Modern Wisdom - #602 - Gurwinder Bhogal - 14 Shocking Lessons About Human Nature

Episode Date: March 16, 2023

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 fantastic, and today we go through some of my favourites. Expect to learn why asking questions is the most selfish thing you can do, why people create hatred in an attempt to feel love, the real danger of censorship, why it's more important to avoid being wrong than try to be right, what postjournalism is and why you need to understand it, how to win every debate even if you lose, why you should never take an internet insult personally and much more... Sponsors: Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours with your first box at https://www.drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) Download Hevy, the best workout tracker for free at https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hevy-workout-tracker-gym-log/id1458862350 Get 20% discount on House Of Macadamias’ nuts at https://houseofmacadamias.com/modernwisdom (use code MW20) Extra Stuff: Check out Gurwinder's Substack - https://gurwinder.substack.com/ Follow Gurwinder on Twitter - https://twitter.com/G_S_Bhogal 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

What's happening people, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Gwinda Bogal, he's a programmer and a writer. He's also one of my favourite Twitter followers and he's written yet another mega-thread exploring human nature, cognitive biases, mental models, status games, crowd behaviour, and social media. It's fantastic and today we get to go through some of my favourites. Expect to learn why asking questions is the most selfish thing you can do, why people create hatred in an attempt to feel love, the real danger of censorship, why it's more important to avoid being wrong than to try to be right, what post journalism is and why you need to understand it, how to win every debate even if you lose, why you should

never take an internet insult personally and much more. This guy's a beast. The insights that I get when I speak to Gwinder and when I read his work, I value an awful lot and they genuinely inform the way that I see the world. I am super, super happy to bring this to you today. And it's yet another two hours of us going through just a bottomless pit of interesting stuff that helps to explain the world. I really hope that you enjoyed this one.

If you do, don't forget to hit the subscribe button. It is the best way to support the show and it means that you will never miss an episode when they go live and it assists me in being able to book bigger and better guests every single week. So go and press it. I thank you.

But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Gwinda Bogle. Your writing is so good, dude. People send me that audience capture article all the time. This most recent one that you did about how smart people make themselves be dumb, the TikTok article, it's phenomenal. You're the only sub stack that I pay for. And quite rightly, quite rightly so. What can I say? So my favorite thing to do with your Twitter is go through some of the mental models, biases and ideas that you've got, and we're going to go through as many as we can today. First one is chilling effect. When punishment for what people say becomes widespread,

people stop saying what they really think and instead say whatever is needed to thrive in the social environment. Thus, limits on speech become limits on sincerity. Yeah, so I mean, so this is, you know, a sort of very timely thing, I think, because there's a lot of talk about suppressing people from social media and stuff. I think people should really realise that stopping people from airing their true opinions doesn't change their opinions. It just makes them mask their opinions. And when this happens at scale, it can lead to all kinds of absurd situations like the Abelene paradox.

I don't know if we've covered the Abelene paradox. Run it by... Basically a situation where everyone professes a belief that no one actually believes purely because they think everybody else believes it. And so you can have a situation where literally everybody just is saying stuff that is just not true. For the sole reason that they think everybody else thinks it's true. And an example of this would probably be considered

sort of the issue of what a woman is. You've got pretty much everybody in the mainstream culture now pretending that they don't know what a woman is. But if you were to ask these people in private they would probably be able to tell you they're just probably say an adult human female. But because there's this sort of stigma now around knowing what a woman is, people you know basically sort of they have to pretend like they don't know. And it's just, it needs to observe situation after observe situation.

And that's why I think it's, I mean, there's many reasons, there's many arguments against censorship, but this is definitely one of the strongest, I think. You're not, by censoring people, you're not changing their behavior, you're not changing their opinions, you're not changing their beliefs.

All you're doing is just sort of sweeping them under the carpet, you know, and they're just going to continue. You just won't be able to see it anymore. So you can't keep track of these people anymore. This ties into your view about when people are their opinions, they feel like they have to have an opinion on anything and everything. and changing your opinion is tantamount to destruction of yourself. So because people value their opinions so much in this situation, quite rightly, you're the performative nature of having the right opinion of the Abelian paradox, playing along with that has never been more important because opinions

have never been more relevant to our status within the world. Yeah, absolutely. And you see this reflected most in the precisely the industries that you would expect it to be reflected in, i.e. the industries that are image oriented. So if you have a look at people who have the most fashionable opinions, I mean Rob Henderson would probably call these luxury beliefs, they're sort of fashionable opinions that people adopt in order to sort of signal status. When I was a kid, we all used to like buy sweatshirts which had like

brand names stamped across the front of them, like, you know, Fila, Nike, you know, and you're a kid at school because you want everybody to know that you paid for it. So nowadays, when you get older, you know, longer wear these labels now, it's opinions instead, you know, you have the she-her and the he-him instead of poor harm, poor fem, you know. And it's sort of like, you see this in Hollywood. You see it amongst Hollywood actors, you see it amongst academics, you see it in politics, you see it in all of the industries where image is important,

where basically appearing to have the right opinions is more important than actually having the correct opinions. Yeah, and it's also an industry where opinions and actions have never been more diverged. Right? You know, somebody now can have a Twitter account that proselytizes the rights, beliefs, and in private, whole completely different beliefs or the way that they go about living their lives be totally different. You could be an online vegan who's an offline carnival, and for as long as the twine she'll never meet, it kind of doesn't really matter so much whereas

in the past, your ability to profess a belief that you didn't live up to in reality would have been much more difficult to diverge, especially in before the internet, right, or before print media, there is no way for your opinions are very much your actions, right? There is no way to do this and to bifurcate you and what you say from what you and what you are and what you do. So yeah, it's the opportunity and the motive

have aligned to create this chilling effect. Yeah, absolutely. People have, what the digital age has done is it's separated the person from the persona. So now, you know, there's a much wider golf between how you appear to others and how you actually are than there ever was because of the sort of importance of social media in our daily lives. And so because of that sort of dissociation, there's now big golf between the beliefs that people profess and what they actually believe in real life. There's no consequences nowadays for what a person actually believes really in most of the time anyway, at least as long as you have the fashion of the opinions,

if you have unfashionable opinions, then there is consequences. But if you believe something like, for instance, that it's not a problem for, like, for instance, there was this issue in Scotland recently about that there was a rapist who was locked in a women's prison briefly and then there's an outcry outcry about it over The internet which sort of led Nicholas Sturgeon to walk it back and may have led to a resignation But I mean if you're like a really really sort of Rich Hollywood actor

And you know you know you've got no you know, nobody who's going to go to prison, there's nobody in your life who's ever gone to prison or anything like that. You don't need to worry about anybody you know being hurt by your opinions on whether women should, because whether a trans rapist should be allowed in a woman's prison. So you're not paying the consequences, other people are paying the consequences. And you could say the same thing about black crime rates or whatever. People say that, you know, black people have been shot at a disproportionate rate by police and that this is purely due to systemic racism. You know, if you're a Hollywood actor, you don't need to worry about the true causes of their sort of climberates in neighborhoods. So you could just say the outcomes of the systemic racism.

Yeah, all the outcomes of defunding the police, right? Defund the police. Exactly. Yeah. For example, this, say it, but yours isn't the neighborhood where you need police in any case. Okay. So next one, epistemic humility. Instead of trying to be right, try to be less wrong. The investor Charlie Munger said, it is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent. Avoiding idiocy is much simpler than achieving genius, so it's easier to turn it into a habit. Furthermore, if we try to be right, then we'll often convince ourselves we're right, even if we're not. But if we try to be right, then we'll often convince ourselves we're right, even if we're not. But if we begin from the position that we're wrong,

and we simply try to be less wrong, we gain more awareness in our blind spots and become less wedded to our beliefs, reducing our resistance to learning. Yeah, so this has got wide applications. I use this in every endeavour, really. This has got wide applications. I used this in every endeavor, really. A particular one that I found is very useful was my approach to writing. Because when I first started writing, I used to try to sound smart. I tried to be intelligent. And what this led to was me using a lot of really fancy words, a lot of big words.

So instead of using the word tiptoe, I would use the word digit to grade. you know, and I'd use all these other really long words that people just didn't know what I was talking about. And because they didn't know what I was talking about, what actually happened was that by trying to be smart, I became less clear in my communication. So I basically, I was becoming more stupid and people had less understanding of what I was trying to say So it backfired and it was then that I realized that actually good writing is not about trying to sound smart It's about avoiding sounding stupid by just using you know you could use simple language To communicate clearly rather than trying to sort of signal

sophistication or anything like that. And when you communicate clearly, then you naturally become smarter because your thoughts and your, you know, what you write reflect each other. So if you think clearly, you're right clearly, and if you're right clearly, you'll think clearly. You know, if you try to think in these big, long words that you barely understand, you're not going to really develop a good understanding of what you're actually thinking. Have you heard this is one example? Have you heard the mental model never multiplied by zero? I think I have, but I can't recall what it is. You might have to remind me. Yeah, so it ties into this perfectly. So, multiply by zero, describes avoiding situations that

could permanently get you out of the game, whatever that game may be. So for instance, you could have the perfect health and fitness regime, making sure that you eat organic fruit and vegetables, your microbes and macros are perfect. You sleep eight hours every night and you're hydrated thoroughly throughout the day, but you have a common habit of driving a car without the seatbelt. It's like, okay, all of the good things that you're doing, it's 45 times 7 times 1.2 times 360 times zero. If you multiply any sequence of numbers by zero, the outcome is zero. It's the same as you've been saving for a long time and working hard on your education

and you can't wait to move away, but you commonly have unprotected sex and accidentally get pregnant. Okay, that has put a very big change. That has stopped a lot of the things that you had intended. And it's the same here. It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid instead of trying to be very intelligent. You can get so much success in life, simply by avoiding failure,

because so many people multiply either by zero, or by a half or by three quarters, and it takes down so much of the good work that they've done. Yeah, absolutely. It's the lowest common denominator issue, is it? It's people can focus all of their energies on certain things and maximize those until their heart's content, but they'll neglect one tiny aspect of their life, and that will be the thing that brings them down.

