Modern Wisdom - #486 - Gurwinder Bhogal - 14 Mental Models To Understand Human Nature

Episode Date: June 13, 2022

Gurwinder Bhogal is a programmer and a writer. Gurwinder is one of my favourite Twitter follows. He’s written another monstrous thread exploring human nature, cognitive biases, mental models, status games, crowd behaviour and social media. It's one of the best things I've read this year, so I just had to bring him on. Expect to learn why stupidity is more dangerous than evil, why most content has to appeal to midwits, why political debates are essentially mass-scaled ventriloquizism, how lower stakes lead to more vicious arguments, why the word retard is a strange choice as an unspeakable slur, why being a mess is more likeable than being perfect and much more… Sponsors: Join the Modern Wisdom Community to connect with me & other listeners - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Get 2 weeks Free Access to the State App at https://bit.ly/statewisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 2 weeks free access to Wondrium by going to https://www.wondrium.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and Free Shipping from Athletic Greens at https://athleticgreens.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Follow Gurwinder on Twitter - https://twitter.com/G_S_Bhogal Gurwinder's MegaThread: https://twitter.com/G_S_Bhogal/status/1527720869191114756  Subscribe to Gurwinder’s Substack: https://gurwinder.substack.com/  Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Gwinda Bogle, he's a programmer and a writer. Gwinda is one of my favourite Twitter followers, he's written another monstrous thread exploring human nature, cognitive biases, mental models, status games, crowd behaviour and social media. It's one of the best things that I've read this year, so I decided to bring him on to get him to break down all of my favourite concepts. Expect to learn why stupidity is more dangerous than evil, why most content has to appeal to midwits, why political debates are essentially mass-scaled ventriloquism, how lower stakes lead to more vicious arguments, why the word retard is a strange choice as an unspeakable

slur, why being a mess is more likeable than being perfect? And much more. This guy is so good. If you don't follow him or subscribe to his sub-stack, I highly recommend that you do. I always learn so much stuff. And these episodes where we just break down a big list of interesting things

are some of my favorites. I really, really hope that you enjoy this one. Bit of an update from Modern Wisdom HQ. Andrew Huberman is finally confirmed on the show. I'm going to be recording with him out here in Austin at the end of the month and it's going to be with the full production crew that we had for Jordan Peterson so the whole thing's going to be filmed in 6K on Netflix, cinema cameras with gorgeous sound and lighting and production

and all of that stuff. This is going to be pretty special. I imagine we'll be publishing probably the start of July. So this is something very big and next week I've got an even bigger announcement about another new guest coming. So stay tuned for that. But now ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Gwinda Bogle. As is tradition you write these huge threads on Twitter. I fall in love with all of the concepts and then we get to go through them. But before we start on some of the concepts, you put a tweet out about the pandering and posturing that companies are doing in the West versus what they're doing in the Middle East. What did you learn there? Yeah, so I mean, you know, I thought it was quite interesting because you can tell whether a belief is genuine

by what people are willing to sacrifice for it, and corporations love to appear compassionate by claiming to stand for Black Lives Matter or gay pride or trans rights, but they're only openly support these rights in countries in which they're already popular. They're not willing to risk or sacrifice anything for their professed beliefs, and the reason for this is that their beliefs are just a charade. So really the point here is just that words are cheap, you know, so if you really want to know if a person's principles are genuine, see what it actually costs them. If it's cost them something, then it's probably a genuine belief, but if it's cost them nothing, then it's just noise.

And we see a lot of that today in this kind of image-oriented age in which we live where corporations feel the need to be part of the conversation and constantly putting out these opinions that they think are going to be popular. But it's all just a show. So I just wanted to draw attention to that. We see so much. June 1st is like the Twitter profile, update, photo, collage, deployment, waterfall thing,

where Cisco, Mercedes, Lenovo Lenovo BMW Bethesda, Visa BP and millions others that we probably haven't got screenshots of have decided to have their central account with the colors of the rainbow we're supporting pride we're in support of gay people around the world and then the middle east version hasn't been updated at all. I was trying to come up with the name for it and I was thinking of something like equality shadow boxing because that's kind of like what they're doing. They're fighting in an arena that, whether concept already been won, corporations support pride in the West where it's widely accepted but not in the East because their activism is not motivated by principles but by public relations. So fighting where the battle's already been won and not fighting for a quality where it's needed.

Yes, absolutely. I mean, if I had to use a word to describe it, I would just call it pandering. Really, you know, a nice simple word. Because that's essentially what it is, they're looking at their target audience and they're seeing what does this audience want. And at the moment corporations really want to pull in the sort of TikTok teens because they want to get people when they're young, they want to establish, you know, brand loyalty to these kids when they're young so that they'll sort of stay with them for life. And so the TikTok generation is kind of quite

infamous for being quite woke and, you know, into all this kind of like, sort of social justice posturing. And as a result of that, I think that's why they've chosen this route, they've chosen to go towards the more kind of, you know, social justice-y kind of thing. You don't really see corporations sort of being based, you know, being, you know, sort of pro sort Trump or whatever, you know, I mean, you've got Elon Musk, who's a very rare exception. He's kind of gone towards the base route. But I think that's him as an individual. Tesla's not doing that.

You know, Tesla's sort of quite still quite on the left sort of. I think they're probably desperately trying to hold on to whatever acceptable face that they can and wrangling, working their way kind of around Elon as this. He's a bit of a force to be reckoned with on his own. But yeah, I mean, we see this with body positivity websites that are using plus sized girls and some use plus sized guys. But for the most part, you don't ever see skinny fat guys, right, that a pale that look like they spend a ton of time in VR. Okay, so it's not about bodies of all sizes and making everybody feel represented. It's about pushing a narrative that drives more clicks

and means that you can say we are part of the virtuous crowd. You do not need to look here. Over there, those are the people that aren't doing it. I mean, you see it with the different races that are used as well. Acer's is really bad for this. Tons and tons of their models are now mixed race guys that have got neck tattoos, but there's no Asians. There's basically no Asians on that site. You go, okay, what is it that you're doing? It's split testing something that mediates between. We need to be able to show variety and signal virtue

and we still need to drive clicks. So all of that's been split tested as well. If fat Asian lads were selling more ASOS clothes, do you not think that they would be using it? Exactly, yeah. I mean, I don't see a problem with sort of diversifying sortifying models and things like that. I think it's okay, but I think the issue begins when it's basically sort of done performatively.

An example of this is, I don't really watch Star Wars, so I don't know much about it, but I saw this tweet recently in which the Star Wars official account basically posted their new actress who's gonna be like a main star of one of their upcoming shows or something. I don't really know what it is, but it was a black woman. And the tweet was essentially saying like, this is our new star, she's a black woman, she's a strong independent black woman.

And they were really highlighting the fact that she's black, and there were like, you know, if you have a problem with her, then we don't want you to be one of our fans and all. You know, it was a very sort of confrontational tweet, and I was like, I don't understand the point in it, because if you look at the previous, the old Star Wars, I mean, I haven't really seen much of it, but I remember the originals, and there's that Lando Calvriss, is a black guy. There's no mention is made of this guy being a black guy, because it doesn't need to be made. The point doesn't need to be made that he's a black guy. It doesn't matter that he's a black guy.

So people didn't have a problem with that. And it's when they start forcefully saying, this is our main star, this is a black guy, or a black woman. And you will enjoy it,, you will enjoy it or you will, you know, suffer the consequences. Harry. Yeah. That's, I think that's, it's a very aggressive kind of thing that I think a lot turns a lot of people off, but also it also turns a lot of people on, unfortunately, as well, which is why they do it.

And you imagine if we make it all the way to whatever year Star Wars is set in, and we've got lightsabers and laser guns and we can travel super super faster on the universe and yet still the most important thing about somebody is their skin color. I honestly think just bring on the Death Star man, fucking send us all to the end of hell because I don't want to live in that future. Yeah, absolutely terrible. Okay, so moving on to your concept from this new super tweet thread, which will be linked in the show notes below if people want to go and check that out.

Bonhoeffer's theory of stupidity. Evil can be guarded against. Stupidity cannot. And the world's few evil people have little power without the help of the world's many stupid people. As a result, stupidity is a far greater threat than evil. Yeah, so we have a tendency as a species to view the world in minishean terms. Minishean is a fancy word of saying that we divide the world into good and evil. We evolved to view our tribe as good and the enemy tribe as evil to justify annihilating them quite frankly

and taking their resources without any sort of hesitation or guilt or any sort of other emotion that might get in the way. Tribes that were sort of morally relativist, they would not have survived for very long because they would have been killed by the tribes that were morally absolutist, the ones that were so sure that they were right and their enemies were evil. So, as a result of that, we have this kind of flaw in our DNA, which is that we see the world in minishean terms, we tend to divide things into good and evil, we see struggles as fairy tales in a way. It means that when you have a debate with somebody online on Twitter, you're instead of sort of seeing them as just having a disagreement, you'll see them as evil, often the times,

you can see it today with the way that the left sort of views the right as bigots, and increasingly you see the right viewing the left as groomers or child abusers and you know so they take the worst sort of thing that they can think of and they attribute that to their people that they disagree with. This is sort of a evolutionary sort of byproduct that we have. I think if we recognize that most people are just merely ignorant rather than actually being malevolent, then disagreement ceases to become a cause of conflict and it instead becomes an opportunity for understanding.

