Modern Wisdom - #516 - Gurwinder Bhogal - 16 Surprising Psychology Truths

Episode Date: August 22, 2022

Gurwinder Bhogal is a programmer and a writer. Gurwinder is one of my favourite Twitter follows. He’s written yet another megathread 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 how bad things can sometimes feel better than good things, why people die on the hill of opinions they've only just begun believing, why intelligence plus ideology is a nightmare, how comedy can be a troll's last line of defence, the biggest lesson I learned from Joe Rogan, why regret minimisation should be a priority, why authoritarians lose sight of rationality and much more... Sponsors: Get over 37% discount on all products site-wide from MyProtein at https://bit.ly/proteinwisdom (use code: MODERNWISDOM) Get 20% discount & free shipping on your Lawnmower 4.0 at https://www.manscaped.com/ (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get the Whoop 4.0 for free and get your first month for free at http://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Check out Gurwinder's Substack - https://gurwinder.substack.com/ Follow Gurwinder on Twitter - https://twitter.com/G_S_Bhogal Gurwinder's new MegaThread - https://twitter.com/G_S_Bhogal/status/1545510413982474253  Adam Mastroianni's post - https://experimentalhistory.substack.com/p/underrated-ideas-in-psychology  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, everybody. Welcome back to this 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 yet another mega 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 just start to bring him back on to talk about it. Expect to learn how bad things can sometimes feel better than good things, why people die on the hill of opinions they've only just begun believing, why intelligence plus ideology is a nightmare, how comedy can be a troll's last line of defense, the biggest lesson I learned from Joe Rogan, why regret minimization should be a priority, why authoritarians lose

sight of rationality? And much more. I always enjoy speaking to Gwinda, which might be apparent by the fact he's been on the show three times in the last year, but he's just super smart. I love talking about human nature, and looking at the actions that we take from a third party bird's eye view. It's very, very cool,

and there is tons to take away from today. Also, don't forget that you might be listening but not subscribed. And that means you're going to miss episodes when they get uploaded. So if you want to support the show and make me very happy at the same time, head to Spotify and press follow.

It's right in the middle of the page or there's a little plus button in the top right hand corner and Apple podcasts. I thank you. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Gwinderbogel, look at the show. Thanks Chris, nice to be here. Dude, you're crushing it at the moment.

That audience capture article that you wrote and substack has gone absolutely everywhere. When someone posts something that's one of my friends' work in a group chat, but I don't post it, there's this weird sense of ownership or jealousy. I'm like, no, that's one of my friends work in a group chat, but I don't post it. There's this weird sense of like ownership or jealousy. I'm like, no, that's my friend. That's supposed to be me that's posting that, but dude, I'm so happy to see how everything's blowing up for you at the moment. Thanks, man. Yeah, it's appreciated. I think a lot of it's probably due to you as well, like spreading word about me, you know, so thanks for that. That's a part of the Borgal cult. But so for people that aren't familiar with these episodes, you do these huge mega threads on Twitter. You talk about

cognitive biases, human nature, psychological effects, groupthink, all this stuff. I fall in love with them and then we go through them today. I've got some, I actually brought some from home. I've got some that I've made already. So I'll bring some of mine into it as well. We just get to go through them and we'll break some down. So the first one, and this is my favourite one from your most recent mega thread, which will be linked in the show notes below. Gwinn does theory of bespoke bullshit. Many don't have an opinion until they're asked for it. At which point, they cobbled together a viewpoint from Wim and half remembered here say before deciding that this two-minute-old makeshift opinion will be their hill to die on. Yeah, so I think the last time I was on this show, we talked about how social media has made

opinions more important than deeds, and people are judged by their opinions. And I think one of the sort of side effects of that is that now everybody feels the need to have an opinion on everything. But obviously the problem with this is that, you know, people can't really do the research to actually back up all the opinions that they have. And so what do they do? They just make shit up, you know. And I've seen this on social media since I joined Twitter in 2014.

I've seen this happen with regular occurrence, with regular consistency. And it's kind of, I think it's something that really is just, it comes naturally to people to feel the need to apply non-subjects because it makes them feel connected and it makes them feel like they're part of the conversation. And it also, obviously, because of the opinion economy, it's something that people feel the need to do in order to bolster their own status. And so people just end up just talking. And it's remarkable how often this happens. It happens with pretty much everything. I mean, if you look at, for instance, let's take a subject like fracking,

for instance, most people have probably read like one or two articles on fracking, for instance. Most people have probably read one or two articles on fracking, right? Maybe from the BBC or from New York Times, right? And suddenly everybody becomes an expert on fracking. It's just have to really warn article on fracking. Everybody has a strong opinion on this, oh yes, great, for the energy efficiency or it's really bad for the environment.

And none of these people really know what they're talking about. You know, and I think this is one of the dangerous things about this is that the need to have an opinion sort of compels people to take a stance on things that they don't know anything about. And what that does is it just pollutes the sort of conversation, it pollutes the national conversation, the global conversation, pollutes the global conversation with garbage, basically. People just ill-thought out opinions, things that people don't really understand. They're just sort of talking. What I find interesting here is the fact that it's their new hill to die on. Not only is the fact that it's their new hill to die on. So not only is the opinion brand new, but for some reason, people feel like, like, existentially connected to it, that letting go of the opinion would be tantamount to their own destruction.

Yeah. I mean, so one of the things with this is that once people utter an opinion in public, even if it's a really, really poorly thought out opinion, they feel the need to defend that opinion, because if they don't, then they're going to look inconsistent. You know, if they, if they go back on that opinion, if they change their mind, they have this perception that they're going to be, they're going to sort of be perceived as weak or stupid. And so their egos compel them to defend even the worst opinions, you know, because the fact is that they want to remain consistent. And do you think that part of this is to do with the fact that typically our opinions wouldn't have been set in stone and referenceable for almost all of human history,

whereas our entire lives now are there to be linked and screen-shotted until the day we die? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think what people would have done in the past, because human ego is as old as humans. So people always want to be right. They've always wanted to be right throughout history. But I think the way that people did this before the internet was that they quietly changed their opinions and hoped that nobody would notice, you know. But now people can't do that because there's a public record of everything. So people are compelled by the record, by the public ledger, to just defend the worst opinions that they've ever had. The blockchain of opinion errors, yeah, yeah, yeah. And this is, I think, a very dangerous thing because it means that people are stifled.

They're not allowed to grow, they're not allowed to develop. They're not allowed to change. People sort of remain static in their lives because of this. They think, oh my god, if I change my opinion, everybody's going to know they're going to see this post from like 2014. And they're going to see this post from 2020. And that fear, I think, is responsible for a lot of people being very pig-headed and stubborn, I think, in their beliefs. They double down on their worst beliefs. Yeah.

This seems to be so many of the previous ones that we've spoken about. One of my favorites from all of our conversations was an absurd ideological belief as a show of fealty and a threat display. So this kind of explains why people might choose group ideology or group think over rationality and reason itself. Then the fact that our opinions are significantly more visible than our deeds adds another layer on top of that because we are our opinions rather than our actions now. And then you know, you continue to roll this a little bit further forward. I love that. Right, next one. Next one. When intelligent people

affiliate themselves to ideology, they're intellect ceases to guard against wishful thinking, and instead begins to fortify it, causing them to inadvertently mastermind their own delusion, and to very cleverly become stupid. Yeah, so this is actually a very robust finding in psychology. This is one that's been replicated many, many times, so it's a very reliable finding. And there's so much evidence for it. I mean, there was one experiment, I've forgotten the name of the researcher, but what they did was they basically, they got people to post their opinions. And then what they did is they rearranged the opinions, they re-worded the opinions so that they would disguise as other people's opinions. And then they asked these people like, what

do you think of this opinion? And they would suddenly be like, oh, you know, this is wrong. I don't believe this at all. You know, this is whoever wrote this is stupid, you know, even though it was their own opinion. And so, you know, when people were asked, why do you object with this, they had a whole list of reasons. They would be like, oh, well, this part is wrong, that part's wrong. So they were actually critically analyzing their own opinions, and they were dissecting them, they were finding what's wrong with their own opinions, but they were doing this unwittingly, which showed that they actually possessed mental faculties, but that these mental faculties were

being misdirected in a way to sort of essentially destroy their own opinions. And this, I mean, this is something that you see every day on Twitch as well. You see people using logic and things like syllogisms and what's a syllogism? So syllogism is like a logical argument where you say like if A, a logical argument where you say, like, if A, then B, if B, then C, therefore A, then C. So it's like just a way of making a simple argument. And people will use logic and things like they'll use sometimes very sophisticated arguments and they'll often, they'll mention cognitive biases. This is the irony of it. They'll mention cognitive biases, but they'll always apply these cognitive biases to other people, never to themselves. And I'm guilty of this as well, I mean, I'm sure, you know, I've made many, many errors as a result of my own cognitive biases, but it's much easier

for me to see them in other people than it is for me to see in myself. And so all of our knowledge of mental models, cognitive biases, all of these things, you know, we can be the most knowledgeable people in the world, we can have all of this knowledge of all the biases that other people, that, well, that human beings, you know, suffer from and we will only really see these other people because of that blindness. And that blindness is why intelligent people, when they affiliate themselves to ideology, they become more dangerous than stupid people who are affiliated to ideology because the intelligent people can come out with rationalizations and they can

come out with very clever arguments that support stupid positions. And so, I mean, like Thomas Sol, he had this great line which he said that, you know, he spoke of this idea, said it was an idea, so absurd only an academic could believe it, you know. And that really sums it up because you can spend your whole life, you know, sort of just coming out with the best arguments. But if you are, if your mind is blinded by ideology or by tribalism, then you will put your great intellect to the service of stupid ends, idiotic ends basically. It's a very, a very fast, powerful car being driven in the wrong direction. the service of stupid ends, idiotic ends basically.

It's a very fast, powerful car being driven in the wrong direction. Yeah, oddly, a slower car would do less destruction. That's it. It's like this other saying, I think it was Saul Bello, who said that a great deal of ignorance can be invested in, no, sorry, a great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance if the need for illusion is high.

And so if you really need to believe something, no matter how absurd it is, if you have the intelligence, you can make yourself believe it through your own arguments. You can convince yourself, and that's the danger of intelligent people is that they can convince themselves of stupid arguments. Absolutely. I love it. All right. Next one.

This is one of mine. So, I found a guy, Adam Maas Stroyoni, but showing his surname, but he's got a sub stack as well that people should go and check out. So this is the fading affect bias. The goodness and badness of memories fade over time, but the badness faced fades faster. Some bad memories even become good memories while good memories rarely become bad memories.

