14 Shocking Lessons About Human Nature - Gurwinder Bhogal

Gurwinder Bhogal is a programmer and a writer. Gurwinder is one of my favourite Twitter follows. He’s written yet another megathread exploring human nature, cognitive biases, mental models, status games, crowd behaviour and social media. It's fantastic, and today we go through some of my favourites. Expect to learn why asking questions is the most selfish thing you can do, why people create hatred in an attempt to feel love, the real danger of censorship, why it's more important to avoid being wrong than try to be right, what postjournalism is and why you need to understand it, how to win every debate even if you lose, why you should never take an internet insult personally and much more... Sponsors: Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours with your first box at https://www.drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) Download Hevy, the best workout tracker for free at https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hevy-workout-tracker-gym-log/id1458862350 Get 20% discount on House Of Macadamias’ nuts at https://houseofmacadamias.com/modernwisdom (use code MW20) Extra Stuff: Check out Gurwinder's Substack - https://gurwinder.substack.com/ Follow Gurwinder on Twitter - https://twitter.com/G_S_Bhogal Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #psychology #mindset #news - 00:00 Intro 00:57 Social Media is Making People Less Sincere 08:18 Instead of Trying to Be Right, Be Less Wrong 13:18 People are More Interested in Criticising than Helping 17:15 Never Take Information at Face Value 20:29 Becoming Trapped in a Purity Spiral 30:47 It Isn’t Coordination, It’s Cowardice 45:53 Media is Now ‘Post-Journalism’ 52:51 The Majority of Evil People Had Good Intentions 59:34 Why It’s Easier to Debate Geniuses than Idiots 1:09:16 Don’t Take Social Media Attacks Seriously 1:25:28 Are People Really Judging Us? 1:32:30 The Configuration of Dominant Ideologies 1:47:50 Where to Find Gurwinder - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Gurwinder Bhogal?

  A team of researchers analysed 27 million news articles published between 1970 and 2019. And what they found was that use of words like sexist and racist in the New York Times and in the wider liberal media increased over 400% since 2012. Obviously sexism and racism have not actually increased 400% since 2012. It's only the media's use of these terms that's increased.

• 0:23Chris Williamson?

  Your writing is so good, dude. People send me that audience capture article all the time. This most recent one that you did about how smart people make themselves be dumb. The TikTok article, it's phenomenal. I, you're the only Substack that I pay for and

• 0:44Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Thanks.

• 0:44Chris Williamson?

  Quite rightly, quite rightly so. What can I say? So my favourite thing to do with your Twitter is go through some of the mental models, biases and ideas that you've got. And we're going to go through as many as we can today. First one is chilling effect. When punishment for what people say becomes widespread, people stop saying what they really think and instead say whatever is needed to thrive in the social environment. Thus, limits on speech become limits on sincerity.

• 1:14Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, so I mean, so this is, you know, a sort of very timely thing, I think, because there's a lot of talk about sort of suppressing people from social media and stuff. And I think people should really realise that stopping people from airing their true opinions doesn't change their opinions. It just makes them mask their opinions. And when this happens at scale, it can lead to all kinds of absurd situations like the Abilene paradox. I don't know if we've covered the Abilene paradox.

• 1:46Chris Williamson?

  Run it back.

• 1:46Gurwinder Bhogal?

  It's basically a situation, yeah, it's basically a situation where everyone professes a belief that no one actually believes purely because they think everybody else believes it. And so you can have a situation where Literally, everybody just is saying stuff that is just not true for the sole reason that they think everybody else thinks it's true. And an example of this would probably be considered sort of the issue of what a woman is. You've got pretty much everybody in the mainstream culture now pretending that they don't know what a woman is. But if you were to ask these people in private, they would probably be able to tell you. They'd just probably say an adult human female.

• 2:27Gurwinder Bhogal?

  But because there's this sort of stigma now around knowing what a woman is, people, you know, basically sort of have to pretend like they don't know. And it's just, it leads to absurd situation after absurd situation. And that's why I think it's, I mean, there's many reasons, there's many arguments against censorship, but this is definitely one of the strongest, I think. You're not, by censoring people, you're not changing their behaviour, you're not changing their opinions, you're not changing their beliefs. All you're doing is just sort of sweeping them under the carpet, you know, and they're just going to continue. Just, you just won't be able to see it anymore. So you can't keep track of these people anymore.

• 3:08Chris Williamson?

  This ties into your view about when people are their opinions, they feel like they have to have an opinion on anything and everything, and changing your opinion is tantamount to destruction of yourself. So because people value their opinions so much, in this situation, quite rightly, you're the performative nature of having the right opinion of the Abilene paradox, playing along with that has never been more important because opinions have never been more relevant to our status within the world.

• 3:49Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, absolutely. And you see this reflected most in the precisely the industries that you would expect it to be reflected in, i.e. the industries that are image oriented. So if you have a look at people who have the most fashionable opinions, I mean, Rob Henderson would probably call these luxury beliefs, they're sort of, you know, fashionable opinions that people adopt in order to sort of signal status. You know, when I was a kid, we all used to like buy sweatshirts which had like brand names stamped across the front of them, like, you know, Fila or Nike, you know, when you're a kid at school, because you want everybody to know that you paid for it. So nowadays, when you get older, you no longer wear these labels, now it's opinions instead.

• 4:34Gurwinder Bhogal?

  You know, you have the she/her and the he/him instead of poor harm, poor femme, you know. And it's sort of like, you see this in Hollywood, you see it amongst Hollywood actors, you see it amongst academics, you see it in politics, you see it in all of the industries where image is important, where basically appearing to have the right opinions is more important than actually having the correct opinions.

• 4:57Chris Williamson?

  Yes, and it's also an industry where opinions and actions have never been more diverged, right? You know, somebody now can have a Twitter account that proselytizes the right beliefs and in private, whole completely different beliefs, or the way that they go about living their lives be totally different. You could be an online vegan who's an offline carnivore, and for as long as the twine shall never meet, it kind of doesn't really matter so much. Whereas in the past, your ability to profess a belief that you didn't live up to in reality would have been much more difficult to diverge, especially in before the internet, right? Or before print media, there is no way for you, your opinions are very much your actions,

• 5:42Chris Williamson?

  right? There is no way to do this and to bifurcate you and what you say from what you and what you are and what you do. So yeah, it's, the opportunity and the motive have aligned to create this chilling effect.

• 5:58Gurwinder Bhogal?

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

• 6:40Gurwinder Bhogal?

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

• 7:15Gurwinder Bhogal?

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

• 7:55Gurwinder Bhogal?

  You know, if you're a Hollywood actor, you don't need to worry about the true causes of the sort of crime rates in in in like neighborhoods. So you could just say it's all just systemic racism.

• 8:08Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, or the outcomes of defunding the police, right? Defund the police would be a perfect example of this. Say it, but yours isn't the neighborhood where you need police in any case. Okay, so next one. Epistemic humility. Instead of trying to be right, try to be less wrong. The investor Charlie Munger said, it is remarkable how much long term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid instead of trying to be very intelligent. Avoiding idiocy is much simpler than achieving genius, so it's easier to turn it into a habit. Furthermore, if we try to be right, then we'll often convince ourselves we're right, even if we're not. But if we begin from the position that we're wrong, and we simply try to be less wrong, we gain more awareness in our blind spots and become less wedded to our beliefs, reducing our resistance to learning.

• 8:55Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, so this has got wide applications. I use this in every endeavor, really. A particular one that I found is very useful was my approach to writing. Because when I first started writing, I used to try to sound smart. I tried to be intelligent. And what this led to was me using a lot of really fancy words, a lot of big words. So instead of using the word tiptoe, I would use the word digitigrade, you know, and I'd use all these other really long words that people just didn't know what I was talking about. And because they didn't know what I was talking about, what actually happened was that by trying to be smart, I became less clear in my communication. So I basically, I was becoming

• 9:37Gurwinder Bhogal?

  more stupid. And people had less understanding of what I was trying to say. So it backfired. And it was then that I realized that actually, good writing is not about trying to sound smart. It's about avoiding sounding stupid by just using, you know, you could use simple language to communicate clearly, rather than trying to sort of signal sophistication or anything like that. And when you can communicate clearly, then you naturally become smarter because you're Your thoughts and your, you know, what you write reflect each other. So if you think clearly, you're right clearly. And if you write clearly, you'll think clearly. You know, if you try to think in these big, long words that you barely understand, you're not going to really develop

• 10:20Gurwinder Bhogal?

  a good understanding of what you're actually thinking.

• 10:24Chris Williamson?

  Have you heard?

• 10:24Gurwinder Bhogal?

  And so this is one example.

• 10:26Chris Williamson?

  Have you heard the mental model never multiply by zero?

• 10:31Gurwinder Bhogal?

  I think I have, but I can't recall what it is. You might have to remind me.

• 10:34Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, so it ties in, it ties into this perfectly. So never multiply by zero describes avoiding situations that could permanently get you out of the game, whatever that game may be. So for instance, you could have the perfect health and fitness regime, making sure that you eat organic fruit and vegetables, your micros and macros are perfect, you sleep eight hours every night and you're hydrated thoroughly throughout the day, but you have a common habit of driving a car without a seatbelt. It's like, okay, all of the good things that you're doing, it's forty five times seven times one point two times three hundred and sixty times zero. If you multiply any sequence of numbers by zero, the outcome is zero. It's the same as you've been saving for a long time and working hard on your education and

• 11:18Chris Williamson?

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

• 11:52Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. It's the lowest common denominator issue, isn't it? It's people can focus all of their energies on certain things and maximize those, you know, until their hearts content, but they'll neglect one tiny aspect of their life and then that will be the thing that brings them down. And I think when you, when you're trying to be smart, you can get lost in trying to excel at one particular thing whilst neglecting all of the other things that are periphery, but which are just, just as important, all of the supporting things. I've found just it simplifies life so much when you. Just try not to be stupid, you know, it just it's just such a more elegant and

• 12:35Gurwinder Bhogal?

  simple way to live than to try to be smart. I don't have any, you know, I used to signal a lot to people, you know, especially on social media and stuff where I used to try to just be as smart as I possibly could. But it would often just lead me into just complete stupidity because I would just be hyper focused on one thing, trying to make that thing as perfect as possible. And in so doing, I'd neglect everything else which was needed. So yeah, I mean, gener- it's all about being a generalist. It's not about being a specialist anymore. You know, if you want to excel in life now, you've got to be a generalist. You've got to be good at, you've got to have a baseline sort of goodness at everything rather than, you know, being super good at one thing. Because that super goodness at one thing can lead you astray.

• 13:17Chris Williamson?

