14 Concepts To Understand Human Nature - Gurwinder Bhogal

Gurwinder Bhogal is a programmer and a writer. Gurwinder is one of my favourite Twitter follows. He’s written another monstrous thread exploring human nature, cognitive biases, mental models, status games, crowd behaviour and social media. It's one of the best things I've read this year, so I just had to bring him on. Expect to learn why stupidity is more dangerous than evil, why most content has to appeal to midwits, why political debates are essentially mass-scaled ventriloquizism, how lower stakes lead to more vicious arguments, why the word retard is a strange choice as an unspeakable slur, why being a mess is more likeable than being perfect and much more… Sponsors: Join the Modern Wisdom Community to connect with me & other listeners - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Get 2 weeks free access to Wondrium by going to https://www.wondrium.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and Free Shipping from Athletic Greens at https://athleticgreens.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 2 weeks Free Access to the State App at https://bit.ly/statewisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Follow Gurwinder on Twitter - https://twitter.com/G_S_Bhogal Gurwinder's MegaThread: https://twitter.com/G_S_Bhogal/status/1527720869191114756 Subscribe to 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 #mentalmodels #humannature #psychology - 00:00 Intro 00:38 How Companies in the West Virtue-Signal 07:35 Bonhoeffer’s Theory of Stupidity 12:19 Mean World Syndrome 20:40 Two-Step Flow Theory 26:38 Introspection Illusion 33:58 Sayre’s Law 41:28 Nut-Picking 54:43 The Lesser Mind’s Problem 1:01:03 Discussing the Word ‘Retard’ 1:09:38 The Law of Oligarchy 1:12:50 Noble Cause Corruption 1:18:58 Fire-Hosing 1:23:02 The Beautiful Mess Effect 1:32:20 Where to Find Gurwinder - Join the Modern Wisdom Community on Locals - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Listen to all episodes on audio: Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

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

• 0:00Gurwinder Bhogal?

  We once used to judge people mostly based on their deeds, but in the age of social media, we judge people mostly based on their opinions. And since we're now defined by our opinions, there is pressure to have an opinion on everything. Problem is, is that people generally don't have the time or the will to research every issue on which they're expected to have an opinion, so they copy the opinions of others. And the result of this is that there are preciously few genuine thinkers out there. The majority of people posting opinions online are just thoughtlessly reposting other people's opinions as their own.

• 0:30Chris Williamson?

  So, as is tradition, you write these huge threads on Twitter. I fall in love with all of the concepts and then we get to go through them. But before we start on some of the concepts, you put a tweet out about the pandering and posturing that companies are doing in the West versus what they're doing in the Middle East. What did you learn there?

• 0:49Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, so I mean, you know, I thought it was quite interesting because you can tell whether a belief is genuine by what people are willing to sacrifice for it. And corporations love to appear compassionate by claiming to stand for Black Lives Matter or gay pride or trans rights. But they only openly support these rights in countries in which they're already popular. They're not willing to risk or sacrifice anything for their professed beliefs. And the reason for this is that their beliefs are just a charade. So really, the point here is just that words are cheap, you know. So if you really want to know if a person's principles are genuine, see what it actually cost them. If it's cost them something, then it's probably a genuine belief.

• 1:34Gurwinder Bhogal?

  But if it's cost them nothing, then it's just noise. And we see a lot of that today, you know, in this kind of image-oriented age in which we live, where corporations feel the need to be part of the conversation and they're constantly putting out these opinions that they think are going to be popular. But it's all just, it's just a show, you know, so I just wanted to draw attention to that.

• 1:56Chris Williamson?

  We see so much, June 1st is like the Twitter profile update photo collage deployment waterfall thing where Cisco, Mercedes, Lenovo, BMW, Bethesda, Visa, BP and millions others that we probably haven't got screenshots of have decided to have their central account with the colors of the rainbow, we're supporting Pride, we're in support of gay people around the world. And then the Middle East version hasn't been updated at all. I was trying to come up with a name for it and I was thinking of something like equality shadow boxing, because that's kind of like what they're doing. They're, they're fighting in an arena that where the

• 2:41Chris Williamson?

  concept's already been won. Corporations support Pride in the West where it's widely accepted, but not in the East because their activism is not motivated by principles, but by public relations. So fighting where the battle's already been won and not fighting for equality where it's needed.

• 2:56Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yes, absolutely. I mean, if I had to use a word to describe it, I would just call it pandering, really, you know, a nice, simple word, because that's essentially what it is, that they're looking at their target audience and they're seeing what does this audience want. And at the moment, corporations really want to pull in the sort of TikTok teens, because they want to get people when they're young. They want to establish, you know, brand loyalty to these kids when they're young so that they'll sort of stay with them for life. And so the TikTok generation is kind of quite infamous for being quite woke and, you know, into all this kind of like, sort of social justice posturing. And as a result of that, I think that's why they've chosen this route. They've chosen to go towards

• 3:40Gurwinder Bhogal?

  the more kind of, you know, social justicey kind of thing. You don't really see corporations sort of being based, you know, being, you know, sort of pro sort of. Trump or whatever, you know, I mean, you've got Elon Musk, who's a very rare exception. He's kind of gone towards the base route. But I think he, I think that's him as an individual. Tesla's not doing that. You know, Tesla is sort of quite, still quite on the left, sort of.

• 4:06Chris Williamson?

  I think they're probably desperately trying to hold on to whatever acceptable face that they can and wrangling, working their way kind of around Elon is this, he's a bit of a force to be reckoned with on his own. But yeah, I mean, we see this with body positivity, websites that are using plus sized girls and some use plus sized guys. But for the most part, you don't ever see skinny fat guys, right? That are pale, that look like they spend a ton of time in VR. Okay, so it's not about bodies of all sizes and making everybody feel represented. It's about pushing a narrative that drives more clicks and means that you can say, we are part of the virtuous crowd. You do not need to look here. Over there, those are the people that aren't doing it. I mean, you see it with the different

• 4:49Chris Williamson?

  races that are used as well. A lot of them, I mean, ASOS is really bad for this. Tons and tons of their models are now mixed race guys that have got neck tattoos, but there's no Asians. There's basically no Asians on that site. And you go, well, okay, like, what is it that you're doing? It's split testing something that mediates between, we need to be able to show variety and signal virtue, and we still need to drive clicks. So all of that's been split tested as well. If fat Asian lads were selling more ASOS clothes, do you not think that they would be using it?

• 5:25Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Exactly, yeah. I mean, you know, I don't see a problem with sort of diversifying sort of models and things like that. I think it's okay. But I think the issue begins when there's, when it's basically sort of done performatively. And an example of this is in, I think there's this, I don't really watch Star Wars, so I don't know much about it. But I saw this tweet recently, in which the Star Wars official account.

• 5:53Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Basically posted their new actress who's going to be like a main star of one of their upcoming shows or something. I don't, I don't really know what it is, but it was a black woman and they, the tweet was essentially saying like, this is our new star. She's a black woman. She's a strong, independent black woman. And they were really like highlighting the fact that she's black, you know, and they were like, you know, if you have a problem with her, then we don't want you to be one of our fans. And it was, you know, it was a very sort of confrontational tweet. And I was like, I don't understand the point in it because if you look at the previous, the old Star Wars, I mean, I haven't really seen much of it, but I remember the originals and there's that Lando Calrissian is a black guy. There's no mention is made of this guy being a black guy because he doesn't, it doesn't need to be made. The point doesn't need to be made

• 6:37Gurwinder Bhogal?

  that he's a black guy. He, you know, it doesn't matter that he's a black guy. So people didn't have a problem with that. And it's when they start forcefully saying, you know, this is our main star and this is a black guy or a black woman and you, you, you will enjoy it or you will, you know, suffer the consequences. Yeah. That's, I think that's, it's a very aggressive kind of thing that I think a lot turns a lot of people off, but also it also turns a lot of people on unfortunately as well, which is why they do it.

• 7:06Chris Williamson?

  Can you imagine if we make it all the way to whatever year Star Wars is set in and we've got lightsabers and laser guns and we can travel super, super fast around the universe and yet still the most important thing about somebody is their skin color. I honestly think, just bring on the Death Star man, fucking send us all, send us all to the end of hell because I, I don't want to live in that future.

• 7:26Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, absolutely terrible. Yeah.

• 7:29Chris Williamson?

  Okay. So moving on to your concept from this new super tweet thread, which will be linked in the show notes below. If people want to go and check that out. Bonhoeffer's theory of stupidity. Evil can be guarded against stupidity cannot. And the world's few evil people have little power without the help of the world's many stupid people. As a result, stupidity is a far greater threat than evil.

• 7:52Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah. So.

• 7:55Gurwinder Bhogal?

  So we have a tendency as a species to view the world in Manichean terms. Manichean is a fancy word of saying that we divide the world into good and evil. We evolved to view our tribe as good and the enemy tribe as evil to justify annihilating them, quite frankly, and taking their resources without any sort of hesitation or guilt or, you know, any sort of other emotion that might get in the way.

• 8:24Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Tribes that were sort of morally relativists, they would not have survived for very long because they would have been killed by the tribes that were morally absolutist, the ones that were so sure that they were right and their enemies were evil. So as a result of that, we have this kind of flaw in our DNA, which is that we see the world in Manichean terms. We tend to divide things into good and evil. We see struggles as fairy tales in a way.

• 8:51Gurwinder Bhogal?