It makes sense that both join pain fade with time, stuff just feels less intense when it's farther away, but why does pain fade faster? It's because when bad stuff happens to us, our psychological immune systems turn on. We start to rationalize why we don't want to be in a relationship with someone who doesn't want to be with me. We downplay, breakups happen all the time in high school, it's no big deal, we distance,

I never liked it that much anyway, and we distract, I'm going to go and play video games. These emotional processes function like emotional antibodies, taking the sting out of bad memories, we don't use them on good memories, so good memories keep their luster longer. Everything is temporary, bad stuff, especially. Tragedy plus time equals comedy is the closest thing psychology has to a chemical equation. Beautiful, yeah. I mean, yeah, I couldn't agree more. I mean, yeah, because I've heard about this, this bias, and I have a theory about it, actually, which is that I think we've covered negativity bias, didn't we? We did it in the first episode that we did.

And so just for your audience, just a refresher. So negativity bias is the tendency for people to focus on and remember bad news over good news. And the reason for this is because bad news constituted an existential threat, whereas good news didn't. So you had to pay more attention in order to survive to bad news. So one of the side effects of the negativity bias is that it fills your head up with a lot of bad memories, a lot of really, really horrific and sort of traumatic events. And you need a kind of safety valve against this. You need some way of being able to continue to live your life without wanting to commit suicide from all these negative emotions as a result of the negative bias.

So I think that this fading effect bias acts as a kind of safety valve, in that it allows us to release all of that pent up negative energy as a result of all of these negative memories that we have so that we can retain a sense of hope and a sense of motivation and feeling that we have, so that we can retain a sense of hope and retain a sense of motivation and feeling that we can actually do things in life. So I think it's like a psychological defense mechanism, I think, which is pretty much what Adam seems to have said, yeah, in your opinion.

Yeah, for sure. I also think that makes a lot of sense. Imagine if you didn't have the fading affect bias and you just accumulated this ever-increasing intensity of negative experiences throughout your life, every caveman would have been an eyelist, right? Yeah. No one would have ever got anything done because they would have been bowed under the weight of their brother that died 55 years ago or something. Exactly. It's a nice thing to remember here though that not only can bad things

fade and become less bad, but sometimes can actually become a perverse source of joy that the tragedy plus time equals comedy is true. I look back on some of the things that I thought were kind of close to destruction back in the day and it's now almost got a humorous quality to it because you've come out here the side. And the same doesn't happen, which really should give us reason to discount how bad bad things feel. As you're going through something, not only do you know that this isn't going to last forever, not only will you know that the memories are going to fade

over time and won't feel as intense, but maybe even in five years time genuinely be a source of something that's valuable or at least funny to you. Yeah, I think, like I posted a tweet about how regret is a sign of progress, and I think that basically applies to this because if you have a bad event in your life, if you have a bad sort of incident and you learn from it, then the sort of, there's no more need to feel any pain because you've learned from it, you're a different person, you've grown since that occurred. Oh, you know, there's been so many times in my life where I've just done something,

you know, just got awfully embarrassing, and I've just made me cringe, you know, and burn up, just thinking about it. But then after time, you change your behaviors and you realize that that wasn't, that's no longer you, the person that did that is no longer you, you're a different person now. Oh, how does you grow?

And once you've grown, you no longer need to feel that negative sort of feeling in a sense. So, you know, it kind of just gets ejected as a sort of a necessary waste product. That's a very interesting way to think about regrets. The fact that you still regret doing something maybe a little bit of an indicator that you still regret doing something may be a little bit of an indicator that you haven't transcended it or fixed the thing that it's based on

anymore. I had, um, fuck, he wrote the book, Daniel Pink, the power of regret. He wrote that book at the start of this year. I spoke to him while I was in New York. And he used the same thing. He basically said that regret is the opportunity to remind yourself that you're genuinely invested in something. It gives you a direction that you're supposed to look at when you move forward. But he never mentioned that it's kind of a canary in the coal mine to remind you whether or not this is still something that you probably need to work on. Because if you get yourself to the stage where you've completely emeliorated whatever the regret situation was, and you've just brought it, imbibed it in your life.

The regret would, by design, would start to fall away. Maybe there would sort of be something that linger, but it wouldn't be visceral and emotional in the same way I don't think. So yeah, that's an interesting one. I think pain only really exists as a sort of warning system to prevent you from, you know, doing stupid things. Like, you know, burning yourself, you yourself. That's obviously the body is trying to tell you, don't put your hand in fire. It's the same with psychological pain as well.

If you suffer as a result of something, it's your body's way of telling you not to do that, don't do that because this is going to be the effect. I think that the fading effect bias is your body's way of telling you that this pain is nothing personal. It's just there as a lesson sort of thing You know don't take it personally and That's why we can kind of try and see through it after a while and just be like okay Just needed to teach us a lesson. It was our boss in a way just telling us look that's not the right way to do it This is a way to do it now. Let's go out for a drink and have a point. You know, so it's like it's it's it's just a kind of way of just teaching us without

You know any any sort hard feelings, as it were. Navarls Razer, if you can't decide between two choices, take the path that's more difficult or painful in the short term. Doing this will counteract the hyperbolic discounting, the brain's tendency to overestimate short-term pain and underestimate long-term pain. Yeah, so we perceive objects in time similarly to how we perceive them through space. So the further something away is in space, the smaller it appears,

and the same is also true of time as well. The further something into the future, something is, the less it really registers in our lives, and the same thing with further into the past. This obviously is a necessary thing. We have to focus on the present moment because if we're too focused on what's happening 10 years in the future,

we're not going to be able to live our lives. But it comes with side effects in that we tend to underestimate problems in the future, or even rewards in the future. And we tend to overestimate problems and rewards in the present. And the future and we tend to overestimate problems and rewards in the present. And this is why we tend to have this short termist view of things where this is why we procrastinate essentially because we just passed the book to, you know, my future self would deal with it, you know, because your future self seems

like he can solve every problem in the world because he seemed like a superhero, don't he? Because you don't have to think too far ahead, you don't need to think about your future stuff very much. You just be like, I hate you, he'll sort it out. I'm just going to focus on just eating some ice cream and watching TV or whatever, you know. But yeah, this is, I think this is one of the things that really screws people over, is this sort of belief that what's happening now is more important, always than what's happening in the future. And you know, yeah, to a certain extent it is. You've got to obviously be aware of what's going on in the present.

But you've got to always remember that your brain is configured to make you believe this. And so you have to take the sort of opposite view. I mean, all biases now that we have now, they're all a result of heuristics, but they're all mental shortcuts that we once had in a different environment. And now they've become biases because we're in a completely different environment. But we can use heuristics, we can use a new set of heuristics to overcome the present biases that we have.

And one of these is Naval's, Razor Naval Ravicant, he's a great thinker, I'm sure you know who he is, probably most of the audience know, but he's an investor and he's a philosopher as well. And this is just a, I think, a great thinker, I'm sure you know who he is, probably most of the audience know, but he's an investor and he's a philosopher as well. And this is just a, I think, a great sort of mental model to use when you want to consider whether you should pursue a certain action. You'll always underestimate the things that are going to be happening further out in the

future than you will, the things that are happening closer to the present. So therefore, always take this into account when you're making decisions, because your brain is very good at making you believe that the only thing that matters is the present. There's a thing that I brought to science called anxiety cost, which is the longer that you take to complete an action, the more time that is taken up,

thinking about having not completed the action. So you wake up every morning, you've got a meditate, you've got to go to the gym, you've got to do whatever. If you do it in the morning, then you've got the rest of the day to enjoy it. If you wait until the evening time, then you've spent all of that time every single second that your mind was taken up thinking about the fact that you haven't meditated or gone to the gym yet, could have been gotten rid of had you have done it in the morning. That's the anxiety cost and you can immediately rate that in a similar way by getting things done. And I think

if you can't decide between two equal choices, take the path that's more difficult or painful in the short term, is basically you trying to start to front load against that hyperbolic discounting, right? It's reverse procrastination. Okay, if I try and find something that seems overly difficult short term, that probably will maybe end up being about equal to what it should be rationally over the long term. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I think it's hard to really, because you can't quantify value it in very sort of accurate ways when it comes to whether I should do a certain actual or another one.

You can't put numbers on it, but as a sort of just general rule of thumb, it's always worth considering that you're always going to overestimate the short term over the long term. What you have to do in the short term over the long term because the long term is something that you don't want to think about most of the time. Yeah, absolutely. It's an important way to sort of defeat procrastination, I think, because at the end of the day, postponing a problem extends it, as you said. So the best thing to do is just to get it done as quick as possible, and then you have more time to just do whatever you want to do. It's more time. That's fucking lovely. Pursponing a problem extends it. That is absolutely lovely.

Right, next one. So, Pose Law, I got taught about my house a couple of weeks ago, but I'd seen it written online and people had said it, but I never actually bothered to look at the definition of it, which I guess is probably most people with most things. Pose Law, it's now impossible to distinguish trolling from sincerity online partly because shitposts have become so

life-like and partly because life has become so shitpost-like. Yeah, I mean what else is there to say? I mean yeah, I think everybody knows this, you know, when you go on social media, it's just impossible to tell whether somebody's serious, whether somebody's actually saying, whether somebody actually believes what they're saying. And I think, you know, this is largely, I think this is a result of the sort of short format of social media, you know, you never really get context

in on social media, you just kind of just get a short snippet of what somebody's saying, but you don't understand sort of what led to that thought process, you don't understand the motivations or the intent behind it, you can always gauge, if you look at a book, if you read a book, within a few pages, you'll be able to understand what the author's trying to convince you of, and you know, you'll understand a bit more about the author's background and things like that, just without them telling you directly, just from what they write. You can't really do that on social media, you can only see just an isolated, just a couple

of sentences or just a meme that somebody's posted, you know. And that, so basically all the information you're getting on social media, most of it at least, is anonymous. It's coming from people who you have absolutely no idea what their intentions are, what their motivations are. And this problem is compounded by the fact that we have now massive amounts of manipulators online. We've got troll farms, we've got marketers, we've got cultural warriors, we've got all these different people who are all, you know, just trying to manipulate the information space. And so they're putting out stuff sometimes that they think is false. They'll create an account of like Maga Mike or something and then they'll start posting loads of pro Trump stuff. And there's loads of these sort of fake accounts that are kind of just flooding social media. And a lot of it's just really outrageous stuff. Trump is the son of God and he's gonna bring about the second coming.

And stuff, and you know that there are people on the surface who are crazy enough to believe shit like that. So you can't discount it as just satire or parody or just some attempt to, you know, to just screw with people's heads. But the place that these people have to retreat to, if they do say something which is beyond the pale or outside the over-tombed window or completely unacceptable or whatever, it was just a joke, bro.