  Interesting. Okay, next one. Cunningham's Law. The best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question, but to post the wrong answer, because people are more interested in criticizing others than helping them. This is so incisive. It's so correct.

• 13:33Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah. Yeah, I mean, the, the actual, I mean, Cunningham's Law is basically just the best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question, but post the answer. And then I was the one who basically decided that it was because people are more interested in criticizing others than helping them. So I don't want to give the impression that, you know, if, just in case this turns out to be wrong, that that that was the law. His law is just the first part of that. So I mean, yeah, I've witnessed this constantly since I've been on social media, you know, places like Twitter and Reddit. I even, I think I even did this experiment myself where I actually asked a question and I got very little response. And then I deliberately posted the, the wrong

• 14:15Gurwinder Bhogal?

  answer. I'm pretty sure I did that once earlier, 2016 or something like that. Because this is something that I've thought about for a long time. And I think many people are constantly on the lookout for someone to ridicule. And I think they, they want that because they want to feel better about themselves. So if, if you give people an opportunity to

• 14:37Gurwinder Bhogal?

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

• 15:09Chris Williamson?

  Well, you're, you're, you're smart. Stand on the shoulders of somebody else's stupidity, right? So by pointing at the stupidity, really interesting thing. So I'm, I'm all for calling out the performative incentives of social media. But Chris Voss, the guy that wrote Never Split the Difference, he was the former head of the FBI's negotiation team. He said that one of the ways that he extracts information from people who are either unwitting or unwilling is he will make proposals about them that are wrong, but that they want to correct. So for instance, he'll say, that's a, that's a great accent. Is that, that's Hull, isn't it? That's, you're, you're from Hull. No, no, no, I'm actually

• 15:54Chris Williamson?

  from Huddersfield. You go, oh, yeah, interesting. But you, I mean, you must be a Pisces. Actually, I'm an Aquarius. And you go, okay, I've got the place that you live and the month of your birth. That simply by proposing things that are wrong. And I, it's, I don't know where it comes from. It can't just be performative fanciness on the internet. It's something deeper than that. It's a desire to close loops of erroneous information. And I think that that just gets maybe magnified when the internet's involved.

• 16:22Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, yeah, I think, I think that probably is part of it. People probably do it for different reasons. I mean, this is quite, it's quite a general sort of concept. So I mean, you know, I'm sure it's not just a specific, it has one specific cause. But yeah, I mean, I think it's always better, you get a lot more information out of people by getting them to tell you what they want to tell you, rather than trying to sort of railroad them into an answer, you know. So I think a lot of sort of.

• 16:51Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Interrogators would probably do that. I don't know, I don't know their tactics, but I could see them doing that. You know, they would rather than, rather than actually asking you a question, they would give you a statement that would lead you to a certain response. I think because then you don't feel like you're being interrogated as well. You know, you feel like you're just giving the information freely, which probably is better for them. You know, I don't know, but I'm not an expert in that, so I don't know.

• 17:15Chris Williamson?

  Next one, Wittgenstein's ruler. The less you know of the measurer compared to the thing being measured, the less the measurer's measure measures the thing being measured, and the more it measures the measurer. As an analogy, if a man says everyone he meets is an asshole, the asshole is likely him. You can apply this concept to any source of information. For example, if a news outlet's stories frequently outrage you, instead of taking it as evidence that the world is becoming more outrageous, consider the possibility that the news outlet is deliberately trying to outrage you and temper your reactions accordingly. Basically, never take information at face value and always ask yourself, what does the info from this source suggest about the source itself?

• 17:59Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, so I'll never sort of understand why people just take information at face value. You know, I see it just constantly online where somebody will say something and then nobody questions the motives behind the person saying it. They just, it's as though it's like chat GPT saying it to them, you know? They'll just accept whatever is, is being said without any kind of suspicion towards the motives behind, why did somebody say this? You know, what does this say about the source of the information? I think it's just a very, very important skill for media literacy in the age of misinformation. There's, you know, there's, there's always an agenda behind every piece of information that is shown on your screen.

• 18:43Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Apart from in the cases of chat GPT, but, but that's a different issue. But like when you're getting information from other human beings, there's always an agenda there. There's always some reason why you're being shown that information, some reason why they've chosen to disclose that information. And I think it's always worth considering what those potential agendas could be, because that is half of the information you're being given. You know, if you're just accepting the information at face value, you're only receiving half of the information. You need, you need the other half, you need the other half of the context. You know, so you see this, you know, if, for instance, like The Guardian posts something about the economy, you know, and then you see that the author and then you can do a bit

• 19:28Gurwinder Bhogal?

  of background research into that person's views on economics. And then it's amazing how much information that will provide you when you actually read the article.

• 19:37Chris Williamson?

  Oh, so that is.

• 19:38Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Then you'll suddenly.

• 19:39Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that would be the first line of Wittgenstein's ruler is the less you know of the measurer. So what you're doing there is you're learning more about the measurer.

• 19:49Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah. Yeah, you want to get as much information about both sources. You want to get, sorry, not both sources, about the source and the information. So you want to get as much information about both. And you should, the ruler in this case is the one that you have the most information about. So if you have more information about the information than the source, then you should use the information to measure the source. And if you have more information about the source, you should use the source to measure the information. So it's, you know, it's basically like you would, if you had two rulers and you weren't sure which one was correct, you knew one of them was correct and the other one wasn't, you would use the correct one to measure the one that wasn't, you know, so it's a similar principle.

• 20:28Chris Williamson?

  Interesting. Okay, purity spiral. Members of political tribes inevitably begin competing with their fellows to be the most ideologically pure. The constant one-upmanship toward moral superiority causes the whole group to gradually become more extreme. For example, Maoist China or Twitter echo chambers. Nice that you drew the correlation between those two there.

• 20:51Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, I think people have this kind of tendency to turn everything into a competition. And that goes for morality also. You know, if you have a certain dominant ideology, dominant moral ideology. Uh, that's fashionable, again, going back to the, the thing that we're talking about before. Then people will start competing, they'll turn it into a competition, they'll start gamifying it essentially, they'll, they'll turn it into an opportunity to um to sort of gain an advantage, a social advantage. Uh, and this has been shown throughout history, I mean, you know, it's not just Mao's China, you can look at any regime that had strong sort of laws

• 21:36Gurwinder Bhogal?

  uh, against certain behaviours or in favour of certain behaviours. And you would see that there were people always who would compete to either call out those behaviours in other people, or if they were bad, or engage in those behaviours if they were good. You know, literally, a- any, any regime you name, you know, you, you, you'll see, you can see examples of it, it's, it's something that's sort of fundamental to our species. Um, and it's one of the reasons why I think a lot of regimes become uh, more extreme over time, you know. Uh, a lot of them, like, for instance, if you look at, if we're going by the sort of, uh, the example of communism. Uh, you know, Lenin was pretty bad, he was quite bad, he wasn't Stalin though, you know, Stalin was a completely different

• 22:21Gurwinder Bhogal?

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

• 23:02Chris Williamson?

  Did you ever hear Tim Dillon push back on Joe Rogan's view of LA comedy? Because this is exactly the same thing. So Tim's one of the few guys that can kind of poke back at Joe because he's, you know, similar status and he's doing well in comedy scene and stuff like that. And Joe was saying about how lovely the LA comedy scene is, you know, every time that he goes through there, everything's just fantastic and everyone treats him so well. And Tim sort of bumped in and said, Joe, you do know that you're Joe Rogan, right? That the way that people behave when you step into the room is not representative of how they behave

• 23:44Chris Williamson?

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

• 24:11Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Howard Hughes Syndrome.

• 24:12Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Howard Hughes Syndrome.

• 24:13Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Howard Hughes Syndrome.

• 24:14Chris Williamson?

  That's it.

• 24:16Chris Williamson?

  So if you combine Howard Hughes Syndrome with the purity spiral, the purity spiral is the incentive or the purity spiral is like the drive and the direction that that's what's going on. And then the Howard Hughes Syndrome is the fuel that persists and causes that to keep on going. One, one question I've got in my mind is what sort of environment would engender a more purity spiral like situation? What are some of the predictors of a purity spiral, do you think?

• 24:51Gurwinder Bhogal?

  So there need to be rewards, incentives, basically, for that kind of behavior. There need to be rewards for extreme behavior. So, you know, if you, if you look at, say, Twitter, for instance, there are rewards to acting. If you're, you know, if you're like in right wing circles, for instance, then there's an incentive to act based. You know, and if you're in the left wing circles, then there's an incentive to act woke because Other people will see you as a sort of paragon of what they believe and then they'll they'll want to retweet you and, you know, say, oh, this person, if you're based, for instance, people will say, this person doesn't give a fuck, you know, he's, you know, basically, he's, he's sticking it to the lips, you know, he's triggering the lips or whatever. And, you know, vice versa with the, with the left, they'll be like, you know, this

• 25:35Gurwinder Bhogal?

  person is calling it out, like calling out injustice or whatever, blah, blah, blah. So there's got to be some sort of social reward for engaging in more extreme behaviour than your peers. That's the first rule. And another thing is, this is probably even better incentive would be that if, if there's a punishment for not acting more extreme, and this is more to do with the sort of Stalinist kind of element of things. So if you look at The Purges, for instance, in fact, there's an even better example than that. If you look at, there's a very famous video of Saddam Hussein where he basically is in a room filled with people and he basically says that he's uncovered a plot. This was

• 26:18Gurwinder Bhogal?

  shortly after he, he assumed power. It was shortly after he assumed control in Iraq. And the way that he consolidated power was that he basically concocted this idea that there was a conspiracy against him so that he could, you know, pretext to remove people that he didn't like. And he had a list of names and he said that these people had betrayed him. And there was a big packed room filled with people, all of the sort of delegates and diplomats. And one by one, he called out the names of the betrayers and they were led out of the room to their deaths. They were basically executed. And as soon as people realised what was happening, they began to panic and they began to copy Saddam Hussein's actions. So there's a point where he, he, he was apparently crying or he was pretending

• 27:01Gurwinder Bhogal?

  to cry and he got a, a handkerchief and he began to wipe his eyes and immediately the camera pans to the, the crowd, to the audience. And you see many, like, people just get handkerchiefs out of their hands, sorry, out of the pockets and they begin to wipe their own eyes, exactly how Saddam Hussein's doing. And it's, I think it's a sort of, it speaks to sort of this idea that people were so terrified of dying that they just, the only, they panicked and the only thing that they knew how to do to prevent from dying was to be as, as much like Saddam as possible.

• 27:34Chris Williamson?

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

• 28:16Chris Williamson?

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

• 29:00Chris Williamson?

  you really need to be like, gay and black with a club foot and a gluten intolerance. Like, that's really where you need to be at in order to be a part of our, our club.

