some way, you’re asking an even easier question, which is, what will show that it has consciousness?
COWEN: But you could have consciousness and not a theory of mind, right?
BLOOM: Yes. But you were saying, I think, that to have theory of mind involves something you might call consciousness.
COWEN: But what’s the extra thing about having consciousness that indicates a person has a theory of mind? We reject the false-belief test. That makes sense to me. What is it, then? What’s the test?
BLOOM: I think what you’d have to do — and you could do this on the fly, you could work it out — would be develop . . .
Okay, here’s a good test. Read it half of a good novel and then ask what’s going on here. What’s going to happen next? Show it half of a TV episode. When we do these things, our theory of mind is just fully operational. We say that detective is going to get his revenge because he will not take that sort of stuff, and she’s going to leave in the first moment she has a chance, dah, dah, dah. I think that shows theory of mind at work. If you do it in that way, you can’t cheat. If it’s a novel novel or a novel episode, then it would have to do it on the fly.
COWEN: I’m afraid I’m going to fail that test. I always think of strange imaginary endings that are improbable, and occasionally, they come to pass. I think my endings are often much better than what they end up putting on the screen.
BLOOM: My dad is great. When we watched TV together as a kid — and of course, the TV was very different and much more predictable — but a character would be about to say something, and then he would say it. He would say it simultaneously with the character.
COWEN: My wife does this too. She’s great at this.
Do monkeys have cognitive dissonance?
BLOOM: I’ve done some research suggesting that they might of a sort. The sort of cognitive dissonance we were interested in is that when you choose something, say out of a choice of two things, that makes you like it more and makes you like the things that you didn’t choose less. In some work with Laurie Santos, who had a thriving monkey lab, we found that Capuchins did the same thing. We also found three-year-olds did the same thing.
COWEN: Endowment effects, right?
BLOOM: That’s a separate thing, but I think there’s some evidence that monkeys also show endowment effects.
COWEN: Are we sure that’s dissonance?
BLOOM: The endowment effects — I’m less sure that there’s dissonance. There are alternative explanations. Favoring that which you chose is a textbook example of dissonance. That’s dissonance if anything is.
COWEN: What if you want to carry a story with you of what it meant to you, and your act of choosing helped create and define the story, and you value things through this narrative function, and you actually ought to be that way? Is that so improbable?
BLOOM: No, no. I guess the experiments that test it aren’t open to that kind of interpretation. It could often be like, we give you two M&Ms, and you just choose one at random. Then later, when you rank the taste of the M&Ms, you say, “Oh, the one I picked is tastier than the one I didn’t pick,” while if we simply handed it to you, you wouldn’t get that effect. There’s not much of a narrative to that, but I agree that when you get it more complicated in life, it could serve all sorts of other functions.
COWEN: How much does formal education boost IQ?
BLOOM: The data are, a little bit. Each year you’re in school, your IQ goes a little bit up. The skeptics will say — I think Bryan Caplan says — you get better at taking tests, you get better at a scholastic way of thinking. I do think, though, that education, period, does play a role in making you smarter. It gives you practice in dealing with abstractions, with hypotheticals, the sorts of things that we often use as markers of intelligence.
COWEN: Do people overestimate or underestimate your intelligence? You.
BLOOM: My own?
COWEN: Yes. You must know.
BLOOM: Either way, it’s a humiliating answer, but I would imagine — particularly when I was at Yale — they overestimated. People sometimes ask me questions about domains which I have no knowledge about, and they take me seriously about that. Isn’t that an overestimation? What about you?
COWEN: Oh, they way overestimate my intelligence, but they underestimate how much I know. It’s interesting. I know a lot, and they mistake that for innate intelligence, is what happens in my case.
BLOOM: You know even more than you seem to know, which is quite a lot.
COWEN: In my opinion. I’m being both modest and not modest —
BLOOM: I noticed, yes.
COWEN: — with each part of the answer. I think I take good care to try to apply what I know, and people mistake that for, again, high IQ.
BLOOM: It’s not entirely clear that isn’t high IQ, that IQ might be largely built on a scaffolding of a lot of knowledge.
COWEN: Partly, yes, but it’s something else as well. There’s some kind of G [G factor] where I think I’m actually much weaker.
BLOOM: Yes, yes. Maybe there’s a tradeoff, which is, the more knowledge you have, the less G you need to get to the same point, where somebody with less knowledge would need a lot of G to get to that point.