That's the defense mechanism that most people fall back on. This has always been the point of envy that I've had over comedian podcasters, because they can always say anything and use the, I'm just a comedian podcasters, because they can always say anything and use the, I'm just a comedian, as an excuse. It's the Get Out of Jail Free Card. He said something that was, I mean, if anyone's listened to Andrew Schultz's intro as recently, I don't know whether he's done it

on his most recent episodes, but certainly when he first started his new studio, he does kind of a bit, maybe a 30 second to a one minute bit, which is a little bit like the old Saturday night style. So tonight we've got, coming up into this thing, and of this thing, except for the fact that it is the most ruthless, cutting jokes that you can think of about anyone that they're maybe going to bring up or stuff that's happened in the past or whatever.

And I keep on thinking how the living fucked as this guy get away with saying that on the internet without being canceled. Just outrageous stuff, but because it's delivered well and because it's evidently a joke, there are different rules. So if you can accept the fact that there are different rules for jokes than things that people say seriously, what you have with Pozalore is basically a way for people to push the variance and the boundaries

of what they typically say while using the, it's maybe just a joke, bro, card as an ejector seat that they can pull if they need it. Absolutely, yeah. Yeah, I think this is spot on. I think a lot of, I've seen this happen as well on social media where a lot of people will say this and they'll use it they'll use it as a get out of jail card. Basically, if you point out that what they've said is stupid, they can always just say, oh, I'm only joking, bro. You know? So they try and make you look like the idiot for having not got the joke.

That wasn't it. Yeah, you threw something out there that had it have landed as a genuine insight. You would have happily taken that road and you threw something else the same thing and if it gets lambasted and you need to call it a joke then so be it. It's kind of un-falsifiable in a way. Yeah, absolutely. It gives them plausible deniability at all times so they can just say whatever

they like and get away with it. They'll be anything that is taken seriously and is like appreciate it. They'll be like, yeah, that's what I really mean, but it's not hard in being that, you know, I'm just joking. So, you know, it's like, yeah, so it's a very clever, very digital sort of digital defense mechanism. So I, on Rogan, the biggest insight that I learned when I went on his show, I've given a name to, so it's Rogan's difficulty and value conflation. So this is from my three-minute Monday news, so if some people may be familiar with this already, but I really loved it. This is a quote from him, quote,

look at the car he's driving, look at the watch he's wearing, look at the girl he's with. That's so unattainable to many people, so it seems like it's valuable, but then you attain it. And then you realize, oh, this is not valuable, this is just difficult to get. And there's a difference. There's a big difference. Yeah. Some things aren't valuable. They're just difficult to get in a world which has never been more convenient. Our ability to avoid

discomfort is very high. It means we can sail through life in a chasm of comfortable complacency. Most smart people also realize that there is value in stepping outside of this comfort that on the other side of the discomfort is something valuable. We're told that worthwhile things are difficult to attain, because if they weren't difficult to attain, they wouldn't be worthwhile. This is how non-valuable, but difficult things get slipped into our desires without just noticing. Attaining something worthwhile is often going to be difficult, but just because it's difficult doesn't mean it's worthwhile. We use the challenge as a proxy for virtue or value or alignment or integrity. There's some signaling going on here too, difficult things by design will be attained by a small number of people, which makes them

desirable simply because it's an easy way to stand out from the crowd. We realize too that sometimes easiness can be a signal of value. In my opinion, valuable relationships shouldn't be hard. Your partner should be someone you would take to wall, or take into wall, not someone you're at wall with. Your friend should make your life better, not more difficult, your parents should make you feel enough, not insufficient. Valuable work on the other hand is a beautiful blend of difficulty and ease. An apple employee wants to ask Tim Cook about whether it should still feel like hard work when you do something you love.

Tim replied, you'll have to work harder than you ever have in your before in your life, but the tools will feel light in your hands. But where the difficult things, mas your life, but the tools will feel light in your hands, but where the difficult things masquerading is the valuable ones. Perfect, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I was a big fan actually of your, your Brogan podcast. Now, remember that line as well.

Thank you. Yeah, and I think that this is actually, this explains a lot of the sort of incentive structures that we see in the world today. For example, I'll give you an example of this. I used to be quite addicted to video games. And one of the things I used to play was a game called Diablo 3. And it's basically you run around just killing zombies and demons and stuff like that.

And what they did is they basically had this concept called loot boxes. And this is something that you probably heard about since then, because I think Diablo III was the first one that really did this. There were not loot boxes which you could obtain, but they made these loot boxes extremely difficult to get. And the reason that they did it, I think, is to make them valuable. For no other reason than just to make them valuable, because a lot of these,

I remember like the actual things themselves weren't that great. Like there were legendary weapons for instance that you could get and these weapons would be like a bit more they'd have bonus effects like for instance there would freeze enemies if you hit them with the sword, you know like a ice sword or whatever and they would have these bonus effects but they wouldn't actually be that powerful they would just be extremely hard to get, so that when people did get them that get a sense of achievement, and it would create like a dopamine reward in their brain, they'd be like, oh my God, I got this sword, rare sword.

And even though it's just a piece of crap, and you will eventually, you'll need another better weapon as the levels progress, because this weapon isn't gonna cut it, literally, you know? And so, you know, you're basically kind of, in this loop, where you're constantly looking for the next legendary weapon, legendary weapons drop once every 200 enemies or something. You have to kill about 200 enemies,

and then it drops the treasure box, and then in that treasure box, you'll get this thing that glows, and it's like a legendary weapon. So they would make these really, really hard to get. And after a while, there were a lot of complaints. I think there was even talk of a class action lawsuit because they were making people buy these weapons, people, because it takes so much time

just to get one of these weapons that people would just fork out money instead. But the weapons wouldn't last very long. So you wouldn't get that effect very long. And they were milking it. They were making so much money. And this was the thing that kick started this whole loot box thing. If you know anything about video games, you'll know about loot boxes.

It's a very manipulative practice that is used in video games. And I think, I mean, I'm not really sure that you could apply it to something like social media. But there is a certain difficulty in acquiring a large follower account and getting that kind of social approval. And I think one of the reasons why people value that so much is because of the amount of effort that you have to put into it. It's not really that special to have a large number of followers because it's, you know, anybody can do it if you've got enough time.

You don't actually even have to be an interesting person. You can just talk shit and everybody grows an audience over time. You just have to look at some of the people who have audiences to see that you don't need any special skill to be, you just need to labour away and just post consistently. And so it creates this kind of, this sort of sense that, yeah, if you've got a lot of followers that you're a special person, but you're not really. All you've done is just posted consistently over a period of years. Well, this is a matter of what it is. It's kind of a little bit like Goodheart's Law, right? When a measure becomes an outcome,

it ceases to be a good measure that people use follow account as a proxy for value or integrity or insight or whatever, entertainment, whatever it is that people are following these people for. Did you ever find when you were playing Diablo III that you would use a suboptimal web weapon that signals difficulty ahead of a more effective weapon that would be more valuable? I can't say I did, but I think that probably were other people who do understand the dynamic, the fact that you want to swing the cool sword that doesn't do much damage rather than the effective sword that doesn't look so good.

I mean, I didn't say it with Diablo 3, but I do remember seeing it with Street Fighter. That was another game that I used to play. Street Fighter, I think it was Street Fighter 3, right? Because there's this character on Street Fighter called Dan, and he's got a pink, sort of, we've got a pink, what they called the overalls. They were, I forgot what they called.

But he basically, he was like a Ryu, like, and a Ken kind of character, except he was pink instead of white or red. And he was deliberately really weak, like the guy's Capcom who made the game. They made him deliberately weak as a kind of handicap to, you know, to, so that people who are really good at the game, they could basically beat somebody we're done and just humiliate them basically. Oh, okay, yeah, that's very funny. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so there were, there were people who would do this and some people would

actually take Dan to these tournaments as well. Like there's these big tournaments in Streetfire where you can earn like hundreds of thousands of dollars. And people, some people were so cocky, they would actually take Dan, and they would play as Dan in these tournaments, these world tournaments with some of the best plays. Most of them would get their asses kicked, but I mean, if you would see like exhibition games against less skilled players,

where Dan would just completely wipe the floor with, you know, like, Ryu or one of the other characters. The areas, that's pretty much. So that thing does happen, yeah. All right, nover effect. You may think losing your job is bad, but what if staying at your job would have led to you dying in a fire?

You can't truly know if an outcome is good or bad, because fortune can lead to misfortune and vice versa. So don't be quick to judge the cards you're dealt. Yeah, so the thing with outcomes is that outcomes never end. Every outcome has another outcome. So if something happens and that's going to cause other things to happen and then that thing's going to cause other things to happen and it's a chain that's just going to continue forever into the future. So when you actually zoom

out of the present moment and you actually look at the entire span of your life or even just you know it could just be a year, it doesn't even have to be that long. You can see that fortunes change very quickly. What seemed to be an advantage to you is now a disadvantage or what seemed to be a disadvantage is now an advantage. And there's an old Chinese proverb about this, um, called good look bad luck. It's a long story and it's about, um, it basically just about a story of how, um, you know, a a story of how, you know, a guy gets, he gets thrown off his horse and he breaks his leg and he thinks it's

bad luck. But then what happens is that some soldiers come to his village and they ask him to, they ask for conscription in the army because they want to fight some war. And because he's got a broken leg, he doesn't have to go to the into the war. So what was initially a bad accident has turned out to be fortuitous to him. And I think this is something that people don't appreciate enough because we tend to just look at a single outcome and just be like, oh, that's a bad thing. But we don't look at the effects of the effects. And this is obviously this links into second order thinking, the idea that we should consider the consequences of consequences and not just the consequences.

And so I think people really need to take them zoom out and just take a wider look at things and try not to be too hasty in judging things as good or bad. This is something that I suffer from myself. I think it's instinctive in it's all where we all are quick to judge something good or quick to judge something bad. But I think when we take a longer, longer term view

of things, we start to realize that, you know, that there's this kind of dynamic of oscillation of things that will be good one moment and they'll become bad and they'll become good and they'll become bad. And I think that if you remember this, it can help you to not be not be crushed by bad events in your life. And likewise, not be, not be sort of not let good things go to your head and make you cocky. Yeah. Yeah. I think this links in nicely with the fading affect bias as well, right? Just the hyperbolic discounting thinking long term. So there's something here that I've been thinking about for ages about what happens in reverse, about the stories that we tell ourselves about when bad or good things happen to us. I always got irritated for ages and I couldn't work out why when people said it was meant to be. So something bad occurs and then a situation

ends up spiraling around and then they end up in a better place. They go, you know, I lost my job, but that meant that I met my partner because while I was doing training or art class or whatever that I wouldn't have been able to go through. And I think the reason that I don't like that type of narrative is that it's incredibly disempowering to the agency of the individual over them to take a bad situation and turn it good. Why would you attribute the success that a situation has had from something suboptimal to something optimal to anything that isn't you? Why not take credit for it? People want to take credit for almost everything, but for some reason, in these situations, looking in retrospect to a bad situation,

a lot of the time people will claim that the outcome was some mystical, it was meant to be force. And it seems like it's related to what we're talking about here, the Nova effect, but in reverse. Yeah, absolutely. I think this kind of segues quite well into the concept of the region beta paradox.