• 29:09Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, absolutely. It's easier to rally around shared hatreds than shared values. And so there are people always looking to create new things to hate, just in order to keep the group together. You know, shared values are, are okay for a while, but really what people want is they want to get together to really hate somebody. You know, there's, there's few things that bring people together, like hating someone else. And I think a lot of this happens, like, I mean, you see it in.

• 29:40Gurwinder Bhogal?

  When there's this thing called rally round the flag syndrome, which is a concept, another one of my mega thread concepts, where it's this idea that when leaders are unpopular with the public, what they do is they will start conflicts, they will start foreign conflicts, because this will bring people together against a mutual enemy. And I mean, some people have argued that Putin, part of the reason that Putin invaded Ukraine was that he was flagging in popularity, and people were becoming disillusioned with him. And so he needed to have this sort of external enemy to sort of unite the people and sort of, you know, create this this other that they could sort of level all their hatred against. You see it in the novel Animal Farm as well, where the

• 30:22Gurwinder Bhogal?

  character of Napoleon, the pig, Napoleon, wants to consolidate his power by sort of essentially exiling Snowball, who's his rival, and then just sort of blaming him for literally everything that's going wrong, you know, scapegoating. And that's how the sort of Animal Farm gets consolidated, and how they form their sort of their their their community by hatred rather than love.

• 30:47Chris Williamson?

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

• 31:29Chris Williamson?

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

• 32:14Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, that's a fair assessment. I think it's quite accurate. It sounds to me like sort of Hanlon's razor, sort of applied to cancel culture. I think, yeah, a lot of people

• 32:27Gurwinder Bhogal?

  are more passive than active when it comes to the sort of propagation of new ideologies. And I see this pretty much all the time. You know, if we go back to the example of wokeism and stuff like that, wokeism is largely pushed not by ideologues, not by people who are, you know, actively trying to sort of spread this ideology, but mostly by people who just sort of read Wikipedia, just see what ideas are on there and just accept them as fact and just think, okay, I better not question this because, you know, this is the consensus amongst my community. And, you know, if I, if I speak out against this, I'm going to be in trouble. So I'll just keep my mouth shut. And that's largely how,

• 33:10Gurwinder Bhogal?

  you know, these ideologies really spread, I think. It's, it's sort of like, it goes back to the sort of chilling effect where people are afraid of saying what they really think. So they just keep their mouths shut. And then this allows false ideas to propagate much more quickly. So yeah, I mean, I think that's, it's a pretty straightforward one. It is, you said it was Schultz's razor. Who, who was the one who?

• 33:35Chris Williamson?

  So Andrew Schultz on, on, on his podcast just talked about the fact that he's spent time in Hollywood. In Hollywood, everyone from the outside thinks that it's all of these people trying to trans the kids and stuff. And he said, from the inside, there's none of that, you know, they're blundering around, just trying to sort themselves out and get to CrossFit in time. And I came up with Schultz's razor and then sent it to him and asked if I've got. Uh. If he reckons that it was a good summation of what he was talking about and he was like, fucking hell, that's really nice. Do not attribute to group conspiracy that which can be explained by cancellation anxiety. But another thing, the reason that I really like it, and I actually spoke about this in Miami this weekend, I spoke about that that exact passage.

• 34:14Chris Williamson?

  Is because it's very reassuring for the people who are concerned that we are facing an insurmountable coordinated coalitional assault. Right on our freedoms, because what it reminds you is individual actors incentives can align in such a way to make it look like collusion. But it's not. And if it's not, it's actually a lot more fractured and fragile. And all that you need to do to fix something which isn't a coordinated conspiracy. Is change the incentives. If the incentives then change, that immediately opens up and frees pretty much everything else.

• 34:50Gurwinder Bhogal?

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

• 35:30Gurwinder Bhogal?

  This is a danger for pretty much any, anything really. I mean, you know, you've got the equivalent conspiracy theories on the right. About the World Economic Forum. So many people believe in this now. They believe that there's some evil dusty plot by the W E F to sort of enslave everybody and. I mean, I've looked at the evidence and I'm not convinced by it. I could be wrong, but I I think people are just sort of, most people are just sort of accepting it on the right now. Just as people accepting, accepting sort of a lot of ideas, woke ideas on the left, you've now got people accepting conspiracy theories on the right, just because everybody else is accepting them. And I think that's quite dangerous.

• 36:06Chris Williamson?

  What was that?

• 36:10Chris Williamson?

  The world has many stupid people and few evil people, therefore the world's few evil people

• 36:15Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Von Hoffer's theory of stupidity.

• 36:17Chris Williamson?

  Von Hoffer's theory of stupidity. Yes, yes, I mean, that's the same as this, right? That's that's precisely the same. Yeah, yeah, that you have, and it would be maybe not stupid people, but just self-interested people or, you know, resourcefully anxious people.

• 36:34Gurwinder Bhogal?

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

• 37:16Gurwinder Bhogal?

  These are really social media issues. These are issues that people get really, really worked up over social media. And this is not to say that there's no real world impact, there is obviously. But the the level at which they're being discussed is far in excess of their actual real world impact. There's far more important things to be worrying about, you know, like AI, for instance. You know, AI is major, major issue now, but most people are still worried about trans people in toilets. And it's, you know, that like AI is literally an existential threat. I mean, not in the immediate future, but eventually it will be. You know, what's we've got AI now, that will soon give rise to AGI. AGI will probably give rise to a super intelligence.

• 38:01Chris Williamson?

  And then we're going to be in shit. Yeah, we haven't, we're all going to be fucking pay per click. Yeah, I mean.

• 38:06Gurwinder Bhogal?

  And that's long term. I mean, there's short term issues with AI, which are even more dangerous possibly, which. You know, the idea of sort of misinformation now is it can be done on an industrial scale. You can literally just fill the web up with misinformation without any real human labour.

• 38:24Chris Williamson?

  Well, yeah, I mean, think about if if you were concerned, what, six years ago with Cambridge Analytica? Is that when that came out, six or seven years ago?

• 38:32Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, it was about six years ago, I think, yeah.

• 38:34Chris Williamson?

  If you're worried about Cambridge Analytica having a team of copywriters create ads and then use rudimentary algorithmic analysis to target those to people that they think it'll impact the most. Imagine having a virtual avatar that reflects every social media user's preferences that exists on the internet and have them be able to create the perfectly persuasive,

• 39:02Chris Williamson?

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

• 39:47Chris Williamson?

  Podcasting was one of the few things where I considered that it might be a little bit more safe, given that people don't tune in for the rote indexing of information, but they tune in more for the natural human vibe, which is inherently difficult to predict. Like, the way that language learning models work is it's essentially predictive text just replicated over time, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, all the way. So by design, it's a very predictive form of communication, an unpredicted form, which is where you might actually find something charming or endearing or funny or whatever. Come, it is significantly more complex computationally.

• 40:27Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Absolutely. Yeah, I think the sort of that that really does touch on something very important there, I think what you just said.

• 40:36Gurwinder Bhogal?

  There is a certain randomness to human behaviour, which is inherently valuable, I think, which people value more than sort of the perfection, the so-called perfection of things that are artificially created. And you can see this, I mean, there's actually, there are apps now which can actually, which purport to be able to determine whether a piece of text was written by an AI or by a human. They use a measure called perplexity, which is exactly what you were just saying, a measure of the randomness of the of text or whether it's representative. I think probably averageness is a better term for it. It's basically how how indicative of the training data a piece of text is. So

• 41:21Gurwinder Bhogal?

  perplexity has actually turned out to be a really, really bad way of determining whether something was written by an AI or a human. And I use this myself. I got an essay that I wrote in 2017 and I fed it into this machine, this device, which basically is supposed to determine whether I'm a human or an AI. And it accused me of being an AI.

• 41:43Chris Williamson?

  I knew, I fucking knew it. I fucking knew it all along, bastard.

• 41:47Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, yeah, the bastard. I mean, I couldn't believe it. I thought, you know, okay, fair enough. I'll do it again. And I did it a few times. And I think once or twice it got it correct. It managed to identify me as a human, but most of the time it was calling me an AI, right? And that's because I was writing in a style which was very indicative of journalism back in 2017, because I was I was writing for a magazine called Rabbit Hole and they had a very strict editorial style. And so I was writing, I was writing sentences sort of very clean. I wasn't adding much of my own character to the sentences. I was just

• 42:19Chris Williamson?

  They were quite predictable in a way.

• 42:21Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Exactly. And that's why it came to that conclusion. But it shows that really, you know, Um, it's, it's very, uh, I think what people really want is, is they want a bit of flair, I think, to writing. They don't want, um, just the information just to be given to them. They want the information to be given to them with a bit of flair. And I think you see that, not just in, in writing, but you see it in, in a lot of industries. I mean, for instance, people like flaws. They like the human flaws that only a human has, um, because that gives things character. For instance, if you look at a diamond, uh, you have synthetic diamonds now, which are far more, um,

• 43:04Gurwinder Bhogal?

  perfect and flawless than real diamonds that are sort of mined. And yet mined diamonds are far more valuable. They, they sell for just far more money. And I think part of that is because the flaws are actually what make it valuable. The fact, not just flaws, but also the fact that it was dug out of the earth by a human and it has a story behind it. You know, I think that story, the, the, the history of that thing is, is what gives it value. People call it, people in the art world, uh, call it provenance. And that's one of the things that gives human made things value is that they have a story behind them. Um, you know, if you have something that's just sterile and perfect and, you know, just clear and has no idiosyncrasies.

• 43:44Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 43:45Gurwinder Bhogal?

  It kind of diminishes the value of it, even though it's, it's perfect on a technical level. It's not, it doesn't have a story, you know?

• 43:52Chris Williamson?

  It's also sterile, right? It's very sterile to do it that way. This is what I tell fledgling podcasters that ask for advice is your job is not to perfectly index all of the information in yours or the guest's head and that forgetting that town that's on the west coast of the, the north of England, that's what's it called? It's near Manchester, Blackpool. Like that's, that is part of the vibe. It is adding to the character of you as a person. And there are podcasters out there that spend a lot of money on editors to go through and remove any. Heavy breaths or pauses or mistakes by them or the guest or whatever. And I mean, if you want that, you can go to Blinkist, as far as I'm concerned.

• 44:38Chris Williamson?

  It's the job is to ask questions that are outside of the scope of the book that are unique, that you can't get elsewhere and also to create a vibe. You know, if you and your friend can't breathe because you're laughing for 20 seconds, that's part of you. And it speaks massively, I think, as well, an over reliance on that, whether it be online with writing or in podcasting or in YouTube or whatever. It speaks massively to an insecurity that you are not worthy of acceptance or that your work or you as a person is not going to be enjoyed by the audience. And I understand that. I understand why in a presentation you might want to overthink and so on and so forth. But being able to let go, and again, this is only something that you can achieve through many repetitions of doing anything of this kind.