So I think that's a crucial lesson for social media in particular. How is it that stupidity can't be guided against and how is it that stupid people help evil people? Well, because stupidity is not predictable. It's not you can't predict when you're going to make a mistake, whereas you can, to an extent, predict what an evil person is going to do. An evil person will try to do evil, you know, but stupidity is so broad and you can make so many mistakes at so many different points of reasoning that you just, that is impossible to predict, so you can't really guard against it. So, you know, that's, that's, that's the, the first thing and then the second thing is that there are some evil people. I mean, I use the word evil broadly to describe people

who are sadists, people who take pleasure in suffering the others. Or either that or people who are sort of sociopaths, people who don't care at all about other people's feelings have zero, you know, regard for them. But these people are tiny, minority, you know, most people are not like that. And what these people do, these psychopaths and these sociopaths, is that they can't really

do much on their own. I mean, they can become serial killers and they do sometimes. But a serial killer can usually only kill a few dozen people at most before their court. Whereas if you look at the most destructive people in history, they were people who had armies, they were people who had nations behind them. And these people were essentially, they were psychopaths to an extent. You know, people like Stalin and Hitler, for instance, they had very sort of a low regard for human life. But they were only able to do what they did

because they were able to get many, many, many stupid people onto their side. And not even necessarily stupid people, but just people who were uninformed, basically. And it's so, it's really, if they didn't have all of those people on their side, then they wouldn't have done. They wouldn't have been able to get anywhere close to what they did.

They would have probably, you know, Hitler might have just ended up being a crappy artist, you know, like he was going to be before he was chucked out of art school, Stalin would probably have become a priest because he was, you know, a seminary when he was young. So it's the masses, the sort of the stupid masses who really caused the destruction in the end. It's not the people that we put all the blame on. They're just the sort of spark that ignites the wildfire as it were. Next one, mean world syndrome. The news exists to get your attention so it tends to shock.

As such, it doesn't reflect reality, but precisely that, which is uncharacteristic of reality. But since it's all we see, we begin to think the world is crazy than it actually is. Yeah, so, so people want to see stuff that's surprising, because it has more informational value, that you learn more from what's surprising than what from what's mundane and predictable. And since people have an appetite for the surprising, the information filters that dictate what you see online, the editorial filters, the algorithmic filters, they select for shocking stuff basically. So the news that you see is stuff

that's intended to sort of shock you. And obviously if it's shocking you, then it's not gonna be characteristic of reality. It's not gonna be something that you could predict. It's gonna be something that's completely out of the ordinary. The problem is, is that while your mind is browsing this information online, it's not very good at critical thinking

because you enter something called a dissociative state in which you kind of zone into what you're looking at and you kind of become lost in it and you lose the capacity for thought. And as a result of that, what happens is that you lose the ability to make the distinction between what you're seeing and the probability of it actually occurring. So you see extraordinary events and you regard them as just probability of it actually occurring. So you see extraordinary events and you regard them as just ordinary events in a sense when you see them in off times. So the problem with this is that it leads us to sort of see things like injustices and

other sort of anomalies as the norm and we'll probably get more into this actually with some of my other concepts. But yeah, I mean, so it's yeah, this is I think a very important concept for again, for social media because when you have a curated feed like Twitter, you're seeing information that has passed through several filters, and that information every time it passes through a filter, it selects for stuff that's uncharacteristic of reality. So it's taking you further and further away from reality as it passes through all these various filters, the algorithms and the sort of editorial decisions

and all that sort of stuff and your own decisions as well. So I think it's one that people should be aware of, definitely, because it... It's strange about what rises to the top. The most shocking news stories, the ones that are unrepresentative, the ones that are uncharacteristic of what happens, they're the ones that garnered the most attention, they're the ones that Limbically hijacked, so they're the ones that are going to be pushed the most online,

by other people and by the algorithm. And then it's so obvious when you think, well, the reason that people are shocked by it is the fact that it wasn't mundane. But by definition of it being shocking and not mundane, it has to be an outlier event. And if you get a collection of outlier events all the time, because that's what's most effective in order to garner the most attention on the internet and on news. What you have is a selection of anomalies put together to try and represent a world that people think, well, this is just what happens.

And I also think the human brain is not meant to consume the entire globe's news in real time, 24 hours a day. And then when you have some perverse incentives like this going on as well, what you end up with is a very sort of skewed perspective of just what's going on. It doesn't surprise me that people think that the world's going to shit at the moment. You know, it's chaos out there. The world's never been so turbulent. And well, has it or is that just the lens through which the information that you're being fed is giving it because think about your daily experience? It's strange that people can hold in their minds at the same time The world is kind of banal and it's this sort of gray sludge that we're being fed to kind of keep us working for the man and Yet at the same time it's a post-apocalyptic hellscape with, you know, fire and brimstone going on outside. That people's personal experience doesn't seem to match up with what's going on. This is the same with the Blackpill, Mig-Tow, Insel movement too, that most guys, when you actually

drill down and say, look, what's your experience like with women? It's perfectly pleasant. Most guys, that's not to say that there isn't a bunch of amber herds out there that are manipulative and doing stuff to men and taking the kids away from them and accusing them of stuff yet. But for the most part, and yet, because the internet and Reddit forums and telegram groups and YouTube channels that work in that space, obviously raise up the most shocking stories out of the lot. Well, what do you end up with? You end up with a group of people that believe that those stories are representative of what all women are like, whilst having an experience in their own life, which completely

disproves that. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, you know, it gives people a completely distorted sense of reality, and it's one reason why I've actually, sort of of toned down my consumption of news. Because I mean, I read this really good piece by I don't know if Sarah Heider, she's a writer who writes on Substack and she wrote a great piece about news consumption, about what it's actually good for.

And she sort of came to the conclusion that essentially most of the news that we consume is actually pointless. It doesn't help us in our daily lives. It doesn't really enlighten us. It doesn't make us. It doesn't increase our understanding of the world. And when you pair it with what we're talking about, in fact, it actually has the opposite effect. It makes you less informed because it distorts your sense of reality. And so what I do now, I mean, I still have to consume better news because I'm a writer, so I have to write about what's going on in the world,

but I only consume what I have to, I don't consume any more than that. I feel that if you get into a habit of feeling that you always have to keep up with what's going on, it puts you in this kind of trap in which you're sort of just constantly distorting your own reality every day. Every time you log on in the morning

and you check Twitter or whatever, you're creating a sort of false narrative in your mind, which it compounds with itself over time. If the more you consume news, the more distorted your reality becomes. And so I think really the best way out of this is just to limit your consumption of news to, to basically what is essential for you to know and to not really bother with other stuff, because it really doesn't help. I am in a group chat with a bunch of guys from Austin

and one of them came up with something that I think should appear in one of your future tweet threads. I'm gonna give it to you now. It's the Midwit appeal theorem. By definition, most people are Midwits, therefore nothing can achieve mass significance without appealing to and allowing itself to be explained by midwits. It's something that, you know, something else that I've written about is the idea that we all tend

to sort of converge in our narratives because we all ultimately see the stuff that gets the most traction online. And this is what results in midwits. Midwits are people who browse the internet in predictable ways. And because they're browsing the internet predictable ways, it's very easy to gain them. You know, social media can gain them very easily. So it can show them stuff that's going to sort of incite outrage or whatever, because it knows that they're predictable. So it can sort of, it knows what they're going to see, it knows what they're not going to see. And when you've got large numbers of people all consuming the same content, the result is that people tend to sort of form these big blocks of like-minded, not just like-minded,

but people of uniform beliefs. And that's where the Midwits come from, I think. They're all people who just consume at the internet in very predictable ways, which is why I try to do the opposite. I draw a look at things that other people are not looking at, click on the 21st search result, rather than the first, that kind of stuff,

falling the algorithm, I think is very important to maintain a kind of independent mindset. Or just being really stupid, or being really, I think, is very important to maintain a kind of independent mindset. Or just being really stupid or being really, really smart. It's kind of hard, I'm pretty hard to be really, really smart, but yeah, just be really stupid or really smart is the best way to inoculate yourself. Right, next one, next one from you. Two-step flow theory. Most people's opinions are copied from their favorite influences, who in turn copy the opinions of their favorite mass media. As such, politics is largely a battle between two armies of puppets being ventriloquized by a handful of actual