Yes, there it is. Let's go. Let's go. So circumstances can sometimes drive us to be better than we are. So if we are in a sort of really, really bad situation, if we, I mean, you use this example when you gave the example, you basically spoke of how if something is a certain distance from you,

you're, you're walk the distance, you know, but then if something's just a tiny bit further away, then you'll think, okay, I might as well just drive the way there. So that tiny change in the environment is causing a completely different outcome in your behavior. And this is how I think negative events in your life can actually be turned to your fortune. They can actually make you into a better person. Because if you're under discomfort, that can drive you to be better

and to do things that you wanna do in life rather than if you're comfortable And I think that this is something another thing that people underestimate is that The discomforts that are carrying our lives make us stronger overall. They make us go out there and do things They make us think about they make us think outside the box You know if you are comfortable your whole life if you have everything given to you That's not actually a good outcome. Even though you might think it is, it's not a good outcome because what's happening is

that your brain and your body is going to be atrophying because you're not using it. You don't need to use it because you're comfortable. It's only when you're not comfortable that you begin to think and begin to actually do things. And this is when you think outside the box. So if a bad event occurs in your life, there are two ways of looking at it. You can either feel sorry for yourself and say,

oh, this is horrible. We know what's the point? What's the point doing when the face just going to throw it back in my face? Or you can use it and say, OK, this is a problem. I need to solve it. And then you start solving it. And in solving it, you actually benefit

from that bad event. Yes. So that's like alchemy. That's like, yeah, it's like an ecological alchemy. Absolutely, yeah, you turn the lead that would weigh you down into gold. So it's, yeah, this is a form of this kind of oscillation that I was talking about. You take something bad and then you turn it into something good. So you get the

trough of experience and you turn it into the peak of experience, you become better through adversity. And so this is another reason not to believe that bad things that happen to you are bad because they drive you to be better than you actually are. I think this is one of the sort of defining philosophies of stoicism, which I recently released at an article about. And you also, I think you had a guest on talking about stoicism quite recently as well. And this is why stoicism, I think, is such a powerful philosophy and why it's so widespread in places like Silicon Valley and Wall Street, it's because it allows you to turn stress and misfortune and things like that, that would ordinarily be considered negative

and to turn them into empowering actions, to actually make the most of them and to actually become better as a result of them. So you turn misfortune into fortune, which I think is one of the most powerful things you can do. I never realized that Amor Fati wasn't stoic, it's Nietzsche, right? Well, the idea originates with the Stoics, Nietzsche sort of appropriated it from the Stoics. Even though he despised the Stoics because he misunderstood what they meant by living according to nature, but he did still read a lot of Stoicism and he took this idea and he made it his. The idea is more famously associated with nature, but it actually originates with, I think it originates with Seneca. As far as we know, it probably

precedes Seneca to someone like Client These or Chrysipus, but we don't know about their thought very much because not much of their works of eyes. So the first, I think, known incident of this is thinking of the work of Seneca in which he talks about how people think that amorphatic means that you should just be resigned to fate, that you should just allow whatever happens to happen and just be passive. And this couldn't be further from the truth, it's not about being passive. It's about understanding the difference between what you can control and what you can't control and focusing your energies on what you can control and just

accepting the things you can't control. Because if you don't accept the things you can't control, you can't focus on the things that you can control. So you're not living optimally. You're not constantly going to be fighting against that, which can't be changed. Exactly. It's like trying to swim against the tide. You're wasting your energy. And you're going nowhere. So what you're going to do is you've got to surf that tide.

Ride it. No matter where it takes you, ride that tight because you can't do anything about it. But what you can do is you can control how you surf. You know, you can control your balance. You can control your positioning of your feet on the board. The story that you tell yourself about the waves that you're on top of. Yeah, that's one thing that you can definitely do something about. But most of all is, is your actions. Your actions are what you have complete control over, and your actions are the things that ultimately determine your fate, because it's not, like Epic Ted has said, this is not what happens to you, it's how you react to it that matters.

Because, you know, we're all going to die one day, when we're all, you know, we're all aging, we're all rotting, slowly decaying, we can't do anything about that. So there's no point in getting upset about it. What we can do about is we can be healthy, we can live healthy lives, we can make the most of the time that we're on this planet. And so drawing a distinction between the things we can't control and things we can't is very important because it allows you to direct your energies towards the areas where you can actually make an impact. And that's what Amal Fatty is.

It's about, it's about essentially accepting the things you can't change because not accepting them is not going to matter. It's not going to change anything. It's not going to, you know, it's just, it's like being upset that you're going to die. It's not going to change anything. It's not going to change the fact that you're going to die. You're still going to die. So you have to focus on what you can do something about. And I think that's the essence of Stoicin.

What I really liked about the region beat of paradox, which is another Adam Maestro Yanney. I'm going to link his stuff in the show notes because I've butchered his name so much. Yeah, the example was if you have a rule that you walk whenever you're traveling a mile or less or you drive when you're traveling more than a mile, then paradoxically you get two miles faster than you get one mile. The important insight here is that if you only take action when things cross a certain threshold of badness, sometimes better things can feel worse than worse things. And this is, I think it's episode 13 or something with a friend of mine, I call Michael Casu, and he was a drug addict

from the age of 11 or 12, heroin by 13 or 14, and then by the age of 22, 23, he was two times CrossFit Games a affiliate cup champion in the team. Wow. And then started a multi million pound business and then married a woman who started another multi million pound business with him,

and he now lives here in Austin, they've got this beautiful kid and another one on the way and blah, blah, blah. And even at the time, I remember using this example about the fact anyone that's ever tried to squat something very heavy, but you've only done a three-quarter squat. It's actually easier to bounce out of the bottom because you get a little bit of elasticity from the bottom of your squat, then it is to take it just above that and then have to drive it up yourself And it's kind of the same here If you don't act until you cross a particular threshold of badness you get stuck in region beta and region beta is

Comfortable complacency, right? It's the job which is pretty crap, but maybe has good benefits and you don't have to do much So the relationship which isn't bad and traumatic, but it isn't that good either. It's the flat, which is pretty terrible to live in and has a bit of mold, but not that much mold and maybe it's cheapening in or out location or something. If any of these situations got a little worse, you would have the activation energy to get yourself out of them and to move on to something else. And this is, I think, I mean,

Talib's got that barbell strategy thing, right? Where the gray zone is where you go to die. You want to be in black and white. And it kind of gets reflected here as well. That if something's unbelievably good, then fantastic, keep it going. If something's unbelievably bad, then you'll be motivated to change it.

If something's just about comfortably numb enough in the middle, that is precisely where you can spend decades in complacency. Yeah, so someone said, I forgot who they were, but they said that life begins at the end of your comfort zone. And I think that's so true. I think when you test yourself, when you put yourself in situations where you're not comfortable,

that's when you actually begin to really feel alive. And that's when you tend to actually begin to make the most of who you are. Your brain works faster because you're thinking about unfamiliar surroundings. You're thinking about an unfamiliar, familiar environment. It's, it's when, you know, for instance, when you go to sleep in a new place, your brain, half of your brain actually stays awake. Because it's, you have more micro awakenings because it's uncertain about whether it's safe or not. And your brain is more active when you're in a completely new environment than when you're in the same environment

over and over again. And so really what your brain really needs to develop is it needs to be uncomfortable. It needs to be in a situation that you don't, that you can't predict one where you're unfamiliar with what's, with what the rules of the game are. So I think that this really applies a lot to life is that if you, I think one of the, the sort of dangers of, of the world that we're living in at the moment is that everything is just so easy in terms of compared to how it used to be. Well, think about it this way. We're going out of our way to artificially inject difficulty into our lives. Yeah, yeah, we are. I've got a cold, I've got a cold plunge to about side.

I have to go and buy a purpose-built piece of equipment to set outside in my yard, to get into it for three minutes, whatever time today, and then get out and do breath work and all this, because I'm going from air conditioned room to air conditioned room to shade covered's veranda. Yeah, Ted Kaczynski, the the Unibomber, I mean his his his work, the industrial site in his and his future is a pretty crazy sort of expose in a way of the sort of world that we're living in now, even though it was written in the 1980s. And he basically talks of this thing called

surrogate activities, which is basically the idea that our lives have become so comfortable that we have to artificially create struggles. And, you know, the examples I think he gives are things like sports, and you could apply also to video games culture wars online Even like just politics itself a lot of that is just sort of theater You know we create these kind of artificial struggles just so that we feel alive because that's because the brain is a problem solving machine and When it finds itself without problems it invents the problem to solve itself so that it can solve the problem of having no problems to solve. It's basically, the brain is a problem solving machine. That's why it exists to solve problems.

That's the evolutionary function of the brain. And so when we find ourselves in an environment in which we have very few problems where we can instantly eat food just by picking up the phone and just calling someone and they're delivered to our doorstep. Or if we are cold, we can just take a hot shower. This life is just so much easier now than it was in the past. And most of the problems in our lives have very easy solutions. If we have a headache, we can just take an aspirin.

If we are feeling something strange in our belly, we can just Google the problem online. Things are getting easier and easier. So the brain is finding itself necessary to create more and more of these surrogate activities. And I think this is one reason why the culture wars have just been taken over online, on places like Twitter. Because people feel the need to have this struggle, they feel the need to rage against something. Even if it's a self-created enemy, shadow boxing and imaginary headjama. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think sports

I think this is what sports is in a sense is that it's kind of sense of competition and not just the competitors themselves But the teams and the people who support the teams pretend war Yeah, it's pretend war. I mean, that's essentially what especially in the UK like football hooliganism You know, you see I mean I used to live in Luton and I lived right next door to the stadium every Saturday night. It was absolutely crazy, you know, you had the mix who were these hooligans basically. They'd just get pissed up at the local tavern and they'd just basically just start trading through the streets and just, you know, just screaming at everyone and just egging themselves on and just trying to get themselves ready.