• 45:23Chris Williamson?

  But you must have found this with writing that as you get out of your own way more and just say, look, I'm going to avoid being stupid. I'm going to say things as clearly and precisely and simply as I can. And I'm going to have faith that the accumulated experience I've got is going to make something good. And then once it's out there, it's fine. But when you start to overthink it, when you've spent six months planning what it's going to be and you've built it up and it's this big behemoth and then everything's tight and awkward and uncomfortable. So anyway, next one, next one, this is a really good one. Post journalism. The press lost its monopoly on news when the internet democratized info. To save its business model, it pivoted from journalism into tribalism.

• 46:03Chris Williamson?

  The new role of the press is not to inform its readers, but to confirm what they already believe. Post journalism.

• 46:12Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah. So there was a study published in the Social Science Computer Review. And basically what it was, a team of researchers analyzed 27 million news articles published between 1970 and 2019. And what they found was that use of words like sexist and racist in the New York Times and in the wider liberal media increased over 400% since 2012.

• 46:39Gurwinder Bhogal?

  So obviously sexism and racism have not actually increased 400% since 2012. It's only the media's use of these terms that's increased. And this, they, they found this was the case anyway, you know, they, they found that essentially what happened was that there was some event that had occurred that had caused a massive shift in the editorial policy of the New York Times towards sex and race. And I mean, this was actually, I think, who was it? There was a writer who, who dubbed this the great awakening.

• 47:10Gurwinder Bhogal?

  He, although he didn't, he didn't refer to this specific example, but he referred to a general trend that, that occurred with the rise of social media in the early 2010s, where there was a sudden shift towards issues of sex and race. And this was driven by the media, I think. I think this was driven by the fact that this, the New York Times was no longer the sole or for, you know, one of the sole authorities of news anymore. Um, with the sort of advent of social media and, and all this alternative media that, that sprang up. And stuff like the Joe Rogan podcast and all these alternative sources of information. The New York Times had suddenly lost its authority. Um, it was no longer, it no longer had a monopoly on information. And so obviously they had to do something.

• 47:51Gurwinder Bhogal?

  And I believe, I don't have any hard evidence of it, but I think that this is what led to this surge in usage of, um, terms like sexism, racism and the rise of the sort of, you know, woke politics in media. Because I feel that

• 48:06Gurwinder Bhogal?

  it, it decided that it was gonna cater to hipsters, basically, you know, to, to certain, I don't want to stereotype them too, but the kinds of people who hang out in Starbucks and, you know, like, um, you know, drinks sort of pumpkin spice latte and all that, you know? They wanted this sort of, they thought these guys

• 48:22Chris Williamson?

  Mate crowd will be coming for you hard.

• 48:25Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah. Yeah, I've tried to, they're actually quite nice. I've drank, drank a few myself.

• 48:30Chris Williamson?

  Knew you were a hipster.

• 48:31Gurwinder Bhogal?

  But yeah.

• 48:34Gurwinder Bhogal?

  I did it before everybody else.

• 48:36Chris Williamson?

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

• 49:17Chris Williamson?

  perfectly curated, tempting way to get people to press on a news article.

• 49:24Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Absolutely. Yeah, because the interesting thing with these terms is that they don't just get the audience from the, they don't just get the liberal audience engaged. They also get conservative audience engaged because, you know, the conservative sort of media ecosystem is largely reactive, which fits in with their reactionary ideology. So they, they, they react to the liberal politics of the day, to the liberal mainstream media. And so when the New York Times says that air conditioning is racist or whatever, then Fox News is going to come out, Tucker Carlson is going to go on and he's going to say, you know, look at this madness in the New York Times, you know, the world's going to hell. The New York Times now is claiming that air conditioning is racist.

• 50:08Gurwinder Bhogal?

  And the New York Times obviously knows that Tucker Carlson is going to do this. And that's why they do it, because they know that they can provoke him. So then Tucker gets his audience of conservatives to essentially just take part in this dialogue, to take part in this sort of debate. And that drives more traffic to the New York Times when people share it like, look at this craziness, you know, on social media. What they're doing, they're doing the New York Times's own work for them, you know, they're just sharing it. Even it doesn't matter if people don't like the New York Times's article, it's still getting shared. And that's what matters. At the end of the day, people are clicking on it so that they can hate it. And I think, you know, that's really the sort of the liberal media's business model and the conservative media's business model.

• 50:53Gurwinder Bhogal?

  The liberal media will randomly accuse things of being sexist or racist, knowing that it's going to fire a lot of people. Then the the right wing media, the conservative media, will sort of react just as predicted. And it will just create, it's like a sort of symbiosis where they sort of fuel each other. You know, they they fuel each other's traffic. And, you know, I mean, you do see it happening the other way now as well. You see, you know, Tucker Carlson or whatever will will make a claim, which is absolutely crazy on Fox News. And then the New York Times will write an opinion piece about him and how he's a danger to, you know, everyone and he's gonna, you know, create the Third Reich or whatever, like, I'm sorry, the Fourth Reich. But like, you know, it's a, it's a back and forth between them. They they have this,

• 51:39Gurwinder Bhogal?

  this sort of tribal warfare thing going on and they both mon- they both monetize it, they both profit from it. And everybody else loses because everybody else becomes more stupid as a result.

• 51:50Gurwinder Bhogal?

  And and that's basically the media ecosystem now, I think.

• 51:53Chris Williamson?

  There's a really good quote from Dana White. And this is from three years ago now, and he says, "The media are not in the news business, they're in the clickbait business. They think negativity sells and gets clicks, so that's what they deliver. Negativity is their product." And what he's touching on there is the fact that people are more likely to click on sensationalist negative stories than they are. I mean, did we see this? Even when it comes to designing thumbnails for the channel. If I use a term like war or battle, uh, go to war with your mind, you must battle for self-improvement, stuff like that. Even though they're being used in a positive manner, it's still an inflammatory word.

• 52:37Chris Williamson?

  And it gets more clicks, you know, people, people see that war, that words, they see the word war and they go, oh, war. Uh, you're gonna click on it, even if it is a. A war for more fucking hypertrophy or whatever it is. Anyway, next one. Noble cause corruption. The greatest evils come not from those seeking to do bad, but from those seeking to do good and believing the ends justify the means. Ironically, few things justify the immoral treatment of others more than the belief that you're more moral than them.

• 53:08Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, so if you look at sort of people who do evil things in life, very few of them are actually evil in terms of very few of them actually set out to deliberately do evil. You know, I mean, there are probably a handful of serial killers who would fall under this umbrella. People like Richard Ramirez, you know, the Night Stalker. I would say he was probably closest you could come to somebody who was just doing things purely because they were evil. He deliberately went out to do things because he knew that they were evil. But people like that are extremely rare in life. And the vast majority of of sort of evil acts in life are

• 53:51Gurwinder Bhogal?

  committed by people who actually think they're doing good. If you look at history, you know, I mean, how many people have created atrocities as a result of them trying to be evil, trying to do the wrong thing? Not, I don't know of any. But then if you ask yourself, how many people have committed atrocities in the name of trying to do good? Well, you could, you can, there's no end of them, you know, they're just everywhere like. If, you know, if you look at the classic example, I mean, even people like Hitler, I mean, Hitler's regarded as a classic supervillain.

• 54:24Gurwinder Bhogal?

  But the fact of the matter is, is that he wasn't, he wasn't evil in the sense that he didn't deliberately set out to do evil. He actually believed he was doing the right thing. You know, and Germany believed he was doing the right thing as well. That's why they elected him. You know, he wasn't, he didn't just take over power and become a tyrant and go against the German people's wishes. The German people elected him into power. And they elected him because they believed in his message, because they believed he was correct that. Western, that Germanic civilization was collapsing and it was the fault of Jews and gypsies and Jehovah's Witnesses because they were apparently stealing the wealth of the country and they were robbing the minds of the the youth with degenerate art as they, as the Nazis

• 55:06Gurwinder Bhogal?

  called it. So these ideas were very common. They were not just common in Germany, they were common in the US, they were common in Europe. Anti-Semitism was was commonplace in the nineteen twenties and thirties. I mean, you know, there was a, in Madison Square Garden, there was a massive meeting of American Nazis. Now, can you imagine that today? Imagine today you had like, you know, the

• 55:28Chris Williamson?

  MSG Nazi Fest twenty twenty three.

• 55:30Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, exactly. Hiring out Madison Square Garden, you know, and actually having a live show, neo-Nazi show. That's what it was like in nineteen twenty. So there was a lot of people who actually believed that it was right to do what that, what Hitler eventually did, you know, which is actually terrifying when you think about it. This wasn't, this wasn't just some madman who just took over power and then decided to exterminate an entire race of people. This was something that had support from the bottom, from the grassroots. And so these people were convinced they were doing the right thing.

• 56:01Chris Williamson?

  It says here, ironically, few things justify the immoral treatment of others more than the belief that you're more moral than them. What does the more moral than them part have to play here?

• 56:12Gurwinder Bhogal?

  So if you think, if you go back to the example of Jews in Germany, Nazi Germany, Hitler and the Nazis believed that they were morally superior to the Jews because they believed that the Jews were corrupting people because they believed, well, first, they believed that they were greedy and they were stealing the wealth of Germany. Secondly, they believed that they were corrupting the minds of Germanic youth by, with their so-called degenerate art. They were essentially undermining civilization. They were parasites that were destroying civilization. So they were immoral in that sense. That's what the Nazis believed. And so the Nazis believed that since these people are not moral people, they're not ethical, since the Jews are not ethical people in their view.

• 56:55Gurwinder Bhogal?

  It's okay to exterminate them. It's okay. They're not human. They're subhumans. You know, they're Untermensch. Wiping them out is good for society. And you see this literally in every other example of this kind. So if we go to the polar opposite example of Stalin. Stalin believed that the bourgeoisie were morally inferior to the proletarians because they were, they had been corrupted by their wealth. They were greedy. They were, you know, capitalists. They wanted to enslave everybody else. And so he used this idea that, that the humble worker was more moral and more ethical than the bourgeoisie to to sort of justify the murder of the bourgeoisie. And not just the bourgeoisie, but pretty much anybody who spoke out against him.

• 57:40Gurwinder Bhogal?

  So these people were by definition immoral if they, if they spoke out against him because they were obstacles to the utopia that he was trying to enact. So the idea is that if, you know, if you can present yourself as more moral than your enemies, then you can justify their slaughter. Because nobody's going to miss a person, you know, who's, who's immoral. I mean, I like to think about a very commonplace example would be the, the idea of, of child molesters. Like child molesters are considered probably the most evil and the, the people, the most least worthy of sympathy people on the planet. And I know people who are really, really good-hearted people, like really nice, kind, compassionate people.