  It means that when you have a debate with somebody online on Twitter, you're instead of sort of seeing them as just having a disagreement, you'll see them as evil oftentimes, you know. You know, you can see it today with the way that the left sort of views the right as bigots. And increasingly, you see the right viewing the left as groomers, child abusers. And, you know, so they they take the worst sort of thing that they can think of and they attribute that to their that the people that they disagree with. It's this sort of evolutionary sort of byproduct that we have. I think if we recognize that most people are just merely ignorant

• 9:33Gurwinder Bhogal?

  rather than actually being malevolent, then disagreement ceases to become a cause of conflict and it instead becomes an opportunity for understanding. So I think that that's a crucial lesson for social media in particular.

• 9:49Chris Williamson?

  How is it that stupidity can't be guarded against? And how is it that stupid people help evil people?

• 9:55Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Well, because...

• 9:57Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Stupidity is not predictable. You know, it's not, you can't predict when you're gonna make a mistake, whereas you can to an extent predict what an evil person is gonna do. An evil person will try to do evil, you know, but stupidity is so broad and it's, you can make so many mistakes at so many different points of reasoning that you just, it's impossible to predict, so you can't really guard against it. Um, so, you know, that's, that's, that's the first thing, and then the second thing is that there are some evil people, I mean, I use the word evil broadly to describe people who are sadists, people who take pleasure in suffering of others, or either that or people who are

• 10:38Gurwinder Bhogal?

  sort of sociopaths, and people who don't care at all about other people's feelings, have zero, you know, regard for them. Um, but these people are a tiny minority, you know, most people are not like that. And what these people do, these psychopaths and these sociopaths, um, is that they can't really do much on their own, I mean, they can become serial killers, and they do sometimes, but a serial killer can usually only kill a few dozen people at, at most before they're caught. Whereas, if you look at the most destructive people in history, they were people who had armies, they had people who had nations behind them. And these people were essentially, they were psychopaths to an extent.

• 11:21Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Um, you know, people like Stalin and Hitler, for instance, they had very, sort of, uh, low regard for human life. But they were only able to do what they did because they were able to get many, many, many stupid people onto their side, you know, and not, not even necessarily stupid people, but just people who were uninformed, basically. And it's so, it's really, if they didn't have all of those people on their side, then they wouldn't have done, they wouldn't have been able to get anywhere close to what they did. They would have probably, you know, Hitler might have just ended up being a crappy artist, you know, like he was going to be before he was chucked out of art school. Um, Stalin would probably have become a priest because he was in a seminary when he was young. So, it's these...

• 12:06Gurwinder Bhogal?

  It's the masses, the sort of the stupid masses who really caused the destruction in the end. It's not the the people that we we put all the blame on. They're just the sort of spark that ignites the wildfire, as it were.

• 12:20Chris Williamson?

  Next one, mean world syndrome. The news exists to get your attention, so it tends to shock. As such, it doesn't reflect reality, but precisely that which is uncharacteristic of reality. But since it's all we see, we begin to think the world is crazier than it actually is.

• 12:37Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, so so people want to see stuff that's surprising because it has more informational value. You learn more from what's surprising than from what's mundane and predictable. And since people have an appetite for the surprising, the information filters that dictate what you see online, the editorial filters, the algorithmic filters, they select for shocking stuff, basically. So the news that you see is stuff that's intended to sort of shock you. And obviously, if it's shocking you, then it's not going to be characteristic of reality. It's not going to be something that you could predict. It's going to be

• 13:19Gurwinder Bhogal?

  something that's completely out of the ordinary. The problem is, is that while your mind is browsing this information online, it's not very good at critical thinking because you enter something called a dissociative state in which you kind of zone into what you're looking at. And you kind of become lost and then you don't you lose the capacity for thought. And as a result of that, what happens is that you lose the ability to make the distinction between what you're seeing and the probability of it actually occurring. So you see extraordinary events and you regard them as just ordinary events, in a sense, when you see them in oftentimes. So the problem with this is that it leads us to sort of see.

• 14:06Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Things like injustices and other sort of anomalies as the norm. And we'll probably get more into this actually with some of my other concepts. But yeah, I mean, so it's a, yeah, this is, I think, a very important concept for, again, for social media, because when you have a curated feed like Twitter, you're seeing information that has passed through several filters and that information, every time it passes through a filter, it selects for stuff that's uncharacteristic of reality. So it's taking you further and further away from reality as it passes through all these various filters, the, you know, the algorithms and the sort of editorial decisions and all that sort of stuff and your own decisions as well.

• 14:50Gurwinder Bhogal?

  So I think it's, it's one that people should beware of definitely because it.

• 14:53Chris Williamson?

  It's strange about what rises to the top, you know, the most shocking news stories, the ones that are unrepresentative, the ones that are uncharacteristic of what happens, they're the ones that garner the most attention, they're the ones that limbically hijack, so they're the ones that are going to be pushed the most online by other people and by the algorithm. And then it, it's so obvious when you think, well, the reason that people are shocked by it is the fact that it wasn't mundane, but by definition of it being shocking and not mundane, it has to be an outlier event. And if you get a collection of outlier events all the time, because that's what's most effective in order to garner the most attention on the internet and on news, what you have is a selection of anomalies put together to try and represent a world that people think,

• 15:38Chris Williamson?

  well, this is just what happens. And I also think the human brain is not meant to consume the entire globe's news in real time, 24 hours a day. And then when you have some perverse incentives like this going on as well, what you end up with is a very sort of skewed perspective of just what's going on. It doesn't surprise me that people think that the world's going to shit at the moment. You know, it's chaos out there. The world's never been so turbulent and well, has it? Or is that just the lens through which the information that you're being fed is giving you it? Because think about your daily experience. It's strange that people can hold in their minds at the same time.

• 16:19Chris Williamson?

  The world is kind of banal and it's this sort of grey sludge that we're being fed to kind of keep us working for the man. And yet, at the same time, it's a post-apocalyptic hellscape with, you know, fire and brimstone going on outside. People's personal experience doesn't seem to match up with what's going on. This is the same with the Blackpill, MGTOW incel movement too, that most guys, when you actually drill down and say, "Look, what's your experience like with women?" It's perfectly pleasant. Most guys, that's not to say that there isn't a bunch of amber herds out there that are manipulative and doing stuff to men and taking their kids away from them and accusing them of stuff, yeah. But for the most part, and yet, because the internet and Reddit forums and Telegram groups and

• 17:04Chris Williamson?

  YouTube channels that work in that space, obviously raise up the most shocking stories out of the lot. Well, what do you end up with? You end up with a group of people that believe that those stories are representative of what all women are like, whilst having an experience in their own life which completely disproves that.

• 17:21Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah. Yeah, I mean, you know, it gives people a completely distorted sense of reality. And it's one reason why I've actually sort of toned down my consumption of news. Because, I mean, I read this really good piece by, I don't know if you know Sarah Hyder, she's a writer, writes on Substack, and she wrote a great piece about news consumption, about what it's actually good for. And, you know, she sort of came to the conclusion that essentially most of the news that we consume is actually pointless. It doesn't help us in our daily lives. It doesn't really enlighten us. It doesn't make us, it doesn't increase our understanding of the world. And when you pair it with what we're talking about, in fact, it actually has the opposite effect. It makes you less informed because it distorts

• 18:04Gurwinder Bhogal?

  your sense of reality. And so what I do now, I mean, I still have to consume better news because obviously I'm a writer, so I'll have to write about what's going on in the world. But I only consume what I have to. I don't consume any more than that. I feel that if you get into a habit of like feeling that you always have to keep up with what's going on, it puts you in this kind of trap in which you're, you're sort of just constantly distorting your own reality every day. Every time you you log on, you know, in the morning and you check Twitter or whatever, you're, you're creating a sort of false narrative in your mind, which...

• 18:37Gurwinder Bhogal?

  It compounds with itself over time. If you, the more you consume news, the more distorted your reality becomes. And so I think really, the best way out of this is just to limit your consumption of news to, to basically what is essential for you to know and to not really bother with all the other stuff, because it really doesn't help.

• 18:56Chris Williamson?

  I am in a group chat with a bunch of guys from Austin, and one of them came up with something that I think should be in, should appear in one of your future tweet threads. So I'm going to give it to you now. It's the midwit appeal theorem. By definition, most people are midwits. Therefore, nothing can achieve mass significance without appealing to and allowing itself to be explained by midwits.

• 19:17Gurwinder Bhogal?

  It's something that, you know, something else that I've written about is the idea that we all tend to sort of converge in our narratives because we all ultimately see the stuff that gets the most traction online. And this is what results in midwits. Midwits are people who browse the internet in predictable ways. And because they're browsing the internet in predictable ways, it's very easy to game them. You know, social media can game them very easily. So it can show them stuff that's going to sort of incite outrage or whatever, because it knows that they're predictable. So it can, it can sort of, it knows what they're going to see. It knows what they're not going to see. And when you've got large numbers of people all consuming the same content, the result is that people tend to

• 19:59Gurwinder Bhogal?

  sort of form these big blocks of like-minded, not just like-minded, but people of uniform beliefs, you know, and, and that's where the midwits come from, I think. They're all people who just consume the internet in very predictable ways, which is why I try to do the opposite. I try to, you know, look at things that other people are not looking at, click on the 21st search result rather than the first, you know, that kind of stuff. Failing the algorithm, I think, is very important to maintain a kind of independent mindset.

