Shocking Psychology Lessons To Understand People Better - 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 every debate is fundamentally an argument about the definition of words, whether modern men are right to believe they would be better off living in medieval times, why people fighting injustice might actually be suffering with an identity crisis, why so many people go shopping for their opinions online, how the culture divide we have today stemmed from our tribal roots, why over analysing Tweets is a waste of your time and much more... Sponsors: Get the Whoop 4.0 for free and get your first month for free at http://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 15% discount on Craftd London’s jewellery at https://craftd.com/modernwisdom (use code MW15) Get over 37% discount on all products site-wide from MyProtein at https://bit.ly/proteinwisdom (use code: MODERNWISDOM) Extra Stuff: Follow Gurwinder's Substack - https://gurwinder.substack.com/ Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - 00:00 The Internet is Saturated with Garbage 10:27 Why People Compare Opponents to Nazis So Quickly 14:34 Why is Happiness Evolutionary? 26:09 When Incels Think They Would Be Better Suited to Medieval Times 36:33 A Crisis of Purpose is a Privilege 41:00 Why Activists Can Never Be Content 47:14 We Don’t Take Expert Advice Unless We Agree With It 56:26 Does Karma Really Exist? 1:00:10 The Issue with Tribalism in the Digital Age 1:08:00 Intelligent People Can Often Have Stupid Opinions 1:17:09 Challenging Chris’s Vestigial Pattern Bias 1:26:15 The War for Public Sympathy on Social Media 1:39:30 Why the Female Boss Role in Hollywood Isn’t Working 1:47:27 Societal Consequences of Grind Culture 1:52:57 Judging People from the Past Whilst Ignoring the Sins of the Present 2:03:24 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.

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  You've become the intellectual Nicocado Avocado. You are obese obese with interesting ideas. So we're going to go through as many as we can get through today. My first one, one of my favorites, idiocy saturation. Online, people who don't think before they post are able to post more often than people who do. As a result, the average social media post is stupider than the average social media user. Worth remembering whenever Twitter dumbassery drives you to despair.

• 0:30Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah. So by Twitter dumbassery, what I mean is if you just go onto Twitter and unfiltered and you're not sort of, you don't have a curated feed and you just look at the posts, it makes you want to blow your brains out just because there's just so much garbage. It's just an avalanche of garbage. And it kind of like, when I first went onto Twitter, I got a really low opinion of humanity because I was fooled into believing that this was reflective of what humans actually think. But it actually took me a bit of time to realize that the stuff that you see on social media is overwhelmingly, it consists of stuff that people have posted hastily without thought. Because the people who really think about what they're posting, they take a lot longer to post. And so naturally, it's going to be

• 1:15Gurwinder Bhogal?

  filled with stuff like, oh, I'm tired lol, you know, I'm going to go to bed lol, and stuff like meaningless nonsense like that is going to be the stuff that makes the majority of social media posts. And I think this is why it's so important to curate your feed. Because I always say that a social media feed is the worst possible source of information you can have. But a well curated social media feed is amongst the very best sources of information you can have. It makes such a difference. It's the difference between hell and heaven. And a large part of that really consists of filtering out people who don't think before they post, people who just give in to their worst impulses and just follow

• 1:57Gurwinder Bhogal?

  their whims, rather than actually following their logic and their rationality.

• 2:01Chris Williamson?

  What was that insight you had around how famous people will tweet some half baked idea whilst they're sat on the toilet that will then be studied by the entire world for the next three weeks?

• 2:13Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, I mean, I mean, this was kind of like a guess, but I think that this is true. I suspect it's true. I think we kind of, what's happened is that people have a tendency to over interpret information online. So they'll read into information a lot more than was intended. And, I mean, I call this the politicization of Babel, basically. I think that's what it what it actually is, is a lot of people don't look, because they don't think before they post, they're just making a comment about something that just off the top of their head. It's just something that's come very sort of, you know, quickly to their mind, and it's something that they just vomit out. They don't really think about it. And then what happens is you get people on the other side of the world who will see that.

• 2:55Gurwinder Bhogal?

  And they will assume that this is a hill that the person's willing to die on, something that they've spent their entire life thinking about. And they will scrutinize it and dissect it and evaluate it and write essays on it. And I've seen this happen a lot, you know, with, I mean, nowadays you get whole articles, whole news articles written about one tweet. You know, some if some famous person like Elon Musk, if he just, just, you know, farts out a tweet, uh, then you'll get like a BBC journalist will basically just lock on to that tweet and then they'll just write a whole piece about it. And they'll they'll just completely scrutinize it as though they could sort of give a psychological profile based on this one tweet, you know? And I think that's very dangerous because most people don't think very much before they tweet. It's just a whim. It's like

• 3:40Gurwinder Bhogal?

  when you go and meet somebody and you have a cocktail party and then they just start just talking. They're not, they're not really thinking. They're just trying to make conversation. Um, so they'll just say stuff that they don't even mean half the time. And I think this is something that people need to realize is that when people say things, it doesn't necessarily mean that they mean what they're saying. Sometimes people are just, they're just sort of experimenting, you know, they're just kind of throwing out ideas out there just to see what people think of it. And to be honest, I do that as well. I don't actually uh firmly believe a lot of the stuff that I tweet out. I just tweet it out just to see how people react. And, you know, then I can maybe sort of calibrate what I'm thinking based on that. Um. So, yeah, we shouldn't take what people tweet out or what they post seriously online

• 4:24Gurwinder Bhogal?

  most of the time, because they might feel differently five minutes after. In fact, I do that all the time. You know, I'll tweet something and then I'll just, five minutes after I tweeted it, I've got a completely different opinion. And I'm like, actually, what I just tweeted was a load of shit, you know, and um, yeah, so I think people need to to bear that in mind. Scott Adams actually had a really good uh idea where he he calls it the forty eight hour rule, where he says that we should never judge what a person has posted until forty eight hours have passed, and we've given that person a chance to retract what they've said. Obviously, this is not feasible, it's not something that you could actually do in real life, because, you know, you you can't wait forty eight hours after every opinion. But the I like the idea behind it, because I think

• 5:07Gurwinder Bhogal?

  a lot of what people say is essentially, it's kind of like just a untamed frisson of some sensation that they've had in their in their mind, you know, something that's just kind of triggered them to just say something. Um, and they haven't really, so they haven't domesticated it, they haven't really, you know, tamed it. So it's just a wild idea that's just kind of run rampant in their head and they've just decided to just, you know, let it out of the cage.

• 5:34Chris Williamson?

  The uh, this is, this is facilitated by the frictionlessness of social media. You know, previously, if you wanted to use the Gutenberg printing press to actually get something down onto paper, the you would make sure that you'd spent some time thinking about what you were going to get this one very, very small slot that you had to be able to produce your incredibly important pamphlet or whatever you're talking about. But you're right, that the the frictionlessness allows brain to mouth or brain to fingertips to be instantaneous. This is something that I realized around the Jordan Peterson uh Sports Illustrated Girl Furore, was it last year, I think? And I I love Jordan, he's been a massive influence on me and he's very, very kind to me. But things like that.

• 6:19Chris Williamson?

  People tried to dissect exactly what was going on in the inner recesses of Jordan's mind when he said, sorry, not beautiful and no amount of totalitarian overreach will convince me otherwise. Everything about that tweet and almost everything really that the older guys on Twitter are putting out can be understood if you remember that they're boomers. All that you need to do is just remember the fact that they're a bit right. Filter it through. This isn't somebody who has a particularly additionally sophisticated Twitter habit or process that they go through before they construct a tweet. You know, our friends,

• 7:01Chris Williamson?

  some of our friends who are way, way less famous, George Mack, yourself, you know, these guys craft tweets over, over weeks. It takes weeks and weeks to come up with these huge mega threads and George will show me his notes and he's building them up over time and all this sort of stuff. I guarantee that Jordan took less than three minutes probably to type that tweet out. And yet it's then going to be indicative of his pathologization. Let's get the psychiatrists in to work out. Oh, is this something to do with his unrequited Jungian archetype from the like, no, no, no, no, no. Like it's just, he saw an image of a, he saw an image of a girl on Sports Illustrated that he didn't like and he had a crack and maybe, you know, maybe he'd been gassy that day. Maybe, maybe he'd had a shit

• 7:46Chris Williamson?

  night's sleep because of builders next door. Like, yeah, the frictionlessness facilitates this.

• 7:51Gurwinder Bhogal?

  And I think, I think it's the tweets that people don't think about very much that tend to be the ones that people talk about most.

• 7:58Chris Williamson?

  Oh, absolutely.

• 8:00Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah. Because, because if it's reasonable, if you've actually spent a long time thinking about it, then it's going to be reasonable. And if it's reasonable, it's not going to outrage people. It's not going to make people sort of, it's not going to stir up emotions in people because it's going to be the antithesis of that. It's going to be something calm, measured, reasonable. But if you are just firing off what's the first thought that just instantly comes into your head, then it's by definition not going to be reasonable. It's going to be something that's impulsive and that's going to make other people impulsive. And they're going to react to it in that same kind of language, as it were, the language of sort of the animal language of, of human nature, rather than the language of reason. And so I think that's one of the dangerous things about social media is that it tends

• 8:43Gurwinder Bhogal?

  to favor ideas that people don't think very much about, people that just sort of.

• 8:49Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Are a product of human whim rather than human reason.

• 8:52Chris Williamson?

  There's a associated idea you had, Shaker's Law, those who announce their departure from an online discussion almost never actually leave.

• 9:02Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, I mean, I've got no way of knowing whether this is true as a kind of general rule of law, but I think it's, it's probably, it's something I suspect is probably true, because I personally haven't really sort of engaged in, in arguments with people very much recently. But when I used to, I used to spend a lot of time on, on Twitter, just arguing with people. And I would often get people who would just say, oh, I've had enough of this, you know, this, this, it's not worth my time, you know, and all this stuff. And then I would say something that would just bait them out again. And then they'd come back and they'd be like, ah, so, you know, this happened so many times that I just thought, yeah, this has got to be real.

• 9:38Chris Williamson?

  Needs to be.

• 9:40Gurwinder Bhogal?

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

• 10:05Chris Williamson?

  One of my, one of my most interesting things that I see on the internet is people who do announce that they're going to unfollow somebody, as if that announcement of them unfollowing them wasn't the first time that that person they were following had ever heard of them. It's like, I, I wasn't even aware of your existence up until this moment, but it's like saying goodbye on the way out of the door, or like hello on the way out of the door, I don't know. But there's another one as well, Godwin's Law, to add on to this, as an online discussion grows, the probability of a comparison to Nazis or Hitler approaches 100%. Most people are quick to compare things to Nazi Germany because it's the only history they know.

• 10:43Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, so I think this is an instance of the availability heuristic. So one of the ideas that comes most sort of freshest to mind in people's minds when they think of history is Hitler and the Nazis, because it's one thing that we constantly talk at school. It's the one thing that is basically because it's it's got all the sort of it's got all the elements of a narrative sort of box office smash, you know, it's a story of good against evil. To an extent, I mean, if you don't include Stalin on the Allies, you know, and it's basically about kind of, you know, people who wanted freedom from tyranny against essentially a tyrant.

• 11:25Gurwinder Bhogal?

  And the good guys weren't in the end, you know, obviously, this is a simplification, but this is the general sort of way it's portrayed and and it's just a timeless classic. It's something that you'd find in a movie. And so because it's so cinematic and because of all the stuff involved, I mean, it's got so many crazy stories in there, you know, and the story of the Enigma machine. We've got Oppenheimer now, which is going to be a hit film and all these crazy stories within the sort of remit of World War Two make it something that is very memorable. And a lot of people will focus on that. A lot of people who don't know anything about history know about World War Two and they know about the Nazis and they know about-

• 12:02Chris Williamson?

  They think they know about that.

• 12:04Gurwinder Bhogal?

  They think they know, yeah.

• 12:05Chris Williamson?

  They think they know about World War Two. Do you not know that Nazi was actually socialist? It was actually the part of the Socialist Party? And then it just gets into a game of linguistic. There should be a rule, you need to come up with one, which is almost all arguments online devolve into a game of lexical Brazilian Jiu Jitsu over time. Because almost all of it is just, that's not the term that I mean precisely. You're using that word in the wrong way. What is the word woman in any case? Do you not know that Nazi meant socialist? Nazis were far left, not far right. Stalin wasn't a blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Do you know what I mean?

• 12:44Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Absolutely, yeah. I mean, there is actually a law about this, actually. Let me see if I can find it in my list of rules, because I've forgotten the name of it. But it's, there's actually a, let me just quickly go through them, right, so I can find it.

• 13:02Gurwinder Bhogal?

  So I find it, Lane's Law. So every debate is ultimately a debate about the definition of words. So for instance, you know, many examples of this, but one example would be gender, for instance. So if you're, you know, if you, if there's an argument between a gender critical person and a trans rights activist, the debate will almost always end with them discussing what gender is. And if there's a debate about free will, it will almost always end with them discussing what free will is. And likewise socialism, you know, like socialism will mean a different thing to a leftist as it will mean to a right rightist. And so this is called Lane's Law, and it's basically the, the idea that every debate ultimately is a debate about the definition of words. I think that's actually accurate. I don't think it's, it's probably not like a universal law.

• 13:44Gurwinder Bhogal?

  It's not, it's not true in every single instance, but I think it's a true enough law that it's a good rule of thumb.

• 13:50Chris Williamson?

  Agreed.

• 13:50Gurwinder Bhogal?