thinkers. Yeah. So this is one of my sort of pet issues. So basically the rise of social media as the primary form of social interaction changed the way that we evaluate people. We once used to judge people mostly based on their deeds, but in the age of social media, we judge people mostly based on their opinions because that's really all we see of people. And since we're now defined by our opinions, there is pressure to have an opinion on everything. opinions, there is pressure to have an opinion on everything. The problem is is that people generally don't have the time or the will to research every issue on which they're expected to have an opinion, so they copy the opinions of others. And the result of this is that

there are preciously few genuine thinkers out there, basically. The majority of people posting opinions online are just thoughtlessly reposting other people's opinions as their own. What this means is that almost everyone who posted an opinion online has not actually researched it or even considered it. They're actually considered the issue that they're pining on. So in other words, they don't know what they're talking about. Where do you think the first mover of this comes from? Because there has to be someone that comes up with something somewhere. Yeah, I mean, there are people out there who come up with ideas,

you know, the intellectuals. They're a very, very sort of small minority of people, but there are genuine thinkers. And what happens is that these guys come up with the ideas and gals, they come up with the ideas. And then everybody just copies them, and then they get copied, and then they get copied. So what usually happens is there are a few people usually in the mainstream media commentators, and they have original thoughts, and then

influences will usually read these, and then they'll sort of just to just basically parrot them. Yeah, just parrot them. And then the people who follow those influences will parrot them. And then it just spreads like a virus, basically, you know. Do you remember in the general election, the UK general election? Was that 2019 the last one? And in the lead up to that,

if you watched social media, you would have thought, this is an absolute white wash for labor. And you were seeing stormsy and amber that won love island and all of these people that were like so vehement. And you think, well, this person's got a very, very strong opinion and they're just one person. So the other people, they must be a complete army that's behind them.

And then the results came in and you realized that it was just allowed people saying things that they definitely, I mean, forgive me, but Stormzi doesn't strike me as the sort of guy that spent ages considering his political position. It makes good music, but he's not a political thinker. I mean, I think the thing with Storms is that his crowd are not really political, they're not really interested in voting in elections and that's where the mistake was made because although yeah there are probably a lot of people who voted because of him, there was nowhere near the amount that people expected simply because he's not he's not generally a political figure, he's an artist and people are more interested in his music than they are in his opinions. Really, I think where the two-step

flow theory really sort of becomes apparent, I think, is on social media with things like sort of political opinions, you know, that actually sort of spread through social media in particular amongst the political classes, not amongst sort of teens, you know, because I mean storms these main audience are probably teens aren't they? I mean, those guys are not political really. So yeah, it's mainly this is more of an issue that really sort of becomes apparent on on in Twitter politics. But if you think about what a retweet actually is, and what is a retweet it's you, it is a retweet actually is? What is a retweet? It's you. It is a demonstration of that very fact.

It is actually parroting an opinion. Precisely. Loaning an opinion. So yeah, exactly, that's a very good point. So it works in two ways. I think firstly, people copy opinions directly, but then secondly, they also would rather just retweet something rather than actually think for themselves. It's much easier just to press the retweet button than formulate your own tweet.

I do think so. The retweet function, the less that you use it, most of the accounts that I follow don't retweet that much. I think that they're closer to the first moveersvers and that's probably a pretty good heuristic. Are most of the people that you follow retweeting? Are are most of them either quote tweeting or tweeting their own stuff? Even if they've re-worded something that sounds smart, at least that's one degree of separation or half

a degree of separation. Yeah, absolutely because if you re-word something you have to actually consider it in your mind. You have to sort of pass it. And then once you pass it, you've got to rearrange it. And that requires thought. So that's actually a pretty good thing to do. In fact, that's a good way to learn, I think, is to actually take an opinion and then to deconstruct it

and to rearrange it. And you can actually, then I've done that with some people's things. Because I remember reading this thing about how to become a better writer when I was younger and it said you should take a page of a writer that you really admire and you should rewrite what they've written in your own words.

And I found that that was a really good exercise just to sort of, because you pick up on things when you're rewriting it, that you don't, when you're just reading it. Because you're understanding and yeah. Because you're actually interacting with the text rather than you're just reading it. Because then you're understanding. Yeah. You're actually interacting with the text rather than just passively, you know, consuming it.

And so I would encourage you that. I think that's a very good thing to do. Inter-spection illusion. We think we understand the real reasons why we think and act the way we do. But we think other people have little understanding of why they think and act the way they do. We assess ourselves as if they're psychiatric patients and ourselves as if we're gods.

Yeah, so I mean you've probably noticed this when you've sort of witnessed a Twitter debate, but many debates online consists not of two people trying to refute each other's ideas, but rather two people trying to psychoanalyze each other. So for example, I believe what I believe because it makes sense. You believe what you believe because you're just seeking social approval. And I do think many people believe things just for social approval, like we were just talking about with the corporations earlier. But it's much harder for me to accuse myself of seeking social approval. It's something I haven't really, it's alien to me, I think it's alien to everybody to accuse themselves of believing something for something other than reason. It's not something that

we normally do. I mean, I don't think I do believe things for social approval, but I can't be sure because my actual motivations could just be rationalizations. So, you know, this is, it basically puts you in a bit of a tricky spot where you have to really consider the things that you're accusing other people of. Isn't it strange that you never accuse yourself of these very things? So I think we should sense a foster of, we should foster a sense of consistency on this issue. Yes, many people hold beliefs as a result of social needs and character flaws, so it's legitimate to accuse other people of it, but for the very same reason, we should recognize that we could also be guilty of it, and therefore, instead of getting defensive, we should be open to accusations that we believe what we

believed due to character flaws rather than reason. This is the fundamental attribution error as well, right? Yeah, to an extent. Yeah, I mean, that's more to do with whether you believe something because of an inherent something inherent to you or whether you believe something due to situational factors. So yeah, it's I think the fundamental attribution error is a more broad a way of yes, of saying this, yeah. Yeah, but it is, this is something that I always said to people that are going through breakups.

If you invert this, what you realize is, you're understanding of yourself and the depth of time and detail that you've gone into your own mind with is greater than even if you had a conjoined twin, you're going to have with them. So if somebody's gone through a breakup a lot of the time and it wasn't their choice, they romanticize the other partner, they make them out to be kind of saintly and they're wistfully sort of chasing after them. And they can also put them on a pedestal, it's going to be very difficult to find somebody like this son and so forth. But one of the

ways that you can at least invert that a little bit is by using this introspection illusion kind of to your advantage and think, well, look at how deep and rich your understanding of your experience is. There is this wild asymmetry, basically your brain's infinite to you and somebody else is unbelievably finite to you in your experience. Not only do you not know what they're thinking, all that you know about what they're thinking is what they've communicated to you and they can communicate what they do, what they think at a much lower bandwidth than they think, and they don't choose to say everything. And you weren't there for all of the things that they were going to say. So this asymmetry between the two, I think, is something that can cause people firstly to feel quite lonely in the world, right? Because

your inner experience is significantly richer than the reflected experience you get from other people. But on top of that as well, it is something that should make you feel a bit reassured. That you are special because your experience of you is the only person, the only consciousness that's ever going to get that degree of depth. So it is the sort of thing,

I think, in part, that should give people a reason to be sort of proud of themselves. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I think it's always worthwhile to sort of consider oneself, like when one is, when one's sort of forming opinions to actually consider what one gains from it or what one would lose from it, because I think, you know, the idea is that we don't really know ourselves, we don't know ourselves, we think we know ourselves, you know, we have this idea of who we are, but really that's, we can't step outside of ourselves, we know, we can't step outside of ourselves. We're stuck inside of ourselves, and that prevents us from seeing the forest for the trees,

so to speak. So really, we can't really second guess our own opinions. We can't know the real reasons why we believe what we believe. But what we can do is we can try to understand what we would gain from those beliefs. So if I had to have a political belief, I should ask myself, what would I actually gain from believing this? Because we know now that a lot of beliefs are not just sort of reason, they're not just a resort of reason. There's complex factors that play in a term in terms of somebody's character and what they want from life and people believe things because it brings them comfort or there's so many different factors

to what goes into a belief. So in order to avoid the trap of believing something purely for an irrational reason, it's always worth asking you what else you stand to gain from that belief. It's something that I've been trying to do. It's a very hard habit to develop because we're used to criticizing other people for that. We're not used to doing it to ourselves, but I think when you do it to yourself, it really does help you understand yourself. It helps you understand why you think the way that you do.

