Modern Wisdom - #805 - Gurwinder Bhogal - 14 Uncomfortable Truths About Human Psychology

Episode Date: July 4, 2024

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 our mental model of the world assumes people are just like us, why Narcissists tend to inject themselves into every story no matter how unrelated or tenuous, the role of Postjournalism in a world of fake news, why we navigate the world through stories and not statistics or facts, why people specialise in things they are actually bad at and much more... Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period from Shopify at https://www.shopify.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) Get a 20% discount on Nomatic’s amazing luggage at https://nomatic.com/modernwisdom (use code MW20) Get the Whoop 4.0 for free and get your first month for free at https://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: https://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: https://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: https://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - Get In Touch: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What's happening people? Welcome back to the show. My guest today is Gwinda Bogle. He's a programmer and a writer. Gwinda is one of my favourite Twitter followers. He's written yet another mega thread exploring human nature, cognitive biases, mental models, status games, crowd behaviour and social media. And it's fantastic and today we get to go through some of my favourites. I expect to learn why our mental model of the world assumes that people are just like us, why narcissists tend to inject themselves into every story, no matter how unrelated or tenuous, the role of post-journalism in a world of fake news, why we navigate the world through stories and not statistics or facts,

why people specialise in things that they are actually bad at and much more. These are some of my favorite episodes. They absolutely fly by. They're so much fun for me and the guests to do. And Gwinda just writes and thinks all the time. And then I grab him and I drag him in front of a camera and I force him to speak to me for two hours.

And then he runs away for another four months. And then we do it again. And that's kind of his sort of hibernation cycle thing. And it's great and I'm not going to stop. And I really hope that you enjoy the episode because I think it's awesome. This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Shopify is the global commerce platform

that helps you sell at every stage of your business. From the launch your online shop stage to the first real life store stage, all the way to the, did we just hit a million orders stage Shopify is there to help you grow whether you're selling scented soap or offering outdoor outfits Shopify helps you sell everywhere from that all-in-one Ecommerce platform to their in-person POS system wherever and whatever you're selling Shopify has got you covered Shopify helps you turn browsers into buyers with the internet's best converting checkout. 36% better on average

compared to other leading commerce platforms. You would be amazed at how many massive brands you love use Shopify. Gymshark, perhaps one of the biggest independent sportswear companies in the world, uses Shopify. And if it is good enough for them, it is good enough for you.

So if you are looking to get started at selling something online, Shopify is the easiest, quickest, and most convenient way to do it. Plus you can sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com slash modern wisdom, all lowercase that's Shopify.com slash modern wisdom to grow your business no matter what stage you're in. You might have seen that I recently went on tour in the UK, Ireland, Dubai, Canada and the US and the entire time for a full month I didn't check a single bag in because hold luggage is a psyop meant to keep you poor and late.

In fact I never need to check bags anymore thanks to Nomadic. They make the best, most functional, durable and innovative backpacks and luggage that I've ever found. Their 20 litre travel pack and carry on classic are absolute game changers. They're beautifully designed, not over engineered and will literally last you a lifetime with their lifetime guarantee.

Best of all, you can return or exchange any product within 30 days for any reason. So you can buy your new bag, try it for a month and if you do not like it, they will give you your money back. Right now, you can get a 20% discount and see everything that I use and recommend by going to nomadic.com slash modern wisdom and using the code MW20 at checkout.

That's nomadic.com slash modern wisdom and MW20. A checkout. This episode is brought to you by Whoop. I've won Whoop for over four years now since way before they were a partner on the show and it is the only wearable I have ever stuck with because it's the best. It is so innocuous.

You do not remember that you've got it on. And yet it tracks absolutely everything 24 seven via something from your wrist. It tracks your heart rate, it tracks your sleep, your recovery, all of your workouts, your resting heart rate, your heart rate variability, how much you're breathing throughout the night. It puts all of this into an app and spits out very simple,

easy to understand and fantastically usable data. It's phenomenal. I am a massive, massive fan of Whoop and that is why it's the only wearable that I've ever stuck with. You can join for free, pay nothing for the brand new Whoop 4.0 strap, plus you get your first month for free and there's a 30-day money back guarantee.

So you can buy it for free, try it for free, and if you do not like it after 29 days, they will give you your money back. Head to join.whoop.com slash modern wisdom. That's join.whoop.com slash modern wisdom. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Gwinda Bogle. ["Gwinda Bogle Theme Song"] You write these amazing mega threads. I love them.

We're going to go through as many of the concepts that we can get through today. The first one, false consensus effect. Everyone driving slower than you is an idiot and everyone driving faster than you is a maniac. George Carlin. Our model of the world assumes people are like us. We don't just do whatever we consider normal. We also consider normal, whatever we do.

Yeah. So I think this is a very important point because we only know ourselves and we kind of, because we're so familiar with ourselves, we tend to use ourselves as the baseline by which we judge everything else. And this can cause problems because let's say, um, if you're somebody who is around somebody else, uh, you're, and you're inclined to find this person annoying because they're not like you. There's two ways you can look at this.

Either you can look at it as that person is annoying or I am easily annoyed. And what people tend to do is they almost always err on the side of considering the other person annoying, you know, so this is just one example, but this is pretty much what we do in our, in our lives up and down everywhere. Like we do it all over the shop. The reason why I think it's important is because if we start asking ourselves, well, hang on a second, maybe I'm the issue, maybe I'm seeing things differently because of my experiences, we can actually get a more grounded understanding of actually what's going on.

I've started doing this in my life a lot more where if I feel a certain way about someone, I ask myself, is it me or is it them? It's something that a lot of people don't do. They just assume that it's either person's that's the problem or they assume that something in the world is wrong rather than their perception. So that's the reason I included it. I think it always helps. It's a good heuristic to just double check, just to ask yourself if there's

something askew in the world, is it really askew or is it your perception? Is it your experiences that have put you askew from the world? Is this related to the fundamental attribution error? Yeah, to an extent. I mean, so with the fundamental attribution error, people have a tendency to attribute the failures of an ally to external circumstances and the failures of an enemy or opponent to their character. If your friend is late, they just got held up by the bus. The

bus was the problem. But if an opponent is late, they're just a horrible person. They're lazy, all this stuff. That's more of a tribal thing, but it does have an element of this false consensus effect to it because we tend to see things relative to ourselves in that sense. So, you know, obviously if we, we judge ourselves, you know, we say, Oh, you know, I, I lost control because I was under pressure. They lost control because that's just who they are. You know, there's a, a gen Z girl equivalent of this. I saw a meme that said, uh, any guy who likes girls who have got smaller

titties than me is a paedophile and any guy who likes girls that have got bigger titties than me is a fatty chaser. It's basically like a remix of the Joel Carlin quote. Yeah. But yeah, man, I think, uh, you know, this, it's like a sort of a relativistic view of morals and motivations, right? That I am the thing that's in stasis.

I am the foundation. It's me and everything sort of comes out from me. Everything else is done in relativity to me. Hmm. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. We have to bear in mind that we have a flawed baseline because, you know, what we're seeing is not objective.

We're all seeing the world through the filter of our own experiences. And also our character, our personality, these are all filters through which we look at the world and it's very easy to forget that those filters exist. It's like, if you're looking through a window long enough, you forget that you're actually looking through a window, you know, because that window becomes invisible, um, cause you're so focused on what's beyond the window that you forget to see through the window. And so this is why this I think is quite a useful heuristic.

You can, if you could just bear in mind that you're seeing things through these filters, it can help you to judge things more accurately and to also take responsibility as well for what may be a problem within yourself rather than a problem in the external world. Freudians paradox. The more similar two choices seem, the less the decision should matter. Yet the harder it is to choose between them. As a result, we often spend the most time on the decisions that matter least.

Yeah. So we live in an age of abundance where pretty much everybody is trying to gather our attention and they're trying to do it by offering us choice, they're offering us more and more choices. So, we're flooded with choices in this day and age, and that's why it's become so important to be able to decide between choices. Most of the time, these decisions are actually not even important. They're actually quite trivial. Things like, what am I going to eat for dinner? Should I buy Colgate or should I buy another brand of toothpaste?

These are a lot of trivial decisions and they exert a cost, not just a time cost, but also an energy cost. If you're making hundreds of these decisions in a day, that's wearing you out without you even knowing half the time and it's costing you time as well. What I do is I use certain decision-making heuristics. I list quite a few, I think, on my sub stack. One of them is, for instance, to always choose the decision that is more painful in the short term because we have a natural bias to, um, avoid pain in the short term would rather have the pain in the long term because it's so far away, you know, so it doesn't seem as bad.

So there was a little, you know, that's one, one sort of heuristic, um, another heuristic, and this is actually a really useful one and specific to free Frickens paradox, which is if you can't decide, the answer is no. And the reason why this is a good heuristic is because of the very fact that we are flooded with decisions. And so we need to actually err on the side of denying rather than approving decisions, because if we approve all these decisions and if we go ahead, like if, you know, if you, your friends are asking you, oh, can you do this? Can you do that? Can you do this?

If you say yes to all of that, you're going to be led astray and you will have no time left to do actually what you want to do. And so it actually helps to just as a default, say no to all decisions if you can't decide that is so as a last resort. Yeah. The, uh, that kind of relates to that anxiety cost idea I've got, which is the longer that you spend thinking about doing a thing, the more valuable it would have been to have just done the thing in the first place, but doing the

thing with regards to decision-making is the same as categorically saying no to it. You can either say yes to it and do it or say no to it. And that it just closes off the loop of should I still be doing this thing? Am I going to make it? They say, well, this is good, but that's good. There was a really interesting workbook from Tony Robbins, awaken the giant within that a friend sent to me about three months ago, and I had a bunch of decisions that I was really, really struggling with and I've been vacillating

about for ages. And, uh, it's one of those classic sort of mid 2000s, American self help, hardcore self helpy style. You know, it's got a real sort of uplifting music in between each of the chapters. It's really funny. But yet it's this great idea where he says that you cannot say that you have made a decision until you have taken an action in the world that moves yourself toward it. And I think that that's just such a lovely frame. Like people talk about, yeah, I've decided that I'm going to start a business,

leave my job, go and talk to that girl over there, change my relationship to alcohol or whatever it's okay. Well, what, what, what does that mean? What does making a decision mean? Uh, I have. Created some sort of mental contract with myself. It's some kind of internal commitment. Okay.