And I think when you try to be smart, you can get lost in trying to excel at one particular thing whilst neglecting all of the other things that are periphery, but which are just as important, all of the supporting things. I've found just it simplifies life so much when you just try not to be stupid. It's just such a more elegant and simple way to live than to try to be smart. I don't have any, I used to signal a lot to people, you know, especially on social media and stuff where I used to try to just be as smart as I possibly could. But it would often just lead me into just complete stupidity because I would just be hyper focused on one thing, trying to make that thing as perfect as possible

and in so do we got neglect everything else which was needed. So yeah, I mean, it's all about being a generalist, it's not about being a generalist. It's not about being a specialist anymore. If you want to excel in life now, you've got to be a generalist, you've got to be good at, you've got to have a baseline sort of goodness at everything rather than being super good at one thing because that super goodness at one thing can lead you astray. Interesting. Okay, next one, Cunningham's Law. The best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question, but to post the wrong answer, because people are more interested in criticising others than helping them.

This is so incisive. It's so correct. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, the actual, I mean, Cunningham's Law is basically just the best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question but personally answer. And then I was the one who basically decided that it was because people are more interested in criticizing others than helping them. So I don't want to give the impression that, you know, if just in case this turns out to

be wrong, that that was the law. His law is just the first part of that. So I mean, yeah, I've witnessed this constantly since I've been on social media, you know, placing like Twitter and Reddit. I even, I think I even did this experiment myself where I actually asked a question and I got very little response and then I deliberately posted the wrong answer. I'm pretty sure I did that once earlier, in 2016 or something like that, because this is something that I've thought about for a long time. And I think many people are constantly on the lookout for someone to ridicule, and I think they want that because they want to feel better about

themselves. So if you give people an opportunity to make them look smarter than you, they will take it, you know, because people want validation on social media and one of the ways people get validation is by pointing out when other people get things wrong. I mean, I used to do this a lot as well, I used to, I mean, I don't know if I was trying to seek validation, maybe I was subconsciously, but I did get this drive to really point out when people got things wrong and I felt like a duty almost to do it. I don't do it anymore, but I used to always do on social media. If I saw something that was incorrect, I would just feel like, this is wrong. And I'd bask in the praise afterwards.

Well, your, your, your smiles stand on the shoulders of somebody else's stupidity, right? So by pointing at the stupidity, really interesting things. I'm I'm all for Calling out the performative incentives of social media, but Chris Voss the guy that wrote never split the difference He was the former head of the FBI's Negotiation team. He said that one of the ways that he extracts information from people who are either unwitting or unwilling is he will extracts information from people who are either unwitting or unwilling, is he will make proposals about them that are wrong, but that they want to correct. So for instance, he'll say, that's a great accent. That's a whole, isn't it?

You're from a whole. No, no, no, I'm actually from Huddersfield. You go, oh, yeah, interesting. But you must be a Pisces. I actually am an Aquarius. You go, okay, I've got the place that you live and the month of your birth there, simply by proposing things that are wrong. And I, it's, I don't know where it comes from, I mean, it can't just be performative fanciness on the internet, it's something deeper than that. It's a desire

to close loops of erroneous information. And I think that that just gets maybe magnified when the internet's involved. Yeah, I think that probably is part of it. People probably do it for different reasons. This is quite a general sort of concept, so I'm sure it's not just a specific, it has one specific cause. But yeah, I mean, I think it's always better. You get a lot more information out of people by getting them to tell you what they want to tell you

rather than kind of sort of railroad them into an answer. So I think a lot of sort of interrogators would probably do. I don't know, I don't know their tactics, but I could see them doing that. They would rather than actually asking you a question, they would give you a statement that would lead you to a certain response. I think because then you don't feel

like you're being interrogated as well. You feel like you're just giving the information freely, which probably is better for them. I don't know if I'm not an expert in that, so I don't know. Next one, Vidgian Stein's ruler, the less you know of the measure compared to the thing being measured, the less the of the measure compared to the thing being measured, the less the measure as measure measures the thing being measured, and the more it measures the

measure. As an analogy, if a man says everyone he meets is an asshole, the asshole is likely him. You can apply this concept to any source of information, for example, if a news outlet stories frequently outrage you, instead of taking it as evidence that the world is becoming more outrageous, consider the possibility that the news outlet is deliberately trying to outrage you and temper your reactions accordingly. Basically, never take information at face value and always ask yourself, what does the info from this source suggest about the source itself? Yeah, so I'll never sort of understand why people just take information at face value. I see it just constantly online, where somebody will say something and then nobody questions

the motives behind the person saying it. It's just, though, it's like Chatchy PT saying it to them, you know, they'll just accept whatever is being said without any kind of suspicion towards the motives behind why did somebody say this, you know, what does they say about the source of the information? I think it's just a very, very important skill for media literacy in the age of misinformation. There's, you know, there's always a gender behind every piece of information that is shown on your screen apart from, in the cases of chat you can see, but that's a different issue. But like when you're getting information from other human beings, there's always an agenda

there's always some reason why you're being shown that information, some reason why they've chosen to disclose that information. And I think it's always worth considering what those potential agendas could be because that is half of the information you're being given. If you're just accepting the information at face value, you're only receiving half of the information. You need the other half, you need the other half of the context. So you see this, if, for instance, like the Guardian posts something about the economy, and then you see that the author, and then you can do a bit of background research into that person's views on economics. And then it's amazing how much information that will provide you when you actually read the article.

Oh, so that is... But then you'll suddenly... Yeah, that would be the first line of fitgenstein's ruler is the less you know read the article. Oh, so that is... Because then you'll suddenly... Yeah, that would be the first line of fitgenstein's ruler is the less you know of the measure. So what you're doing there is you're learning more about the measure. Yeah. Yeah, you want to get as much information about both sources. You want to get...

Sorry, not both sources, about the source and the information. So you want to get as much information about both. And you should... The ruler in this case is the one that you have the most information about. So if you have more information about the information than the source, then you should use the information to measure the source.

And if you have more information about the source, you should use the source to measure the information. So it's basically like you would, if you had two rulers, and you weren't sure which one was correct, you knew one of them was correct and the other one wasn't, you would use the correct one to measure the one that wasn't. So it's a similar principle. Interesting.

Okay, purity spiral. Members of political tribes inevitably begin competing with their fellows to be the most ideologically pure. The constant one-upmanship toward moral superiority causes the whole group to gradually become more extreme. For example, Maoist China or Twitter echo chambers, nice that you drew the correlation between those two there. Yeah, I think people have this kind of tendency to turn everything into a competition. And that goes for morality also. If you have a certain dominant ideology,

a moral ideology, that's fashionable again, going back to the thing that we talked about before, then people will start competing, they'll turn it into a competition, they'll start gamifying it, essentially, they'll turn it into an competition and start gamifying it essentially. They'll turn it into an opportunity to gain an advantage, a social advantage. This has been shown throughout history. It's not just Maoist China. You can look at any regime that had strong laws against certain behaviors or in favour of certain behaviors and you would see that there were people always who would compete to either

Hallout those behaviors in other people or if they were bad or engaging those behaviors if they were good You know literally any any regime you name you know You you can see examples of it. It's it's something that sort of fundamental to our species And it's one of the reasons why I think a lot of regimes become more extreme every time. A lot of them, like for instance, if you look up, if we go by the example of communism, Lenin was pretty bad, he was quite bad, he wasn't Stalin though. Stalin was a completely different category of authoritarian and it would have continued as long as Stalin was there because he got worse and worse as he

gained more and more power. It wasn't just because he was gaining more power. It was because the people around him were also becoming more extreme. If you have a look at people like Laurenti Berri at, for instance, they were also, they became more extreme over time. And part of it was because I think of the purity spiral where people felt that they had to compete to be as much like Stalin as possible in order to avoid being purged. So in this case, it was literally a life of death matter, but it's not always a life of death matter. Sometimes it's just a case of status, which is more of the case on Twitter. but it's not always a life of death matter. Sometimes it's just a case of status, which is more of the case on Twitter.

Did you ever hear Tim Dillon push back on Joe Rogan's view of LA comedy? Because this is exactly the same thing. So Tim's one of the few guys that can kind of poke back at Joe because he's, you know, similar status and he's doing well in comedy scene and stuff like that. And Joe was saying about how lovely the LA comedy scene is, you know, every time that he goes through there, everything's just fantastic and everyone treats him so well. And Tim sort of bumped in and said, Joe, you do know that you're Joe Rogan, right?

That the way that people behave when you step into the room is not representative of how they behave, typically for other people. That there is a reality distortion field that occurs when this happens. And because of that, your experience may not be representative of everybody else's. I can't remember the rule that we went through, but this was one one of the previous episodes that you featured on, where as somebody gains power, the people around them are more concerned with appeasing the person in power than giving them real information from the world outside. So if you have...

How would you syndrome? Yeah. How would you syndrome? How would you syndrome? That's it. So if you combine how would you syndrome with the purity spiral? The purity spiral is the incentive,, the purity spiral is the incentive, or the purity spiral is like the drive and the direction that that's what's going on,

and then the Howard Hughes syndrome is the fuel that persists and causes that to keep on going. One question I've got in my mind is, what sort of environment would engender a more purity spiral like situation. What is some of the predictors of a purity spiral do you think? So they need to be rewards incentives basically for that kind of behavior. They need to be rewards for extreme behavior. So if you look at Twitter, for instance, there are rewards to acting. If you're like in right wing circles, for instance, then there's an incentive to act based. And if you're in the left wing circles, then there's an incentive to act work because other people will see you as a sort of paragon of what they believe

and they'll want to retweet you and say, say, oh this person, if you're based for instance people say this person doesn't give a fuck you know he's you know basically he's sticking it to the lips you know he's triggering the lips or whatever and you know vice versa with the with the left dubby like you know this person is calling out calling out injustice or whatever blah. So there's got to be some sort of social reward for engaging in more extreme behavior than your peers. That's the first rule. And another thing is this is probably an even better incentive would be that if there's a punishment for not acting more extreme and this is more to do with the sort of style in this kind of element of thing.

So if you look at the purges for instance, in fact, there's an even better example than that. If you look at, there's a very famous video of Saddam Hussein where he basically is in a room filled with people and he basically says that he's uncovered a plot. This was shortly after he assumed power. It was shortly after he assumed control in Iraq and the way that he's uncovered a plot. This was shortly after he assumed power. It was shortly after he assumed control in Iraq. And the way that he consolidated power was that he basically concocted this idea that there was a conspiracy against him so that he could, you know, pretext

to remove people that he didn't like. And he had a list of names and he said that these people had betrayed him. And there was a big packed broom, filled with people people all of the sort of delegates and diplomats and one by one he called out the names of the betrayers and they were led out of the room to their deaths they were basically executed and as soon as people realised what was happening they began to panic and they began to copy Saddam Hussein's

actions so there's a point where he he he was partly crying or he was pretending to cry and he got a hankerchief and he began to wipe his eyes and immediately the camera pans to the crowd to the audience and you see many people just get hankerchiefs out of their hands, sorry, out of the pockets and they begin to wipe their own eyes exactly how Saddam says to it. And I think it speaks to this idea that people are so terrified of dying, that they're just the only they panic and the only thing that they knew how to do to prevent from dying is to be as much like Saddam as possible. In that room.