  And that's why, yeah, I think in most debates, it becomes like a contest between, it's like one, one person's playing tennis and one person is playing baseball. Because they're using different definitions for terms based on their tribe. Because every tribe has got its own definitions, you know, it has its own definitions of what certain words mean. And so when people from two different tribes are arguing, they're using their own tribe's definitions. And that's why they'll never ever see eye to eye. And that's why if I am going to debate somebody, I don't really do it very often, but if I am going to do it, I'll always be sure to ensure that we're actually on the same page in terms of definitions. I think that's absolutely essential. There's just no point in having any debate unless you are willing to agree on the definitions of words.

• 14:33Chris Williamson?

  Yep. Next one, a rival fallacy. We didn't evolve to be happy, but to believe we'll be happy if we just accomplish the latest goal. So we seldom taste true joy, but we often pick up its scent just enough to keep us in pursuit. Paradise is not a destination or a journey, but a horizon.

• 14:53Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, I think so happiness, we have to ask ourselves, why did happiness evolve? And obviously, it didn't evolve for us to, you know, meet one goal and then be satisfied for the rest of our lives. Because if we did that, we wouldn't live very long. We would just fulfill one goal and then we would die because we wouldn't have any motivation to do anything else. So in a sense, happiness is like a carrot constantly being dangled in front of your, your, your head. Except it's tied to your head. So every time you move forward, the carrot moves forward. So you're constantly reaching for the carrot, but you can't quite get it. And what this does is it keeps you moving forward under the impression that you're going to eventually get that carrot. But you will never get the carrot because it's, it's tied to your head.

• 15:38Gurwinder Bhogal?

  And this is, I think, is a good way of looking at happiness. This is not to say that you can't ever be happy in your life. You will be happy in your life, but that happiness will never last. You know, you'll, you'll be happy, for instance, if you save up to buy a nice car. The day you get that car, you're going to be happy, you're going to be really happy. And you take it out for a test drive and you impress your friends with it. And, you know, you'll be, you'll, you'll feel good. But within a couple of days, you'll have gotten used to having that car. And it's no longer going to bring you that same joy. And then you're going to want to chase something else. And this is the process that a lot of people go through in their lives where they're constantly chasing something new. Because the things that they have have not made them happy. And Naval Ravikant, he had this great line where he said that desire is a contract that you make with yourself

• 16:21Gurwinder Bhogal?

  to be unhappy until you get what you want. And I think that's a good way of looking at it, where you're basically choosing to be unhappy because you don't have this thing that you're looking to get. And you're, you basically tell yourself, you write this contract with yourself where you'll only be happy if you can get that thing. But the thing is, it's an illusion because once you get it, you're only going to be happy for a short period of time. And I think ultimately, what I found in my life is that the solution to this sort of quandary is that you're not going to be happy by accumulating possessions, but by relinquishing desires. So you have to learn to be happy with less, learn to appreciate the little things in life. And I've found that since I've done this, I've just been so much happier.

• 17:03Chris Williamson?

  How do you relinquish desires?

• 17:06Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Just to be content like with what you have like this is a bit of a complex thing and I'm going to tell you a bit of a weird story but um the other day I was in the supermarket and I saw a tomato and I was absolutely overjoyed by this tomato. I just thought this tomato was absolutely amazing. I picked it up and it was so plump and juicy and shiny and bright and I loved it. I thought this is absolutely incredible and I was so happy that I'd seen this tomato and you know when I got home I ate this tomato and I was really, really happy about it. And the reason why that tomato made me really happy was because I've actually thought about the amount of work that it takes to make a beautiful tomato like that, right? This is like tomatoes

• 17:48Gurwinder Bhogal?

  originally were not as delicious as they are now. They were originally not as beautiful as they are now. This is a product of many, many years, many centuries of selective breeding of cultivation, of people learning everything that there is to learn about agriculture. And then over many, many years then passing this knowledge down to their their sons and daughters and then their sons and daughters learning even more and then passing that information down. And all of this selective breeding of the tomato over many generations and the knowledge of agriculture of how to create the perfect tomato. And all of this was done in order to create this one tomato essentially, to create this beautiful thing that people want to eat. And I when I think about the amount of effort that it takes to create something as beautiful as a nice tomato, something

• 18:34Gurwinder Bhogal?

  that feels really good in the mouth, something that has a lot of flavour, it makes me appreciate that so much more. And I think that a lot of the value in things comes from understanding just how lucky we are to have them. And that's why I try to not to take these things for granted, right? I I will always try to look at how hard things are to get. For instance, I am constantly amazed by the fact that I can eat food from all over the world, right, without even leaving my apartment, right? That is absolutely incredible. If you were to go back in time to the 18th century and you were to tell people that you could do this in the future, that you could just pick up a device and talk on this device and then within half an hour you could have food from anywhere on the planet delivered to your doorstep, they would be blown away. They would think this is you're living a life better than a king.

• 19:18Chris Williamson?

  Have you heard have you heard the story behind the first ever pineapple that was imported to the United Kingdom?

• 19:26Gurwinder Bhogal?

  I haven't.

• 19:26Chris Williamson?

  I'll send you the, I'll send you the, I'll send you the link afterward. I watched a YouTube video about it. Absolutely fantastic. So pineapples cost, I think, the equivalent of four thousand pounds each in, I want to say maybe late seventeen hundreds, something like that. And it was just a signal of opulence, so opulent, in fact, that people would get statues of pineapples placed outside of their family estates. This is the sort of house you're going into. It's a house that eats four thousand pound fruit. Like that, this is the kind of place. And, um, yeah, they're talking about, they're talking about the, the journey that this thing goes through. And then as soon as the first pineapple is

• 20:07Chris Williamson?

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

• 20:36Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, absolutely. And that's what I do is I think of my, my life relative to, say, a medieval peasant and how lucky I am.

• 20:43Chris Williamson?

  You remind me a lot of a medieval peasant, actually.

• 20:47Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Well, I think a medieval peasant has a lot of wisdom about them. I think that kind of lifestyle appeals to me, to be honest. But like, you know, they, to them, like, the idea that of a person like you and I that are living the kind of, you know, we're, we're talking to each other from across the world. Like you're in the States, I'm in the UK, and we're having an ordinary conversation as though we were sharing the same space. You know, this is magic to a medieval peasant. The things that we do are absolutely mind blowing to pretty much all of human history. Apart from to our generation, because we're used to it, because to us, we're born into this world. And so it doesn't seem that special to us.

• 21:26Chris Williamson?

  Here's the crazy thing, though, if that peasant, there's nothing special about that particular peasant himself. It's simply about the time that he was in. If you placed that peasant into the modern world, and he was able to pick up the language and do all of the things, I bet within five years, he would have forgotten the fact that he used to live in 1678 or something. And you're like, the, I was imagining there in my mind, what human existence would be like if our hedonic adaptation wasn't as powerful as it is, we'd be fucked, because we wouldn't be able to keep up with the pace that the world changes at. There's a Morgan Housel quote as well, which is phenomenal. And he says, the first rule of winning the game is to stop moving the

• 22:06Chris Williamson?

  goalposts. He's talking about it in a money saving psychology of investing perspective. But it's so true. When we're thinking about the arrival fallacy, you know, this belief that what we're moving toward, that we eventually we will be happy. What is it? The, the, that thing about the idyl that you're moving toward was in fact your death, the not yet started life fallacy or something?

• 22:31Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, the something syndrome. I've forgotten what it's called now.

• 22:38Chris Williamson?

  Anyway.

• 22:38Gurwinder Bhogal?

  I know. Yeah.

• 22:41Chris Williamson?

  It's a, it's a rule that where people presume that they will be happy when I will be happy when I will be happy when. And then eventually what you realize is the thing that you were putting off is your death. And Bill Perkins, that wrote Die with Zeros, got another amazing quote where he says, delayed gratification in the extreme results in no gratification. And

• 23:01Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

• 23:02Chris Williamson?

  You keep on pushing it off.

• 23:05Gurwinder Bhogal?

  It's a case of finding a balance, as with most things in life, I think, you know, we are like in that quote that I, the original quote, I said that we are all, we, we often pick up the scent of happiness. And I think that that's what we need to content ourselves with is the scent of happiness, because We are like, essentially happiness is a reward system that we get in order to motivate us. All emotions are essentially motivations and if we didn't feel desire, we wouldn't do anything. We would literally just sit there and rot until we were dead because there would be no motivation to do anything. So the desire there is actually a motivational system and that little taste of happiness that we get when we accomplish a goal.

• 23:44Gurwinder Bhogal?

  That is our reward for accomplishing the goal. So we can find happiness, you know, in fulfilling basic goals. But I think ultimately, if you want to be happy, then you can't make your happiness dependent on circumstances. Because if you do that, then you'll never really often be happy. You'll very seldom be happy. And so it's all about finding a state of mind in which you are happy, regardless of what goes on in circumstances. If you need a reason to be happy, you'll seldom be happy.

• 24:12Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, what's that? If you can't be happy with a coffee, you won't be happy with a yacht. That's another.

• 24:16Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Exactly.

• 24:16Chris Williamson?

  Naval quote.

• 24:17Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Absolutely.

• 24:17Chris Williamson?

  But yeah, it's um, it's one of the hacks that I have found that I think is effective for this. This comes from Tim Ferriss. Our anticipation of things is often more enjoyable than the things themselves. So what you can do is extend the enjoyment of the thing by planning lots and lots of stuff out far ahead. Me and George Mack are going to Anjunadeep Open Air at Red Rocks in Denver in November. We've had this booked for nine months. So I've been listening to Anjunadeep releases and albums and oh, there's a new DJ's been released for this thing. And I think definitely as you get older, you get, it seems, I don't know, much, not juvenile, but maybe you're just too busy or something.

• 24:58Chris Williamson?

  You don't, you don't excite yourself as much about the idea of future plans because you have so many things to do in between now and the plans to allow you to have the time to go and enjoy the plans. So I think that definitely protracting that as much as possible. It's one of the, you know, I've opened the, broken the fourth wall about this a million times on the show and I'll continue to do it. I hack all of the audiences, like anticipation networks, every single time that I release a big episode. I have this fucking awful, protracted, drawn-out launch sequence. Who's it gonna be? I recorded it in LA. It's a person who's friends with this person. Oh, it's fucking Sam Harris. This is gonna come out just after a Sam Harris episode. So, no one knows right now. No one listening to the show knows that it's gonna be Sam Harris. Then there'll be a teaser, then

• 25:43Chris Williamson?

  there'll be an announcement about Sam, then there'll be clips, then the episode will drop. Because it gets people excited, and I would want that. If I was a fan of the show and I was a fan of Sam Harris, I would want to be like, oh, like, Sam Harris is coming on. I can anticipate it a little bit. And I don't think that there's anything nefarious or manipulative about doing that. I think it allows people to enjoy the experience of knowing that someone that they like is going to do a thing that they're going to enjoy for longer. So, speaking of, speaking of your peasant thing, I had a new one for you, which I came up with. This is a collaboration between me and Alexander Date Psych, who is a great Twitter follower. This is "The Alpha History Fantasy. Modern men who are angry at a world they believe

• 26:25Chris Williamson?

  has rejected them mistakenly feel that they would have done better in medieval times. They are somehow adamant that the chance of them being Genghis Khan is greater than the chance of them being cannon fodder peasant number 1,373,000, whose favela was sacked and destroyed."

• 26:42Gurwinder Bhogal?

  That's a brilliant one. I love that one. Yeah, absolutely. I was, I was reading this, this article yesterday about Bronze Age pervert.

• 26:50Chris Williamson?

  Yes, I read it as well. I read the same, I read the same article.

• 26:54Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, yeah, it's, it's quite funny because for your audience who might not know who he is, so he's a sort of far-right figure. And when I say far-right, I actually mean genuinely far-right, not the kind of far-right that you'll see on Wikipedia, you know, but actual far-right. Like, he's a, he's a neo-reactionary. So, he's like, this guy basically believes that a group of strongmen should rule over everybody with absolute authority, essentially, and he's openly fascist and stuff. So, this guy's become quite popular, sort of on the right, and particularly-

• 27:27Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Among certain people in the Trump White House, he was quite popular. They used to pass out, pass around his book, Brian's Age Mindset. And he, his whole thing is basically about being strong. It's about, you know, working out and having a massive physique like his, his avatar on, on Twitter is like this hench, like jacked guy, basically. And he's all about like, you know, cultivating physical strength and basically the strongest should, should rule and the weak should perish. And all this, and it's hilarious because his identity was actually sort of revealed against his wishes. And he's this guy called Amaru, who's like, I think Romanian immigrant to, to the US. And he's basically,

• 28:09Gurwinder Bhogal?

  his actual appearance, he's, he's like some scrawny little sort of pale kid, like, you know, who's, who's nothing like he was presenting himself out to be on Twitter and on sort of, you know, on his Caribbean rhythms podcast, because he was making out like he was this massive bodybuilder, like beefcake, you know, monster, basically like a barbarian. That's what he was, his whole thing is based around. But in real life, he's like this really wimpy looking like scrawny kid and like, it's absolutely hilarious because I think that a lot of these people who claim that they want to live in these, you know, old sort of Genghis Khan style

• 28:43Gurwinder Bhogal?

  worlds where, you know, it's just all about brutality. A lot of them wouldn't survive, like, you know, even a couple of days.

• 28:49Chris Williamson?