Is that the end goal of it? Well, no, it's the sort of lead measure before the first action I take. Okay. Well, the first action is when you've started to make a decision toward doing something. And that just, that reframe, uh, really helped. And I think raising the bar for what constitutes making a decision, uh, and committing to something is a pretty good idea because it stops us from wallowing.

And it also helps to. New to that anxiety cost that we pay. Yeah, that's a great sort of heuristic to use. I'm kind of reminded also of there's this kind of idea where Steve Jobs and Barack Obama and Mark Zuckerberg, they've basically all said that on the average day, they actually just wear a single outfit. They just choose a single outfit for the week. And then they just basically wear that throughout the week, like just various versions of that outfit. And that just helps them to pare down decisions because they don't really care about how they dress.

Obviously if you're in charge of the country or if you're, you know, in charge of a multi-billion dollar company, the last thing you really care about is how you look really on the average day. And so they just basically pare down the decisions by choosing the same dollar company, the last thing you really care about is how you look really on the average day. They just basically pare down the decisions by choosing the same thing over and over again. What they're essentially doing is they're turning decision making into routine. By doing that, they're eliminating the cost of actually having to make the decisions. Routine is really good for that because you can just, I mean, I kind of do it with, with meals, for instance, you know, I'll have said things that I eat on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and just do just enough variety that I get

bored, but like not so much variety that I have to actually choose every day, you know, like a new recipe or whatever. So, um, you know, it's very important, I think, to be able to pair down decisions because most of the decisions we make on the day just don't really matter that much. They're not going to impact our lives in the long term very much. And these decisions, it's better to just make the decision quick because if you don't make the decision quick, you're actually exerting more of a cost than if you had chosen either

of the options. And again, I go back to the thing about what you're, what you're going to have for lunch, um, really it doesn't matter that much. And as long as you can eat it, um, it's not going to impact your life. If you choose one or the other, but if you spend a whole hour trying to choose, now you've lost an hour. So now it is going to impact your, your life, you know? So it's always good to have these things planned in advance to prevent the kind of essentially to free up time and to prevent that anxiety

cost and the energy cost. It's not just the time either. It's the sort of fatigue that you have when you make lots of meaningless decisions. And I think that we know deep down, I'll never forget, dude, when I started making a little bit of money through nightlife events and I was in Asda in Gosforth near Newcastle and I was there and I must have spent, I'm not kidding, two full minutes. Vassalating between the Tesco own brand or the finest range or whatever it was, the Asda's finest range of yogurts.

And I was like, the difference was, you know, 50 pence per yogurt. And it was a pack of four. So maybe it was two pounds and I was back and forth and back and forth. And I sort of came out of this fever dream and thought, you're that's, this is, if anything is wasting time, this is wasting time. It doesn't matter. Just grab whatever yogurts you want and throw them in. to just grab whatever yogurts you want and throw them in.

But, um, just that the, the energy sapping nature of tiny pointless decisions. I think this is the reason why asynchronous communication is such a sap on people as well, that it just chips away all the time, this endless sort of Japanese water torture drip, drip, drip of email and Slack and WhatsApp and Telegram and Signal and iMessage. Yeah. Yeah, it's true. And that's another thing is that if you don't make the decisions, then the decisions become harder to make in a sense and they take more of a cost

because certain problems grow. So, you know, if you, for instance, if you dither on answering an email, So, you know, if you, for instance, if you did the wrong answering an email, what happens is now you're going to, you're going to email that person late and now you have to add an apology to the email and, you know, so you're now doing, making more work for yourself. And so a lot of the time it's actually better just to make the decisions quicker and to do the things that you need to do quicker, because that actually prevents the problems from growing. The way I like to look at it is

the more like the less time you spend making decisions, the more time you spend making decisions work. So, you know, you can use that extra time to just whatever decision you made, you can make it work. So with your example of choosing different yogurts, um, if you had spent less time choosing between those yogurts, you could have used the extra time to maybe create a fancy fruit salad to go with the yogurt, you know, that's a very silly example, but you know, you can move forward and you can make, you know, you can, you can make hay with the extra time that you save. Well, there is a small number of decisions that are very, very important

and probably is worth an awful lot of work being spent on them. You know, am I going to leave this job? Am I going to marry this person? What am I going to do about my finances? Invest in this company or don't, whatever. I had to go to this university or not. whatever, go to this university or not. Um, but we are so sapped by all of the yogurt decisions that the university decisions, uh, feel they get lumped into the same category of effort and sort of

banal gray sludge of, oh, here's another task on the fucking to-do list for today. All right, next one. This is one of mine, the narcissist's bedpost. Notice how many times a person uses the words me and I, when speaking about a non-personal topic as a good gauge of how self-centered they are. The narcissist can't resist injecting themselves into every story and example, no matter how unrelated or tenuous, because they can't imagine a story that doesn't have them at the center.

Yeah, this is a good one. This is actually one that I wrote down because I was planning on adding this to a future mega thread. Yeah, I think it's a great heuristic because I know that the word narcissist is probably overused, but I think it's overused for a reason. And I think the reason is, is that social media has kind of privileged this I culture, this me culture where people are trying to present themselves as a product almost, uh, you know, it's social media kind of encourages is particularly Instagram where you try to present the best self possible. And I think that this has led to a kind of me culture.

possible. And I think that this has led to a kind of me culture. I think, um, a lot of people now focus on trying to, instead of just getting to know other people, they try to present themselves, get other people to know them rather. And they try to do this in a sense where, you know, they're obviously trying to present their best self. And so they'll see things like a normal conversation as an opportunity to advertise themselves. I've seen this happen so much. This happens on social media. It happens on X or Twitter. It happens on Substack. And I suppose it happens on probably other ones as well, where you'll talk about something and then the replies will get filled with people talking about how it applies to them and how they manage to use it to better themselves. It'll be something like you'll basically present some kind of heuristic and then they'll basically

say something about how they used it in their life. And I suppose it's natural for people to do that, to, to relate how it, you know, how it applies to their life. But a lot of the time, it's not just that a lot of the time, it's actually advertising. People are trying to appear clever. They're trying to appear, um, sort of charismatic. And I think you can actually gauge the degree to which somebody is doing this in a conversation by the number of times that they use the terms I and me and we, or, you know, all those sorts of things, because it just shows that they are either one of two things are happening

either. They don't really have much else to talk about apart from themselves, or they're trying to draw the conversation to themselves. And in either case, this is a very solic so let's just, so let's just stick person, um, that somebody who is really focused on themselves either one way or another. So it might not necessarily be narcissism. Uh, it could be just natural, um, so let's just, um, you know, it could be just selfishness, it's a self centeredness, right?

But it's so interesting, man. Like thinking about what people actually want in conversations. And I always thought, especially coming from a nightlife background, that the best people in the room were the ones with the most impressive stories with the ones who, they were the ones that seemed the most cool or charismatic or outgoing or whatever it might be. There's that famous example, was it Winston Churchill's wife who met the two presidential candidates and she said that when she sat down with one of them,

she left them at the dinner feeling like he was the smartest person in the world. And when she sat down with the other one, she left the dinner feeling like she was the smartest person in the world. And when she sat down with the other one, she left the dinner feeling like she was the smartest person in the world. Yeah. I think, I think the point. Yeah. Yeah. Karen.

Yeah. Just recognize the point. Yeah. The point there being that it's so important and what people actually want is to feel like they are interesting. They don't really care about how interesting you are. And it's bizarre that you can make yourself very interesting by doing nothing interesting, by just pointing it towards them.

And yeah, I had this other idea, which is kind of related to this inverse charisma. Some people feel interesting. Some people make you feel interesting. And what we think is that we want to be charismatic. And I actually, upon real closer inspection, I'm not sure if I like people that are that charismatic because a lot of the time the charisma kind of comes along with, how many people do you know that have got actually well balanced integrated sort of holistic good vibe chill guy charisma? Very few. How many people do you love spending time around where you just leave and you go, Oh

man, that was so cool. I got to talk about stuff I never talk about with anybody else. It was very generative, you know, new things came out of that conversation. Even if it was about both, even if it was about both, even if it was about UFC knockouts or whatever it was, it was, it was generative for both of us. And I was made to feel like my opinions were valued and I feel like I asked them interesting questions.

At no point in that exchange did anybody really use charisma. So yeah, that sort of inverse charisma idea, I think is a good hack, especially if you think that, ah, man, like I'm not that outgoing. I'm not that gregarious. I don't do the funny thing. Bro, that doesn't matter. If you can ask good questions and make the other person that you're with feel interesting. I think that that's actually better than charisma.

Yeah. I mean, an argument could be made that that true charisma is the ability to make other people feel charismatic. So like, yeah, I think that's probably one kind of charisma anyway. I suppose there are probably different kinds, but, but that's definitely one kind of charisma. Uh, yeah. So yeah, it's an interesting. Enthymeme, enthymeme, enthememe. Yeah. Enthymeme, enthymeme, enthymeme.

Yeah. Enthymeme. Enthymeme. Enthymeme. Yep. The best propagandists convince people of a lie, not by stating the lie directly, but by making statements that tacitly assume the lie as a premise. A mistruth deduced in one's own mind is much harder to guard against the one that

ends as fully formed from elsewhere. Yeah. So I think one of the biggest obstacles to propaganda is when people feel that they're being propagandized against, you know, when, and so people put their guard and one of the ways to let down that guard and to sneak past it is to make a point that doesn't seem like it's propaganda, but which has propaganda as a sort of crucial part of it. I see this being done with politicians quite a lot. You'll see that they will talk about certain issues that they know are

important to the people. What they do is they use that as a Trojan horse by which to disseminate their propaganda. Some people may feel that the economy is very important. Most people think that the economy is very important. What a demagogue could do is that they would talk about the economy. But then they could, if they wanted to, let's say if they were a left-wing politician, then what they could do is while they were talking about the economy, they could talk about banks and the rigged system, you know, like Bernie Sanders often does, and how the problem is the banks. He could sneak in a point about how the banks are not paying their fair share of taxes,

but he would use it, but he would do it in such a way that he's not making the point about the banks. He would have the bank point as a sort of peripheral point, because if it's as a peripheral point, it's more effective because then people, they let their guard down. They're like, okay, this guy's not trying to convince us that banks are evil. He's just making a point about the banks. And so this kind of indirect propaganda, I think is a lot more powerful than him just straight out saying, oh, the banks are the evil. They are not paying their fair share of taxes. Because if he just says that straight, then people are automatically putting their guard up. they're like, okay, this guy's a left-wing politician. He's, he's trying to convince us that it's all the bank's fault.

