Modern Wisdom - #662 - Gurwinder Bhogal - 18 Shocking Psychology Lessons To Understand Yourself

Episode Date: August 3, 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 every debate is fundamentally an argument about the definition of words, whether modern men are right to believe they would be better off living in medieval times, why people fighting injustice might actually be suffering with an identity crisis, why so many people go shopping for their opinions online, how the culture divide we have today stemmed from our tribal roots, why over analysing Tweets is a waste of your time and much more... Sponsors: Get the Whoop 4.0 for free and get your first month for free at http://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get over 37% discount on all products site-wide from MyProtein at https://bit.ly/proteinwisdom (use code: MODERNWISDOM) Get 15% discount on Craftd London’s jewellery at https://craftd.com/modernwisdom (use code MW15) Extra Stuff: Follow Gurwinder's Substack - https://gurwinder.substack.com/ Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello everybody, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Gwinda Bogle. He's a programmer and a writer. Gwinda happens to be 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 is phenomenal and today we get to go through

some of my favourite lessons. Expect to learn why every debate is fundamentally an argument about the definition of words, whether modern men are right to believe that they would be better off living in medieval times, why people fighting injustice might actually be suffering with an identity crisis, why so many people go shopping for their opinions online, how the culture divide we have today stemmed from our tribal roots, why over-analysing tweets is a waste of time, and much more. These are some of my favorite episodes. I absolutely love sitting down with people that are as smart as Gwinder and getting

to just dig into the best concepts and lessons they've got. These ones are so high bang for your book. The insight per minute rate of these sorts of episodes are just so huge and I have so much fun recording these ones. I really, really hope that you do listening to them. In other news this episode is brought to you by Woop. Woop is the only fitness tracker that I have ever stuck with. It is a 24-7 health and fitness coach that tracks your sleep, strain, recovery, stress, and more to provide personalized insights that help you to reach your goals. Whether you're obsessed with putting in a little more effort

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they will send you a new one for free. Plus, they ship internationally and you can get 15% of everything by going to bit.ly-cd-wisdom using the code mw15.a-checkout.that's bit.ly-lettasy-wisdom-and-mw15.a-checkout. But now, ladies and gentlemen, it is time for one of my favourite people. But now, ladies and gentlemen, it is time for one of my favorite people. Gwinda Bogle. You've become the intellectual Nicarcardo avocado. You are obese, obese with interesting ideas. So we're going to go through as many as we can get through today. My first one, one of my favorites, idiocy saturation. Online people who don't think before they post are able to post more often than people

who do. As a result, the average social media post is stupider than the average social media user, worth remembering whenever Twitter Domasserie drives you to despair. Yeah, so by Twitter Domasserie, what I mean is if you just go on to Twitter and unfiltered and you're not sort of, you don't have a curated feed and you just look at the posts. It makes you want to blow your brains out just because there's so much garbage. It's just a avalanche of garbage. And it kind of like when I first went on to Twitter, I got a really lower pitty in a humanity because I was fooled into believing that this was reflective of what

humans actually think. But it actually took me a bit of time to realize that the stuff that you see on social media is overwhelmingly consists of stuff that people have posted hastily without thought, because the people who really think about what they're posting, they take a lot longer to post. And so naturally, it's going to be filled with stuff like, oh, I'm tired, I'm going to go to bed and stuff like that, meaningless nonsense tired, lol, you know, I'm going to go to bed, lol, and stuff like meaningless nonsense like that is going to be the stuff that makes the majority of social media posts. And I think this is why it's so important to curate your feed, because I always say that a social media feed is the worst possible source of information you can have, but a well-curated

social media feed is amongst the very best source of information you can have. It makes such a difference. It's the difference between hell and heaven. And a large part of that really consists of filtering out people who don't think before they post, people who just give in to their worst impulses and just follow their whims rather than actually following their logic and their rationality. What was that insight you had around how famous people will tweet some half-baked idea whilst they're sat on the toilet that will then be studied by the entire world for the next three weeks? Yeah, I mean, this was kind of like a guess, but I think that this is true, I suspect it's true. I think we kind of, what's happened is that people have a tendency to overinterpret information

online. So they'll read into information a lot more than was intended. And I mean, I call this the politicization of Babel basically. I think that's what it actually is. A lot of people don't, because they don't think before they post They're just making a comment about something that just off the top of their head. It's just something that's come very sort of you know quickly to their mind and it's something that they just vomit out they don't really think about it and then what happens is you get people on the other side of the world who will see that and They will assume that this is a hill that the person's willing to die on, something that they've spent their entire life thinking about,

and they will scrutinize it and dissect it, and evaluate it, and write essays on it. And I've seen this happen a lot, you know, with... I mean, nowadays you get whole articles, whole news articles written about one tweet. You know, some... if some famous person, like Elon Musk, if he just just, you know, farts out a tweet, then you'll get like a BBC journalist, we'll basically just lock onto that tweet and then they'll just write a whole piece about it.

And they'll just completely scrutinize it as though they could sort of give a psychological profile based on this one tweet, you know. And I think that's very dangerous because most people don't think very much before they tweet. It's just a whim. It's like when you go and meet somebody and you have a cocktail party and then they just start just talking. They're not really

thinking. They're just trying to make conversation. So they'll just staste it. They don't even mean half the time. And I think this is something that people need to realize is that when people say things, it doesn't necessarily mean that they mean what they say. Sometimes people are just sort of experimenting. They're just kind of throwing out ideas out there just to see what people think of it. And to be honest, I do that as well. I don't actually firmly believe a lot of the stuff that I tweet out.

I just tweet it out just to see how people react. And then I can maybe sort of calibrate what I'm thinking based on that. So yeah, we shouldn't take what people tweet out or what they post seriously online most of the time because they might feel differently five minutes after. In fact, I do that all the time. I'll tweet something and then I'll just

five minutes after I've tweeted it, I've got a completely different opinion. And I'm like, actually, what I just tweeted was a load of shit. And so I think people need to bear that in mind. Scott Adams actually had a really good idea where he calls it the 48 hour rule, where he says that we should never judge what a person has posted until 48 hours have passed and we've given that person a chance to retract what they said. Obviously, this is not feasible, it's not something that you could actually do in real life because you can't wait 48 hours after every opening, but I like the idea behind it. Obviously, this is not feasible. It's not something that you could actually do in real life

because you can't wait 48 hours after every opening. But I like the idea behind it because I think a lot of what people say is essentially it's kind of like just a untamed frisson of some sensation that they've had in their mind. Something that's just kind of triggered them to just say something. And they haven't really, so they haven't domesticated it. They haven't really, you know, tamed it. So it's just a wild idea that's just kind of run-rapping in their head and they just decided

to just, you know, let it out of the cage. This is facilitated by the frictionlessness of social media. You know, previously, if you wanted to use the Gutenberg printing press to actually get something down onto paper, you would make sure that you spent some time thinking about what you were going to get this one very, very small slot that you had to be able to produce your incredibly important pamphlet or whatever you're talking about. But you're right, the frictionlessness allows brain to mouth or

brain to fingertips to be instantaneous. This is something that I realized around the Jordan Peterson Sports Illustrated Girl, Fioraure, was it last year, I think. And I love Jordan, he's been a massive influence on me and he's very, very kind to me. But things like that, people tried to dissect exactly what was going on in the inner recesses of Jordan's mind when he said, sorry, not beautiful, and no amount of totalitarian overreach will convince me otherwise. Everything about that tweet, and almost everything really that the older guys on Twitter are putting out can be understood if you remember that they're boomers.

All that you need to do is just remember the fact that they're a bit like filter it through this isn't somebody who has a particularly additionally sophisticated Twitter habit or process that they go through before they construct a tweet. You know, our friends, some of our friends who are way, way less famous, George Mack yourself, you know, these guys craft tweets over, over weeks, takes weeks and weeks to come up with these huge mega

threads and George will show me his notes and he's building him up over time and all this sort of stuff. I guarantee that Jordan took less than three minutes probably to type that tweet out. And yet it's then going to be indicative of his pathologization. Let's get the psychiatrist in to work out. Oh, is this something to do with his unrequited, Jungian archetype from the like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, like it's just he saw an image of a, he saw an image of a girl on sports illustrator that he didn't like and he had a crack.

And maybe he'd been gassy that day. Maybe he'd had a shit night sleep because of builders next door. Like, yeah, the frictionlessness facilitates this. And I think it's the tweets that people don't think about very much, that tend to be the ones that people talk about most. Oh, absolutely.

Yeah, because if it's reasonable, if you've actually spent a long time thinking about it, then it's going to be the ones that people talk about most. Oh, absolutely. Yeah, because if it's reasonable, if you've actually spent a long time thinking about it, then it's gonna be reasonable. And if it's reasonable, it's not gonna outrage people, it's not gonna make people, so it's not gonna stir up emotions in people, because it's gonna be the antithesis of that. It's gonna be something calm, measured, reasonable.

But if you are just firing off, what's the first thought that instantly comes into your head, then it's by definition not going to be reasonable. It's going to be something that's impulsive and that's going to make other people impulsive and they're going to react to it in that same kind of language as it were, the language of the animal language of human nature rather than the language of reason. And so I think that's one of the dangerous things about social media is that it tends to favor ideas that people don't think very much about. People that just sort of are a product of human whim rather than human reason. There's a associated idea you had, Shaker's Law, those who announced their departure

from an online discussion almost never actually leave. Yeah, I mean, I've got no way of knowing whether this is true as a kind of general rule of law, but I think it's, it's probably, it's something I suspect is probably true because I personally haven't really sort of engaged in, in arguments with people very much recently. But when I used to, I used to spend a lot of time on Twitter, just arguing with people. And I would often get people who would just say, I've had enough of this, you know, this, this, it's not worth my time, you know, and all this stuff. And then I would say something that would just bait them out again. And then they'd come back and they'd be like, ah, no, no, no, no. So, you know, this happened so many times that I just thought,

yeah, this has got to be real. Yeah needs to be. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And it does happen on websites where it's where blocking is less of a thing. So websites like Reddit, you can block on Reddit, but it's a lot more torture. It's a lot more harder to do. And so people are more vulnerable to that. But I think on places like Twitter, you just block people nowadays, you know. So it's not, it's not as much of a thing now. It's, if you don't wanna talk to somebody now,

you just either block them or you commute them. One of the most interesting things that I see on the internet is people who do announce that they're going to one follow somebody, as if that announcement of them and following them wasn't the first time that that person they were following had ever heard of them. It's like, I wasn't even aware

of your existence up until this moment, but it's like saying goodbye on the way out of the door. Well, hello on the way out of the door. I don't know, but there's another one as well. Godwinslaught add on to this. As an online discussion grows, the probability of a comparison to Nazis are Hitler approaches 100%. Most people are quick to compare things to Nazi Germany because it's the only history they know. Yeah, so I think this is an instance of the availability heuristic. So one of the ideas that comes most sort of freshest to mind in people's minds when they think of history is Hitler and the Nazis because it's one thing that we constantly talk at school. It's the one thing that is basically,

because it's got all the elements of a narrative, sort of box office smash. It's a story of good against evil, to an extent, I mean, if you don't include styling on the Allies, and it's basically about people who wanted freedom from tyranny against essentially a tyrant. And the good guys weren't in the end. Obviously, this is a simplification, but this is the general sort of way it's portrayed.

And it's just a timeless classic. It's something that you'd find in a movie. And so because it's so cinematic and because of all the stuff involved, I mean, it's got so many crazy stories in there, and because of all the stuff involved, I mean, it's got so many crazy stories in there, you know, and the story of the enigma machine, we've got Oppenheim and now, which is going to be a hit film. And all these crazy stories within the sort of remit of World War Two make it something that is very memorable. And a lot of people will focus on that. A lot of people who don't know anything about history know about war two, and they know about the Nazis,

and they know about that. They think they know about war two. Do you not know that Nazi was actually socialist? It was actually the part of socialist party, and then it just gets into a game of linguistic. There should be a rule you need to come up with one, which is almost all arguments online devolve into a game of lexical Brazilian jujitsu over time.