• 20:30Chris Williamson?

  Or just being really stupid, or being really, really smart. It's kind of hard, pretty hard to be really, really smart. But yeah, just be really stupid or really smart is the best way to inoculate yourself. Right, next one, next one from you. Two-step flow theory. Most people's opinions are copied from their favorite influencers, who in turn copy the opinions of their favored mass media. As such, politics is largely a battle between two armies of puppets being ventriloquized by a handful of actual thinkers.

• 20:59Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah. So this is one of my sort of pet issues.

• 21:04Gurwinder Bhogal?

  So basically, the the rise of social media as the primary form of social interaction changed the way that we evaluate people. We once used to judge people mostly based on their deeds, but in the age of social media, we judge people mostly based on their opinions, because that's really all we see of people. And since we're now defined by our opinions, there is pressure to have an opinion on everything. The problem is, is that people generally don't have the time or the will to research every issue on which they're expected to have an opinion, so they copy the opinions of others. And the result of this is that there are preciously few genuine thinkers out there, basically.

• 21:47Gurwinder Bhogal?

  The the majority of people posting opinions online are just thoughtlessly reposting other people's opinions as their own. What this means is that almost everyone who posted an opinion online has not actually researched it, or even considered it. You know, they're not actually considered the issue that they're pining on. So in other words, you know, they don't know what they're talking about.

• 22:08Chris Williamson?

  Where do you think the first mover of this comes from? Because there has to be someone that comes up with something somewhere.

• 22:12Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, there are people out there who come up with ideas, you know, the intellectuals, they're a very, very sort of small minority of people, but there are genuine thinkers. And what happens is that these guys come up with the ideas, and gals, they come up with the ideas, and then everybody just copies them, and then they get copied, and then they get copied. So what usually happens is there are a few people, usually in the mainstream media commentators, and they have original thoughts, and then influencers will usually read these, and then they'll sort of just, just basically.

• 22:48Chris Williamson?

  Parrot them.

• 22:49Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, just parrot them. And then the people who follow those influencers will parrot them, and then it just spreads like a virus, basically, you know.

• 22:57Chris Williamson?

  Do you remember in the general election, the UK general election, was that 2019, the last one?

• 23:02Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah.

• 23:03Chris Williamson?

  And in the lead up to that, if you watched social media, you would have thought, this is an absolute whitewash for Labour. And you were seeing Stormzy, and Amber that won Love Island, and all of these people that were like so vehement, and you think, well, this person's got a very, very strong opinion, and they're just one person. So the other people, they must, it must be a complete army that's behind them. And then the results came in and you realised that.

• 23:30Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah.

• 23:31Chris Williamson?

  It was just. Loud people saying things that they definitely, I mean, forgive me, but Stormzy doesn't strike me as the sort of guy that's spent ages considering his political position. Makes good music, but like, he's not there as a political thinker.

• 23:47Gurwinder Bhogal?

  I mean, I think the thing with Stormzy is that his crowd are not really political. They're not really interested in voting in elections. And that's where the mistake was made because although, yeah, there are probably a lot of people who who voted because of him, it there was nowhere near the amount that people expected. Simply because he's not, he's not generally a political figure. He's an artist and people are more interested in his music than they are in his opinions. Really, I think where the two step flow theory really sort of becomes apparent, I think, is on social media with things like sort of political opinions, you know, that actually sort of spread through social media in particular amongst the political classes, not amongst

• 24:31Gurwinder Bhogal?

  sort of teens, you know, because I mean, Stormzy's main audience are probably teens, aren't they? I mean, those guys are not political really. So, yeah, it's mainly, this is more of an issue that really sort of becomes apparent on, on, in Twitter politics.

• 24:46Chris Williamson?

  Well, if you think about what a retweet actually is, what is a retweet? It's you.

• 24:51Gurwinder Bhogal?

  It is a demonstration of that very fact. It is essentially parroting an opinion.

• 24:55Chris Williamson?

  Precisely.

• 24:56Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Blaming an opinion.

• 24:57Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 24:58Gurwinder Bhogal?

  So, yeah, I mean, yeah, exactly. That's a very good point. Yeah, it's, it's sort of, so it works in two ways, I think. Firstly, people copy opinions directly, but then secondly, they also would rather just retweet something rather than actually think for themselves. You know, it's much easier just to press the retweet button than formulate your own tweet.

• 25:19Chris Williamson?

  I do think the the retweet function, the less that you use it, most of the accounts that I follow don't retweet that much. I think that they're the, they're closer to the first movers and that's probably a pretty good heuristic. Are are most of the people that you follow retweeting or are most of them either quote tweeting or tweeting their own stuff? Because even if they've, even if they've reworded something that sounds smart, at least, I mean, that's one degree of separation or half a degree of separation.

• 25:46Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, absolutely. Because if you reword something, you have to actually consider it in your mind. You have to, you have to sort of parse it. And then once you've passed it, you've got to rearrange it, and that requires thought. So that's actually a pretty good thing to do. In fact, that's a good way to learn, I think, is to actually take an opinion and then to deconstruct it and to rearrange it. And you can actually then, I mean, I've done that with some people's things, because I remember reading this thing about how to become a better writer when I was younger. And it said you should take sort of a page of a writer that you really admire, and you should rewrite what they've written in your own words. And I found that that was a really good exercise, just to sort of, because you pick up on things when you're rewriting it that you don't when you're just reading it.

• 26:28Chris Williamson?

  Holds in your understanding and yeah.

• 26:31Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Because you're actually interacting with the text rather than just passively, you know, consuming it. And so I would encourage that. I think that's a very good thing to do.

• 26:39Chris Williamson?

  Introspection illusion. We think we understand the real reasons why we think and act the way we do, but we think other people have little understanding of why they think and act the way they do. We assess ourselves as if they're psychiatric patients and ourselves as if we're gods.

• 26:55Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah. So, I mean, you've probably noticed this when you've sort of witnessed a Twitter debate. But many debates online consist not of two people trying to refute each other's ideas, but rather two people trying to psychoanalyze each other. So for example, you know, I believe what I believe because it makes sense. You believe what you believe because you're just seeking social approval. And, you know, I do think many people believe things just for social approval, like we were just talking about, you know, with the corporations earlier. But it's much harder for me to accuse myself of seeking social approval. You know, it's something I haven't really, it's a bit alien to me. I think it's alien to everybody to accuse themselves of believing something for something

• 27:40Gurwinder Bhogal?

  other than reason. It's not something that we normally do. I mean, you know, I don't think I do believe things for social approval, but. I can't be sure because my actual motivations could just be rationalizations. So, you know, this is, it, it, it basically puts you in a bit of a tricky spot where you have to really consider the things that you're accusing other people of. Isn't it strange that you never accuse yourself of these very things? So I think we should sense a foster of consist, we should foster a sense of consistency on this issue. Um, you know, yes, many people hold beliefs as a result of social needs and character flaws. So it's legitimate to accuse other people of it, but for the very same reason, we should recognize that we could also be guilty of it. And therefore, instead of getting defensive,

• 28:25Gurwinder Bhogal?

  we should be open to accusations that we believe what we believe due to character flaws rather than reason.

• 28:31Chris Williamson?

  This is the fundamental attribution error as well, right?

• 28:34Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, to, yeah, to an extent, yeah. That, I mean, that's more to do with whether you believe something because of an inherent, something inherent to you, or whether you believe something due to situational factors.

• 28:44Chris Williamson?

  Uh huh.

• 28:44Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Uh, so yeah, it, it's, I think the, the fundamental attribution error is, is a more broader way of

• 28:49Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 28:50Gurwinder Bhogal?

  of, of saying this, yeah.

• 28:51Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, but the, i- it is, this is something that I always said to people that are going through, uh, breakups. If you invert this, what you realize is your understanding of yourself and the depth of time and detail that you've gone into your own mind with is greater than even if you had a conjoined twin, you're going to have with them. So if somebody's gone through a breakup, a lot of the time, a- and it wasn't their choice, they romanticize the other partner. They make them out to be kind of saintly and, and they're wistfully just sort of chasing after them. Uh, and they can also put them on a pedestal. It's gonna be very difficult to find somebody like this, so on and so forth. But one of the ways that you can at least invert that a little bit is by using this introspection illusion kind of to your advantage and think, well, look at how deep and rich

• 29:36Chris Williamson?

  your understanding of your experience is, right? There is this wild asymmetry. Basically, your, your, your brain's infinite to you and somebody else is unbelievably finite to you in your experience. Not only do you not know what they're thinking, all that you know about what they're thinking is what they've communicated to you. And they can communicate what they do, what they think at a much lower bandwidth than they think. And they don't choose to say everything, and you weren't there for all of the things that they were going to say. So this asymmetry between the two, I think, is something that Can cause people firstly to feel quite lonely in the world, right? Because your inner experience is significantly richer than the reflected experience you get from other people. But on top of that as well, it is something that should make you feel a bit reassured.

• 30:21Chris Williamson?

  That you are, you are special because your experience of you is the only person, the only consciousness that's ever going to get that degree of depth. So it is the sort of thing, I think in part, that should give people reason to be sort of proud of themselves.

• 30:37Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I think it's always worthwhile to sort of consider oneself, like when one is, when one's sort of forming opinions, to actually consider what one gains from it or what one would lose from it. Because I think, you know, the idea is that we don't really know ourselves. We don't know ourselves. We think we know ourselves. You know, we have this idea of who we are, but really that's, we can't step outside of ourselves. We know we're stuck inside of ourselves and that prevents us from seeing the forest for the trees, so to speak. So really, we can't, we can't really second guess our own opinions.

