Make the First Move

Peter Kinderman if AI rolls out in the way that we're talking about, nobody will date, nobody will have sex, there'll be no babies,

Hilary Jeffs Hello, and welcome to Experience, the weekly podcast where we get to psychoanalyse the news. If you, like us, are obsessed with the news cycle and also what makes people tick, then don't keep it to yourself. Tell your friends to like and subscribe as well, because that's how we can keep our podcast going. Each week we romp through those headlines. We're gonna be talking about the AI-mageddon that's coming our way. Is it the end of the world as we know it, or is it just the end of the world full stop? Anyway, enough depression. We'll come onto that. We've got the new bereavement laws that will be coming into place next year to give you some time off if someone close to you does unfortunately pass away, rights that you haven't previously had. And we'll be talking about Burnham and Trump, and are these leaders, and crucially the media, finally standing up to a bully? But of course, I cannot do this on my own. I could not bring you such concepts of the week or Triple T, the tips to try. For that we have the one and only, the wonderful professor of psychology, Peter Kinderman. Hello, how are you?

Peter Kinderman I'm very well, thank you. Yep, lots to talk about and feeling good

Hilary Jeffs Good. I'm feeling good because it was Strictly at the weekend, and I'm a bit of a fan. How about you?

Peter Kinderman Yeah. Well, I, yeah, I enjoy it. I find some of it quite irritating. There are bits that I'd kind of like them to do less of, and I find the kind of... Yeah, no talking. And, is it Craig where, you know, pantomime villain and just a bit boring. But, you know all in all,

Hilary Jeffs Craigie. He's a pussycat really. I'm quite liking the new lineup.

Peter Kinderman That's the thing, is just, meh

Hilary Jeffs Ah. But the new lineup, I thought they didn't do too badly for the first go. It wasn't a total car crash. I know people are a bit worried about Josh and his nose, but I reckon it'll all come good

Peter Kinderman I suspect that having, having watched Strictly on and off, I'm not, you know, obsessive over the years. I-- no, I'm not. I, the everything I say is at least within my own frame of reference what I believe to be at least proximal to

Hilary Jeffs Otherwise you'll be wearing the Clearly Not Really T-shirt I've bought you. We've gotta get you wearing that

Peter Kinderman No, not happening. Yeah, I think that the people have started to get kind of savvy and so they do a bit of practice first and, you know, so yeah, 'cause you don't wanna come down on the first day and look like an idiot. So I think people are doing a little bit of prep, but all good. Yeah,

Hilary Jeffs so when you watch it, do you get fully spangled up? A few sequins and

Peter Kinderman No, of course I don't. No, no, of course I don't. I

Hilary Jeffs for you then?

Peter Kinderman well, it's been known in the past, but not for, not for many years. No, no, a beer and a bag of crisps and then watching it. I have to say, members of my family do get up and kind of do it, and they kind of reach out their hands towards me, and then, then I kind of refuse, and then I, then I accede and then get very embarrassed. But, you know, that's the way it goes

Hilary Jeffs Oh, so we need to get some secret filming going on

Peter Kinderman We absolutely do

Hilary Jeffs household on

Peter Kinderman No, we,

Hilary Jeffs so you like dancing, 'cause it's really good for you, isn't it? It's really good for your wellbeing. So is it something you partake in?

Peter Kinderman Yeah. So this whole thing about dancing and Strictly i - is a little bit of a thing for me. So, I'm extremely self -conscious. I don't mind talking about things that I feel confident in, but I don't like talking about things I don't. So acting is n- never something that I've been near. The idea of putting on an act is kind of a th- an anathema to me. I know... And I've spent a lot of time with actors, and some of the things about actors is that they go, "If I'm given a script and a character, I can play that, but I wouldn't do what you do, Peter." And I go, "Well, I'm just standing up in front of 2,000 people and giving a lecture, and I know what I'm talking about." They go, "I wouldn't do that. I will play Hamlet." I go, "I wouldn't do that." So dancing is one of those things where I hate the idea of people looking at me and looking at my moves and looking at my body, and I don't feel very confident in understanding music and genre and people going, "God," and, "Don't you understand?" And I, you know... You'll put on something by Stone Roses, and I'll say that it's, I don't know you know, the Chippendales or something, and I'm just utterly... And then you get involved. And then what? You see people laugh. And then what?

Hilary Jeffs That's what I got to see now Well, you said it now. If that's what you're dancing

Peter Kinderman I meant the, I meant the two comedy chipmunks thing.

Hilary Jeffs Oh, A- oh,

Peter Kinderman The two comedy chipmunks,

Hilary Jeffs the Chipmunks

Peter Kinderman Alvin and the Chipmunks. Of course, two comedy chipmunks is Ant and Dec, and I'll probably get sued for that. But anyway. No, but the point is... And I did once go to a party. So when I was a lecturer at the University of Manchester, I went to a party of some of the students, and they were down in some basement and they were doing dancing. They go, "Come on, Peter, don't dance. Come and dance." And I went, "I never dance because when I dance people will laugh at me." And they went, "Of course people won't laugh at me." And then I danced, and then they laughed at me, and it was quite, it was quite unpleasant. I won't say traumatising. It was quite unpleasant. Anyway, on Friday I went to a friend's 50th birthday party, and it was the kind of South Manchester kind of people who've been through the Madchester scene, and it was at

Hilary Jeffs Now the whistles. Whoop, whoop.