If you look at your experiences and you try to understand how your experiences have shaped your beliefs. If you can make a habit of that, then you can start to interrogate yourself and start to realize why you believe what you believe and to sort of see the flaws in your own beliefs and then correct them. Would you say that if somebody assesses either one of their own beliefs or that of somebody else and it seems like they pay quite a high price for holding that belief that they should probably consider that as more likely to be truthful.

I always think about this with regards to Sam Harris, the fact that he's got, he was anti-woke but anti-Trump, he was pro-vax, but anti-mask mandate, you know, he held a very sort of unusual dynamic in his beliefs. And you go, well, he's paying a high price for that. Does that mean I probably tend to have a bit more faith that he actually believes what he believes? Absolutely. I mean, yeah, like we were saying earlier,

with the corporations, not risking anything for their beliefs. When you risk something with your beliefs or when you sacrifice something for your beliefs, then that's a sign that your beliefs are genuine. But that doesn't mean that your beliefs are justified. You know, that's a whole different ballgame, and I think the introspection illusion is really more about establishing whether your beliefs are justified rather than whether they're genuinely held. Because you can make a good idea. You have a good idea of whether your beliefs are genuinely held. You know better than anyone, whether you're a blue-sage genuinely held, but you can't really tell whether you're blue-sage justified until you interrogate yourself. And that takes a lot of effort.

It's something that is completely alien to human beings. Yeah. All right. Sayers Law, the lower the stakes, the more vicious the politics, intense nuclear talks, people act civilized. In Twitter culture wars, people act like Armageddon has come, raging like maniacs, calling for total war, safe in the knowledge that none of it matters. Yeah, so this law was originally invented to describe academic politics, but it's recently become applicable to online politics. Said and really offer an explanation for the law, but I think I have one of my own,

It's said and really offer an explanation for the law, but I think I have one of my own, which is basically people's egos cause them to exaggerate the importance of their struggles when it's possible to do so. In truly serious matters, understanding is essential, therefore precision of language is essential. This prevents people from exaggerating their struggles. But when it comes to issues with lower stakes, in which there is some leeway, accurately describing reality becomes less important, so people can take greater liberties to exaggerate their pet issue. So the result, you can see it widely in the culture wars. So for instance, with the woke left sort of thing, words of violence, silence is violence,

using the wrong pronoun and is erasing someone's existence, dressing as a Cherokee for Halloween is committing genocide against Native Americans. But I mean, we do see this problem on the right also. It's not just a problem of the left. I mean, for instance, racial mixing is white genocide. So both sides engage in this kind of catastrophization. And I think really, it's just the symptom of people wanting their struggles to see more important than they actually are, because really, they're not that important when you really consider

the grand scheme of things. People make up for it. When people actually do have real struggles, they grand scheme of things. And so people make up for it. Whereas when people actually do have real struggles, they have to be truthful, they have to be precise because there are costs to being incorrect or imprecise. So the result is that you can gauge how serious an issue is by the language used to describe it. Issues that are described in sensationalist terms

are generally not as serious as issues that are described in sensationalist terms are generally not as serious as issues that are described in very precise terms, because in the latter case the rewards for misrepresenting reality are smaller and the risks are far greater. What was Seiya trying to describe originally? So he was trying to describe academic politics as this kind of thing, very bitter and very vicious struggle, where people are very petty. And I mean, you could say that he was talking about the narcissism of small differences. You know, he was basically saying that because the stakes are so low in politics, people's egos generally drive them to become more ruthless and more petty,

basically, just to sort of compensate for the fact that their struggles are so trivial. But he didn't really explain it, it was more of an observation, and I really had to think about it to try and work out why I thought it was true. I do believe it is true, it took me a while to try and work out why, and I think that that's what it is. I think that there are costs to being untruthful when the stakes are high. When you're in a nuclear negotiation, you can't misrepresent reality. You have to be truthful because the costs are just too great. And the rewards are small

because you don't need to exaggerate the problem because the problem's already big. Whereas when you're in a small struggle like a Twitter culture war, there's plenty of room to be untruthful because it doesn't matter because it's so it's so trivial. It doesn't matter whether you're economical with the truth. You can just say whatever it doesn't matter. It's all in consequential. So people exaggerate and they they lap and they catastrophize and then they just, you know, the result is that this problem takes on an apocalyptic tone, even though it's usually just what somebody said online. And bizarrely, there's probably an inversion between the seriousness of the problem, the language that's used to describe it, which means that the problems that probably require the most attention are the ones that linguistically are given, perhaps not the least, but they're at least being constrained with precision, thoughtfulness, and perhaps even in some situations, I suppose,

like secrecy to a degree, you know. So many, there's this, it's called terrorism close calls, and it's on Netflix. It's kind of a bit cheesy, actually. It could have been much better, but kind of fun. And it's declassified files and CIA agents and stuff and FBI people that have dealt with close calls where some serious shit nearly went down. And this is how you're finding out about it. This is, it's 30 years ago, and someone was going to blow up a tube going from New York to whatever Long Island or some shit. That's

how you found out about it. And I wonder as well whether, again, everything, it's easy to bring everything back to social media because almost everything is mediated by social media and the perverse incentives that you have online for attracting attention, for using this inflammatory language. It's kind of really hard to just separate that out and go, okay, this is, this is just something like gravity that's always there. How do we then pass this in? But for sure, this is a big reason that it gets promulgated even more. The fact that signaling is such a big part of what you do now online and that the language that you use is one of the primary signals that you use. Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, I mean, I think really the Twitter culture war is largely a result of language being used to exaggerate struggles. It's taken on this kind of apocalyptic tone precisely because of the way that it's described online. But when you really break it down, what actually is it? It's just people snaring at each other online. It's just kind of people exchanging insults. That's all it is.

Because although some of the struggles might be real, like for instance, things like transgender rights and these are all real political struggles, but the actual Twitter culture war is divorced from that. Even though it purports to be about such things, it doesn't really have any effect on these issues. It seems as well like it's kind of a bit of a losing battle because let's say that there is a serious problem that you're dealing with, so you decide to use precise language and treat it with the requisite respect that

it deserves. It doesn't go on any attention. Then you decide, okay, well, that's not going to work. So we'll try the flamboyant, incendiary language instead, and then people have got this filter. I have this filter, even if it's subconscious until I read this thread and realized, why? I'll discount that. So you're okay. So you're damned if you do, and you're damned if you people aren't going to pay attention if you're precise and Realistic with your language and they're going to castigate you and dismiss it if you're inflammatory with your language, so yeah, I think A big rule over the top of all of this is social media is a very bad way to have conversations that a series. Yeah, absolutely Next one let's go on and not to picking

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Next one. Let's go on and not to picking. Cherry picking the most outlandish members of the enemy side and Presenting them as indicative in order to make the entire side look crazy a common tactic on Twitter Arguably the entire culture war is just each side sneering at the other sides lunatics. That is Good. Yeah, I mean So you'll be very familiar with this and I this. And I think most people who browse Twitter are familiar with this sort of thing, because it happens so commonly online. Last time I was on your show, we spoke of Libs of TikTok. And I mean, that, since we've last spoke, that's exploded.

It's now massive, you know. And one of the reasons it's massive is that it engages in this nut picking, which people love, people love to see nut picking, and that's why it's so popular. I was browsing through the lips of TikTok feed the other day and was just seeing all these crazy people that were just trying to get and get sort of four, five year olds to come out, you know, of the closet and stuff. And, you know, I thought, if you spend your life following this account, you're going to think that this stuff is happening literally everywhere.

You're going to think that this is extremely common that it's like, you know, happening in every school that there's a massive plot to sort of sexualize young children. And it would drive you absolutely crazy. If I believe that the world, you know, was like a big conspiracy, just basically fill classrooms up with these kind of sort of sex positivity activists who are just basically trying to sexualise young children, I would drive me absolutely insane. And you see it, you see people online who actually believe this is happening. They believe that there's a massive operation to just completely just turn kids degenerate, basically.