• 31:20Gurwinder Bhogal?

  We can't know the real reasons why we believe what we believe. But what we can do is we can try to understand what we would gain from those beliefs, you know? So if I, if I had to have a political belief, I should ask myself, what would I actually gain from believing this? Because we know now that, you know, a lot of beliefs are not just sort of reason, they're not just a result of reason. They, there's complex factors that play in a term, in terms of somebody's character and what they want from life. And, you know, people believe things because they think it brings them comfort or, you know, there's so many different factors to what goes into a belief. So in order to avoid the trap of believing something purely for an irrational reason,

• 32:03Gurwinder Bhogal?

  it's always worth asking you what else you stand to gain from that belief. It's something that I've been trying to do. It's a very hard habit to develop because we're used to criticizing other people for that, you know? We're not used to do it to ourselves. But I think when you do it to yourself, it really does help you understand yourself. It helps you understand why you think the way that you do. You know, if you look at your experiences and you try to understand how your experiences have shaped your beliefs, if you can make a habit of that, then you can start to interrogate yourself and start to. Realise why you believe what you believe and to sort of see the flaws in your own beliefs and then correct them.

• 32:39Chris Williamson?

  Would you say that if somebody assesses either one of their own beliefs or that of somebody else, and it seems like they pay quite a high price for holding that belief, that they should probably consider that as more likely to be truthful? I always think about this with regards to Sam Harris, that the fact that he's got, he was anti-woke but anti-Trump, he was pro-vax but anti-mask mandate, you know, he held a very sort of unusual dynamic in his beliefs, and you go, well, he's paying a high price for that. Does that mean I probably tend to have a bit more faith that he actually believes what he believes?

• 33:16Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Absolutely. I mean, yeah, like we were saying earlier, you know, with the corporations, you know, not risking anything for their beliefs. When you risk something with your beliefs, or when you sacrifice something for your beliefs, then that's a sign that your beliefs are genuine. But that doesn't mean that your beliefs are justified. You know, that's a whole different ballgame. And I think the introspection illusion is really more about establishing whether your beliefs are justified, rather than whether they're genuinely held. Because you could make a good idea, you have a good idea of whether your beliefs are genuinely held, you know better than anyone whether your beliefs are genuinely held, but you can't really tell whether your beliefs are justified until you interrogate yourself. And that takes a lot of effort. It's something that is completely alien to human beings.

• 33:57Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. All right. Sayers' Law: The lower the stakes, the more vicious the politics. Intense nuclear talks, people act civilized. In Twitter culture wars, people act like Armageddon has come. Raging like maniacs, calling for total war, safe in the knowledge that none of it matters.

• 34:15Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, so this law was originally invented to describe academic politics, but it's recently become applicable to online politics. Sayers didn't really offer an explanation for the law, but I think I have one of my own, which is basically firstly, people

• 34:36Gurwinder Bhogal?

  People's egos cause them to exaggerate the importance of their struggles when it's possible to do so. In truly serious matters, understanding is essential, therefore, precision of language is essential. This prevents people from exaggerating their struggles. But when it comes to issues with lower stakes, in which there is some leeway, accurately describing reality becomes less important, so people can take greater liberties to exaggerate their pet issue. So, the result, you can see it widely in the culture wars. So, for instance, you know, with the woke left sort of thing, words are violence, silence

• 35:18Gurwinder Bhogal?

  is violence, you know, using the wrong pronoun is erasing someone's existence, dressing as a Cherokee for Halloween is committing genocide against Native Americans, you know. But I mean, we do see this problem on the right also, it's not just a problem of the left. I mean, for instance, you know, racial mixing is white genocide, you know. So, both sides engage in this kind of, you know, sort of catastrophization. And I think, really, it's just a symptom of people wanting their struggles to seem more important than they actually are.

• 36:00Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Because, really, it's, they're not that important when you, when you really consider, you know, the grand scheme of things. And so, people make up for it. Whereas, when people actually do have real struggles, they have to be truthful, they have to be precise, because there are costs to being incorrect or imprecise. So, the result is that you can gauge how serious an issue is by the language used to describe it. Issues that are described in sensationalist terms are generally not as serious as issues that are described in very precise terms, because in the latter case, the rewards for misrepresenting reality are smaller and the risks are far greater.

• 36:40Chris Williamson?

  What was Sayer trying to describe originally?

• 36:44Gurwinder Bhogal?

  So he was trying to describe academic politics as this kind of thing, very bitter and very vicious struggle where people are very petty. And I mean, you could say that he was talking about the narcissism of small differences. You know, he was basically saying that because the stakes are so low in in politics, people's egos generally drive them to become more ruthless and more petty, basically, just just to sort of compensate for the fact that their struggles are so trivial. But he didn't, like I said, he didn't really explain it. He just, it was more of an observation. And I really had to think about it to try and work out why I thought it was true. And I think, I mean, I do believe it is true. It's just that it took me a while to try and work out why. And I think that

• 37:27Gurwinder Bhogal?

  that's what it is. I think that there are costs to being untruthful when the stakes are high. When when you're in a nuclear negotiation, you can't misrepresent reality. You have to be truthful because the cost is too great. And the rewards are small because you don't need to exaggerate the problem because the problem is already big. Whereas when you're in a small struggle like Twitter culture war, there's plenty of room to be untruthful because it doesn't matter because it's so it's so trivial. It doesn't matter whether you're economical with the truth. You can just say whatever. It doesn't matter. It's all inconsequential. So people exaggerate and they they larp and they catastrophize and then they just, you know, the result is that this problem takes on an

• 38:09Gurwinder Bhogal?

  apocalyptic tone, even though it's usually just, just what somebody said online, you know?

• 38:14Chris Williamson?

  And bizarrely, there's probably an inversion between the seriousness of the problem, the language that's used to describe it, which means that the problems that probably required the most attention are the ones that linguistically are given perhaps not the least, but they're at least being constrained with precision, thoughtfulness, and perhaps even in some situations, I suppose, like secrecy to a degree, you know, so many, there's this, it's called terrorism, close calls, and it's on Netflix. It's kind of a bit cheesy, actually. It could have, it could have been much better, but it's kind of fun. And it's declassified files and CIA agents and stuff and FBI people

• 38:55Chris Williamson?

  that have dealt with close calls where some serious shit nearly went down. And this is how you're finding out about it. This is, it's 30 years ago and someone was going to blow up a tube going from New York to Whatever, Long Island or some shit. That's how you found out about it.

• 39:14Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah.

• 39:14Chris Williamson?

  And I wonder as well whether, again, everything, it's easy to bring everything back to social media because almost everything is mediated by social media. And the perverse incentives that you have online for attracting attention, for using this inflammatory language, it's kind of really hard to just separate that out and go, okay, this is, this is just something like gravity that's always there. How do we then pass this in? But for sure, this is a big reason that it gets promulgated even more. The fact that signaling is such a big part of what you do now online and that the language that you use is one of the primary signals that you use.

• 39:50Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think really the Twitter culture war is largely a result of language being used to exaggerate struggles, you know. It's, it's taken on this kind of apocalyptic tone precisely because of the way that it's described, you know, online. But when you really break it down, what, what actually is it? It's just people sneering at each other online. It's just, you know, it's just kind of people exchanging insults. That's all it is. Because although the struggle, you know, some of the struggles might be real, like for instance, you know, things like transgender rights and things, these are all real political struggles.

• 40:31Gurwinder Bhogal?

  But the actual Twitter culture war is divorced from that, even though it purports to be about such things. It doesn't really have any effect on these, on these issues.

• 40:40Chris Williamson?

  It seems as well like it's kind of a bit of a losing battle because let's say that there is a serious problem that you're dealing with. So you decide to use precise language and treat it with the requisite respect that it deserves. It doesn't garner any attention. Then you decide, okay, well, that's not going to work. So we'll try the flamboyant incendiary language instead. And then people have got this filter. I have this filter, even if it's subconscious until I read this thread and realized why. Oh, I'll, I'll discount that. So you're okay. So you're damned if you do and you're damned if you. People aren't going to pay attention if you're precise and realistic with your language. And they're going to castigate you and dismiss it if you're inflammatory with your language. So yeah, I think.

• 41:21Chris Williamson?

  A big rule over the top of all of this is, social media is a very bad way to have conversations that are serious.

• 41:26Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, absolutely, yeah.

• 41:28Chris Williamson?

  Next one, let's go on to nutpicking. Cherry picking the most outlandish members of the enemy side and presenting them as indicative in order to make the entire side look crazy. A common tactic on Twitter, arguably, the entire culture war is just each side sneering at the other side's lunatics. That is so good.