Peter Kinderman of

Hilary Jeffs Yep.

Peter Kinderman that. And m- m- m- m- and I was just, I was just quite happy. I was in a very happy place, and I was just at the back and I was going, "But..." And I... It was just great, and the music was great, and I was just... And I thought, "I'm not..." And then the DJ, 'cause they were quite a well-known combo that kind of like have a little bit of a scene in Manchester. And

Hilary Jeffs Peter, you are sh- such a dark horse

Peter Kinderman so I went up to him and I went, "Really great set." And he goes, "Yeah." He goes, "You were dancing all night, weren't you?" And I just go, "Well, I was kind of swaying at the back." He goes, "I was using you as my reference point." And I thought, "Bloody hell, that's, that's,..." So apparently when I put my har- arms up in the air, he... I thought, "Whoa,

Hilary Jeffs Like you just don't care. Yeah, you are the man.

Peter Kinderman And then of course I got terribly embarrassed and made it all go horribly wrong. So there you go

Hilary Jeffs Yeah, unfortunately I was dancing at a wedding once, and when people watched the video back they all laughed. And since then, guess what? I don't dance anymore. That's my USP. I don't dance at a party

Peter Kinderman yeah, I m- I might do it more next time. Who knows? Depends how drunk I am.

Hilary Jeffs now, and we are definitely getting some secret filming. Also, this week, just hot off the press, is the Booker shortlist.

Peter Kinderman Yes

Hilary Jeffs Yeah, and there is a book that you and I definitely need to be watch- to be reading. And I'm already giving away that in a bid for me to win the reading race, I've already started listening to it on Spotify. the book is Black Bag by Luke Kennard, and it's basically a psychology professor, you can see why I'm interested, who gets an actor to live in a bag in the classroom. What is going on? Do you know about this experiment? Have you heard about this experiment? Apparently, it was, Charles Goetzinger's Basic Persuasion lectures at Oregon State University in the late '60s, where he was testing Robert Zajonc's mere exposure effect, which is that just by being in the proximity of something, you start to like it. That's what it's testing, and that's what the book is sort of riffing on, that experiment

Peter Kinderman So I briefly read last night, I read the Times Literary Supplement review of the book up to the point where it hit a paywall, whereupon being a cheapskate, I stopped. I do know about the Zajonc effect and, or Zajonc or however you pronounce it. It's really quite interesting, which is people work harder when they're in company. People work harder when they're observed, and animals work harder when... And I seem to remember, and I might have hallucinated this, but I seem to remember that Zajonc did it with cockroaches running up s-slopes of panes of glass, and the cockroaches run faster when there were two of them. Which makes sense 'cause I guess you're in competition for food, right? So the two, yeah. So yeah, so the observer effect, when you're observed, y-you work harder. You know, that's, that's what people do. So as I understand it from the TLS review, the novel is all about, that effect, and this Oregon State University professor did have somebody in a black bag standing or sitting or in some way present during his lectures, and all, all sorts of things followed. and I'll need to read the book in order to know more. The problem is if you and I read, or in your case, shamefully I have to say, lazily listened to the book, then and it doesn't win, then we've wasted our effort, haven't we? So, hmm. But

Hilary Jeffs Oh, surely not. You can't tell me that every book that doesn't win the Booker Prize is a waste of your time

Peter Kinderman I suppose to be fair, I suppose even getting on the long list would be something that I'd, I'd give one of my teeth for. So,

Hilary Jeffs Exactly right. Well, actually, you can really tell that Mary Beard was on the judging. She was the chair of the judges, I think, this year, because there seems to be a book about a student, a book about a professor, a book about a archivist in a museum. It seems to be really pulling on her expertise there.

Peter Kinderman I have...

Hilary Jeffs was on the panel, too

Peter Kinderman Oh, Jarvis Cocker. You see, I've met lots of people in my life, both professionally and just bumping into people. And I will at some point tell you my H-Helena Bonham Carter story whi-which I told her and made

Hilary Jeffs her. I... She is... No

Peter Kinderman Have I not told you my Helena Bonham Carter story? Right. So what I need to do is the only way to tell a Helena Bonham Carter story is to drop in my claim to fame with Helena Bonham Carter, and then leave it for a very long time before I explain why. W- this is the way that I explained it to her when I met her originally, which is that she did once rub her breasts against the back of my head. That's it. Anyway, anyway, the point

Hilary Jeffs I'm sure it wasn't wittingly, don't worry.