COWEN: Why do you think it’s worked out the way it has, that people overestimate your intelligence? Because you are at Yale?
BLOOM: Yes. Prestige bias. I’m a university professor. I’m at Yale. Maybe I benefit from other forms of privilege, being an older white man, but I don’t know. I show all the markers of a smart guy.
COWEN: You think when you interact with other people that you’re too much impressed by their intelligence, or not enough? Because a lot of smart people overvalue smarts in others. Why not just drive that out of your calculus? Is it so hard?
BLOOM: No. I read your talent book, and it was actually very, very useful to me because it taught me other ways, other things to look for. When it comes to choosing graduate students, for instance, I tend to rank intelligence very highly. A good conversation with someone who’s quicker than me and smart on their feet and everything — I value that very highly. It’s only recently I started to try to also value things like productivity and work ethic and other things and a certain degree of creativity, but I go too much for smarts.
COWEN: What do you think is psychologically the hardest trait for us to value properly? Disagreeableness or something else? Because after all, they might be disagreeing with you, right?
BLOOM: Yes. Disagreeableness. Probably honesty. One of the tropes on social media I hate the most is when somebody says, “Well, here I am, and now I’m a professor. I want to say to somebody who was my adviser many years ago, who said I’d never make it, well, you’re a jerk.” And everybody laughs at the person who said they’d never make it. To be honest with somebody — and in that case, they were wrong — but even if you’re right, people hate you.
To be honest with somebody when they say to you, “What do you think of my book?” “Do you think I’m suited for this job?” Stuff like that can be doing them a huge service. “Am I with the right person?” Can be doing them a huge service, and the reward you will get is hatred and resentment.
COWEN: On your Substack, Small Potatoes, you wrote a post on doing academic interviews. The interviewers, at a general level — what’s the bias they’re most likely to have?
BLOOM: Oh, all sorts of biases. I’m almost leaning towards — your book aside — jettisoning interviews sometimes, getting rid of them. But all sorts of biases. They’re biased by charm. They’re biased by quickness. They’re biased by flattery. In fact, part of my advice, to put it somewhat cynically, is for people on job interviews, know the person you’re talking to, do the research, because it’s flattering. Somebody comes into my office and says, “Oh, my God, it’s such an honor to meet you. I read Against Empathy, and it changed my life.” I don’t want it to sway me, but it’s hard for it not to, and so yes, that’s our weakness.
COWEN: I’ve wondered quite often, why is flattery undersupplied in these contexts? Because by no means does everyone do it. It’s not very costly. Even if you’re not fully believed, it can have a positive impact on the person. Why isn’t the supply of flattery just way, way up there? Every job interview.
BLOOM: I think it’s such a cheap thing.
COWEN: It starts off with, “Oh, I read your article two years ago. It was wonderful. It changed how I think about tax incidence.” But not every interview starts that way. Most do not. Why not?
BLOOM: I tell the story in my Substack of a very famous speaker — I never met him before — comes into my office and was like, “Oh my God, it is such a delight to meet you,” and talks all about my work extensively. I fully knew — even my ego is not so . . . I fully knew he read up on me, but it still felt great. I don’t know. I feel maybe people are uncomfortable flattering. Maybe there’s an awkwardness when you’re talking to somebody who is of a higher status than you, when you want a job and maybe it feels inappropriate to flatter. “Who am I to tell this person their work is great?” I don’t know.
COWEN: You still think they ought to do it more, right? As do I.
BLOOM: I do.
COWEN: Yes.
BLOOM: I do. There should be — there’s a flattery shortage in the world. It’s going back to a criticism abundance sometimes, where I think people have a false theory of mind where they go to somebody, and they say, “I read your stuff, and I think it’s really poorly thought out.” It could be very helpful from a friend; not a good tactic when you’re looking for a job.
COWEN: How can we train people to be better flatterers? What do we need to do?
BLOOM: Maybe it’s some degree of theory of mind, which is, you just ask people, and you’re like, “How do you feel when somebody tells you how wonderful you are?” I think that will help them do it. It doesn’t seem like a very difficult thing to pick up. I don’t know. It’s a mystery.
COWEN: If we should train flattery, how do you think we should best tax empathy? In the broad sense of tax, right?