Wow. I imagine one other predictor, or another predictoror of the purity spiral would be an important in-group, out-group tribal dynamic that's happening because the whole purpose of having a purity spiral is to identify others, right? There is us and there is not us. And if you do not do the things, pray, do the shibbolaths, etc. that is the us, then you're a not us. And it's why intersectionality, in particular, is a pretty obvious example of what goes on with regards to a purity spiral, because in part, some of it is based on fanciful exaggerations. And also, it's mostly based on not being another as opposed to being a something.

When you have a poorly defined something, the only way you can identify yourself is as not being the other. And what that means is, in order to keep group cohesion together, you need to constantly shave off people who are others. It's like, if your mutual love of an in-group is not bound together over that, it's bound together over the mutual hatred of an out-group, you need to permanently find new out-group members in order to say, well, see, we're not that. For instance, Douglas Murray, gay man, but like white and conservative, so he's not really a part of the LGBT movement anymore.

You know, like, you're just gay. It's like, you really need to be gay and black with a club foot and a gluten intolerance. That's really where you need to be at in order to be a part of our club. Yeah, absolutely. It's easier to rally around shared hatreds than shared values. And so, though, people always looking to create

new things to hate just in order to keep the group together. You know, share values are okay for a while, but really what people want is they want to get together to really hate somebody. You know, there's few things that bring people together like hating someone else. And I think a lot of this happens, like, I mean, you see it in when there's this thing called Rally Round, the Flagson Road, which is a concept, another one of my megathread concepts, where it's this idea that when leaders are unpopular with the public, what they do is they will start conflicts, they will start foreign conflicts, because this will bring people together against a mutual enemy. And I mean, some people have argued that Putin,

part of the reason that Putin invaded Ukraine, was that he was flagging in popularity and people were becoming disillusioned with him. And so he needed to have a sort of external enemy to sort of unite the people and sort of create this other that they could sort of level all their hatred against. You see, in the novel Alan the Farm as well, where a character of Napoleon, the pig, Napoleon,

wants to consolidate his power by sort of essentially exiling Snowball, who's his rival, and then just sort of blaming him for literally everything that's going wrong in a scapegoatening. And that's how the sort of animal farm gets consolidated and how they form their community by hatred rather than love. This is one of mine, so I've got a new one for you here, and this is Schultz's Razer. Do not attribute to group conspiracy that which can be explained

by cancellation anxiety. From the outside, it might look like everyone is coordinating to push some ideology or movement. From the inside, everyone is terrified of losing their job if they don't adhere to the new ideological stance. It's not coordination, it's cowardice. A lot of the time we believe that there is a grand plan at work to try and push a narrative or hurt people from a particular group. From the outside, it looks a lot like a coordinated assault. Collusion orchestrated by some malign overlord conspiracy. But on the ground, it doesn't look anything like that. It's just individuals trying to save their own skin and not get fired. They've got an expensive house they can barely pay the mortgage on

and a wife who wants a new car and private school for kids. It's much easier for them to adhere to whatever ideology will keep them in their job rather than go against it. Sure, it might mean that they push an unhinged story about trans story hour for toddlers or bandsome on from saying something innocuous on a platform, but this doesn't mean that they've been indoctrinated into some grand plan. The incentives encourage execs, influential actors, and people in power to behave in particular aligned ways, but their coordination is not consciously conducted. It's just a path of least resistance for each person. It doesn't make them less culpable, it makes them less malicious, and more cowardly for sure. And Schultz finished this often said,

so much content is curated by a pool getting installed in an executive's yard. Yeah, I think that's a fair assessment, I think it's quite accurate. It sounds to me like, so of, Hanlon's razor, sort of applied to cancel culture. I think, yeah, a lot of people are more passive than active when it comes to the sort of propagation of new ideologies. And I see this pretty much all the time. You know, if we go back to the example of wokeism, stuff like that, If we go back to the example of wokeism, it's like that. Wokeism is largely pushed not by ideologues, not by people who are actively trying to sort of spread this ideology, but mostly by people who just sort of read Wikipedia, just see what ideas are on there and just accept them as facts and just think, okay, I'm not questioning

this because this is the consensus amongst my community. If I speak out against this, I'm going to be in trouble, so I'll just keep my mouth shut. And that's largely how these ideologies really spread, I think. It goes back to the chilling effect where people are afraid of saying what they really think, so they just keep their mouth shut. And then this allows false ideas to propagate much more quickly. So yeah, I mean, I think that's, it's a pretty straightforward one. It's this, you said it was shorts as razor, who, who was the one who, who, who, who, so the Andrew shorts on, on, on his podcast, just talked about the fact that he's spent time in Hollywood. In Hollywood, everyone from the outside thinks that it's all of these people trying to

trans the kids and stuff. And he said from the inside, there's none of that. They're blundering around just trying to sort themselves out and get to cross for the time. And I came up with Schultz's razor and then sent it to him and asked if he reckoned that it was a good summation of what he was talking about. And he was like, fucking hell, that's really nice. Do not attribute to group conspiracy, that which can be explained by cancellation

anxiety. But another thing, the reason that I really like it, and I actually spoke about this in Miami this weekend, I spoke about that, that exact passage, is because it's very reassuring for the people who are concerned that we are facing an insurmountable coordinated coalition or assault on our freedoms. Because what it reminds you is individual actors, incentives can align in such a way to make it look like collusion. But it's not, and if it's not, it's actually a lot more fractured and fragile, and all that you need to do to fix something which isn't a coordinated conspiracy is change the incentives. If the incentives then change, that immediately opens up and frees pretty much everything else.

Yeah. I think there's that famous quote which is the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil and is for good men to do nothing, which I think really sort of sums it up. I agree, I agree. I don't think that there is some sort of massive conspiracy to trans people or anything like that. I think that's just nonsense. But I mean, what I am worried about is exactly what you've just been saying, which is that there are going to be a lot of people who simply will just accept stuff that is probably and true simply because they're afraid. And I don't have specific concerns about the trans sort of ideology in particular, but just generally, I think this

is a danger for pretty much anything really. I mean, you've got the equivalent conspiracy theories on the right about the world economic forum. So many people believe in this now, they believe that there's some evil dust in the deep plot by the WEF to sort of enslave everybody. And I mean, I've looked at the evidence and I'm not convinced by it, I could be wrong, but I think people are just sort of, most people are just sort of accepting it on the right now, just as people accepting sort of a lot of ideas, woke ideas on the left.

You've now got people accepting conspiracy theories on the right, just because everybody else is accepting them. And I think it's quite dangerous. What was that? The world has many stupid people and few evil people. Therefore, the world's few evil people have a serious due identity. Bonhoff is serious. A serious, yes.

Yes. Yes. I mean, that's the same as this, right? That's precisely the same. Yeah, yeah, that you have. And it would be maybe not stupid people, but just self-interested people, or resourcefully anxious people. Yeah, yeah, passive, I would say.

I'd just say passive people, because I think, you're like you alluded to earlier, they're more interested in feeding their families and who can blame them, you know, they want to feed their families, they want to just live their lives, you know, I mean, why would, you know, why worry about all these things that are probably not going to influence our lives, sort of, very much unless there's some drastic, you know, sort of tyranny that just suddenly takes over, but that's very unlikely. I mean, I think most of these issues, things like the whole thing about the trans ideology and the WFEF and all these other theories,

they don't really impact the average person very much in their lives. These are really social media issues. These are issues that people get really, really worked to put over social media. And this is not to say that there's no real world impact. There is, obviously. But the level at which they're being discussed is far in excess of their actual real world impact. There's far more important things to be worrying about, like AI, for instance. AI is a major, major issue now, but most people are still worried about trans people in toilets.

AI is literally an existential threat, not in the immediate future, but eventually it will be. What's, we've got AI now, that will soon give rise to AGI. AGI will probably give rise to a super intelligence. And that will be the alignment. AGI will probably give rise to a super intelligence. And that was the alignment. Yeah, we have exactly fucking paperclip. Yeah, I mean, I mean, it's long time. I mean, there's short term issues with AI, which are even more dangerous, possibly,

which, you know, the idea of sort of misinformation now is it can be done on an industrial scale. You can literally just fill the web up with misinformation without any real human labor. I mean, if you were concerned what, six years ago with Cambridge Analytica, is that when that came out six or seven years ago? Yeah, it was about six years ago. I think, yeah. If you're worried about Cambridge Analytica having a team of copyrighters create ads and then use rudimentary algorithmic analysis to target those to people that they think it will impact the most. Imagine having a virtual avatar that reflects every social media user's preferences that exists on the internet and have them be able to create the perfectly persuasive, individually tailored

message to nudge your preferences over time that it can account for neuro-linguistic programming, it can have controlled opposition that shows you the other side. You know, I mean, it's, I think both of us are of the opinion that within the next five years or so, almost all of the content that is produced on social media won't be produced by humans. I spoke to Rob Wiblin, the guy that does 80,000 hours, he's big in the effect of altruism community and long-termism and existential risk. He, as a career podcaster like myself, says that within 10 years he thinks that AI will do his job better than he ever can.

So he's already looking to wind down into retirement from podcasting. Podcasting was one of the few things where I considered that it might be a little bit more safe given that people don't tune in for the rote indexing of information, but they tune in more for the natural human vibe, which is inherently difficult to predict. Like the way that language learning models work is it's essentially predictive text, just replicated over time, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, all the way.

So by design, it's a very predictive form of communication, an unpredictable form, which is where you might actually find something charming or endearing or funny or whatever, it is significantly more complex computationally. Absolutely. Yeah, I think the sort of, that really does touch on something very important there, I think, where you just said, there is a certain randomness to human behavior, which is inherently valuable, I think, which people value more than the perfection, the so-called perfection of things that are artificially created.