Peter Kinderman No, it was... But I could tell you, I could tell you why. So, but not now. So I was on a train once and I saw Mary Beard, and I thought, "Eh." So I've, like I say, I've met lots of famous people and I'm, "Oh, oh, oh." And it was the only time when I went up to her and went, "I'm a bit of a fan." And she went, "Good." And

Hilary Jeffs Yeah, absolutely. But she came under a lot of fire for her breasts, didn't she? Because she had them free-flowing when she was on TV, and I just thought it's shameful, isn't it? That that's the focus of the critics, is not what a good acad- acad- I can't even say the word. What a good historian she is. We'll go for that word instead. It was all about how she looked because she didn't conform to their idea of what a woman should look like on the television. Shameful. Shameful. Anyway, Helena Bonham Carter,

Peter Kinderman L- no, another time

Hilary Jeffs If we're, if we're doing that, can you give me some notice? Because that is definitely a red wine moment. I might break my cardinal sin of drinking whilst actually recording.

Peter Kinderman there is problem

Hilary Jeffs happen. Right. Moving swiftly on, we need your concept of the week, Peter

Peter Kinderman the bi-- the concept of the week is the bystander effect or bystander apathy. And weirdly, it links to Zajonc, being observed. And it's, it comes from a nasty bit of psychology. It's one of these sort of psychology things where when you delve into it might not quite have been exactly as it was presented. But the bystander effect or the bystander apathy is the idea that when things are going on, i-if there's more than one person observing, then people don't tend to intervene. So there was a murder where the story is that a woman was murdered, and lots of people were aware that something was going on and nobody called the police. That's, that's the [unclear]. And then people took it forward and started investigating it in various ways. And several things happened from this that we understand in psychology to be, you know, on the balance of probabilities and more likely than not, this is what happens. Which is when people, like for instance, on the tube and somebody's being harassed or assaulted on the tube nobody steps in to help. People walk past. And then it gets a little bit more interesting, which is, I mean, one of the interesting tangents is if there's somebody dressed as Batman, then people do step in to help. But the other thing which is very interesting is that, so they staged this with students, and you'd have a student, and then a student con-collaborator would get assaulted, and another student would be observing and just... The student would play the part of the victim, and a p- student would play the part of the... And see what happened. They did it on, I think in America on the underground system, and people tend to like not do anything. And there's various theories about why, and one of them is that if you observe everybody else not reacting, you pick up the message that to react is not the social cue. nobody's reacting, so I won't react. I was taught this when I became a lecturer by the people in health and safety, where they go, "If the fire alarm goes off, all the students will wait to see what you do. Leave the bloody room

Hilary Jeffs Yeah. No,

Peter Kinderman pick up the cue

Hilary Jeffs and it's interesting, as a woman, they tell you if you're attacked to shout fire and not rape, because people are more likely to come if there's a fire

Peter Kinderman Woya

Hilary Jeffs than if you shout rape. I don't know if that's true, but that's certainly what I was told as a young woman

Peter Kinderman I've, I've, I've heard that advice as well. I don't, I don't know whether it's true or not. What I-- What follows from the research into the bystander effect and bystander apathy is another rather interesting thing, which is because people are waiting for the social cue and because they see everybody else hanging back, they hang back. But if somebody steps forward, chances are they will be supported by everybody else.

Hilary Jeffs Yep.

Peter Kinderman So it's a, it's a, it's a funny phenomenon and it, and it leads to some obvious implications about how we should conduct ourselves in public life, I think.

Hilary Jeffs One time my teenage son was off in Brighton with some friends and then came back to me after it got dark. I was waiting in a pub in Brighton for him to arrive, and he came back. He was in a real fluster that he'd just seen a homeless woman be punched in the face, and I insisted that we went back. And he was like, "No, there were loads of people there. There were police all around." I said, "No one is looking at a homeless woman. We have to go back and see if she's okay," because, you know, especially when there's so many people using around there, that actually a punch can be really serious, can't it? So we found who we thought was the woman, and spent a lot of time talking to her friend who was, you know, obviously very protective, and someone else was coming over, and he was protecting us from them. But I thought it was really interesting that I would not leave until I'd seen her breathe. Because no one else was caring. No one else was looking. It was like they were entirely invisible, so I completely get what you're saying, that you have to just step in, don't you, and try and encourage others to do the same. That's a really interesting concept, Peter, and hopefully it gives people a lot of food for thought about what to do as well going forward. If we go onto our first headline, this is a headline that is full of jeopardy for me. AI-mageddon, you know, the end of the world. Not only have we had the tech bros now sort of calling out that maybe there needs to be some regulation. We've had Trump wade in saying, you know, it shouldn't be even called AI, it should be called super intelligence or bigly intelligence or whatever that man has said, and it doesn't need regulation. And then I listened to sorry for the pedantry, The Rest Is Politics. Rory Stewart has done a special with a historian, Harari. Oh, my Lord. The parallels they're drawing between the Aztecs when they were wiped out by just a few hundred people is terrifying, and I got the jitters. And the second episode of this thing is behind a paywall, and I'm not signing up even though I kind of want to do it because it's made me entirely inert psychologically. I mean, this is even harder than climate change. When we talked about climate change, you were saying about how every individual must do what they feel is the right thing to do for the good of humanity and not think about the big picture. But in this case, there's nothing we can do about it. We're entirely at the whim of these super rich people, aren't we, just taking over? help me.