BLOOM: Yes. I think we should tax empathy through social disapproval. Here’s what I’m thinking: A lot of American politicians say racist things and have racist policies, but almost always, they cloak it, they dog-whistle it, they cloak it. Maybe they aren’t even aware of it themselves because when somebody says something avowed, clearly racist, people boo them. They suffer a huge social cost. I’d like to see the same thing with regard to overt displays of empathy.
I would like to see that when a politician comes up and says, “I want to talk about the healthcare plan,” and says, “I want to read you a letter I got from an eight-year-old who told me the story about her father,” I want the crowd to boo and to shout, “Don’t treat us like children.” I think empathy could easily be used as a tool for all sorts of things. If we stop putting up with it, it would discourage it.
I think we should tax empathy through social disapproval. Here’s what I’m thinking: A lot of American politicians say racist things and have racist policies, but almost always they cloak it. Maybe they aren’t even aware of it themselves because when somebody says something avowed, clearly racist, people boo them. They suffer a huge social cost. I’d like to see the same thing with regard to overt displays of empathy. I would like to see that when a politician comes up and says, “I want to talk about the healthcare plan,” and says, “I want to read you a letter I got from an eight-year-old who told me the story about her father,” I want the crowd to boo and to shout, “Don’t treat us like children.” I think empathy could easily be used as a tool for all sorts of things. If we stop putting up with it, it would discourage it.
COWEN: Where is the empathy problem worse, Canada or the United States?
BLOOM: I think everything is both worse and better in the United States.
COWEN: There’s broader variance?
BLOOM: There’s broader variance. Politics is more intense, a lot more interesting. I think the degree of empathic pandering, as well as the degree of everything else, is more accelerated in the States. I think part of Canadian politics or parliament encourages more vibrant debate and discussion, often at a pretty high level that you don’t see in the States.
COWEN: Do you think there are any humans who are what I would call truly egalitarian? There are plenty of people who genuinely want to redistribute wealth, but typically, I think they have other status markers. It could be intellect, it could be empathy, it could be a certain kind of left-wing politics. Are there people who are genuinely egalitarian across all dimensions?
BLOOM: No. I think you’d cease to become a person. To become indifferent between the present and the future, indifferent between your child and a stranger, to not care about somebody’s looks or intelligence or kindness would be . . . You could imagine an LLM program for that, but I think when we encountered the LLM, we’d find it repellent.
COWEN: The person would disgust us?
BLOOM: Yes.
COWEN: That’s a case where disgust might be useful, right?
BLOOM: [laughs] Yes. You have come full circle on me. Yes.
COWEN: Why do so many people enjoy horror movies? For the most part, I do not, I’ll interject, but clearly many do.
BLOOM: Do you enjoy any movies that scare you, of a lighter sort? Not gory, not chainsaw stuff, but lighter.
COWEN: That, I enjoy. Darth Vader comes on the screen. I wouldn’t say I’m scared, but I feel the negative evil presence, and I respond to that in an aesthetically positive way.
BLOOM: I think that that’s right, where we take some sort of pleasure from negative emotions: sadness and fear and disgust and even guilt, shame. But there’s a lot of variation in which emotions people like — some people like a good cry; some people like to scream — and the intensity of it. I do like scary movies, but for me it’s like The Babadook or It Follows. The gory ones, I can’t bear to watch.
I think there are different sources for our appetite for them, but one is, it might reflect what’s sometimes been called safe practice, where our minds are drawn to worst-case scenarios as a way to practice encountering them. An analogy I like is that of a flight simulator. You’ve got a flight simulator; you would often program it for difficult situations to get you practiced into coping with them if you get them in real life. Sometimes I think our enjoyment of fiction and fantasy is like we’re running off a flight simulator.
COWEN: You’ve posed this question in your work as a hypothetical: Is consenting sex between adult siblings morally wrong? What’s your view?
BLOOM: Yes, I do think it’s morally wrong.
COWEN: Why?
BLOOM: Because although as adults, there’s a strong supposition that they’re free to do what they want, I think that the problem is that when they’re not adults, the fact that later on they can have sex — and worse, between, say, a stepfather and a stepdaughter or an uncle and a niece — the idea that sex is a possibility in the future when they’re adults corrodes the relationship early on. Does that make sense?
This is my utilitarian attempt to try to do a cost-benefit analysis for what you are going to accuse me of having a disgust reaction.