Because almost all of it is just, that's not the term that I mean precisely. You're using that word in the wrong way. What is the word woman in any case? Do you not know that Nazi meant socialist? Nazis were far left, not far right. Stalin wasn't a blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Do you know what I mean? Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, there is actually a law about this actually. Let me see if I can find it in my list of rules because I forgot the name of it. But it's, there's actually a, let me just

quickly go through them right So I can find it. This is at Lane's Law. So I'll find it Lane's Law. So every debate is ultimately a debate about the definition of words. So for instance, many examples of this, but one example would be gender, for instance. So if there's an argument between a gender critical person

and a trans-righted activist, the debate will almost always end with them discussing what gender is. And if there's a debate about free will, it will almost always end with them discussing what free will is. And likewise socialism, you know, like socialism will mean a different thing to a leftist as it will mean to a rightist. And so, it's called Lane's Law, and it's basically the idea that every debate ultimately is a debate about the definition of words. I think that's actually accurate. I don't think it's probably not like a universal law. It's not true in every single instance, but I think it's a true enough law that it's a good rule of thumb. Agreed. And that's why, yeah, I think in most debates, it becomes like a contest between, it's like one person's playing tennis and one person is playing baseball

because they're using different definitions for terms based on their tribe because every tribe has got its own definitions, you know, it has its own definitions and what's in words me. And so when people from two different tribes are arguing, they're using their own tribe's definitions and that's why they'll never ever see eye to eye. And that's why if I am going to debate somebody, I don't really do it very often, but if I am going to do it, I'll always be sure to ensure that we're actually on the same page in terms of definitions. I think that's absolutely essential. There's just no point in having any debate unless you are willing to agree on the definitions of words. Yeah. Next one, arrival fallacy. We didn't evolve to be happy, but to believe

we'll be happy if we just accomplish the latest goal. So we seldom taste true joy, but we often pick up its scent just enough to keep us in pursuit. Paradise is not a destination or a journey, but a horizon. Yeah, I think so happiness, we have to ask ourselves, why did happiness evolve? And obviously it didn't evolve for us to just, you know, meet one goal and then be satisfied for the rest of our lives, because if we did that, we wouldn't live very long. We would just fall for one goal and then we would die, because we wouldn't have any motivation to do anything else. So, in a sense, happiness is like a carrot constantly being dangled in front of your head, except

it's tied to your head. So every time you move forward, the carrot moves forward. So you're constantly reaching for the carrot, but you can't quite get it. What this does is it keeps you moving forward under the impression that you're going to eventually get that carrot, but you will never get the carrot because it's tied to your head. And this is, I think, a good way of looking at happiness. This is not to say that you can't ever be happy in your life. You will be happy in your life, but that happiness will never last. You know, you'll be happy,

for instance, if you save up to buy a nice car, the day you get that car, you're going to be happy. You're going to be really happy. And you take it out for a test drive and you impress your friends with it. And you know, you'll be you'll you'll feel good. But within a couple of days, you'll have gotten used to having that car and it's no longer going to bring you that same joy. And then you're going to want to chase something else. And this is the process that a lot of people go through in their lives where they're constantly chasing something new because the things that they have have not made them happy. And Naval Ravi Khan, he had this great line where he said that, Desire is a contract that you make with yourself to be unhappy

until you get what you want. And I think that's a good way of looking at it, where you're basically choosing to be unhappy because you don't have this thing that you're looking to get. And you basically tell yourself, you write this contract with yourself where you'll only be happy if you can get that thing. But the thing is it's an illusion because once you get it,

you're only gonna be happy for a short period of time. And I think ultimately what I found in my life is that the solution to this sort of quandary is that you're not going to be happy by accumulating possessions but by relinquishing desires. So you have to learn to be happy with less, learn to appreciate the little things in life. And I've found that since I've done this I've just been so much happier. How do you really like desires? Just to be content like with what you have like this is a bit of a complex thing and I'm gonna tell you a bit of a weird story but the other day I was in the supermarket and I saw a tomato and I was market and I saw a tomato and I was absolutely overjoyed by this tomato. I just thought this tomato was absolutely amazing. I picked it up and it was so plump and juicy and shiny

and bright. I loved it. I thought this is absolutely incredible and I was so happy that I'd seen this tomato and you know what I got home, I ate this tomato and I was really, really happy about it. And the reason why that tomato may be really happy was because I've actually thought about the amount of work that it takes to make a beautiful tomato like that. This is, like, tomatoes originally were not as delicious as they are now. They were originally not as beautiful as they are now. This is a product of many, many years, many centuries of selective breeding, of cultivation, of people learning everything that there is to learn

about agriculture. And then over many, many years, they're passing this knowledge down to their sons and daughters, and then their sons and daughters learning even more and then passing that information down. And all of this selective breeding of the tomato over many generations and the knowledge of agriculture of how to create the perfect tomato.

And all of this was done in order to create this one tomato essentially, to create this beautiful thing that people want to eat. And when I think about the amount of effort that it takes to create something as beautiful as a nice tomato, something that feels really good in the mouth, something that has a lot of flavour, it makes me appreciate that so much more. And I think that a lot of the value in things comes from understanding just how lucky we are to have them. And that's why I try to not to take these things for granted. I will always try to look at how hard things are to get. For instance, I am constantly amazed by the fact that I can eat food from all over the world, right, without even leaving my apartment, right?

That is absolutely incredible. If you were to go back in time to the 18th century and you were to tell people that you could do this in the future, that you could just pick up a device and talk on this device, and then within half an hour you could have food from anywhere on the planet delivered to your doorstep. They would be blown away. They would think this is, you're living a life better than a king. Have you heard the story behind the first ever pineapple that was imported to the United

Kingdom? I'll send you the link afterward. I watched a YouTube video about it. Absolutely fantastic. So pineapple's cost, I think the equivalent of 4,000 pounds each in I want to say maybe late 1700 something like that and it was just a signal of opulence so opulent in fact that people would get statues of pineapple's placed outside of their Family estates. This is the sort of house you're going into into a house that eats 4,000 pound fruit like that This is the kind of place and yeah,, they're talking about the journey that this thing goes through. And then as soon as the first pineapple is grown in the UK, they're able to start growing them in the UK.

All of the pineapple monuments go down because it's a counter signal. You did a great thread about Marcus Arrelius as well. And there's a quote from him that reminds me of what you're talking about here. Do not indulge in dreams of having what you have not, but reckon up the chief of the blessings you do possess. And then thankfully, remember how you would crave for them if they were not yours. Gratitude for what you have, can cure the endless desire for what you have not. Yeah, absolutely.

And that's what I do is I think of my my life relative to say a medieval peasant and how lucky I am. I mean, it reminds me a lot of medieval peasant actually. Well, I think a medieval peasant has a lot of wisdom about them. I think that kind of lifestyle, if he was to be honest, but like, you know, they, to them, like the idea that of a person like you and I that are living the kind of, you know, we're talking to each other from across the world, like you're in the States, I'm in the UK, and we're having an ordinary conversation as though we were sharing the same space, you know, this is magic to a medieval peasant. The things that we do are absolutely mind-blowing

to pretty much all of human history apart from to our generation because we're used to it because to us we're born into this world and so it doesn't seem that special to him. He's the crazy thing though. If that peasant, there's nothing special about that particular peasant himself. It's simply about the time that he was in. If you place that peasant into the modern world and he was able to pick up the language and do all of the things. I bet within five years he would have forgotten the fact that he used to live in 1678 or something. I was imagining there in my mind what human existence would be like if our hedonic adaptation wasn't as powerful as it is. We'd be fucked because we wouldn't be able to keep up with the pace that the world changes that.

There's a Morgan Housel Court as well, which is phenomenal. And he says, the first rule of winning the game is to stop moving the goalposts. He's talking about it in a money-saving psychology of investing perspective. But it's so true. I'm thinking about the arrival fallacy, you know, this belief that what we're moving toward that we eventually we will be happy. What is it? The, that thing about the idyll that you're moving toward was in fact your death, the not yet started life fallacy or something? Yeah, the something syndrome, I forgot what it's called now. Anyway, I know. Yeah.

So it's a rule that where people presume that they will be happy when I will be happy when I will be happy when and then eventually what you realize is the thing that you were putting off is your death. Is it? Yeah. Bill Perkins that wrote, die with zeros, got another amazing quote where he says, delayed gratification in the extreme

results in no gratification. And so that's absolutely, yeah. Keep on putting it off. It's the case of finding a balance as with most things in life, I think, you know. We are, like in that quote that I, the original quote, I said that we are all, we often pick up the scent of happiness.

And I think that that's what we need to content ourselves with is the scent of happiness. And I think that that's what we need to content ourselves with is the scent of happiness. Because we are like essentially happiness is a reward system that we get in order to motivate us. All emotions are essentially motivations. And if we didn't feel desire, we wouldn't do anything. We would literally just sit there and rot until we were dead because there would be no motivation to do anything. So the desire there is actually a motivational system and that little taste of happiness that we get when we accomplish a goal. That is our reward for accomplishing the goal. So we can find happiness, you know, in fulfilling basic goals. But I think ultimately if you want to be happy, then you can't make your happiness dependent on circumstances. Because if you do that, then you'll never

really often be happy or very seldom be happy. And so it's all about finding a state of mind in which you are happy, regardless of what goes on in circumstances. If you need a reason to be happy, you're seldom be happy. Yeah, well, if you can't be happy with a coffee, you won't be happy with a yacht. That's another example of alcohol. Yeah, absolutely. But yeah,, it's one of the hacks that I have found that I think is effective for this. This comes from Tim Ferris. Our anticipation of things is often more enjoyable than the things themselves.

So what you can do is extend the enjoyment of the thing by planning lots and lots of stuff out far ahead. Me and George Mack are going to, and Juno Deep, Open Air at Red Rocks in Denver in November. We've had this book for nine months. So I've been listening to Anjuni Deep releases and albums and all, there's a new DJ's been released for this thing. And I think definitely as you get older, you get, it seems, I don't know, mod, not juvenile, but maybe you're just too busy or something. You don't, you don't excite yourself as much about the idea of future plans

because you have so many things to do in between now and the plans to allow you to have the time to go and enjoy the plans. So I think that definitely protecting that as much as possible, it's one of the, I've opened the, broken the fourth wall about this a million times on the show and I'll continue to do it.

I hack all of the audiences, like anticipation networks, every single time that I release a big episode. the show and I'll continue to do it. I hack all of the audiences, like, anticipation networks every single time that I release a big episode. I have this fucking awful, protracted, drawn out launch sequence, who's it going to be? I recorded it in LA. It's a person whose friends with this person. Oh, it's fucking Sam Harris. This is going to come out just after a Sam Harris episode. So no one knows right now. No one listening to the show knows that it's going to be Sam Harris. Then there'll be a teaser, then there'll be an announcement about Sam, then there'll be clips, then the episode will drop because

it gets people excited and I would want that. If I was a fan of the show and I was a fan of Sam Harris, I would want to be like, ah, like Sam Harris is coming on, I can anticipate it a little bit. And I don't think that there's anything nefarious or manipulative about doing that. I think it allows people to enjoy the experience of knowing that someone that they like is going to do a thing that they're going to enjoy for longer. So speaking of your peasant thing, I had a new one for you, which I came up with. This is a collaboration between me and Alexander Datecyke, who is a great Twitter follow. This is the Alpha History fantasy. Modern men who are angry at a world they believe has rejected them mistakenly feel that they would have done better in medieval times. They are somehow adamant that the chance of them being

Genghis Khan is greater than the chance of them being cannon fodder peasant number 1,373,000 whose for Lalla was sacked and destroyed. That's a brilliant one. I love that one. Yeah. Absolutely. I was reading this article yesterday about Bronze Age pervert. Yes.