Peter Kinderman Well, there's, there's always things that we can do. I mean, been-- I'm not sure that I would, I'm not sure that it would be appropriate to encourage anything that even veers towards illegality. But of course around here around Manchester in the time of the early phase of the, Industrial Revolution, there were the Luddites who were breaking weaving machines. there are things that we can do. And

Hilary Jeffs But they didn't win, did they? It wasn't the Luddites who won that whole

Peter Kinderman No, and

Hilary Jeffs Or indeed, if you look globally, the countries that didn't embrace it didn't

Peter Kinderman Yeah. And you can also, you know, look at kind of Marxist analysis of history and think, you know, unfettered capitalism tends to harm people and regulation is necessary and lack of regulation is bad. And those countries that, like the Nordic countries that embrace technology and heavily regulate it tend to be the ones that do best because, you know, if I were to be very, very rich and if I were to have a menagerie and if I were to have tigers in my menagerie, I'd probably want to spend some of my enormous wealth on making sure that the fences are secure. You know? If you're gonna have something lovely, you need to have some regulations to look after it. And if we're gonna have artificial intelligence, which we clearly are, then it makes sense to regulate it because that's what a sensible person does with something very powerful

Hilary Jeffs but when you talk about the very rich man with the tiger enclosure, it makes me think of a very rich man who had a submersible going down to the Titanic. And, you know, people want things, and do they put the safety measures in place? And I'm not making any judgment about that particular case, but it just brought it to mind

Peter Kinderman but my point is that I can imagine a world in which, it, is, it's dreadful and I have the same conversations that everybody else has about both the extraordinary, I mean, almost transcendental nature of artificial intelligence. You know, the idea that not only am, am I no longer a member of the species that is the most intelligent thing in the universe or even on this planet, but also those things that are most intelligent... We now know that the most intelligent things in the universe aren't even, aren't even organic. It's just an extraordinary time to be alive and it propels us into the realms almost beyond anything that science fiction writers have thought about. It's, it's just an extraordinary time to be alive, you know, whatever that means. but I don't think that means it's, it's inevitable. I think there are things-- I can imagine worlds in which, we have taken steps in order to regulate it. I was reading over the weekend about the Lavender project coming out of, Israeli military intelligence, where they're using artificial intelligence to target people and to make decisions about how many civilians will be killed if they do a targeted or indeed untargeted strike on the target that they've identified. and there were interviews with human operators of the system who were very explicit in saying, "My role is to take the decision from the algorithm, press yes, whatever that is, and then it happens." So all I am is I'm not actually enacting a decision in this matrix. The artificial intelligence is doing the killing. I'm just an inevitable step in the cogs that lead to it, and that's quite frightening

Hilary Jeffs situation. Yes, and indeed, that's one of the things that they think rather than AI perhaps, you know, weaponising a bioweapon and killing us all out like that, or setting on fire a nuclear power station, that actually it's the enfeeblement of the human race that might actually happen, that actually we become someone who defers all our thinking to the AI. 'Cause they've done a study of these radiographers, I think this was about 2023, and they told the radiographers that the mammograms they were gonna look at had already been looked at by an AI system that was there, a diagnosis tool. So they thought and expected AI to have looked at these. And when the AI was correct, or what they thought was AI was correct, they agreed with that diagnosis 80% of the time. But when the AI was wrong, and they purposefully made it, the algorithm, so it would be wrong on occasions, they only disagreed with it 20% of the time. So they literally outsourced their brain and put more weight on the artificial intelligence than their own thinking to decide whether things were right or wrong

Peter Kinderman And that's terrifying and problematic in all sorts of levels. However, it-- the immediate connection I made in my mind was with a conversation I had with a, with a colleague in the field of mental health. And, we were talking about staff, and obviously I have my views on mental health, and we were talking, we were talking, and he goes, "Well, very interesting," he goes. so he had some interesting letters after his name, and he goes, "I have served for over 10 years as the chair of mental health review tribunals." And I-- in the, in the region where we worked, he was the most senior person who chaired mental health review tribunals. And he says, "In all of that time that I sat on the mental health tribunal, we have never once ever disagreed with the psychiatrist." Now, there's no artificial intelligence in this. It's just people outsourcing their decisions to, "We'll, we'll just, we'll just rubber stamp it." So is it worse that the radiographers are rubber stamping the decision of AI than, for instance, in this case, a legally empowered senior member of our civic society rubber stamping the decision of... Meh.