  Dude, you've landed precisely on what Alex started having an argument about online. So he came up with, with half of this and then I fleshed it out and gave it the name. And he was having a, an argument with the at incels co Twitter account, which is super, super like antagonistic and, and it like something really fascinating to observe, absolutely fascinating to observe, to be honest. He's having this big argument with them and his point was, hang on a second. So you are unsuccessful in the competence dominance hierarchy and socio sexually with, or socio economically in terms of being able to attract women sexually in 2023.

• 29:31Chris Williamson?

  And somehow, the belief is that half a millennia ago, in 1523, you would have done better? That you, like, a guy twice your size would have warned you to fuck a girl with. Like, there is, he would have, he would have happily beheaded you, he would have happily taken your wa- you know, so I do think that it's just an important redress to the balance that things were, you know, it was a purer time, it was a better time. Don't, don't get me wrong, like-

• 30:03Gurwinder Bhogal?

  I think that a lot of the people who claim to want to live in a sort of idyllic past are really yearning for their childhood, I think, a lot of the, a lot of the time. Because when they say that they want a simpler time, a simpler world, that is essentially their childhood. That's a world where things were much simpler, where, you know, they didn't have to worry with all, about all the kind of complexities of adulthood and all that kind of stuff. So this is me being kind of armchair psychologist here, but I, I do think that a lot of people really are secretly yearning for their childhood when they claim to want to return to this idyllic past. Because this idyllic past didn't actually ever exist. It's always been brutal. Like, I mean, there was this one really, um, there's a, this, this kind of far-right, another far-right, um,

• 30:46Gurwinder Bhogal?

  lady, she's half-Indian, I think, her name's Megga or something, and she's, uh, she's always tweeting about how the past was so much better than the, than the present. And she wrote this one thing about how, um, you know, in the past, it was much easier to grow food, because all you had to do was just have your own little patch of land, and then you could grow any food you wanted. And, you know, you, you had enough to feed your whole family and everything. And it is complete nonsense, because the, the kinds of, in the past, food was so hard to grow. Like, you had to have the perfect soil, it had to have the perfect pH, uh, you know, you had to, you had to constantly ensure that insects weren't getting at the food pests and stuff. Um. You had to ensure that the weather was right. There were so many things that would just go wrong, things that we take for granted now, right?

• 31:30Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Now we've got pesticides, we've got fertilizers, uh, we've got like greenhouses, we've got uh, UV, sorry, infrared lights, we've got all this um, different stuff that helps stuff grow, right? We can grow stuff at length now, we can grow as much food as we want. But this wasn't always the case, it wasn't, food wasn't always this plentiful. In the past, your crops could fail like within a day, like, you know, you could, you could be, you could have a massive field of crops and within a day, they could get ruined by a single flood. You know, it, we, we were completely at the mercy of nature, um, you know, and people don't seem to realise this. People seem to think that, oh, you know, living in the past is just like um, living around nature, man, you know, like, you know, just basically, yeah, free love, and those, like, the people, and this is true of the trads on the right as well as the kind of,

• 32:14Gurwinder Bhogal?

  the kind of hippies that you might find who are more on the left, but like, it's, it's this sort of idealisation of the past, one that you just don't, one that doesn't reflect reality.

• 32:24Chris Williamson?

  I wonder if

• 32:24Gurwinder Bhogal?

  A lot of the stuff

• 32:25Chris Williamson?

  I wonder if we could fold in that like the horticulturalist's history fantasy as well, or the agriculturalist's history fantasy as well as the alphas.

• 32:33Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Exactly, you know, there, there's, for instance, like, there, you know, there's, if you look at sort of the famines that are happening in places like Sudan, for instance, and Somalia, those things were widespread, they were happening everywhere at one point. Um, and the only reason they don't happen in the West anymore is because we have the technology to prevent them from happening. So this is not like, oh, you know, we're just lucky uh, to, to, because nature's on our side and nature wants us to eat well, no. Nature doesn't give a shit about us, you know, nature's, nature's desires are not aligned with us. Uh, i- if it wants to ruin our crops, it will just ruin our crops, it doesn't care about what humans want. And, you know, entire populations in the past died of starvation. We are lucky because we are the ones that descended from those who just happened to, to make it.

• 33:17Chris Williamson?

  Here's, here's another way to look at it, so for the people that are on the left that would maybe, um, you know, the climate a hundred years ago, it was so much more balanced, look at these extreme weather events that we're having, et cetera, et cetera. Climate-related deaths have decreased by ninety-eight percent in the last century. There's been a fifty X decrease and more people die from cold weather than die from hot weather. More people die from cold than die from heat and there's been a fifty, fifty X decrease in climate-related deaths over the last century. So, you know, the, I, I think, yeah, you're right, there's, there's something going on whereby

• 33:52Chris Williamson?

  If if you can convince yourself that a past time would have been better, it alleviates some of the pressure of now not being as good as it could be because you are no longer culpable for the reason that it's not as good as it could be. Ah, I've outsourced this, the challenges that I'm facing to the fact that there is something structural or systemic or systematic that's stopping it from happening.

• 34:19Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, absolutely. I think there is a desire for people to blame, to shift the blame to things outside of themselves. And I mean, I'll cover this in my most recent article, where we've seen this happen actually a bit more. It's actually quite disturbing how, I think Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twain, they found that there has been an externalization of the locus of control. So for your audience, the locus of control is the degree to which one believes that they, as opposed to external circumstances, shape their destiny. So people who have an internal locus of control, they believe that their own decisions are what dictate what happens in their life. And people who have an external locus of control,

• 35:03Gurwinder Bhogal?

  they believe that what they do doesn't really matter because their lives are dictated by what happens in the external world. And interestingly, there seems to have been an externalization of the locus of control over the past sort of 40 years, and particularly since the 1990s. I actually think that people in the distant past didn't have the luxury of having an external locus of control, most of the time. I mean, there was still scapegoating and things like that when people got formed tribes. But I think when you're trying to survive, you don't have that luxury. You don't have the luxury of, you know, blaming other things. You have to take responsibility for for what's going wrong in your life. But when you arrive in a world like ours, where pretty much everything is done for you.

• 35:47Gurwinder Bhogal?

  You have that luxury. You can now suddenly start blaming everything else except for yourself. And that's why I think we have these people who are yearning for this distant past where, you know, everything was in their eyes much better because they can easily just blame the modern age. It's easy to blame modernity because you don't have to take responsibility for modernity. Because modernity is doing everything for you. Modernity is growing your food. Modernity is keeping you safe from uh invasions. Modernity is keeping you warm. You know, modernity is giving you the information that you need to help yourself in pretty much any situation that you could possibly find yourself in. Modernity is a map for you that you can find your way through anywhere. You know, modernity gives you pretty much everything and that allows you the luxury to blame modernity for your problems.

• 36:32Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, there's a, there's one, there's one that I came up with. The existential crisis luxury. Only when the bottom levels of Maslow's hierarchy are filled can you ask questions like, am I truly self-actualizing? Therefore, having a crisis of life direction should be a reason for gratitude, not despondency.

• 36:51Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Absolutely. We are so lucky, you know, to have what we have. Gratitude is something that, you know, to have the kinds of problems we have, we have to be living lives that are essentially, you know, this, the whole thing about first world problems. You know, this is, this is what we worry about most of the time now. We worry pretty much, I would say 90% of my problems now are first world problems.

• 37:13Chris Williamson?

  Am I enacting my logos? Am I speaking my truth forward? Is this really my highest self showing up day to day?

• 37:21Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, and this is why, you know, it's, we, you know, if you look at the kinds of things that people are talking about now, people are talking about trauma, for instance. Trauma has become probably one of the most common buzzwords in the world today um in the, in the West. And what trauma means now. Is it usually just means being a little bit disappointed. Whereas what trauma meant in the past would probably mean something like having your arm cut off. You know, so but there's been a there's been a massive amount of concept creep with regard to what we really regard as a problem. Um. Because we live lives of such luxury now. Uh. The people sort of who were living two hundred, three hundred years ago, they would probably be laughing at our problems. They would be just considering.

• 38:03Chris Williamson?

  I I I don't disagree, and I'm I've seen from the same hymn sheet as yourself, but as we said before. Hedonic adaptation is a hell of a drug and it's going to continue to come in. And whatever the opposite of hedonic adaptation, but for how you begin to zero in on an ever more high resolution, high standard, high bar that you want from your life. And I don't think that this is necessarily a bad thing for society to do either. If we were to say we only need to have healthcare standards that are at the level that they were in the eighteen hundreds, despite the fact that we've made all of this progress, that would be a rejection of the responsibility we have with our newly increased capacity. So it is important, both structurally and individually, to continue to ask more from yourself.

• 38:46Chris Williamson?

  It's the balance, as with everything, the virtuous mean, as with everything, you're trying to find where is the middle ground? Where is the balance between these two different things?

• 38:57Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, absolutely. Um. I wrote this tweet, actually, which I think speaks to this quite a bit. And it's basically about, and this basically is, it's, um. Everything about humanity has improved throughout history, except contentment. But it is only because our contentment never improves that we keep improving everything else. And I think that that kind of speaks to what you were saying, which which is basically that it's it's essential to progress. We have to be uncomfortable in order to progress. We have to keep. We have to always find ways that the world could be better in order to make the world better. And so I agree with you completely, you know, we do need to have this kind of sense of.

• 39:38Gurwinder Bhogal?

  You know, this kind of hedonic adaptation is it's not just uh good, it's necessary, it's absolutely necessary. Because if it weren't, we would just be, we would never, we would never progress as a species. We would just be content with what we have. So I think, like I said, it's a case of balancing um what we have with what we want. So we should be grateful for what we have, and that's what I am. I'm absolutely grateful for everything I have. But that doesn't mean that I don't want more. I can still want more and still be grateful for what I have. And that's, it's a bit of a weird sort of line to balance, but it can be done. Um, because you can always find new things to want. That's, that's the easiest thing in the world. The harder thing is to be, find some sort of value in what you already have.

• 40:19Gurwinder Bhogal?

  And I think just finding that balance is, is the key to being happy, I think.

• 40:24Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 40:25Gurwinder Bhogal?

  It's definitely made a difference to me.

• 40:26Chris Williamson?

  Have I told you about that story I learned about uh the Buddha's quote of life is suffering? So the word suffering is dukkha, D U K K H A. And some scholars argue, contest that it's not suffering, but unsatisfactoriness. Life is unsatisfactoriness. And I think that that makes an awful lot more sense. That it's always just about going to be

• 40:51Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Hmm.

• 40:52Chris Williamson?

  That behind where your anticipation and your expectation were. Because your expectation is built to be out ahead of what reality can deliver to you. Okay, next one, next one. Uh Saint George in Retirement Syndrome. Many who fight injustice come to define themselves by their fight against injustice. So that as they defeat the injustice, they must invent new injustices to fight against simply to maintain their identity.

• 41:18Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, I think this is a product of people uh sort of tying their, their mission with their identity. So people will come out and they will have some kind of political cause. Where they'll be like, you know, oh, I absolutely hate racism or something. And then they'll go out there and be like anti racist, you know? But what they will do is they'll make the mistake of tying their status as an anti racist with their identity. And they will actually make that part of their identity. So they will begin to define themselves as an anti racist. And the dangerous thing with this is that if they do eventually defeat racism. Then their identity is essentially nullified. They no longer have any meaning.

• 42:01Chris Williamson?

  They're not just out of a job, they're out of personhood as well.

• 42:04Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Exactly. And they've lost their sense of purpose. They've lost their meaning in their life. They've lost their kind of narrative, because we all view our lives as narratives. We're all kind of like movie characters, living a movie. And if you've basically defeated the villain, then there's no point in continuing the movie. You know, that's it, the movie's over. Roll credits. So these people, unfortunately, what they, how they tend to respond is that they will sort of increase the, they will project new racisms in the world. They will create new causes, new dragons to slay, basically. And you can see this in the phenomenon of concept creep, where,

• 42:50Gurwinder Bhogal?

  you know, when we defeat one form of harm, we will expand the definition of that harm so that it covers more things. So, for instance, racism is the obvious one. So racism, obviously, there's still racism, but it, if we look at how it was with Jim Crow, Jim Crow was, was actual genuine hardcore systemic racism, where you had two tiers of society, you had white people and you had black people. And then the civil rights movement and everything kind of just destroyed that. And then the, the definition of racism was expanded. So then you had institutional racism, you had systemic racism. And then you had these new subspecies of racism, you had microaggressions, cultural appropriation.

• 43:33Gurwinder Bhogal?

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

• 44:07Chris Williamson?

  And if someone lets go of that, then who am I? Who am I after all of this has happened?

• 44:13Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, I think, yeah, this is one of the things why it's almost pointless to argue with an activist. Because they have tied their identity to their activism. So if you are arguing with their cause, if you're saying that their cause is meaningless, you're basically saying that their life is meaningless. You're basically saying that their their entire identity is meaningless, you know? Like, if you were to go to Ibram Kendi in St. Helens, look, racism is nowhere near as much of a problem as you say it is. That's going to be a personal attack against him because he spent his whole life writing about racism. And so this, it comes across as a personal attack. They view it as a personal attack, it's not just a political disagreement. It becomes an actual attack on their whole sort of system of identity. The way that they they form sort of this self conception,

• 44:59Gurwinder Bhogal?

  which makes it very sort of hard to argue with these people.

• 45:02Chris Williamson?

  Why do you think it is that people are attaching their sense of self, their sense of self-worth, integrating art and artists together in in this way? Is this a surrogate for religion? Is this that a lot of cultural technologies previously would have been so central to the way that we see the world? Is it just that the allure of fame and status and continuing to, you know, uphold whatever the cause is allows you to keep charging forward? Have you got any idea of the post-mortem there?