I read it as well. I read the same article. Yeah. Yeah. It's quite funny because for your audience who might not know who he is. So he's a sort of far-right figure. When I say far-right, I actually mean generally far-right, not the kind of far-right that you'll see on Wikipedia, but actual far-right. He's a neo-reactionary, so he's like, this guy basically believes that a group of

strong men should rule over everybody with absolute authority, essentially, and he's openly fascist and stuff. So, this guy has become quite popular on the right, and particularly among certain people in the Trump White House, he was quite popular. He used to pass out, passed around his book, Brian's Age Mindset. And his whole thing is basically about being strong. It's about working out and having a massive physique like his avatar on Twitter,

it's like this hench, like Jack Guy basically. And he's all about cultivating physical strength and basically the strongest should rule and the weak should perish and all this. And it's hilarious because his identity was actually sort of revealed against his wishes and he's this guy called Amaru who's like a I think a Romanian immigrant to the US and he's basically his actual appearance, he's like some scrawny little sort of pale kid who's nothing like he was presenting himself out to be on Twitter and on his Caribbean rhythms

podcast because he was making out like he was this massive bodybuilder like Beefcake monster, basically like a barbarian. That's what his whole thing is based around. But in real life, he's like this really wimpy looking like scrawny kid and like it's absolutely hilarious because I think that a lot of these people who claim that they want to live in these old sort of gengus-can style worlds where, you know, it's just all about brutality, a lot of them wouldn't survive like, you know, even a couple of days. They would be- You've landed precisely on what Alex started having an argument about online. So he came up with half of this and then I fleshed it out and give it the name. And he was having an argument with the at in cells co Twitter account, which is super super like antagonistic

and it's like really fascinating to observe, absolutely fascinating to observe, to be honest. These have a nice big argument with them and his point was hang on a second. So you are unsuccessful in the competence dominance hierarchy and sociosecually with, or socioeconomically in terms of being able to attract women sexually in 2023. And somehow the belief is that half a millennia ago in 1523, you would have done better. That you, like a guy twice your size

would have worn you to fuck a girl with. Like there is, he would have happily beheaded you, he would have happily taken your, what, you know, so I do think that it's just an important redress to the balance, that things were, you know, it was a pure time, it was a better time. Don't get me wrong way. I think that a lot of the people who claim to want to live in a sort of idyllic past are really yearning for their childhood, I think, a lot of time. Because when they say that they want a simpler time, a simpler world, that is essentially

their childhood. That's a world where things were much simpler, where they didn't have to worry with all about all the kind of complexities of adulthood and all that kind of stuff. So this is me being kind of armchair psychologies here, but I do think that a lot of people really are secretly yearning for their childhood when they claim to want to return to this idyllic past, because this idyllic past didn't actually ever exist. It's always been brutal. Like, I mean, there was this one really, there's this kind of far right, another far right, a lady, she's half Indian, I think, her name's mega or something. And she's always tweeting about how the past was so much better than the present. And she wrote this one thing about how, you know, in the past, it was much easier to grow food because all you had to

do was just have your own little patch of land and then you could grow any food you wanted and you had enough to feed your whole family and everything. And it is complete nonsense because the kinds of in the past food was so hard to grow. You had to have the perfect soil, you had to have the perfect pH. You had to constantly ensure that insects weren't getting at the food pests and stuff. You had to ensure that the weather was right. There were so many things that would just go wrong. Things that we take for granted now. Now we've got pesticides, we've got fertilizers, we've got greenhouses,

we've got UV, sorry, infrared lights, we've got all this different stuff that helps stuff grow. We can grow stuff at length now, we can grow as much food as we want, but this wasn't always the case, it wasn't food, it wasn't always as plentiful. In the past your crops could fail like within a day, you know, you could be, you could have a massive field of crops and within a day they could get ruined by a single flood, you know, we would completely at the mercy of nature. And people don't seem to realize this, people seem to think that, oh, you know, living in the past is just like living around nature, man.

You know, like, you know, just basically, yeah, free love. Like the people, and this is true of the trads on the right, as well as the kind of hippies that you might find who are more on the left. But like, it's this sort of idealization of the past, one that you just don't, one that doesn't reflect reality. I wonder if a lot of the stuff, I wonder if we could fold in the like the horticulture list history fantasy as well, or the the agricultural list history fantasy as well as the alphas. Exactly, you know, there's for instance, like there, you know, there's, if you look at sort at the famines that are happening in places like Sudan, for instance,

and Somalia, those things were widespread, they were happening everywhere at one point. The only reason they don't happen in the West anymore is because we have the technology to prevent them from happening. This is not like, we're just lucky to, because nature's on our side and nature wants us to eat well. No, nature doesn't give a shit about us. Nature's desires are not aligned with us. If it wants to ruin our crops, it will just ruin our crops.

It doesn't care about what humans want. And entire populations in the past died of starvation. We are lucky because we are the ones that descended from those who just happened to make it. Here's another way to look at it. So for the people that are on the left that would maybe, the climate 100 years ago, it was so much more balanced,

look at these extreme weather events that we're having, et cetera, et cetera. Climate-related deaths have decreased by 98% in the last century. There's been a 50X decrease, and more people die from cold weather than dry from hot weather. More people die from cold than die from heat and there's been a 50 x decrease in climate related deaths over the last century. So, you know, I think, yeah, you're right. There's something going on whereby if you can convince yourself that a past time would have been better. It alleviates some of the pressure

of now not being as good as it could be because you are no longer culpable for the reason that it's not as good as it could be. I've outsourced this, the challenges that I'm facing to the fact that there is something structural or systemic or systematic that's stopping it from happening? Yeah, absolutely. I think there is a desire for people to to shift the blame to things outside of themselves. And I mean, I'll cover this in my my my most recent article where we've seen this happen actually and a bit more. It's actually quite disturbing how I think think Jonathan, Height and Gene Tweng, they found that there has been an externalisation of the locus of control. So for your audience,

the locus of control is the degree to which one believes that they, as opposed to external circumstances, shape their destiny. So people who have an internal locus of control, they believe that their own decisions are what dictate what happens in their life. And people who have an external locus of control, they believe that what they do doesn't really matter because their lives are dictated by what happens in the external world. And interestingly, there seems to have been an externalization

of the locus of control over the past sort of 40 years, and particularly since the 1990s. I actually think that people in the distant past didn't have the luxury of having an external locus of control most of the time. I mean, there was still skate-goating and things like that when people got formed triumphs. But I think when you're trying to survive, you don't have that luxury,

you don't have the luxury of, you know, blaming other things, you have to take responsibility for what's going wrong in your life. But when you arrive in a world like ours where pretty much everything is done for you, you have that luxury, you can now suddenly start blaming everything else except for yourself. And that's why I think we have these people

who are yearning for this distant past where everything was in their eyes much better. Because they can easily just blame the modern age. It's easy to blame modernity, because you don't have to take responsibility for modernity, because modernity is doing everything for you. Modernity is growing your food,

modernity is keeping you safe from invasions, modernity is keeping you warm, modernity is giving you the information that you need to help yourself in pretty much any situation that you could possibly find yourself in. Modernity is a map for you that you can find your way through anywhere. You know, modernity gives you pretty much everything and that allows you the luxury to blame modernity for your problems. Yeah, there's one that I came up with, the existential crisis luxury. Only when the bottom levels of Maslow's hierarchy are filled,

can you ask questions like, am I truly self-actualising? Therefore, having a crisis of life direction should be a reason for gratitude, not despondency. Absolutely. We are so lucky to have what we have. Gratitude is something that, to have the kinds of problems we have, we have to be living lives that are essentially, you know, the whole thing about first world problems. You know, this is what we worry about most of the time now. We worry pretty much, I would say 90% of my problems now are first world problems. Am I enacting my logos? Am I speaking my truth forward? Is this really my highest self showing update today? Yeah, and this is why, you know, it's,

you know, if you look at the kinds of things that people are talking about now, if people are talking about trauma, for instance, trauma has become probably one of the most common buzzwords in the world today in the West. And what trauma means now is it usually just means being a little bit disappointed, Whereas what trauma meant in the past would probably mean something like having your arm cuff, you know, so that there's been a there's been a

massive amount of concept creep with regard to what we really regard as a problem. Because we live lives as such luxury now. The people sort of who are living 200, 300 years ago, they would probably be laughing at our problems. They would be just considering it. I don't disagree. I'd sing from the same hymn sheet as yourself, but as we said before, hedonic adaptation is a hell of a drug and it's going to continue to come in.

Whatever the opposite of hedonic adaptation, but for how you begin to zero in on an ever more high resolution, high standard, high bar that you want from your life. And I don't think that this is necessarily a bad thing for society to do either. If we were to say, we only need to have healthcare standards that are at the level that they were in the 1800s, despite the fact that we've made all of this progress, that would be a rejection of the responsibility we have with un newly increased capacity. So it is important, both structurally and individually, to continue to ask more from yourself.

It's the balance as with everything, the virtuous mean, as with everything you're trying to find where is the middle ground, where is the balance between these two different things? Yeah, absolutely. I wrote this tweet actually, which I think speaks to this quite a bit. And it's basically about, and this basically this, it's everything about humanity has improved throughout history except contentment. But it is only because our contentment never

improves that we keep improving everything else. And I think that that kind of speaks to what you were saying, which is basically that it's it's essential to progress. We have to be uncomfortable in order to progress. We have to keep, we have to always find ways that the world could be better in order to make the world better. And so I agree with you completely, you know, we do need to have this kind of sense of, you know, this kind of hedonic adaptation is, it's not just a good, it's necessary. It's absolutely necessary, because if it weren't, we would just be, we would never, we would never progress as a species. We would just be content with what we have.

So I think it, like I said, it's, it's a case of balancing, um, what we have with what we want. So we should be grateful for what we have. And that's what I am. I should be grateful for what we have. And that's what I am. I'm absolutely grateful for everything I have, but that doesn't mean that I don't want more. I can still want more and still be grateful for what I have. And it's a bit of a weird sort of line to balance,

but it can be done, because you can always find new things to want. That's the easiest thing in the world. The harder thing is to be find some sort of value in what you really have. And I think just finding that balance is the key to being happy, I think. It's definitely made a difference to me.

Have I told you about that story I learned about the Buddha's quote of life is suffering. So the word suffering is duke du kkj. And some scholars argue could test that it's not suffering but unsatisfactoryness. Life is unsatisfactoryness. And I think that that makes an awful lot more sense.

That it's always just about going to be behind where your anticipation and your expectation were, because your expectation is built to be out ahead of what reality can deliver to you. Okay, next one, next one. St. George in retirement syndrome, many who fight injustice come to define themselves by their fight against injustice so that as they defeat the injustice, they must invent new injustices to fight against simply to maintain their identity. Yeah, I think this is a product of people sort of tying their mission with their identity. So people come out and they will have some kind of political cause where they'll be like,

you know, I absolutely hate racism or something and then they'll go out there and be like, anti-racist, you know, but what they will do is they'll make the mistake of tying their status as an anti-racist with their identity and they will actually make that part of their identity. So they will begin to define themselves as an anti-racist. And the dangerous thing with this is that if they do eventually defeat racism, then their identity is essentially nullified. They no longer have any meaning in the lives of a job, they're out of personhood as well. Exactly. And they've lost their sense of purpose, they've lost their meaning in their life, they've lost their kind of narrative. Because we all view our lives as narratives. We're all kind of like movie characters living a movie. And if you've basically defeated the villain then there's no point in continuing the movie you know that's it the movie's over

raw credits so these people unfortunately what they how they tend to respond is that they will sort of increase the they will project new racisms in the world, they will create new causes, new dragons to slay, basically. And you can see this in the phenomenon of concept creep, where when we defeat one form of harm, we will expand the definition of that harm so that it covers more things. So for instance, racism is the obvious one. So racism, obviously there's still racism, but if we look at how it was with Jim Crow, Jim Crow was actual genuine, hardcore systemic racism

where you had two tears of society, you had white people, you had black people. And then the civil rights movement and everything kind of just destroyed that. And then the definition of racism was expanded. So then you had institutional racism, you had systemic racism, and then you had these new sub-species of racism,

your microaggressions, cultural appropriation. And basically, the kind of definition of racism just kept expanding, because as racism was gradually removed from society, people needed to retain that sense that they were fighting a great threat. And so they expanded it. And like I said, this is not to say that racism doesn't still exist, it does still exist, but it's nowhere near the problem that it was a hundred years ago, or even further back. So as racism has become less of an actual threat, people have expanded their definition of it

in order to give themselves a purpose in order to retain this sense that they are slaying this mighty dragon. And if someone let's go of that, then who am I? Who am I? Exactly. After all of this has happened. Yeah, I think, yeah, this is one of the things why it's almost pointless to argue with an activist because they have tied their identity to their activism

So if you are arguing with their cause if you're saying that their cause is meaningless You're basically saying that their life is meaningless. You're basically saying that they're their entire identity is meaningless You know like if you were to go to ebram kendi and tell him look racism is nowhere near them as much of a problem as you say is That's gonna be a personal attack against him because he spent his whole life writing about racism. And so, it comes across as a personal attack, they view it as a personal attack as not just a political disagreement. It becomes an actual attack on their whole system

of identity, the way that they form this self-conception, which makes it very hard to argue with these people. Why do you think it is that people are attaching their sense of self, their sense of self-worth, integrating art and artists together in this way? Is this a surrogate for religion? Is this that a lot of cultural technologies previously would have

been so central to the way that we see the world. Is it just that the allure of fame and status and continuing to uphold whatever the cause is allows you to keep charging forward? Have you got any idea of the post-mortem there? I would say that it's probably many different factors because obviously humans do things for a variety of different reasons. And I think all of the reasons that you just mentioned are probably they all probably play a part.