• 41:48Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, I mean, so you'll be very familiar with this and, you know, I think most people who browse Twitter are familiar with this sort of thing because it happens so commonly online. Last time I was on your show, we spoke of libs of TikTok. And, I mean, that, that, since we've last spoke, that's exploded, it's now massive, you know. And one of the reasons it's, it's massive is that it engages in this nutpicking, which people love. People love to see nutpicking and that's why it's so popular. You just, you know, I was browsing through the libs of TikTok feed the other day and was just seeing all these crazy people, you know, that were just sort of trying to get sort of four, five year olds to come out, you know, of the closet and stuff and,

• 42:34Gurwinder Bhogal?

  you know, I thought, if you, if you spend your life following this account, you're going to think that this stuff is happening literally everywhere. You're going to think that this is extremely common, that it's like, you know, happening in every school, that there's a massive plot to sort of sexualize young children. And it would drive you absolutely crazy. It would, if I, if I believed that the world, you know, was like a big conspiracy, just basically fill classrooms up with these kind of

• 43:01Gurwinder Bhogal?

  sort of sex positivity activists who are just basically trying to sexualize young children, I would drive, it would drive me absolutely insane. And you see it, you see people online who actually believe this is happening, you know, that they believe that there's a massive operation to sort of, you know, just completely just sort of turn kids degenerate, basically.

• 43:23Gurwinder Bhogal?

  But then you've also got the left wing version of this, which is Right Wing Watch. This is a

• 43:28Chris Williamson?

  I haven't seen that. What is that?

• 43:30Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, so that's a Twitter account, which is the sort of left wing equivalent of Libs of

• 43:33Chris Williamson?

  What do they post?

• 43:35Gurwinder Bhogal?

  So they just post crazy like Christian conservatives, you know, who believe that the the modern world is going to burn in hellfire and all this kind of stuff and just and mental like racists and like, you know, white nationalists and stuff like that. Just the craziest loons from the right wing, basically. And, you know, people who are like, want to blow up buildings and just just get crazy people on there. And and I mean, if I was, you know, following this account, if I was following Right Wing Watch, I would get this idea that the right are just gonna like, you know, kill everybody, shoot everybody to death with their guns. And just basically, you know, put minorities into concentration camps or whatever. So, you know, that's the problem with when you take the worst examples from each side.

• 44:19Gurwinder Bhogal?

  And then you create like a Twitter feed of nothing but those, because this goes back to what we were talking about earlier. About, you know, how social media misrepresents

• 44:28Chris Williamson?

  Mean world syndrome, yeah.

• 44:29Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, with the mean world syndrome, yeah. Um, you know, you all you see, if all you see is just the most extreme examples of any worldview, you're going to think that that worldview is an existential threat to to the world, basically, and that's going to drive you crazy. And it's going to make you more extreme in your beliefs. So the long term effect of this is that it makes everybody more extreme, which makes it quite dangerous. It it might be entertaining, you know, nitpicking is always quite entertaining if, especially if you're a culture warrior, you know, and you want to you want to laugh at the other side. Then if, you know, if I'm if I was a right winger, I wanted to laugh at the other side, I'd just go on Libs and TikTok and just start browsing and, you know, I could spend hours on it.

• 45:09Chris Williamson?

  Look at a ton of the right wing channels and and the content that they put out. I mean, Matt Walsh from the Daily Wire has his five headlines. I would I would guess that at least two to three news stories per week on this show that has a big research team probably comes from Libs of TikTok. So you go, okay, that's not even one ideology, that's not even one type of talking point. That's one account that is filtering some of this stuff through. And One of the weirdest things about this is it should enrage people of the side that this account is putting stuff out from more than it enrages the other side.

• 45:50Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Absolutely, yeah.

• 45:51Chris Williamson?

  Libs of TikTok should piss off the moderate left significantly more than it pisses off the right. And it feels like a duty of the people on that side of the fence to call out the lunatics of their own side, because they're misrepresenting a view that you, that they're taking to the sort of caricature nth degree of ridiculousness, a view that you're supposed to care about. People on the right, they don't give a fuck. They're not bothered. They're happy for you to lose yourself in pink haired wokeness. And the people on the left don't care about the gun toting Christian, everyone's going to go to hell people, right? They don't mind. So it's your job to be the mediator, to not be the mediator, to be like the enforcer, to bring them back into the conversation.

• 46:32Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, absolutely. I completely agree with what you're saying. I mean, you know, I'm not, I'm no longer like, I don't consider myself left or right, but I was a leftist for like 10 years. And during that time, I, even when I was a leftist, I was more anti-woke than most right leaning people, because I understood.

• 46:51Chris Williamson?

  You've got a dog in the fight.

• 46:52Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, because at the end of the day, you know, who's really being harmed by all this craziness, this woke craziness? It's not people on the right, they're actually gaining support from it. It's the people on the left who are being harmed by it, because this, this wokeness is an embarrassment to the left. Because what it shows is that the left have, you know, they've basically allowed themselves to lie down and be walked all over by these woke ideologues. And yes, these woke ideologues are a minority, they're a tiny minority within the left, but they do have disproportionate influence now as a result of the left just lying down and letting these kind of neon haired children just walk all over them.

• 47:32Gurwinder Bhogal?

  You know, now you, I mean, you see this kind of stuff, you know, in academia, you see powerful people in academia who have these kinds of views. You see powerful people who work in corporate boardrooms who have these views. You see powerful people in Hollywood who have these views, you know? And the result of, I mean, this is all a result of the left doing nothing for a long, long time and allowing this belief to just gestate and grow. And on the right, you do have a similar thing. I mean, I would say that on the right is slightly different because the crazies on the right are generally more concerned to the fringes, but that's not to say that there are no crazies on the right who don't receive mainstream support. I mean, I would say that Donald Trump was a pretty extreme

• 48:16Gurwinder Bhogal?

  right winger, although he's not genuinely a right winger. He doesn't really have any ideological beliefs, I don't believe. But he he rode to power on a platform of a pretty extreme right wing crap, you know, like with all this QAnon nonsense and stuff like that. And that is pretty insane stuff and that guy became president of the United States. So yeah, this issue does occur on the right as well.

• 48:40Gurwinder Bhogal?

  But I think that stuff is not seen as much of a liability to the right as wokeness is to the left. Because wokeness is a lot more visible because it because wokeness is it controls essentially the West's cultural institutions, academia, the mainstream media, apart from Fox News and that kind of stuff. And sort of Hollywood and, you know, even publishing as well. Publishing is pretty woken now as well.

• 49:08Chris Williamson?

  We saw that Penguin Random House threatened walkout when they said that they were going to publish Jordan Peterson's second book.

• 49:15Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah.

• 49:16Chris Williamson?

  And yeah, it's I think wokeness is a rallying cry, sorry, wokeness is an embarrassment to the left and a rallying cry to the right. That's the way that it's seen. It's the thing that galvanizes the right to push back against the wildness that's coming out of that. And if you are moderately on the left, it should be the sort of thing that makes you put your head in your hands. And it's strange. Last time that we spoke, we came up with this idea that an absurd ideological belief is a show of loyalty to your side and a threat display to the other. What it proves is that you value the group ideology.

• 49:58Chris Williamson?

  More highly than you even value reason itself and truth. And that, I think, explains so much of this. It's like, is this a show of fealty to your side? And any slight nuance that you show is seen as a chink in your armour by your enemies and a lack of commitment by your compadres, right? That's the way that it's viewed. And it means, how is someone supposed to defect? How do you move away from that? You're not going to be accepted by the other side because you still hold 80% of the beliefs that they don't hold. And you're not any longer going to be accepted by your own side because everybody's terrified of this circular firing squad coming and going for them. They just purity spiral their way up to an increasingly ridiculous belief.

• 50:43Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, absolutely, yeah. I think, yeah, conformity plays a huge part in this. Because when you have, pretty much, the entirety of Western culture is in the grips of wokeness right now. Because all of these-

• 50:59Chris Williamson?

  Do you really think it's that bad?

• 51:00Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Sorry?

• 51:01Chris Williamson?

  Do you really think it's that bad?

• 51:02Gurwinder Bhogal?

  I do, I do think it's that bad. I mean, you know, I don't think it's an existential threat to the world or anything like that. But I think it's, it could be considered an existential threat to the left as we currently understand it. And that's why I oppose wokeness. Not because it's a threat to the world, but because it's a threat to the left. And even though I'm no longer a leftist, I believe that we do need a strong left in the world because I believe it stands up for things that are missing in the right. And it provides a good and solid, powerful counterbalance to the right's excesses. I believe, really, we need a left and a right to sort of bounce off each other and to keep each other in check.

• 51:41Chris Williamson?

  Well, isn't that interesting that your major concern about what's happening with woke isn't the people that don't believe in it, it's the people that almost don't believe in it. It's the people that are part of their own side. Yeah, yeah, for sure, man. It's, I really, really don't know what's going to happen, rolling the clock forward with this.

• 51:58Gurwinder Bhogal?

  I do think that the tide is turning against wokeness, though. I do believe gradually it's becoming more and more acceptable to call out the bullshit on the woke sort of side, you know, to talk about these kinds of things. For instance, like, you know, the gender wage gap. Say, sort of, three years ago, if you pointed out that the gender wage gap is not actually due to discrimination. People would call you a misogynist and you know, you'd probably get, you'd probably lose your job and stuff. I mean, James DeMore, do you remember him?

• 52:26Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 52:27Gurwinder Bhogal?

  He, he pointed out that there are different preferences that women and men on average have different preferences due to evolutionary roles. And as a result of that, I mean, that's, that's, that's real science. That's backed up by a mountain of evidence. But the thing is, is because he said that, um, he was fired from Google and that happened in, I think it was 2017, it was either 2016 or 2017. And now it's acceptable to sort of point out that yes, actually, women and men on average do have slight differences in behavior. And that leads to slight differences in social outcomes, you know? So it's like, it's becoming more acceptable to talk about these things. So I think that's a sign that wokeness is gradually receding. But I think it's, it still has a huge amount of power in the cultural

• 53:09Gurwinder Bhogal?

  institutions, but it's going to take time for people to see through the bullshit, I think, and to people to summon the courage to actually speak out against it.