Whereas if he does it as a peripheral point, then it kind of sneaks into the mind while people are looking at something else. Yeah. I wonder whether the sort of widespread conspiracy. Uh, that has been pretty rampant over the last few years. I think an awful lot of that, you know, this usage of they, the sort of never defined sort of new world order, deep states, the military industrial complex,

you know, like pick your shadowy hooded, goat head skull wearing figure of choice. And those, like a lot of that tacitly assumes some part of a much more tenuous, uh, uh, uh, uh, pre-supposition about the world. It just bakes it in as give it well, of course, of course we know that the military industrial complex is X, Y, and Z, But what we're talking about is how they started fires in Kauai or whatever. Um, that, that I see a lot.

And I suppose that it's a little bit like out of sight, out of mind. Another part of this is that who wants to be the person that seems so stupid as to question one of the premises when this is like starting to watch a game of Thrones season five and asking what's that stock guy like what's he do and why is he there and it's like, Oh, well, I just assume that everybody else is on board with all of this because it's been baked in. It's part of the law, the mythology. Well, I'm not going to question that thing. It's obviously a part, but what we're really talking about is Fauci or whatever. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. There's a very interesting point here. I mean, there's this, uh, so there was some experiments, um, the Ash

conformity experiments in which, um, you're probably familiar with this is quite a famous experiment. So basically the purpose of the experiment was to see the degree to which people conform to information that is blatantly wrong. And what they did is they had a group of participants. Most of these participants were stooges. So they were working for the researchers and only some of these people were actually the test subjects. And what happened was basically they were asked to measure the length of,

measure which of these two lines was bigger. And one of the lines was blatantly bigger than the other line. And all of the stooges basically said that the smaller line was bigger than the big one. And what this did is this actually caused many of the participants in the study to agree with everybody else because they just didn't want to be the odd one out. Even though it was obvious which line was bigger, they thought, hang on a second, maybe I'm the problem. And so this is weird because it actually, this is sort of like an inversion of the false consensus effect where they actually realize, okay, so it's me who's the problem. Even though they weren't the problem, it was actually the

external world that was a problem. So it was an a vision of that. And it was interesting. I mean, there was a gender difference here. So women were more likely to conform than men. And this is a finding that's been replicated as well. So that was quite interesting. But yeah, I mean, if something seems obvious or is appears to be obvious to everybody, then you don't want to look stupid by questioning it. Because then, you know, people are like, how could you question something so obvious, you know? And so that's why this, this enthamine tends to work a lot of the time is that if somebody's

making a point and they assume a certain propaganda point is a premise of the point. Then it seems obvious. It seems obvious because if it was obvious, it wouldn't be the premise. And so people feel that, okay, nobody else is questioning it. So I'd better not question it. That's cool. That makes it, that makes this make a lot more sense. Where's Enthameme?

What's Enthameme? What, why is it called that? So it's actually from Greek. Where's Enthymeme? What's Entho? Why is it called that? So it's actually from Greek. It's actually a Greek term. So Enthymeme, I can't actually remember what the Enthi means. Obviously we know what the meme means. It's even in, I didn't even know that this is, this is just straight up, this isn't from like the annals of your weird mental models thing. I've just triple clicked on it on Mac and it's come up in the English language and argument in which one premise is not explicitly stated mid 16th century via Latin from Greek and come mean from and the meme tie consider from within enthomos mind within the mind consider.

Interesting. Yeah. That's an odd one. Yeah. So I wasn't aware of that one, but yeah, I mean, it's, um, I think it's a very important point for today because a lot of politicians seem to be quite savvy to it. Uh, a lot of these politicians are actually quite sort of well-versed in

rhetoric, um, because a lot of them went to sort quite sort of well-versed in rhetoric. Um, because a lot of them went to sort of, you know, these elite universities where they have to speak Latin and Greek and, you know, they learn about all of these ancient Greek rhetorical forms. And so it's, it's why it's a good idea. I mean, I should probably do a mega thread about these rhetorical forms because they would probably help people, uh, a lot, I think. I was listening today while I was hooked up to an IV to the Dworkesh podcast episode he did with Dominic Cummings.

Have you heard this? I haven't known. Dude, it's fucking fire. I got to walk cash to intro me to Dominic. So I'm going to try and bring him on the show, but Cummings is basically saying, at least in the UK, I don't know how much the equivalent is in the US, that basically the ministers in the UK are, they see themselves as talent more than operators. So what they're doing all the time is this sort of bullshit PR, this press is always

giving speeches, dealing with speech writers, how are we positioning, what's the optics, who are we going to speak to today? You know, kiss the baby on the forehead, go to the gala dinner. And they don't actually see their job as making change. They see their job as communicating change. And you know, when you've got such a priority on output, not outcome, right?

Like output, output, output, let's broadcast as much as possible as, and no one really looks at what's going on. I mean, that's another type of enthememe, I suppose, where all of the premises about change is happening, we are doing work, those are baked into the rhetoric that these people are putting out there. And yet, you know, how many years of conservative government are we about to leave in the next few months, like 15 years, 16 years, 17 years? Yeah.

So, um, I think it was around 2006, I think. So, you know, like nearly 20 years, nearly two decades of conservative government. And throughout that entire time, we are doing this and blah, blah, blah. It's like, Hey, baked into the premises that you're making change. Like you've done nothing. You've done nothing. And that's exactly why you're about to get completely side swiped. All right, next one, which I think is actually related to this post journalism.

The press lost its monopoly on news when the internet democratized info to save its business model, it pivoted from journalism into tribalism. The new role of the press is not to inform its readers, but to confirm what they already believe. Yeah. So, you know, I originally wasn't sure whether the media used to be less biased. Um, but I, I stumbled across this really great YouTube video by a guy called Ryan Chapman, who actually analyzed whether the media used to be less biased or whether it was just cherry picking, rose-tinted glasses sort of thing. But it actually turns out that the media were less biased back in the day.

And this was prior to the internet. This was when the media essentially had a lot of power and they had a lot of money because nobody else could provide the news. And so they didn't have to be partisan as partisan as they are now. They actually could afford to just tell the news because the news was actually a valuable thing back then. But that changed with the internet. What happened with the internet was suddenly anybody could tell the news. And in fact, some people could tell the news faster than the big press organizations, because there would be local people reporting on things going on in their, in their facility. And this obviously took a lot of the wind out of the sails of the media.

They no longer had this monopoly. And so they had to find a new way to sort of a new business model, basically. And that really ended up becoming less about telling the news and more about, uh, confirming what people wanted to believe. And we see it with the New York Times, the New York Times, if you look at some of the New York Times articles prior to the internet, so in the early 1990s, 1980s, you see that it's actually a lot more factual. Even the opinion pieces tend to be a lot more factual in their presentation.

Whereas now, even not just the opinion columns, but also the actual news itself is slanted towards a certain angle. And that's because since people can get news anywhere, they have to do something different. They have to do something new. And a lot of these people who are supposed to journalists and commentators, one thing that they're very skilled at is again, rhetoric. I suppose, journalists and commentators, one thing that they're very skilled at is again, rhetoric. And so they use their rhetorical skills to essentially tell stories, um, you know, very powerful and interesting stories. Struct narratives with persona.

Yeah. And it's all, it's almost like a kind of TV serial. I mean, we saw this a lot during the Trump years. Um, you know, after 2016, we saw the ways that this changed the New York Times. The New York Times became like a TV serial in which Trump was like this Saturday morning cartoon villain. Every article should have, it may as well have just, at the end of the article, it may

have well just said, tune in next week to see what Donald Trump is going to do, you know? So it was like an ongoing narrative about like Donald Trump and what is he going to do next, you know, find out in the next issue of the New York times. Um, and so, you know, it's, it's why I don't really read the sort of press too much. I mean, I don't want to demean it too much because I do feel that the press is a little bit probably over demeaned. Um, I think that pretty much everybody hates the press, you know, and I think

that, yeah, they are, they are, of course they're biased, every, you know, every, every human being is biased. And yes, I think, you know, if you look at, if you do read the New York Times for news, then God help you, but I think it's valuable anyway because it allows you to see what they're doing. It allows you to see what they're trying to convince people of. And that's why I do still read the New York Times. And look, I don't want to be completely unfaithful to the New York Times. It still does break important stories and it does still matter.

It's still an important voice. It's very easy to just dismiss it and just say, oh, they're all just biased. And they're just trying to convince you of things that are not true. I don't think that's the case. I think there are some good journalists working at the New York Times. So I don't want to demean it too much, but I think, yeah, we need to be careful when we need to ask ourselves what they're trying to convince us of. When we, um, we need to ask ourselves what they're trying to convince us off. The sort of narrative element and this, um, constructing of a personification

of both events of countries, of regimes, of ideologies that kind of takes. Stories out of the realm of fact and into the realm of fiction. It means that people that are reading it don't need to, uh, they don't need to actually understand the first principles or the foundations of what's going on. It's an easy story between good and bad, between fair and unfair, between plight and justice. And, uh, there's this guy, Craig Jones, who I had on the show a couple of weeks ago, talking about he's created this new grappling tournament, which is, uh, there's this guy, Craig Jones, who I had on the show a couple of weeks ago, talking about he's created this new grappling tournament, which is going head to head with essentially the Olympics of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. And I mentioned to him, I was like, look, dude, I don't, the sport of BJJ is kind of confusing.