COWEN: I think you have a disgust reaction. That’s fine. It sounds to me like an argument that it’s imprudent, which can slide into morally wrong, but I still think there’s something out of sync between the strength of our disgust reaction and the degree of moral wrongness it has.
BLOOM: I think that’s right. I think that if that was my argument, say, making this ratchet it up a bit and make it a relationship between a father and an adult daughter and —
COWEN: Let’s say brother-sister. I could reword the question. I said siblings, so brother and sister, or two sisters for that matter. That seems much less wrong than the stepfather and the daughter.
BLOOM: It does, because in some way, as it brings us down to childhood, there’s less of a power asymmetry. There’s less of a case of an adult carefully grooming a child so that when she is of age, they could then have sex, and it would be okay. I have a visceral response to it.
I’ll give another argument, which is — again, trying not to be disgust-based — which is that I think that there’s a range of human relationships that are tremendously valuable, and sometimes they’re better off without sex. In relationships, certain sex is great, connects to romance, connects to a great degree of intimate relationships. But some relationships are sex-free, like a relationship between most people and their adult children, and that’s good.
COWEN: Now, as a CWT listener, might you be up for a round of overrated versus underrated?
BLOOM: Yes, I was hoping for this. Hit me.
COWEN: Okay, these are all easy. Jean Piaget — overrated or underrated?
BLOOM: Underrated. He is wrong in just about everything he said about kids. There’ve been studies finding that just about every claim he makes is mistaken and overridden, but he was a great scientist with a great encompassing theory. A lot of his theoretical foundation, particularly the notion that children are like scientists exploring the world, has stood the test of time. Also, he was a sweet guy. Unlike Freud, Piaget was a genuinely decent guy. So, I’d say he’s underrated.
COWEN: The notion of mirror neurons?
BLOOM: Oh, it shouldn’t be rated at all. Horribly —
COWEN: It’s just false. Right?
BLOOM: I’m not enough of a neuroscientist to say it’s entirely dead. Maybe. People have talked about mirror neurons and primates being involved in certain aspects of motor learning. I’m not expert enough to say that that’s all bogus, but it was once hugely overrated, in that this was the solution to everything. Explained autism, explained language learning, explained empathy. And the whole field, I think, crashed. It’s still overrated because some people don’t know it crashed. That was an easy one.
COWEN: Sociopaths — overrated or underrated? That’s harder, right?
BLOOM: [laughs] You mean the idea or the people?
COWEN: No, the actual ones. They’re very productive, a lot of them, right?
BLOOM: They are. I think they’re overrated. I think that there’s a sexiness to this. There was a woman who was profiled in The New York Times recently, who described herself as a sociopath or a psychopath.
COWEN: I read that.
BLOOM: I don’t know. I think there’s a lot of allure to it, and a lot of drama. Many studies of psychopaths and sociopaths find that they’re actually often below normal intelligence. They tend to be depressed. They’re more likely to kill themselves. They live lousy lives. They’re not the sexy, conscience-free people we like to imagine, suggesting that to some degree, you and I — the non-sociopaths — are sensitive to this, and when we see a sociopath, we run away.
COWEN: You’re assuming I’m a non-sociopath, right?
BLOOM: Oh, I know you well from the podcast.
COWEN: A lot of people just think they’re psychopaths like they’re all serial killers, and that’s not true at all.
BLOOM: No.
COWEN: Maybe they lack a moral sense. If they can learn to behave according to incentives, maybe a lot just fit in. They learn how to flatter, say, because they’re not held back by these other weird feelings that you shouldn’t flatter your interviewer.
BLOOM: You could get very far. But the thing about the people we want to be around is, we want them to be nice to us even when the incentives aren’t present.
COWEN: Carl Jung — overrated or underrated?
BLOOM: Oh, yes, hardly rated at all these days, I think maybe just because of Jordan Peterson, who has been promoting him. I often get people saying, “Why didn’t you talk about Carl Jung in your book?” I’ll say underrated in that what little I know about him seems quite interesting. I think maybe he’s been so eclipsed by Freud that nobody gives his ideas any attention. Certainly, some of his ideas about the unconscious are worth studying, so mildly underrated.
COWEN: Memories, Dreams, and Recollections is a great book, I think. I believe, with LLMs, Jung will make a comeback. In a sense, LLMs are tapping into a Jungian subconscious of all the data we’ve put out there.
BLOOM: That sort of collective unconscious is now coming online.