• 53:17Chris Williamson?

  The problem that you have is this tit for tat mentality. The fact that as one side does something that's ridiculous, that almost legitimates the other side to do. It's kind of like a relationship. Oh, well, you texted your ex-boyfriend to go and collect your shoes from his house. So I'm going to catch up with my ex-girlfriend for a coffee. Oh, well, I'm going to go out for drinks. Oh, well, I'm good. And there you go. It just ends up justifying increasingly extreme behavior on both sides. Um, but yeah, I mean, if the volume could be turned down, that would be great. It's definitely, I keep talking about this. The um, ascendancy and then uh, fall from grace of woke is such a really good

• 53:59Chris Williamson?

  example of why satire and um, comedy is useful online. Because that word, that entire group has been memed out of existence by people that are kind of funny. People that are funny have turned that into a caricature of itself. And the word woke was a, you were able to use it for like two weeks unironically. And then after that, it was just completely co-opted by people that were using it to mean the most extreme version of what it didn't mean.

• 54:27Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Hmm. Yeah. Yeah. It's a sad thing. It's like a kind of. Concept creep, but in a sort of in a different way, I suppose it's the opposite of concept creep, really, in which the meaning becomes more specific and very more tailored towards a very specific sort of worldview.

• 54:43Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, okay, right, next one, the lesser minds problem. We dismiss those we disagree with as stupid, insane or evil because it saves us from having to deal with the complex truth that people see things differently from us largely because the labyrinth of experience has led them to different conclusions.

• 54:59Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, I mean, so this sort of goes back to what I was saying earlier about minutianism. We evolved to view people of other ideological tribes as just plain wrong, basically, whether by evil or insanity. You know, 10 years ago, you know, when I was a leftist, I got all my news from the New York Times and the Guardian, which taught me that right wingers were only right wing because they were selfish or bigoted. But then I actually got to know a few right wingers and I began to see that there's a kind of, there is a value in right wing politics that isn't really mentioned in the New York Times or in the Guardian.

• 55:37Chris Williamson?

  What is that, what's the value?

• 55:40Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Oh, there's plenty of value to it, but it's something, this is something that I learned is that the value of leftism is very obvious and it's very clear and it's very shallow in a way. And that's why young people always begin as leftists. But then they gradually move rightwards as they get older. And the reason for that, I think, is that people become more risk averse. Because when you're young, you know, you, you're experimental, you're exploratory because you've got nothing to lose. So you take big risks and you take big chances. And so you want to completely overturn society, you want to completely change everything, you know, tear down the old statues, let's erect something new. You're very ambitious when you're young.

• 56:22Gurwinder Bhogal?

  But then as you begin to accumulate things in life, as you begin to accumulate a family and a house and wealth, you become more risk averse because you realise that you've got something to lose now and you realise how good you've actually got it. You realise how grateful you should be because of the position, the unique position that you occupy in history. And you realise that the things that you thought were useless in the world actually have a very important purpose. You know, this is the whole Chesterton's fence argument. And as a result of all of this, you become conservative, you begin to see things from a more conservative point of view. You realise that, hang on a second, we've got it good, you know, you've, we've got it really good to live.

• 57:07Gurwinder Bhogal?

  When we live in this time, having, you know, been through all the things that our, our species has been through. To actually live in a time where we have all these freedoms that we, you know, we don't take these things for granted anymore because we've become grateful for them. And we understand what we have. And so I think that's part of the, the value of right, of the right. But there are other values as well, obviously, you know, like there's the more libertarian angle where, you know, you, you value freedom and the things like that. But for me, you know, I, I wasn't really aware of, of what I was just talking about. I wasn't aware of that. Until in my sort of mid twenties, when I kind of like believed that. When I stopped getting all my news from the New York Times and the Guardian and sort of liberal media, you know, Washington Post and all that kind of stuff.

• 57:53Gurwinder Bhogal?

  And I actually started to, uh, talk to actual right wingers and actually have a civil conversation with them. And so that was when I stopped realising, that was, sorry, that was when I realised that, um, that. Right wingers are not evil, not simply evil or not simply stupid or, or whatever, you know, and. That was a big revelation for me because it, that was one of the reasons why I started having doubts about the left because. For the very same reason, I believed that the left were good. I believed when I was young, you know, I believed, um, the left, they were compassionate because. They wanted an equal world. They wanted to look after everybody.

• 58:29Chris Williamson?

  Is that what you mean when you say that it's obvious and shallow?

• 58:32Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's the, the, the, the appeal of leftism is very easy to see. Because who doesn't want a more compassionate world? You know, who doesn't want a world where the, the weakest amongst us are taken care of by the strongest? It's a very beautiful image, isn't it? Um, where we all look after each other and, you know, where nobody goes hungry, nobody is discriminated against. It's a beautiful image. And anybody can relate to it pretty much. So, yeah, the value of leftism is, is very clear, but. Be, in being clear, it's also quite shallow because when you get older, you realise that it's not actually very easy to create that world. Because you have to sacrifice a lot of things to create that world. And the sacrifices that you make can actually make things a lot worse for, for everybody.

• 59:15Gurwinder Bhogal?

  And so you gradually learn about economics and you learn about evolutionary psychology and you learn about all these things that the left doesn't teach you about. And that's when you start to have doubts about the left. And that's when I started having doubts and that's when I realised I couldn't really consider myself to be a leftist anymore because, I mean, part of it was I just didn't want to be tribal anymore, you know, I wanted to see things from outside the perspective of a tribe, so I had to abolish all allegiances to tribes. But secondly, I thought that the left itself, I do value the left, I think it's important to have the left as a, as a sort of political force in the world. But I don't want to be part of it because I believe that doing so would make me irrational

• 59:57Gurwinder Bhogal?

  because I'd have to believe things about the world that I naturally do not, um, you know, I would have to dispute some of my own deepest convictions. And so, um, yeah, it's complicated, I think it's very complicated that as you get older, you realise that people have good reasons for believing things that seem on, you know, on the surface to be completely crazy.

• 1:00:19Chris Williamson?

  Do you know, so over time, um, age tends to cause people to lean more to the right. Do you know if it causes people to go from authoritarian to libertarian as well?

• 1:00:31Gurwinder Bhogal?

  I have no idea about that.

• 1:00:32Chris Williamson?

  I'd be really interested to find out.

• 1:00:34Gurwinder Bhogal?

  No, I'm, I mean, I, one thing I've seen research, which shows that there is a very real trend towards conservatism, but I don't think that there's any particular correlation between authoritarianism, libertarianism.

• 1:00:47Chris Williamson?

  Interesting, yeah, I just wondered whether or not people increasingly, uh, kind of see the fallibility of politics as they get older. And, you know, if you're going further down, it just means basically leave me alone. Um, the more that you go toward that libertarian thing. Okay, right, um, I want to talk about the word retard. What have you learned about the word retard recently?

• 1:01:10Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Okay, so I was doing a bit of research into why things become offensive, because it just became curious to me, I wanted to know, why are some things offensive and other things not offensive? And I began to sort of think about the word retard and.

• 1:01:30Gurwinder Bhogal?

  This is a word that's quite offensive. I mean, most people would consider it pretty offensive, you know, especially in polite society. I mean, there are a lot of people who use it in jest, but but there's a lot of people who find it offensive. And, um, you know, if you ask these people why they find it offensive, then they'll say, oh, it's because, you know, it was historically used to refer to mentally disabled people, um, which I think is a perfectly reasonable explanation. But then you ask these same people, do they find the word idiot offensive, or the word imbecile offensive, or the word moron offensive, or the word cretin offensive? And most people don't find these words offensive. I mean, a few people find cretin offensive,

• 1:02:14Gurwinder Bhogal?

  but most people don't find idiot, or imbecile, or moron particularly offensive. You know, they use it's a very, these are common words. But the thing is, is if you look at the history of these words, they were also used to refer to mentally disabled people. That's their origins. Their origins is actually they were used as categorizations of mentally disabled people. And I I point out this example of the Queen's first cousins, who were officially diagnosed as imbeciles. And as a result of that, the Royal Family faked their deaths and basically locked them away in a care home for the rest of their lives. And they were, and when they died,

• 1:02:57Gurwinder Bhogal?

  the Royal Family didn't even attend their funeral. You know, it was a pretty tragic story, but like, it goes to show that, you know, the word imbecile was used even for members of the Royal Family if they had, if they were mentally disabled. And so there's this weird sort of disparity between the word retard and the other words which mean exactly the same thing, but which are not offensive. And you've got to ask yourself, what's the purpose for this? Why is the word retard offensive, but all these other words, which were used again, for exactly the same reason? Why are they not offensive? And I was looking into the history of these words, and the only conclusion that I could come to was that it was a purely arbitrary decision. So a group of people, you know, a group of intellectuals, one day decided

• 1:03:42Gurwinder Bhogal?

  that the word was offensive. And they said as much to the people, and, you know, them, I don't know where where it was officially established, but gradually, it became offensive to use that word. And so

• 1:03:57Gurwinder Bhogal?

