What Do BDSM & Meditation Have In Common? | Professor Paul Bloom | Modern Wisdom Podcast 120
Paul Bloom (guest), Chris Williamson (host), Narrator
In this episode of Modern Wisdom, featuring Paul Bloom and Chris Williamson, What Do BDSM & Meditation Have In Common? | Professor Paul Bloom | Modern Wisdom Podcast 120 explores paul Bloom Explores Empathy’s Flaws, Tribalism, and Productive Suffering Chris Williamson interviews Yale psychologist Paul Bloom about empathy, morality, tribalism, and why we sometimes seek out suffering. Bloom argues that emotional empathy (feeling others’ pain) is biased, exhausting, and often a poor moral guide, and proposes “rational compassion” as a better foundation for ethics and helping others. They discuss in‑group/out‑group psychology, the naturalness of tribalism and revenge, and how modern society increasingly tries to transcend some of our evolved instincts. Bloom also previews his upcoming book on why people willingly pursue painful experiences—from BDSM and horror films to intense exercise and challenging life projects—and how suffering is intertwined with meaning and the good life.
Paul Bloom Explores Empathy’s Flaws, Tribalism, and Productive Suffering
Chris Williamson interviews Yale psychologist Paul Bloom about empathy, morality, tribalism, and why we sometimes seek out suffering. Bloom argues that emotional empathy (feeling others’ pain) is biased, exhausting, and often a poor moral guide, and proposes “rational compassion” as a better foundation for ethics and helping others. They discuss in‑group/out‑group psychology, the naturalness of tribalism and revenge, and how modern society increasingly tries to transcend some of our evolved instincts. Bloom also previews his upcoming book on why people willingly pursue painful experiences—from BDSM and horror films to intense exercise and challenging life projects—and how suffering is intertwined with meaning and the good life.
Key Takeaways
Distinguish clearly between empathy and compassion in your own life.
Empathy (feeling what others feel) is not the same as compassion (caring and wanting to help); you can be highly compassionate and effective without emotionally absorbing others’ distress, which often leads to burnout and poor decisions.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
Don’t rely on empathy as your primary moral compass.
Empathy is inherently biased toward people who are similar, close, or salient, which means it can skew fairness (e. ...
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
Cultivate ‘rational compassion’ for better decisions and policies.
Use your head to decide who most needs help and what actually works, while keeping genuine concern for others; this allows you to care beyond your immediate circle and avoid being captured by the loudest or closest plea.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
Recognize that tribalism is natural—but not automatically right.
Humans effortlessly form us-versus-them groups, even over arbitrary differences, so overcoming prejudice requires conscious rules, institutions, and self-scrutiny rather than assuming our gut reactions are morally trustworthy.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
Seek meaningful challenges instead of pure comfort.
Deep projects—raising children, building a career, athletic feats—are valuable partly because they involve effort, risk, and discomfort; when life becomes too easy, people often feel restless or empty rather than fulfilled.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
Notice how controlled suffering can clear your mind.
Intense exercise, rock climbing, combat sports, or even consensual BDSM can temporarily wipe out everyday rumination by demanding total focus, functioning as a kind of shortcut to the ‘in-the-moment’ state people also seek via meditation.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
Be wary of how signaling shapes your public views.
Much of what people say—especially online—doubles as a performance of identity and moral purity, which compresses nuance; in safer, longer conversations you can explore mixed, atypical, or uncertain views far more honestly.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
Notable Quotes
“Empathy pushes you to the close, to the similar, and as moral reflective beings, we say, ‘We could do better than that.’”
— Paul Bloom
“What we want in friends is not somebody to multiply our sadness, but somebody to replace it with happiness.”
— Paul Bloom
“There’s no such thing as not giving a shit. There’s just signaling you don’t give a shit.”
— Paul Bloom
“If there’s one thing we know, it’s that a propensity to break the world up into us versus them comes natural.”
— Paul Bloom
“If you told me about something you did and you said, ‘It was easy-peasy, no pain at all,’ I would guarantee you you’re not gonna take much of value from it.”
— Paul Bloom
Questions Answered in This Episode
How can individuals in high-emotion helping professions practically cultivate compassion while dialing down empathy to avoid burnout?
Chris Williamson interviews Yale psychologist Paul Bloom about empathy, morality, tribalism, and why we sometimes seek out suffering. ...
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
If empathy is biased and tribal, what concrete mechanisms should governments or institutions use to make more impartial moral decisions?
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
Where exactly should we draw the moral line between acceptable in‑group favoritism (family, friends) and unjust discrimination (race, religion, nationality)?
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
In your upcoming work on suffering, how do you distinguish between ‘good’ self-chosen suffering that builds meaning and harmful suffering that people should avoid?
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
Could structured practices like meditation ever fully substitute for intense physical or painful experiences (BDSM, extreme sports) in providing escape from self-consciousness?
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
Transcript Preview
Some people think that the, the modern notion of race isn't something we've had for that long. But certainly breaking the world up into us versus them-
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
... um, and liking the us and really hating-
(laughs)
... the them i- is natural. There's, there's now tons of studies, including from babies, but also from young children, cross-cultural studies, computer simulations of biological evolution. If there's one thing we know, my field knows, it's that a propensity to break the world up into us versus them, um, comes natural. So there's even these very clever study. You get 100 people in a room, you know, like you and me, and we all have a coin, and we all flip our coin. So roughly half is heads, half is tails, go into different parts of the room. Then we ask, "So what do you guys think... You're tails. What do you think of the tails group?" They think, "We're smarter."
(laughs)
Even put- putting myself aside, it so happens the tails group is smarter. The heads group, you seem to have like a, a bunch of ****** over there. Like, who, who likes them?
(laughs)
And, and even the, you know, the most arbitrary ways of cutting us apart sets up psychological mechanisms where, where we, where we split the world.
I'm joined by Professor Paul Bloom. Paul, welcome to the show.
Thank you so much for having me.
It's a pleasure to have you on. Eh, been listening to a lot of your work recently, some fantastic interviews with Sam Harris, some podcasts that you did a little while ago. But, um, some super interesting stuff. We've been talking about empathy and about resilience a lot on the show. Recently discussed Eliud Kipchoge's, uh, sub-two-hour marathon performance-
Oh, yeah.
... which was a, a very resilient, uh, physical feat that people have seen. Um, so we got a lot, a lot to delve into today. But how would you describe the work that you do if someone hadn't met you before and, and didn't know you?
So I'm interested in... I'm a psychology professor at Yale, and I'm interested in human nature. And so my work goes from topic to topic, and they're kind of related. Um, broadly, I'm interested in pleasure, what we like, why we like it. I'm really interested in morality. Um, how do we explain our intuitions about good and evil? Um, how do we explain our, our, our, um, who we hate, who we admire, and what kind of moral judgments are good for us? Like, how should we think morally? And there, my work kind of blends into, into philosophy. And that was my most recent book, Against, Against Empathy. And, um, and I'm interested in a cluster of things. I'm interested in the self. I'm interested in, um, how we think about, uh, things that aren't like us, like robots or, um, non-human animals. Uh, interested in religion, where religious belief comes from. Most recently, I've been interested in suffering. So I have a kind of dream job where I, you know, I get (laughs) , I get paid perfectly fine to, uh, to just ask some really cool questions and my students and my colleagues work on them.
Install uListen to search the full transcript and get AI-powered insights
Get Full TranscriptGet more from every podcast
AI summaries, searchable transcripts, and fact-checking. Free forever.
Add to Chrome