• 58:24Gurwinder Bhogal?

  And I hear them sometimes say things like, I mean, there's one person that I know who's really, really kind person, really compassionate person. And they said that what they wanted was for child molesters to be locked in a room with a ground, with, with floor made out of sandpaper that was basically a treadmill that never ended. You know, that's what they wanted. And they said it, they said it without any, they just said that that's what they should do to, to, to child molesters. And this is a classic example. Like if somebody is regarded as morally inferior, then they, they lose any right to compassion in, in an average person's mind. Like you can, you know, you can say, oh, this person's a child molester. So you can do whatever you like to them because they're not

• 59:04Gurwinder Bhogal?

  human because of what they've done. And so if you can present a person as morally defective, as morally inferior. Then you don't feel bad, no matter what happens to them. And that's why, you know, people who are so convinced of their own morality, when they see somebody who's less moral than them, or who they think is less moral than them, then they can become complete monsters towards that person. So that's where I think a lot of the world's greatest atrocities occur is due to that, that sort of belief.

• 59:33Chris Williamson?

  Fascinating. Okay, next one, Gurwinder's third paradox. In order for you to beat someone in a debate, your opponent needs to realise they've lost. Therefore, it's easier to win an argument against a genius than an idiot.

• 59:48Gurwinder Bhogal?

  This is the reason I stopped debating.

• 59:51Gurwinder Bhogal?

  You know, I, well, it's one of the reasons anyway. I, I, I used to debate people all the time on social media, you know, I used to, I used to think it was something worth doing. I actually thought, you know, that I could convince people. But I realised after a while that really a debate is not, it's not, it's not really a battle of intellect. It's not a match of wits. It's really just, it's more of a battle of ego than intellect. Because people want to win, they don't want to understand. And they approach their, they, they approach debates. Well, basically, there's, there's a rationalist thinker called Julia Galef, who had this great book called Scout Mindset.

• 1:00:32Chris Williamson?

  She came on the podcast.

• 1:00:33Gurwinder Bhogal?

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

• 1:01:08Gurwinder Bhogal?

  And you're not very bright. What will happen is you'll often just keep going because your ego is just driving you, you know, further and further and you you won't see that you're you've actually lost the debate because your ego is just there and you're just you're trying to do everything you can. You're moving the goalposts, you know, as much as you can to try to win at all costs. I think with smarter people, this is not to say that smarter people don't approach with a solid mindset. They also can be extremely egotistical and they can be arrogant and stuff like that. But they often are more likely to realise when they've screwed up, when they've contradicted themselves, or when they've, you know, they said something that's just factually incorrect. And it's harder for them to come back from that because they realise they've screwed up. So they're like, oh, okay. And they can't just pretend.

• 1:01:53Gurwinder Bhogal?

  They can't just, you know, some of them will, but they're just.

• 1:01:58Chris Williamson?

  talks about this. He says that, um, once you've become convinced of something, even if you claim the opposite, you can no longer unconvince yourself of it. If I convince you that two equals four, and you then see it, you can tell me, no, no, no, it's three. I know it's three. But on the inside, you you can't become an up until a point at which somebody convinces you of something else. You can't be unconvinced of something which you are convinced of. But as you've spoken about in your most recent Substack article that everybody needs to go and read, smart people plus ideology is a terrifying cocktail because that can use their ingenuity to engineer a more easily, a more fortified

• 1:02:41Chris Williamson?

  defence around their irrational beliefs or around just beliefs that they haven't assessed. So there's another thing that relates to this. So Gwenda's third paradox about needing to ensure that your opponent has to work out that they've lost. And this is from Scott Alexander and it's years ago. This is from his old stuff. If you're interested in being on the right side of disputes, you will refute your opponent's arguments. But if you're interested in producing truth, you will fix your opponent's arguments for them. To win, you must fight not only the creature you encounter, you must fight the most horrible thing that can be constructed from its corpse.

• 1:03:18Gurwinder Bhogal?

  It's a very good way of putting it, yeah. There's a concept called Rogerian rhetoric, which is how I try to approach any kind of discussion, which is instead of trying to convince that person that they're wrong, what I try to do is I try to understand that person's belief system as well as I can. So I don't necessarily deny or defy anything that they say. I just listen and then I ask them questions to work out how they came to that conclusion. And then I leave the discussion, not having convinced them, but having a better understanding of why they believe what they believe. And I think that's far more important, you know, because that helps me to

• 1:03:59Gurwinder Bhogal?

  better understand positions that I disagree with. Then I will formally, maybe I will attack their beliefs in a piece of writing, you know, where I can really think it through and I don't have somebody, you know, moving the goalposts or anything like that. But I'll do that formally in like an essay. I won't do it in a discussion. I found that trying to change somebody's beliefs in a debate is almost pointless. It's like trying to change their mind through a rap battle, you know. So it's just a

• 1:04:23Chris Williamson?

  It worked for Eminem and Eight Mile, but I am totally on board with that. And someone asked in a Q and A a couple of weeks ago about how I remain at least partially impartial when it comes to speaking to people. And for me, the question asking, I called it the Socratic method, but you've just called it, what was that one?

• 1:04:44Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Rogerian rhetoric. It's different from the Socratic method because the Socratic method is an attempt to win an argument. It's basically an attempt to ask questions until you lead somebody into contradicting themselves or into saying something that's not true. Whereas Rogerian rhetoric dispenses with that completely. Rogerian rhetoric is purely about trying to understand the other person's position from a neutral, objective point of view. So trying to understand what experiences in their life led them to the beliefs that they have with them now, no matter how wrong those beliefs are, you know. So if somebody believes that the world is flat, Instead of trying to refute that, instead of saying, oh, you know, if you use your binoculars

• 1:05:27Gurwinder Bhogal?

  and you peer out over the horizon, you'll see that the sails of ships appear before their prowls. You could say something like that to refute them. Or what you could do is ask them, so how did you come to this belief system? And what is the evidence that convinced you? And then, once you've asked these questions, you get a better understanding of why they believed what they believe, why they were persuaded by that. And that in itself is valuable because now you understand why people believe it, which is probably more valuable to you than just refuting them and changing their beliefs. Do you get what I'm saying? So it's a different, it's a different value system. It's basically more about understanding.

• 1:06:05Chris Williamson?

  I actually think that that is much closer to the position that I take as well, because my goal is very rarely to ask people questions that make them look stupid up until the point at which they recant all of the opinions that they've got. It's much closer to that. How do you spell that first thing?

• 1:06:25Gurwinder Bhogal?

  So it's O R V E G E R I A N. So it's Roger I A N on the end.

• 1:06:33Chris Williamson?

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

• 1:07:01Gurwinder Bhogal?

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

• 1:07:44Gurwinder Bhogal?

  They they basically form a personality profile of you and they say this person is very close minded, you know, he's not even listening to me, he's just refuting, he's trying to refute what I'm saying. He's attacking me and then they they go into war mode, you know, they start red alert and then they basically want to, you know, debate you. So you you you set yourself up to fail the moment you try to immediately refute what somebody is saying. I think it's much better just to sort of, um, just to listen to them and again, you know, use this Rogerian rhetoric, understand why they believe what they believe. And I mean, this shouldn't, you know, this shouldn't be, um, something that you do just so you can win an argument. You shouldn't just listen to them so that you can understand their argument, so that you can beat their argument.

• 1:08:25Gurwinder Bhogal?

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

• 1:09:08Gurwinder Bhogal?

  And then it makes you more well equipped to deal with these beliefs in future as well. That's an added bonus.

• 1:09:15Chris Williamson?

  I love that. Tilting at windmills. An online stranger doesn't know you. All they have are a few vague impressions of you, too meager to form anything but a phantasm. So when they attack you, they're really just attacking their own imagination and there is no need to take it personally.

• 1:09:33Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, I mean, when I first joined social media, uh, it started tweeting in two thousand and sixteen. I used to get quite upset when I used to get like nasty comments and stuff, you know. Like people would say stuff and, you know, it would get, I would, I would believe it in a way. I would be like, you know, they'd, they'd say stuff about me and I, you know, they'd call me like, um. Well, I, I, sometimes I'd just be called a dumb shit or whatever, you know. Sometimes people would say that, uh, I was a pseudo intellectual or whatever and. And I, I, back then, you know, I, I used to sort of think, oh, okay, I must have said something that was wrong, you know, for them to, to think that. And then I realised after a while. Hang on a second. I don't know anybody who I, um, engage with online.

• 1:10:15Gurwinder Bhogal?

  I don't actually know any of them. I don't have, even have an idea of who they are, really. But I've convinced myself that I know who they are. So therefore, I mean, the same must be happening to other people doing that to me. They, they couldn't possibly know who I really am. You know, they've only seen one or two of my posts and then they've built up a personality profile of me based on those two posts, you know. And, I mean, we barely know people that we know in real life. You can live with someone for five years and still not really understand who they are. And yet we seem to think that, you know, we can read one post by someone or, you know, watch one video by that person. And immediately we think that we know that person. And this is a very powerful illusion that influences, I think, almost every, in fact, I would say that everybody is afflicted by this delusion.

• 1:11:00Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Um, where we, we just get a tiny snippet of a person's words or their actions, just a tiny snippet. And from that, we just build this massive fictional character in our heads, you know, from that skeleton. You know, I mean, I actually, I think I did tweet something along the lines of that. I'll read it out to you. Um. Yeah, this was a tweet I recently sent, actually. So I'll read it. So it says, uh. "You are a different character in the mind of each person who knows you because their impression of you is made of the bones of what they've seen, fleshed out by a musculature of pure imagination." And I think that really sums up what we do when we see people online. Where, you know, we just have this bare bones, just bare bones, based on a very brief interaction with someone.

• 1:11:46Gurwinder Bhogal?

  And then from that, we create this whole fictional character who. Is very real in our minds, but doesn't actually exist outside of our own heads. And that is a person that we level our criticism at. That is a person that we level our praise at. And that is a person that will defend or attack in arguments and, you know, will develop all these theories about this person who doesn't actually exist. And that happens all of the time and it happens. I realised it was happening to me, you know, people were doing that to me. They would say things about me that just wasn't true, like, for instance, if I wrote a tweet that criticised the left. People would say that I was right wing, but I'm not right wing at all, you know. In fact, I'd say that, you know, I, I, I don't really have strong political opinions, but I'm probably a centrist overall, generally.

• 1:12:28Gurwinder Bhogal?