So I'd say, yeah, absolutely, the meaning crisis has contributed to this a lot. There's this kind of vacuum that people are now trying to fill with the obviously the death of God. People are trying to fill this vacuum with whatever they can. And some people are choosing to fill it with social justice. And the last time I was on this podcast, we spoke of atheism plus being a kind of surrogate for, it was a way that the new atheists

tried to retain a sense of purpose and meaning was by going full social justice. So I think that's definitely part of it. And then I think that there are other people who perhaps are looking for cloud online, looking for some kind of, you know, some sense of belonging or something, and they want to have a kind of audience, you know, or a trying to belong to. And a hill to die in as well.

Yeah, and a hill to die on. You know, there are many things, many reasons why people do. And there are obviously, there are probably just people who genuinely have been fooled into believing that racism is more common than it actually is, or, you know, that misogynism is more common than it actually is, or whatever, you know, whatever cause you want to talk about. I mean, I was one of those people. I used to believe racism was more common than it actually was, because I used to get all my information from the Guardian and the New York Times. And this was around the time when we had the

great awakening, where there was a 400% increase in the use of words, like sexism and racism in the liberal media. And I was reading it at that time. So I developed this idea that everybody was racist and all this kind of stuff. And that goes back to what you said before about a well curated social media feed is either have an oh hell. Okay, next one, opinion shopping.

Maybe many who conduct research online ignore every source they disagree with till they find one they agree with and then use this source as an authority to justify what they already believe. They don't consider someone an expert unless they agree with them. So this is one that hits quite close to home

because I used to do this. I was guilty of this. When I first sort I first got onto Twitter and stuff and I used to engage people in arguments, what I would do is whenever I wanted to prove something to my interlocutor, what I would do is I would type in what I wanted to prove. So basically, let's say if I wanted to prove

that let's just say something random. I wanted to prove that the world was flat. I would just type in evidence that the world is flat. And then I would get, obviously, I would get some kind of evidence from some fringe website. And then I would basically say, hey, look, see, look, this is proof that the world is flat. So I think this is something that a lot of people do. And the reason I think that a lot of people do this is because I've also seen other people do it. In fact, they've done it in arguments with me. Like, for instance, what would happen is that I would say,

oh, what evidence is there for claim X? And then they wouldn't respond for like an hour or something. And then eventually, they would basically post this link to this article or whatever which was which claims to Represent what they say it claims and then what I would do is I'd go on Google and I would type in What then you know what they would try and prove and immediately be the first first search result and I'd see okay So what you've done is you basically just you've gone on to Google you you've typed in something, you've ignored all the search results, which disagree with your position, picked the one which agrees with it, and then you've held the surface.

Well, you've even put a prompt in that is only going to give you things that confirm your world view. You haven't even- Exactly. But even with that- Is the world flat? Yeah. You've also, you've looked for the world is flat evidence. Yeah, that's the first thing, but then even within that, that Google will sometimes will say,

this is a myth or whatever. And then they'll just skip that completely and they'll go to the one. And I think this is, people compare it to maybe confirmation bias. So it is similar sort of mechanism to confirmation bias except the difference is that confirmation bias is unconscious.

It's something that you do unwittingly, whereas opinion shopping is a conscious action. It's when you consciously are looking for information that supports your worldview. Yeah, very good. Yeah, so I do think that this is a very, very common thing because if you are good enough at Googling, in fact, you don't even need to be very good at Googling.

If you know basic English, you can always get pretty much any academic study or any kind of New York Times article or whatever that just supports what you're trying to prove. And then you can just hold it up as proof of what you're, you know, like any time somebody says that they've got evidence of something, if you do a Google, you can always find evidence to the contrary. Because, and this probably goes to another concept that I that was in one of my mega threads, which is the idea that for every PhD, there is an equal and opposite PhD. I think it's this, it gives us law, yeah, it gives us law. It matters, in matters of law and policy, anyone can find a subject matter expert who supports

their view because having a PhD doesn't necessarily make someone right, it often just makes them more skilled at being wrong. Yeah, and this is something that's a sort of very common in law court. In fact, I think many of your audience might have watched the Johnny Debt trial, where, you know, when him against Amber Heard, which was last year. And anybody who watched that trial will have noticed that both people drew on psychologists and psychiatrists to support their candidate, their sort of defendant or whatever. I think candidate, I think candidate is probably more accurate. Yeah, yeah, or plaintiff or whatever. But like, yeah, I mean, so, you know, what happened is

that you had two groups of psychiatrists, psychologists, both of them were equally qualified, they both, they know that both groups had PhDs from pretty respectable universities because they had, they were, you know, being paid by Hollywood actors, so they were the cream of the crop. So these were prestigious psychiatrists and yet they had completely opposite conclusions to what was going on. And so what you see here is obviously these two groups cannot both be right at the same time. Their opinions are mutually exclusive. And so there's only one thing that could be happening here,

which is that they are rationalizing, they are cherry picking evidence to support the narrative that they want to push. And this I think is a very good microcosm of what goes on in the real world, where you have experts who are drawn on not just by lawyers and by legal teams, but by businesses. And you see this with regards to say, for instance, in the corporate world in business, what happened is, in fact, the original term opinion shopping originally comes from the business world, because what businesses would do is that they would hire experts who agreed with them

to write papers that agreed with what they were trying to do. So for instance, Coca-Cola would hire nutritionists who would say that, oh, sugar isn't actually that bad for you, for instance, the main thing that you want to be wearing about is salt and fat. Those are much more worse for you than sugar. Obviously, this has been shown to be not quite true. But the issue was that they wanted to make people believe that Coke was healthy.

So they would cherry pick experts. They would find experts who had done research, which they thought they could use to their advantage. And then they would pay this person to write a report on their behalf. And you see this everywhere now. You see it in gender clinics. they thought they could use to their advantage and then they would pay this person to write a report on their behalf, which would, you know, and you see this everywhere, now you see it in gender clinics. So, you know, for instance, GITs, GITs, basically the Tavistock, you know,

they were pretty cushty with mermaid's charity and with other similar charities and what they would do is they would, they would work with academics who believed what they believed, people like Jack Turban, who's a well-known gender ideologue in academia, and they would basically pay these people to write academic papers using their expertise, using their knowledge to make the case for instance giving puberty

blockers to underage kids or whatever like to young children. And then, you know, just to be balanced, there would probably be people on the opposite side of the soil who would do the opposite. They would get the experts that agree with them to write papers, to do the same things. And that's really is, a lot of academia is fueled by this. It's fueled by institutions paying academics to make the case for why that institution is great, in other

words, basically, but to do it indirectly by just by doing it studies. And these studies are usually quoted and widely quoted by the press. So this is another reason why you can't really believe what you read in the press because even the academic studies that are quoted by these media outlets are often a result of perverse incentives. There's a quote that I put in my newsletter today from that Friedman that says, better to get your dopamine from improving your ideas than having them validated. Yeah, because it feels good. Nowadays, yeah, absolutely.

Nowadays, what I do is I don't really read work from authors that I agree with very often anymore. I do sometimes, you know, because I feel like I mainly just so that I can kind of boost them, you know, retweet them or whatever, like, you know, I want to retweet some people that I agree with. So I naturally will read it first, but like usually what I would do now nowadays is I will actually seek out information from people I disagree with, because I find that's just so much more valuable to me. I learn so much more from reading people that I think I disagree with and I say think because I'm not always sure whether I agree with them but people that I assume that I will disagree with because they're in a different tribe or whatever you know. So like recently I've been

been reading the works of people like Judith Butler who this is going back to the old gender thing again because I've never really considered her world view very much. Obviously, I was familiar with her work, but because she's blamed for a lot of this kind of gender ideology kind of stuff. And so I thought I'd better get to the fur, get right to the source. Instead of reading what people are saying about her, which is what I've been doing for the past few years, I thought I'd actually better get to the source itself and actually read what she's actually said and to be fair to her I mean she still strikes me as a little bit crazy, but not as crazy as she'd be made out to be by people like Chris Rufo You know and other people like that. So

You know, it's I think it's important for it getting a balanced view and it's also I have learned things that I wouldn't otherwise have learned because The kinds of circles that I'm moving I would never have gotten the ideas that Judith Butler is putting out. I would only have gotten sort of straw men of those kinds of ideas. Even though I would regard the people that I hang out with as being pretty reasonable and being pretty fair-minded, even then they have still human beings so they're going to have the prejudices that a human being has. And you've selected them, right? You've chosen them to be around you. So your biases are at play just with the selection effect there. Yes, exactly. I've got one here that I stole

from Navalu, quoted Navalu earlier on, and this is a real world karma. Karma doesn't need quantum energy or spiritual will to be real. Karma is just you repeating your patterns, virtues, and flaws until you finally get what you deserve. So I think Navarra meant this in a way, when he said this, he meant it in a very specific context, right? He meant it in the context of whether you work hard or whether you don't or, you know, basically if you work hard you will eventually get the fruits of your layers and if you don't you won't.

I don't think that karma exists in any kind of capacity in the wider world. I mean, history is filled with nasty, nasty people who got away with everything in the end and will live very happy lives. So on the contrary, history is also filled with people who didn't know thing but help other people and ended up getting betrayed at the end.

So I don't think karma exists in any kind of real sense of the world, but I think it does exist in the sense that maybe I think Navar means it, which is that you get the fruits of your own labours with regards to productivity. And so, if you feel like you're not worth anything and you don't really, you're not willing to put in the work because you just feel like, you know, oh, what's the point? And you don't really have any agency, then that's a self-fulfill in prophecy. You won't get what you want in life. But if you are adamant on getting what you want and you put everything that you want to what, you know, you basically

sacrifice the present for the future within reason as we were saying before, then you will get what you want and you will get essentially what you deserve. Well, when he says the word deserve, I hate the word deserve because I don't even know what the word deserve means. You know, it basically implies a value judgment of some kind. What does it even mean?

Nature doesn't have any concept of deserve. It doesn't, there is no concept, you know. Nature just gives people things based on cause and effect. There is no desire. And so I do think that people deserve things only in the sense that did they put in the work. Yeah, I think if I was to reread the dessert bit at the end, karma is just you repeating your patents, virtues,

and flaws until you finally get what you deserve. For me, it's until you finally get what is likely. It's the way that I think about it when I read that quote is people rolling dice. And it also relates back to this internal external locus of control thing that you mentioned earlier on, which is if you believe that you have an internal locus of control, if you continue to roll the dice over and over

and your patterns, virtues, and flaws suggest that you are going to get, this is not to say that there are people, as you mentioned before, perfectly noble, virtuous, high integrity people who work hard, who at the end of their life or partway through their life have some catastrophe that they wasn't basically their fault. Absolutely, that can happen, but the more times that you roll the dice and the more effective your inputs are, the less likely it is that that's going to happen, right? The, the, the, uh, yeah, I agree with that. Yeah.

Yeah, I think, yeah, that's a good way of, of, of looking at it. I think, um, yeah, it's, it's, I think, yeah, it, it really comes down to like, we can't control probability, but we can control the probability space. So we can control the range of outcomes, but we can't control the specific outcome. So, for instance, if you don't work hard, then there is no chance that you're ever going to succeed because that's not within the probability space that you've created. But if you work hard, then you are creating that probability space. You're putting that as one of the possible outcomes you can have.

And so I think in that sense, yes, you will get what you deserve in that sense, because you are essentially, you are creating the branching tree of possibilities that exist ahead of you. And so you'll get one of those outcomes. Miss match theory, Moths evolved to navigate by the moon, a good strategy until the invention of electric lamps, which now lead them astray. Equally, humans evolved to be tribal, a good strategy until the digital of electric lamps, which now lead them astray, equally, humans evolved to be tribal, a good strategy until the digital age, where it now leads us to act

like polarized goons online. I think this is everything. I think this theory is the foundation of pretty much all of our problems in the modern age, the fact that we have created for ourselves a world that we didn't evolve for. You know, our sort of the majority of our evolution and adaptation occurred over sort of 300,000 years when we were on the African savannas. And that's the world that our brains are configured for. And pretty much everything that happens now is a result of this, And pretty much everything that happens now is a result of these evolved behaviors, behaviors that we evolved for the African savannah from hunter gatherer lifestyle, not being of much use in this new environment in which we find ourselves in. So that tribal thing is the one, is one aspect of it.