But then you've also got the left wing version of this, which is right wing watch. This is a, I've seen that. What is that? Yeah, so that's a Twitter account which is the sort of left wing equivalent of lipstick. What are they post? So they just post crazy like Christian conservatives, you know, who believe that, you know, the modern world is going to burn in

hellfire and all this kind of stuff and just, and mental like racists and like, you know, white nationalist and stuff like that. Just the craziest loons from the right wing, basically. And, you know And people who are like, want to blow up buildings and just get crazy people on there. And I mean, if I was following this account, if I was following right wing watch, I would get this idea that the right are just going to kill everybody, shoot everybody to death with their guns and just basically put minorities into concentration camps or whatever. So that's the problem with when you take the worst examples from each side and then you create like a Twitter feed of nothing but those because this goes back to what we were talking

about earlier about how social media misrepresents reality. With the meme world syndrome. Yeah. You know, you all you see, if all you see is just the most extreme examples of any world view, you're going to think that that world view is an existential threat to the world based on these. And that's going to drive you crazy. And it's going to make you more extreme in your beliefs. So the long term effect of this is that it makes everybody more extreme, which makes it quite dangerous. It might be entertaining, you know, not picking is always

quite entertaining, especially if you're a culture warrior, you know, and you want to laugh at the other side, then if I was a right wing around, I wanted to laugh at the other side, I'd just go on lips and tick-tock and just start browsing and you know, look at it. Look at it. Look at a ton of the-wing channels and the content that they put out. I mean, Matt Walsh from The Daily Wire has his five headlines. I would guess that at least two to three news stories per week on this show that has a big research team probably comes from Libs of TikTok. So you're like, okay, yeah, that's not even one,

like ideology, that's not even one type of talking point. That's one account that is filtering some of this stuff through. And one of the weirdest things about this is, it should enrage people of the side that this account is putting stuff out from more than it enrages the other side. Lives of TikTok should piss off the moderate left significantly more than it pisses off the right.

And it feels like a duty of the people on that side of the fence to call out the lunatics of their own side because they're misrepresenting a view that you, they're taking to the sort of caricature and degree of ridiculousness, a view that you're supposed to care about. People on the right, they don taking to the sort of caricature and degree of ridiculousness, of you that you're supposed to care about. People on the right, they don't give a fuck, they're not bothered, they're happy for you to lose yourself in pink head walkery. And the people on the left don't care about the good-toting

Christian, everyone's gonna go to hell, people, right? They don't mind. So it's your job to not be the mediator, to be like the enforcer, to bring them back into the conversation. Yeah, absolutely. I completely agree with what you're saying. I mean, you know, I'm not, I'm no longer like I don't consider myself left or right, but I was a leftist for like 10 years. And during that time, I, even when I was a leftist, I was more anti-work than most right-leaning people because I understood. You've got a dog in the fight.

Yeah, yeah, I mean, because at the end of the day, who's really being harmed by all this craziness, this work craziness? It's not the people on the right. They're actually gaining support from it. It's the people on the left who are being harmed by it. Because this, this workness is an embarrassment to the left. Because what it shows is that

the left have, you know, they've basically allowed themselves lie down and be walked all over by these work idilogs. And yes, these work idilogs are a minority, they're a tiny minority within the left, but they do have disproportionate influence now as a result of the left just lying down and letting these kind of neon-hahead children just walk all over them. You know, now you see this kind of stuff, you know, in academia, you see powerful people in academia who have these kinds of views. You see powerful people who work in corporate boardrooms who have these views. You see powerful people in Hollywood who have these views. You know, and the result of, I mean, this is all a result of the left doing nothing

for a long, long time and allowing this belief to just gestate and grow. And on the right, you do have a similar thing. I mean, I would say that on the right, it's slightly different because the crazies on the right are generally more consigned to the fringes, but that's not to say that there are no crazies on the right who don't receive mainstream support. I mean, I would say that Donald Trump was a pretty extreme right-winger, although he's not genuinely a right-winger, he doesn't really have any ideological beliefs, I don't believe, but he rode to power on a platform of a pretty extreme right-wing crap, you know, like with all this QAnon nonsense and stuff like that. And that is pretty insane stuff and that guy became president of the United States.

So yeah, this issue does occur on the right as well. But I think that stuff is not seen as much of a liability to the right as weaknesses to the left because workness is a lot more visible because it because workness is it controls essentially that the West's cultural institutions, academia, the mainstream media apart from Fox News and that kind of stuff and sort of Hollywood and you know even publishing as well publishing is pretty well now as well. We saw that Penguin Random House threatened walk out when they said that they were going to publish Jordan Peterson's second book.

Yeah. And yeah, I think walkness is a rallying cry. Sorry, walkness is an embarrassment to the left and a rallying cry to the right. That's the way that it's seen. It's the thing that galvanizes the right to push back against the wildness that's coming out of that. And if you are moderately on the left, it should be the sort of thing that makes you put your head in your hands. And it's strange. Last time that we spoke, we came up with this idea that an absurd ideological belief is a show of loyalty to your side and a threat display to the other.

What it proves is that you value the group ideology more highly than you even value reason itself and truth. And that, I think, explains so much of this. It's like, is this a show of fealty to your side? And any slight nuance that you show is seen as a chink in your armor by your enemies and a lack of commitment by your compadres, right? That's the way that it's viewed.

And it means how is someone supposed to defect? Like how do you move away from that? Well, you're not gonna be accepted by the other side because you still hold 80% of the beliefs that they don't hold. And you're not any longer going to be accepted by your own side because everybody's terrified of this circular firing squad coming in going for them, they just purely spiral their way up to an increasingly ridiculous belief. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I think, yeah, conformity plays a huge part in this because when you have

plays a huge part in this because when you have pretty much the entirety of Western culture is in the grips of wokeness right now. I don't think it's an existential threat to the world or anything like that, but I think it could be considered an existential threat to the left as we currently understand it. And that's why I oppose workiness. Not because it's a threat to the world, but because it's a threat to the left. And even though I'm no longer a leftist, I believe that we do need a strong left in the world because I believe it stands up for things that are missing in the right. And it provides a good and solid, powerful counterbalance to the right successes. I believe really we need a left anorite

to sort of bounce off each other and keep each other in check. Well, isn't that interesting that your major concern about what's happening with woke isn't the people that don't believe in it. It's the people that almost don't believe in it. It's the people that are part of their own side. Yeah, for sure, man.

It's a really, really don't know what's going to happen rolling in the clock forward with this. I do think that the tide is turning against work, I do believe gradually it's becoming more and more acceptable to call out the bullshit on the way sort of side, you know, to talk about these kinds of things. For instance, like, you know, the gender wage gap, say three years ago, if you pointed out that the gender wage gap is not actually due to discrimination,

people would call you a misogynist, and you probably lose your job and stuff. I mean, James DeMour, do you remember him? He pointed out that there are different preferences that women and men on average have different preferences due to evolutionary roles. And as a result of that, I mean, that's real science. That's backed up by a mountain of evidence. But the thing is, is because he said that, he was fired from Google, and that happened in, I think, 2017, it was either 2016 or 2017. And now it's acceptable to sort of point out that, yes, actually, women

and men on average do have slight differences in behaviour, and that leads to slight differences in social outcomes, you know. So it's becoming more acceptable to talk about these things. So I think that's a sign that wokenness is gradually receding, but I think it still has a huge amount of power in the culture institutions, but it's going to take time for people to see through the bullshit, I think, and to people to summon the courage to actually speak out against it. The problem that you have is this tit for tat mentality, the fact that as one side does something that's ridiculous, that almost legitimates the other side to do. It's kind of like a relationship.

Oh, well, you texted your ex-boyfriend to go and collect your shoes from his house, so I'm going to catch up with my ex girlfriend for a coffee. Oh well, I'm going to go out for drinks. Oh well, there you go. It just ends up justifying increasingly extreme behavior on both sides. But yeah, I mean, if the volume could be turned down, that would be great. It's definitely, I keep talking about this. The ascendancy and then fall from grace of woke

is such a really good example of why satire and comedy is useful online. Because that word, that entire group, has been meamed out of existence by people that are kind of funny. People that are funny have turned that into a caricature of itself. And the word woke was, you were able to use it for like two weeks or ironically. And then after that, it was just completely co-opted by people that were using it to mean the most extreme version of what it didn't mean. Yeah, it's a sad thing. It's like a kind of concept creep, but in a different way,

I suppose the opposite of concept creep, really, in which the meaning becomes more specific and very more tailored towards a very specific sort of worldview. Yeah, okay, right, next one. The lesser minds problem, we dismiss those, we disagree with as stupid, insane or evil, because it saves us from having to deal with the complex truth that people see things differently from us

largely because the labyrinth of experience has led them to different conclusions. Yeah, I mean, so this sort of goes back to what I was saying earlier about minisheanism. We evolved to view people of other ideological tribes as just plain wrong, basically, whether by evil or insanity. You know, 10 years ago, you know, when I was a leftist, I got all my news from the New York Times and the Guardian, which taught me that right wingers were only right wing because they were selfish or bigoted. But then I actually got to know a few right wingers and I began to see that there's a kind of there is a value in right wing politics that isn't really mentioned in the New York Times or in the Guardian. What is that? What's the value? Oh, there's plenty of value to it, but it's something, this is something that I learned is that the value of leftism is very obvious and it's very clear and it's very shallow in a way. And that's

why young people always begin as leftists. But then they gradually move rightwards as they get older. And the reason for that I think is that people become more risk averse. Because when you're young, you know, you, your experimental, your exploratory because you've got nothing to lose. So you take big risks and you take big chances and so you want to completely overturn society, you want to completely change everything, you know, tear down the old statues, let's erect something new. You're very ambitious when you're young. But then as you begin to accumulate things in life, as you begin to accumulate a family, a house and wealth, you become more risk of a verse because you realize that you've got something to lose now and you realize how good you've actually got it. You

realize how grateful you should be because of the position, the unique position that you occupy in history. And you realize that the things that you thought were useless in the world actually have a very important purpose. This is the whole Chesterton's fence argument. And as a result of all of this, you become conservative. You begin to see things from a more conservative point of view. You realise that, how long is that? We've got it good.