If you don't really know what's going on and you don't understand the intricacies of his foot position and what this side control means and all of this. But I'll tell you what I can get on board with, a huge amount of drama between two big organizations and athletes having to make the decision between prestige that's old and money that's new. Like, I, anybody can understand that. Anybody can. And I have this thing in my house talking to the guys by the pool yesterday. And I was like, uh, much of the time I want to talk about ideas and like your, um, decision-making heuristic, a conversational heuristic that I try to catch myself on is if I start talking too much about people, their motivations,

what they're like, I'm like, ah, I'm creating this sort of personified narrative thing and I'm like, look, dude, the Trump versus Biden is just, or Jordan Peterson versus some lefty person. It's just the Kardashians for people with three figure IQs. Like that's all it is. It's just, it's reality TV for the substack generation. And you're, you're trying to, you're, you're still doing the same thing. Don't yeah, maybe the ideas are a

little bit more high for Lutin. Maybe the people that are involved are a little bit smarter or intellectual or academic or something. But the, the fundamental foundation of this is gossip. You're gossiping about people. And that's that idea of Craig and also sort of what's going on here with this post journalism idea, it brings news stories into a realm everybody can understand, which is the most fundamental human, human, which is who's hot, who's not, who's playing fair, who isn't, who's in, who's out, that's what it's focused on at the moment.

Yeah. I mean, I've actually noticed this in the ways in which the sort of stories, the sort of press stories are constructed. They actually often use a lot of the same devices as actual literature. So a lot of these, you know, these new stories, they will actually have fictional tropes. They'll have twists, they'll have poetic justice, they'll have irony, like dramatic irony and all of this stuff, you know. And so it's, it shows that the writers are, are not telling you the facts, but they're presenting a narrative. Which they're basically, probably what's happened is it might be that they've just watched too many Netflix shows and that

they're unconsciously projecting this onto the world when they report. But it does seem that, a lot of the time, if a news story does have some of these literary devices, where you have like a dramatic reversal of events and then there's a happy ending or something, you know, where you have like a dramatic, uh, reversal of events and, you know, then there's a happy ending or something. You're not, you're not reading the news. You're reading story. Um, but unfortunately those kinds of stories sell so much better. They get a lot more attention.

And so easier to read as well. Even look at what nonfiction great nonfiction. We're both big fans of Morgan Housel as a good example. Yeah. Right. Morgan Housel nonfiction writer. Read one of his Housel as a good example. Yeah. Right. Morgan Housel, non-fiction writer. Read one of his books. It's a storybook.

It's a, it's a storybook masquerading as a finance book. And yeah, the philosophical underpinnings of this might very well inform your investing strategy or how you think about wealth or how you think about stuff that never changes. But when you read it, it's just a sequence of stories from history or stories from politics or from space or from sports or from whatever. It's story because it's so much easier for us to retain that kind of information. Yeah.

Yeah. It's, it's one of the kinds of paradoxes, which is that you can't really, uh, you won't get read if you just tell the truth, like you have to dress it up in a story. Uh, and so you have to kind of the only way you're going to actually be able to tell this truth is by making it a little bit fake, you know? Um, and so, you know, I got to have it up a little bit. Yeah.

Yeah. And I'll confess, I have to do this when I publish a sub stack articles. I try to be as honest as I can. I don't, I don't deliberately lie, but I know that for instance, with, with the titles that I use, you know, I do slightly use sensational titles because I know that if I don't, I'm not going to get as many read it's and so it's, it's sort of an unfortunate necessity, but I think it's possible to tell the truth in story form.

I do think that it's possible. It's hard, but it's possible. And I think the best way to do it is to draw attention to the fact that you're telling a story. I think that as long as you do that, then you can actually negate the fictional aspects of it sort of thing. So it's like a beautiful packaging that you tell them to rip off, you know? And then they can actually get to the actual meat of what you're trying to say.

Yeah. For better or worse, there are rules to the game of garnering attention online. And, you know, the guys that do the copywriting for the channel, the titles and the thumbnails and stuff like that, and which I'm still very heavily involved with all of the time, we're permanently asking ourselves the question, does the, is this tasteful? Does this fit within our confines of what we think is acceptable? But we're also thinking, is this engaging and interesting? Is this going to get clicks?

And, you know, you can go too far down one angle, which is if you split test any website enough, you end up with porn. But on the reverse side, if you don't play by the rules of the game at all, the ideas that you care about and the message that you think is really cool, no one sees it. So you're okay. Well, I need to do something here. We've got to play within the confines of the game. And this relates, I think, to another one of yours from your most recent thread, which was fiction lag, AKA experience taking. When people are captivated by a work of fiction, they unconsciously adopt the traits of their favorite characters. We develop our identities by copying others.

And perhaps one reason we enjoy fiction is that it gives us ideas on who to be. Yeah, so this is quite interesting. So there's basically experiments actually, which kind of show that this is the case, where what they did is they basically got people to sort of consume various forms of fiction. And in one of the forms, there was a political figure who was a really endearing figure and they were basically like an activist. This character was, I think they might have been in suffrage or something, but they basically campaigned for some kind of voting rights and they wanted to change the world or whatever random. voting rights and they wanted to change the world or whatever. The people that had consumed this fiction, they then became more likely to vote afterwards. I think what happened

was that there was an election a few days afterwards and the ones that had bonded with this fictional character, they actually began to identify almost with this character and began to vote. They actually went out in the real world and voted. In another example, a group of people, they browsed fiction featuring a person of an ethnic minority and they were a very endearing, sympathetic character. Once this person was identified with, the people that had identified with this character became more open and more sympathetic towards people of that ethnicity. These are quite small scale experiments and they're not, I mean, I don't know if they've replicated so I'm going to put a caveat there.

But the reason I included it was because I noticed it happening in my own life and in the lives of the people around me. So I feel that it probably would replicate if they attempted. When I was young, for instance, I got attached to certain characters and I would start acting like them in a way and use them as a model. For instance, one of my favorite characters when I was young was Michael Corleone in The Godfather. I can imagine you as an Italian mobster. Well, I mean, that's basically what I try to do. But it was more when I was drunk, weirdly enough. I noticed it was more when I was drunk. It wasn't, it wasn't so much when I was sober.

It was when I was drunk, I found myself sort of acting and saying, saying lines from the movie, you know, if you read too much Harry Potter, you're going to try and cast spells on people. Once you've had one too many, but this is, there's three really that are, that are very, very interesting here that I think link, link together. So post journalism, um, looking at using tribalism, creating a sort of us versus them mentality, they're utilizing narrative to drag people together.

You've got fiction lag, this experience taking thing. Very rarely we are exposed to the inner workings of anybody else's mind with the level of resolution that you get when reading a 500 or 1000 page book. Anyone that's read The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss, you know, you become unbelievably familiar. It's like pedestrianally slow for chapters and chapters and chapters. You learn about this guy's walk to the bar that he plays his lute and the sound of his shoes on the cobblestones and all of this. So you become really, really sort of familiar with him. So of course, if it's a well-written character,

you start to have this sort of sense of affinity with them. And you think, well, he has done well by design, especially outright fiction, not just like news masquerading or fiction masquerading as news, should I say. And then this is showing up. Sorry. Yeah. Do you want to finish what you say? Yeah, just that it relates to compassion fade, you know, which is that one, one, one death is a tragedy.

One million is a statistic when presented with two appeals for charity, one based on famine statistics and one based on a single starving goal. People tend to donate much more to the girl. Our minds can't grasp big numbers. So we navigate the world through stories, not statistics. We are moved by drama, not by data. Why? Because we can, it's narrative, it's being personified. We understand the emotion of this individual person.

That, you know, compassion fade explains fiction lag and post-journalism. Like it's one of the reasons as to why this occurs. Yeah. And I think basically, I think that the sort of reason why we enjoy films and literature and fiction generally, um, is because it presents us with certain character archetypes and then it presents us with scenarios. And it allows us to see what that archetype, how that it presents us with scenarios and it allows us to see what that archetype, how that archetype would perform in that scenario.

And so it gives us ideas on who to be basically, because we are, we are kind of mimetic beings. You know, we, we, we take bits and pieces from other people and we assemble them, we cobble them together into this kind of character that we choose to become. I think that we get ideas of who to be when we watch films and we identify with certain characters that have certain similarities to us, but are different enough that they're interesting. It's like an experiment. We see what will this set of traits do in this scenario and, and how will that, and what will be the consequences

of that? And so it allows us to essentially, um, see how, how certain types of people will perform and whether it's good. Yeah. Split testing solutions. But the, I guess the problem is especially in, again, in outright fiction or even in news masquerading, fiction masquerading as news, that the outcomes aren't true. This isn't how the behavior of this protagonist. Yeah, yeah, the behavior of this protagonist isn't that.

And what's maybe even more sort of nefarious and manipulative is assuming that this is fact, that this is in the New Yorker or the New York Post or the New York Times or Hollywood magazine or whatever. And that this does explain something because it delivers a story that you can buy into and gives you the illusion that this is how things are and that is how things turned out.

But it doesn't. So if you then begin to model your behavior off how this protagonist dealt with it or whatever it might be, I think, well, you may be convinced to actually do something, which is totally wrong. Yeah. I mean, there's an interesting paradox where when we watch a movie, we know we're watching a movie and yet once we get engrossed in it, we forget we know we're watching a movie. And yet once we get engrossed in it, we forget that we were just watching a movie. It seems real to us. Because if it didn't seem real, it wouldn't be interesting and we wouldn't actually be glued to it like we are.

And so the very fact that we're able to fool ourselves into believing something that we know is not true shows that there's this sort of, we have this kind of vulnerability stories where, you know, we can even, we can know from the outset, you know, like we'll see the opening credits and we'll see, you know, directed by produced by, obviously we're watching a movie, but then as soon as the film begins, and as soon as the drama begins, we forget all of that and we're completely sucked into this picture. Why do people cry? Why do people cry at movies?

Why do they get sad when they read books? Because they're invested that genuinely emotionally invested and they no longer see this situation as a work of fiction. They see it as a work of reality. Yeah. Yeah. It's a, it's something that we need to sort of be aware of. I think a lot of the time our affinity to stories, we're so attracted to're so attracted to stories that we need to keep our guard up whenever we're presented with them because we're just naturally,

I think it's probably a spandrel. It's probably an evolutionary spandrel. So it's a byproduct of evolution. So it's not something that was intended. It's not adaptive. It's maladaptive in a sense, because we're so used to watching other people. And maybe in the old days before, you know, when we were hunter gatherers, we would watch people in our tribe and see how they acted and what the consequences of that action would be. And that's how we learned who to be. And that's now being exploited by movies where we kind of, our brains haven't caught up. And so how long has the written word written words been around for like 12,000 years?