  I find that, you know, I agree with some of the left, agree with some of the right things and just merge them together, but. Left wingers, when I, when I criticise the left, people assume that I'm like some far right guy. And they'll be like, you know, they'll, they'll write, oh, you're, you're a crypto fascist. And then if I criticise the right, you know, um, then. So, yeah, if I criticise the right, then people say I'm a globalist libtard, you know. All this stuff like, you know, I'm a W E F shill or whatever, like, you know.

• 1:12:57Chris Williamson?

  There's never been a better time to insult someone than right now.

• 1:13:01Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Exactly. And I, and I'm just there, like, you know, before this would have really upset me, you know, it would have been like, just, just from the fact that it was just, because I wasn't used to it. I wasn't used to receiving all this hate, but. Now, when I read, I actually read it with a smile on my face, you know, I'm just like, because I know that this person is not actually attacking me, they're attacking their own imagination.

• 1:13:18Chris Williamson?

  Yes, well, here's one, uh, here's maybe a couple of, of interesting considerations to add in there. This is one of the reasons why audience capture is so dangerous, because the only way that someone can genuinely tilt at windmills is if they have an erroneous view of who you are really compared with what they've seen of you online. But if your entire persona has subsumed the person and you are playing a role on the internet. Quite rightly, they're pointing at the person that you are on the internet. And what you've done is you've basically become cooked by your own audience. You're now this marionette that's being played by the algorithm

• 1:14:03Chris Williamson?

  to the point where you do whatever it asks of you, you feed red meat to the, to the mob. So when someone does point the finger and say, you're a globalist shill, or you're a, a woke libtard, or you're a right wing racist or whatever, when someone does say that. Where is the firm place for you to stand? Where have you got that you can actually stand if you have sold your soul in order to gain notoriety online and your integrity is something that you can't buy back, no matter how much you try and pay for it? If you've done that, where is the, you can't grin when people criticize you because they're criticizing the contrived monster that you made, that you created yourself into.

• 1:14:50Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Absolutely. And it's a self reinforcing feedback loop as well because like if you're, if you're someone like, say, let's use an example, let's use someone like Tim Poole, for instance. Tim Poole was originally sort of like a kind of anti, he was, he was an occupied Wall Street guy and he was sort of, I'd say he's quite progressive, he's quite left. And he began to sort of flirt with some right leaning ideas and he developed a right wing audience. And over time, people on the left who were formerly followers of his, they began to attack him, you know, saying, oh, you're a right wing shill now, you know, you're racist, sexist, transphobe, blah, blah, blah.

• 1:15:30Gurwinder Bhogal?

  And so they were attacking this and what happened was that Tim began to take this, at least this is what it appears like to me, I don't know him personally, but this is what it seems like to me. He seems to have taken that to heart and he became gradually more and more right wing. So I mean, I would say he's probably on the right now. I don't know if he would agree with that, but based on what I know of his, his content, he seems to be pretty firmly conservative, although he calls himself a liberal, his, his opinions don't gel with his self perception. So I think he's, he's a pretty good idea of somebody who's succumbed to audience capture. He, he might still think he's a liberal, but all of his guests pretty much are people on the right or at best at the centre.

• 1:16:12Gurwinder Bhogal?

  He doesn't really have, he doesn't engage with left people very often. You know, the only time that I really remember him doing that in recent history was with Vijay Agadi on the Joe Rogan podcast. But generally, he seems to be pretty firmly on the right. He's got his, you know, his, his friends are people like the quartering who are also sort of somewhat, they call themselves liberal, but they're really more slightly to the right. And I think what's happened is When left people call people like Tim Poole out, what happens is this makes him even more audience captured because he then says, you know, I'm a centrist. How could you call me right wing? How can you call me a racist? I'm a centrist. And then he'll say, oh, no, no, no, it's not me who's moved. It's you who've moved.

• 1:16:54Gurwinder Bhogal?

  You have gone crazy and not me. And so he'll go even further to the right and say, these people are absolutely crazy. They're accusing me of being racist. And, you know, so it's like a self perpetuating cycle. And then he becomes a bit more right wing. So then the left attacking even more saying, oh, you know, you're racist. So it just keeps going on and on and on. And, you know, it happens, I think, across the spectrum. That's just one example. I mean, there are probably people who have done this, who've moved leftwards. And, you know, they've been attacked by people on the right due to that. And then they've gone even more to the left as a result of that. And so, yeah, it's a mutual sort of cycle symbiosis.

• 1:17:31Chris Williamson?

  There's another one that I think relates to what we've just spoken about, which is the principle of humanity. Every single person is exactly what you would be if you were them. This includes your political opponents. So instead of dismissing them as evil or stupid, maybe seek to understand the circumstances that led them to their conclusions.

• 1:17:51Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah. So, I mean, this is, again, this is part of why Rajaian rhetoric is so valuable. Because we don't really have a good idea of anybody that we'd be only online, you know. There are people that I've got relationships with online, who I feel like I know well, but I don't. I just don't because all I've seen is what they've chosen to show me. And when you, when all you've seen is what people have chosen to show you, there are selection effects to that. And you develop a very distorted idea of who they are. And this causes you to have assumptions about people and it can, you know, just cause you to have completely skewed reality. And the thing, so if you really want to understand who somebody really is,

• 1:18:37Gurwinder Bhogal?

  a much better strategy is to try to look at who, how they became who they were. Put yourself in their shoes and to reflect on. Their own internal logic, the internal logic of their own actions to try to understand. Because you've got to bear in mind that everybody does things that they think are right for them. You know, everybody, like every action that somebody takes, they take because they think it's the right thing to do. Even if it's the wrong thing to do, they think it's the right thing to do, which is why they do it. So if you can use that assumption to try to reverse engineer a person's life experience and find out why they did the things that they did, then you can develop a much more deeper understanding than if you simply look at what they've said online

• 1:19:23Gurwinder Bhogal?

  and what they've done online and, you know, what's been said about them or written about them. These are all going to be things that are sort of subject to selection effects, you know. People are always going to comment on the most extraordinary, most wildest, wildest things that people have done. They're not going to comment on the, the more mundane things that people do in their lives, you know. For every crazy, uh, cancelable thought that a person has, they have thousand opinions that are just run of the mill and mundane.

• 1:19:54Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:54Gurwinder Bhogal?

  But what happens is that if somebody says one thing that you don't like, you know, you'll, you'll basically just regard that one thought in that entire galaxy of thoughts that is their mind. And you're just, you know, you use that one little thought to just sort of judge them and to dismiss them or to fall in love with them or whatever, you know.

• 1:20:14Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:15Gurwinder Bhogal?

  And so it's, it's much more important to have a, a, a full holistic understanding of a person's life. Because what they show on, online is just, is nothing. It's, it's just, it's the tip of the iceberg. You can't see that massive iceberg that is all of the things that are motivating them behind the scenes of offline, you know, in their life.

• 1:20:33Chris Williamson?

  That's why, uh, the Rogan N word cancellation video didn't hold water. Because the way that mainstream media and cancellation attempts usually work is this is the smoking gun of his racist, transphobic, bigoted views that we always knew were there and we always told you were there. And I had, I had the inclination, do you remember? I said, I thought Joe Rogan was a racist. And this is the tip of the iceberg. The issue that you had with Rogan, his protective mechanism was that even a casual fan of his may have listened to 200 or 500 hours. And you know, there's some people out there that have listened to thousands and thousands of hours of him. They say, you're telling me this is the tip of the iceberg. I've seen the whole iceberg. I know that there's nothing lurking down there and I have reliable, difficult

• 1:21:16Chris Williamson?

  to falsify evidence that suggests that Joe is a reliable, good, non-begated guy. And that asymmetry, it's the vacuum and the holes with in somebody's personality persona that gets filled by speculation and accusation from the press. And if you have a sufficiently large body of work and a sufficiently big audience that's been exposed to enough of it, that's actually protective in that regard.

• 1:21:45Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, this is why cancel culture is fundamentally elitist and fundamentally anti-left. And I tried to use this argument before I wrote in that essay about why cancel culture is not actually left-wing. Because the only thing that cancel culture can cancel is people who don't really have much social media presence, people who don't have much clout, people who are largely powerless. There are occasional exceptions, but you know, in order for this to be an exception, you have to do something that's extremely beyond the pale, like, you know, sexual assault, something like that. If you just make a comment about something, then you're going to get cancelled if you don't have much clout, but you won't be cancelled

• 1:22:27Gurwinder Bhogal?

  if you have a lot of clout and a lot of people know you well online, you know, famous people very, very rarely get cancelled for just one thing that they say. Whereas poor people or people who are just ordinary people, you know, like that lady, I always think of that lady who, I don't even remember her name, which is telling, I suppose. But, you know, she said that she was going to go to, she was going to hop on a flight to Africa and she was, she wanted people to pray for her that she didn't get AIDS or something like that.

• 1:22:54Chris Williamson?

  Lol joke.

• 1:22:55Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Only joking.

• 1:22:55Chris Williamson?

  I'm white. Yeah, that was like a decade ago.

• 1:22:58Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Just a thoughtless, yeah, it was a stupid tweet. It was just a thoughtless tweet that, how many thoughtless tweets do people send or, you know, thoughtless posts that people don't even think about? They just post it just thinking that it's being funny. I've done that plenty of times. I've not. Said anything probably that stupid, but I've said stuff that's almost as stupid as that. Um, and you know, it's, it could have been any one of us who, who said something like that, really. And it was just off the cuff. She did it before she got on to the plane. When she got off the plane, she realised that it had blown up and pretty much everybody knew who she was. And now she was, yeah, her life was over, you know, which is, it was really, it's actually quite sad, but it was, I mean, it was weirdly amusing, but it was also really sad. Like, because she did lose um, her, her livelihood as a result of that.

• 1:23:42Gurwinder Bhogal?

  And if she was more famous, she wouldn't have lost that livelihood. Because not only because of the things that you just mentioned about people would know from her past experience, she probably wasn't a racist person. You know, she, there are plenty of people that I know personally who are not racist, who occasionally make jokes about race, you know, uh. Who, you know, that it just happens. It's just, it's just a commonplace thing, but people online act as though if you make one joke that's mildly racist, that means that you literally want to start Holocaust. And, you know, you want to wipe out non-white people or whatever, like, you know. There's a massive difference between those two things, you know, there's, there's people who joke about racism, but they wouldn't judge somebody by their race in the real world.

• 1:24:23Gurwinder Bhogal?

  They wouldn't, you know, uh, they, they wouldn't do that. But then there's people out there who, who would, who would do that. And then the two groups often get confused and this happens a lot. But if you actually know somebody like Joe Rogan in your example, if you have a long history of, of listening to that person. Then you get, you realise that they're one of the, the group that might occasionally say something that's offensive, but isn't one of those people, isn't like a racist, isn't sexist. You know, so.