It was like the war paint on as well, you know, and they're just basically, it was like they're going to war, basically, that's what it was like every Saturday. And I just, I remember looking at them, just thinking these guys are identical to this, sort of, the tribes that existed a hundred thousand years ago, you know, who were put on their war paint and just go to war, you know,

this exactly the same dynamic. This, this atavistic sort of element of this tribal behavior that's remanifesting in their lives and it happens just so often people want struggle in their lives and I think culture war is the next evolution of this. It's an online video game that everybody plugs into like when they go on Twitter and they you know they come across this kind of battle this virtual battlefield where you know their their side is on the right side of history and they're

going to defeat the enemies of humanity and then they're going to remember as the heroes of humanity by all the preceding generations, all of posterity. But I mean, it's all an illusion that the brain conjures in order to justify its own existence, because if the brain has no problems to solve, what happens? You get bored. That's what boredom is. You know, boredom is when your brain is not fulfilling its evolutionary purpose, when it's not solving problems, or when it's not engaged in analysis. Well, we saw probably a good example of this at the very beginning of the pandemic. So the the brief two-week

Period where everybody came together before it was politicized. Yeah, and what you saw was I know in the presence of a real crisis everybody resented our values, but in the absence of a real crisis we created our own. And it feels very much like That was an example of what humanity could get to if everybody was facing a little bit of discomfort on a daily basis because everybody did face a little bit of discomfort. There was some uncertainty, there was a requirement for everybody to bind together and then very, very quickly everyone was like, what, we're probably going to be okay, therefore

what is the next problem that I can manifest in order to solve. Right, this next one, apathea, is that how I say it? Yeah, apathea, yeah. Apathea. Often fear is more crippling than that, which is feared. Rage is more maddening than that, which in Rage's hate is more toxic than that, which is hated. Few foes crush us more than our emotions, so victory over our enemies requires victory over our feelings about them.

Yeah, so this is another core concept in stoicism. And this is, I think, something that's extremely relevant today, because we are essentially, we're over stimulated in the digital age. We're just being barraged with stimuli stimuli and these stimuli are making us feel emotions. And they're calculated to make us feel emotions as well. That's the reason that we're being bombarded with this stimuli is to basically just make us feel and these feelings then drive our behaviors in ways that are beneficial to the people that are bombarding us with the stimuli. So, you know, one example would be the sort of dopamine rush that we get from being, you know, approval on social media, getting approval on social media. That's whole, the whole system is set up in a way as to make us chase social approval. We want more followers,

we want more engagement with our posts. And so we would seek out to do that, you know, we're rats in the skiner box, we're basically pulling that lever to get that pellet, that food pellet. And it's not just with this emotion, it's with pretty much every emotion that we can possibly feel. If you look at anxiety, they make us anxious, like the news agencies, they make us anxious because they want us to be fearful, because if we're fearful, we're going to want to read more articles about the thing that's we're scared of. So if they make us fearful of terrorism, then we're going to read more articles about terrorism because we're

going to be worried, so we're going to want to know what's going on. And so they're going to get more income because they're going to get more page views. So it works out for them. So it's in their interest to make us anxious. And then outrage is also another classic example. If you make people angry, then they're going to complain about it on Twitter. They're going to spread their outrage to other people. And we all know that outrage spreads like wildfire online. And it's one of the most consistent ways

that you can get attention and get your message out there. It's just by outraging people. So now we have things called rage bait. And even the New York Times, the old sort of bastions of journalistic integrity, they are engaging in this sort of stuff now as well, where what they'll do is they'll say something that they know is stupid.

So it will be something like, I mean, I'm just gonna make something up, but this is the kind of thing that I oppose. Something like refrigerators are an expression of white supremacy or something like that, you know, TVs are racist or whatever. They'll just get a random object and call it racist and they do that on purpose. I don't think that they're stupid of to actually believe what they're writing, but they're doing it because they know that it's going to anger their enemies. It's going to anger people in the Republican

party. It's going to anger the anti-SJW kind of people. The retweet of somebody that agrees with you is worth precisely the same as the retweet of somebody that doesn't. In fact, it might be worth even more. I think I saw a map of you showing just how bifurcated online communication is between left and right. So what you're actually optimizing for maybe

in order to reach new viewers is to get people who typically wouldn't engage with your content, to engage with your content, which probably means people on the other side, not the same side. That's a very good point, actually. I think that's probably that figures into the calculations. I think with these kinds of these divisive articles, Scott mean, like Scott Alexander the Bay Area psychiatrist, he spoke of CISA statements, which are statements that are supposed to make people angry and to make them take a strong stance on one of the issues. So for instance, you could say something

like, trans women are women, you post that, you know that's just going to set the fireworks, you know, because there's going to be some people who agree with it and they're going to agree with it very strongly and they're going to be people who disagree with it and they're going to be, they're going to think about it very strongly. So these two groups are going to argue with each other and in arguing with each other, they're going to spread the idea, they're going to spread it across all domains. And so this is the interesting thing that he found is that it's actually the things that divide people that spread furthest, not the things that people agree with, not the things that everybody agrees with.

Was that the Toxill Plasma of Rage? Was that that one? Yes, this is exactly what he called it. So, I think we did cover this on the previous episode. But this is essentially what it is. It's that ideas that unified people don't spread as far as ideas that divide people. And so this is why we have rage-bait. It's a business decision.

It's to basically spread the ideas not just in the circle of the New York Times readers, but also in the rival gang, in the right wing groups. So all these emotions that we're feeling, they're all promoted by the online ecosystem, anxiety, anger, desire, even happiness. All these feelings that they're artificially inserted into our brains just to make us to control us. And so, the stoic idea that the emotions causes more harm than the things that cause them

is actually very apt, I think, is more relevant now, even now, than it was in ancient Greece when the idea was first formulated, which is why I'm supposed to be the idea. Because these emotions are used to control us. If you are sort of easily outraged, then you're easily manipulated. If you are sort of any

emotion that you feel will be used to control you basically. So, Epic Tedis has this great line where he says, anyone capable of angering you becomes your master because they're essentially what they're doing is they're getting your attention and they're redirecting your attention to where they want it to be. And they're making you dance like a monkey essentially, they're just making you move and they're making you act in ways that you don't really necessarily want to. But which you can't control because your emotions are overpowering you. So I think it's very important that we control our emotions in this digital age because those emotions are used to manipulate us and to control us more than they ever have throughout history. Sam Harris has a really interesting insight here where he talks about try and

be angry without maintaining your anger. The point being that the the sensation of whatever made you angry is super super brief and almost all of the area under the curve of your anger for the the rest of time, is you perpetuating some story or framework or narrative or little mantra about how you could have what it should have changed, what that person would have done to you. And it's you that ends up becoming, your own mind has caused way more suffering

than whatever occurred in the first instance. That's the pebble that caused the avalanche, perhaps, but it's you that perpetuates it. There's another thing, another thing here as well, which I think is very interesting, that if you look at it from the other side, should be quite reassuring to most people, which is that your own mind is able to torture you

in significantly more sophisticated ways than anything or anybody that's outside of you. And this is one thing for anyone that's gone through depression or low mood periods, anxiety and stuff, which we all have, some more than others. If that's been you, you can find firm ground and reassurance in the fact that there is very little out there in the world that can hurt you as much as your own mind already has. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that's a great way of looking at it. I think that there is very little out there in the world that can hurt you as much as your own mind already has. Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, that's a great way of looking at it. I think what I tend to do with emotions is it's impossible to not feel emotions. You know, you can't just stop yourself from feeling emotions, but what you can do is you can develop some distance between yourself and your emotions. And that's what I try to do.

Is that when I feel an emotion, I don't automatically react. I put a gate between stimulus and response. So when I feel that anger or whatever, what I do is I use it as information. That's what emotions are to me. Emotions are information. It's your body's way of telling you

that something has upset or provoked your evolutionary ancestors, not you, but your ancestors, your distant, distant ancestors. So if somebody, you know, somebody angers you, that's basically your ancient ancestors telling you that a line has been crossed. But whether you actually choose to believe that is up to you because you're living in a completely different world to the world of your ancestors. You know, they lived in tribes, they lived out in on the savannah or in the jungle, you know. So they had a

completely different environment. So the things that they might think were lines that were crossed may not be like what you think is a line that was crossed. So you use it as information, you use your emotions as advises, not as masters. You know, you never be controlled by emotions but understand that they're telling you something about the present environment. So if somebody's angered you, what does that really mean? What does it actually mean? You know, I tried to look at, you know, what does this actually mean when somebody angers me?

What was actually happening there? And it's basically, if you go back to our evolutionary history, we needed a way to enforce boundaries before we had police, before we had a legal system. There needed to be some sort of way of reinforcing our own personal boundaries or even the tribes boundaries. And anger became a way to do that. Because if there's a cost to screwing with somebody else, then obviously you're not going to want to screw with that person.

If the cost is that they might lose their mind for a moment and Pick up a spear and and hurt it at you, you know Obviously, you don't want to engage in that behavior. So it worked as a very effective Sort of regulatory system before the advent of police before the advent of any legal system and So that's carrying over now into this world what we do have police We do have a system of order We have a society of morals and ethics and all this kind of stuff that we've developed since those times.

So it's become, anger has in a way become obsolete. It's still not completely obsolete because there are times when you should be angry because there are certain lines that should not be crossed. And you should reinforce those lines. But most of the things that you see online are not going to be lines that you need to enforce. If you are, you know, somebody calls you, you know, a dickhead online, you know, it doesn't matter. It's not, you don't need to get angry about it because you're never going to see this guy

in your life. You're never going to, you don't even know who they are. They could just be a chapap. You know, might not even be a real person. So there's no, there's no need. And, you know, what is it? It's just a word. They've literally just put a word on a screen. And there's no need and you know what is it? It's just a word. They've literally just put a word on a screen and that's it. You know, but people, they won't think about these

things. They won't put that gate between stimulus and response. As soon as they see that word, as soon as they see that insult, you know, the old ancestral sort of alarm system kicks in and they start losing their shit. So yeah, definitely got to realize that it's just information. That's all it is. That's all emotions are just information. Regret minimization. Somewhere in the future, your older self is watching you through memories.

Whether it's with regret on a stouture depends on what you do now. Yeah, so this is one that I sometimes use myself when I feel that I'm not motivated to do things. I've always found that a great way to develop a good character is to actually zoom out of your life and to look at the whole picture. And this is something that also applies with the 101010 strategy. So the 101010 strategy, I think we might have mentioned this before, I don't know, but this is one of the mental models in one of the mega threads, I think, that I wrote. And basically, it's the idea that we can stop ourselves engaging in behaviors that we might regret

if we think about how we would react to those behaviors in 10 minutes, in 10 months, and in 10 years. So, let me give an example. So, let's say you're addicted to cigarettes and you really want to quit cigarettes. You don't want to have a cigarette, but you've got an urge to just have one cigarette. You're like, our region's just one cigarette won't hurt. Most of the time, it's very hard to overcome that urge. But what you can do is you can zoom out of your life and look at the whole, the total of your life and say, okay, I'm here now.