Hilary Jeffs I think it's a very dangerous slope to not question things generally. I really like to question things. I think that's something you and I might have in common. For all our differences, I think you and I might be argumentative people,

Peter Kinderman Yeah. Well, yeah. Oh,

Hilary Jeffs maybe

Peter Kinderman yeah, always disagree. And you can disagree with the fundamental principles. I remember, I, yeah, just, just fundamentally disagreeing with the, with the idea o-of there being things called limited companies that own things. And I, remember having a dinner with somebody where I was going, you know, I work for the University of Liverpool. The University of Liverpool exists. It owns land. It owns buildings. Who owns it? And mmm, I go, "Well, so we have invented a system where there are things that own things, and those things aren't owned." And we-- it's like the conversation about the turtles sitting on a pile of turtles all the way down, is we've invented a system which can be questioned in its own logic. I was also talking about the way that Sharia loans and Sharia mortgages work, and,... But I didn't mention it was Sharia because that leads to racism issues. And, you know, there are different way... So people will say things like, "You know, but I've borrowed the money." And I go, "Well, there are different ways of doing borrowing," and people don't understand that you can question all sort... The thing about artificial intelligence, going back a step, is there are many ways in which human beings could be threatened by it. I'm not particularly worried by the idea of it threatening the evolution of the human species. I am worried about autonomous robots shooting me because I failed to score appropriately on an algorithm that either the Russians or the Israelis, or indeed Elon Musk would do. I mean, I have had conversations with people whereby, you know, I know that if I personally living now were living in the era of 1930s Nazi Germany, I would be off to a concentration camp because I don't meet their algorithm for the sort of person who would be allowed to. If the AI bots used that algorithm, then I would be farmed for my meat. Not that I have much anymore. If on the other, if on the other hand, the AI bots decided that Barack Obama was the ideal person to emulate, which I think he probably is, then that would be brilliant

Hilary Jeffs would disagree with you on his war crime and his sort of deportation

Peter Kinderman but Hilary, y- your kids are incorrect. He is obviously the person that we want to have. But, you know, if you take the Al- the Turing thing and you produce the universal machine, and they decide that the brain that they're going to emulate is Barack Obama's, I'd quite like Barack Obama's brain to be... You know, w- when the Amazon delivery truck turns up at my house and there's nobody in, and they don't know what to do with the package, if Barack Obama were to make that decision, then happy days. If the cat needed feeding and the AI home controller were thinking, "Oh, what do we do about the cat?" And it was Barack Obama's brain that was doing it, happy days. If it was B-

Hilary Jeffs honest, if Barack Obama just in person turned up and delivering me a parcel, I'd say, "Hello, would you like a cup of tea? Maybe something

Peter Kinderman exactly. I think I'm off

Hilary Jeffs like to spend some time? I definitely think you are..." Well, you haven't done anything to make me feel better about this existential threat. Because on the one hand, I'm sitting here going, "Perhaps people in the poorest countries, the least developed countries, will actually be the ones that fare better out of this." That actually what might happen as a result of this is that we all have to turn this tech off in order to be able to know what is real. But then of course, climate change is gonna come in and kill all those people, so we're all doomed.

Peter Kinderman so here's the answer, which is, okay, all of this might be true and it really doesn't matter. So back in sort of psychology, sort of philosophy, there was the Descartes thing, where Descartes came up with cogito ergo sum. I know that I'm alive. I know that I exist. It's the only thing I know, but I know I exist, and people debate it backwards and forwards and all sorts of stuff. But one of the things about that is you reduce things down to what could I possibly know? And I was having a conversation with a- an extraordinarily intelligent person a few years ago, and we were debating this and debating that and debating the other. And she said... Well, a modern version of it would be, what if you are in fact not a human being, that you don't exist in any sense, but what you actually are, you don't realise, a bit like "Blade Runner," you don't realise, you do not know that what you are in fact is a character in somebody else's video game. What should you do? And the answer to that is you should play the game to the best of your ability.

Hilary Jeffs Yeah.

Peter Kinderman That's, that's not only what you should do, it's what you've been programmed to do. We had this conversation, you and I, about climate change, which is, "Oh my good God," or maybe it's not happening. But the answer is, when it comes to should you or should you not rack up your central heating to a higher level of heating. You might, you might not. There's nothing inherently wrong about either of those decisions. What you should do is make that decision bearing in mind the situation as you understand it. And if you believe, as I do, that the world is, that the global world is under threat because human-made products are poisoning the atmosphere, I should make that decision about my central heating in the light of that knowledge. Off you go. And you always can. So if you're terrified by AI, well, yeah, I agree, but it doesn't change the fundamental job of you as a human being, which is take that information and make the best possible decision. If Russian Spetsnaz drop out of the sky just over there, because I live very close to Manchester Airport, what I need to do at that point is make the best possible decision that I can. And at the moment, my car has got a reasonably full charge. I'll go and pick up children, and I shall drive to a small house in Wales that I happen to know about, which is incidentally, I also know where to get a gun. So I,

Hilary Jeffs You are the man to know.

Peter Kinderman am the man to know. So I have a plan. I hope it doesn't happen. I'm fatalistic. I'll probably die. But I-- the point is, if the situation is terrible, then accept the fact that the situation is terrible and make the best possible decision. A bit like we were talking last week about end-of-life decisions. I really hope that today I don't have a searing pain somewhere in my body, go to see a doctor, and the doctor t- gives me very, very, very bad news. But if they do, I'll make the best decision in the light of the circumstances that I see. I did not know about the Israeli government's Lavender program until two days ago. Now I do. That shifts my algorithm. But it's still the same thing, which is given the world in which I live, what's the best possible decision I can make right now? And I would vote for people other than Donald Trump having input into how we regulate artificial intelligence.