We are, obviously, when you're living in the African of Anna as a hunter gatherer, it makes sense to be tribal. Because if you're not tribal, you're not going to survive very long on your own. You know, you need you need the cooperation of other people, and you need to have a common purpose and a common sense of unity. Because if you don't, then the another tribe that does have a common sense of purpose and you see it's going to completely wipe you out. So a lot of these things, and this is particularly

true of belief forming. So belief forming, we sort of naively often believe that people believe things because they think they're true, but that's just not true at all. What's actually the sort of main driver of beliefs, I think, particularly true of political beliefs is whether those beliefs help us in a social context.

So if they can make people like us or if they can give us a kind of identity, something to belong to, a common purpose with other people. And this is a very only theoretical about this, actually. The white, smart people believe stupid things. There's an idea called, by psychologists called Dan Cahahn or Cahahn, I don't know how you pronounce it, it's K-A-H-A-N. And he had an idea called identity protective cognition,

which is this idea that when people form beliefs, what they're doing is they're looking at other people and seeing how these beliefs operate in a social context. So if having a certain belief makes people very, very popular, and if it makes a lot of other people love them, then that makes you feel that that belief is more true. And this is a mechanism that is designed to essentially allow us to form beliefs with people that will allow people to like us and that will allow us to have status

and a sort of sense of belonging and to how this tribal sort of arrangement around us, so that it's a way of arranging tribes, it's a way of forming these kind of hierarchies. So if you believe something that everybody around you believes they're going to like you, and this is something that everybody knows, if you have the same beliefs as somebody they will like you a lot more, that's a system, that's basically a gluing system. It's a way that glues people together into tribes and allows them to form a common purpose

and then allows them to succeed on the planes of Africa. Unfortunately, that doesn't work so well in this age where we now have a lot of sort of partisan thinking, we have people forming online tribes, engaging in misinformation online where people are posting information that they agree with, but not information that's necessarily true. And so the whole system has been sort of torn apart by this new way that we're living. Now it doesn't bring us, we don't really form mobs anymore. We don't form, at least we don't form them in the real world. We form online, but we don't form these tribes

that would help each other out physically in the real world anymore. Now we form mobs online, and we go after people, and we have skate goats, and we have this kind of bickering with other tribes. And all of this is not serving any of us. Well, it's not actually doing anything for us. All it's doing is it's making us angry. It's making us bitter. It's making us fight with people on the other side of the world who we're never going to meet in real life. It's making us push out information that's not true and fake narratives everywhere. It's causing indoctrination. It's causing people to be distracted from what they really want to achieve in their lives. So all of these negative consequences have emerged from what was once an asset,

which has now become a liability as a result of this new way that we're living. And this is just one aspect of the mismatch theory. The mismatch theory can be applied to so many different aspects of life. Another aspect is that our brains are sort of evolved to operate when we're moving. This is a lesser known thing, but we're supposed to be moving all the time pretty much. We're supposed to be on foot, traveling vast distances, and that's good for our body, because that's how our bodies evolve, their bodies evolve for movement. But now we spend most of our lives indoors sitting in a sedentary position. And so the system, like our blood system, the circulatory system, is sort of evolved for movement.

It's supposed to, it's created under the sort of assumption that a being is going to be moving, but we're not doing that. We're just sitting still for a long period of time. And so our circulatory systems are not operating efficiently. Our blood's not efficiently sort of oxygenating our organs. And as a result, that we're having many health problems now. Do you know what I was doing? The best way that anyone who is unsure whether or not

that hypothesis is real can prove it to themselves. Think about the last time that you took a phone call and you needed to think hard while you were on the phone. A huge proportion of people will find themselves just as if some hand has been placed inside of them, they'll stand up and they'll start pacing around the room. And I learned this from Kelly Starrett. I did it all the time. Yeah. Kelly Starrett says that we're built to locomot and that our brains work better when we're locomoting. And you know, if there was a way that I could do

a podcast that didn't look too weird because if I was doing this on some sort of treadmill as I'm bouncing up and down and there may be a bit of noise. But yeah, I am, I totally agree and I think that. Yeah, it's why walking is so good for writing, you know, when I wasn't walking, when I just used to wake up in the morning and then go to my desk and write, it would take me ages to actually come out with good ideas. But I began sort of about shortly, there's actually quite a reason it was about three months ago,

since I moved into this new place. I've been going for walks every day pretty much, and I've found that the number of ideas that I've come out with is just so stark. And I mean, this is something that brightest throughout history have said as well, it's not just me, it's not, you know, this is not just something I discovered just now, but brightest throughout history have recommended

walking, like Nietzsche, for instance, Nietzsche used to go for long walks in the Swiss Alps when he was recovering from some sort of depression or anxiety that he had. They didn't call it depression back in the day, but he had some kind of mental problems and he went out into the Swiss Alps and he'd go for long walks and he said that he didn't trust any idea that he didn't come out with unless it was Wining's walking. So, you know, he was, so basically any idea that he came up with what he was seeing at desk, he didn't trust the idea. And I mean, I feel almost, yeah, I wouldn't go quite that far, but I think that, you know, I am walking is just such a... If you have an idea while standing at the desk, make sure that you still believe it after you've

gone for a walk. That's not a bad, that's not a bad way to use. Okay, next one. This rationalia, just because someone is intelligent, doesn't mean their intelligence is pursuing intelligent goals. It's possible to devote a genius level intelligence to justifying idiotic opinions and behaviors. So in artificial intelligence research, there is something called the orthogonalty thesis. And what this says is that basically, just because a machine is intelligently pursuing a goal, it doesn't mean that the goal itself is intelligent. So a standard sort of illustration of this idea would be the paperclip maximizer. So the paperclip maximizer is a machine that is a hypothetical, thankfully, hypothetical

machine, which has been programmed to create as many paperclips as possible. And it's basically been programmed to have this as its absolute priority to basically override all other priorities. And so what this machine does is it begins to turn literally everything on the planet into paper clips. And when the engineers realize what they've done and they go to change it, they go to re-d program it, it turns them into paper clips. Because if it were to not, then they would be fewer paper clips. And so it ends up turning the whole world into paper clips. And so it does something extremely stupid, but it does it in a very intelligent way.

And this really is a good sort of metaphor for the human brain. Because just because somebody is intelligent, and just because somebody has a high IQ, it doesn't mean that that intelligence is being put into the service of intelligent goals. It's very, very possible to have very, very stupid opinions, like really stupid conclusions, but to very intelligently reason for them. Yeah, fortified with an absolute genius level armory around it. Exactly. And you see this a lot in academia, you know, people who have their whole lives, they've just, they've spent their whole lives in their head. And they

become very good at thinking, but they use that thinking to come out with the most wackiest ideas because they want to be original. Because if you're, if you're an academia, you want to, you want two things, you want to be interesting and you want to be original. And because there's a publication bias in favor of those two things. And so you have to say something that nobody else is saying, and you have to say something that shocks people or surprises people. And so you see a lot of academics who come out with the most insane opinions, and then they will use their intelligence, which is usually quite considerable. They'll use that intelligence to justify that, the most moronic opinions.

You know, I read this one laughable study, which was conducted by this author who said that basically rape didn't exist in America until white people arrived on its shores, and then they introduced rape to the Native Americans. You know, just completely bizarre idea. That base saying that Native Americans were innocent didn't have, they didn't ever commit any sexual assault. They always think about the Comancheans, Indians as being very, very civilized people up until the point at which they were invaded.

Exactly. And then white people taught them how to rape and that's why rape exists in America amongst the Native Americans. Completely like idiotic opinion. But this author then used like all these weird sort of, this really weird isteric knowledge about peculiar things that happen in history. And then basically got like scientific studies really, really cherry-picked, you know, just to kind of create this narrative. Yeah, which is very similar narrative together. Yeah, exactly. And this would, doing this required a lot of intelligence because they had to get information from very disparate fields and sort of combine them together and create this weird

argument, which, when you look at the argument, I mean, it's a complete nonsense argument, but it's very intelligently put together. It's taken a lot of effort clearly because there's so much research involved. Do you know what it makes me think of? It makes me think about the four stoic virtues. So just this temperance, courage, and wisdom. And without the fourth one, which I think is going to be the final book that Ryan writes in his series on the four virtues, without the fourth one, all of the previous ones can be deployed in a stupid way. You can be courageous for a cause which is pointless, that you can be just towards something which doesn't require it, that your temperance can be used in the wrong sort of way.

So, yeah, there is a, I don't even know what it's, it's cognition and metacognition almost, right? It's like being able to step out, a George Mack calls it, clouds and dirt. So he says that you need to get down to the level of the frog and you need to get up toward the level of the birds. See the map. Make sure that the map and the terrain are still different. Go down, go do the work, come back up. Make sure that I'm still doing the right thing. Go back down.

Yes, absolutely. Yeah, I mean, I would say that it's like looking through a microscope and a telescope at the same time. You've got to look at both. You've got to see the big picture and then you've got to focus in and zero on the details. And most, you know, a lot of academics will just look at the microscope. They'll, they'll just zero in on a very tiny part of the picture and they'll use their intelligence to interpret that little picture, but they won't look at the greater scheme of things. And I think ultimately it comes down to having intelligent goals. Because if you can create intelligent goals, then you have some kind of guiding light. You have a north star by which you can navigate.

But one of the problems is that people don't have intelligent goals. They would just have a very simple goal. And then in many cases what they would do is they will begin with a conclusion. And they'll just say, okay, I need to get to that conclusion. Any way I can. And then they will rationalize their way to that conclusion. And this is a big danger, I think, is that when you reason backwinds instead of reason for it. So most people like will begin with that conclusion, and they'll try and look for a way to get there. So if you're a very, very intelligent person, you'll always find a way to get there. You'll always find a way to get there, no matter how crazy the conclusion is.

And you've just got to look at the number of books with crazy feces, you know, and just by intelligent people just to know that this is true. I could, you know, if I wanted to, I could come out, I could basically have a really insane conclusion, a really insane goal. So it would be something like, again, if I wanted to prove that the world is flat, I could begin from that assumption, and then I could put every waking day researching any piece of information that would possibly be used to rationalize that argument, and I could create a book out of it. I could actually do that, but it would take me a long time and it would really be frying my brains trying to do it, but I could do it, I think.

So I could create a compelling argument that the world is flat by ignoring all the information that I don't like and focusing only on the information that I like. And this is why intelligent people often believe stupid things because the capacity for reasoning is also the capacity for rationalization. And rationality is not something that comes naturally to people. Rationalization is something that comes naturally to people. We are, again, this goes back to identity protective cognition,

Dan Khan's idea. The idea is that intelligence evolved not to help us to find the truth, it evolved to help us to survive. And if surviving requires us to believe crazy beliefs, like if we're living in North Korea, for instance, it makes much more sense for our intelligence to help us to believe that Kim Jong-un is the son of God or whatever, you know, he's like a divine being and that he was born on a mountain and that the birds sang his praise

when he was born. You know, obviously a normal person couldn't believe that, but if you're intelligent, you can convince yourself of that. And, you know, this is something that throughout history, we needed to do. We needed to believe, we needed to convince ourselves, or at least, imagine, at least pretend that we believed a crazy belief. So either we were good at acting and pretending that we believed something that we don't, or we could genuinely convince ourselves of that beliefs. And both of those things require intelligence.

So our intelligence was used to make us believe bullshit. It was made specifically configured and calibrated to help us to believe things that are not true because they would help us survive in social context. One of my favorite explanations for why we have theory of mind and why we have consciousness at all is that it allows us to model what other people are thinking about us. So in a very nimble and complex social structured species like we are that have moving power dynamics and I know that that person Doesn't quite like that person and they used to be in favor with this one And what do they think about me and how did I show up and blah blah?