  We chose, we all collectively decided to have a specific emotional reaction to a certain word, but not to other words with the same meaning. And that strikes me as very strange because it means that a lot of the outrages, a lot of the things that outrages are purely arbitrary, they're just arbitrarily chosen. You know, there's no real reason why we should be upset or offended by a certain word. We just choose to be offended by it. And we choose to not be offended by other words, you know. So this, I think, is a, it was a big insight for me because it really opened my eyes to exactly what outrage is. A lot of outrage is manufactured. It's purely manufactured. You don't need to be angry

• 1:04:42Gurwinder Bhogal?

  about any of the things, or at least most of the things that you're angry about, you know, in everyday life.

• 1:04:49Chris Williamson?

  They're not rooted in anything more solid than simply people making choices in the past. You also used that example of, is it the NAACP?

• 1:04:59Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Oh, right. Yeah, yeah. I mean, yeah. So this is another thing that I've never understood, is that somehow the word coloured people became offensive and you had to use the word, the term people of colour instead. I've never understood why. I've never really understood why. I mean, I did ask somebody who was pretty sort of woke and they said to me that it's because when you use the word, when you use coloured people, you're centring colour. But when you use people of colour, you're centring people because the first word is people rather than colour. And so.

• 1:05:33Chris Williamson?

  That's a fucking tenuous, very tenuous explanation.

• 1:05:36Gurwinder Bhogal?

  I don't understand it, you know. And I have no problem with people calling me a coloured person. I don't find it offensive.

• 1:05:42Chris Williamson?

  What's your heritage?

• 1:05:44Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Indian.

• 1:05:44Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:05:45Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, I'm Indian, Punjabi. So I don't have any problem with, with people calling me a coloured person, you know. And I don't think most coloured people do. I don't think most of us do have a problem with it.

• 1:05:57Chris Williamson?

  Tell you what's really interesting is the NAACP is the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, is that right?

• 1:06:03Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:04Chris Williamson?

  So what that's like is kind of like a fossilized record of what linguistic territory used to be acceptable. And because they haven't updated their branding to move in line with lexically what's now part of the green light, red light system. They're they're they're kind of this fossilized record of, oh, that used to be okay. But now it's not. So if there was the N double A R P, right, for retarded people, you go, okay, well, hang on, is that a pejorative? Are you using that to to refer to this entire group? What about the cretins in the room? And what about the morons in the room? What about them? Where are they? So, yeah, it's so that that.

• 1:06:45Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, the thing is, is that linguistic, all this kind of linguistic re re tribalizing of territory is that it just creates outrages where outrages don't need to exist. We've already got enough things to be outraged about in this world, plenty of things to be outraged about in this world. You know, if you you've just got to switch on the news to see what's going on, you know, in some parts of the world. But the thing is, is that instead of like trying to do something about the things that outrages, the things that we should be outraged about, some of the injustices that are occurring, for instance, you know, the concentration camps in China, for instance, instead, we just sort of kind of redraw the territory of language

• 1:07:29Gurwinder Bhogal?

  and create new outrages out of it, out of nothing. We create new outrages out of nothing. And it just doesn't make any sense to me. I just don't understand why, why people would choose to be upset over, you know, the the use of words.

• 1:07:43Chris Williamson?

  Is that a little bit of

• 1:07:44Gurwinder Bhogal?

  So many other things to be outraged about.

• 1:07:46Chris Williamson?

  Sayers' law coming back in again, the fact that you can create outrage and posture the fact that you are helping, that this is something that you're really bothered about, but you know that by pushing back against colored people or the word retard, that really the battlefront that you're playing on has pretty low stakes.

• 1:08:07Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah. Well, the thing is, is that if you're a member of an ideology and you're dedicated to a certain cause, then you have an invested interest in making that cause seem like a bigger issue than it actually is. So if you're an anti racist, then you have a vested interest in making racism seem bigger than it actually is, because that makes your task and your job and your mission more important than it actually is. And that's why I think a lot of people who are sort of these who define themselves as anti racists will constantly cause, they'll constantly create new forms of racism, because they need it. You know, I think somebody said, I've forgotten who it was, that they said that the The demand for racism exceeds the supply, you know.

• 1:08:51Gurwinder Bhogal?

  And that's basically what's causing a lot of this, kind of is driving a lot of this, these new outrages and these new offences. Because people need racism in order to feel like they've got something to fight against. And if you look at, you know, yes. If you look statistically, there, there does seem to be some racial disparities, but those racial disparities are not as big as they're portrayed in, in the mainstream media. And the mainstream media exaggerates these because it needs to feel like there's a, a big struggle that it's fighting against. Um, and so that's, I think, probably the explanation for why the word coloured people is now offensive because

• 1:09:31Gurwinder Bhogal?

  we need more and more things to be racist so that we can feel more anti-racist when we fight against them.

• 1:09:37Chris Williamson?

  Okay. Iron law of oligarchy. All organisations of people, no matter how democratic and egalitarian, will eventually be controlled by a dominant few. Since if everyone has power, then no one has power. And if someone has power, they'll use it to get more power.

• 1:09:55Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, so, um, so in order to be able to move an organisation forward, there needs to be a power differential between people. Uh, it's simply not practical to have every decision made by committee. But if someone has got power, if they've got an extra, a little extra bit of power, then that power will compound over time. This occurs like largely as a, a result of the Matthew effect. I think I've, I might have spoken about the Matthew effect on the last podcast, I can't remember, but, um. Yeah, the Matthew effect is, is the idea that advantage begets advantage. So it, it's sort of usually encapsulated in saying the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Um, you know, if somebody has influence over decisions, then they can use that influence

• 1:10:41Gurwinder Bhogal?

  to steer decisions that favour them and give them even more influence. And the typical result of the Matthew effect is is a Pareto distribution. And this is basically a sort of statistical distribution in which you have a small number of people holding the vast majority of power. It's the best way to sort of really describe it.

• 1:11:05Gurwinder Bhogal?

  So the interesting thing about this concept is that it can be used to justify left wing or right wing politics. For the right, it's a key reason for why communism and socialism don't work. And for the left, it's an argument for regulation against monopoly power. So what you really think, like what you conclude from this concept really depends on your your political views. But I think that it's a very interesting concept because it's so fundamental, because people are always trying to create sort of egalitarian democratic systems or highly competitive systems.

• 1:11:48Gurwinder Bhogal?

  And this law essentially refutes the possibility of that. I don't think it's impossible to create a completely democratic or competitive situation in which there are equal players operating against each other or with each other. But I think it's very, very difficult because, like I said, you need to have some people have power over others in order for the organisation to be able to do anything. Because some people, you just can't make a organisation by committee. It doesn't work. Even communist states like the Soviet Union didn't have pure committees.

• 1:12:26Gurwinder Bhogal?

  They had to have people like Stalin and Beria, you know, who actually made decisions unanimously, sort of thing, unilaterally, rather.

• 1:12:38Gurwinder Bhogal?

  And so, yeah, this is, it's interesting because it really does make you question the possibility of a lot of these programmes that people try to create.

• 1:12:50Chris Williamson?

  Noble cause corruption. The greatest evils come not from people seeking to do bad, but people seeking to do good and believing the ends justify the means. Ironically, few things legitimise the immoral treatment of others more than the belief that you're more moral than them.

• 1:13:08Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, so once again, this harks back to what I was saying about monicianism. We're evolutionary configured to view ourselves as good and our opponents as evil in order to justify conquering them, sorry. So there's a weird irony in that our belief that we are good can make us act with great evil. What this means is that the real problem is not that some of us are good and some of us are evil, but that we all believe we're good and that our opponents are evil. And if you look at history, you know, the greatest injustices were committed in the name of justice. Even the Holocaust was regarded as a means to a righteous end.

• 1:13:50Gurwinder Bhogal?

  You know, it was viewed as necessary to save Western civilization, Western European civilization. You know, the Jews were regarded as evil, which made it easy for the Nazis to commit evil against them. And I think this is why we should... The people we should fear the most are not simple psychopaths, but rather those with noble aims who are convinced that they're on the right side of history. Because such people's belief in their own goodness is so great that it can be used to justify any evil.

• 1:14:21Chris Williamson?

  There's a lot more conviction that comes from someone that believes that they're right than knows that they're doing wrong. It's got to be more fragile. You know, it's got to be more hit it enough times and it's going to break. If someone is kind of lapping or they're playing a persona or whatever versus someone who actually genuinely believes that they're on the side of righteousness. I mean, this is the sort of crusader style adherence that you have to particular viewpoints. I mean, look at, you know, after this Uvalde school shooting, you know, the degree of vitriol and how vehement Second Amendment people have become online, even just buddies

• 1:15:00Chris Williamson?

  of mine, like friends of mine from Texas, that are really, really, that even more unprepared to give ground now. Like they're not going to give a single inch with regards to that because that's their... that's one of the deities that they hold up.

• 1:15:18Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, I think when you're convinced that you're right, you're capable of essentially anything. And that's the danger because... You know, even, I mean, if you look at what does evil really, you know, what does evil really achieve? What does somebody who's evil really do in the, in the world? They usually end up becoming serial killers. But when you look at what good does in the world, it, it leads to genocides and massacres because people actually believe that they're, they're making the world a better place.

• 1:15:51Chris Williamson?

  Presumably it's more compelling as well, like we were saying earlier on, getting people to believe in your cause is, it's sort of a solo man operation if you're doing something that's evil. But if you can convince someone that what you're doing is good, that's how you end up with entire armies and nation states behind you.