If I do have this cigarette, how will I feel about having that cigarette, having had that cigarette in 10 minutes? How will I feel about it in 10 months? How will I feel about it in 10 years? How will I feel about it in ten years? And when you do that, you realize that it's actually not going to make much of a difference to your life at all. Because after you have smoked that cigarette, like ten minutes later, you don't feel any happier. I don't know if you've been addicted to cigarettes, but I was at one

point in it. And it kind of, you don't feel happier when you smoke. You feel like you will be very happy if you could just have that cigarette. But once you've actually got that cigarette in your mouth and you're actually chugging on it, you don't feel happier. After you've had it, you certainly don't feel happier. You feel regret and you just go off the game and you feel weak and you feel like you're giving in and that doesn't make you feel good. If you look at the long view, look at what your future self would think of what you're

doing, then that can help put things into perspective and it can help you to separate what's actually matters and what does it matter. And this is what I mean when I say that your future self is watching you through memories because if you look at your future self as somebody who already exists and they are actually looking at you. And in a way, I mean I'm a subscriber to the block theory of the universe. I do believe that time, that all times exist, that time is not a river, that time is actually an ocean, and that all moments exist forever, but that our brains, because they're 3D, we can only perceive a moment at a time. But I believe that every moment of our lives is already in existence right now. And I think that viewing things like

that can help us to take the long view and to see that hang on a second, we're going to spend the rest of our lives in the future. So we should actually care about that quite a bit. You know, it's, it's a lot more important than the present moment, which is just literally going to be gone like that. I mean, does now even exist? I mean, you know, if I say now, that's now in the past, you know, yeah. And the now, the now for you and the now for me is ever so slightly different in any case because of the light cone. Right. There is no such thing as two as two separate nows. Yeah. Well, one of the interesting things to consider here when it comes to considering what a life well lived means. For me, a life well lived is one that in retrospect you're glad you lived. And there's two views of happiness,

one by Dan Gilbert and one by Daniel Kahneman, and they don't really agree tremendously well. So Dan Gilbert says, if you were to spend the rest of your life on a lilo with a cocktail in a pool, just drink in and listening to tunes, that would be a life well lived because each individual now was one that was filled with pleasure. This is pleasure, this is pleasure, this is pleasure. And I, at first, because that doesn't appeal to me, that's not the sort of thing that would give me pleasure, but I know that there are people that it does. I felt like that was, I don't know, like a lesser type of pleasure or something, I got on my high horse about how moral I was for wanting the more difficult meaningful pleasure.

And Daniel Kahneman says the opposite or something different. He says that, you know, a life well lived, a good life, one that is happy is one that in retrospect is given you meaning that you're happy to look on in retrospect. The moment to moment experience of it is less important than the retrospective experience of it. What I've come to believe is that this is dependent on how introspective you are. It'll align with stuff to do with extraversion, and introversion, how neurotic you are, all sorts of different personality biases and affects and stuff. But if you are the sort of person that spends a lot of time reflecting, doing internal work, considering the way that your life has been lived and ruminating in a good way, I guess, or being nostalgic, considering the way that your life has been lived and

and ruminating in a good way, I guess, or being nostalgic. What you want to do is optimize your life so that you have many different memory slots filled with things that you can be happy and proud of, because things that you've done in the past can give you pleasure in the present, in a way that doing something like a Lilo and a cocktail can't. That being said, I have a ton of friends that I know that would fucking love to just spend the rest of time on a Lilo with a cocktail listening to tunes and throwing a ball around with their friends. And I would happily go around to that party

every so often. For me, that wouldn't work for the rest of time. But there are people for whom it does, and I've come to believe that the reason for that is that they may be a more forward thinking, maybe they're more present thinking, maybe they have fewer neuroses to deal with than I do, I'm not sure, but I think that that's an interesting way

to look at it, right? Absolutely, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's a perfect way of summing it up. I mean, I don't think I could add anything. I mean, it's just, it does, yeah, it does depend on how introspective you are, really, because how we live our lives is non-linear. You know, we don't live our lives just straight through time.

We live our lives, darting to hopes to the future, the memories of the past. The loops and loops. But constantly darting between the future, the present and the past, you know, we're enjoying the sort of present. Even when we're enjoying the present,

we're sort of sometimes just enjoying memories of the past. And so, I think, yeah, it does depend on the sort of degree to which you introspect, because people who introspect a lot obviously are going to be dieting around through time a lot more. And so the whole of their life is going to matter more than just the present moment. But people who don't introspect very much,

extroverts, yeah, for them, it's just going to be party all the time, you know? Just living in a present moment. But I mean, there's an interesting thing which I've, you know, it's just going to be party all the time, you know, just living in a present moment. But I mean, there's an interesting thing which I've, you know, going back to the whole point about it does now even exist. I mean, how long does now really last? I mean, this is a question of always, I actually have come to the conclusion that now doesn't exist. I think even when you're enjoying in the present moment, what you're doing is that you're enjoying something in the media past. Like if you're even, you know, let's say you're doing is that you're enjoying something in the immediate past. Like, if you're even, you know, let's say you're kissing someone, you're not actually enjoying the present moment of

kissing, you're actually enjoying the memory that you've created in the immediate split second past of being kissing that person and the continuation of that in the future. It's not really the present moment because even when you receive the nerve impulses from kissing, you're receiving them in the future. It's not really the present moment because even when you receive the nerve impulses, it's from kissing, you're receiving them in the past. Yeah, Sam Harris has this beautiful insight. There's a talk he gave called Death in the Present Moment. It's about 10 or 15 years old, super, super popular, and there's an edit of it. I think it's maybe called On Life or something

which has got this beautiful music underneath it. Anyway, he's talking about the fact that our conscious experience of the present moment is in some very relevant sense already a memory. And yeah, you know, it comes meaning for, it only becomes meaning for when it's a memory. Yeah, once you can't consciously process something before it's happened, that being said, we're anticipatory beings, right? Our entire setup is designed to take ourselves out with the present moment. We anticipate something before it happens, we get excited. There's

a good bit of evidence that shows that people are actually, they enjoy experiences more in advance of them happening than either during or after they've happened. And then once something has occurred, you have the opportunity to reflect on it. But yeah, man, right, next one, next one. Howard Hughes syndrome, everyone always lies to the powerful to curry favor or avoid punishment. Hearing nothing but flattery causes the most powerful people to develop the most distorted views of reality and their vast influence means we all pay the price.

Yeah, so I think this is a particular problem of authoritarians. People who people are afraid of are only going to hear stuff that they want to hear, you know. And if you look at history, right, you look at history, you find that every dictator ended up getting worse and more enhinged through time. I don't know of any dictator who started off extremely severe and saying, sorry, insane and then became less sane over time. I don't know of any dictator who started off extremely severe and saying, sorry, insane, and then became less sane over time. They all went more

unhinged and they went more crazy and they became more authoritarian over time. And I think part of the reason for that is that people are so afraid of telling them the truth that they just tell them what they want to hear and they kind of cushion them in this sort of alternate reality in which they are God and everything is going that way and it creates this, it just inflates their ego. I mean, you see it, you know, sorry, with Gaddafi, Gaddafi actually started off as quite a sane person, you know, he was, he was just basically wanted equality, you know, he was like a kind of, he was a socialist and he basically had the socialist revolution. And then over time he began to develop this sort of personality. But it wasn't something that happened within a few years or a few years. This took decades

to really emerge. And it happened very gradually because as time went on, people became more and more afraid of telling them the truth. And so they began to cocoon him in this kind of web of lies where he was just hearing only the things he wanted the truth. And so they began to cocoon him in this kind of web of lies where he was just hearing only the things he wanted to hear. And this caused him to just gradually distance himself from reality. And he began to believe that he was like this grand godlike figure who was going to just bring

the sort of justice to the entire world. He wanted to start off this whole Pan-African thing. And his ambitions grew because he became so convinced of his own godhood. But he's one example, Stalin is another example, Stalin is a classic example. By the end of his life, by the end of Stalin's life, when he was dying, nobody called the police, it was totally not the police, nobody called an ambulance, and the reason they didn't was because they were absolutely terrified of doing anything without his wishes and even saving his life. Yeah, even saving his life. People were afraid of it. And some people have said that the reason that nobody called a doctor or whatever was because.

Yeah, sorry, it was calling a doctor not calling an ambulance. They wouldn't have called an ambulance there. But yeah, nobody by the call doctor because they wanted them to die. I mean, that could be one reason as well. But these were some of his trusted, most trusted people, people like Lerenty, Barrier. And, you know, with styling, what happened was that he was so ruthless and so, I mean, he was known to sort of kill people if they gave him bad news.

And the same thing happened with Saddam Hussein as well. These people so bad that kill people just for giving them bad news. And so people just didn't want to tell them anything that they didn't want to hear. And this turned out to be very, very bad for Stalin because doctors were afraid to tell him if he had a medical condition, you know, they didn't want to make him, they didn't want to remind him that he's just a human, you know. And so what happened was overall, he just gradually became more and more distant from reality. He became worse and worse and worse. And this is a pattern that you see throughout history.

It's worse with the authoritarians. I don't know if this really happens with every leader because there are some leaders who are pretty open to hearing conflicting views, people like Richard Branson, for instance, he was notoriously kind-hearted and open-minded when it came to hearing things from his employees. So it's not every leader, but I think authoritarians in particular

and people who are, people who, anyone who people are afraid of, basically, they're doing themselves to this life of illusion. Yeah, because you have this sort of predisposition around tyranny or wanting things to be the way that you want them to. And then the world and you're in a circle of psychofants begin to reflect back to you that which you want, which means that you become ever more attuned to anything which is even slightly outside of the

thing that you want. There's this Tim Dylan went on Rogan and there's not many people that go on Rogan and really push back against him, but Tim has just got so much sass and wit and comedy. I think that he can get away with saying to Joe, and it's obviously got an existing relationship with him, things that very few other people could do. And Joe was talking about something like, I think Tim was lamenting how bad the something scene is in LA, let's say, let's say it was a comedy scene in LA or something. And Joe said something like, well that's strange because you know, whenever I'm around the people in the comedy scene in LA or something and Joe said something like well, that's strange because you know Whenever I'm around the people in the comedy scene in LA They've always been really kind to me all that I've ever had from them is you know Warmth and welcoming and stuff like that and Tim broke the fourth wall completely and said

Joe you do have to remember that you are Joe Rogan People are reflecting to you a world which they wouldn't reflect to pretty much anybody else because what they're seeing in front of them isn't a person it to King Yeah, absolutely. Yeah Yeah, this is this is one of the scary things I think so it's not just authoritarians is also people that are respected a lot You know, so if somebody is really really respected than other people won't want to sort of seemingly damage their own reputation in that person's eyes by giving them bad news, you know, they'll want to, want to like, you know, bolster their sort of ego and just say things that they know that they're the person that be happy to hear. But I think this is actually, this is a much

bigger problem than just individuals. I think that this is becoming a systemic problem. If you have a look online, the whole thing with censorship now, you've essentially got these massive tech giants now who can completely extinguish your online existence if you say something that they don't like. And what does this do is that this creates a chilling effect where people are now afraid to essentially tell Twitter or Facebook what it doesn't want to hear. Jeremy, and so we're now entering this world where people are now posting things that they know is going to be acceptable on Twitter. And so they're actually lying.