And you can see this, I mean, there's actually, there are apps now, which can actually, which purport to be able to determine whether a piece of text was written by an AI or by a human. They use a measure called perplexity, which is exactly what you were just saying, a measure of the randomness of the of text or whether it's representative. I think probably averageness is a better term for it. It's basically how indicative of the training data a piece of text is. So perplexity is actually turned out to be a really, really bad way of determining whether the training data a piece of text is so complexity is actually turned out to be a really really bad way of determining whether something was written by an AI or a human and I use this myself I got an essay

that I wrote in 2017 and I fed it into this machine this device which basically is supposed to determine whether I'm a human or AI and which basically is supposed to determine whether I'm a human or AI. And it accused me of being an AI. I knew. I fucking knew it. I fucking knew it all along. It busted. Yeah.

Yeah, the bastard. I mean, I couldn't believe it. I thought, you know, okay, Farron, if I do it again, and I did it a few times. And I think once or twice, it got it correct. It managed to identify me as a human. But most of the time, it was calling me an AI, right? And that's because I was writing in a style which was very indicative of journalism back in 2017 because I was writing for a magazine called Rabbit Hole

in there, a very strict editorial style. And so I was writing sentences sort of very clean. I wasn't adding much of my own character to the sentences. I was just writing them all in a way. Exactly. And that's why it came to that conclusion. But it shows that really, you know, it's very, I think what people really want is, is they want a bit of flair, I think, to writing. They don't want just the information just to be given to them.

They want the information to be given to them with a bit of flair.. I think you see that not just in writing, but you see it in a lot of industries. I mean, for instance, people like flaws. They like the human flaws that only a human has. Because that gives things character. For instance, if you look at a diamond, you have synthetic diamonds now, which are far more perfect and flawless than real diamonds, then are so mind. Yet, mind diamonds are far more valuable. They're just far more money. And I think part of that is because the flaws are actually what make it valuable. Not just the flaws, but also the fact that it was dug out of the earth by a human. And it has a story behind it. I think that story, the history of that

thing is what gives it value, people call it, people in the art world, call it providence. And that's one of the things that gives human made things value is that they have a story behind them. If you have something that's just sterile and perfect and just clear and has no idiosyncrasies, it kind of diminishes the value of it. Even though it's perfect on a technical level, it doesn't have a story. It's all a sterile. It's very sterile to do it that way. This is what I tell fledgling podcasters that ask for advice is your job is not to perfectly index all of the information

in yours or the guest's head and that forgetting that town that's on the west coast of the north of England, that's what it called it, it's near Manchit at Blackpool. Like that is part of the vibe. It is adding to the character of you as a person. And there are podcastes out there that spend a lot of money on editors to go through and remove any heavy breaths or pauses or mistakes by them or the guests or whatever. And I mean, if you want that, you can go to Blinkist as far as I'm

concerned. The job is to ask questions that are outside of the scope of the book that are unique that you can't get elsewhere, and also to create a vibe. If you and your friend can't breathe because you're laughing for 20 seconds, that's part of you. It speaks massively, I think, as well, an over-reliance on that, whether it be online with writing or in podcasting or in YouTube or whatever, it speaks massively to an insecurity that you are not worthy of acceptance or that your work or you as a person is not going to be enjoyed by the audience.

And I understand that. I understand why in a presentation you might want to overthink and so on and so forth. But being able to let go, and again, this is only something that you can achieve through many repetitions of doing anything of this kind. But you must have found this with writing that as you get out of your own way more and just say, look, I'm going to avoid being stupid. I'm going to say things as clearly and precisely and simply as I can. And I'm going to have faith that the accumulated experience I've got is going to make something good. And then once it's out there, it's fine. But when you start to overthink it,

when you've spent six months planning what it's going to be, and you've built it up, and it's this big behemoth, and then everything's tight and awkward and uncomfortable. So anyway, next one, next one, this is a really good one. Post-journalism, the press lost its monopoly on news when the internet democratized info. To save its business model, it pivoted from journalism

into tribalism. The new role of the press is not to inform its readers, but to confirm what they already believe. Post-journalism. Yeah, so there was a study published in the social science computer review. Basically what it was, a team of researchers analyzed 27 million news articles published between 1970 and 2019. And what they found was that use of words like sexist and racist in the New York Times and in the wider liberal media increased over 400 percent since 2012. So obviously sexism and racism have not actually increased 400 percent since 2012. So obviously sexism and racism have not actually increased 400% since 2012. It's only the media's use of these terms that's increased.

And this is, they found this was the case, anyway, they found that essentially what happened was that there was some event that had occurred that had caused a massive shift in the editorial policy of the New York Times towards sex and race. And I mean, this was actually, I think, who was it? There was a writer who dubbed this the great awokening. Although he didn't refer to this specific example, but he referred to a general trend that

occurred with the rise of social media in the early 2010s, where there was a sudden shift towards issues of sex and race. And this was driven by the media, I think. I think this was driven by the fact that the New York Times was no longer the sole or for, you know, one of the sole authorities of news anymore, with the sort of advent of social media and all this alternative media that sprang up and stuff like the Joe Rogan podcast and all these alternative sources of information. The New York Times had suddenly lost its authority, it was no longer in no log out and monopoly on information. And so obviously they had to do something.

And I believe, I don't have any hard evidence of it, but I think that this is what led to this surge in usage of terms like sex as a reason, and the rise of this sort of, you know, woke politics in media because I feel that it decided that it was going to cater to hipsters basically, you know, to certain, I don't want to stereotype you too, with the kinds of people hang out in Starbucks and, you know, like, you know, drinks sort of pumpkin, spicy latte, a little, you know, they wanted to sort of, they thought we were going to buy spice by the way. I think that's my favorite.

I would be coming for you hard. Yeah. Yeah, I've tried it. They're actually quite nice. I've tried a few myself. You were a hipster. Yeah. I did it before.

Everybody else. That's the most hipster thing you could say. That doesn't defend you from being a hipster. Yeah. Okay. So what you're saying is that the New York Times, they need to, they need to re-engineer news from being something which accurately portrays what's going on to competing for clicks up against people who are significantly better at getting clicks. What it seems like, if racism and sexism have increased by 400% since 2012 in New York Times and the liberal media,

it seems like racism and sexism have been split tested as the most limbically hijacking, perfectly curated, tempting way to get people to press on a news article. Absolutely. Yeah, because the interesting thing with these terms is that they don't just get the audience engaged. They also get conservative audience engaged, because the conservative sort of media ecosystem is largely reactive which fits in with their reactionary ideology. So they react to

the liberal politics of the day to the liberal mainstream media. And so when the New York Times says that air conditioning is racist or whatever, then Fox News is going to come out, took a Carlson who's going to go on and is going to say, you know, look at this madness and the New York Times within it, the world's going to hell, the New York Times now is claiming that conditioning as racist and the New York Times obviously knows that took a call, some is going to do this. And that's why they do it because they know that they can provoke it. So then took her gets his audience of conservatives to essentially just take part in this dialogue, to take part in this sort of debate. And that drives more traffic to the New York Times when people share it like, look at this craziness on social media.

What they're doing, they're doing the New York Times's own work for them, they're just sharing it. Even it doesn't matter if people don't like the New York Times' article, it's still gang shared and that's what matters at the end of the day. People are clicking on it so that they can hate it. And I think that's really the sort of the liberal media's business model and the conservative media's business model. The liberal media will randomly accuse things of being sexist or racist knowing that it's going to fire a lot of people, then the right wing media, the conservative media will sort of react just as predicted, and it will just create, it's like a sort of symbiosis where they sort of fuel each other, you know, they fuel each other's traffic and, you know, I mean,

you do see it happening the other way now as well, you see, you know, took a Carlson or whatever, will make a claim which is absolutely crazy on Fox News. And then the New York Times will write an opinion piece about him and how he's danger to, you know, everyone and he's going to, you know, create the Third Reich or whatever, like him, I'm sorry, the Fourth Reich. But like, you know, it's a, it's a back and forth between them. They have this sort of tribal warfare thing going on, and they both monetized it. They're both profit from it, and everybody else loses because everybody else becomes

more stupid as a result. And that's basically the media ecosystem now, I think. The base of media. There's a really good quote from Dana White, and this is from three years ago now, and he says, the media are not in the news business, they are in the clickbait business. They think negativity sells and gets clicks, so that's what they deliver. Negativity is their product. And what he's touching on there is the fact that people are more likely to click on sensationalist negative stories than they are. I mean, dude, we see this even when it comes to designing

thumbnails for the channel, if I use a term like war or battle, go to war with your mind, you must battle for self-improvement, stuff like that. Even though they're being used in a positive manner, it's still in inflammatory word. And it gets more clicks. People see that word, they see the word war and they go, oh, war, you're going to click on it. Even if it is a war for more fucking hypertrophy or whatever it is. Anyway, next one, noble cause corruption. The greatest evils come not from those seeking to do bad, but from those seeking to do good and believing the ends justify the means. Ironically, few things justify the immoral treatment of others more than the belief that you're more moral than them. Yeah, so...

I can't look back. Sort of people who do evil things in life. Very few of them are actually evil in terms of... very few of them actually set out to deliberately do evil. You know, I mean there are probably handful of serial killers who would fall into this umbrella, people like Richard Ramirez, you know, the Night Stalker. I would say he was probably closest, you could come to somebody who was just doing things purely because they were evil. He deliberately went out to do things because he knew that they were evil.

But people like that are extremely rare in life. And the vast majority of sort of evil acts in life are committed by people who actually think they're doing good. If you look at history, you know, I mean, how many people have created atrocities as a result of them trying to be evil, trying to do the wrong thing.