The whole point is to portray as best as possible to the outside world that we are not insane I am a totally normal fully functioning person and what's that quote about, like, humans are easy to fool, and you yourself are the one that's the easiest. The fact that you must fool yourself. Yeah, Richard Feynman. Yes, that's the Feynman thing. OK, so I came up with one. And then you called me out on Twitter twice

with two different ideas that were my idea that had already existed. But I'm going to give you all three and we can, with the audience, can vote on whether or not mine's the coolest. I'm pretty sure it is. So I called mine vestigial pattern bias. The successful deliberate approaches we learned during our development can become a prison, which stop us from being more free-flowing and at ease when we are developed. The tools that got you from 0 to 50 are not the same ones that get you from 50 to 90 or 90 to 95, but we found success with this approach in the past, so we cling on to an overly rational, effortful approach. We hope that applying pure cerebral horsepower to a situation will fix it.

We think that the more deliberate we are, the better the outcomes will be, without realizing that our subconscious has aggregated the thousands of hours of experience we've clocked up to now and not using that experience is keeping us in the same league that we've always been in. You told me that the I'm-stelling effect, the I'm-stelling effect occurs when preexisting knowledge impedes one's ability to reach an optimal solution. We become unable to consider other solutions when we think we already have one, even though it may not be accurate or optimal.

It leaves us cognitively incapable of differentiating previous experience with current problems. So we may solve a problem, but we don't actually innovate. And the final one, path dependence. The Quarty Keyboard layout was a misguided attempt to stop typewriters jamming, but despite it being inefficient for typing, it remains with us because people accepted it as the norm. We

failed to notice so many problems because we let them become part of life. I think vestigial pattern bias is by far the best named of the three, but I do see that they're all part of the same. Yeah, I think that they're kind of, I would say that path dependence is the vestigial pattern bias in a social setting. So it's how it occurs at scale, when everybody is thinking that way, when everybody is thinking with that vestigial pattern bias,

then you get the result is you get path dependence. I think that the Einstein effect and the vestigial pattern bias are pretty much the same thing. I mean, there are probably subtle differences between them, but I think that the general concept is the same, which is that our methods gradually rigidify, because we get used to solving problems in a certain way, and then that prevents us from considering alternatives. And I think that this is something that I've seen in my own life. I feel like we tend to become blind to what we're familiar with. And you sent me this great idea on Twitter, actually, at DMs.

And I responded with the whole frog and fish thing, which is that basically the frog says to the fish, how's the water? And the fish says, what's water? And that's because the fish has lived its whole life in water, so it doesn't know anything else. I think it supplies to the vestigial pattern bicep, which is that we become so used to the solutions that we use in our daily lives, that we just, it just doesn't occur to us to consider that we could do things a different way. I found this so many times with regards to the ways that I write essays, for instance, I've got a very standard way of doing it, and I've been using that way for a very long time, so much so that I've almost forgotten that there are other ways of doing it. And

it's only been recently where I've been kind of tinkering around and trying new things that I've actually realized how, sort of, how much I was constraining myself in my methodology because I just simply just didn't occur to me that I could do things a different way. I think this is probably responsible for a lot of people's stagnation, is this just this idea that people forget that things can be changed and that's why they don't change them. I think there's a good amount of scarcity mindset that comes into this too, that I have found a particular way of wrangling reality into a form which rewards me. Oh, I can't believe I've managed to do this. Let's hold on, let's grip it tighter, let's not let things change.

I learned this when I did Rogan's Show last year, and I sat down opposite this guy, and he's got, it's a different sort of episode to this, right? He's just the most meandering conversation. Like if he has a bad steak the night before, guess what, you're talking about steak for 20 minutes. But he sits down, no notes in front of him, and just Jamie's already pressed the button, and then he just begins,

and you watch this man hold a cogent conversation together with no plan beyond what's front of mind and a bit of prep that he's done for like three, four hours. And it really opened up to me as the importance of storytelling, the importance of allowing the meander to happen, the importance of leaning into it just being a hang. I've said for a long time that the job of a podcaster is to be a vibe architect rather than a blinkist for podcasts that you're not trying to index everything that's in someone's mind. You're trying to just create a vibe that the audience can enjoy. And you know, the vibe from from this episode might be there are amazing ideas

out there that you don't know about and we're gonna riff on them and you're going to learn some and maybe you take them home with you. I've got one of the guys that's a part of the sound of freedom coming in. Like the vibe from that is that there are seriously evil people out there and it is important that we're aware of it and we need to protect children.

And there's another vibe from this and another vibe from that. But within that broader sort of landscape, you can just weave however you want. And that was really, really interesting. And that again was, you know, my pattern bias was showing that I have my way of preparing. I have my way of creating a show. And then I watched Joe, and I've listened to him do it, where he is, he's like one of those guys that's gone beyond the rules set. You know, it's like once you reach seventh Dan,

seventh degree black belt that you have learned the rules so well that you can then break them. And you know, that's very, very interesting. And obviously then opens up huge more ranges of learning because you're no longer constrained by just the one or two or three ways that you do things, all of the different paths are open to you. Yeah, absolutely. I think for you, this is actually a great way to avoid the vestigial padbys because you meet so many different people who have got completely different ways of

looking at the world and different ways of doing things. So you're constantly being exposed to new ideas. I think it's probably one of the greatest ways to avoid vestigial padbys would be to have the kind of podcast that you have where, like you said, you know, one minute you're talking about ideas the next minute you're talking about, you know, crazy evil people, whatever, you know, so it's constantly mixing things up, I think is is the cure to this. And I think one of the problems is that we like the algorithmic sort of structure of the internet compels us to do things the same way that we've always done them. So for instance, recommendation algorithms, or if you watch one video of, say, Ben Shapiro, YouTube's just going to just flood you with Ben Shapiro videos, you know, and then now you're watching even more of them and then the more you watch of them you get even more flooded with them and so It basically narrows your sort of your probability space of the things that you could possibly learn and and you know kind of the kinds of things that you could the kinds of information you could consume so I think it is important

for now whether if for now the reason then to simply keep your probability space as wide as possible to do things against your own nature, to sort of have an anti-algorithm, to basically do things that second guess yourself. If you feel like visiting a certain website, visit a completely different website, you know, and just try to second guess yourself and to not have a fixed routine. I think one of the things that I do. Sorry, one of the things that I do now is that if I read from, say, like a left-wing new source, say, like, if I read the New York Times, then the following day I will read right wing news, so I will read the Wall Street Journal. So, I'm constantly shifting between different narratives,

and that allows me to not be encapsulated, not be imprisoned within one single narrative, so that I'm constantly being exposed to different ways of looking at the world, constantly being exposed to new ways of sort of being as it were. It would be awesome. It would be awesome if there was an app that was able to do that for you. I think there is. There actually is. I've forgotten the name of it, but there is actually a new AI app, which I was looking at recently. Unfortunately, in fact, I might have it as a bookmark, but yeah, this is, there's an app which basically will give you different sort of information, almost that random, basically, based on... But over time, over the space of whatever two months you will end up with an even split

of center, left and right. Yeah, basically it gives you a wide range. Yeah, text skeptical and pro-tech and all that stuff. Okay, next one. Oppression Olympics. Social media is a war for public sympathy, so victimhood is a status symbol that many compete for by collecting injuries real and imagined,

often goading others into attacking them so they can screenshot or record and immortalize their prestigious oppression. I mean, so because we're living in an attention economy, attention is like money. It's essentially currency. If you could get eyeballs, then that gives you power. And one of the ways that people get attention now is by trying to make people empathic towards them or sympathetic or whatever. They're trying to get people's emotions engaged into what their

life is. So, if you can engage some of these sympathies, then you can get them to do pretty much anything you want them to do. You can get them to send you money, you can get them to boost your content to other people, you can get them to give you some emotional support. So there are many ways that you can you can sort of In a sense monetize people's affection and The easiest way to do it the simplest way to do it is to Essentially pretend that you're oppressed

There's even a word for this now. It's known as sad fishing which is when people go on social media and They basically pretend that they're oppressed, not oppressed, but they just pretend that they're unfortunate. They pretend that something bad has happened to them. So it might not be oppression, it might be that they might pretend that they have mental illness, they might pretend that they're depressed, they might pretend that they're up there, pardon the left them. Do you remember the trend last year or the year before on TikTok where loads of people were

pretending they had multiple personality disorder? Yes, I actually, I wrote about this quite recently. And so this is something that is crazy. I mean, this is, like, if you go on TikTok and you type in DID, dissociative identity disorder, you will get just video upon video upon video, get millions and millions of videos of people claiming to have dissociative identity disorder. And by the way, dissociative identity disorder is multiple personality disorder. It's just the newer, newer name for it. But yeah, there's so many of these videos online now, like you'll just see people who will shift between these personalities on a street, right? just do it, and they'll pretend

that they're like some, first they'll pretend that they're like a six-year-old schoolgirl in Minnesota, and then they'll pretend that they're like some tribal elder in Nairobi. What's it called? Is it others? Is it my other? Is that what they call it? Olds, that's it, fucking others. Yeah, yeah, and so, and they basically, the truth about DID is quite very interesting actually because there was a guy recently, unfortunately he died, Ian Hacking, he's a philosopher, and he studied the spread of DID back then,

it was called multiple personal disorder in the 1970s. And what he found was that in 1970, there were almost no cases of multiple personited disorder. It was basically pretty much unheard of. There was maybe one case or two cases in the entire medical literature. And then what happened was that there was an article written, I think, a cartoon on which paper it was,

but it was pretty big paper about this issue, about people having multiple personality. And it was more of a speculative essay. It was a really medical kind of thing. It was more just somebody speculating about it. And then this kind of popularized this idea. And after this happened, more and more people began to claim that they had multiple personalities. And then what happened is that the clinicians at the time, they were trying to work out

why this was happening because they didn't really understand social contagions at the time. So they were trying to work out why more people were coming forward with multiple personalities. And at the time, they believed that simply what was happening was that just awareness of this condition was increasing. And so they began speculating and they began saying that people might be creating these alternate personalities in order to repress memories of sexual abuse.

Now we now know that repressed memories are a complete bullshit. They're not real. Repressed memories are Freudian mumbo jumbo basically. They're not, people don't repress memories based on bad experiences, it just doesn't happen. And There is something, there is a psychogenic amnesia, but that's different, but repress memories don't happen. And so we know for a fact that these people were not, they were not creating these multiple personalities because they'd been sexually abused. What was actually happening was that they were looking at the diagnosis and they

were looking at reports of multiple personality disorder and then they were essentially using that to kind of make sense of their own lives and so they were creating these multiple personalities in order to make sense of their lives in a weird sort of sort of way and what Ian Hacking found was that at the beginning the average number of altars that a person had was between two and three and within a decade the average number was apparently 17. Apparently, this is according to his work. So I don't know if this can be verified, but this is what Ian Hacking found anyway in his research.

And so I believe that DID is not a real disorder. I don't believe it's actually a real thing. I believe it's a complete fabrication. And people who have the idea are pretending because I've actually looked at the medical literature and there's only one one study that I found which Which in which I think that there is actually a real thing going on in which people actually do have multiple personalities and that's a thing called psychological gating

It's a very very bizarre study. I'm not really sure what to make of it But what I found with this one study, and this is the only study that's convinced me that maybe there are people under who have multiple personalities, is that there's a woman who actually presented to a clinic with blindness and she actually, she was blind. And apparently she also had another alter living within her. And apparently the alter within her was not blind. And apparently what the experimenter found

was that when this woman shifted, there was actually a shift in the activity in her optic nerve. So something strange was going on that when she shifted to a different state of mind, when she shifted it to another alter, suddenly she could see, a blind woman could see. So that kind of creep me out. I don't know how much to believe this,

because this hasn't been replicated. And I'm very wary about these kinds of studies. Psychology is a bit shady. You can't really trust a single study because there's so many, you know, so many of these, I've just made up, a lot of these psychological studies are made up.

So I don't know whether to trust it. If it's true, then maybe I can be convinced that multiple personalities maybe are a thing. But I have so far seen no evidence that multiple personalities are actual thing other than what people pretend. And this is why it's crazy when you look at TikTok and you see all these videos of people pretending that they've got multiple personalities. And the reason that they're doing it is obviously because it brings them attention and impression and sympathy. Yeah. It's the impression of limping.