• 45:34Gurwinder Bhogal?

  I would say that it's probably many different factors because obviously humans do things for a variety of different reasons. And I think all of the reasons that you just mentioned are probably, they all probably play a part. So I'd say, yeah, absolutely, that the meaning crisis has contributed to this a lot. You know, there's, there's this kind of vacuum that people are now trying to fill with, obviously with the death of God. People are trying to fill this vacuum with whatever they can. And some people are choosing to fill it with social justice. And the last time I was on this podcast, we spoke of atheism plus being a kind of surrogate for for, it was a way that the new atheists tried to retain a sense of purpose and meanings by going full social justice. So I think that's definitely part of it. And then I think that there are other people who perhaps are.

• 46:18Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Looking for clout online, looking for some kind of, you know, some sense of belonging or something, you know, they wanna be part, they wanna have a kind of an audience, you know, or a tribe to belong to.

• 46:30Chris Williamson?

  And a hill to die on as well.

• 46:32Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, and a hill to die on, yeah, there's, there are many things, many reasons why people do it, and there are obviously, there are probably just people who genuinely have been fooled into believing that racism is more common than it actually is, or, you know, that misogyny is more common than it actually is, or whatever, you know, whatever cause you wanna, you wanna talk about. I mean, I was one of those people, I used to believe racism was more common than it actually was, because I used to get all my information from The Guardian and The New York Times, and this was around the time when we had the Great Awakening, where there was a 400% increase in the use of words like sexism and racism in the, the liberal media, and I was reading it at that time, so I developed this idea that, you know, everybody was racist and all this kind of stuff.

• 47:09Chris Williamson?

  That goes back to what you said before about a well-curated social media feed is either heaven or hell. Okay, next one, opinion shopping. Maybe, many who conduct research online ignore every source they disagree with till they find one they agree with, and then use this source as an authority to justify what they already believe. They don't consider someone an expert unless they agree with them.

• 47:33Gurwinder Bhogal?

  So this is one that hits quite close to home, because I used to do this, I was guilty of this. When I was, when I first sort of like got onto Twitter and stuff, and I used to engage people in arguments, what I would do is, whenever I wanted to prove something to, to my interlocutor, what I would do is I would type in what I wanted to prove. So, so basically, so like, let's say if I wanted to prove that, let's just say something random, like I wanted to prove that the world was flat, you know, I would just type in evidence that the world is flat, and then I would get, obviously I would get some kind of evidence from some fringe website, and then I would basically say, hey, look, see, look, this is proof that the world is flat. So, you know, I think this is something

• 48:17Gurwinder Bhogal?

  that a lot of people do, and the reason I think that a lot of people do this is because I've also seen other people do it, in fact, they've done it in arguments with me, like, for instance, what would happen is that I would, I would say, oh, what evidence is there for claim X, and then they wouldn't respond for like an hour or something, and then eventually they would, they would basically. Post this link to this article or whatever, which was, which claims to represent what they say it claims. And then what I would do is I'd go on Google and I would type in what they, you know, what they would find proof and immediately it would be the first, first search result. And I'd see, okay, so what you've done is you've basically just, you've gone on to Google, you've, you've typed in something, you've ignored all the search results,

• 49:01Gurwinder Bhogal?

  which disagree with your position, pick the one which agrees with it, and then you've held this up.

• 49:05Chris Williamson?

  You've even, you've put a prompt in that is only going to give you things that confirm your worldview. You haven't asked, is the world flat?

• 49:13Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah.

• 49:14Chris Williamson?

  You've also, you've looked for the world is flat evidence.

• 49:18Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, that's the first thing, but then even within that, they'll, Google will sometimes will, you know, say this is a myth or whatever. And then they will just skip that completely and they'll go to the one that, yeah. And, and I think this is, you know, people compare it to maybe confirmation bias. So it is a similar sort of mechanism to confirmation bias, except the difference is that confirmation bias is unconscious. It's, it's something that you do unwittingly, whereas opinion shopping is a conscious action. It's when you consciously are looking for information that supports your worldview.

• 49:47Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, very good.

• 49:48Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah. Yeah. So I, I do think that this is a very, very common thing, because if you are good enough at Googling, in fact, you don't even need to be very good at Googling. If you know basic English, you can always get pretty much any academic study or any kind of New York Times article or whatever, that just supports what you're trying to prove. And then you could just held it, hold it up as proof of what you're, you know, like any time somebody says that they've got evidence of something. If you do a Google, you can always find evidence to the contrary. Because, and this probably goes to another concept that I, that was in one of my mega threads, which is the idea that for every PhD, there is an equal and opposite PhD.

• 50:27Chris Williamson?

  Gibson's Law.

• 50:28Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Gibson's Law, yeah, Gibson's Law.

• 50:29Chris Williamson?

  In matters, in matters of law and policy, anyone can find a subject matter expert who supports their view, because having a PhD doesn't necessarily make someone right. It often just makes them more skilled at being wrong.

• 50:40Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, and this is this is something that's a sort of very common in sort of law court. In fact, I think many of your audience might have watched the Johnny Depp trial, where you know, when him against Amber Heard, uh, which was last year. And anybody who watched that trial will have noticed that both uh, both people drew on psychologists and psychiatrists to support their candidate, uh, their their sort of defendant or whatever.

• 51:10Chris Williamson?

  I think candidate, I think candidate is probably more accurate.

• 51:13Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, yeah, or plaintiff or whatever. But like, yeah, I mean, um, so, you know, they, what what happened is that you had two groups of psychiatrists, psychologists. Both of them were equally qualified. They both, you know, both groups had were PhDs from pretty respectable universities because they had, they were, you know, being paid by Hollywood actors. So they were the cream of the crop. Um, so these are prestigious psychiatrists, and yet they had completely opposite conclusions to what was going on. And so what you see here is obviously these two groups cannot both be right at the same time. Their opinions are mutually exclusive. And so there's only one thing that could be happening here, which is that they are rationalizing. They are, they're cherry picking evidence to support the narrative that they want to push.

• 51:56Gurwinder Bhogal?

  And this, I think, is a very sort of good microcosm of what goes on in the real world, where you have experts who are drawn on, not just by, um, you know, uh, by lawyers and by legal teams, but by businesses. And you see this, uh, with with regards to, say, um, for instance, in the in the corporate world and business. What what what happened is, uh, in fact, the original term opinion shopping originally comes from the business world. Because what businesses would do is that they would hire experts who agreed with them to write papers that agreed with what they were trying to do. So for instance, Coca-Cola would hire nutritionists who, uh, would say that, you know, oh, um, sugar isn't actually that bad for you. For instance, you know, uh, the main thing that you want to be worrying about is salt and fat. Those are much more worse for you than sugar.

• 52:40Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Obviously, this, you know, this has been shown to be not quite true, but, um, the the the issue was that they wanted to make people believe that Coke was healthy. So they would cherry pick. Experts, they would, you know, they would find experts who had done research which they thought they could use to their advantage. And then they would pay this person to write a report on their behalf, uh, which would, you know, and you see this everywhere now. You see it uh in gender clinics. So, you know, for instance, GIDS, uh, JIDS, uh, basically the, the Tavistock. You know, they, they were pretty cushy with Mermaid's Charity and um with other similar charities. And what they would do is they would, they would work with um academics who believed what they believed. People like Jack Turban, who's, who's a well-known uh gender ideologue in academia.

• 53:22Gurwinder Bhogal?

  And they would, they would basically pay these people to write academic papers using their expertise, using their uh, their sort of their knowledge to make the case for, for instance, giving puberty blockers to underage kids or whatever, like, you know, or to, to, to young, young uh children. And then, you know, just to be balanced, there would probably be people on the opposite side of the aisle who would do the opposite. They would get the, they would get the um, the experts that agreed with them to write papers to do the same things. And that's, that really is, a lot of academia is fueled by this. It's fueled by institutions paying academics to make the case for why that institution is great. In other words, basically, but to do it indirectly by, just by doing its studies.

• 54:05Gurwinder Bhogal?

  And these studies uh are usually quoted and widely quoted by the press. So this is another reason why you can't really believe what you read in the press. Because even the academic studies that are quoted by these uh media outlets are often, they are often a result of perverse incentives.

• 54:21Chris Williamson?

  There's a quote that I put in my newsletter today from Nat Friedman that says, better to get your dopamine from improving your ideas than having them validated.

• 54:30Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah.

• 54:31Chris Williamson?

  Because it feels good.

• 54:32Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Nowadays, yeah, absolutely. And nowadays, what I do is I don't really read um work from authors that I agree with very often anymore. I do sometimes, you know, because I feel like I mainly just so that I can kind of um. Boost them, you know, retweet them or whatever, like, you know, I want to retweet some people that I agree with. Uh, so I naturally will read it first, but like, usually what I would do now nowadays is I will actually seek out information from people I disagree with. Because I find that's just so much more valuable to me. I learned so much more from reading people that I think I disagree with. And I say think because I'm not always sure whether I would disagree with them. But people that I assume that I would disagree with because they're on, they're in a different tribe or whatever, you know. Um, so like recently, I've been, been reading the works of, um, uh, people like Judith Butler, this is going back to the whole gender thing again.

• 55:18Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Because I, I've never really considered her worldview very much. I mean, obviously I was familiar with her work, but uh, because she's blamed for a lot of this kind of gender ideology kind of stuff. And so I thought I'd better get to the, get right to the source. Instead of reading what people are saying about her, which is what I've been doing for the past few years, I thought I'd actually better get to the source itself and actually read what she's actually said. And to be fair to her, I mean, she still strikes me as a little bit crazy, but not as crazy as she'd been made out to be by people like Chris Ruffo. Um, you know, and, and other people like that. So, you know, it's, I think it's important for getting a balanced view and it's also, I have learned things that I wouldn't otherwise have learned because

• 55:58Gurwinder Bhogal?

  the kinds of circles that I move in, I would never have gotten the ideas that Judith Butler is, is putting out. I would only have gotten, um, sort of straw men of those kinds of ideas, even though I, I would regard my, the people that I hang out with as being pretty reasonable and being pretty fair minded. Even then, they are still human beings, so they're going to have the prejudices that a human being has.

• 56:19Chris Williamson?

  And you've selected them, right? You've chosen them to be around you. So your biases are at play just with the selection effect there.

• 56:25Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yes.

• 56:25Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I've got, I've got one, I got one here that I stole from Naval. You quoted Naval earlier on. And this is, uh, real world karma. Karma doesn't need quantum energy or spiritual woo to be real. Karma is just you repeating your patterns, virtues and flaws until you finally get what you deserve.

• 56:43Gurwinder Bhogal?

  So I think Naval meant this in a, when he said this, he meant it in a very specific context, right? He meant it in the context of whether you work hard or whether you don't, or you know, basically if you work hard, you will eventually get the fruits of your labors. And if you don't, you won't. I don't think that karma exists in any, any kind of capacity in the wider world. I mean, history is filled with, with nasty, nasty people who got away with, with everything in the end and will live very happy lives. So, and on the contrary, history is also filled with people who, you know, did nothing but help other people and then ended up getting betrayed at the end. So I don't think karma exists in any kind of real sense of the world, but I think it does exist in the sense that maybe I think Naval means it, which is that

• 57:25Gurwinder Bhogal?

  you get the fruits of your own labors with regards to productivity. And so if you, if you feel like, you know, you're, you're not worth anything and you don't really, you're not willing to put in the work because you just feel like, you know, what's the point? And you don't really have any agency, then that's a self fulfilling prophecy. You know, you won't get, you won't get what you want in life. But if you, if you are adamant on getting what you want and you, you put everything that you want to what, you know, you basically sacrifice the present for the future within reason, as we were saying before, then you will get what you want and you'll get essentially what you deserve. And when he says the word deserve, I hate the word deserve because I don't even know what the word deserve means. You know, it basically implies a value judgment

• 58:08Gurwinder Bhogal?

  of some kind. Yeah. What does it even mean? Nature doesn't have any concept of deserve. It doesn't, there is no concept, you know, nature just gives people things based on cause and effect. There is no deserve. And so I do think that people deserve things only in the sense that did they put in the work.

• 58:27Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I think if I was to, if I was to reread the deserve bit at the end, karma is just you repeating your patterns, virtues and flaws until you finally get what you deserve. For me, it's until you finally get what is likely. It's the way that I think about when I read that quote is people rolling dice. And it also relates back to this internal, external locus of control thing that you mentioned earlier on, which is, if you believe that you have an internal locus of control, if you continue to roll the dice over and over, and your patterns, virtues and flaws suggest that you are going to get, this is not to say that there are people, as you mentioned before, perfectly noble, virtuous, high integrity people who work hard, who at the end of their life or partway through their life have some catastrophe, that they, it wasn't basically their fault.

• 59:13Chris Williamson?

  Absolutely, that can happen, but the more times that you roll the dice, and the more effective your inputs are, the less likely it is that that's going to happen, right?

• 59:21Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, I agree with that. Yeah. Yeah, I think, yeah, that's a good way of looking at it, I think. Yeah, it's, it's, I think, yeah, it, it really comes down to like, we can't control probability, but we can control the probability space. So we can control the range of outcomes, but we can't control the specific outcome. So for instance, if you don't work hard, then there is no chance that you're ever going to succeed, because that's not within the probability space that you've created. But if you work hard, then, then you are creating that probability space. You, you, you are putting that as one of the possible outcomes you can have. And so I think in that sense, yes, you will get what you deserve in that sense. Because you are essentially, you are creating the branching tree of possibilities

• 1:00:07Gurwinder Bhogal?

  that exist ahead of you. And so you'll get one of those outcomes.