COWEN: But there’s a reinforcement learning applied to it, so it’s also suppressed in the Freudian way. You get this weird mix of Jung and Freud in contemporary LLMs.
BLOOM: There’s a book there somewhere.
COWEN: Yes. Asian Tiger parenting — over- or underrated?
BLOOM: Amy Chua, who is a friend of mine, who brought the idea in her Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. I think underrated. I tend to be a rather permissive parent, but the thing about it is, a lot of these tiger parents end up with kids who are not merely successful, but happy and love their parents. It doesn’t work for everybody, not for every kid, nor for every parent. I could not fashion myself as a tiger dad, but I think we should take it more seriously.
COWEN: Do you need the whole community for it to work?
BLOOM: Oh, yes. It’s like everything else — cell phones, smartphones, and social media, and — I don’t know — sex, alcohol, where if you’re one individual within the community doing it, it’s extremely difficult. It’s much easier to be any parent if everybody else around you is the same sort of parent.
COWEN: Big Five personality theory.
BLOOM: Underrated. Stood the test of time. Often, when people complain about the replication crisis, they throw away all of psychology, but personality psychology has proven surprisingly robust, and I think there’s a lot of sense in the idea. I know you actually were somewhat critical of this in your book Talent — the idea of the Big Five, the idea that you could characterize somebody in terms of five numbers, determining their openness and their conscientiousness and so on. What do you think on that?
COWEN: I think it’s overrated by people who use it in hiring, but I still think, in general, it’s somewhat underrated, so we’re maybe not far apart. People who don’t know about the categories at all would do well to learn them. That’s how I would put it.
BLOOM: Yes. Once you know about them, you should be flexible and not take them too, too seriously.
COWEN: What’s a neglected classic in psychology that more people should read?
BLOOM: Well, psychologists don’t read. We don’t read books. We don’t read anything from the past.
COWEN: But you read.
BLOOM: I have gone through my adult life, my whole life, without ever reading Principles of Psychology by William James. Then a couple of friends of mine invited me on their podcast to talk about his chapter on habit, and I read it, and it blew me away.
COWEN: It’s an incredible book.
BLOOM: It’s an incredible book. It was well written. It is sharp. He talks about instinct. It is a very contemporary voice. He’s a lyrical, beautiful writer, and it’s full of insights. Maybe it’s an embarrassment to psychology that you use it for an intro psych class and you would gain a lot.
COWEN: Why do religious people cry when their loved ones die? Assuming they believe in heaven, of course. Not all religions do.
BLOOM: Yes. I think the answer is more . . . Some people say — and I have atheist friends — “Well, they’re hypocrites. They don’t really believe in heaven. If they really believed in heaven, they wouldn’t cry. They would rejoice. The same thing with their own death.”
I think there’s belief and there’s belief. I could have a very confident belief in heaven. Maybe I’m even 100 percent sure that I’ll go to heaven when I die, but when faced with my own death, there are other systems that lead to tremendous fear.
When faced with the death of somebody I love, there are other systems in the head that lead to terrible grief. We’re not unitary beings. It’s possible, upon learning my son has a terminal disease, for part of me to think, “Oh, he’ll be reunited with God in heaven and be in paradise,” and feel good about it, and feel horrible grief. Yes, they conflict with one another, but that doesn’t negate the existence of either one.
COWEN: What does the Hebrew Bible most get right and wrong about social psychology? It has a mimetic desire, right? Peter Thiel will tell us that. How good is it as a text in social psychology?
BLOOM: I think it’s a great text in social psychology and personality psychology and even a little bit of cognitive psychology. It captures in a very stark way the us-them biases that are present, that social psychology makes so much out of. It captures the idea of prejudice. It captures the idea of thinking about men and women, children and adults, in-group, out-group separately.
I’ve long been interested in the portrayal of God in the Hebrew Bible, which is absolutely fascinating because people who haven’t read it think, “Oh, God — all-knowing, all-loving, and everything.” In fact, it’s this wonderful character. This goes beyond social psychology, talking about internal workings of the mind.
I wrote in my Substack about the Passover story, where he sets the plagues loose on the Pharaoh unless he lets the Jews go. The Pharaoh says, “Fine, fine, fine.” Then the Pharaoh bends, breaks, and says, “Fine, you win.” Then God fiddles with the Pharaoh’s mind in this wonderful twist to say, to make him refuse. He says later, “I wanted to show off my powers. We had gone this far.” It’s like, I don’t know, the invasion of Iraq or something. There are lovely stories there.