If you have a mental, like this is another thing, like previously people, the main way the people were oppressed was through sociological systems. So it would be the patriarch he that was oppressing you would be systemic racism or it would be capitalism. But now there's a new way of being oppressed, which is through psychology and through medicine, or rather not medicine, but through biology. And a lot of people I've seen are now doing this. They're pretending to have conditions that they don't have. And we've seen it with Tourette's. There's a famous TikToker called Tix and Roses, who was core fabricating her Tourette's basically for Cloud. Because she wanted

people to like her, you know, she wanted Cloud online. And so she pretended to have these ticks. And people thought that the ticks were really strange because they weren't like normal ticks. And they seemed to occur only when she was, you know, only when she had a camera, when she knew that she had a camera on her because when she didn't know that she had a camera on her, suddenly the tics went away. And there was another guy who was a Twitch streamer. I've forgotten his name, but he was quite a famous Twitch streamer and he pretended that he couldn't walk. And then there was a streamer. Fucking video of him, yeah, I've seen this video. Yeah.

Yeah. So this is another. This is a common thing. People pretending that they've got illnesses that they don't have. And I've written an entire article about it, along like 4,000 word I call about it, in which, you know, I just document like why people are doing this. And well, can people get this if they want to read the articles? So this is on my substack. So it's just govinder.substack.com. And the article is called the pathologization pandemic, which is my name for this phenomenon. So, you know, it's, so I originally,

actually, I won't go into it too much because I let people read it, but I'll focus on what I was talking about before, which is basically the whole TikTok thing, which is, you know, people on TikTok are doing this at crazy rates. There's just the number of cases of people pretending to have these conditions on TikTok surpasses the number of cases in real life, you know. So, so, so, so there are more people with multiple personality disorder on TikTok than there are in real life. And, and, and obviously, you know, this just goes to show that these people are just completely making it up.

And it is obviously because people want sympathy. And I don't hold it against these people. I don't do them as bad people. I think they're just doing what the market is demanding that they do. These people want attention and they want to be loved, like every other human being wants to be loved. And they want to be loved, like every other human being wants to be loved. And they want to clap. This is why your article on audience capture, I think,

twins with this pathologization pandemic thing. So nicely, because the audience, perils of audience capture explains the incentives and explains how you have this sort of self reinforcing recursive feedback loop between creator and audience and creator and audience. I remember I read in a book once, I think it steves to you at Williams who says, sympathy is investment advice. It says that when we feel sympathy, it is advising us of the person who is so lowly that

if we give them our effort, it will be rewarded and they will be grateful for it so much higher than somebody who wasn't as desperate and down than their luck and so to speak, which is why sympathy, you know, you start fucking pulling that trigger and it's why, you know, these golden retriever or like rescue dog reels on Instagram, do like, million, I saw this one the other day that had seven million likes. I've never seen a reel with seven million likes before. Anna, it was some dog and this dog's been, it was hurt and it was trying to bite the people that were getting it

and it was all scraggly and then they wash it and they feed it and they give it antibiotics and they bring it back. And here it is with its owners jumping around in the yard. And you're like, in 60 seconds, I've got like the an amazing story of this dog. And I feel sympathy toward it. And now I'm all happy and I'm fucking weeping. And I'm like, I'm watching a video of a dog

by my weeping. So sympathy is just such a, it's such a compelling engagement reason to engage. Yeah, it's such, it's so magnetic. It's, yeah. It's, I mean, it is the thing that will get people likes and retweets online. You can see this with Twitter, for instance, you see that people who don't really, simply and their audiences, can have a massive follow-up count, but they won't get very many likes

on their tweets. Whereas somebody who really forms a connection with their audience, they can have far fewer followers, but they'll get so much more likes because their audience is engaged and they're like, they're actually invested in this person's life and they actually want to know. The way I look at it is it's almost like a movie character. Like, what, the structure of a movie is that the first sort of half an hour of a film, like the act one of a movie, is designed to get you to like the character, and get you to like the main character. Why should I care?

You develop this sympathy, exactly. And once you've developed the sympathy for the character, then you want to watch more of that character. You want to see what happens to them, and then you're rooting for that character, and you're invested in that character. And the same thing happens with social media media where people will try to create this struggle that they're having. One of the ways that screenwriters will make a character beloved to an audience is that they will give them a struggle. They'll make life hard for them.

So if somebody has a struggle, then you can identify with that person because everybody has a struggle in their life. And if that struggle is a universal struggle, so if it's like a guy that wants to get a girl, for instance, or somebody who wants to be a part of it. Overcoming poverty or whatever. Or overcoming poverty or all of that kind of stuff. These are universal struggles that everybody understands. They're like me. Yeah, exactly.

It's me. Yeah. And so if you can convince people that this person has got this struggle in their life, which you can identify with, then that will make you love that person so much more because you'll begin to see yourself in that person and you'll root for them and you'll want them to have a happy ending. And I think this happens with social media as well. Yeah, let me give you an input there. So I learned this from baggage claim at Manisha and the critical drinker as well, both online YouTube film critics, I suppose.

And Manisha is very anti this sort of new wave of female boss, boss bitch heroes that are kind of being portrayed online. That if you look at the difference between the two Milan films in the first one, she had to be innovative and crafty because she was smaller than the rest of them. And in the second one, she was better than all of the men immediately because she had like, Eastridge and she or something like that.

Or in the second Doctor Strange, there's like the central American daughter of a lesbian couple has the most power in the entire universe and the only reason that she can't use it is because she doesn't believe in herself because like like yeah yeah yeah yeah I've seen them some critical drinkers videos and there's one where he's commenting about Star Wars and about how Ray is basically a Mary Sue the main character Ray what's a Mary Sue? Mary Sue, the main character Ray. What's the Mary Sue? So a Mary Sue is like a character who is basically

like a fantasy character. It's like basically the author injecting themselves as an ideal figure in the movie. So there'll be somebody who is just basically good at everything and who is perfect in every way. Somebody who never ever has any sort of setbacks or if they do have a setback that will immediately overcome it, there's never any struggle

with this character. So they're basically just perfect. And a lot of people have accused Ray of being this kind of character. I've not actually seen the newer Star Wars movies, but because I don't really have any interest in it, but the conversation about this is so wide that even I know who Ray is, even though I've never watched the movie.

So, Ray is the main character of the newer Star Wars movies of the new trilogy. And she's basically, I think she's related to Luke Skywalker, but anyway, she's the main character and she is basically instantly good at everything. She doesn't need to be trained by a Jedi master. I've seen the original Star Wars movies and Luke Skywalker. He had to be trained by Yoda and by Obi-Wan Kenobi in order to become the great Jedi that he would become. But apparently, I haven't seen these new movies, so I might get this wrong, but I've heard from, I think, Critical Drinker and others that, basically, Ray doesn't need to learn anything. She just has the abilities already. She has the Jedi powers. She knows how to wield a lightsaber from the get-go. She has everything

already. And it's like, basically, I think he basically attributes it to this new wave of, hyper feminism in Hollywood where the female characters are always more competent in the male characters. It's patronizing. I understand. We need to come up with a name for this. I have a little bit of a thing about this. If you optimize for being, let's say sympathetic or empathetic or caring or comforting on the front end, without considering the second, third, fourth order affects down the line and how that might be adverse

to the group that you are supposedly trying to help. So for instance, if you think about an entire generation of girls now who are growing up with these kinds of female leads, yes, maybe the initial experience is them being told, girls are great. If you're female, you can achieve whatever you want. Blah, blah, blah, right? The second, third, fourth order effects of this are if you, all of the heroes never had to encounter difficulty. So when you do in your life, who are the role models that

you look up to, any difficulty that you do encounter in your life is due to something structural and you should complain about the world as opposed to change yourself or adapt to it or accept the fact that sometimes life can be shitty. Like it makes a, according to Manisha baggage claim, it makes an entire generation of fragile narcissists women. And you know, she uses, who's fucking Prince Harry's wife? Meghan Markle. Meghan Markle.

She is on like a vendetta against Meghan Markle, but she sees Meghan Markle as kind of like the poster child for this vulnerable narcissistic kind of like position. And I think it's right. I think that not teaching women, especially that they are not only worthy, but capable of overcoming difficult things because it's somehow more inspirational

to never show a woman facing any adversarial situations. To me, just seems like it's stupid. Exactly, yeah. Yeah, I think that one of the reasons why people watch movies is so that they can actually understand how to overcome difficult, what kind of a character must they be in order to overcome some of the sort of obstacles in life.

It's one of the, obviously not the only reason, but I think it's one of them. And I think it does serve a good purpose in that way because it gives us ideals to aspire to. It gives us sort of people that we can model our own lives on. But the problem is, is that if this person is unrealistic, if they're too ideal, then it can be dangerous to try to model your life on them, because the kinds of things that they would deserve in Navas to a sense of the term are not going to equate, they're not going to translate to reality. So if somebody, for example, like this Ray character, if she can instantly

overcome everything, she, you know, some guy attacks her and then she's instantly just whipses us. That's not going to translate to the real world because the sad fact is is that for, you know, men are on average a lot stronger than women. So if a woman were to emulate Ray in the real world, and you know, she was trying to physically take down a guy, the chances are she's gonna get beaten down, you know. So it's just not gonna work. Like what works in a movie is not gonna work in reality. And I think this is one of the dangerous things about

trying to create, turn these kinds of people into role models, because that's what they've tried to do. They're trying to turn Ray kinds of people into role models, because that's what they're trying to do. They're trying to turn rage to a role model for women. And another thing is, is that why would you make a role model just defeat every problem with physical violence? Because I think that's what she does. She just uses the force. She just knocks people over and kills them with a sword or whatever. This is not a role model for any human being. It's just what exactly is supposed to learn from this,

that you could just kick everybody's ass. Is that the lesson you're supposed to learn? It doesn't teach anybody anything. It's just a fantasy. So when a lot of these writers, because you watch these documentaries of how they made the movie, and a lot of them will sort of stroke their chins and say, yes, well, we want to do create a modern woman, you know, like somebody who the modern woman could

relate to and all this sort of stuff, but modern women can't relate to that kind of literally. The least relatable woman. Exactly. I couldn't create it. That's what, yeah, that's it. And that's what Mary Sue is. And Mary Sue is somebody who's just so good at everything that they're just not relatable in any sense of the term. You just can't, you know, they're superhuman. And that's why out of all the superheroes, my least favorite is Superman. A lot of people might disagree with me on that, but I don't like Superman because he's just good at everything.

He's just, he's a god basically. He's got, I mean, he's only weakness. Is this mythical substance that doesn't even exist in the real world, like kryptonite, you know. So it's just like, I don't care. We bond. I like the flaws. I like characters who've got flaws.

I like Batman, because he's got flaws. He's kind of rich guy and all this sort of stuff. But he's got his dark side as well. And he's constantly trying to fight with his own craziness and his dark side. He's an outcast. So you've got to have flaws, I think, in a character. If you want to make them appealing to other human beings, which is, I don't, you know,

I just don't get why they make so many Mary Seuss. They should have learned this by now. But, yeah. Let's do two more. So, we'll do mine first. We'll do mine first, and we'll finish on one of yours. So this is productivity purgatory. The ancient Greek word for work was not at leisure.

A 21st century grind addiction has turned pursuits like walks in nature, meditation, The ancient Greek word for work was not at leisure. A 21st century grind addiction has turned pursuits like walks in nature, meditation and time and sunlight into just another productivity hack, slowly turning all leisure activities into a tribute to work. Yeah, so I've been thinking about this for a long time. So basically, there's a Greek classification of tasks. So ancient Greek classification of tasks, they divided tasks into tellyq activities and a tellyq activities.

Now tellyq comes from the Greek word tellyqs, which means an end or a goal. And tellyq activities are activities that you do in order to reach some goal. So an example of this would be washing the dishes or washing your car or doing some kind of chore or a job, going to a job to do your work. And then opposed to this is A-Tellic activities. A-Tellic activities are activities that you do for the sake of the activity itself and not for any other goal. So an example of this would be anything that you enjoy. So painting maybe a picture if you enjoy doing that, you know. I mean, that could be both a telek and an atelic because you're doing it for the love of painting,

but you're also doing it to have a painting at the end of it. So that maybe that's not a good example. So I would say a good example of an atelic activity would be going for a walk in the park or something, you know, assuming you're not doing it for exercise, but you're just doing it just telling. Well, you could do it for exercise, but you're not doing it to reach a certain destination. You're just doing it for the sake of walking, you know, you're walking for the sake of walking. And what I've been trying to do in my life is I'm trying to turn a lot of my telek activities into a telek activity. I've got the, I've got this, I think the correct terminology for you here. Autotellic derives goals joined reward mostly internally judging their own actions. Exotellic derives

goals joined reward externally takes care how that actions are being judged. Yeah, I mean, I use the words helic and a-telec. Maybe I think it's simpler. Yeah, it's quite three T-E-L-I-C. And yeah, so it's called telicity. That's the terms, those are the terms that I use. Oh, well, telic and telet. This has been hijacked by a bunch of, like, Af-Lezure companies. So it's taking me, all I can see, a lime-green, like, slip-on, fucking...