• 1:24:49Chris Williamson?

  I wonder if, uh, I wonder if this relates to, is it Brandalini's law and concept creep? So as a particular social uh, problem becomes uh, more rare, the definition of that needs to be expanded. And with Brandalini's law, as the living standards in a society rise, people's expectations rise along with it.

• 1:25:11Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, so that's so the first one you got correct there. That's yeah. The second one's not Brandon Lee's law, that's Tocqueville paradox.

• 1:25:17Chris Williamson?

  I knew it. I bloody, I bloody knew it.

• 1:25:20Gurwinder Bhogal?

  But yeah, you've got all the other ones correct though. So that's fair enough.

• 1:25:23Chris Williamson?

  I knew that there would be a fucking quiz at some point. Right, next one, next one. Overblown implications effect. We think people judge us by a single success or failure, but they don't. If you mess up one meal, no one thinks you're a bad chef. And if you have one great idea, no one thinks you're a genius. People just aren't thinking about you that much.

• 1:25:44Gurwinder Bhogal?

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

• 1:26:27Gurwinder Bhogal?

  to basically take away, you know, if, if, if you're focusing on what other people think about you, you won't really live your life how you want to live it. You won't have that sense of independence. You'll be completely dependent on what other people think or what you think other people think about you. But in reality,

• 1:26:44Gurwinder Bhogal?

  people just don't care. People are more worried about how they appear to you than about how you appear to them. You know, like 10 years ago, if I was to go on this show, like you've got 750,000 subscribers, right? If I was here thinking about what 750,000 people are thinking about me, you know, while I'm saying this, this stuff right now, I would, I'd be paralyzed. I wouldn't be able to do anything. I'd be here like stuttering and I'd just be like, you know, I wouldn't be able to say anything because I just, my mind would be completely filled with the thoughts of 750,000 people thinking of me. The way I look at it is people are going to watch this episode. They'll probably take some good things from it, hopefully, if, if all goes to plan. But they won't really remember.

• 1:27:25Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Me much, they won't remember my mistakes that I said, you know, whatever, if I said something wrong, they won't really remember it. They won't focus on it, they're not going to stalk me, I'm not attractive enough to be stalked. So I don't really need to worry about all of these things, you know, you know, I'm just basically

• 1:27:44Chris Williamson?

  Don't speak too soon, mate.

• 1:27:46Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, well, I think it takes something quite drastic for that to happen. But like, yeah, I mean, generally speaking, I'm, you know, I find that you just end up, another thing is that you actually end up looking a lot better to other people if you don't care too much what they think of you. And this is not to say that you shouldn't, I'm not into that whole, you know, you shouldn't give a fuck and all that shit. I don't think that's, that's really good. I think you should care what people think, but you shouldn't, you shouldn't be constantly focusing on what they think of you. You know, you should, you should just make an effort just to be relaxed and just to be yourself. Not, not because of, you know, like, you, you want people to, I mean,

• 1:28:28Gurwinder Bhogal?

  really, I mean, the main reason I want, I think that you should try to be yourself is because if you try to be someone who's fake, then you have to essentially create that character and you have to become that character. So essentially it's a prelude to audience capture. You know, if you try to be someone you're not, if you're constantly focusing on how you appear to others, you'll stop being who you really are and you'll begin to play to that audience and you'll essentially be acting in the limelight of their gaze and you will cease to be who you actually are, which is dangerous.

• 1:29:01Chris Williamson?

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

• 1:29:44Chris Williamson?

  combining all of your predispositions and genetics with life experiences and traumas, that is worthy of love and acceptance and praise and all the rest of it. Like, that's so fulfilling. And it was one of the things that I really noticed transitioning from an industry where I did have to be more performative, oddly had to be more performative as a guy stood in the front door of a nightclub than a guy that talks on a podcast. I found that I would do and say things that were incongruous with who I really was, even though I wasn't necessarily doing the self-assessment to realize it. It's only in retrospect that I got to to work out that I was playing this role. But someone would ask me my opinion and I would think, okay, what

• 1:30:23Chris Williamson?

  does Gwinda want to hear from me at this moment? What should I say in order to engender the most positive response that I can get from him? And it was fucking crippling. Like, it was it was absolutely crippling because I'm permanently playing this meta-me game. I'm always having to be one degree of separation removed. I don't actually have an opinion. I don't actually hold any truths myself. What I hold are various avatars that all need to exist in my mind at one time because the you that I am, the me that I am for you, and the me that I am for my housemate, and the me that I am for my mum, and the me that I am for all of the other people in my life, all need to be very carefully held and remembered. And what did I say to him last

• 1:31:07Chris Williamson?

  time? What was my opinion about that? Did I think it was going to be Tommy Fury or Jake Paul that was going to win? And da, da, da, da. Like, all of that, all of that, it's incredibly computationally, it's basically impossible.

• 1:31:17Gurwinder Bhogal?

  It is. Yeah, I mean, there's a quote that's been attributed to Mark Twain. I don't know if he actually said it, but it's attributed to him. And it's something like, if you tell the truth, then you don't need to remember anything. And I think that that really saves you a lot of energy. You know, if you are just who you really are, and you just are relaxed, and just say what you really think, and you don't try to put on a front. It just saves so much energy in in interactions, you know, I used to be exhausted in interactions, social interactions, because I was constantly acting, I was constantly trying to impress, or I was constantly trying to be the person that I thought people expected me to be. And it, like you said, you know, it's this constant sort of computational

• 1:32:01Gurwinder Bhogal?

  sort of power, like just to be, you know, your brain's being fried by all this, you know, circuitry firing off. And it it's just not good, because you end up not being who you really are, and you end up taxing yourself, you end up sort of exhausting yourself to be someone who you who you're not. And at the end of it all, people probably don't even fucking remember. So.

• 1:32:22Chris Williamson?

  Yes, after all of that, and they didn't even fucking care. Yes.

• 1:32:26Gurwinder Bhogal?

  It's something that exists only in your head.

• 1:32:28Chris Williamson?

  Let's get, let's try and get one or two more in, because some of these are so good. And I've got enough to do another episode that we haven't got through. So meme theory, an ideology parastatizes the mind, changing the host's behaviour so they spread it to other people. Therefore, a successful ideology, the only kind we hear about, is not configured to be true, it is configured only to be easily transmitted and easily believed.

• 1:32:54Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, I think this idea is one of my favourite ideas, because I think it explains so much of the information landscape. If you, if you look at the sort of the dominant ideologies on the on the internet right now, you'll see that they're all adapted, evolutionarily adapted, for nothing else than their own propagation. And so, I mean, we like to use the sort of woke ideologies as an example, because it's one of the most prominent ideologies right now. And wokeism is a very powerful idea in terms of, it's a very fertile idea, it spreads very quickly,

• 1:33:34Gurwinder Bhogal?

  because it allows people to signal compassion, open-mindedness, cosmopolitanism, and all of these very highly prized social forms, forms of social capital, basically. So that if, you know, if something is good at making people look good, then it's obviously going to be adopted, like a fashion, that's that's the very definition of a fashion. A fashion is something that emerges that, in the current age, makes people look like they're sophisticated, clued up. Cosmopolitan, you know, all of these things, and that's exactly what wokeism does. The claims of wokeism are false. You know, if you look on Wikipedia, they're presented as fact.

• 1:34:15Gurwinder Bhogal?

  So for instance, implicit association tests, they're pure pseudoscience. And yet, if you go on Wikipedia, you'll see that, you know, Wikipedia will claim that implicit association tests can can determine whether someone is a racist or not. The fact of the matter is, is that in experiments, implicit association tests are as reliable as lie detectors. You could give somebody the same implicit association test twice and have radically different results each time. In fact, that's what often happens. So they don't really measure anything apart from what you're thinking at a specific moment in time. But because if you believe in implicit association tests and you believe in implicit bias and all this other stuff, and white fragility and everything else that comes from that, then suddenly you're clued up. Especially if you're a white person, if you're a white person who believes in white fragility,

• 1:35:00Gurwinder Bhogal?

  then this signals, oh, look, I'm a white person, but I hold white people to account for, you know, their crimes against black people. So therefore, I'm a very selfless person. You know, I'm doing things that are not in my own interests. So therefore, I'm a very compassionate person. I'm very altruistic and all this. It signals very, very powerful things to other people online. And that's one of the reasons why wokeism has become such a powerful force in the world. And, you know, it's, it's not just wokeism. I mean, we can use other examples. We can use the, the posing ideology. We can use basism, you know, being based, being red pilled. This idea that, you know, you should just not care what anybody else thinks. You should be who you want to be and all sorts of this. This ideology is very powerful because

• 1:35:45Gurwinder Bhogal?

  it signals to others that you are strong, that you, you don't fold. But, you know, when you're met with the, sort of the mob, the woke mob, you don't, you know, you're basically, you're independent minded and all this other stuff. So. A lot of these, in fact, all of the dominant ideologies now, they all offer things besides anything epistemic. So they don't have epistemic value. They're not, they don't have value in being true. They have value in what they allow you to signal to others. And so this is really why these ideologies are so powerful. It's why they have taken over. That's why meme theory and cultural paritism, paritism, by the, by the way, this is an idea that

• 1:36:29Gurwinder Bhogal?

  was originally formulated by Richard Dawkins. I adapted it a little bit in my, in my tweet to sort of, you know, just to sort of sum, sum it up in one tweet. But yeah, the, the original credit for this idea comes from Richard Dawkins. He was the first to realise, I mean, he applied this idea to religion. Because he saw that, you know, religion is not configured to be true. It's configured to be easily disseminated and easily believed. And, you know, in his view, what gave religion value was not its epistemic claims, but the idea that it gives people comfort from death. It allows them to, it gives them meaning to their lives. It gives them purpose. It gives them something to aspire to.

• 1:37:13Gurwinder Bhogal?

  And then people like Nassim, Nicholas Taleb and Jordan Peterson added new

• 1:37:19Gurwinder Bhogal?

  benefits to it, saying that it was also an ancestral memory which helped to codify culture and people's, you know, ideas that work, sort of thing. So, you know, it was basically like a kind of, it was a repository of knowledge. Religion was a repository of knowledge through which people would encode ideas that worked in, in everyday life.

• 1:37:42Chris Williamson?

  Tell you what's interesting is something that I've noticed. A lot of people who 10, 20, 40 years ago would have been very anti-religion, you know, forthcoming atheists.

• 1:37:56Chris Williamson?