Something like that. I think yes, probably. Yeah. About 10,000, I'd, probably. Yeah. About 10,000 I'd say probably. Yeah. Yeah. And, um, but it's, but the written word has only been, um, it's only been commonplace for about 500 years, you know, it's only been sort of like a, uh, something that a

lot of people know because in the past, it was an extremely esoteric thing that was confined usually to priesthood. Um, and yeah, only in the past 500 years, with the printing press, I suppose, was that's the early time when writing and that kind of stuff. Because we had the oral tradition before that, where stories were completely just told through around a campfire or whatever, and then stories were passed down through generations. Sometimes the constellations were used as a projector screen, a cinema screen, and they were used to tell stories. But yeah, I mean, I think that part of mythology is to give us moral lessons about who we should be and what

the consequences of that are. If you look at Greek mythology, in fact, if you look at any mythology, it tends to deal with this concept of hubris and nemesis, for instance, where you have mortals who will act in a certain way and then they'll receive a judgment from the gods. I think that that's the same thing that we're seeing in movies today where instead of the gods, it's fate and chance or destiny or whatever. But it presents you with a certain character and says, if you are this character, this will be the consequences of being this character. In our primal hunter-gatherer brain, we associate that with reality because we're so used to watching other people and learning from other people, as I said, we're memetic beings. And so we get fooled into thinking that that's, that these fictional worlds are real in that sense. You know, we think that this is the

real consequences of being this way. If you're arrogant, you know, like Icarus and you fly too close to the sun, then your, your, your wings will melt and you'll fall to earth sort of thing. Yeah. Your wings will melt and you'll fall to earth sort of thing. Yeah. Golden mean good character is not about maximizing virtues, but moderating them to be sensitive without being fragile, confident without being cocky, steadfast without being stubborn, driven without being reckless, focused without being obsessed. Yeah. So I think trying to be a good person is kind of being the opposite of a movie character.

So movie characters tend to be very exaggerated. They tend to have very sort of almost, they tend to be caricatures, you know, because they have to be larger than life in order to be interesting. And I think that in fact, what we were just saying is actually quite interesting because really, if you want to be somebody who's successful and charismatic and all that kind of stuff, it's not to actually emulate the movie characters. It's not to do what the movies are designed to do. It's actually to do the opposite.

So fiction lab can actually be a bad thing in that sense. It's better to actually have a lower, a smaller than life personality in a sense, not to be too much of anything, but to have moderation in all things. Because that prevents, because all of these character traits can be a weakness if they're taken to excess, even the best character trait, you know, even if you're, if you're extremely compassionate, for instance, like if you have a little bit of compassion, you'll be a nice person, you'll be a good person. You'll also be well liked because people like compassion, but if you have a little bit of compassion, you'll be a nice person. You'll be a good person. You'll also be well liked because people like compassion, but if you have too much

compassion, then you will end up giving everything you own to other people and you'll be left with nothing, you know, for instance, or you'll spend your whole day on social media, crying about all the suffering in the world. And so that every single good attribute that a person can possess, it's possible for them to have too much of it. And the original, the original golden mean is, uh, Aristotle, right? Neither a vice of excess nor a vice of scarcity. Yeah.

Yeah, that's true. Yeah. And I think it's a, it's a very powerful idea because it's very easy to just get one trait or a couple of traits and just to run with it and try and maximize it. You know, we live in a world where everybody's trying to max things now, you know, you've got like looks maxing and health maxing and all this different maxing thing, you know, there's a culture of maxing. And I think that really we should focus less on maxing and more on moderating. I think that's more important

because even health maxing is, I don't think a very healthy thing, ironically enough, because if you spend all of your energy on trying to be super healthy, and I think of Brian Johnson here, I actually respect Brian Johnson. I think he's doing a great thing. He's obviously a guinea pig. He's a self-confessed guinea pig who's trying out these new things. I can understand why he's doing what he's doing, but if you try to live that kind of lifestyle just to be healthy, you actually lose out on so many things that make life good and worth living. He has, I think, a two-hour skin routine every morning. seen his, his daily routine where he just spends like, you know, five hours just go through the rounds and doing all this stuff. And I'm just wondering to myself, like, you know, he's, he's obviously trying to live long enough, you know, he's trying, he's trying to maximize his longevity, but he's actually in a sense, reducing his longevity because he's actually, although he's living longer, his life is shorter because he's not actually doing the things he wants to do.

He's spending so much of that time doing banal, arduous sort of things, you know, and again, you know, I'm not going to knock him because I think he's, he's fantastic. I think he's, he's contributing to the knowledge of the human race with the things that he's doing. He's contributing to the knowledge of the human race with the things that he's doing. He's contributing to longevity science. But if you were to do that just purely for longevity, for your own longevity and nothing else, it would be bad because you'd be missing out on your life. You wouldn't be living. And so you're actually shortening your life. And so, yeah, he's a, he's, he's a sweetie man.

He's in town, uh, this week, actually he's in Austin this week. So I've got a nut pudding dinner, uh, with him, I think tomorrow. And, um, he's, he's a real sweetie. I met him in Roatown a couple of weeks ago. He's been on the show and he's nice. That being said, the way that I see Brian, the way I've kind of sort of conceptualized, I've told him this, um, I think he's kind of like a scout in an army. And I am more than happy for him to go behind enemy

lines, put himself, his, his time, his money, his effort, all of that out there in an attempt to try and find out all of this stuff and then come back and tell us, tell us what you found when you looked over that ridge and you know, you saw all of the army and what, where were they moving and what was going on, but it wouldn't do to have an army full of scouts. You don't need that.

And you also don't want to necessarily be a scout yourself. It's an extreme position to be in. And what you want to do is then get that and integrate the pieces, the highest value pieces into your value set. The same thing goes, you know, in many ways for Alex Hormozi, like Hormozi is an absolute outlier when it comes to work ethic. The guy is unrelenting and that's great.

I want him to push as hard as he can and come back and tell us what he found. Tell me what it's like to do 12, 16 hour days, seven days a week for years at a time. And let me know what you've come up with. That's very, very important, but both Brian and Alex are outliers with their particular psychological makeup and their desire and their passion and the enjoyment

that they get from doing those things inherent. We spoke last time about a telec and exotelic pursuits. And for them, something which for many other people would be exotelic for them is telec. And I think that just realizing, okay, so what gives me pleasure? Well, I want to live longer, right? Okay.

Yeah. But is the dopamine that you get from finding out some slightly different methylated version of cobalamin B12, is that really where you get your sort of greatest sense of pleasure from? Because that might be for Brian or is really locking yourself in a large cupboard with no windows, wearing a nose strip, pumping yourself full of nicotine and writing for six hours from six a.m. every single morning. Is that really what you want to do or do you want to work out how to be able to get, you know, two really great hours of writing done once a week. And, you know, that's using the extremes,

using those people, but going back to the sort of obsession, this difficulty with the golden mean, and I remember where I was when I first heard it, I was driving again through Newcastle on the way to the gym and it made me think about dieting. So throughout a lot of my twenties as a gym bro, I would, you know, hard cut for a Bha this summer and I'm going to get shredded. And it was very easy to be in full on degenerate bulk birthday cake for dinner

mode, bro, or to be in absolute obsession, tracking the calories on my fitness pal mode, like those two worlds are very easy to be in. If I put a packet of biscuits in front of you and say, you can eat none of them, or tracking the calories on my fitness pal mode. Like those two worlds are very easy to be in. If I put a packet of biscuits in front of you and say you can eat none of them, or you can eat all of them, both of those are kind of easy decisions. If I say you're allowed to have two,

it's like, ah, that's impossible, I can't have two. If you let me have two, I'm gonna have half the packet. If you let me have none, you let me have all of them. Both of those are quite easy. But there is something about, and I think, you know, the way, the story that we tell ourselves about the identity that we have, who am I in this moment? What am I, what am I sort of contributing to a solution?

And I find myself in this, I'm saying it like largely to myself, I'm quite an absolutist creature. I have a lot of obsession about things that I want to do and I want to dedicate myself to them. One of the ways I found that I can toggle this a little bit is to try and periodize. So to say, okay, I am going to be super, super focused on dialing in my diet and the nutrition and the calories and all the rest of it, but I'm going to do it for three months. And then at the end of those three months, I'm maybe going to have a reset.

Maybe I'm going to do something else. And if you actually aggregate that out across a year or a decade or a life, you end up with something that does approximate a pretty well balanced life whilst not having to use this insane amount of willpower to always be like in fourth gear at sort of your foot half pressed to the floor, which is really, really difficult to do. Yeah, I think it helps to just sort of set limits in advance on things that you're going to do, I think, because I think when people are left to their own devices, they have a tendency to go to extremes. You know, we all have obsessions, Everybody's obsessed about something. And this is why I think planning is very important.

When I do research, for instance, when I'm writing, I am obsessive when it comes to research. I literally have to know everything about something before I start writing about it. And it would take just so long to do it. But what I've done is I've decided to, because I know this about myself, I start writing about it. You know, and I was going to take just so long to do it. But what I've done is I've decided to, uh, because I know this about myself, I create cutoff points. So I will say, you know, I'm, I'm going to go online and I'm going to find one thing out, right? Just this one thing. And once I found out, I'm going to cut the internet, that's it.

And then I'm just going to start writing, you know? So, and this is also good for social media addiction, where instead of going online and just browsing, because a lot of people have this obsession where they just have a habit of just taking their phone out and just scrolling through social media. Instead of doing that, only allow yourself to take your phone out of your pocket for a very specific reason. So if you want to check social media, for instance, have an idea of what you actually want to see before you open your phone, before you open Twitter or whatever. And then when you've seen the thing that you wanted to see, put your phone back in, you know, and so if you have this deliberate nature, then it allows you to just cut off that point and prevent yourself from becoming obsessed. You can apply this to anything, you know, when you do a certain amount of things, then you stop basically.

Uh, it's a good way to moderate. Going back to sort of your original example, these are, um, valuable and useful, especially tactically, but when we're talking about how much compassion is too much compassion, how much charisma, how much confidence, how much drive is, is too much. Those as values that we imbue in ourselves, much more difficult. How are we tolerating that? What does it mean to have too much compassion? Yeah.