• 1:00:11Chris Williamson?

  Mismatch theory. Moths evolved to navigate by the moon, a good strategy until the invention of electric lamps, which now lead them astray. Equally, humans evolved to be tribal, a good strategy until the digital age, where it now leads us to act like polarized goons online.

• 1:00:28Gurwinder Bhogal?

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

• 1:01:12Gurwinder Bhogal?

  tribal thing is the one, is one aspect of it. You know, we are, obviously, when we, when you're living in the African savanna as a hunter gatherer, it makes sense to be tribal, because if you're not tribal, you're not going to survive very long on your own. You know, you need, you need the cooperation of other people, and you need to have a common purpose and a common sense of unity, because if you don't, then the, another tribe that does have a common sense of purpose and unity is going to completely wipe you out. So, a lot of these things, and this is particularly true of belief forming. So, belief forming, you know, we sort of naively often believe that people believe things because they think they're true, but that's just not true at all. What's actually the sort of main driver

• 1:01:53Gurwinder Bhogal?

  of beliefs, I think, a particular, this is particularly true of political beliefs, is whether those beliefs help us in a social context. So, if they can make people like us, or if they can give us a kind of identity, something to belong to, a common purpose with other people. And this is, I wrote in the article about this, actually, the white smart people believe stupid things. There's an idea called, by a psychologist called Dan Kahane, or Kahane, I don't know how you pronounce it, it's K A H A N. And he had an idea called identity protective cognition, which is this idea that when people form beliefs,

• 1:02:34Gurwinder Bhogal?

  what they're doing is they're looking at other people and seeing how these beliefs operate in a social context. So, if, if having a certain belief makes people very, very popular, and if it makes a lot of other people love them, then that makes you feel that that belief is more true. And this is a mechanism that is designed to essentially allow us to form beliefs with people that will allow people to like us and that will allow us to have status and a sort of sense of belonging and to have this tribal sort of arrangement around us, you know, so that it's a way of arranging tribes, it's a way of forming these kind of hierarchies. So if you, you know, if you believe something

• 1:03:19Gurwinder Bhogal?

  that everybody around you believes, they're going to like you. And this is something that everybody knows. If you have the same beliefs as somebody, they will like you a lot more. That's a system, that's basically a gluing system. It's a way that glues people together into tribes and allows them to form a common purpose and then allows them to succeed on the plains of Africa. Unfortunately, that doesn't work so well in this age where we now have a lot of sort of partisan thinking. We have people forming online tribes, engaging in misinformation online where people are posting information that they agree with, but not information that's necessarily true. And so the whole system has been sort of torn apart by this new way that we're living, you know, now it doesn't bring us, we don't really form

• 1:04:04Gurwinder Bhogal?

  mobs anymore. We don't form, at least we don't form them in the real world, we form them online. But we don't form these tribes that would help each other out physically in the real world anymore. Now we form mobs online and we go after people and we, you know, we have scapegoats and we have, you know, this kind of bickering with other tribes. And all of this is not serving any of us well. It's not actually doing anything for us. All it's doing is it's making us angry. It's making us bitter. It's making us fight with people on the other side of the world who we're never going to meet in real life. It's making us push out information that's not true and, you know, fake narratives everywhere.

• 1:04:46Gurwinder Bhogal?

  It's causing indoctrination. It's causing people to be distracted from what they really want to achieve in their lives. So all of these negative consequences have emerged from what was once an asset, you know, which has now become a liability as a result of this new way that we're living. And this is just one aspect of the mismatch theory. The mismatch theory can be applied to so many different aspects of life. Another aspect is that our brains are sort of evolved to operate when we're moving. This is a, this is a lesser known thing, but we're supposed to be moving all the time, pretty much. We're supposed to be on the, on foot, uh, travelling vast distances. And that's good for our body because that's how our, that's how our bodies evolved, our bodies evolved for movement.

• 1:05:29Gurwinder Bhogal?

  But now we spend most of our lives indoors, sitting in a sedentary position. And so the system, like our blood system, uh, the circulatory system is sort of evolved for movement. It, it, it's supposed to, it's, it's created under the sort of assumption that a, a being is going to be moving. But we're not doing that. We're just sitting still for long periods of time. And so our circulatory systems are not operating efficiently. Our blood's, you know, blood's not efficiently, um, sort of oxygenating our organs. And as a result of that, we're having many health problems now.

• 1:06:01Chris Williamson?

  Do you know, uh, the, the best way that anyone who is unsure whether or not that hypothesis is real can prove it to themselves. Think about the last time that you took a phone call and you needed to think hard while you were on the phone. A huge proportion of people will find themselves just as if some hand has been placed inside of them. They'll stand up and they'll start pacing around the room. And I, I learned this from Kelly Starrett.

• 1:06:27Gurwinder Bhogal?

  I do that all the time.

• 1:06:28Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Kelly Starrett says that we're built to locomote and that our brains work better when we're locomoting. And, you know, if there was a way that I could do a podcast that didn't look too weird. Because if I was, if I was doing this on some sort of treadmill and bouncing up and down, and there may be a bit of noise. But yeah, I am, I, I totally agree. And I think that.

• 1:06:47Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah. It, it's why walking is so good for writing, you know? When I wasn't walking, when I, when I just used to wake up in the morning and then go to my desk and write. It would take me ages to actually come out with good ideas. But I began sort of about shortly, actually quite recently, it was about three months ago since I moved into this new place. I've been going for walks every day pretty much. And I've found that the number of ideas that I come out with is just so stark. And I mean, this is something that writers throughout history have said as well. It's not just me. It's not, you know, this is not just something that I discovered just now. But writers throughout history have, have recommended walking, like Nietzsche, for instance. Nietzsche used to go for long walks in the Swiss Alps, uh, when he was recovering, uh, from, uh, some sort of depression or anxiety that he had.

• 1:07:29Gurwinder Bhogal?

  They didn't call it depression back in the day, but, but he had some kind of mental problems and he, he went out into, um, the Swiss Alps and he'd go for long walks. And he said that he didn't trust any idea that he didn't come out with. Unless it was while he was walking. So, you know, it was a so basically any idea that he came up with while he was sitting at desk, he didn't trust that idea. And I mean, I feel almost, you know, I wouldn't go quite that far, but I think that, you know, I walking is just such a

• 1:07:53Chris Williamson?

  If you have an idea while sat at a desk, make sure that you still believe it after you've gone for a walk. That's not a bad, that's not a bad razor to use. Okay, next one. Dirsacionalia. Just because someone is intelligent doesn't mean their intelligence is pursuing intelligent goals. It's possible to devote a genius level intelligence to justify idiotic opinions and behaviours.

• 1:08:16Gurwinder Bhogal?

  So in artificial intelligence research, there is something called the orthogonality thesis. And what this says is that basically just because a machine is intelligently pursuing a goal, it doesn't mean that the goal itself is intelligent. So, you know, a standard sort of illustration of this idea would be the paperclip maximizer. So the paperclip maximizer is a machine that is a hypothetical, thankfully, hypothetical machine, which has been programmed to create as many paperclips as possible.

• 1:08:55Gurwinder Bhogal?

  And it's basically been programmed to have this as its absolute priority, to basically override all other priorities. And so what this machine does is it begins to turn literally everything on the planet into paperclips. And when the engineers realize what they've done and they go to change it, they go to re deprogram it, it turns them into paperclips. Because if it were to not, then there would be fewer paperclips. And so it ends up taking, turning the whole world into paperclips. And so it does something extremely stupid, but it does it in a very intelligent way. And this really is a good sort of metaphor for the human brain. Because just because somebody is intelligent and just because somebody has a high IQ,

• 1:09:37Gurwinder Bhogal?

  it doesn't mean that that intelligence is being put into the service of intelligent goals. It's very, very possible to to have very, very stupid opinions, like really stupid conclusions, but to very intelligently reason for them.

• 1:09:51Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, fortified fortified with an absolute genius level armoury around it.

• 1:09:56Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Exactly. And you see this a lot in academia, you know, people who have their whole lives, they they've just they sort of spend their whole lives in their head and they become very good at thinking. But they use that thinking to come out with the most wackiest ideas because they want to be original. Because if you're if you're in academia, you wanna you you want two things. You want to be interesting and you want to be original. And, you know, because there's a publication bias in favor of those two things. And so you have to say something that nobody else is saying, and you have to say something that shocks people or surprises people. And so you see a lot of academics who come out with the most insane opinions. And then they will use their intelligence, which is usually quite considerable.

• 1:10:38Gurwinder Bhogal?

  They'll use that intelligence to justify that the most moronic opinions. You know, I read this this one laughable study, which was conducted by this by this author, who said that basically rape didn't exist in America until white people arrived on its shores. And then they introduced rape to the Native Americans, you know, just completely bizarre idea. That they're basically saying that Native Americans were innocent, didn't have, they didn't ever commit any sexual assault.

• 1:11:06Chris Williamson?

  I always think about the Comanche Indians as being a very, very civilized people up until the point at which they were invaded, yeah.

• 1:11:13Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Exactly. And then white people taught them how to rape. And that's why rape exists in America amongst the Native Americans. Completely like idiotic opinion. But this author then used like all these weird sort of. Really weird esoteric knowledge about peculiar things that happened in history. And then basically got like scientific studies really, really cherry picked, you know, just to kind of create this narrative.

• 1:11:36Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, some very special narrative together.

• 1:11:38Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, exactly. And this doing this required a lot of intelligence because they had to get information from very disparate fields. And sort of combine them together and, you know, create this weird argument, which when you, when you look at the argument, I mean, it's a complete nonsense argument. But it's very intelligently put together. It's taken a lot of effort clearly because there's so much research involved.

• 1:11:58Chris Williamson?

  Do you know what it makes me think of? It makes me think about the four Stoic virtues. So justice, temperance, courage and wisdom. And without the fourth one, which I think is going to be the final book that Ryan writes in his series on the, the, the four virtues. Without the fourth one, all of the previous ones can be deployed in a stupid way. That, you know, you can be courageous for a cause which is pointless, that you can be just towards something which doesn't require it. That your temperance can be used in, in, in the wrong sort of way. So, um, yeah, there is a, I don't even know what it, it's, it's cognition and metacognition almost, right? It's like being able to step out. George Mack calls it clouds and dirt. So he says that you need to get down to the level of the frog and you need to get up toward the level of the birds.

• 1:12:43Chris Williamson?

  See the map, make sure that the map and the terrain is still different. Go down, go do the work, come back up, make sure that I'm still doing the right thing, go back down.

• 1:12:51Gurwinder Bhogal?

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

• 1:13:35Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Um. And then they would, you know, they will, they will. In many cases, what they will do is they'll begin with a conclusion. And they'll just say, OK, I need to get to that that conclusion any way I can. And then they will rationalize their way to that conclusion. And this is a big danger, I think, is that when you reason backwards instead of reasoning forwards. Yes. So um. Most people like will begin with that conclusion and they'll try and look for a way to get there. So uh if you're a very, very intelligent person, you'll always find a way to get there. You'll always find a way to get there, no matter what, no matter how crazy the conclusion is. And you've just got to look at the number of books with crazy theses, you know, and just by intelligent people. Just to know that this is true.

• 1:14:16Gurwinder Bhogal?

  I could, you know, if if I wanted to, I could come out, I could basically have a really, really insane conclusion, a really insane goal. Um. So it would be something like, um. Again, if I wanted to prove that the world is flat, right, I could I could begin from that assumption. And then I could put every waking day researching any piece of information that would possibly be used to rationalize that argument, and I could create a book out of it. I could actually do that, you know, but it would take me a long time. And it I would really be frying my brains trying to do it, but I could do it, I think. So I could create a compelling argument that the world is flat by ignoring all the information that I don't like and focusing only on the information that I like. And this is why intelligent people often believe stupid things, because

• 1:15:00Gurwinder Bhogal?

  the capacity for reasoning is also the capacity for rationalization. Uh, you know, rationality is not something that comes naturally to people. Rationalization is something that comes naturally to people. We are, again, this goes back to identity protective cognition, Dan Kahane's idea. The idea is that intelligence evolved not to help us to find the truth. It evolved to help us to survive. And if surviving requires us to believe crazy beliefs, like if we're living in North Korea, for instance, it makes much more sense for our intelligence to help us to believe that Kim Jong-un is the son of God or whatever, you know, he's like a divine being and that he was born on

• 1:15:43Gurwinder Bhogal?

  a mountain and that the birds sang his praise when he was born. You know, obviously, a normal person wouldn't couldn't believe that. But if you're intelligent, you can convince yourself of that. And, you know, this is something that throughout history we needed to do. We needed to believe, we need to convince ourselves, or at least imagine, at least pretend that we believed a crazy belief. So either we were good at acting and pretending that we believe something that we don't, or we could genuinely convince ourselves of that beliefs. And both of those things require intelligence. So our intelligence was used to make us believe bullshit. It was made, it was specifically configured and calibrated to help us to believe things that are not true, because they would help us survive in a social context.

• 1:16:24Chris Williamson?

  One of my favorite explanations for why we have theory of mind and why we have consciousness at all is that it allows us to model what other people are thinking about us. So in a very nimble and complex, social structured species like we are that have moving power dynamics, and I know that that person doesn't quite like that person, and they used to be in favor with this one, and what do they think about me, and how did I show up and blah, blah. The whole point is to portray as best as possible to the outside world that we are not insane. I am a totally normal, fully functioning person. And what's that quote about like, humans are easy to, to fool and you, you yourself are the one that's the easiest.