Hilary Jeffs Yeah, well Burnham is backing, according to his, UN General Assembly chat last night, he seems to be backing the idea that no, we don't become an AI rival superpower, that actually our role could be a role to be a policeman of the AI of the world. I'm sure he thinks this is a shortcut for us having some control over it at a, at a reduced price no doubt. but that was his take on it, and indeed he had his first meeting face-to-face with Trump, and it didn't go terribly, although obviously he's had to give up the Chagos Islands in order for, the Falklands to be protected by Trump, I think. I can only see that is why he's saying that the Chagos Islands is back on the table for negotiation, is because of Trump having said that he thought the Falklands Islands possibly should be not ours anymore. Well,

Peter Kinderman it's also possible that-- I mean, one of the ways to handle it... Well, if in a world that I cannot imagine turning into reality, the UK government were to approach me and say, "As a psychologist, we're obviously not gonna follow your advice in any detail, but just to add to the pot, what psychological advice would you give about, about negotiating with Donald Trump?" What I would say is, "Oh yeah, no, actually, now you come to mention it, that's a really, really, really good tactic," which is when he says something outrageous, say, "Let's talk about it." Because, A, you can talk about it for a very long time, and you could use the tactic of going, "Absolutely. That's definitely 100%. I completely agree. That's definitely something that we should ask our officials to have a conversation about scheduling a time at which that could be something that might or might not be on the agenda for some other officials to produce some briefing papers for." But he's not got a very good memory, and he'll probably forget about it. And he's really interested in what he looks like on TV. So say yes, and then bury it the long grass

Hilary Jeffs for him.

Peter Kinderman I was chairing committee meetings, I used to... If something was on the table that I really liked, I'd say, "Yes, who's going to act on it today?" And if it was something on the table that I really didn't like, I'd go, "Yes, who's going to take this forward for further discussions?"

Hilary Jeffs Mm-hmm. Absolutely. No, it's one of the things you absolutely have to do, and that's a really good tactic. But they're all learning how to handle him better, aren't they? Carney, I think, was the first leader really to get the measure of the man, and he's just been hilarious talking to the EU. Did you hear him talk about how he doesn't want to create a third power block just to rule other people, but with better manners? And a direct hit at Trump. That was just hilarious. But he doesn't... He stands up to this bully, doesn't he?

Peter Kinderman When he does, and he stands up to it in a, in a way which I hope Burnham is going to do, which i- which is to say als- okay, I've heard you, but my principles are... That's, that's a very good way. I really like the American press pool's approach, which is he goes, "Yeah, you're all fake news. You can all sod off." And they go, "Okay then. What we'll do is we'll broadcast five minutes of the noise of a helicopter engine and see if you like that then."

Hilary Jeffs Yes, but how long has it taken the US press pool to finally unite behind the fact that he has kicked out the CNN and all the rest of it, who are now suing him for kicking them out? It's taken him to do that, and however many years that man has now been in office, before they've taken action. It's, to me, disgraceful that they didn't stand up every time he was so misogynistic to a female reporter, and rude to their face. And it was mostly women.

Peter Kinderman It was mostly women. Absolutely. And I mean, what... It's only a small point in agreement with your bigger point, but one of the things that I was slightly disappointed about is that politicians use this thing of access. So if you're a journalist and you want to serve the interests of the public, you make one decision. If you want to serve your own career interests, it's really useful to have access. So they basically threaten and bribe you with access, and I think the journalists should've been bigger than that and said, "Look, it's in my interest to have access to the mechanisms of power in the White House, but you're bribing me and I'm not gonna go for it."

Hilary Jeffs Well, everyone did it, didn't they? Because we had the kowtowing from legal firms who didn't stand up to him when he started throwing his weight around, and indeed the media more generally when he was kicking his weight around. Everyone kowtowed. Even the universities did as well, didn't

Peter Kinderman Oh, the universities did. And incidentally, because I'm a fan of them, the BBC didn't. They looked like they

Hilary Jeffs Yeah. No, that was great

Peter Kinderman fine, fine. Let's go for disclosure." that's, that's, that's obviously a way to

Hilary Jeffs Yeah, no, the BBC did play a blinder with that when he was suing us, or, I think he still is suing us to be absolutely fair.

Peter Kinderman I think that the lawsuit is going on, but I think he's trying to wriggle out of disclosure of his presumably illegal fi- financial arrangements. I don't

Hilary Jeffs Maybe, but I mean, obviously if they're not illegal, what's he got to lose by disclosing them, Peter? That would be my response to that. So quickly, just before we go on, do you always stand up to a bully? Is that the only way to handle a bully?