We've got it really good to live when we live in this time, having, you know, been through all the things that our species has been through, to actually live in a time where we have all these freedoms that we, you know, we don't take these things for granted anymore because we become grateful for them and we understand what we have. And so I think that's part of the value of right of the right. There are other values as well, obviously, there's the more libertarian angle where you value freedom and the things like that. But for me, I wasn't really aware of what I was just talking about. I wasn't aware of that until in my mid-20s, when I kind of believed that when I stopped getting all my news from the New York Times and the Guardian

and liberal media and Washington Post and all that kind of stuff, and I actually started to talk to actual right wingers and actually have a civil conversation with them. So that was when I stopped realising, that was when I realised that right wingers are not evil, not simply evil or not simply stupid or whatever, you know, and that was a big revelation for me because that was one of the reasons why I started having doubts about the left because for the very same reason I believe that the left were good. I believed when I was young, you know, I believed the left one, they were compassionate because they wanted an equal world, they wanted to look after everybody.

Is that what you mean when you say that it's obvious and shallow? Yeah, yeah, yeah, the appeal of leftism is very easy to see, because who doesn't want a more compassionate world? Who doesn't want a world where the weakest amongst us are taken care of by the strongest? It's a very beautiful image, isn't it? Where we all look after each other and you know where nobody goes hungry, nobody is discriminated against. It's a beautiful image and anybody can relate to it pretty much. So yeah, the value of leftism is very clear but in being clear it's also quite shallow because

when you get older you realize that it's not actually very easy to create that world because you have to sacrifice a lot of things to create that world. And the sacrifices that you make can actually make things a lot worse for everybody. And so you gradually learn about economics and you learn about evolutionary psychology and you learn about all these things that the left doesn't teach you about. And that's when you start to have to doubts about the left. And that's when I started having doubts and that's when I realized I couldn't really consider myself to be a leftist anymore, because I mean, part of it was I just didn't want to be tribal anymore, you know, I wanted to see things from outside the perspective of a tribe. So I had to abolish all allegiances to tribes, but secondly, I thought that the left itself,

I do value the left. I think it's important to have the left as a, as a sort of political force in the world, but I don't want to be part of it because I believe that doing so would make me irrational because I'd have to believe things about the world that I naturally do not. I would have to dispute some of my own deepest convictions. And so, yeah, it's a complicated thing think it's very complicated as you get older you realise that people have good reasons for believing things that seem on surface to be completely crazy. Do you know so overtime age tends to cause people to lean more to the right? Do you know if it causes people to go from authoritarian to libertarian as well. I have no idea about that.

I've been really interested in finding out about that. I mean, one thing I've seen research, which shows that there is a very real trend towards conservatism, but I don't think that there's any particular correlation between authoritarianism and libertarianism. Interesting. Yeah, I just wondered whether or not people increasingly kind of see the fallibility of politics as they get older. And, you know, if you're going further down, it just means basically, leave me alone. The more that you go toward that libertarian thing. Okay, right. I want

to talk about the word retard. What have you learned about the word retard recently? Okay, so What have you learned about the word retard recently? Okay, so I was doing a bit of research into why things become offensive because it just became curious to me. I wanted to know why are some things offensive and other things not offensive? And I began to sort of think about the word retard. And this is a word that's quite offensive. I mean most people would consider it pretty offensive, you know, especially in polite society. I mean, there are a lot of people who use it in jest, but there's a lot of people who find it offensive. And you know, if you ask these people why

they find it offensive, and they'll say, oh, it's because, you know, it was historically used to refer to mentally disabled people, which I think is a perfectly reasonable explanation. But then you ask these same people, do they find the word idiot offensive or the word imbecile offensive or the word moron offensive or the word cretin offensive?

And most people don't find these words offensive. I mean, a few people find cretin offensive. And most people don't find these words offensive. I mean, a few people find Cretin offensive, but most people don't find idiot or imbicile or moron, particularly offensive. You know, they use, it's very, these are common words. But the thing is, if you look at the history of these words, they were also used to refer to mentally disabled people. That's their origins. Their origins is actually they were used as cataclysmic of mentally disabled people. And I point out this example of the Queen's first cousins who were officially diagnosed as imbeciles. And as a result of that, the Royal family faked their debts and basically locked them away in a car for the rest of their lives. And when they died, the Royal family didn't even attend their funeral.

It was a pretty tragic story, but it goes to show that the word imbestyle was used even for members of the Royal family, if they were mentally disabled. And so there's this weird sort of disparity between the word retard and the other words, which mean exactly the same thing, but which are not offensive. And you've got to ask yourself, what's the purpose for this? Why is the word retard offensive? But all these other words, which were used again for exactly the same reason, why they are not offensive? And I was looking into the history of these words,

and the only conclusion that I could come to was that it was a purely arbitrary decision. So a group of people, group of intellectuals, one day decided that the word was offensive, and they said as much to the people, and I don't know where it was officially established, but gradually, it became offensive to use that word. And so, we chose, we all collectively decided to have a

specific emotional reaction to a certain word, but not to other words with the same meaning. And that strikes me as very strange, because it means that a lot of the outrage is a lot of the things that outrage us are purely arbitrary. They're just arbitrarily chosen. You know, there's no real reason why we should be upset or offended by a certain word. We just choose to be offended by it. And we choose to not be offended by other words, you know, so this I think is a is a it was a big insight for me because it really opened my eyes to exactly what outrage is.

A lot of outrage is just manufactured. It's purely manufactured. You don't need to be angry about any of the things, and you know, well, at least most of the things that you're angry about, you know, in everyday life. They're not rooted in anything more solid than simply people making choices in the past. You also use that example of, is it the N double ACP? Oh right, yeah, yeah. I mean, yeah, so this is another thing that I've never understood

is that somehow the word colored people became offensive and you had to use the word, the term people of color instead. I've never understood why. I've never really understood why. I mean, I didn't ask somebody who was pretty sort of woke and they said to me that it's because when you use the word, when you use colored people, you're your centering color. But when you use people of color, you're centering people because the first word is people rather than color. And so- That's a fucking tenuous, very tenuous explanation.

I don't understand it. And I have no problem with people calling me a colored person. I don't find it effective. What's your heritage? Indian. Yeah, I'm Indian Punjabi. So I don't have any problem with people calling me a colored person, you know, and I don't think most colored people do.

I don't think most of us do have a problem with it. But, say what's really interesting is the NAACP is the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, is that right? Yeah. So what that's like is kind of like a fossilized record of what linguistic territory used to be acceptable. And because they haven't updated their branding to move in line with lexically what's now part of the green light red light system.

They're kind of this fossilized record of, oh, that used to be okay. But now it's not. So if there was the N double AR R. P. for retarded people. You go, okay, hang on, is that a pejorative or using that to refer to this entire, what about the crattons in the room and what about the morons in the room, what about them, where are they? So, yeah, the thing is, is that linguistic, all this linguistic retrivalizing of territory, is that it just creates outrages where outrages don't need to exist.

We've already got enough things to be outraged about in this world. Plenty of things to be outraged about in this world. You've just got to switch on the news to see what's going on, you know, in some parts of the world. But the thing is, is that instead of like trying to do something about the things that outrage is, the things that we should be outraged about, some of the injustices that are occurring, for instance, you know, the concentration camps in China, for instance. Instead, we just sort of kind of redraw the territory of language and create new outrages out of it. Out of nothing. We create new outrages out of nothing. And it just doesn't make any sense to me. I just don't understand why.

Why people would choose to be upset over the use of words. Is that a little bit of... So many other things to be outraged about. Say as law coming back in again, the fact that you can create outrage and posture the fact that you are helping that this is something that you're really bothered about, but you know that by pushing back against colored people or the word retard, that really the battle front that you're playing on has pretty low stakes.