Well, I mean, with me personally, I, I think stoicism is actually a pretty good system. And we probably talk about stoicism a lot. I think we've spoken about it before, but like, and you've probably talked about it with many other people on the show, but stoicism, I think is a great way to know where to draw the line because what it does is it divides the world neatly into two things, into what you can control and into what you can't control. And so with compassion, for example, I have compassion when I can use that compassion, when it actually makes a difference. So if I was to see somebody in the street who needed my help, for whatever reason, I would have the compassion and I would help them because I can actually make

the difference. But if I hear about, you know, some horrible massacre that occurred on the other side of the world, there's no real point in me getting upset about it. And there's no real point about, you know, me trying to have compassion for these people, although yeah, I had the basic, the baseline compassion that any human being has, I think it's awful, but, um, I can't do anything more than that. You know, so having extra compassion and just sitting there and crying about it isn't going to change anything. It's not going to make their lives.

It's not going to, you know, it's not going to make their lives better. It's not going to make my life better. And so I have that cutoff point. And again, this requires self-discipline, you know, controlling your emotions is a very difficult thing to do, and it's something that I had to train myself to do. I can do it quite well. Now I feel that I have pretty good control of my emotions, but I, I appreciate that. It's not easy and it's something that you need to inculcate into yourself.

You need to train yourself to be able to detach from the source of whatever is irking you, whether it's, you know, this news of a massacre or whether it's somebody annoying you online or whatever it is, you need to create a distance between yourself and that thing. The thing is there's no single answer because obviously there's a huge difference between limiting your compassion, limiting your anger, limiting your sexual desire, limiting all these different things. There's different strategies for doing all of these things and one size isn't

going to fit all you've got to find what works for you. What works for me is stoicism. Like it, it just allows me to, um, that, that neat delineation between what you can control, what you can't control. And also creating the distance between stimulus and response. I think that's also an extremely important thing. I find that if you just slow down in the ways that you respond to things, slow down in your reactions, it actually helps a great deal because I think it was Seneca who said that the greatest remedy

to anger is delay. So if you just slow down and pause before you react to whatever it is, that can actually help. And this can help, you know, if you see a beautiful woman, you can just not think about sex. You don't have to think about sex and you can create that pause and just focus on something else. If a troll is angry at you online, again, you just pause and just create that distance and just say, you know, you can also use perspective.

You can say, okay, so this person doesn't even know me. They're just some person on the other side of the world. They've never met me. They don't know me. So anything that they're saying about me is not directed towards me. It's directed to some caricature of me that they've created in their imagination. Tilting it when windmills thing. Well, this is, this is super similar to Tarzwell's razor.

Emotion causes bias, but it also causes motivation as such when we're most likely to act is when our judgment can be trusted least solution. Don't trust thoughts you have while emotional instead pause and wait for the feeling to pass before acting. Yeah. Well, there you go. Um, I think that's an extremely important, and this is probably a theme in a lot of my ideas is this idea that the thoughts that enter your head are essentially a

decision that you make. And you have the power to not think about certain things. You could choose to see things in a different way. And what I do is I like to look at my emotions not as masters that I have to obey, but as advisors. Because really, what are emotions? Emotions are alarm systems. They're things that exist to alert you to something. For example, anger exists to alert you that a line has been crossed. Some kind of moral line, ethical line has been crossed and somebody has violated something that you hold dear. That's what anger is. But the thing is that anger is somewhat obsolete. It's an obsolete instinct in a sense because it existed really because this was prior to there being a legal system, prior to there being a police force, and was prior to that being a legal system prior to that being a police force and they needed to be a way to police tribes.

And the way that we policed it was through anger. So if somebody were to cross a line, if somebody were to, um, sleep with your wife, for instance, or whatever that would anger you, and then you would probably do something pretty horrendous to that person. And so that kept order in the tribe. Um, so anger was like a kind of a police force in a sense, but now we actually have a real police force, we have a real legal system, so that can take care of people crossing lines, so we don't actually need to get upset about it too much.

We don't need to get angry, angry as much because we get the dispassion of police to sort that out for us. And so it's somewhat of an obsolete instinct. I'm not saying it's completely obsolete. There is still a use to anger, but it's not as useful as it used to be. And so when you understand this, when you understand why anger exists, it allows you to create that distance between yourself and the feeling of anger. And you could do this with love, you could do it with sadness, you could do it with anything. I mean, humor, everything, you know, so you understand why that emotion exists. And then that allows you to see it more as a construct as something that evolution

has programmed rather than as something that you must obey. And so I think that's a good way to create that pause, that distance between stimulus and response. Talib's got this interesting quote where he says, the world is broken up into two groups of people, those who don't know how to make money and those who don't know when to stop. And that little bifurcation about, I was thinking as you were talking there, the world sort of being split up into people who can't stop listening to their emotions

and those who don't know how to, or don't respect them. You know, you've got the sort of cognitive cerebral horsepower praying at the rationality people for whom they probably need to actually allow more of that emotion to come through. They don't use instinct or gut particularly well. Everything has to go through a multiple checklists before spreadsheet before they can do it.

And then the other side, the people who need a multiple checklist before the spreadsheet, before they can do it. And then the other side, the people who need a little bit more mindfulness gap, the people who need to not just act on impulse quite so much. And, um, you know, this is again, it's that golden mean it's finding this balance, not a vice of excess, nor a vice of, uh, of scarcity. All right, next one package deal ethics. If I can predict all of your beliefs from one of your beliefs, you're not a serious thinker being pro-choice and being pro gun control. Don't necessarily follow from each other yet.

Those who believe one usually also believe the other. This is because most people don't choose beliefs individually, but subscribe to packages of beliefs offered by a tribe. Yeah. So you'll be quite familiar with this one because that was actually a quote by yourself that you read there. Um, and, uh, yeah, I mean, it's, uh, this is also, I think, uh, it explains a lot about the current political landscape.

Um, so again, right, this goes down to this idea that time is limited, uh, energy is limited and this cognitive horsepower is finite. People have to take shortcuts in their beliefs. One of the ways in which they take shortcuts is instead of analyzing every belief that they have and trying to make a decision on whether they're pro gun controller or anti gun control, whether they're pro life or pro choice, or whether they're sort of pro tax, anti tax, all of these different separate things, instead of analyzing them all,

which would take a lot of time, a lot of energy, a lot of anxiety, they instead decide to just adopt packages, just whole packages of beliefs, like a ready-made oven-ready belief system, where all they've got to do is just take out the packaging and then just crack it in the oven maker. There's no real effort required. So, you know, that's the one thing, but it also comes with another, another advantage, which is that it also gives people tribal belonging. So if you have the same package as, as everybody else, it makes you feel like you belong to that group and you feel a kinship with, with other people who have the same package as you.

And so it allows people to form identity groups around these packages. And so these two advantages, the fact that it's much less costly to have a package belief than to have an individually analyzed belief system. And also that it gives people a sense of belonging is why you will find that people's beliefs are very, very easy to predict. you will find that people's beliefs are very, very easy to predict. If you know their beliefs about gun control, you'll be very likely to predict their beliefs about healthcare, about abortion, about economics, about immigration, all of these things, which are not really related. I mean, some of them are loosely related, but a lot of them are not. For instance, right-wingers tend to be against immigration and yet right-wingers are also pro-freedom.

So there's a contradiction there. And also, right-wingers tend to be against that abortion, yet they're pro-freedom on the whole. And so there's a lot of these kinds of contradictions that you see. And this shows that know, there's a lot of these kinds of contradictions that you see. And this shows that, you know, there's these people aren't reasoning themselves into these individual beliefs. They're just adopting these umbrella sort of beliefs. One of the most well remembered insights, I think it may be even the first ever episode that me and you did was that, uh, an absurd ideological belief is as much a show of fealty to your own side and a threat display to the other as it is a ideology that you imbue or some sort of philosophy that you live by. And I keep coming back to this term, I think that we came up with, which was an unreliable ally. So if I know that you're with me on gun control, but I know that you're not with

me on abortion, the next time that something appears when Donald Trump gets convicted or there's this debate that occurs about COVID masks or about lockdown or about immigration or whatever, I think, well, I'm not really too sure what Gwendolyn is going to say here. Cause you know, he was with us on that one point, but on the other one, he really wasn't. I'm a little bit, I'm a bit unsure about that guy. So the idea of an unreliable ally, that sort of person, it is likely that you're going to be ostracized from the group. It's likely that there's going to be pressure placed on you by members of that group to no longer be as

sartorially bespoke in your ideology and instead just put the onesie on, zip it up and you know, we know where you start. You don't need to worry about Gwinda. He's a good guy. We've got him. He's like, don't worry. He's locked in. He's always there, always with us, always sort of toes the line. And yeah, just the pressures, the pressures are so huge, dude, to do this, especially in an atomized world where everybody wears their opinion pageant, where everyone wears their opinions on their sleeve. It is so compelling for people to do that. And I think one other element is I had a, as a bunch of heuristics to work out whether

or not your favorite content creator is actually telling the truth. When was the last time that they surprised you with one of their takes? And this is why love him or hate him. I think Sam Harris is an interesting person to follow because I don't always know what his takes going to be something. He can quite happily be a like pro vaccine, but anti-lockdown. He can be anti woke, but anti Trump. He can, you know, it's a odd sort of ugly shape that his belief structure has.

It's not a smooth round ball. And given that he pays and anybody else doesn't have to be Sam Harris, anybody who pays a relatively high price for not having package deal ethics, for not necessarily being a reliable ally, they pay such a high price for holding those non-typical constellation of beliefs. You have to assume that they believe they at least they at least what they believe, or they think that they believe what they believe, because otherwise they would just do the easier route. They would get the backing of either the left or the right or the gun people or the abortion people or whatever. Uh, but they don't. So yeah, that's the last time that follow surprised you

as a good heuristic. Yeah. I mean, in your recent conversation with Sam Harris, actually, you use this brilliant term. I'll get onto that in a moment, but it was this idea that basically, so Sam is kind of like, he angers the left and the right. The left are really angry with him and the right are too. And you use this term called ideological spit roasting. It's a brilliant, brilliant term. It just perfectly describes what's happening. But like, yeah, I mean, anybody who is being ideologically spit roasted, it shows that they are not, they're paying a heavy cost for their beliefs. And when somebody's paying a heavy cost for their beliefs, this is a signal that their beliefs are genuine. Because why would you pay such a heavy cost if your beliefs were not real? What are you going

to gain from that? And so when you see people who are attacked by both the left and the right, this is usually a sign that you're dealing with someone who's sincere, unless they've done something completely egregious. But if they're being counseled by the left and the right for something that's not illegal, and it's just something that they've said or some opinion that they hold, this is usually a good sign that they have some integrity because it takes a lot of integrity to basically go against either tribe, knowing that the amount of flak you're going to get from the left and from the right.