Peter Kinderman No. No, no, I don't always ha- stand up to a bully. So I've been physically assaulted badly, broke my nose, long-term consequences, once, and it was completely out of the blue. I was walking down the street in Leeds and somebody thumped me in the face. What I then what s- did, which was a mistake, was I then sort of got myself kind of vaguely to my f- to my elbows and said, "You bastard," where he probably came back and kicked me in the head, which was a mistake. and it was... It's quite bad. And then various things happened after that. No, if I'm, if I'm in a, if I'm in a pub, or in a, in a club and somebody spins round and go... And says, I won't say what they would say, but was, is rude to me, I would say, "Yes, you're absolutely right. I am exactly like that. Here, have a tenner. The drink's on me. It's my fault." Of course, I won't stand up to a bully. I'm not an idiot. I don't feel like I have to go through some sort of performative male shit in order to feel good about myself. I'll get out of the system in a way that gets out. I will stand up for other people. I'll absolutely stand up for other people, but no, it doesn't matter to me at all. So not always, no, and if the best thing to do is to accept liability and wriggle out in a humiliating fashion, then I'll accept liability and wriggle out in a humiliating fashion, 'cause that's the best thing to do.

Hilary Jeffs understandable.

Peter Kinderman And it's the same thing. It's exactly the same message, and I think that, you know, as I'm getting older in life, my kind of rules for dealing with things are boiling down to one simple rule, which is, I'll appraise the situation as best I can and make my best judgment about it, and sometimes that's standing up to a bully and sometimes that's running away

Hilary Jeffs Yeah, no, I couldn't agree more with you. As a woman, I think, we all understand exactly where you're coming from there, so absolutely. Gosh, I'm really sorry, Peter, that's a horrible thing to have happened to you. If we just move then on to the third and final headline, which is about the bereavement rights that have come in. Now, this really demonstrated to me how flipping privileged I am, frankly. The fact that there needs to be a law for someone to take two weeks unpaid leave to grieve someone that they love. Frankly, I was, I was kind of just so disappointed in the world that that needs to be mandated. That actually as an employee you can't just go to your boss and say, "Do you know what? My stepbrother died last night. I really need to take some time," and that they would be so begrudging of that time that it has to be mandated in law. Ugh, it really made... Left me with a bad taste in my mouth, frankly, about the state of workforces and what they have to deal with

Peter Kinderman Oh, absolutely. And I also was surprised. I'm also surprised incidentally about, you know, quite a lot of these sorts of changes about things like zero hours contracts and so forth, that you... We see politicians going through a lot of arguments about whether it's good and whether it's bad, and whether they can afford it, and then what comes in is that you have a right to ask. Not, not a right to demand, a right to ask. And yeah, and what it, what it told me was that I think, I mean, generally I'm with the philosopher A.C. Grayling, that we are moving forward. I think people like, well, people like Hitler, but people like Trump are steps back in our generally sawtooth-like progression as a civilisation. but we haven't moved quite to where we need to be yet, and it reminded me of, you know, the struggle of the trade unions to move us as... Because I don't come from a privileged background in the slightest. My parents were very, you know, solidly working class. The trade union movement as worldwide has moved us a little bit from being physical human commodities of oligarchs to being citizens with rights, and we're moving there, but we're n- we're, we're not there yet. So the idea that a worker is y- you know, is a, is a collective member of a cooperative organisation that takes in raw materials and produces finished products, we're nowhere near yet. We're, we're just, we're just cogs in the machinery of the m- of the machine that's owned by others

Hilary Jeffs I mean, interestingly, I wasn't surprised that it needed to be mandated for women and indeed par- you know, partners of women who've had a miscarriage under 24 weeks, because there's been such a seismic shift in how women who've h- suffered a miscarriage have been treated. I mean, it's not that long ago when it was sort of like, "Don't look at the baby. Don't talk about the baby. Get up, move on. Don't think about it." You know, there was a real approach of kind of nothing to see here, just get up and get on, and not, not take any time to grieve at all. So that is, I think, probably something that definitely did need to be mandated and wasn't thought about. But of course, you know, it's so common now to have step relationships, isn't it? And half siblings and, you know, of course there are people in your life, and recognising those wonderful carers who look after people, you know, who don't have any rights over these children, but you know, really look after them as though they're their own. There's... I know some splendid people who've taken on children. It's, it's amazing

Peter Kinderman Yeah. And I think this conversation about bereavement rights and about employment rights generally relates to the artificial intelligence thing. As a, as a species, as a, as a world, we're plenty rich enough. We- we, I mean, our worries, you know, the worries about migration are these people are taking our jobs. Well, there's plenty... The, there's, there's more than enough wealth to go around. We- we- we should all be working one-day weeks. You know, the idea that you could give somebody two weeks off so that they could care for themselves, we've got plenty of workers, we've got plenty of slots for employment, we've got plenty of money, we've got plenty of food, we've got plenty of resources. That's not the problem that we have. The problem that we have is in distributing it, allocation of it. Yeah.