Not, I don't know of any. But then if you ask yourself, how many people have committed atrocities in the name of trying to do good? Well, you could, you can, there's no end of them, you know, there's just everywhere, like you know, if you look at the classic example, many of them people are Hitler, I mean, Hitler is regarded as a classic supervillain. But the fact of the matter is that he wasn't evil in the sense that he didn't deliberately set out to do evil. He actually believed he was doing the right thing. And Germany believed

he was doing the right thing as well, that's where they elected him. He didn't just take over power and become a tyrant and go against the German people's wishes. The German people elected him into power. And they elected him because they believed in his message, because they believed he was correct that Germanic civilization was collapsing. And it was the fault of Jews and gypsies and Jewish witnesses because they were apparently stealing the wealth of the country and they were rupting the minds of the youth with degenerate art as they as the Nazis called it. So these ideas were very common

They were not just common in Germany. They were common in the US. They were common in Europe Antisemitism was was commonplace in the 1920s and 30s. I mean, you know, there was a in Madison Square Garden There was a massive meeting of American Nazis. Now, can you imagine that today, imagine today you had like, you know, the American Nazi first, 2023. Yeah, exactly. Hiring up Madison Square Garden, you know, and actually having a live show, neo-Nazis show. And that's when it was like in 1920s. So there was a lot of people who actually believed that it was right to do what Hitler eventually did, which is actually terrifying when you think about it. This wasn't just some madman who just took over power and then decided to exterminate an entire race of people. This was something that had support from the

bottom, from the grassroots. And so these people were convinced they were doing the right thing. from the grassroots. And so these people were convinced they were doing the right thing. It's a tear. Ironically, few things justify the immoral treatment of others more than the belief that you're more moral than them. What does the more moral than them have to play here? So if you think, if we go back to the example of Jews and Germany, Nazi Germany, Hitler and the Nazis believe that they were morally superior to the Jews because they believed that the Jews were corrupting people because they believed, but first they believed that they were greedy and they were stealing the wealth of Germany. Secondly, they believed that they were corrupting the minds of Germanic youth by, with their so-called degenerate

art. They were essentially undermining civilization, they were parasites that were destroying civilization, so they were immoral in that sense. That's what the Nazis believed. So the Nazis believed that since these people are not moral people, they're not ethical, they're not ethical, they're not ethical people in their view, it's okay to exterminate them, it's okay, they're not human, they're subhumans, they're unto mench, wiping them out is good for society. And you see this literally in every other example of this kind. So if you go to the Paul opposite example of Stalin, Stalin believed that the bourgeoisie were morally inferior to the

proletarians because they were, they were, they were been corrupted by their wealth, they were greedy, they were, you know, capitalist, they wanted to enslave everybody else. And so he used this idea that the humble worker was more moral, or more ethical than the bourgeoisie, to sort of justify the murder of the bourgeoisie. Not just the bourgeoisie, but pretty much anybody who spoke out against him. So these people were by definition, they were more but pretty much anybody who spoke out against him. So these people were by definition immorally if they spoke out against him because they were obstacles to the utopia that he was trying to enact. So the idea is that if you can

present yourself as more moral than your enemies, then you can justify their slaughter. Because nobody's going to miss a person who's immor who's, who's, and what I mean, I like to think about a very commonplace example would be the idea of child molesters. But child molesters are considered probably the most evil and the people, the most least worthy of sympathy people on the planet. And I know people who are really, really good-hearted people, like really nice, kind, compassionate people. And I hear them sometimes say things like, I mean, there's one person that I know who's really, really kind person, really compassionate person. And they said that what they wanted was for charmlesses to be locked in a room with a ground,

with with with floor made up sandpaper that was basically a treadmill that never ended. You know that's what they wanted and they said it they said it without any matter they just said that that's what they should do to to child nurses and this is a classic example like if somebody is regarded as morally inferior then they they lose any right to compassion in a in an average person's mind like you can you know you can oh, this person is charming, so you can do whatever you like to them, because they're not human, because of what they've done. And so if you can present a person as morally defective, as morally inferior, then you don't feel bad no matter what happens to them.

And that's why people who are so convinced of their own morality, when they see somebody who's less moral than them or who they think is less moral than them, then they can become complete monsters towards that person. So that's where I think a lot of the world's greatest atrocities occur is due to that sort of belief. Fascinating. Okay, next one. Gwinder's third paradox. In order for you to beat someone in a debate, your opponent needs to realize they've lost. Therefore, it's easier to win an argument against a genius than an idiot. This is the reason I stopped debate. Well, it's one of the reasons anyway.

I used to debate people all the time on social media. I used to think it was something worth doing. I used to think that I could convince people. But I to think it was something worth doing. I used to think it was something worth doing. I used to think it was something worth doing. I used to think it was something worth doing. I used to think it was something worth doing. I used to think it was something worth doing. I used to think it was something worth doing. I used to think it was something worth doing.

I used to think it was something worth doing. I used to think it was something worth doing. I used to think it was something worth doing. I used to think it was something worth doing. I used to think it was something worth doing. I used to think it was something worth doing. I used to think it was something worth doing. I used to think it was something worth doing. I used to think it was something worth doing. I used to think it was something worth doing. I used to think it was something worth doing. I used to think it was something worth doing.

I used to think it was something worth doing. I used to think it was something worth doing. I used to think it was something worth doing. I used to think it was something worth doing. I used to think it was something worth doing. I used to think it was something worth doing. I used to think it was something worth doing. I used to think it was something worth doing. I used to think it was something worth doing. I used to think it was something worth doing. I used to think it was something worth doing.'t want to understand. And they approach debates. Well, basically, there's a rationalist thinker called Julia Gleff who had this great book called

Scout mindset. She came on the party base, made the, yeah, yeah, great, yeah. In fact, I think I saw that one, yeah. And yeah, she made the case the case that basically when people, when they enter debates, they tend to approach with a soldier mindset, which is that they just want to win. They just want to conquer the enemy. They have no real other goal. But they should really approach with a scout mindset, which is to seek as much information as possible, objective information, do what a scout does rather than what a soldier does. But the problem is, is that most people are soldier, they approach with a soldier mindset.

And when you approach with a soldier mindset and you're not very bright, what will happen is you'll often just keep going because your ego is just driving you further and further and you won't see that you've actually lost the debate because your ego is just there and you're just trying to do everything you can. You're moving the goal posts, you know, as much as you can to try to win at all costs. I think with smart people, this is not to say that smart people don't approach what the solid ones say. They also can be extremely, um, egotistical and they can be arrogance to fly that. But they often are more likely to realize when they've screwed up, when they've contradicted themselves or when they've, you know, they said something that's

just factually incorrect. And it's harder for them to come back from that because they've realized they've screwed up, you know, so they're like, oh, okay, and they can't just pretend. They can't just, you know, it's all in the world, but they just talk. Talks about this. He says that once you've become convinced of something, even if you claim the opposite, you can no longer unconvince yourself of it. If I'd convince you that it's two equals four, and you then see it, you can tell me, no, no, no, it's three. I know it's three. But on the inside, you can't become an up until a point at which somebody convinces you of something else. You can't be unconvinced

of something which you are convinced of. But as you've spoken about in your most recent sub-stack article, that everybody needs to go and read, smart people plus ideology is a terrifying cocktail because that can use their ingenuity to engineer a more easily, a more fortified defense around their irrational beliefs or around just beliefs that they haven't assessed. So there's another thing that relates to this. So Gwendo's third paradox about needing to ensure that your opponent has to work out that they've lost. And this is from Scott Alexander and it years ago, this is from his old stuff. If you're interested in being on the right side of disputes,

you will refute your opponent's arguments. But if you're interested in producing truth, you will fix your opponent's arguments for them. To win, you must fight not only the creature you encounter, you must fight the most horrible thing that can be constructed from its corpse. It's a very good way of putting it. Yeah. There's a concept called regirian rhetoric, which is how I try to approach any kind of discussion, which is instead of trying to convince that person that they're wrong, what I try to do is I try to understand that person's belief system as well as I can. So I don't necessarily deny or defy anything that they say. I just listen and then I ask them questions to work out how they came to that conclusion. And then I leave the discussion not having

convinced them, but having a better understanding of why they believe what they believe. And I think that's far more important, you know, because that helps me to better understand positions that I disagree with. Then I will formally maybe all attack their beliefs in a piece of writing where I can really think it through and I don't have somebody moving the goalposts or anything like that. But I'll do that formally in like an essay, I won't do it in a discussion. I found that trying to change somebody's beliefs in a debate is almost pointless. It's like kind of changing their mind through a wrap up, you know, it's just it works. It works for it worked for M&M and 8 mile, but yeah, I am I'm totally on board with that and someone asked in a Q&A a couple of weeks ago about how I

remain at least partially impartial when it comes to speaking to people and And for me, the question asking, I called it the secratic method, but you've just called it, what was that one? Regerian rhetoric. It's different from the secratic method, because the secratic method is an attempt to win an argument. It's basically an attempt to ask questions until you lead somebody into contradicting themselves, or insane something that's not true.

Whereas Regerian rhetoric dispenses with that completely. Regerian, rhetoric is purely about trying to understand the other person's position from a neutral objective point of view. So trying to understand what experiences in their life led them to the beliefs that they have, have with them now. No matter how wrong those beliefs are, you know, so if somebody believes that the world is flat, instead of trying to refute that,

instead of saying, oh, if you use your binoculars and you peer out over the horizon, you'll see that the sales of ships appear before that prowess. You could say someone like that to refute them or what you could do is ask them, so how did you come to this belief system and what is the evidence that convinced you?

And then once you ask these questions, you get a better understanding of why they believed, what they believed, what they were persuaded by that. And that in itself is valuable because now you understand why people believe it, which is probably more valuable to you than just refuting them and changing their beliefs. Do you get what I'm saying?

So it's a different, it's a different valley system. It's basically more about understanding. I actually think that that isn't much closer to the position that I take as well, because my goal is very rarely to ask people questions that make them look stupid up until the point at which they recant all of the opinions that they've got. It's much closer to that. How do you spell that first thing? So it's O-R-V-E-G-E-R-I-A-N. So it's Roger, I-A-N on the end.

Roger, I'm sorry. Okay, cool. So this relates to something that I wrote about a couple of weeks ago, which is what I've called the soft signal of effectiveness. Triggering a tribal response is antithetical to having an effective behaviour and belief-changing message. It's nowhere near as sexy to caveat heavily, but when it comes to important subjects, the most compelling arguments are sometimes the gentler ones. If you care about changing behaviour, you'll dial back the aggression of your argument.

Yeah, I think I tweeted something once, which was along the lines of, if you want to convince people, show them that you can be convinced. And I think that works very well in life, because if you, if you show people that you're open to their arguments and that you, you know, you're, you're willing to hear what they have to say, people are far more likely to reciprocate because they see you as more of an open-minded person and they say, okay, this person gave me a chance, so I'll give him a chance. It's like, if you go into an argument straight away trying to win and you immediately deny what they're saying and say that this is wrong, this is that instead of actually listening

to your arguments, they judge your character, they essentially use Wittgen signs of rule in a way, they basically form a personality profile of you and they say this person is very close-minded, he's not even listening to, he's just trying to refute what I'm saying, he's attacking me and then they go into war mode, you know, they start red alert and then they basically want to debate you. So you set yourself up to fail the moment you try to immediately refute what somebody is saying. I think it's much better just to sort of just to listen to them and again use this regery and retry understand why they believe what they believe and I mean this shouldn't be something that you do just so you can win an argument. You shouldn't just listen to them so that you can understand their arguments, so that you

can beat their argument. But it should really be a goal in itself just to understand that you have a better understanding with the people because it's important to understand why people believe what they believe just as much as it's important to believe the right thing. So it helps, particularly for people like you and me, who are seeking to understand human behavior, we need to understand why people adopt false beliefs. And that is much better achieved by just having a good conversation with them, not disagreeing with them, just asking them questions about their belief, about their life, about why, you know, what kind of evidence convinced them, what kind of evidence might convince them that they're wrong, you know, and these kinds of things.