Yeah, well, the thing is, is that if you're a member of an ideology and you're dedicated to a certain cause, then you have an invested interest in making that cause seem like a bigger issue than it actually is. So if you're an anti-racist, then you have a vested interest in making racism seem bigger than it actually is because that makes your task and your job and your mission more important than it actually is. And that's why I think a lot of people who are sort of these who define themselves as anti-racists will constantly cause, they'll constantly create new forms of racism because they need it. I think somebody said, I've gotten to it, they said that the demand for racism exceeds the supply. And that's basically what's causing a lot of this,

kind of, is driving a lot of these new outrageous and these new offenses, because people need racism in order to feel like they've got something to fight against. And if you look at, yes, if you look statistically, there does seem to be some racial disparities, but those racial disparities are not as big as their portrayed in the mainstream media. And the mainstream media exaggerates these because it needs to feel like there's a big struggle that it's fighting against.

And so that's, I think, probably the explanation for why the word colored people is now offensive because we need more and more things to be racist so that we can feel more anti-racist when we fight against them. Okay, Ion Law of Oligarchy. All organizations of people, no matter how democratic and egalitarian, will eventually be controlled by a dominant few since if everyone has power, then no one has power, and if someone has power, they'll use it to get more power. Yeah, so in order to be able to move an organization forward, there needs to be a power differential between people.

It's simply not practical to have every decision made by committee. But if someone has got power, if they've got a little extra bit of power, then that power will compound over time. This occurs largely as a result of the Matthew effect. I think I might have spoken about the Matthew effect on the last podcast I can't remember, but the Matthew effect is the idea that advantage gets advantage. So it's usually encapsulated in the saying, the rich get richer in the poor get poorer.

If somebody has influence over decisions, then they can use that influence to steer decisions that favor them and give them even more influence. And the typical result of the Matthew Effect is a peritone distribution. And this is basically a sort of statistical distribution in which you have a small number of people holding the vast majority of power, as best way to sort of really describe it.

So the interesting thing about this concept is that it can be used to justify left-wing or right-wing politics. For the right, it's a key reason for why communism and socialism don't work. And for the left, it's an argument for regulation against monopoly power. So what you really think, what you conclude from this concept really depends on your your political views, but I think that it's a very interesting concept because it's so fundamental because people are always trying to create sort of egalitarian democratic systems or highly competitive systems and this law essentially refutes the possibility of that. I don't think it's impossible to create a completely democratic or competitive situation in which there are equal players operating against each other or with each other.

But I think it's very, very difficult, because like I said, you need to have some people have power over others in order for the organisation to be able to do anything because some people have make, you just can't make a organisation by committee, it doesn't work. Even communist states like the Soviet Union didn't have pure committees, they had to have people like Stalin and Beria who actually know, who actually made decisions unanimously, sort of thing unilaterally, rather. And so, yeah, this is, it's interesting because it really does make you question the possibility of a lot of these programs that people try to create. Noble cause corruption. The greatest evils come not from people try to create. Noble cause corruption.

The greatest evils come not from people seeking to do bad, but people seeking to do good and believing the ends justify the means. Ironically, few things legitimize the immoral treatment of others more than the belief that you're more moral than them. Yeah, so once again, this harks back to what I was saying about monishinism where evolutionary configured to view ourselves as good in our appearance as an our opponents as evil in order to justify competing in order to justify conquering them. So there's a weird irony in that our belief that we are good can make us act with great evil. What this means is

that the real problem is not that some of us are good and some of us are evil, but that we all believe we're good and that our opponents are evil. And if you look at history, you know, the greatest injustices were committed in the name of justice, even the Holocaust was regarded as a means to a righteous end, you know, it was viewed as necessary to save Western civilization, Western European civilization, the Jews were regarded as evil, which made it easy for the Nazis to commit evil against them. I think this is why we should fear the most, are not simple psychopaths, but rather those with noble aims

who are convinced that they're on the right side of history. Because such people's belief in their own goodness is so great that it can be used to justify any evil. There's a lot more conviction that comes from someone that believes that they're right, that knows that they're doing wrong. It's got to be more fragile. It's got to be more hidden enough times and it's going to break if someone is kind of lapping or they're playing a persona or whatever versus someone who actually genuinely believes that they're on the side of righteousness. I mean, this is the sort of

crusader style adherence that you have to particular viewpoints. I mean, look Look at after this you've all day school shooting, the degree of vitriol and how vehement second amendment people have become online, even just buddies of mine, like friends of mine from Texas, that are really, really, they're even more unprepareds to give ground. Now, they're not going to give a single inch with regards to that because that's one of the deities that they hold up. Yeah, I think when you're convinced that you're right, you're capable of essentially anything and that's the know, even, I mean, if you look at what does evil really, you know, what does evil really achieve? What does somebody who's evil really do in the world?

They usually end up becoming serial killers. But when you look at what good does in the world, it leads to genocides and massacres, because people actually believe that they're making the world a better place. Presumably it's more compelling as well well like we were saying earlier on, getting people to believe in your cause is it's sort of a solo man operation if you're doing something that's evil, but if you can convince someone that what you're doing is good, that's how you end up with entire armies and nation states behind you. Exactly, yeah, exactly. Yeah, so that's a crucial part of it as well is that you can get people on site much easier because there are a lot more people

who want to do good in the world than there are people who want to do evil. I mean, there are very few people who actually wake up in the morning and rub their hands together and say, oh, what's the nastiest thing I can do today? You know, most people want to do good, but it's just that they're misguided

about what good actually is. Isn't that what Peterson keeps on bringing up about how if you were a German in 1941 and you were in the army, you would have been an Nazi as well and everybody likes to think of themselves as the person that would have not sent the Jews to the gas chambers and so on and so forth. But if you're convinced of an ideology, if you're convinced that these are the people that are causing the world to be bad and terrible and taking everything away from you and a threat to the safety of your community, that's going to compel you to do some pretty wild things without any belief that you're doing anything wrong.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, if you actually look at some of the interviews of former Nazi SS guards and people like that, a lot of them will say that they believed that they were doing the right thing, you know, when they were carrying out their actions, they would say that they were basically taught that the Jews had essentially bought Germany to its knees and that they were essentially sort of, they were corrupting the entirety of Western civilization, and that they were essentially sort of, they were corrupting the entirety of Western civilization. They were basically like a cancer and they had to be removed in order to preserve everything that their ancestors had built. And I mean, you know, this is in an age where there was no internet, there was no Wikipedia, you couldn't just go online and fact check

things, you know. So you had to make do with the propaganda, basically. That was being pushed out by the newspapers. Gerbaus was a master propagandist, one of the greatest propagandists in history, in terms of the skill that he had. And he managed to convince so many German people that essentially that Jews were not human beings, essentially, that they were demonic beings, that they're demonic creatures that needed to be removed from the world in order to create a utopia in order to create a world where everybody loves everyone and everything is beautiful. So these people were fighting for beauty, that's the horrific thing about it. The most ugliest things in history were fought in the name of beauty.

And that I think is a very sort of striking thing, a very dangerous thing, because it's something that people don't think much about. People tend to have this view that the world's evils are caused by people trying to do evil, but that's just not the case. You know, very, very little evil in the world is actually caused by people actively trying to do evil. The vast majority of injustice in the world is a result of people trying to do good. Firehousing, with so many competing narratives in the digital age, disinformation agents

can't convince you of any single narrative. So instead, they overwhelm you with many contradictory narratives until you start to doubt everything and become confused, demoralized and passive. Is this a case where beating people down with an overwhelm of information means that they're more malleable a little bit further down the line? Yeah, I mean, I first encountered this idea when I was reading the work of Hannah Arendt, who's a writer who was sort of working in the sort of 60s and 70s, and she had this really good quote.

In fact, let me bring up the quote so I can just read it out. So she wrote, so she wrote, so she wrote, if everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. And the people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act, but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people, you can then do what you please. And she wrote that in 1978. So she was a pretty sort of good prophet.

Because what she said has become far more relevant in today's age than it was even in her age. You know, it's been 45 years since she wrote those words nearly 45 years. And now it's the basis for disinformation strategies of the major world powers. I mean, you know, you'll know about the sort of the so-called Gerosimov doctrine, I mean, the guy who invented that term doesn't like to use it, but it's the name is still used. It's more sort of mundanely known as hybrid warfare, and it's this idea by developed by Gerassomorph who was this sort of Russian strategist, that the best way to assault the West would be to create this kind of decentralized, multi-pronged attack, known as a sort of multi-vector attack strategy,

which is basically where you just bombard the enemy with just so much information and just so many other things, basically just overload the enemy with content, which will just confuse them and distract them and just create a kind of ideological chaos in them. And they'll make them unsure, they'll no longer know what they stand for, you know, amid the fog, they'll lose track of who they are. And as a result, they'll become very, as you said, malleable, they'll become very easy

to control, they'll sort of become easy to manipulate towards whatever ends you want. And we saw evidence of this, particularly sort of around 2016, 2017, with the first, with the interference in the election and also with the Facebook posts by Russian troll farms in which they actually funded Black Lives Matter campaigns and they funded neo-Nazi campaigns. And you got to ask yourself, why would they fund these two completely opposing groups? And the reason is obviously they wanted to create this kind of confusion and this conflict. You know, they wanted to sort of bombard people with so much of these competing ideologies that they'd sort of begin to doubt their own beliefs and they begin to wonder what's true and what's not true.