This is one thing that I look out for in people. You see it with Sam Harris. You see it with Claire Layman, uh, the editor of Quillette. The, uh, she, she's also somebody who's pissed off the left and the right. Bill, Bill Ma Scott Galloway. Yeah. Yeah.

And, and also, I suppose you and I also, to a certain extent, you know, we'll, and if you look at our reply section on Twitter, you'll usually see both left wingers and right wingers who are angry with. Not very complimentary all the time. Yeah. All right. Next one, Rothbard's law. If a talent comes naturally to someone, they assume it's nothing special and instead try to improve at what seems difficult to them as a result, people

often specialize in things they're bad at. Yeah. So this is an interesting one. I mean, it's, it's one that's hard to really experimentally verify, right? Because obviously this is something that really is a very gradual and a long term thing that happens in people's lives. Um, but I think it's true because I think I've noticed it in myself where for a long period of time, I was not interested in writing.

Um, I just didn't think that I was a good writer. And the reason I didn't think I was a good writer, I think was because I was just kind of, again, you know, I was looking at things from my baseline, you know, so there's a false consensus effect comes in here. I didn't know what it was like to not be me. And so I didn't have any concept of what I was good at. I didn't know that I was good at writing until other people told me I was. And it was only after enough people, not just one person, but quite a large

number of people told me I was good at writing. That's only when I actually realized I was good at writing. Um, I'm still not even sure if I am, but a lot of people seem to think so. So, you know, I'll go with it. I'll go with it, you know. But like, this was something that for most of my life, like I said, you know, I used to work in tech and I was more of a numbers guy than a words guy, because I just didn't have any concept of my own talents. I didn't know what I was good at. I didn't know I was, I was a words guy. I thought I was a numbers guy. And, you know, and I think this is true of pretty much everybody because when you really think about it, how are you supposed to know if you're good at something, if you have spent your whole life

thinking it's normal, you know, if it's, if it's your baseline, the only way I could see that happening would be if other people constantly tell you that you're good at it. Because obviously other people are like a mirror and they help us to see ourselves. For me, when I grew up, I didn't really have anybody to tell me that I was good at writing. I grew up in a working class neighborhood and nobody was really interested in reading anything I wrote. I didn't realize I was a writer until I was an adult. If I had known earlier sooner, I probably would have doled down on it earlier. It's why it's important to get feedback early

on from other people and to find friends who are willing to read your work or listen to your music or whatever it is you're doing and to give you honest feedback because that can help you to really see things that you have blind spots for. We all have blind spots with regards to ourselves and the only way we can really learn these things is through other people. And that's why I think it's one reason why it's very important to have sincere and friends who are interested in you

and interested in bearing you. Yeah. Will Barron Ryan Long, the Canadian comedian that lives in New York, sent me that Rothbard's law from yourself and said that he finds himself doing this all the time. You know, he's unbelievably good at comedy and writing sketches. He does things that he's like the sketch version of South Park kind of, that he's able to sort of call out both left and right. He's very much sort of a blind spot poker.

And he said, he texted me and he was like, dude, I like, I'm so seen by this, that he focuses on all of these sort of odd things. I suppose that we use effort and challenge as a proxy for outcome in future. And if something comes easily to us, we assume that it can't be of great value on the other side. I suppose there's certain pursuits in which, um, you know, if you play sport, the outcome is very quantifiable.

It's a sort of an obvious metric, but really. I was thinking as you were talking about, imagine a seven foot seven guy that was somehow born on a desert Island with no other humans around him. Is he tall or what does that mean? What does it mean to be tall when there is no one to be taller than when there is no bell curve of average height? What, what is tall and what is short, tall and short only exist in relation to other people.

And it's the same with this talent. And then look at Michael Jordan, like left basketball to go and play baseball and then kind of got obsessed with golf. You know, even the guys that do have tight feedback loop, objective metric of success, best in the world, all of these accolades. They go, I'm going to try this other thing. And I guess as well, one of the meta skills perhaps is if you're good at a thing and you, um, begin to cultivate the ability to work hard at something, the working hard at something can actually shortcut the outcomes. You can focus on inputs rather than outcomes. And what you end up doing is just trying to, oh, well, look at how hard I can

apply myself to this other pursuit. And it's like, yeah, dude, but you get 0.2 for every hour that you spend on that. And you get 10,002 for every hour that you spend on the other thing. You should really be doubling down on the thing that you're great at, not the thing that you're like kind of average at or the same as everybody else at, or maybe even just a little bit better than everyone else. Yeah. I think probably a good way to avoid Rothbard's law is to focus on what interests you.

Because if you, if something interests you and even if it obsesses you, that's even better, but if something really interests you, then you're going to put the time in and you're going to, you're going to put more time into that than other people would put into it. And that by itself is, it's not a guarantee, but it's an indicator that you might be talented at that thing. Because obviously if you are interested in it, you're going to be putting more hours into it than anybody else or than most people.

And you also have the capacity to get better at it a lot more than you would at something that doesn't interest you because you're going to do it regardless. And so I think, you know, if you're young and you want to know what you're talented at, a good proxy would be what interests you. Because then you can follow that interest and you could even let it become an obsession. This might be one instance in which it's actually best to disregard the golden mean and to go full in on this one obsession because then that's how geniuses are born is they become extremely interested in one narrow thing and they focus on it. They spend their lives thinking about it. interested in one narrow thing and they focus on it.

They spend their lives thinking about it. And, you know, that's what usually sets them apart from everybody else. Champion bias. We assume winners have the best advice, but those who win rarely examine why they won while those who lose often regretfully dwell on their mistakes, so you'll often obtain the best advice on winning, not from winners, but from losers. Yeah. So I noticed this like when I was reading autobiographies and of successful people.

And, um, when I was reading these, you know, people would often tell you that how they became successful, you know, what they did. And a lot of the time I just thought, nah, you know, these people don't actually understand why they were successful. And maybe this is also, it kind of ties in a little bit with Rothbard's law in that people are not really aware of what they're actually good at. And so they kind of misconstrue why they're successful.

They tend to sort of underestimate what they're actually talented at and overestimate what they're not talented at. Because when people are successful at something, they tend not to really question why they were successful. You know, you only really question things when things don't go your way. You know, I mean, obviously when you, when you do things well and things work out, instead of questioning that you're going to be busy celebrating, you're going to be like, yeah, you know, and also there's another bias where people tend to think that if they did well, then they're going to over, they're going to over emphasize the importance of talent as opposed to say, look, so there are a few biases which are going to ensure that somebody who is successful at something is not going to truly

interrogate it. On the other hand, if you have somebody who's failed at something, that's going to eat at them for a long period of time. It's going to create regret in their heart. And that's going to eat at them for a long period of time. It's going to create regret in their heart. That sour note is going to provoke them into thinking over and over, turning over into their in their minds what went wrong. They'll be having sleepless nights about, oh my God, how could this go wrong? They will interrogate themselves about it. They will often have a much better understanding of why they failed than the successful person would about why they were successful. I think this is a general rule. It's not true in all cases, but I think it's a good general rule to hold. I think it's easier.

Also, another thing is it's easier to work out why something failed than why it succeeded because usually it's more important. It's more important. I think it's more important. I think that, uh, avoiding pitfalls is more important than expediting success. You know, far more people have unforced errors and fail out of something. Then have insufficient success. You know, like insufficient success is usually a by-product of too many failures. And if you say to the person, what was it about your business that caused it to go bankrupt, they will be able to tell you all of the ways that you could go

bankrupt and from that you can learn how to not go bankrupt. So many, this is the same, especially in content creation, so many of the pursuits that you're doing, unless you're in VC and it's like build it, ship it, get it to a 10 million run rate, sell it, fuck off. Uh, so much of it is just a marathon. It's like, okay. So what you're looking to do is what are all of the ways that people who didn't keep going were forced to stop.

Avoid those and you kind of all that's really left is success. Yeah, that's it. Yeah. I think, yeah, I think this sort of goes to the idea of like, um, instead of trying to be right, try to be less wrong. Basically. Yeah. So it's, it's, it's easier to do that because you can, you can spot the pitfalls

and then you can just avoid those pitfalls rather than because there is no secret to success other than just avoiding mistakes and just being consistent in your work. That's really the best you can do, avoid the mistakes and just be persistent, those two things. And so I think, if you just set yourself up to try and find the secret to success, you're going to find that it's actually very banal, It's very mundane. There's not actually much you can do other than basic things to be successful. You just got to have that. And don't fuck up. Yeah, basically.

And so the, the, the real sort of wisdom is to be had in finding the mistakes to avoid. That's where the real sort of juices and that that's a very fertile land. There's so much there to learn because there's so many different types of mistakes that you can make. Well, one of my favorite questions that I ask guests on the show is what do most people get wrong about X because the question of how do people do Y better is very, very open and kind of fluffy and you just usually elicits

a much more boring answer. But the question, what do most people get wrong about protein consumption? What do most people get wrong when it comes to understanding stoicism? That it makes everyone's eyes light up because they go, Oh, wow. Like I get the opportunity to really call out all of these fucking errors that people keep on making. And I think that we all know deep down that avoiding pitfalls is way more important than like just never multiply by zero.

If you can keep not multiplying by zero, you will end up with a large number eventually. But, uh, you know, the best example of this, you can spend all of your time working on your diet, ensuring that your house is free of mold and that you've got four stage reverse osmosis filtered water and you macros and everything's organic. Then one day you decide to drive your car without a seatbelt on and you're in a car accident and now you're very dead.

You know, it was all of these big numbers, big number, big number, times, big number, times, big number, times zero game over. Yeah. Yeah. It takes one critical mistake for everything to go to shit basically. You know, yes. And so, you know, you could do everything else really, really well, but if there's one thing that you just get wrong, it could completely append everything else.