They're telling Twitter and Facebook what they think it wants to hear. And this I think is very dangerous because people are now by proxy deceiving themselves and they're deceiving other people. It's something that I think is one of the great arguments against censorship, I think, is that you essentially create this effect at scale. So it becomes a systemic issue. It's not just, oh, I don't want to displease Stalin or, you know, I don't want to displease Saddam Hussein, it actually becomes, you know, I don't want to displease the internet. You know, so what can you do? You literally

have to post online nowadays. If you want to have a life as a commentator, as a right or even, you know, as a human being, you've got to, you've got to post online nowadays, if you want to have a life as a commentator, or even as a human being, you've got to post online, everybody posts online. And so if you're entering this environment where this is a norm now, where you have to be careful of what you post, what Twitter is doing is it's basically putting a limit on honesty. That's what this kind of censorship is happening with this censorship. It seems to have been getting worse as well. I mean, we saw it even with the recent Jerry Sadovitz comedy thing. His share was cancelled because he... I mean, this is Jerry Sadovitz we're talking about.

He's one of the most controversial comedians. And he's been this way for like... It's been 20 years, he's been doing comedy probably longer than that. But he's notorious for being really controversial. And anybody who knows the name Jerry Sadoids knows that this guy is probably one of the most offensive comedians on the planet. And yet he was recently booked at this place called the Pleasants. And a few people complained, I think about two people complained about the show. And so they cancelled the show. They cancelled the show and they said it's racist and it's homophobic and it's transphobic and all this stuff, you know, the usual stuff. And now there's a lot of people like really angry with the Plezans and on the Plezans's Twitter page, you can see they've been

ratioed, you know, on their, on their Ple their post and there's loads of just obscene stuff on there. But basically what this comedy show has done is it's created this effect. It's basically now, no comedian is going to want to, any comedian who works for this company now is going to have to be very careful about what they say. So they're just going to say very bland, very polite, very to sort of like, you know, prosaic stuff, that is not adventurous, it's not creative, because they're limiting themselves because they know that if they don't, then they're going to get cancelled. And so this is a problem that extends not just to individuals, not just powerful individuals, but powerful organizations everywhere, and not just on

the internet, also offline as well. I understand why organizations would do this, you know, because I mean, the whole point of a person like Jerry Sadowitz is to cross boundaries. That's why he exists. You know, that's his whole stick is to cross boundaries and to make people uncomfortable. And so they've taken away the one thing that he was actually there to do. And in doing that, they've sanitized comedy itself. Because now any comedian who goes there is going to know what they've done. And he's going to be like, oh, okay, I'm just going to tell the pleasant's what they want to hear, which is going to be bland,

nonsense, you know, just jokes about. Yeah, plightitudes basically. So, so this is a big problem everywhere now. Deferred happiness syndrome, the common feeling that your life has not begun that your present reality is a mere prelude to some idyllic future. This idyll is a mirage that'll fade as you approach, revealing that the prelude you rushed through was in fact the one to your death. Yeah, so I mean, this is probably another way of saying quite famous quote by, it wasn't John Lennon who actually said this, but he's remembered for saying it, which is life is what happens when you're making other plans. I think this is a universal problem, and it's one, certainly, that I've experienced in my life, where you get this feeling that, you know, oh, you know, my life's not, I'm not really living yet,

but when I do this, when I reach this goal, that's when my life will begin, that's when I'll really enjoy things, that's when I'll truly be, and all that sort of stuff. But I've just got to get to that position. So people tend to sort of section off parts of their lives. And then in these sections, they kind of just automate their lives. They tend to just, they just do what they have to do and just they tend to focus their attention onto the future and to this sort of imaginary paradise where they'll be in the future when they're just, when they're just achieved X and Y, but then once they've achieved X, then they set new goals for themselves, you know, and they say, okay, yeah, I just need to achieve

Y, and then I'll be happy, then I'll be truly alive, then I'll be able to start my life. And this just goes on, on and on, And it seems to just carry on into death. Then the point comes, you're dead, and then you can't really do anything about it. So I think, yeah, this is something that is really a very seductive emotion to feel for people. Why do you think it's seductive? Because we tend to scapegoat many of our problems on things that we think,

you know, like that are not actually effective now, but which will be that we can deal with in the future. So, you know, we tend to scapegoat our lack of happiness on just some arbitrary thing, and we'll think that when we've resolved that thing, that will be happy. It's very easy to just find excuses for why you're not happy, basically. So you can just say, oh, the reason I'm not happy in my life is because I work at this job.

But what I'll do is I'll work for about two years, I'll build up some income, and then I'll just find a better job. So it's easy to just shrug all the problems off to the future and say, okay, yeah, that's the reason I'm unhappy and I can resolve that in the future. You can always resolve things in the future because, as I said before, your future self is a superhero. They can do everything, you know, your future self can solve all problems, you know, it's in, but when obviously when you get there, they can't, they can't do anything there because they are you at the end of the day. And so, yeah, this is, this is the thing

is that we tend to scapegoat our problems on just things that we think we can resolve just like that easily, one event at a time. And this happens when we do resolve that problem, then we find that we've got other problems and we say, oh, okay, well, I've just got to solve this problem and then I'll be happy. it's constantly if I just do this then I'll be happy and That thought process there is the key. That's the culprit. So I think the solution Is to understand that your life is actually happening now. It's not happening in your hopes It's not happening in your memories. It's happening at the moment now

And I know that I said that now doesn't exist But what I say now what what I mean is that the space in which you can act basically, the space in which you can decide, make decisions and act, that is the place where your life is happening. And yeah, that's slightly divided between the present moment and the past moment and the future. It's kind of like a little sort of triage of different things, triage, sorry, of different things.

But, yeah, that's the part of your life where really, if you want to avoid this problem, deferred happiness syndrome, you have to kind of understand that your life is not going to be happening in the future. Because if you delegate problems to your future self, you're creating a chain because your future self tends to act a lot like you. Jereen, and so he's going to delegate to his future self, and then he's going to delegate to his future self. So you have to make a stand.

You can't push off the problems to your future self because that person is you at the end of the day, and he's going to have the same prejudices and the same laziness and same procrastination that you've got. You're not going to magically become a superhero in the future. This is the illusion that a lot of people have. They seem to think, you know, I'll just, I'll do it tomorrow. I'm feeling a feeling like I've got a bit of a headache today. I'll do it tomorrow and I'm feeling better. Tomorrow I'll feel great. You know, there's always tomorrow. That's the thing. You won't feel great tomorrow. You're going to feel like you did today. And so you have to wrestle with the present, you have to embrace the present and try to understand that this is your life, this is actually happening now, it's not happening,

the future is not happening in the past, it's happening now, and this is the opportunity for you to actually make a better life, this is how you make a better life yourself by acting now, not by thinking that you're going to do in the future. So yeah. Dude, I absolutely love that one. Talib surgeons, you're considering two people for a job, one pretty, one ugly, in achievements, they're equal. Who do you hire? The pretty one?

No, the ugly one. They accomplished just as much while having a bias against them, always factor in other people's prejudices. Yeah, so I mean, this is quite a straightforward one, and I think what's interesting about this one is the focus on beauty causing prejudice, because I think that's something that people don't really consider much of. We hear so much about white privilege. We hear so much of our male privilege, but we don't hear about the privileges which actually and experimentally have a much greater influence on life outcomes. And those are pretty privileged. Halo effect. Yeah, yeah, the halo effect is part of it. Yeah, and the pretty privilege is what I call it because it really is just that pretty people just get way more

privileges in life than then ugly people. This is a fact of life it's been shown, you know, that they are more likely to be hired in job interviews, they are more likely to get higher earnings, they are more likely to have the door held open for them, you know, when they're going into a shop, what are there's just so many little things that that attractive people and this is particularly true of attractive women because men tend to judge people by their appearances more than women do. And so I mean attractive women are some of the most privileged people in in the world, but unattractive women are some of the most unprovened people in the world because there's a particular pressure on women

to be attractive. And I think that this is something that nobody talks about really. Like I said, we talk we hear so much about how race or gender causes privilege. We hear it all the time. It's all encompassing on the left, particularly. But we never hear about attractiveness and how much of a privilege that is. Or even things like height, for instance, height, or for a man like the depth of their voice, leaders were more likely to be elected if they have deep voices or if they're taller. And things like that, we don't really think about these things.

And I think I've been wondering why that is. I've been wondering why there's a double standard, why there's a sort of a pretty privilege, privilege, in a sense, in that the people who have pretty privilege are privileged by the pretty privilege, in sense that people are not going to complain about them in the way that they do about people who've got white privilege or male privilege.

So it's, I think part of it is that, I think part of it, part of the reason is that especially people on the left, they don't want to admit that there are such a thing as pretty people and ugly people. Because there's this whole thing about how beauty is subjective, fitness is subjective, big, beautiful women are just as beautiful as as slender women. And two very small extent that's true because if you have a look in older, you know, medieval paintings and things, the the ideal woman was sort of quite quite podgy. Full. Yeah, yeah. And the reason for this I think was

because it was a sign of opulence because if in an age of starvation if you could eat a lot, that was a sign you were rich and you were affluent. So I think it was a socio-economic indicator, but that's no longer the case. Now, in fact, it's the other way now. Being thin in an age of abundance is a sign of affluence and a sign of that you've taken care of yourself. Conchenture, sordally, blah blah. Yeah, because being overweight is now the norm because we live in a world of opulence and abundance. So the beauty standards do, they do, they're affected by cultural standards to a certain extent, but there is a core, there is a core to what is,

there is a kind of universal standard, which is slightly swayed this way and that, but which remains generally the same over time. I wrote in my newsletter about this, that the optimal size, body size for women has indeed fluctuated over time, but the optimal waist to hip ratio has almost always stayed the same. It's about 0.82. So the same the same waist to hip ratio. So those are some of the fundamentals that draw through and then you can have fashions over the top. It's like saying, oh, well,

you'd be the girl that's in the tight jeans and the high heels is hot, or if it was in the 60s, it would be the girl with the dreadlocks and the baggy boot cuts or whatever, right? Like, it's fashions that can kind of be laid over the top of evolutionary precepts. But yeah, with this, the pretty privilege, one of the reasons that I could see for why this isn't used as a categorical identifier that gets pointed out is that it's quite hard to categorize. The good looks and beauty tend to be a lot more crowd-sourced than race or height, say. Or sexuality. It's a bit more subjective, yeah, in that sense. I mean, I think it is possible to to know if somebody's attractive, I think just generally, like if you have a look at sort of,

for instance, celebrities, like most Hollywood actors and actresses are attractive, that's one of the reasons why they're hired, because they have that universal appeal. Like most people would agree that, for instance, Margot Robbie is attractive, or Matthew McConaughey is attractive, you know. And so it's like, so there are these kinds of universal standards. And I think, I think,

yeah, you're right. I think it's harder to gauge it, but I think part of that difficulty comes not from the actual difficulty of gauging the beauty of admitting it as well. Yes. Because you don't admit, you don't want to say, oh, this person is unattractive, and that's why they're being prejudice against you. It's quite a hopeful thing to say to somebody who's unattractive. The reason they're not getting work is because you're unattractive. Yes, especially given, it's strange because unattractive is that maybe because it's felt like that's more, there's a bit more meritocracy in your attractiveness

than there is in your race, that there's something immutable about the race that you've got or whatever. Did you see, there was a, I think it was a YouTube series, it might have been based on a British TV program where they had people and they had to hold up signs, who's got the highest IQ?