And then it makes you more well equipped to deal with these beliefs in future as well. That's how I did bonus. I love that. Tilting at windmills, an online stranger doesn't know you. All they have are a few vague impressions of you, too meager to form anything but a phantasm. So, when they attack you, they're really just attacking that own imagination, and there is no need to take it personally. Yeah, I mean, when I first joined social media, so I'm tweeting in 2016, I used to get quite upset when I used to get

nasty comments and stuff, you know, like people would say stuff and you know, I would believe it anyway, I'd be like, you know, they'd say stuff about me and they'd call me like, well, sometimes I'd just be called a dumb shit or whatever, you know, sometimes people would say that I was a pseudo intellectual or whatever and back then, you know, I used to sort of think, I must have said something that was wrong, you know, for them to think that. And then I realized after a while, I'm going to second, I don't know anybody who I engage with online. I don't actually know any of them, I don't even have an idea who they are, really, but I've convinced myself that I know who they are. So therefore, I mean, the same must be happening to other people doing that to me, that they couldn't possibly know who I really are. You know, they've

only seen what or two of my posts, and then they built up a personality profile of me based on those two posts, you know. And I mean, we barely know people that we know in real life. You can live with someone for five years, and still not really understand who they are. And yet, we seem to think that, you know, we can read one post by someone, or you know, watch one video by that person. And immediately, we think that we know that person.

And this is a very powerful illusion, that influences, I think, almost, in fact, I would say that everybody is afflicted by this delusion, where we just get a tiny snippet of a person's words or their actions, just a tiny snippet. And from that, we just build this massive fictional character in our heads, you know, from that skeleton, you know, I mean, I actually, I think I did tweet something along the lines that I'll read it out to you. Yeah, this was a tweet I recently sent actually. So I'll read it. So it says, you are a different character in the mind of each person who knows you because their impression of you is made of the bones of what they've seen fleshed out by a musculature

of pure imagination. And I think that really sums up what we do when we see people online, where we just have this bare bones, just bare bones based on a very brief interaction with someone. And then from that, we create this whole fictional character who is very real in our minds, but doesn't actually exist outside of our own heads. And that is a person that we level our criticism at.

That is a person that we level our praise at. And that is a person that will defend or attack in arguments and you know will develop all these theories about this person who doesn't actually exist. And that happens all of the time and it happens, I really know it was happening to me, you know people were doing that to me, they would say things about me that just wasn't true, like for instance if I wrote a tweet that criticized the left, people would say that I was right-wing, but I'm not right-wing at all. In fact, I'd say that, I don't really have strong political opinions, but I'm probably a centrist overall, generally.

I find that, I agree with some of the left, I agree with some of the right things, and just merge them together. But left-wing is, when I criticize the left, people will assume that I'm like some far right guy, and they'll be like, you know, they'll write, oh, you're a cryptofatifascist. And then if I criticize the right, you know, then, yeah, if I criticize the right, then people say I'm a globalist, libtard, you know, or this stuff, like, you know, I'm a WEF shill or whatever, you know,

it's so good. There's never been a big time to insult someone then right now. Exactly. And I'm just there, like, before this would have really upset me, you know, it would have been just just from the fact that it was just because I wasn't used to it. I wasn't used to receiving all this hate. But now when I read it, I actually read it with the smile on my face.

You know, I'm just like, because I know that this person is not actually attacking me. They're attacking their own imagination. Yes. Well, he's one, uh, here's maybe a couple of interesting considerations to add in there. This is one of the reasons why audience capture is so dangerous because the only way that someone can genuinely tilt at windmills is if they have an erroneous view of who

you are really compared with what they've seen of you online, but if your entire persona has subsumed the person and you are playing a role on the internet, quite rightly, they're pointing at the person that you are on the internet. And what you've done is you've basically become cucked by your own audience. You're now this marionette that's being played by the algorithm to the point where you do whatever it asks of you, you feed red meat to the mob. So when someone does point the finger and say, you're a globalist shell or you're a woke lib tard or you're a right wing racist or whatever, when someone does say that, where is the firm place for you to stand?

Where have you got that you can actually stand if you have sold your soul in order to gain notoriety online and your integrity is something that you can't buy back no matter how much you try and pay for it. If you've done that, where is the, you can't grin when people criticize you because they're criticizing the contrived monster that you made, that you created yourself into. Absolutely. And it's a self-reinforcing feedback loop as well because like if you're someone like say, let's use an example, let's use someone like Tim Paul, for instance. Tim Paul was originally sort of like a kind of anti, he was an occupied Wall Street guy,

and he was sort of saying he was quite progressive, he was quite left. And he began to sort of flirt with some right-leaning ideas, and he developed a right-wing audience. And over time, the people left who were formerly followers of his, they began to attack him, saying, oh, you're a right-wing chill now, you know, you're racist, sexist, transphobic blah, blah, blah.

And so they were attacking this. And what happened was that Tim began to take this time. At least this is why it appears like to me. I don't know him personally, but this is what it seems like to me. He seems to have taken that to heart and he became gradually more and more right-wing. So I mean, I would say he's probably on the right now. I don't know if he would agree with that, but based on what I know of his his content, he seems to be pretty firmly conservative, although he calls himself a liberal, his his opinions don't gel with his self-perception.

So I think he's a pretty good idea of somebody who's succumbed to audience capture. He might still think he's a liberal, but all of his guests pretty much are people on the right or at best at the centre. He doesn't really have, he doesn't engage with left people very often. You know, the early time that I remember doing that in recent history was with Vijaya Gadi on the J. Rogen podcast, but generally he seems to be pretty firmly on the right. He's got his friends, our people like the quartering who are also sort of somewhat, they call themselves liberal, but they're really more slightly to the right. And I think what's happened is when left

people call people like Tim Pull out, what happens is this makes him even more audience captured because he then says, you know, I'm a centrist, how can you call me right? How can you call me a racist? I'm a centrist, and then he'll say, oh, no, no, no, it's not me who's moved, it's you who's moved. You have gone crazy, not me. And so he'll go even further to the right and say, these people are absolutely crazy, they're accusing you of being a racist. And you know, so it's like a self-perpetuating cycle. And so he'll go even further to the right and say these people are absolutely crazy. They're accusing you of being racist. And you know, so it's like a self perpetuating cycle and then he becomes a bit more right wing. So then the left attacking even more saying, oh, you know, you're a racist.

So he just keeps going on and on and on and on. And you know, it happens, I think across the spectrum, that's just one example. I mean, there are probably people who have done this who've moved leftwards and, you know, they've been attacked by people on the right due to that, and then they've gone even more to the left as a result of that. And so, yeah, it's a mutual sort of cycle symbiosis. There's another one that I think relates to what we've just spoken about, which

is the principle of humanity. Every single person is exactly what you would be if you were them. This includes your political opponents, so instead of dismissing them as evil or stupid, maybe seek to understand the circumstances that led them to their conclusions. Yeah, so I mean this is again this is part of why Regere and Rhetoric is so valuable because we don't really have a good idea of anybody that we be only online. There are people that I've got relationships with online who I feel like

I know well, but I don't. I just don't because all I've seen is what they've chosen to show me. And when you, when all you've seen is what people have chosen to show you, there are selection effects to that and you develop a very distorted idea of who they are and this causes you to have assumptions about people and it can cause you to have completely skewed reality. And the thing, so if you really want to understand who somebody really is, a much better strategy is to try to look at how they became, who they were, put yourself in their shoes and to reflect on their own internal logic, the internal logic

of their own actions, to try to understand, because you've got to bear in mind that everybody, those things that they think are right for them, everybody, like every action that somebody takes, they take because they think it's the right thing to do. Even if it's the wrong thing to do, they think it's the right thing to do, which is why they do it. So if you can use that assumption to try to reverse engineer a person's life experience

and find out why they did the things that they did, then you can develop a much more deeper understanding. Then if you simply look at what they've said online and what they've done online and what's been said about them or written about them. These are all going to be things that have sort of subject to selection effects. People are always going to comment on the most extraordinary, most wildest things that people have done. They're not going to comment on the more mundane things that people do in their lives.

For every crazy, cancelable thought that a person has, they have thousand opinions that are just run of the mill and mundane. But what happens is that if somebody says one thing that you don't like, you know, you're basically just regard that one thought in that entire galaxy of thoughts, that is their mind. And you're just, you know, you use that one little thought to just sort of judge them and to dismiss them or fall in love with them or whatever, you know. And so it's much more important to have a full holistic understanding of a person's life. Because what they show online is just nothing. It's just, it's the tip of the iceberg. You can't see that massive iceberg that is all of the things that are motivating them behind the scenes of offline,

you know, in their life. That's why the Rogan N. Word cancellation video didn't hold water, because the way that mainstream media and cancellation attempts usually work is this is the smoking gun of his racist, transphobic, bigoted views that we always knew with there and we always told you with there and I had the inclination do you remember I said I thought your organ was a racist and this is the tip of the iceberg. The issue that you had with Rogan his protective mechanism was that even a casual fan of his may have listened to 200 or 500 hours and you know, there's some people out there that will have listened to thousands and thousands of hours of him.

They say, you're telling me this is the tip of the iceberg. I've seen the whole iceberg. I know that there's nothing lurking down there and I have reliable difficult to falsify evidence that suggests that Joe is a reliable good non-bigoted guy. And that asymmetry, it's the vacuum and the holes in some body's personality persona that gets filled by speculation and accusation from the press. And if you have a sufficiently large body of work and a sufficiently big audience that's been exposed to enough of it, that's actually protective in that regard. This is why cancel culture is fundamentally elitist

and fundamentally anti-left. And I try to use this argument before. I wrote an essay about why cancel culture is not actually left-wing. Because the only thing that cancel culture can cancel is people who don't really have a social media presence. People who don't have much cloud. People who are largely powerless.