• 1:17:06Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, you mustn't fool yourself. Yeah, Richard Feynman.

• 1:17:08Chris Williamson?

  Yes, the Feynman thing. Okay, so I came up, I came up, I thought I came up with one. And then you called me out on Twitter twice with two different ideas that were my idea that had already existed. But I'm going to give you all three and we can, the audience can vote on whether or not mine's the coolest. I'm pretty sure it is. So I called mine. Vestigial pattern bias. The successful deliberate approaches we learn during our development can become a prison which stop us from being more free flowing and at ease when we are developed. The tools that got you from naught to fifty are not the same ones that get you from fifty to ninety or ninety to ninety-five, but we found success with this approach in the past, so we cling on to an overly rational, effortful approach.

• 1:17:50Chris Williamson?

  We hope that applying pure cerebral horsepower to a situation will fix it. We think that the more deliberate we are, the better the outcomes will be, without realising that our subconscious has aggregated the thousands of hours of experience we've clocked up to now, and not using that experience is keeping us in the same league that we've always been in. You told me that the Einstelung effect, the Einstelung effect occurs when pre-existing knowledge impedes one's ability to reach an optimal solution. We become unable to consider other solutions when we think we already have one, even though it may not be accurate or optimal. It leaves us cognitively incapable of differentiating previous experience with current problems. So we may solve a problem, but we don't actually innovate. And the final one, path dependence.

• 1:18:34Chris Williamson?

  The quirky keyboard layout was a misguided attempt to stop typewriters jamming, but despite it being inefficient for typing, it remains with us because people accepted it as the norm. We fail to notice so many problems because we let them become part of life. I think vestigial pattern bias is by far the best named of the three, but I do see that they're all, they're all part of the, all part of the same.

• 1:18:58Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, I think that they're kind of, I would say that path dependence is, is the vestigial pattern bias in a social setting. So it's how it occurs at scale when everybody is thinking that way, when everybody is thinking with that vestigial pattern bias, then you get, the result is you get path dependence. I think that the Einstel effect and the And the vestigial pattern bias are pretty much the same thing. I mean, there probably are subtle differences between them, but I think that the general concept is the same, which is that our methods gradually rigidify because we get used to solving problems in a certain way and then that prevents us from considering alternatives. And I think that this is something that I've seen in my own life. I feel like

• 1:19:43Gurwinder Bhogal?

  we tend to become blind to what we're familiar with. And this is, you sent me this great idea on Twitter, actually, DMs. And I responded with with the whole frog frog and fish thing, which is that basically the frog says to the fish, how's the water? And the fish says, what's water? And that's because the fish has lived its whole life in water, so it doesn't know anything else. I think it applies to the vestigial pattern biases, which is that we become so used to the solutions that we use in our daily lives, that we just, it just doesn't occur to us to consider that we could do things a different way. And I found this so many times with regards to the ways that I write essays, for instance.

• 1:20:25Gurwinder Bhogal?

  I've got a very standard way of doing it and I've been using that way for a very long time. So much so that I've almost forgotten that there are other ways of doing it. And it's only been recently where I've been kind of tinkering around and trying new things that I've actually realized how sort of how much I was constraining myself in my methodology. Because I just simply, it just didn't occur to me that I could do things a different way. I think this is probably responsible for a lot of people's stagnation is that it's just this idea that people forget that things can be changed and that's why they don't change them.

• 1:20:57Chris Williamson?

  I think there's a good, a good amount of scarcity mindset that comes into this too. That I have found a particular way of wrangling reality into a form which rewards me. Oh, I can't believe I've managed to do this. Let's hold on. Let's grip it tighter. Let's not let things change. I learned this when I did Rogan's show last year. And I sat down opposite this guy and he's got, it's a different sort of episode to this, right? It's just the most meandering conversation. Like if he has a bad steak the night before, guess what? You're talking about steak for 20 minutes.

• 1:21:31Chris Williamson?

  He sits down, no notes in front of him and just Jamie's already pressed the button and then he just begins and you watch this man hold a cogent conversation together with no plan beyond what's front of mind and a bit of prep that he's done for like three, four hours and it's it really opened up to me as the importance of storytelling, the importance of allowing the meander to happen, the importance of leaning into it just being a hang. I've said for a long time that the job of a podcaster is to be a vibe architect rather than a blinkist for podcasts, that you're not trying to index everything that's in someone's mind, you're trying to just create a vibe that the

• 1:22:14Chris Williamson?

  audience can enjoy. And you know, the vibe from from this episode might be there are amazing ideas out there that you don't know about and we're going to riff on them and you're going to learn some and maybe you take them home with you. I've got one of the guys that's a part of the Sound of Freedom coming in, like the vibe from that is that there are seriously evil people out there and it is important that we're aware of it and we need to protect children. And there's another vibe from this and another vibe from that. But within that broader sort of landscape, you can just weave however you want. And and that that was really, really interesting. And that again was, you know, my pattern bias was showing that I have my way of preparing, I have my way of creating a show. And then I watched Joe and I've listened to him do it where he is,

• 1:22:55Chris Williamson?

  he's like one of those guys that's gone beyond the rule set. You know, it's like, once you reach seventh dan, seventh degree black belt, that you have learned the rules so well that you can then break them. And you know, that's, that's very, very interesting. And obviously then opens up huge more ranges of learning because you're no longer constrained by just the one or two or three ways that you do things. All of the different paths are open to you.

• 1:23:21Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, absolutely. I think for you, this is actually a great way to avoid the vestigial pattern bias because you meet so many different people who have got completely different ways of looking at the world and different ways of doing things. So you're constantly being exposed to new ideas. I think it's probably one of the greatest ways to avoid vestigial pattern bias would be to have the kind of podcast that you have where, like you said, you know, one minute you're talking about ideas, the next minute you're talking about, you know, crazy. Evil people, whatever, you know, so it's constantly mixing things up, I think, is is the cure to this. And I think one of the problems is that we like the the algorithmic sort of structure of the internet compels us to do things the same way that we've always done them.

• 1:24:06Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Um. So for instance, recommendation algorithms or, you know, if you watch one video of, say, Ben Shapiro, YouTube's just gonna just flood you with Ben Shapiro videos, you know, and then now you're watching even more of them. And then the more you watch of them, you get even more flooded with them. And so it it basically narrows your sort of your probability space of the things that you could possibly learn and and you know, kind of the kinds of things that you could, the kinds of information you could consume. So I think it is important for no other, if for no other reason than to simply uh keep your probability space as wide as possible to

• 1:24:46Gurwinder Bhogal?

  do things against your own nature, to to sort of have an anti-algorithm, uh to basically, you know, do things that second guess yourself. If you feel like visiting a certain website, visit a completely different website, you know, and and just do things, try to second guess yourself and to not have a fixed routine. Uh like one of the things that I do, sorry, yeah, one of the things that I do now is that, um, if I read uh from, say, like a left wing news source, say, like, uh, if I read the New York Times, then the following day I will read right wing news, so I will read like the Wall Street Journal. Uh, you know, so I'm constantly shifting between different narratives and that allows me to not be sort of

• 1:25:29Gurwinder Bhogal?

  encapsulated, not be imprisoned within one single narrative, so that I'm constantly being exposed to different ways of looking at the world, constantly being exposed to new ways of of sort of being, as it were.

• 1:25:39Chris Williamson?

  It would be awesome, it would be awesome if there was an app that was able to do that for you.

• 1:25:45Gurwinder Bhogal?

  There was, I think there is, yeah. There actually is, I've forgotten the name of it, but there is actually a a new AI app, which I was looking at recently. Uh, fortunately, in fact, I might have it as a bookmark, but um, yeah, this is, there's an app which basically will give you um, different sort of information, almost at random, basically, based on.

• 1:26:03Chris Williamson?

  But over time, over the space of whatever, two months, you will end up with an even split of center, left and right.

• 1:26:10Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, basically it gives you a wide range.

• 1:26:12Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, tech skeptical and pro tech and all that stuff. Okay, next one. Oppression Olympics. Social media is a war for public sympathy. So victimhood is a status symbol that many compete for by collecting injuries, real and imagined, often goading others into attacking them so they can screenshot or record and immortalize their prestigious oppression.

• 1:26:35Gurwinder Bhogal?

  I mean, so because we're living in an attention economy, attention is like money. It's essentially currency. You know, if you if you could get eyeballs, then that gives you power. And one of the ways that people get attention now is by trying to make people empathic, empathetic towards them or sympathetic or whatever. Like they they try to get people's emotions engaged into what their their life is. And so, you know, if you could do that, if you can engage somebody's sympathies, then you can get them to do pretty much anything you want them to do. You can get them to send you money. You can get them to boost your content to other people. You can get them to to give you some emotional support.

• 1:27:17Gurwinder Bhogal?

  So there are many ways that you can you can sort of, in a sense, monetize people's affection. And the easiest way to do it, the simplest way to do it, is to essentially pretend that you're oppressed. There's even a word for this now. It's known as sad fishing, which is when people go on social media and they basically pretend that they're oppressed, not oppressed, but they just pretend that they're unfortunate. They pretend that something bad has happened to them. So it might not be oppression. It might it might be that they they might pretend that they have a mental illness. They might pretend that they're depressed. They might pretend that their partner left them.

• 1:27:55Chris Williamson?

  Do you remember the trend last year or the year before on TikTok where loads of people were pretending they had multiple personality disorder?

• 1:28:02Gurwinder Bhogal?

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

• 1:28:45Gurwinder Bhogal?

  a six-year-old schoolgirl in Minnesota, and then they'll pretend that they're like some tribal elder in Nairobi.

• 1:28:53Chris Williamson?

  What's it called? Is it others? Is it the, my other? Is that what they call it? Alters, that's it, fucking others.

• 1:28:58Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:59Chris Williamson?

  Alters.

• 1:28:59Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah. And so, and, and they basically, um, the, the truth about DID is quite, very interesting, actually, because there was a, a guy recently, unfortunately, he died. Um, Ian Hacking, he's a philosopher, and he studied the spread of DID. Uh, back then, it was called multiple personality disorder, um, in the 1970s. And what he found was that in 1970, there were almost no cases of multiple personality disorder. It was basically, it was pretty much unheard of. Um, there was maybe one case or two cases in the entire medical literature. And then what happened was that there was an article written, I think, um, I can't remember which paper it was, but it was a pretty big paper about, about this issue, about people having multiple, uh, personality.

• 1:29:44Gurwinder Bhogal?

  And it was, it was more of a speculative, um, essay. It was, it was, it wasn't really, you know, medical kind of thing. It was more just somebody speculating about it. And then this kind of popularized this idea. And after this happened, more and more people began to claim that they had, uh, pers- multiple personalities. And then what happened is that the clinicians at the time, they were trying to work out why this was happening. Because they didn't really understood, they didn't understand social contagions at the time. So they were trying to work out why more people were coming forward with, uh, multiple personalities. At that time, they believed that simply what was happening was that just awareness of this condition was increasing. And so. They began speculating and they began saying that people might be creating these alternate personalities in order to repress memories of sexual abuse.

• 1:30:27Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Now, we now know that repressed memories are a complete bullshit. They're not, they're not real. Repressed memories are Freudian mumbo jumbo, basically. They're not, people don't repress memories based on bad experiences. It just doesn't happen. And there is something, there is psychogenic amnesia, but that's, that's different. But, but repressed memories don't, don't happen. And so we know for a fact that these people were not, they were not creating these multiple personalities because they'd been sexually abused. What was actually happening was that they were looking at the diagnosis and they were looking at reports of multiple personality disorder. And then they were essentially using that to kind of make sense of their own lives. And so they were creating these multiple personalities in order to make sense of their lives in a weird sort of, sort of way.

• 1:31:10Gurwinder Bhogal?

  And what Ian Hacking found was that at the beginning, the average number of alters that a person had was between two and three. And within a decade, the average number was apparently seventeen. Apparently, this, this is according to his work. So I don't know if this could be verified, but this is what Ian Hacking found anyway in his research. And so I believe that DID is not a real disorder. I don't believe it's actually a real thing. I believe it's a complete fabrication and people who have DID are pretending because I've actually looked at the medical literature and there's only one, one study that I've found which, which, in which I think that there is actually a real thing going on in which people actually do have multiple personalities. And that's a thing called psychological gating.

• 1:31:54Gurwinder Bhogal?

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

• 1:32:20Gurwinder Bhogal?

  And apparently, what the the experimenter found was that when this woman shifted, there was actually a shift in the activity in her optic nerve. So something strange was going on that when she shifted to a different state of mind, when she shifted into another alter, suddenly she could see, a blind woman could see. So that kind of creeped me out. I don't know how much to believe this because this hasn't been replicated. And I'm very wary about these kinds of studies. Psychology is a bit a bit shady. You can't really trust a single study because there's so many, you know, so many of these are just made up. A lot of these psychological studies are made up, so I don't know whether to trust it.

• 1:33:01Gurwinder Bhogal?

  If it's true, then maybe I can be convinced that multiple personalities maybe are a thing. But I have so far seen no evidence that multiple personalities are actual thing, other than what people pretend. And this is why it's crazy when you look at TikTok and you see all these videos of people pretending that they've got multiple personalities. And the reason that they're doing it is obviously because it brings them attention and it's just sympathy.

• 1:33:24Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:24Gurwinder Bhogal?

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

• 1:34:07Gurwinder Bhogal?

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

• 1:34:38Chris Williamson?

  Fucking video of him. Yeah, I've seen this video.