  Now are lamenting the loss of something that looks an awful lot like religion. Douglas Murray is a great friend, but you know, he wrote The Strange Death of Europe. He talked quite heavily about the problems that occurred there. And he wasn't exactly one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, but he wasn't like, he was tangential to that group. And obviously Sam Harris as well. But Douglas's second last book, The Madness of Crowds, was all about the collapse of grand narratives. The whole purpose was that we have lost ourselves in the world and that people are now praying at the altar of pretty shitty gods. Sam Harris as well, talking about similar lines. I haven't spoken to either of them about, you know, what are your views on religion?

• 1:38:36Chris Williamson?

  But I think that both of them would say, bloody hell, it would be nice if we had a grand narrative that held the entire nation together and gave people a shared sense of belonging. What do you think's going on there? Is that, has the vacuum that's been left by the exit of religion allowed even worse things to be sucked in? And are people now wondering how much baby was thrown out with the bathwater?

• 1:38:58Gurwinder Bhogal?

  This is a question that has occupied me for a very long time. And I'm gonna be, I'm gonna write a long essay about this at some point, because I've been entertaining this idea for years. And I do, I do accept that. I think I'm one of those people, I was one of the new atheists sort of crowd kind of people. I mean, I wasn't, I wasn't one of like, you know, I wasn't sort of a famous person or anything, but I was somebody who grew up listening to Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris and people like that. And, you know, I, I did think that religion was pretty much an unmitigated disaster for a long time. And then with the rise of wokeness and these alternative ideologies.

• 1:39:36Chris Williamson?

  Well, you thought that was bad. Let us, let us give you this.

• 1:39:40Gurwinder Bhogal?

  And then I realized that, hang on a second. I mean, I was also influenced, I was somewhat influenced by the ideas of people like, there's a great evolutionary psychologist called Steve Stuart Williams. He's a professor at the University of Nottingham.

• 1:39:53Chris Williamson?

  The Ako Understood, The Ako Understood the Universe is the best evolutionary psychology book of all time.

• 1:40:00Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I would I would definitely recommend that as anybody who who wants like a a good grounding in evolutionary theory should read that because it's easy to understand and it's very colorfully written and it's just beautifully explained. Um, yeah, I mean, from his work and also from the work of a few other thinkers, I sort of realised that, hang on a second, religion actually did have some kind of a function. I mean, I don't think Steve actually made this claim himself, but he had his he had an adjacent claim, which was that culture is the means by which we codify sort of heuristics, essentially. So, you know, we justify heuristics by sort of giving them this kind of divine authority. And that's how they survive through

• 1:40:44Gurwinder Bhogal?

  the generations, their past from one generation to the next, useful heuristics for living life. For instance, you know, like avoiding uncooked pork or whatever, like, you know, because of the trichinosis and other parasites.

• 1:40:57Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's the, what is it, the literally, uh, was it

• 1:41:04Chris Williamson?

  figuratively true but literally false?

• 1:41:06Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And he had, Steve, Stuart Williams, has this idea called cumulative culture, which is the idea that

• 1:41:14Gurwinder Bhogal?

  individually you and I are not very smart. We don't really, if we were left alone in this world, we would not survive for very long. The only reason we have the value, the sort of information that we have and the knowledge that we have is because of all the information that was transmitted to our generation by past generations through culture. So it's because we're part of this culture that we have learned all of the things that our previous generations learned and survived to tell the tale, you know. So, you know, if we were just an isolated individual with no past, we would, we would not have, like, we would, we would be born in this world, we would probably gain a rudimentary understanding of things like gravity, because things would fall. When we, you know, if we dropped an apple, it would fall. So we would realise, okay, gravity is a thing. We wouldn't call it gravity,

• 1:41:58Gurwinder Bhogal?

  but we would just know it as a force that causes things to fall to the earth. And then from there, we would gradually, very slowly. Just very slowly accumulate information. But the fact of the matter is, is that there are people who have been there before us, who have learned all of these things before. And they supercharge our knowledge when we're born. Because when we go to school, we learn about gravity, we learn about all of these other things that have happened, all the things that passed. So we are the sort of cumulative experience of all past generations. And religion is the means by which this information is transmitted from generation to generation. That's why I call it an ancestral memory. Because it's like a memory for our species as a whole. And so there is value, I think there is value in religion. That's one thing.

• 1:42:42Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Another aspect of religion is that it does preserve a sense of order. Which we've seen collapse now with, you know, the sort of rise of crazy gender ideology and all sorts of stuff. Um, you know, religion did have a certain purpose in that it it kept people in this sort of system where things were structured. And there was, you know, order essentially, we impose order on a chaotic world by inventing myths and by following these myths as if they are the law. And so there is that kind of value. I didn't appreciate that until relatively recently. And I think, I actually did a lot of research into this and I found that, yes, wokeness, I think, has definitely, at least in part, been caused by

• 1:43:27Gurwinder Bhogal?

  the abandonment of religion. And I say this as an atheist, I'm a staunch atheist. I'm convinced that there is no God. But at least not in this universe, there might be in other universes. But at the same time, I also, I accept that the loss of religion did play a part in the rise of wokeness. And this can actually be traced because there, if you look at one of the ways that wokeness became such a big issue, became such a big ideology. It was through something called atheism plus, which was a movement that sort of arose at the tail end of new atheism.

• 1:44:06Gurwinder Bhogal?

  When a group of people on the left, like P C Myers, who's a biologist. He was one of the leaders of the movement. They basically came to the conclusion that if we, if, if new atheism is going to kill religion, we're going to need something to replace it. We're going to need a new system of values. And it's kickstarted this movement of new atheists, basically that decided that the best way to, the best thing to replace religion with is social justice. So they came out with this thing called atheism plus. And this was a massive thing. I mean, this, you know, people, a lot of people who were part of this ended up becoming involved in

• 1:44:48Gurwinder Bhogal?

  things like Gamergate. And a lot of the early woke combat with the sort of right began out of this. There was a lady called, I've forgotten her name, Rachel. Do you remember the, the Lyft incident where there was a, there was a atheist, I think her name was Rachel, Rachel something. I've forgotten her name, but she was quite prominent around 2012, 2011, 2012. Basically, she was a new atheist who became like one of the, the main sort of people in atheism plus. And she had this sort of incident in a Lyft where a guy joked about going to the lingerie section or something. And she said it was like misogynistic and it kicked up a massive fuss and even Richard Dawkins got involved. What was her name? Rachel, Rachel Watson, I think her name was. Let me just quickly

• 1:45:33Gurwinder Bhogal?

  check it online just to check. I don't want to incriminate the wrong person.

• 1:45:36Chris Williamson?

  Accuse the wrong Rachel Watson.

• 1:45:38Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah. Yeah. Rachel Watson. I think her name was Rachel Watson, something like that. But it's not important. I mean, sorry, Rebecca Watson. It was Rebecca Watson. Yeah, Rebecca Watson. But yeah, she was one of them. And then Matt Dillahunty was another guy. He was another one who, who was part of this movement. And then the aforementioned PZ Myes. And what they did is basically they, these people went extremely hard into the whole social justice stuff. But they went so hard, they were, they basically led to the rise of this website called Rational Wiki. Have you heard of that?

• 1:46:13Chris Williamson?

  I have heard of that. Rational Wiki is a And that's now like

• 1:46:16Gurwinder Bhogal?

  It's probably

• 1:46:17Chris Williamson?

  Just a laundry list of all of the unspeakable people from the right.

• 1:46:21Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, and Rational Wiki emerged out of Atheism Plus. It's basically Rational Wiki is the worst. Okay, it's not the worst website on the internet, but it's it's the worst website that appears on the first page of Google search results for most searches. It's quite a popular website, but it's because a lot of people see the term Rational Wiki and they assume that it's rational. They assume that it's a rational wiki.

• 1:46:43Chris Williamson?

  Well rounded.

• 1:46:44Gurwinder Bhogal?

  But it's anything but. Yeah, exactly. It basically exists just to shame people for having views that are not woke, basically. And this was a major, this was a major facilitator of wokeness in the first half of the 2010s. And even in the sort of like first half of the 2000s, I think, it's the latter half of the 2000s. Because this was really like a massive push by new atheists who wanted something to replace the loss of religion with, and they found it in social justice. And then that movement gradually it dovetailed with critical race theory and with critical theory. Critical theory and critical race theory are two different things. And, you know, gender ideology and all sorts of stuff.

• 1:47:28Gurwinder Bhogal?

  They all dovetailed together and they sort of formed wokeness, the Great Awakening, which was in the sort of, you know, 2012, 2013. But Atheism Plus was a major sort of facilitator of wokeness. Nobody has written about this so far. But I've done a lot of research into it and I'm going to write an essay on this at some point.

• 1:47:46Chris Williamson?

  Get the article written, mate. Look, dude, let's, let's bring this one home. Everybody needs to subscribe to your Substack, everyone that is listening. Where should they go for that and what else should they follow?

• 1:47:58Gurwinder Bhogal?

  So, yeah, Substack is G U R W I N D E R dot Substack dot com. It's much better if I just spell out the name because people never know how to spell my name. And my Twitter is G underscore S underscore B H O G A L at basically, that's Twitter, yeah, at Twitter.

• 1:48:18Chris Williamson?

  What are you gonna write? What are you gonna write next?

• 1:48:22Gurwinder Bhogal?

  So the next thing I'm working on is about the AI misinformation explosion and how it's actually a good thing. It's not a bad thing. It's actually a good thing. It's gonna

• 1:48:34Chris Williamson?

  That's one hell of a fucking open loop. Jesus Christ. Yeah. Did you see? Yeah. You see that Eliyahu Katsky is believes that language learning models are causing so much of a problem that he's removed his sabbatical from doing podcasts. That's

• 1:48:50Gurwinder Bhogal?

  I've watched his part. I actually watched it. I watched his podcast recently. There's a podcast entitled something like, we're all gonna die or something like that. And I thought, okay, I've got to watch this because, you know, I respect Eliza. I think he's a very smart guy. And I agree with a lot of what he says. I don't agree with everything he says. I think he does slightly oversell the threat of AI, but not by much, not by much. I think a lot of his points are very important. And I think

• 1:49:16Chris Williamson?

  A much needed counterweight to the, oh, it's just, they're just telling us

• 1:49:21Gurwinder Bhogal?

  The techno utopians. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. And I will, I will be covering his theories at some point as well. I'm going to be writing a lot more often now. Because I'm going to be just doing this full time. I've been meaning to do it full time, Substack full time. I haven't gotten around to it yet, but I'm going to be doing this thing full time very soon. And I'm going to be churning out articles a lot more often.

• 1:49:41Chris Williamson?

  Good. That's good for me. That gives me more stuff to talk about. That gives me more excuses to bring you back on. I absolutely adore every time that you come on. Everyone needs to go subscribe to your Substack and follow you on Twitter. Dude, until next time. I appreciate you.

• 1:49:53Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Thanks, Chris. Always a pleasure.