There are occasional exceptions. But in order for this to be an exception, you have to do something that's extremely beyond the pale, like sexual assault, something like that. If you just make a comment about something then You're gonna get cancelled if you don't have much cloud, but you won't be cancelled if you have a lot of cloud and a lot of people know you well Online, you know famous people very very rarely get cancelled for just one thing that they say whereas poor people or people who are just ordinary people You know like that that that lady I always think of that lady who,

I don't even remember her name, which is telling us, I suppose, but she said that she was gonna go to, she was gonna hop on a flight to Africa and she wanted people to pray for her that she didn't get AIDS or something like that. That's a wild joke. I'm quite. Yeah, that was like a death.

It was just a thoughtless, Yeah, it was a stupid tweet. It was just a thoughtless tweet that, how many thoughtless tweets do people send or, you know, thoughtless posts that people don't even think about. They're just posting, just thinking that it's been funny. I've done that plenty of times. I've not said anything probably that stupid, but I've said stuff that's almost as stupid as that. And, you know, it could have been any one of us who said something like that really. And it was just off the cuff

She did it before she got up until playing when she got off the plane She realized that I've blown up and pretty much everybody knew who she was and now she was Life was over, you know, which is it was really it's actually quite sad But it was I mean it was weirdly amusing, but it was also really sad like because she did lose Her livelihood as a result of that. And if she was more famous, she wouldn't have lost that livelihood because not only because of the things that you just mentioned about people would know from her past experience, she probably wasn't a racist person. There are plenty of people that I know personally who are not racist, who occasionally make jokes about race. You know, it just happens, it's just a commonplace thing.

But people online act as though, if you make one joke that's mildly racist, that means that you literally want to start a Holocaust, and you want to wipe out non-white people or whatever, you know. There's a massive difference between those two things. You know, there's people who joke about racism, but they wouldn't judge somebody by their race in the real world. They wouldn't, you know, they wouldn't do that, but then there's people out there who would do that. And then the two groups often get

confused, and this happens a lot, but if you actually know somebody like Joe Rogan in your example, if you have a long history of listening to that person, then you realize that they're one of the groups that might occasionally say something that's offensive, but isn't one of those people, isn't like a racist, isn't sexism. Yeah, you know, so. I wonder if this relates to, is it Brandylini's Law and Concept Creep? So as a particular social problem becomes more rare.

The definition of that needs to be expanded and with Brandylini's law as the living standards in a society rise, people's expectations rise along with it. Yeah, so that's, so the first one you got correct there, that's, yeah, the second one's not Brandylini's law, that's Tokville paradox. I knew it, I bloody, I bloody knew it,

but yeah, you got all the other ones correct though, so that's very clear. I knew that it would be a fucking quiz at some point. Right, next one. Next one, overblown implications effect. We think people judge us by a single success or failure, but they don't. If you mess up one meal, no one thinks you're a bad chef, and if you have one great idea, no one thinks you're a genius. People just aren't thinking about you that much.

Yeah, I mean, when I was young, when I was a teenager, I used to suffer from anxiety. When I would enter a room, I would immediately feel like everybody was looking at me and I would feel like my every micro movement of my body was being sort of analyzed, you know, like as if it was like literally like I was on a reality TV show or something. And it really was like almost paralyzing experience. And it took me a long time to really realize that, hang on a second, I'm just not that important. But most people just do not give a fuck about me, you know. And it was such a liberating feeling because it's true for a star, but also,

you know, it just helps you to realize, to basically take away, you know, if you're focusing on what other people think about you, you won't really live your life, how you wanna live it, you won't have that sense of independence, you'll be completely dependent on what other people think, or what you think other people think about you. But in reality, people just don't care. People are more worried

about how they appear to you than about how you appear to them. You know, like 10 years ago, if I was to go on this show, like you've got 750,000 subscribers, right? If I was here thinking about what 750,000 people are thinking about me. While I'm saying this, I would be paralyzed. I wouldn't be able to do anything. I'd be here like stuttering. I wouldn't be able to say anything. My mind would be filled with the thoughts of 750,000 people thinking of me.

The way I look at it is people are going to watch this episode. They'll probably take some good things from it, hopefully, if all goes to plan. But they won't really remember me much, they won't remember my mistakes that I said, you know, whatever, if I said something wrong, they won't really remember it. They won't focus on it, they're not going to stalk me, I'm not attractive enough to be stalked. So I don't really need to worry about all of these things, you know. You know, I'm just basically too thin, mate. Yeah, well, I think it takes them quite drastic for that to happen. But like, yeah, I mean, generally speaking, I'm, you know, I find that you just end up, another thing is that you actually end up looking a lot better to

other people if you don't care too much what they think of you. And this is not to say that you shouldn't, I'm not into that whole, you know, you shouldn't give a fork and all that shit. I don't think that's really good. I think you should care what people think, but you shouldn't be constantly focusing on what they think of you, you know, you should just make an effort just to be relaxed and just to be yourself Not not because of you know like you you want people to I mean really the main reason I want I think that you should try to be yourself is because if you try to be someone who's fake Then you have to essentially create That character and you have to become that character.

So it essentially is a prey-loom to audience capture. If you try to be someone you're not, if you're constantly focusing on how you appear to others, you'll stop being who you really are and you'll begin to play to that audience and you'll essentially be acting in the line-light of their gaze. And you will cease to be who you actually are,

which is a think dangerous. I spoke about this in a TEDx talk a couple of years ago and I said that the persona is incapable of receiving love, it can only receive praise. And it was something I learned from Aubrey Marcus that if you're only playing a role, then any compliments that you receive won't existentially connect with you inside because it doesn't feel like someone's complimenting you. They're just complimenting this projection of what you thought they wanted, which is, I don't know, I mean, sure, if you do a shadow puppet that's really good, fantastic, well done, look at what you created, but it's not the same as someone saying you as an

individual, this very natural, unencumbered projection of your very essence that you've brought forward into the world, combining all of your predispositions and genetics with life experiences and traumas, that is worthy of love and acceptance and praise and all the rest of it. Like that's so fulfilling. And it was one of the things that I really noticed transitioning from an industry where I did have to be more performative. Oddly, it had to be more performative as a guy stood in the front door of a nightclub

than a guy that talks on a podcast. I found that I would do and say things that were incongruous with who I really was, even though I wasn't necessarily doing the self-assessment to realize it. It's only in retrospect that I got to work out that I was playing this role. But someone would ask me my opinion and I would think, okay, what does Gwinda want to hear from me at this moment? What should I say in order to engender

the most positive response that I can get from him? And it was fucking crippling. Like it was absolutely crippling because I'm permanently playing this methamee game. I'm always having to be one degree of separation removed. I don't actually have an opinion. I don't actually hold any truths in myself. What I hold are various avatars that all need to exist in my mind at one time because the you that I am, the me that I am for you,

and the me that I am for my housemate, and the me that I am for my mum, and the me that I am for all of the other people in my life, all need to be very carefully held and remembered and what did I say to him last time, what was my opinion about that? Did I think it was going to be Tommy Fury or Jake Paul that was going to win and like all of that, all of that, it's incredibly computationally, it's basically impossible. It is, I mean, there's a quote that's been attributed to Mark Twain. I don't know if he actually said it, but it's attributed to him. And it's something like, if you tell the truth, then you don't need to remember anything. And I think that really saves you a lot of energy.

If you are just who you really are, and you just are relaxed and just say what you really think and you don't try to put on a front. It just saves so much energy in interactions. I used to be exhausted in interactions, social interactions, because I was constantly acting. I was constantly trying to impress, or I was constantly trying to be the person that I thought people expected me to be. And like you said, this is, it's this is constant sort of from computational sort of power, like it's just being, you know, your brain's being fried by all this and the circuitry firing off.

And it's just not good because you end up not being who you really are and you end up haxing yourself, you end up sort of exhausting yourself to be someone who you're not. And at the end of it all, people probably don't even fucking remember so Yes, after all of that I didn't even fucking care. Yeah, so good. So come back Let's get let's try and get one or two more inks that some of these are so good And I've got enough to do another episode that we haven't got through so meme theory an ideology

Poresitizes the mind changing the host's behavior so they spread it to other people. Therefore, a successful ideology, the only kind we hear about, is not configured to be true, it is configured only to be easily transmitted and easily believed. Yeah, I think this idea is one of my favorite ideas because I think it explains so much of the information landscape. If you look at the dominant ideologies on the internet right now, you'll see that they're

all adapted, evolutionarily adapted for nothing else than their own propagation. We like to use the work ideologies as an example because it's one of the most prominent ideologies right now. And workism is very powerful idea in terms of it's a very fertile idea. It spreads very quickly because it allows people to signal compassion, open-mindedness, cosmopolitanism, and all of these very highly-priced social forms of social capital, basically. So if something is good at making people look good, then it's obviously going to be adopted like a fashion. That's the very definition of a fashion.

A fashion is something that emerges that in the current age makes people look like they're sophisticated, glued up, positive, ponditon, you know, all of these things, and that's exactly what wokeism does. The claims of wokeism are false. You know, if you look on Wikipedia, that their present tense fact. So for instance, implicit association tests, they're pure pseudoscience. And yet if you go on Wikipedia, you'll see that, you know, Wikipedia will claim that implicit association tests can determine whether someone is a racist or not.

The fact of the matter is, is that in experiments, implicit association tests are as balanced as light detectives. You could give somebody the same implicit association tests twice and have radically different results each time. In fact, that's what often happens. So they don't really measure anything apart from what you're thinking at a specific moment in time. But because if you believe in implicit association tests and you believe in implicit bias and all this other stuff and white fragility and everything else that comes from that, then suddenly you'll clude up, especially if you're a white person, if you're a white person who believes in white fragility, then this signals, oh look, I'm a white person, but I hold white people to account for their crimes against black people.

So therefore, I'm a very selfless person. I'm doing things that are not in my own interests. So therefore, I'm a very compassionate person, I'm very altruistic. And all this, it signals very, very powerful things to other people online and that's one of the reasons why work is, it has become such a powerful force in the world. And you know, it's not just work is, I mean, we can use other examples, we can use the posing ideology, we can use basestism, you know, being base, being red-pilled. This idea that, you know, you should just not care what anybody else thinks, you should be who you want to be,

and all this sort of this idea is very powerful because it signals to others that you are strong, that you don't fold, but when you are met with the mob, the work mob, you're basically your independent minded and all this other stuff. So a lot of these, in fact, all of the dominant ideologies now, they all offer things besides anything epistemic. So they don't have epistemic value. They don't have value in being true. They have value in what they allow you to signal to others. And so this is really why these ideologies are so powerful, it's why they have taken over.