And then people had to put them into order and then in the way that they predicted and then people would move around. Or it was maybe who earned the most or who, something else and something else. And people's ability to choose things that are non-obvious, basically seems to completely go out of the window. And I suppose as well that

kind of what you were talking about earlier on, was it the nova, the nova effect where you don't know what's going to happen, the effects of your effects and downstream and so on and so forth? You don't know what a miserable childhood could compel somebody to do as an adult. Yeah, maybe having a perfect childhood would be fantastic, but because the butterfly continues to go for a very, very, very long time, you have no idea what all the permutations of the different interactions that person had and the chip on their shoulder and their desire to prove their father wrong and blah, blah, blah. You know, you just simply don't know the outcomes. So part of me is like, yeah, absolutely, I think that accounting for other people's biases,

if you were to give me two versions of someone and the ugly person is managed to get to the same level, you're right, that person's overcome more, they're probably more skilled. But you're trying to rationalize, you're trying to basically account in for the halo effect or the pretty privilege. Yeah. I think this is a very interesting point actually because then how does the region beta paradox factor into this because if somebody's unattractive, they will also sort of bounce out at the bottom.

So what you want, the person that's got the biggest difficulty is the person that's average looking. They're the ones that's had a perfectly comfortable. Tell me about your trauma. Well, I haven't had that much trauma, but I haven't had no trauma. Right, you're amazing. You must be really, really good. Okay.

Interesting point. Yeah. Alders Raser, there's two here that I've grouped together, because I think these two work quite nicely. Alders Raser, if something can't be settled by experiment or observation, it's probably not worthy of debate. This is because without empirical evidence,

there is just your word against mine and everyone wants the last word. Following this rule will save so much time. And I think this goes along with poppers falsifiability principle. For a theory to be considered scientific, it must be possible to disprove or refute it. As such, for each of your beliefs, you should have a clear idea of what would persuade you your wrong, otherwise your belief is immune to reason. Yeah, so I think that most debates and particularly online debates, they're not fact finding exercises, they're power struggles.

So the, you know, the purpose of a debate is not really to come to some mutual understanding of truth. It's to dominate your opponent. And this is something that has become evident to me just from sort of my own experiences. I mean, when I first joined Twitter in 2014, I was just like going crazy. I was basically like, anytime somebody disagreed with me, I would engage them in argument. And I think, you know, I could just change this person, see my point of view. And I would do this all the time. And, you know, sometimes I would waste entire days, just you've all sort of brand and go in there. I learned from this, believe me.

But yeah, this was something that really, you know, I was doing for like a while, like probably for the first sort of few months of joining Twitter, I was arguing with everyone. I wasted pretty much just all my time because I never got anywhere. No matter how many arguments, how many good arguments I came out with, no matter how many pieces of evidence even. So this even sort of is a problem. But also I found that I was doing the same thing. I found

that when people were trying to convince me of something I wouldn't listen and I would just just dig deep into what I already believed. And then this is when I became clear to me that it was ego, it was the issue. It wasn't lack of facts. It was ego. Nobody wants to admit that they're wrong. And people will do everything that they can do in order to avoid admitting that they're wrong. They will do literally everything that they can do to avoid being wrong. And so it's pointless to debate somebody when there is no hard evidence that can completely disprove.

Even then, even if you've got the evidence it's often not worth debating, because you know, you can, for instance, like if you look at, you know, I remember there was a guy who was reading the argument between a flat-earther and a scientist. And the scientist was like, just trying to come out with all this stuff, like I said, you know,

if you go to the shoreline and you look at the ocean on the horizon, you'll see that the sails of ships appear before the prowls. And so that's a sign that the world's a sphere. And the guy was like, nah, nah, nah, that's not true. And I've looked at the beach plenty of times. I live near the beach and I've never seen that happen. So they're just completely deny the evidence.

And if you show them a picture taken from space of the Earth being round, they'll just say, it's just a doctored photoshopped picture, that's not a real picture. So any evidence, if there's any way for somebody to wriggle out of this kind of voice that you try and put them in, they need to bait them, they will, they'll do it, they'll use any means possible. And this is something that I've learned from experience. And I think that's why it's just not worth debating most things. And really, you've got to ask yourself, what really are you going to achieve by winning

an argument online, especially? Not much. The only times that I would consider it worthwhile to debate is if you're actually engaged in an official debate, you know, with a crowd, with an actual audience watching you, because the purpose of the debate in that case is not to convince the opponent, which you're not going to do, it's to convince the audience. So that's a worthwhile time to debate. Or equivalently, if you're online and you're engaged in a debate with somebody who's a blue tick and they've got 100,000 followers and they've got a big audience and you know that they're

going to be over what they're going to be watching and eavesdropping on your debate. Then that's worth time to do it as well. But in most times, it's just simply not worth debating people because you're not going to change their mind. Maybe once one in a million people you'll be able to change their minds because they'll be humble enough to acknowledge when they're wrong But the vast majority of people have got to their egos are way too big and they're just not gonna do it They're especially not gonna do it publicly if you want to change somebody's mind you got to do it privately

Because if you do it publicly, they know that they've been watched and that's gonna obviously make their ego even more They're gonna make them protect their ego even more. That's the theory of bespoke bullshit all over again. Yeah. Yeah. So I think my stance on this is, I don't engage with people that are illogically critical online in a serious way. They either get no response or they get a silly response because the cost benefit that you have, if you start to invest yourself psychologically, emotionally,

existentially, and trying to change this person's mind, it's the equivalent of pissing money away, my dad would say. You're just all downside from here. There is not. It's worse than pissing money. It's pissing away time, which is even more like money. You can't get it back here. And so, yeah, I mean, I've become very jealous of my time recently, you know, I've become protective of my time. I've basically, because I realize that it's the most important resource on the planet. There's nothing more important than time, because it's required for literally everything else. You cannot obtain any of the resource without time. And so, you know, and another thing like you said,

it's the only thing you can't make more of once it's gone, it's gone. And debates are just, I mean, it's going back to stoicism. I think it was a, a Seneca who said that, you know, we are, we're gellously guard our properties, our physical properties, but as soon as someone starts taking away our time, we just let them have it, you know, as though it's just free, but it's not.

I mean, that wasn't the exact thing that he said. He said that we, we fritrate away like it's our, we know, we fritrate away the one thing that we have the right to be to guard of basically. So that was yeah, that's essentially what we do. We sort of become very prodigal without time. We're very wasteful of our time. We tend to just throw it away, even though it's our most important resource. It's the thing that we need to acquire all other resources. And it's the only thing we can't make more of. And so this is why, one reason why I'm very careful about not debating people, because just one reply on social media can turn into a slanging match, which is going to take the rest of your day, and it's not going to just take away your time, it's going to take away your peace of mind, because you're going to be constantly checking your phone from notification from this person.

And you'll be like, oh, what is this bastard saying now? I've come increasingly to believe that sanity and peace of mind are probably the most important things to optimize for when it comes to designing the way that you live your life, because you could optimize your life in a way where risk was ratcheted up a little bit more. And again, this is individuals, some people's risk tolerance is maybe different to mine or whatever. But for me, optimizing for peace of mind insanity is Top of my list. I want to be it because downstream from that is a whole host of things that I really want to have

But if peace and sanity are molested or perverted in a way Nothing else can flow from that easily. I remember, this is why I could never be a trader. So there was a period where me and all my friends got hold of E-Toro and we're gonna start doing bets and our Activision's gonna go up and let's put money in Netflix and Spotify and stuff. And I would check it 10 times a day

because I couldn't bear not to check. So my emotions got ragged around at the mercy of the market. Well, that's completely removed, my peace and sanity, and how much would I pay to get my peace and sanity back? I would pay way more, way more than whatever return I'm going to get from this. And all of the externalities, my lack of focus at work, my lack of ability to connect with my friends,

the fact that now is the only time that I want to reflect on a life that's well lived. All of these things would be, it was ruinous for everything that I genuinely cared about to try and optimize for something that was money that I can make in a different way. So, yeah, that was something that it relates to for me, I think. Yeah, I think everything comes from peace of mind because you could have everything you could have like a mansion, you could have the most attractive woman by your side, you can have anything you could imagine you could have, right?

But if you don't have that peace of mind, then all of it's wasted because you're not actually able to enjoy it, you're not able to enjoy these things. Really, all comes from being able to actually have enough serenity in your own head to be able to enjoy things. Because if you don't have that, then everything that you acquire, everything else you acquire is worthless. You can't get the true value from it. And again, this is another idea from Stoicism. You know, this is the idea that, you know, ultimately, it's not about what's going on in the external world, it's about what's going on in the internal world, that's what matters to your well-being.

If you don't have peace of mind, if you're constantly stressing about things outside in the world, then you're not owning your own well-being. The only way to own your own well-being is to look in inward and to actually try to clean the room inside your head as it were, to get everything organized and to not worry, because when you've got this kind of mess in your head, that's where anxiety comes from. That's where you begin to become confused and you think, oh, okay, what's happening here? What's happening? Your mind starts dying around because it's got no order to it.

You know, it's just chaos. And that chaos manifests in your feelings. So you could have all the best things in the world. The external world could be as ordered as you want it to be. But if the internal world is not ordered, then it's all wasted. It doesn't matter because you're not gonna be able to enjoy it. So it really orders to begin with the mind.

Gwinn DeBogogle, ladies and gentlemen, everyone needs to go and subscribe to your substack, which they can find at goonder.substack.com and just to spell it out, because a lot of people have no idea how to spell it. So g-e-r-w-i-n-d-e-r.substack.com. Go and check that out.

Your Twitter, g underscore s underscore, Bogle, super mega threads, I'm sure that'll be coming soon. I highly recommend everyone goes and reads the audience capture article which you put out before and we're going to do a conversation on that pretty soon. So, dude, I absolutely adore having these conversations with you every single time. I rely on them, I cherish them very, very much. I'm sure that it adds tons of value. Anything else, any other bits that you need to plug

before we go? No, that's fine. Just follow my sub-stack on my Twitter and everything should be on there. I think, yeah. All right, man. Appreciate you. Nice one.

Thanks. Cheers. you