• 1:34:40Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so this is. This is a common thing, people pretending that they've got illnesses that they don't have. And I've written an entire article about it, a long, like, four thousand word article about it, in which, you know, I just document like why people are doing this and.

• 1:34:55Chris Williamson?

  Where can people get this if they want to read the article?

• 1:34:57Gurwinder Bhogal?

  So this is on my Substack, so it's just gawinda.substack.com. And the article is called The Pathologization Pandemic, which is my name for this phenomenon. So, you know, it's, so I originally, actually, I won't go into it too much because I'll let people read it, but I'll focus on what I was talking about before, which is basically the whole TikTok thing, which is, you know, people on TikTok are doing this at crazy rates. There's just the number of cases of people pretending to have these conditions on TikTok surpasses the number of cases in real life, you know? So, so, so, so there are more people with multiple personality disorder on TikTok than there are in real life.

• 1:35:38Gurwinder Bhogal?

  And, and it obviously, you know, this just goes to show that these people are just completely making it up. And it is obviously because people want sympathy and I, I don't hold it against these people. I don't, I don't view them as bad people. I think that they're just doing what the market is demanding that they do. These people want attention and they, they want, they want to be loved like every other human being wants to be loved. And they want, they want clout.

• 1:36:01Chris Williamson?

  This is why, this is, this is why your article on audience capture, I think, twins with this pathologization pandemic thing so nicely, because the audience, perils of audience capture explains the incentives and explains how you have this sort of self-reinforcing recursive feedback loop between creator and audience and creator and audience. I remember I read in a book once, I think it's Steve Stuart Williams, who says, uh, sympathy is investment advice, says that when we feel sympathy, it is advising us of the person who is so lowly that if we give them our effort, it will be rewarded and they will be grateful for it so much higher than somebody

• 1:36:43Chris Williamson?

  who wasn't as desperate and down than they're looking, so to speak. Which is why sympathy, you know, you start fucking pulling that trigger. And it's, it's why, you know, the, these golden retriever or like rescue dog reels on Instagram do like nearly, I saw this one the other day that had seven million likes. I've never seen a reel with seven million likes before. And it was some dog and this dog's been. It was hurt and it was trying to bite the people that were getting it and it was all scraggly. And then they wash it and they they feed it and they give it antibiotics and they bring it back. And here it is with its owners jumping around in the yard. And you're like, in 60 seconds, I've got like the, an amazing story of this dog and I feel sympathy toward it. And now I'm all happy and I'm fucking weeping. And I'm like, I'm watching a video of a dog. Why am I weeping?

• 1:37:27Chris Williamson?

  So sympathy is just such a, it's such a compelling engagement, a reason to engage. Yeah, it's such, it's so magnetic.

• 1:37:37Gurwinder Bhogal?

  It is, yeah. It's, it's, I mean, it is the thing that will get people likes and retweets online, you know. You see, you can see this with, with, with Twitter, for instance. You see that people who don't really evoke sympathy in their audiences can have a massive follower count, but they won't get very many likes on their tweets. Whereas somebody who really sort of forms a connection with their audience, they can have far fewer followers, but they'll get so much more likes because their audience is engaged. And they're like, they're actually invested in this person's life and they actually want to know. The way I look at it is it's almost like a movie character. Like what, the, the structure of a movie is that the first sort of half an hour of a film,

• 1:38:20Gurwinder Bhogal?

  like the act one of a movie is designed to get you to like the character and get you to like the main character.

• 1:38:26Chris Williamson?

  Why should I care?

• 1:38:26Gurwinder Bhogal?

  So you, you do, yeah, develop this sympathy, exactly. And once you've developed the sympathy for the character, then you want to watch more of that character. You want to see what happens to them. And then you're rooting for that character and you're invested in that character. And the same thing happens with social media where people will try to create this struggle that they're having. One of the ways that screenwriters will make a character beloved to an audience is that they will give them a struggle. They'll make life hard for them. So if somebody has a struggle, then you can, you can identify with that person because everybody has a struggle in their life. And if that struggle is a universal struggle, so if it's like a guy that wants to get a girl, for instance, or, you know, somebody who wants to.

• 1:39:03Chris Williamson?

  Overcoming poverty or whatever.

• 1:39:05Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Or overcoming poverty or, you know, all of that kind of stuff. These are universal struggles that everybody understands.

• 1:39:10Chris Williamson?

  They're like me.

• 1:39:10Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:39:11Chris Williamson?

  It is me.

• 1:39:13Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah. And so if you can make, you know, if you can convince people that this person has got this struggle in their life, which you can identify with, then that will make you love that person so much more because you'll begin to see yourself in that person. And you'll root for them and you'll wanna, you wanna, you want them to have a happy ending. And I think this happens with social media as well.

• 1:39:30Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, let me give you an input there. So I learned this from baggage claim, uh, Manisha, uh, and the critical drinker as well. Uh, both um, online YouTube film critics, I suppose. And um, Manisha is very um, anti this sort of new wave of female boss, boss bitch heroes that are kind of being portrayed online. That um, if you look at the difference between the two Mulan films, in the first one, she had to be uh, innovative and crafty because she was smaller than the rest of them. And in the second one, she was better than all of the men immediately because she had like estrogen she or something like that.

• 1:40:08Chris Williamson?

  Or in, in the second Doctor Strange, there's like a, the daughter, uh, the, the Central American daughter of a lesbian couple has the most power in the entire universe. And the only reason that she can't use it is because she doesn't believe in herself because like, like.

• 1:40:24Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I, I've seen some critical drinkers uh, videos and there's one where he's commenting about Star Wars and about how Rey is basically a Mary Sue, uh, the main character Rey.

• 1:40:37Chris Williamson?

  What's a Mary Sue?

• 1:40:39Gurwinder Bhogal?

  So a Mary Sue is like a character who is basically like a kind of like a fantasy character. It's like basically the author injecting themselves as, as an ideal figure in, in, in the movie. So there'll be somebody who is just basically good at everything and who is perfect in every way, you know, somebody who never ever has any sort of setbacks or if they do have a setback, they'll immediately overcome it. There's, there's never any struggle with this character. So they're, they're basically just perfect. And um, a lot of people have accused Rey of being this, this kind of character. I've not actually seen the newest Star Wars movies, but, because I don't really have any interest in it, but

• 1:41:15Chris Williamson?

  Me neither.

• 1:41:16Gurwinder Bhogal?

  I, I, but the, the conversation about this is so wide that even I know who Rey is, even though I've never watched the movie. So Rey is the main character of the newer Star Wars movies of the new trilogy. And um, she's basically, I think she's related to Luke Skywalker, I don't know. But anyway, she's the main character and um. She is basically instantly good at everything. She doesn't need to be trained by a Jedi master. Like, I've seen the original Star Wars movies and Luke Skywalker, he had to be trained by Yoda and by Obi-Wan Kenobi in order to become the great Jedi that he would become. But apparently, I haven't seen this new, these newer movies, so I might get this wrong, but I've heard from, I think Critical Drinker and others, that basically Rey doesn't need to

• 1:41:58Gurwinder Bhogal?

  learn anything. She just has the abilities already. She has the Jedi powers. She knows how to wield a lightsaber from the get-go. She has everything already, you know, and it's like, basically, I think he basically attributes it to this new wave of like hyper feminism in Hollywood where, you know, the female characters are always more competent than the male characters.

• 1:42:15Chris Williamson?

  It's patronizing. I understand. We need to come up with a name for this. I have a little bit of a think about this. If you optimize for being, let's say sympathetic or empathetic or caring or comforting on the front end, without considering the second, third, fourth order effects down the line and how that might be adverse to the group that you are supposedly trying to help. So for instance, if you think about an entire generation of girls now who are growing up with these kinds of female leads,

• 1:42:46Chris Williamson?

  yes, maybe the initial experience is them being told, girls are great. If you're female, you can achieve whatever you want. Blah, blah, blah. Right? The second, third, fourth order effects of this are, if you, all of the heroes never had to encounter a difficulty. So when you do in your life, who are the role models that you look up to? Any difficulty that you do encounter in your life is due to something structural and you should complain about the world as opposed to change yourself or adapt to it or accept the fact that sometimes life can be shitty. Like, it makes a, according to Manisha baggage claim, it makes an entire generation of fragile narcissist women. And, you know, she uses, Who's fucking Prince Harry's wife?

• 1:43:32Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Meghan Markle.

• 1:43:33Chris Williamson?

  Meghan Markle. She is on like a vendetta against Meghan Markle, but she sees Meghan Markle as kind of like the poster child for this vulnerable narcissistic kind of like

• 1:43:43Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:44Chris Williamson?

  position. And yeah, I think that I think it's right. I think that not teaching women, especially that they are not only worthy but capable of overcoming difficult things. Because it's somehow more inspirational to never show a woman facing any like adversarial situations. To me, just seems like it's stupid. So.

• 1:44:07Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. I think that one of the reasons why people watch movies is so that they can actually understand how to overcome difficulties, what kind of a character must they be in order to overcome some of the sort of obstacles in life, you know? It's one of the, obviously not the only reason, but I think it's one of them. And I think it does serve a good purpose in that way because it gives us ideals to aspire to. It gives us, you know, sort of people that we can model our own lives on.

• 1:44:37Gurwinder Bhogal?

  But the problem is, is that if this person is unrealistic, if they're, if they're too ideal, then it can be dangerous to try to model your life on them because the, the the kinds of things that they would deserve in Navas sense of the term are not gonna equate, they're not going to translate to reality. So if somebody, so for example, like this Rey character, if she can instantly overcome everything, she, you know, some guy attacks her and then she's instantly just, you know, whips his ass. That's not going to translate to the real world because the sad fact is, is that for, you know, men are on average, a lot stronger than women. So if a woman were to emulate Rey

• 1:45:21Gurwinder Bhogal?

  in the real world and, you know, she's trying physically take down a guy, the chances are she's gonna get beaten down, you know? So it's just not gonna work. Like what works in a movie is not gonna work in reality. And I think this is one of the dangerous things about. Trying to create, turn these kinds of people into role models, because that's what they've tried to do. They tried to turn Ray into a role model for women, you know. And another thing is, is that why would, why would you make a role model just defeat every problem with physical violence? Because I think that's what she does. She just uses the force. She just knocks people over and kills them with her sword or whatever. You know, this is not a role model for a hu- for any human being, like, you know, it's, it's just, what, what exactly are you supposed to learn from this? That you could just kick,

• 1:46:04Gurwinder Bhogal?

  kick everybody's ass? Is that the lesson you're supposed to learn? It's not, it doesn't teach anybody anything. It's just, it's a fantasy. And so when they, when a lot of these writers, because you, you watch these documentaries of how they made the movie, and a lot of them will sort of, you know, stroke their chins and say, yes, well, we wanted to create a modern woman, you know, like somebody who the modern woman could relate to and all this sort of stuff. But modern women can't relate to that kind of.

• 1:46:26Chris Williamson?

  Literally the least relatable woman.

• 1:46:29Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Exactly. And, and, and that's what, yeah, that's it. And that's what a Mary Sue is. And Mary Sue is somebody who's just so good at everything that they're just not relatable in any sense of the term, that you just can't, you know, they're superhuman. And that's why, out of all the superheroes, my least favorite is Superman. A lot of people might, might disagree with me on that, but I don't like Superman, because he's just good at everything. He's just, he's, he's a god, basically. He's got, his only weakness is this mythical substance that doesn't even exist in the real world, like kryptonite, you know? So it's just like, I don't care, you know?

• 1:47:00Chris Williamson?

  We bond.

• 1:47:00Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Well, I like, I like the flaws. I like, I like characters who've got flaws, you know? I like Batman, because he's got flaws. He's, you know, he's, he's a kind of rich guy and all this sort of stuff, but he's got his dark side as well. And he's, he's constantly trying to fight with his, his own craziness, his own dark side. He's, he's an outcast. So that, you've got to have flaws, I think, in a character if you, if you want to make them appealing to, to, to other human beings, uh, which is, I don't, you know, I just don't get why they make so many Mary Sues. They should have learned this by now, but.

• 1:47:27Chris Williamson?

  Let's do two more. So, uh, we'll do mine first. We'll do mine first and we'll finish on one of yours. So this is productivity purgatory. The ancient Greek word for work was not at leisure. A 21st century grind addiction has turned pursuits like walks in nature, meditation and time in sunlight into just another productivity hack, slowly turning all leisure activities into a tribute to work.

• 1:47:53Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, so I've been thinking about this for a long time. So basically, there's Greek sort of classification of tasks. So ancient Greek classification of tasks. They divided tasks into telek activities and atelic activities. Now, telek comes from the Greek word telos, which means an end or a goal. And telek activities are activities that you do in order to reach some goal. So an example of this would be washing the dishes or washing your car or doing some kind of chore or job, going to a job to do your work. And then opposed to this is atelic activities.

• 1:48:34Gurwinder Bhogal?

  And atelic activities are activities that you do for the sake of the activity itself and not for any other goal. So an example of this would be anything that you enjoy. So painting, maybe a picture, if you enjoy doing that, you know. I mean, that could be both telek and atelic because you're doing it for the love of painting, but you're also doing it to have a painting at the end of it. So that maybe that's not a good example. So I would say atelic, a good example of an atelic activity would be going for a walk in the park or something, you know, assuming you're not doing it for exercise, but you're just doing it just to it. Well, you could do it for exercise, but you're not doing it to reach a certain destination. You're just doing it for the sake of walking, you know, you're walking for the sake of walking.

• 1:49:18Gurwinder Bhogal?

  And what I've been trying to do in my life is I'm trying to turn a lot of my telek activities into atelic activities.