And that's really the only strategy that this information can really fulfill in this world that we're in. Because we live in a world of so much information, you can't possibly convince someone of a single narrative with this information anymore. In Goebbels time, with the Nazis, it was very easy because there was only one source of information, which was the Nazi party. So you could just put out newspapers with one narrative and people would believe it or they'd believe nothing. But in today's age, there's just so many competing narratives. It's just simply not possible to make anyone believe any single thing. So the only alternative is just to confuse people. The beautiful mess effect. We tend to view our mistakes and vulnerabilities with shame

because we think they make us look on appealing. But research suggests our mistakes and vulnerabilities actually make us more relatable and endearing to other people, so don't be afraid to be human. Yeah, so there's a pressure on people to appear infallible, to never admit when they're wrong, to never apologize, because these things are considered a sign of weakness by society, you know. But when you try to appear infallible, when you actually try to do that, it makes you

more fallible because you become unwilling to correct your own mistakes. And that's why I like the beautiful mess effect because it suggests that trying to appear infallible is not just a bad decision-making strategy, but it's also a bad social strategy. No matter how you may try to appear to people, they'll always know that you're just a human. So instead of putting up this facade of trying to be a superhero, an illusion that's doomed to crumble in the end. It's much better to just be who you are, to own your flaws and mistakes and wear them proudly as armour, so that they can never be used against you. Have you seen the recent Brendan Shorbe fall

out from a podcast that he did? I read something very, very briefly about it on Twitter and this is hot shit in the podcast world. Right. Yeah. I've heard about it. I don't know much about it though. So him and the guys from Tiger Belly had this big falling out that's another podcast and then everyone was upset about things that Brendan had been accused of doing. And what I was really interested in was trying to work out the synthesis of why Brendan is so disliked by a very, very passionate group of people online. The fight in the kid subreddit has maybe 70,000 people in it now, and it's exclusively there to rip on them.

That's their subreddit, and it is more passionate than any supporting group I've ever seen. And they're there to take the them, right? That's their subreddit and it is more passionate than any supporting group I've ever seen and they're there to take the piss out of people and I was really, really trying to work out what it is about Brendan beyond, you know, personal preferences about delivery and personality and stuff like that. And I kind of settled on the fact that he is very unprepared to show genuine vulnerability. And the beautiful mass effect is kind of what's been pulled out. He has this quite sort of strong guy. And again, you know, he used to be a fighter, he used to be a professional or a semi-professional football player

when he was in college and now he's doing comedy and he's around alpha males and he's got this sense that he needs to live up to and he's a dad, business owner and all this stuff. But I think what you see is, you're right, inevitably everybody knows that you have vulnerability behind there, unless you're an absolute extreme, like a David Goggins or a Jocker willing, because somebody like that. And even with them, I think that they're very prepared to show their own failings in the past. And this is the trajectory that they're very sort of prepared to show their own failings

in the past. And this is the trajectory that they're onto now. And now you can't hurt me and you need radical responsibility and stuff like that. And I think that the problem that people have is they know, or they have a sense that behind the facade with Brendan specifically, there's something sort of soft and smushy. And if they just keep on tapping away, that they're going to cause that to open up. But you can get out ahead of that narrative pretty easily. Think about some of the most moving podcasts that people have done.

It's when they show genuine vulnerability, not in a performative way, not in a way that's done for effect, almost in a reluctant way. You know, they're trying to tell a story and they're putting a brave face on and maybe they've got a little tears going or they're struggling to get through something in their voice is cracking, but they're moving through it. I, you have to really, really dislike a person to watch that and not think, feb play. You know, you put yourself on the line. This is a really, really vulnerable position that you're in. Yeah, I mean, yeah, because like, you know,

when it comes to some people think that bravery, for instance, is not being afraid, but that's not really what bravery is. Bravery is being afraid and still going ahead and doing what you need to do, despite being afraid. And I think that that's a crucial part of this. I think that everybody's going to know that you're a human. No matter what you do, no matter how many things you try to, how many masks you try to wear, people are going to see through them. They're always going to understand that you're a human that you have flaws. So the best thing to do is just to embrace that and to realize that, hang on a second, you're not gonna convince people that you're as, you know, this is some sort of guard or

superhero or whatever. I know a lot of people try to do that online, especially, like they want to create this kind of facade of them always being right about things. But really, nobody is right about everything. Everybody gets things wrong a lot of the time. And the difference between the people who get things right a little bit and people who get things right a lot is that the people who get things right a lot are willing to learn from their mistakes But in order to learn from your mistakes, you got to first admit that you were wrong

so in order to be right you have to first be wrong You know and this is something that I think people need to do more often. Because you see on social media, people are not willing to own up to their mistakes. So many times, I engage people in a debate and then I point out when they've got something wrong and they won't admit it, even though the evidence is there right in front of them in their own statements, where they've contradicted themselves or where something they've said about something has just turned out to be factually incorrect. They won't admit it because their ego's won't let them. And this is why one of my tweets, recent tweets, as I said that, the greatest enemy of truth is ego. Because when you are so invested

in yourself, you become less invested in the world, in the objective reality. You become less invested in the world, in the objective reality. You become invested in subjective reality rather than objective reality. That's always perilous because subjective reality is not real. It's an illusion. So you're investing in an illusion. Whereas if you invest in the actual objective reality, the objective reality that you are going to be wrong, that's the only way that you can really improve yourself because that's the real world, that's the only thing that's real. The signal that gives to everybody else as well is that you're a

you're a good player in the game. It's worth their time investing in you because you're not an immovable object that perhaps if they were to convince you of something then maybe you'll change your mind and that means, well, I'll actually invest in this. Yeah, absolutely. I think if you wanna convince people, then the best way to do that is to show them that you can be convinced.

Because it shows that you're a reasonable person that you'll listen to reason. And that is, I think it gives people faith in you. Whereas if you are sort of like a kind of Nicholas Nassim to lead kind of character, you know, it doesn't matter how intelligent you are, if you're just kind of like, no, I'm right, I'm always right, I'm never wrong, you know,

then people are gonna lose faith in you. Even if you are always right, they're gonna lose faith in you because that confidence, I think over the long term, it begins to grate on people and they don't, people don't like arrogance and they sense it in people. If you constantly, if you never admit when you're wrong, if you never admit when you're human, people are going to see straight through it. And I think that's what probably happened with Brendan Schaubb is that he, you know, he does seem to

be somebody who's quite fake, cause I've seen him on Joe Rogan. And when he's on Joe Rogan, he's very different to how he is when he's on the fire in the kid. When he's with Brian, forgot his name, but yeah, Colin, that's the one, yeah. And I think people see that, they see that it's just a facade that he's put up

in order to protect some kind of vulnerability that he has, you know. And they're gonna keep tapping away. They're gonna keep on know. And they're going to keep tapping away. Yeah, they're going to keep on going. And that's what they do, yeah, don't try and open that wound. But if you were, if I was to give him advice on how to kind of deal with the current milieu that he's swimming through, I actually think that it's so far gone now that there isn't really much turning around. But if I was to give him advice, I would say, look, man, you need to take a little bit of time off from the show,

you need to genuinely do some reflection and you need to come back with a 30 minute long monologue that explains to people about exactly why you've been the way you are. That says, okay, this is the kind of perspective I have, this is the worldview I have, this is why the sort of actions that you've seen have been portrayed in the way that I've been doing them.

And even the most hard-nosed bastard would, as long as you can convince people that that's genuinely the truth, and that's the sort of wolf and sheep's clothing problem that you get with performative vulnerability, that when you end up trying to fix the problem with genuine vulnerability, people say, no, we know that this isn't the truth.

But you have to be a pretty hard- on those bastards to look at somebody do that. Genuinely open up and go, no, I just still don't believe you. It's really difficult. Look, man, dude, I appreciate the shit out of you. The stuff that you put out online is fantastic. You've got Substack now as well. Yeah, where can people get your Substack? Yeah, it's govinda.substack.com. So that's G-U-R-W-I-N-D-R.substack now as well. Yep, where can people get a sub stack? Yeah, it's a go window dot substack dot com So that's g. You are w i n dr dot substack dot com and G underscore s underscore

BH og al on Twitter. Actually, it's not at Twitter now. Sorry. Just it's a it's at G underscore s underscore b ho g al That's what Twitter handle. Get another thread done. I want to do another one of these as soon as possible. I will do nice one. I appreciate you. Thanks, man. Yeah, you too. Thanks, Chris. Take it easy. you