And so for that reason, yeah. I mean, make avoiding mistakes is a lot more important than trying to find some secrets to success, which just doesn't really exist. I think anchored to your own history bias, your personal experiences make up maybe not point not not not not not not not not not not not 1% of what's happened in the world, but maybe 80% of how you think the world works. That's from Morgan House. So boomers and Gen X had wildly different experiences of how the economy works.

And this gave them different dispositions, worldviews and political preferences. Yeah. So this is a very interesting point because it kind of fits in a little bit with the false consensus consensus effect again, you know, we only know the world from our perspective and from our experiences. Everything we see is filtered through our life's experiences, and that's our model of the world. That's everything we understand about the world we have seen through our own eyes. This creates blind spot because what we've experienced, if you consider that life has been around

on this earth for about a billion years and we are a tiny sliver of that, we're so tiny like our lifetimes that we're almost like a sheet of paper sideways, just trying to edgeways. Seeing it there, as Vladimir Nabokov said, we're a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. That's our life. Right. And there's a massive amount of life and just existence that we have no concept of because we live in this tiny, tiny sliver of time and not just time, but also space.

sliver of time and not just time, but also space. You know, we only occupy just a dot on a dot. Um, you know, so we have like, you know, this kind of, we have, we, we occupy so little time and space in the grand scheme of things that our, our world is, is always going to be skewed and completely, uh, it's not going to be a representative sample, in other words, of what's actually the case. our world is always going to be skewed and completely, it's not going to be a representative sample, in other words, of what's actually the case. Morgan Halsey uses the example of the economy. The boomers would have seen stocks, the stock exchange would have been pretty flat for the boomers and they would have assumed that that's the norm. They would have assumed that's what the

economy does, but that's because their sample was tiny. It was just one lifetime, one human lifetime, which is negligible. It's not even a fraction of a representative sample. And then you look at, say, Generation X, and there was a big boom in the 1980s. The economy behaved completely differently. For them, that was what the economy does. It's just the natural state of things. They assumed that's what nature was. We saw a lot of a resurgence of the ideas of Ayn Rand, Reaganism, Thatcherism in the 1980s because of this idea

that that's what stocks do. Stocks just go up, just free market, free market, free market. But then if you go back in time and you go to the times of Roosevelt, Roosevelt was a very different economy. And so it was more protectionist and more regulation and all that sort of stuff. Our political views are often based on our life experiences. They're based on how the economy behaves when we're alive, how geopolitics behaves, all of these different things. But these are all sort of anomalies because we don't even know what the economy does over the longterm because the economy, we've already been tracking the economy for a couple of hundred years and that's nothing in the grand scheme of things.

When you think of how long civilization could exist, civilization is, well, humans have been around for about 300,000 years. They're projected to be around for a few million, maybe even a few billion years. So that's a very, very long time scale. So we're really, we're just at the beginning. We don't know what the stock exchange is going to do a billion years from now. It will be completely alien. So everything we understand comes from our perspective.

And I think the only way out of this is to try to learn from people whose lives are as unlike yours as possible. And that includes going not just beyond your space, but also beyond your time. There's actually a great quote by CS Lewis, which touches on this. I'll read it out. So it's a quote from CS Lewis. So it goes, a man who has lived in many places is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his village. The scholar has lived

in many times and is therefore immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press of his own age. So what he's advocating there is to spend your time in other times, to basically live in other time periods through literature, through reading people who are alive a thousand years ago, because that can help you understand the peculiarities and the idiosyncrasies of your own time. It gives you a broader view. If you only read content, if you only consume content from your own time period and in, and from your own country or from your own civilization, you're going to be sort of, you're going to have this blind spot because you're going to, you're going to only be using this base rate. So again, it's like the

false consensus effect. The only way to get escape from that is to consume content from outside of your time period and from outside of your civilization. And this is one reason why I watch a lot of news, a lot of Chinese news stations. I watch Russian news stations. I watch Indian news stations, um, instead of the same old, you know, CNN, MSNBC, Fox news, instead of all that, which I'm, I'm, I know what they're going to report. I know what they're going to say. I know what their takes are going to be already.

So I don't need to watch it. So if I watch Indian news, I'm not really familiar with Indian news very much. I get a completely new perspective because this is from another civilization. What are the assumptions that they have that are baked in? How did they frame these sorts of, yeah, that's so interesting. All right, man, one more common knowledge effect. Groups are meant to be better decision makers than individuals because they combine many perspectives, but in practice, a group doesn't base its decisions on the info specific to each member, but only on the info common to them all. This casts doubt on the idea that two heads are better than one, and it helps

explain why despite popular wisdom, diversity generally does not make teams better. Yeah. So, you know, we, we live in a society that worships diversity, diversity, equity, inclusion, you know, like it's everywhere. Um, and it kind of like weird because there's this sort of assumption that more diverse teams are better. And when you actually look at the data, this doesn't really seem to be the case. In fact, I mean, it's close to null. The effect is close to null. Like it doesn't

help teams and it doesn't hinder teams. It's just a completely, it's pretty much a completely independent variable. Have you got any idea how they judged that sort of a thing? Yeah. So there was experiments where they actually had, they had diverse teams and they tested them against teams that were homogenous. And they found that there was no great improvement in the teams that were diverse. I mean, I think it was a marginal improvement. They basically described it as significant, but not substantial. So that means that it wasn't null, but it wasn't actually, the effect size wasn't really anything to write home about. And if you look at like other studies, you'll find some studies which

have shown that there is a small, like a moderate improvement in diverse teams over non-diverse teams. But then you'll also find other studies which show that there is actually, that being diverse actually hinders a team. So this meta- found that overall it, there's not really any real relation. And, um, it's interesting because we're, we're constantly taught that sort of diverse teams make better teams that you know, you have, you can draw on the experience of people who have not. Again, this is interesting because this goes back to what we were just talking about. So these people have, you these people have different backgrounds.

And so if you have different backgrounds, then you're not as likely to be in theory, at least you're not as likely to be sort of blinded by your blind spots because you have other people to see these, but that's not what happens in real life. When you have a team, teams have a very specific dynamic. They don't actually, they don't operate in ways that we think teams would operate. The theoretical way that we would think that a team would operate would be, we would think that everybody would use their expertise and they would pull it together to create this sort of super expertise that is greater than the sum of its parts. But that's not what happens.

Instead, when you get people in a room together, they don't make decisions based on their own specialist knowledge most of the time. What they normally do is they make decisions based on consensus and consensus is obviously what all of them have in common. So it's actually the opposite of what the theoretical model of teamwork is. And so this is a bit of a problem because it means that if you have diverse teams, then the, the, the sort of advantages of diversity are lost in the team, because if somebody has a diverse experience, if somebody has a very different experience

to everybody else, it's not going to be integrated into the decision-making process because the others don't recognize it. They don't agree with it because it's alien to them. And so it ends up being the case that people end up making consensus only on the things that they share in common. And so really, diversity doesn't matter. It doesn't actually make much of a difference. It doesn't hinder the team in particular, but it doesn't help the team either.

And so it's, it's interesting because it, it's a kind of, it's a spanner in the works of the whole, you know, diversity makes teams better sort of narrative, which is everywhere, literally everywhere. I think, I think it's the sort of thing that off the top of your head, it sounds like it would work. Well, you know, there's different perspectives and people are looking at problems from alternate points of view and someone is coming in with a different kind of experience and this different experience may give us a novel insight or solution to whatever the challenges that we're facing.

So, you know, it's kind of surprising that it doesn't work in that way. It can work in some contexts. So, yeah, diversity can be good in some contexts. So I think it's good to have a diverse friend group, for instance, because then when you have one-on-one conversations with each of these friends, you learn new things that you didn't, that are completely different from your own experiences. And it allows you to grow in directions that you ordinarily wouldn't be able to grow because you have access to information that's outside of your experience.

In that sense, diversity can be good. Maybe in some working context, it can be good. Obviously, if you are working in translation, for instance, diversity is going to be excellent because then, you know, you have more languages to draw on and all that kind of stuff. And, you know, so there are some instances in which, in which diversity can work, but as a general rule, diversity in itself is not going to help a team when those teams are making decisions based on consensus. And that's what most teams do. Yeah, I'm going to guess as well that the idea of diversity from first principles gets kind of whitewashed when you then think about all of the social

dynamics that happen when people get put into a group and their desire to sort of conform their uncertainty about standing out this desire to have a reliable ally. The sort of slow ally, the sort of slow adoption, the regression to the mean of whatever everybody kind of feels, which sort of nerfs off the edges of all of the interesting things too. You'll have social hierarchies and strata within that as well, which triage who's the most important. And yeah, it is very interesting.

I'm seeing much more push now against diversity as our strength, especially from the UK. I think multiculturalism has been a pretty abject failure, especially if you go to somewhere like London. I think the people that live there have got massive problems with it. It's becoming more of a problem in the US, but it's mostly abstract for people. They just don't like the idea of things being diluted down, but it's being felt very front and center, I think, by British people.

And, um, you know, I'm starting to see this kind of conversation happen more, whether it's about small microcosms at work, whether it's about, um, the entire sort of nationalities, obviously it's related to a big immigration push that's happening at the moment. Um, but yeah, fascinating stuff, man, dude, look, let's bring this one into land. I appreciate the hell out of you. Every single time we get to speak. I have so much fun.

What are you working on next? And where should people go to keep up to date with the stuff you're doing? Yeah. So I'm working on my book. It's going to take a bit of time for that to get done. So I don't want to talk too much about that right now, but I'm also publishing on Substack, I've got a new article coming out soon, which is going to be in quite a memorable one, I hope.

And so the best place to keep track on me is at my blog on Substack, which is Gwinda.blog. I'm also active on X or Twitter, whichever you prefer. And I think last time I was on here, I said I was going to set up a YouTube channel, uh, which I'm still planning to do. I don't know if I'll have it. Finish the book first. No one's waiting for the, what was that thing about, uh, what was that idea?

Don't focus on the stuff that you're not necessarily good at fucking Rothbard's law, don't Rothbard's law yourself, you know, stick stick to writing words until you've got the book done, dude. I appreciate you. Everyone should go and subscribe. You're, stick to writing words until you've got the book done. Dude, I appreciate you. Everyone should go and subscribe. You're one of the few sub stacks that I pay for. And, uh, I can't wait to see what you do next. I look forward to bringing you on again soon.

Always a pleasure, Chris. Thank you.