• 1:49:26Chris Williamson?

  I've got the, I've got the, I've got this, I think the correct terminology for you here. Autotelic derives goals, joy and reward mostly internally, judging their own actions. Exotelic derives goals, joy and reward externally, takes care how their actions are being judged.

• 1:49:41Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, I mean, I use the words telek and atelic.

• 1:49:45Chris Williamson?

  Maybe I've got.

• 1:49:46Gurwinder Bhogal?

  A bit simpler.

• 1:49:47Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:47Gurwinder Bhogal?

  If you type in T E L I C.

• 1:49:50Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:51Gurwinder Bhogal?

  And yeah, so it's called telecity. Um, that's the terms that those are the terms that I use. Yeah.

• 1:49:57Chris Williamson?

  Oh, wow. This has been, this has been hijacked by a bunch of like athleisure companies. So it's taking me, all I can see a lime green, uh, like slip on fucking.

• 1:50:08Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Uh, no, no, I think the best thing to do is just type in T E L I C.

• 1:50:14Chris Williamson?

  I did, I did, and it came up with a bunch of sandals. Anyway, I'll, I'll, I'll check it out afterwards. So telek and atelic. Cool.

• 1:50:20Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, yeah. So, so I'm trying to turn, um, sort of my telek activities into atelic ones. I'm trying to do more things just for the sake of doing them, because I think if you can enjoy the activity itself and not think too much about the goal, uh, then you will become much more, you, you'll become more content with your life, I think. I think a lot of people do things just for some kind of goal and they don't enjoy the process of doing the thing that they're trying to do.

• 1:50:46Chris Williamson?

  Have you, have you?

• 1:50:46Gurwinder Bhogal?

  And as a result of that, they become less, they become less good at actually achieving the goal.

• 1:50:50Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Have you got any a- advice on how you are becoming more atelic?

• 1:50:55Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah. So I try to find enjoyable ways of doing things. Because there are, there usually are, there are less enjoyable ways of doing these. There are more enjoyable ways of doing things. So for example, um, I used to hate working out, but I've started working out recently and the way I've, I've made it into more of an enjoyable activity is that I, I listen to music that I really, really enjoy, but I only allow myself to listen to that music when I'm working out. So if I want to hear a tune that I really, really enjoy, I can only listen to it if I'm working out. So that compels me to work out. So it, it makes the process of working out more enjoyable because I'm focusing on the music. And you know, I'm just kind of like, uh, just doing that. So little things like that, you can just turn activities into, um,

• 1:51:38Gurwinder Bhogal?

  into more enjoyable things. And also another thing is when I go for walks, for instance, I used to kind of find walking boring because I would go through the same route all this, all the time. But now I mix up my routes and I, I go down streets that I've never gone down before.

• 1:51:50Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I love doing that.

• 1:51:51Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Parks and yeah, I just completely just losing myself because I'm living in a new area now. So all of this is alien to me, the area that I'm in now. So I just basically just wonder, I just choose a direction and I just go in that direction. And then I just end up at these unexpected places and I might see some like crazy cafe in the middle of corner somewhere and just, that looks nice. And just go in there. So you just make. A simple thing like walking, far more enjoyable by adding that element of surprise and the suspense, you know, so going back to what you were saying about how you create that suspense for your audience, uh, you know, I think suspense can really help make things a lot more enjoyable when you, when things are a little bit unpredictable, when you don't know how they're going to turn out. I think unpredictability is one of the great spices of life.

• 1:52:32Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:52:32Gurwinder Bhogal?

  If you can make something unpredictable, then it becomes a lot more exciting and a lot more enjoyable.

• 1:52:36Chris Williamson?

  And you don't need to take huge risks with this unpredictability. Sounds like, uh, you know, I'm going to try and make it home on half a tank of gas, even though I've got two hundred miles to go, or I'm going to have to jump out of an airplane or something like that. Unpredictability can be as benign as you want it to be. It can be, you know, taking a left instead of a right on the way to work. Yeah. Okay. Final one for today. We got so many that we didn't get through. Uh, presentism. We judge history by modern standards. We regard slave owners as evil, but slavery was so common and familiar to our forebears that they were blind to its inequities, as are we to the industrial slaughter of animals for which we too will eventually be called evil.

• 1:53:19Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah. So I'm, I'm one of those people who gets upset when I hear about, uh, the way animals are treated in sort of, you know, factory farms. Um, I just think that the way that they're treated is absolutely horrific. And if, if it was something that we had no knowledge of, but that just suddenly was revealed to us today, I think there would be a massive movement against it to end it because of the ways that they're treated. I mean, pigs, for instance, pigs, apparently according to some studies, uh, they have similar levels of intelligence to a seven year old child. Um, and that they know when they're being, they're going to be killed and, you know, they'll resist it as much as they can. And yet, you know, you hear stories of them being buried alive, um, by, by farmers because they, you know, they might have, not even that they actually have foot

• 1:54:02Gurwinder Bhogal?

  and mouth disease, but they, there's a chance that they might catch it. And because of that, large numbers of them are buried alive. And just, that's just one example. I mean, they're treated in horrific ways in, in factory farms. And I, I think I'm, I'm quite sort of surprised that people don't. View this as more horrific than it actually than it actually is because we care about dogs. We care about dogs a lot, you know, we we wouldn't want to see dogs treated like this. And yet pigs are a lot smarter than dogs, they're a lot more self aware than dogs. And yet we we treat them in the most barbaric ways. And I think that what's holding people back a lot of the time is A, people are just used to it. And this goes, this is like the opposite of hedonic adaptation, where there's a kind of like nightmare adaptation.

• 1:54:45Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Where, you know, if something's horrific, but we're just used to it, it just doesn't.

• 1:54:48Chris Williamson?

  Suffering adaptation.

• 1:54:49Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yep, yeah, it's no, it's no longer horrific because we're just used to it. And so we're born into this world in which animals are treated in these barbaric ways. So we don't really kick up a fuss about it. And we just focus on the beautiful taste of a steak or whatever. And that's enough for us, you know, this is weird. It's this weird sort of cognitive dissonance in the mind to what I've I've I've observed among some people. I saw this one thing once, which was crazy, where I saw somebody. Who was watching a a video on their phone while they were in a McDonald's. And they were, they were, they were watching a a video of a like a cow of a a cow. And they had a Big Mac on the desk next to them, they were eating their Big Mac.

• 1:55:31Gurwinder Bhogal?

  While they're looking at this cute cow on YouTube and going, oh, and ah over it. You know, it's this weird split brain thing goes on in people's brains. And everybody does this, you know, you you see a cow, you'd be like, oh, that's so cute. You know, it's it's lovely, you know, and all this, and you want to stroke it and all that. But then you can just go to to McDonald's and pick up a Big Mac and you'll be eating probably its cousin or something, you know. So it's like this weird sort of cognitive dissonance that we have in our brains. And I think that that's only going to be remedied when we no longer. Need to kill animals in order to have food, in order to have meat. Um, it's not that we need meat now, we can survive without meat, although it's not, it's not quite as efficient. But um, I think like if we, you know, if we could.

• 1:56:16Gurwinder Bhogal?

  When when the time comes when we can actually create burgers in a lap and those burgers taste just as good as natural burgers. Then I think people will actually have more of a motivation to end suffering. And the reason why, I think, is because we have the precedent, which is that the industrial revolution made slavery less necessary in order to maintain the economy. Um, before the industrial revolution, slavery was kind of needed to maintain the economy. And so people did, they they turned a blind eye to how horrifically evil it is. But once the Industrial Revolution came about and the machinery became available to do the slaves' work, then people suddenly realised, oh, we don't need this anymore. Now we have the luxury of being ethical.

• 1:56:59Gurwinder Bhogal?

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

• 1:57:34Chris Williamson?

  What's the broader lesson from presentism then?

• 1:57:38Gurwinder Bhogal?

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

• 1:58:07Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Unfortunately, you know, it's easy to say this is barbaric and it's evil and it's horrible, but you've got to look at what what actually are their alternatives? They have to fight with everything they've got, because if they don't, they're going to die, they're going to get killed. And so they have to be as brutal as they can possibly be. And this is something that a lot of people don't seem to understand is that, you know, even the most horrific people, and I don't want to defend people like Assad, but I remember that during the Syrian war, Assad was basically being criticised for using chemical weapons. And obviously, chemical weapons are absolutely horrific and they're nasty, but...

• 1:58:45Gurwinder Bhogal?

  He was using those weapons because he didn't have precision guided bombs. He didn't have the technology that the West has. The West can afford to be more humane in its bombing campaigns because it's got precision guided weaponry. So it can afford to just target, you know, it can actually target just the the enemy combatants. It doesn't need to have civilian casualties, but even it does have civilian casualties, but it can minimize them. Somebody like Assad, who doesn't have that kind of technology, but who feels in his what he needs to protect his family, he needs to win his war from his point of view. Like I said, I don't agree with Assad. I don't, I think he's a horrible human being, but from his point of view, he needs to win that war. So he's going to use what methods are available to him to win that war.

• 1:59:28Gurwinder Bhogal?

  And that includes using chemical weapons because chemical weapons are very effective and they did prove effective in the Syrian war. They managed to clear huge areas from enemy combatants and they were able to kill people behind cover in, you know, which is what normal munitions can't do. Um, but you know, we need to bear in mind that people are only going to behave ethically when it's within their capabilities to do so, and it's not always within their capabilities to do so. And people need to realize that this is true of their own selves. I think if you eat meat, uh, you've got to reckon with the fact that you are engaging in something that is sort of causing a huge amount of suffering to sentient animals. And, you know, I say this as somebody who has eaten meat.

• 2:00:10Gurwinder Bhogal?

  I try not to eat as much meat as I, as I do, as, as I did. Um, I try to eat sort of more, you know, lower sentient, uh, animals, sort of stuff like shellfish.

• 2:00:20Chris Williamson?

  Clams all the time.

• 2:00:21Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, yeah, I try to eat that a bit more than, than eating the higher order animals, but you know, even I can't resist a good steak now and again, but I'm, I try not to because even when I do eat steaks, I eat sort of animals that have been, been able to roam the fields and stuff, you know, I don't eat factory farmed and stuff, but that's a luxury. That's a luxury that I have because I can afford to buy food that's organic, um, that has, you know, been allowed to roam free. I, if I was poor, I would have to eat factory farmed animals. So I wouldn't judge that person. I'm not going to judge somebody because they're, they're too poor to eat organic food, you know, or, you know, um, that food that has welfare standards. I'm not going to judge them because they don't have that capability. So I think we do need to take into account. Um, I think that's what presentism gives us is it gives us the idea that

• 2:01:07Gurwinder Bhogal?

  we need to consider the context in which people are unethical because do they actually have the alternative? Do they have the ability to do otherwise? And if they don't, then we we need to maybe, you know, not not be so harsh. But I do think I do think people have the ability to not be so evil to animals now. So I do judge people. Um, I judge everybody, including myself, for eating meat. Because I think we're getting to the point now where it's no longer necessary to eat meat. We can have uh food that's been grown in a lab. And, you know, I think that if you don't do that, then you're essentially quite unethical because you're you're choosing the suffering of an animal over the non-suffering of an animal.

• 2:01:46Chris Williamson?

  I learned this from Alex O'Connor five years ago, I think, maybe four or five years ago. And and he managed to convince me, someone that's been a lifelong meat eater and still is, that if I do choose to continue to eat meat, which I have done, uh, that I I need to reckon with the fact that I'm causing suffering and that, you know, if I was being fully ethically aligned with my beliefs and my actions, that I probably would stop eating meat, or I would certainly at at least reduce it down as much as I could.

• 2:02:17Gurwinder Bhogal?

  It strikes me as kind of like path dependence. Um, you know, or the vestigial pattern bias. This is essentially a kind of instance of that. We eat meat today because we've always eaten meat. And we don't think about it because we've never thought about it. But if it was something that we'd never eaten in our lives, if we had gone our whole lives being vegan and not knowing the concept of eating other animals, then suddenly if a steak was presented in front of us and we were told that this is another living being that that's been slaughtered so that we can eat it, I think that would absolutely horrify us. So we we do it because we've always done it. And it's that's why these old habits die hard. And I think it will take time for us to adjust to eating lab-grown meat. I mean, obviously, there's all these conspiracy theories now about how lab-grown meat is is going to be

• 2:03:01Gurwinder Bhogal?

  pumped full of chemicals that will either sterilize us to reduce the population uh for Klaus Schwab or whatever, or, you know, there's going to be all kinds of stuff about that. But I mean, um. You know, I'll be, I for one would be happy to not have animals suffer anymore in the way that they've been suffered on a scale of hundreds of billions of, you know, of the years. So, yeah.

• 2:03:24Chris Williamson?

  Gwyneth Boghul, ladies and gentlemen, dude, I absolutely adore speaking to you. Every time we do these episodes, I'm, I leave feeling fired up and, and ready to go learn more stuff about the world. Where should people go if they want to keep up to date with all of the shit that you're doing?

• 2:03:36Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah. So the best thing to do is to just find me on Twitter. Probably the best thing to do is just type Gwyneth Twitter into Google. That's the easiest way to do it. Or Substack. Again, you could just type in Gwyneth Substack and that's where the main places that I'll be found. And then, yeah, I might try some other new things soon, but I'm not ready to announce them quite yet.

• 2:03:56Chris Williamson?

  That's all right, dude. When you are, we will run this back soon enough. I appreciate the hell out of you. Thank you for today.

• 2:04:02Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah. Thanks, Chris. It's always a pleasure to be here.