Hilary Jeffs Yeah, absolutely. No, I

Peter Kinderman There is absolutely no reason at all why anybody on this planet should be hungry or cold. Absolutely no reason at all. It's just a question of how we allocate it. So if what people are saying is, "I don't want to give you two weeks off because I would prefer you to be working, making me enough profit so I can buy a shinier Porsche next year," well, stuff that. That's, that's not the game that we should be playing.

Hilary Jeffs No, absolutely not. Moving on then. Our triple T before we wrap up for the week, Peter, what is your tip to try this week?

Peter Kinderman So it's, it's make the first move. And this is true if you're in, if you're in the subway and you see somebody being inso- assaulted, chances are you're not part of a covert psychological experiment to deal with bystander apathy, but you just might be. And chances are, I mean, it's possible that you'll step forward and everybody else will continue to demonstrate bystander apathy, but, you know, at least you've done the right thing. And I'll, I'll come to A&E to while the doctors are patching up your wounds and tell you that you've, you've done morally the right thing and that you get a medal for virtue ethics. No, we should, we should do the right thing because broadly speaking, people wait to receive cues from others, and you can do cues. it is

Hilary Jeffs be a leader, not just a follower

Peter Kinderman Just be a leader and just go, "Right, let's go." and that's it. Interestingly, it also relates to... And I hope I've got time to explain this. So I think it might even have been where it's related to stuff that Alan Turing was doing. But in games theory, one of the questions, and I need to be very careful not, not, not to say the wrong thing here, but one of the questions is that, you know, if you're thinking about finding a partner, you obviously want the best partner possible. And if you reduce, which I don't think is right, but psychologists who get involved in these sorts of things tend to think in rather brutalist sort of ways. If you reduce it down to what steps can I take to ensure that I get the highest quality partner that I could possibly get? Then you have a conversation, something like this. So you're sitting in a bar and you're looking at people in the bar, and you're thinking, "Out of all the people in this bar, could we rank order them in terms of attractiveness?" And you go, "Yes, I could." And they go, "Where would you put yourself?" And you go, "I'm not a Z, but I'm probably a P or a Q. But I'd really quite like to go out with somebody who's an A or a B. But there's no point in me asking for an A and a B 'cause I'm a P or a Q. So what I'll do," you say, "is I'll try to identify a fellow P and then I'll ask that person out."

Hilary Jeffs Well

Peter Kinderman and a, and a clever algorithmic computational psychologist will go, "No. Ask the person who- who's an A." Because first of all, as long as you don't care too much, if the answer's no, you're only back where you were. So the... And what you wanna do is work your way down the list systematically, A, B, C, D, E. If you end up at Q, you're only where you thought you were, and the chances are you'd be a lot higher up the list than Q. So the answer for dating is find the person that you really like and ask them out. Don't say, "I'm not good enough. I'll, I'll aim low." Just go to the top and work down. Apply to the best

Hilary Jeffs this quickly, that sounds very much like a male attitude, and I'll tell you why. Because I knew someone who was a producer for one of those shows. It wasn't Love Island, but those sorts of dating shows that you get lots of young people together. And systematically what they do is they put better-looking girls than men in those places, because girls will go down and don't mind what someone looks like, and men always wanna punch up

Peter Kinderman Well, the thing is that I w- what I was hoping for w- was to find a amusing and kind of like socially relevant example of kind of just do it and g- go first. If what you do is you wait, and if what you do is aim low, then the, then the only thing you can possibly do is get what you feared you might get. Whereas you, if you act first and aim high, then... But you have to deal with the fact that you might get disappointed, but, you know, that's okay. So I would say act first, do it now. There's always a possibility that the person that you're intervening will, will turn around and punch you and nobody else in the tube carriage will help. That's always a possibility, but you'll have done the right thing. And of course, there is a possibility like happened with my daughter once where, where I happen to know that somebody asked her whether he could buy her a drink, and she looked at him and went, "Why?" Which is a bit humiliating, but you'll get over it

Hilary Jeffs Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. That reminds me of Patience, which was a great program about an autistic character, and she's asked out, and she's like, "Well, I don't like coffee," or something like that. You know, just kind of like, what on earth are you doing? No absolutely. So you have to be quite tough. If you're gonna put yourself out in the real world, 'cause we all know that people don't date in the real world anymore, it's apps only. Loads of different conversations before they meet in person, and then there's no food apparently. First date always has to just be a coffee, a kind of-

Peter Kinderman so I've just realised this is why AI is a threat. If AI rolls out in the way that we're talking about, nobody will date, nobody will have sex, there'll be no babies,

Hilary Jeffs It's already down. Apparently that whole scrolling at nighttime is stopping everyone doing something else at nighttime. So it's already having an impact. Anyway, thank you very much for a lovely week, Peter. We'll see you next week for a romp through more headlines and into the psychology of people's minds. Have a good week The Experience Podcast is hosted by Hilary Jeffs and Peter Kinderman, produced by James Jones at Granary Digital. You can find us on social media and you can get in touch by email at hello@experiencepodco.com with any questions or comments or topics you'd like us to cover. And don't forget to leave us a review.