No, no, I think the best thing to do is just type in T-E-L-I-C. I did, I did, and it came up with a bunch of sandals. And I'll check it out afterwards. So, Telekin A-atallic, cool. Yeah, yeah. So, I'm trying to turn sort of my telek activities into atelic ones. I'm trying to do more things just for the sake of doing them because I think if you can enjoy the activity itself and not think too much about the goal, then you will become

much more, you'll become more content with your life, I think. I think. I think a lot of people do things just for some kind of goal, and they don't enjoy the process of doing the thing that they're trying to do. Have you got any results that they become less good at actually achieving the goal? Have you got any advice on how you are becoming more italic? Yeah, so I try to find enjoyable ways of doing things, because there are, there are find enjoyable ways of doing things because there are, there are less

enjoyable ways of doing things, there are more enjoyable ways of doing things. So for example, I used to hate working out, but I've started working out recently, and the way I've made it into more of an enjoyable activity is that I listen to music that I really, really enjoy, but I only allow myself to listen to that music when I'm working out. So if I want to hear a tune that I really, really enjoy, I I only allow myself to listen to that music when I'm working out. So if I want to hear a tune that I really, really enjoy, I can only listen to it if I'm working out. So that compels me to work out.

So it makes the process of working out more enjoyable because I'm focusing on the music and, you know, I'm just kind of like just doing that. So little things like that, you can just turn activities into more enjoyable things. And also another thing is when I go for walks, for instance, I used to kind of find walking boring because I would go through the same route all the time. But now I mix up my routes. And I go down streets that I've never gone down before. I'm doing parks. Yeah, I'm just completely just losing myself because I'm living in a new area now. So all of this is alien to me, the area that I'm in now. So I just basically, just wonder, I just choose a direction and I just go in that direction and then I

just end up at these unexpected places and I might see some like crazy cafe in the middle of corner somewhere and just so that looks nice and just go in there. So you just make a simple thing like walking, far more enjoyable by adding that element of surprise and the suspense, you know, so going back to what you were saying about how you create that suspense for your audience, I think suspense can really help make things a lot more enjoyable. When things are a little bit unpredictable, when you don't know how they're gonna turn out,

I think unpredictability is one of the great spices of life. If you can make something unpredictable, then it becomes a lot more exciting and a lot more enjoyable. And you don't need to take huge risks with this. Unpredictability sounds like, you know, I'm gonna try and make it home on half a tank of gas even though I've got

like 200 miles to go or I'm gonna have to jump out of an airplane or something like that. Unpredictability can be as benign as you want it to be. It can be, you know, taking a left instead of a right on the way to work. Yeah, okay, final one for today. We got so many that we didn't get through. At presentism, we judge history by modern standards. We regard slave owners as

evil, but slavery was so common and familiar to our forebearers that they were blind to its inequities as a way to the industrial slaughter of animals for which we too will eventually be called evil. Yeah, so I'm one of those people who gets upset when I hear about the way animals are treated in sort of factory farms. I just think that the way that they're treated is absolutely horrific. And if it was something that we had no knowledge of, but that just suddenly was revealed to us today, I think that would be a massive movement against it to end it because of the ways that they're treating. I mean, pigs, for instance, pigs, apparently according to some studies, are, they have

similar levels of intelligence to a seven-year-old child. And they know when they're going to be killed and they'll resist it as much as they can. And yet, you know, here's stories of them being buried alive by farmers because they, you know, they might have the, not even that they actually have foot and mouth disease, but they have the chance that they might catch it. And because of that, large numbers of them are buried alive. And just, that's just one example. I mean, the treat in horrific ways, in fact, through farms. And I think I'm quite sort of surprised that people don't view this as more horrific than it actually is, because

we care about dogs. We care about dogs a lot. We wouldn't want to see dogs treated like this. Yet pigs are a lot smarter than dogs. There are a lot more self-aware than dogs. Yet we treat them in the most barbaric ways. I think that what's holding people back a lot of time is, A, people are just used to it.

This goes, this is the opposite of hedonic adaptation, where there's a lot of time is A, people are just used to it. And this goes, this is like the opposite of hedonic adaptation, where there's a kind of like nightmare adaptation, where, you know, if something's horrific, but we're just used to it, it's just suffering adaptation. Yeah, it's no longer horrific because we're just used to it. And so we're born into this world in which animals are treated in these barbaric ways. So we don't really kick up a fuss about it. And we just focus on the beautiful taste of a steak or whatever. And that's in offer us. You know, this is weird. It's this weird sort of cognitive dissonance in the mind to what I've observed among some people. I saw this one thing once, which was crazy, where I saw somebody who was watching a video on their phone while they were in a McDonald's.

And they were watching a video of a cow, and they had a big Mac on the desk next to them. They were eating their big Mac while they were looking at this cute cow on YouTube and going, oh, an R over it. It's this weird split brain thing goes on in people's brains. And everybody does this. You see a cow, you'll be like, oh, that's so cute. It's lovely, you know, and on this and you want to stroke it and all that. But then you can just go to McDonald's and

pick up a big mac and you'll be eating probably it's cousin or something. So it's like this weird sort of cognitive distance that we have in our brains. And I think that that's only going to be remedied when we no longer need to kill animals in order to have food in order to have meat. It's not that we need meat now. We can survive without meat, although it's not quite as efficient. But I think like if we, you know, if we could, when the time comes when we can actually create burgers in a lap and those burgers taste just as good as natural burgers, then I think people will actually have more of a motivation to end suffering. And the reason why I think is because we have the president, which is that the industrial revolution made slavery less necessary in order to maintain the economy. Before the industrial revolution, slavery was kind of needed to maintain the economy. Before the Industrial Revolution, slavery

was kind of needed to maintain the economy. And so people did they turned a blind up to how horrifically evil is. But once the Industrial Revolution came about and the machinery became available to do the slaves work, then people suddenly realized, we don't need this anymore. Now we have the luxury of being ethical.

So ethics is to a certain extent, a product of luxury. If you look at how history was, it was often that way. It was often brutal because it had to be brutal in a way. And this is something that a lot of people don't like to hear, but it's the truth. History had to be brutal because there was no alternative at that time. And now that we have the luxury of not having to be so brutal, looking back at history and seeing how brutal people were, makes this recoil in horror at how we were. But those people who engaged in these barbaric acts, they were not any more evil than us. They just were living in a world that required that kind of brutality, unfortunately. What's the broader lesson from

presentism then? So I would say that we need to be careful not to judge people too much. I'm not saying that we should go all moral, relativist or anything, but we need to take into account what people can do in their lives. Like for instance, if you look at the Ukraine war, the Ukraine war is absolutely brutal. You know, there's cluster bombs are now being sold. And there's a lot of very horrific munitions which cause widespread damage are being used. Unfortunately, it's easy to say this is barbaric and evil and it's horrible, but you've got to look at what

actually are their alternatives. They have to fight with everything they've got. Because if they don't, they're going to die. They're going to get killed. And so they have to be as brutal as they can possibly be. And this is something that a lot of people don't seem to understand. It's that, you know, even the most horrific people, and I don't want to defend people like Assad. But I remember that during the Syrian war, Assad was basically being criticized for using chemical weapons.

And obviously chemical weapons are absolutely horrific and nasty. But he was using those weapons because he didn't have precision-guided bombs. He didn't have the technology that the West has. The West can afford to be more humane in its bombing campaigns because it's got precision-guided weaponry. So it can afford to just target, you know, it can actually target just the enemy combatants. It doesn't need to have civilian casualties, but even it does have civilian casualties, but it can minimize them. Somebody like Assad,

who doesn't have that kind of technology, but who feels in his, what he needs to protect his family, he needs to win his war from his point of view. Like I said, I don't agree with Assad. I don't think he's a horrible human being, but from his point of view. Like I said, I don't agree with Assad I don't I think he's a horrible human being but from his point of view He needs to win that war so he's gonna use what methods are available to him to win that war And that includes using chemical weapons because chemical weapons are very effective and they did prove effective in the Syrian war They managed to clear huge areas from enemy combatants and they were able to kill people behind cover, which is what normal munitions can't do. But we need to bear in mind that people are only gonna behave

ethically when it's within their capabilities to do so and it's not always within their capabilities to do so. And people need to realize that this is true of their own selves. I think if you eat meat, you've got to reckon with the fact that you are engaging in something that is sort of causing a huge amount of suffering to sentient animals. And I say this is somebody who has eaten meat. I try not to eat as much meat as I do,

as I did. I try to eat sort of more, you know, lower sentient animals, stuff like shell hands all the time. Yeah, yeah, I try to eat that a bit more than eating the higher-order animals. But, you know, even I can't resist a good state now and again, but I'm, I try not to, because even when I do eat steaks, I eat sort of animals that have been able to roam the fields and stuff, you know, I don't eat fat factory-farmed stuff, but that's a a luxury that's a luxury that I have because I can afford to buy food that's organic That has you know been allowed to roam free. I if I was poor I would have to eat factory farmed animals So I wouldn't judge that person. I'm not gonna judge somebody because they're so they're too poor to eat organic food

You know or you know that food that has welfare standards I'm not gonna judge them because they don't have that capability. So I think we do need to take into account, I think that's what presentism gives us, it gives us the idea that we need to consider the context in which people are unethical because do they actually have the alternative? Do they have the ability to do otherwise?

And if they don't, then we need to maybe, not be so harsh, But I do think, I do think people have the ability to not be so evil to animals now. So I do judge people, I judge everybody, including myself, for eating me, because I think we're getting to the point now where it's no longer necessary to eat me. We can have food that's been grown in a lab. And, you know, I think that if you don't do that, then you're essentially quite unethical because you're choosing the suffering of an animal over the non-suffering of an animal. I learned this from Alex O'Connor five years ago, I think maybe four or five years ago.

He managed to convince me, someone that's been a lifelong meat eater and still is, that if I do choose to continue to eat meat, which I have done, I need to reckon with the fact that I'm causing suffering. And that if I was being fully ethically aligned with my beliefs and my actions, that I probably would stop eating meat or I would certainly at least reduce it down as much as I could. Well, this is, it's strictly as kind of like path dependence, you know, or the vestigial pattern bias. This is essentially a kind of instance of that. We eat meat today because we've always eaten meat and we don't think about it

because we've never thought about it. But if it was something that we'd never eat in our lives, if we had gone our whole lives being vegan, not knowing the concept of eating other animals, then suddenly if a steak was presented in front of us, and we were told that this is another living being that's been slaughtered so that we can eat it, I think that would absolutely horrify us. So we do it because we've always done it. And that's why these old habits die hard. And I think it will take time for us to adjust to eating lab grown meat. I mean, obviously there's all these conspiracy theories now about

how lab grown meat is going to be pumped full of chemicals that will either sterilize this to reduce the population for clouds, shwab, or whatever, or you know, there's going to be all kinds of stuff about that. But I mean, you know, I'll be, I for one, would be happy to not have animals suffer anymore in the way that they've been suffered on a scale of hundreds of billions of Over the years, so yeah, go into bogal ladies and gentlemen Dude, I absolutely adore speaking to you every time we do these episodes I'm I leave feeling fired up and and ready to go learn more stuff about the world Where should people go? Do you want to keep up to date with all of the shit that you're doing?

Yeah, so the best thing to do is to just find me on Twitter Probably the best thing to do is just type GoWinder Twitter into Google. That's the easiest way to do it. Or Substack, again, you could just type in GoWinder Substack. And that's where the main places that I'll be found. And then, yeah, I might try some other new things soon, but I'm not ready to announce them quite yet. That's all right, dude. When you are, we will run this back soon enough.

I appreciate the hell out of you. Thank you for today. Yeah. Thanks, Chris. It's always a pleasure to be here. you