COWEN: I think it’s brilliant on the mentality of whiners, like the Book of Job, even Moses at times. You should write a book on social psychology in the Hebrew Bible.
BLOOM: That’s an idea. Do you know what I like? God has so much patience for whiners in that there are so many scenes where God destroys people with the slightest lack of faith in him. But when it comes to Moses pushing back, “I don’t want to do this,” God says, “Okay, let’s compromise.” Or he ends up negotiating, when he destroys the world in the flood, over how many people to leave behind. If you whine to God, as Job did, sometimes he listens.
COWEN: What do you, Paul Bloom, maximize?
BLOOM: Most recently, time with those I love. That’s what I try. Also, time writing my Substack.
COWEN: The ones you love — they’re all busy right now, and thus, you’re talking to me.
BLOOM: [laughs] That’s right. You can make —
COWEN: They all turned you down, right?
BLOOM: Our relationship is just beginning. Who knows?
COWEN: That’s right.
BLOOM: I maximize different things than I did when I was younger. I try to maximize money less. I still take money very seriously because we want to renovate our house, we want to travel, and stuff like that. I’ve been very lucky to have deep connections with friends, my wife, my children who are now adults. I sometimes have to remind myself. You end up forgetting that this is what I ultimately want to maximize.
COWEN: What’s your most unusual successful work habit?
BLOOM: This is an easy one, as you may know.
COWEN: They’re all easy in this episode.
BLOOM: No, the one about lessons from social psychology from the Hebrew Bible was not an easy one.
My oddest work habit is that I work in six-minute bursts. I have a whiteboard right next to me. I’ll work on a Substack for six minutes, then a reference letter for six minutes. Then I’ll rush and fold my laundry for six minutes. Then I’ll answer email for six minutes. Go on social media for six minutes. Then do this for 10 more things and go back to the Substack and repeat. Then three, four hours will go by. I don’t recommend it for everybody.
My oddest work habit is that I work — not always, but often — in six-minute bursts. I have a whiteboard right next to me. I’ll work on a Substack for six minutes, then a reference letter for six minutes. Then I’ll rush and fold my laundry for six minutes. Then I’ll answer email for six minutes. Go on social media for six minutes. Then do this for 10 more things and go back to the Substack and repeat. Then three, four hours will go by. I don’t recommend it for everybody.
COWEN: That’s an approximation? Or you’ve set it like a timer? Or is the timing internal?
BLOOM: Not an approximate, I have a timer. When my timer beeps, I could be mid-word. I’ll stop and go on to the next. For me, (a) this keeps me from getting bored. Also, by stopping mid-word or stopping wherever I’m stopping, when I go back to it, the energy is still there to want to continue. I highly recommend it to everybody.
COWEN: I’ve advocated a similar system, that you should stop writing each day before you feel you’re done.
BLOOM: Yes, that’s right. That’s right.
COWEN: When you don’t want to stop, you’re just about to write something really good, that’s when — no more. Back to it tomorrow.
BLOOM: Many people do the opposite. They have nice closure on this. They ended the paragraph, they ended the chapter. And then it’s hard to start up next time. That’s right. Excellent advice.
COWEN: And they’re a little exhausted. Very last question — what will you do next?
BLOOM: I’m thinking I want to write a new book, but I’m not exactly sure of the topic. I’ve been playing around with different topics. I have something which I like, but it’s too early for me to talk about. I really want to write a new book.
COWEN: What’s the algorithm you use to decide which topic it will be?
BLOOM: For this book, I started to write a proposal on an idea, and I just couldn’t make it interesting enough, because I work by writing a proposal and sending it to my agent, and so on. Often, if I could write a good proposal, then I know I have a good book. Not that the book’s going to match the proposal in any interesting sense, but it means that the material is there. I guess another way of putting it is, by the time I’m done with that, I know it’ll be a good book for me if I couldn’t live without writing it. If nobody wanted it, I read it anyway.
COWEN: Paul Bloom, thank you very much. Listeners, you can buy all of Paul’s books. Again, his new Substack is Small Potatoes. Just Google Paul Bloom, B-L-O-O-M, Small Potatoes. Thank you, Paul.
BLOOM: Thank you, Tyler. That was great.