That's why meme theory and cultural paratism, paratism, by the way, this is an idea that was originally formulated by Richard Dawkins. I adapted it a little bit in my tweet to sort of, you know, just sort of summit up in one tweet. But yeah, the original credit for this idea comes from Richard Dawkins. He was the first to realize, I mean, he applied this idea to religion because he saw that, you know, religion is not configured to be true. It's configured to be easily disseminated and easily believed. And, you know, in his view, what gave religion value was not its epistemic claims, but the idea that it gives people comfort from death, it allows them to, it gives them meaning

to their lives, it gives them purpose, it gives them something to aspire to. And then people like Nassim, Nicholas Taleb and Jordan Peterson added new benefits to it, saying that it was also an ancestral memory which helped to codify culture and people's ideas that work. So, you know, it was basically like a kind of, it was a repository of knowledge, religion was a repository of knowledge through which people would encode ideas that worked in everyday life. Tell you what's interesting is something that I've noticed a lot of people who 10, 20, 40 years ago would have been very anti-religion, you know, forthcoming atheists. Now, lamenting the loss of something that looks an awful lot like religion.

Douglas Murray is a great friend, but he wrote the strange death of Europe. He talked quite heavily about the problems that occurred there, and he wasn't exactly one of the forehorsesmen of the apocalypse, but he was tangential to that group, and obviously Sam Harris as well. But Douglas's second last book, The Madness of Crowds, was all about the collapse of Grand Narratives. The whole purpose was that we have lost ourselves in the world and that people are now praying at the altar of pretty shitty gods. Sam Harris

as well talking about similar lines. I haven't spoken to either of them about what are your views on religion, but I think that both of them would say, let it be hell, it would be nice if we had a grand narrative that held the entire nation together and gave people a shared sense of belonging. What do you think is going on there? Has the vacuum that's been left by the exit of religion allowed even worse things to be sucked in and people now wondering how much baby was thrown out with the bathwater?

This is a question that has occupied me for a very long time. And I'm going to write a long essay about this at some point, because I've been entertaining this idea for years. And I do accept that. I think I'm one of those people. I was one of the new atheists, sort of, crowd kind of people. I mean, I wasn't one of, like, I wasn't sort of a famous

person or anything, but I was somebody who grew up listening to Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris and people like that. I did think that religion was pretty much an unmitigated disaster for a long time and then with the rise of woe-ness and these alternative ideologies. Oh, you thought that was mad? Let us go either. And then I realized that Hang on a second. I mean, I was also influenced.

I was somewhat influenced by the ideas of people like there's great evolutionary psychologists called Steve Stuart Williams. He's a professional at the University of Nottingham. And the APO understood the universe is the best evolutionary psychology book of all time. Yeah, absolutely. I would definitely recommend that as anybody who wants like a good grounding in evolutionary theory should read that because it's easy to understand and it's very colourfully written and it's beautifully explained.

Yeah, I mean, from his work and also from the work of a few other thinkers, I sort of realised that Hang on a Second religion actually did have some kind of a few other thinkers. I sort of realized that Hang on a second, religion actually did have some kind of a function. I mean, I don't think Steve actually made this claim himself, but he had a Jason claim, which was that culture is the means by which we codify sort of heuristics, essentially. So, you know, we justify heuristics by sort of giving them this kind of divine authority.

And that's how they survive through the generations. They're passed from one generation to the next, useful heuristics for living life. For instance, you know, like avoiding uncooked pork or whatever, like, you know, because of the chrycanosis and other parasites. What is it? Literally figuratively true but literally false. Yeah, absolutely. Steve Stuart will introduce his idea called cumulative culture, which is the idea that individually you and I are not very smart. If we were left alone in this world, we would not survive for very long. The other reason we have the value, if we were left alone in this world, we would not survive for very long. The other reason we have the value, the sort of information that we have and the knowledge that we have,

is because of all the information that was transmitted to our generation by past generations through culture. So it's because we're part of this culture that we have learned, all of the things that our previous generations learned and survived to tell the tale. So if we were just isolated in vigil, we would know past, we would not have, like we would be born in this world, we would probably gain a rudimentary understanding of things like gravity because things would fall when we, if we dropped to Apple, it would fall. So we would realise, okay, gravity is a thing, we wouldn't call it gravity, but we would just know it as a force that causes things to fall to the earth. And then from there, we would gradually, very slowly, just very slowly accumulate information. But the fact of the matter is, is that there are people who have been there before us, who have learned all of these things before.

And they supercharge our knowledge when we're born, because when we go to school, we learn about gravity, we learn about all of these other things that have happened, all of the things that passed. So we are the sort of cumulative experience of all past generations. And religion is the means by which this information is transmitted from generation to generation. That's why I call it an ancestral memory because it's like a memory for as species as a whole. And so there is value, I think there is value in religion. That's one thing. Another aspect of religion is that it does preserve a sense of order, which we've seen collapse now with the sort of rise of crazy gender ideology and all sort of stuff. You know, religion did have

a certain purpose in that it kept people in this sort of system where things were structured and there was, you know, order essentially, we imposed order on a chaotic world by inventing myths and by following these myths as if they are the law. And so there is that kind of value. I didn't appreciate that until relatively recently and I think I actually did a lot of research into this and I found that yes Whopnus I think has definitely at least in part being caused by The abandonment of religion and I say this is an atheist. I'm I'm I'm a staunch atheist. I'm convinced that there is no God but and he's not in this universe. There might be another

Universes but at the same time I, I accept that the loss of religion did play a part in the rise of workers. And this can actually be traced because if you look at one of the ways that work was became such a big issue, it became such a big ideology, it was through something called atheism plus, which was a movement that sort of arose at the tail end of new atheism when a group of people on the left, like P.C. Myers, who's a biologist, he was one of the leaders of movement, they basically came to the conclusion that if newtheism is going to kill religion, we're going to need something to replace it. We're going to need a new system of values. And it's kick-started this movement of New Atheists basically that decided that the best

way to the best thing to replace religion with is social justice. So they came out with this thing called atheism plus. And this was a massive thing. I mean, a lot of people who were part of this ended up becoming involved in things like game again. And a lot of the early woke combat with the sort of right began out of this. There was a lady called, forgot her name her name Rachel Do you remember the lift incident where there was a there was a atheist? I think her name was Rachel's Rachel something I forgot her name. She was quite prominent around 2012 2011 2012 basically she was a new a new atheist who became one of the the main sort of people in atheism plus and she had this sort of

incident in a lift where a guy joked about going to the lingerie section or something and she said it was like misogynistic and it kicked up a massive fuss and even Richard Dawkins got involved. What was her name? Rachel Watson I think her name was let me just quickly check it online just to check I don't know, incriminate the wrong person. He accused the wrong Rachel Watson. Yeah, yeah, Rachel Watson. I think her name was Rachel Watson, something like that. It's like I bought it. I mean, sorry Rebecca Watson, it was Rebecca Watson. Yeah, Rebecca Watson. But yeah, she was one of them, then Matt Dinaunti was another guy. He was another one who was part of this movement, then the aforementioned

PZMIS. And what they did is basically, these people went extremely hard into the whole social justice stuff, but they went so hard, they basically led to the rise of this website called Rational Wiki. Have you heard of that? Rational Wiki is a... And that's now like... It's probably just a laundry list of all of the unspeakable people from the right. Yeah, and Racial Wiki emerged out of Atheism Plus. It's basically, Racial Wiki is the worst, okay, it's not the worst website on the internet,

but it's the worst website that appears on the first page of Google search results for most searches. It's quite a popular website, but it's because a lot of people see the term rational wiki in A, soon that it's rational. They assume that it's a rational wiki. But it's nothing but yeah, exactly. It basically exists just to shame people for having views that are not woke, basically. And this was a major, this was a major facilitator of wokeness in the first half of the 2010s. And even in sort of like first half of the 2000s, I think it's sort of the latter half of the 2000s, because this was really like a massive push by new atheists who wanted something

to replace the loss of religion with. And they found it in social justice. And then that movement gradually, it dotailed with critical race theory and with critical theory, critical theory and critical race theory are two different things. And you know gender ideology and also the stuff they all dovetail together and they sort of formed workless, the great awakening which was in the sort of you know 2012, 2013. But atheism plus was a major sort of facilitator. Nobody has written about this so far, but I've done a lot of research into it and I'm going to write an essay on this at some point.

Get the article written, mate. Look, dude, let's bring this one home. Everybody needs to subscribe to your substack. Everyone that is listening. Where should they go for that and what else should they follow? So yeah, substack is gruR-W-I-N-D-R.Substack.com. It's much better if I just spell out the name because people never know how to spell my name. And my Twitter is G underscore S underscore BH-O-G-A-L. That's Twitter, yeah, that's not Twitter. What are you going to write next?

So the next thing I'm working on is about the AI misinformation explosion and how it's actually a good thing, it's not a bad thing, it's actually a good thing. It's going to be an hell of a fucking open loop, Jesus Christ. Did you see that Elieza Yuk that Elie Dsa Yukowsky is believes that language learning models are causing so much of a problem that he's removed his sabbatical from doing podcasts. I watched his podcast, I actually watched it, I watched his podcast recently, there's a podcast entitled something like We're All Gonna Die or something like that, and I thought okay, I've got to watch this because I respect El Alisa. I think he's a very smart guy.

And I agree with a lot of what he says. I don't agree with everything he says. I think he does slightly oversell the threat of AI, but not by much, not by much. I think a lot of his points are very important. He's a, I think, a much needed counterweight to the, oh, it's just, they're just telling us. They're just telling us, yeah, it's just, they're just telling us. They're just telling us your toe penis. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, and I will, I will be covering his theories at some point as well. I'm going to be writing a lot more often now, because I'm going to be, just doing this full time, I've been made used to do this full time, sub-step full time, I haven't gotten around to it yet, but I'm going to be doing this thing full time very soon, and I'm going to be sharing our articles a lot more often. Good, that's good for me, that gives me more stuff to talk about, I'm going to be doing this thing full time very soon. And I'm going to be sharing our articles a lot more often. Good. That's good for me.

That gives me more stuff to talk about. That gives me more excuses to bring you back on. I absolutely adore every time that you come on. Everyone needs to go subscribe to your sub-stay and follow you on Twitter. Dude, until next time, I appreciate you. Thanks, Chris. Always a pleasure. Yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, yeah, oh, yeah, oh,