• 1:16:06Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Exactly, yeah, exactly. Yeah, so that's a crucial part of it as well is that you can get people on side much easier because there are a lot more people who want to do good in the world than there are people who want to do evil. I mean, there are very few people who actually wake up in the morning and rub their hands together and say, oh, what's the nastiest thing I can do today, you know? Most people want to do good, but it's just that they're misguided about what good actually is.

• 1:16:29Chris Williamson?

  Isn't that what Peterson keeps on bringing up about how if you were a German in 1941 and you were in the army, you would have been a Nazi as well. And everybody likes to think of themselves as the person that would have not sent the Jews to the gas chambers and so on and so forth. But if you're convinced of an ideology, if you're convinced that these are the people that are causing the world to be bad and terrible and taking everything away from you and a threat to the, the safety of your community, that's going to compel you to do some pretty wild things without any belief that you're doing anything wrong.

• 1:17:05Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, if you, if you actually look at some of the interviews of former Nazi SS guards and people like that, a lot of them will say that they believed that they were doing the right thing, you know, when, when they were, when they were carrying out their actions, they would say that they were basically taught that the Jews had essentially brought Germany to its knees and that they were essentially sort of, they were corrupting the entirety of Western civilization and that they were basically like a cancer and they had to be removed in order to preserve everything that their ancestors, that the German ancestors had built. And I mean, you know, this is in an age where there was no internet, there was no Wikipedia,

• 1:17:48Gurwinder Bhogal?

  you couldn't just go online, fact check things, you know, so you had to make do with the propaganda, basically, that was being pushed out by the newspapers. Goebbels was a master propagandist, one of the greatest propagandists in history, in terms of the skill that he he had. And he managed to convince so many German people that that essentially that Jews were not human beings, essentially, that they were they were demonic beings, that they're demonic creatures that needed to be removed from the world in order to create a utopia, in order to create a world where everybody loves everyone and everything is beautiful, you know. And so these people were fighting for beauty, that's the horrific thing about it. You know, the the most ugliest things in history were fought in the name of beauty.

• 1:18:31Gurwinder Bhogal?

  And that, I think, is a very sort of striking thing, a very dangerous thing, because it's something that people don't think much about. People tend to have this this view that the world's evils are caused by people trying to do evil, but that's just not the case. You know, very, very little evil in the world is actually caused by people actively trying to do evil. The vast majority of injustice in the world is a result of people trying to do good.

• 1:18:59Chris Williamson?

  Firehosing. With so many competing narratives in the digital age, disinformation agents can't convince you of any single narrative, so instead they overwhelm you with many contradictory narratives until you start to doubt everything and become confused, demoralized, and passive. Is this a case where sort of beating people down with an overwhelm of information means that they're more malleable a little bit further down the line?

• 1:19:24Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, I mean, I first encountered this idea when I was reading the work of Hannah Arendt, who's a writer who was sort of working in the sort of 60s and 70s. And she had this really good quote, in fact, let me let me bring up the quote so I can just read it out. So she wrote, so she wrote, "If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. And to people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act, but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people, you can then do what you please."

• 1:20:10Gurwinder Bhogal?

  And she wrote that in 1978. So she was a pretty sort of good prophet, because what she said has become far more relevant in today's age than it was even in her age. You know, it's been forty-five years since she wrote those words, nearly forty-five years. And now it's the basis for disinformation strategies of the major world powers. I mean, you know, you'll know about the sort of the so-called Gerasimov doctrine. I mean, the guy who invented that term doesn't like to use it, but it's, the name is still used. It's more sort of mundanely known as hybrid warfare. And it's this idea, you know, by, developed by Gerasimov, who was this sort of Russian

• 1:20:54Gurwinder Bhogal?

  strategist, that the best way to assault the West would be to create this kind of decentralized, multi-pronged attack, known as a sort of multi-vector attack strategy, which is basically where you just bombard the enemy with just so much information and so many other things, basically just overload the enemy with, with content, which will just confuse them and distract them and just create a kind of ideological chaos in them. And they'll make them unsure, they'll no longer know what they stand for. You know, amid the fog, they'll lose track of who they are. And as a result, they'll become very, as you said, malleable. They'll become very easy to control, they'll sort of become easy to manipulate towards whatever ends you want.

• 1:21:39Gurwinder Bhogal?

  And we saw evidence of this, particularly sort of around 2016, 2017, with the, firstly with the interference in the election and also with the Facebook posts by Russian troll farms, in which they, they actually funded Black Lives Matter campaigns and they funded neo-Nazi campaigns.

• 1:22:00Gurwinder Bhogal?

  And you've got to ask yourself, why would they fund these two completely opposing groups? And the reason is, obviously, they wanted to create this kind of confusion and this conflict, you know, they wanted to sort of... Bombard people with so much of these competing ideologies that they'd sort of begin to doubt their own beliefs and they begin to wonder what's true and what's not true. And that's really the only strategy that disinformation can really fulfill in in this world that we're in. Because we live in a world of so much information, you can't possibly convince someone of a single narrative with disinformation anymore. In Goebbels' time with the Nazis, it was very easy because there was only one source of information,

• 1:22:41Gurwinder Bhogal?

  which was the Nazi party. So you could just put out newspapers with one narrative and people would believe it, or they'd believe nothing. But in today's age, there's just so many competing narratives, it's just simply not possible to make anyone believe any single thing. So the only alternative is just to confuse people.

• 1:23:01Chris Williamson?

  The beautiful mess effect. We tend to view our mistakes and vulnerabilities with shame because we think they make us look unappealing. But research suggests our mistakes and vulnerabilities actually make us more relatable and endearing to other people. So don't be afraid to be human.

• 1:23:18Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, so there's a pressure on people to appear infallible, to never admit when they're wrong, to never apologize, because these things are considered a sign of weakness by society, you know. But when you try to appear infallible, when you actually try to do that, it makes you more fallible because you become unwilling to correct your own mistakes. And that's why I like the beautiful mess effect, because it's it suggests that trying to appear infallible is not just a bad decision-making strategy, but it's also a bad social strategy. No matter how you may try to appear to people, they'll always know that you're just a human. So instead of putting up this facade of trying to be a superhero, you know, an illusion

• 1:24:02Gurwinder Bhogal?

  that's doomed to crumble in the end, it's much better to just be who you are, to own your flaws and mistakes and wear them proudly as armor, so that they can never be used against you.

• 1:24:13Chris Williamson?

  Have you seen the recent Brendan Schaub fallout from a podcast that he did?

• 1:24:21Gurwinder Bhogal?

  I I read something very, very briefly about it on Twitter.

• 1:24:24Chris Williamson?

  This is hot shit in the podcast world, right?

• 1:24:27Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, I've heard about it. I don't know much about it, though.

• 1:24:30Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, so him and the guys from Tiger Belly had this big falling out that's another podcast. And then everyone was upset about things that Brendan had been accused of doing. And what I was really interested in was trying to work out the synthesis of why Brendan is so disliked by a very, very passionate group of people online. The Fighter and the Kid subreddit has maybe 70,000 people in it now. And it's exclusively there to rip on them, right? That's their subreddit and it is more passionate than any supporting group I've ever seen. And they're there to take the piss out of people. And I was really, really trying to work out what it is about Brendan beyond, you know,

• 1:25:13Chris Williamson?

  personal preferences about delivery and personality and stuff like that. And I I kind of settled on the fact that he is very unprepared to show genuine vulnerability. And the beautiful mess effect is kind of what's been pulled out. He has this quite sort of strong guy. And again, you know, he used to be a fighter, he used to be in a professional or semi-professional football player when he was in college. And now he's doing comedy and he's around alpha males and he's got this sense that he needs to live up to and he's a dad, business owner, all this stuff. But I think what you see is you're right. Inevitably, everybody knows that you have vulnerability behind there.

• 1:25:54Chris Williamson?

  Unless you're an absolute extreme like a David Goggins or a Jocko Willink or somebody like that. And even with them, I think that they're very sort of prepared to show their own failings in the past. And this is the trajectory that they're on to now. And now you can't hurt me and you need radical responsibility and stuff like that. And I think that the problem that people have is they know or they have a sense that behind the facade with Brendan specifically, there's something sort of soft and smushy. And if they just keep on tapping away, that they're going to cause that to open up. But you can get out ahead of that narrative pretty easily. You know, think about some of the most moving podcasts that people have done.

• 1:26:35Chris Williamson?

  It's when they show genuine vulnerability, not in a performative way, not in a way that's done for effect, almost in a reluctant way. You know, they're trying to tell a story and they're putting a brave face on and maybe they've got a little tears going or they're struggling to get through something and their voice is cracking, but they're moving through it.

• 1:26:57Chris Williamson?

  I, you have to really, really dislike a person to watch that and not think, fair play. You know, you put yourself on the line. This is a really, really vulnerable position that you're in.

• 1:27:07Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, I mean, yeah, because like, you know, when it comes to, some people think that bravery, for instance, is not being afraid, but that's not really what bravery is. Bravery is being afraid and still going ahead and doing what you need to do despite being afraid. And I think that that's a crucial part of this. I think that everybody's going to know that you're a human, you know, no matter what you do, no matter how many things you try to, how many masks you try to wear, people are going to see through them. You know, they're always going to understand that you're a human, that you have flaws. So the best thing to do is just to embrace that and to realize that, hang on a second, you're not going to convince people that you're, you know, there's some sort of god or superhero, whatever.

• 1:27:52Gurwinder Bhogal?

  I know a lot of people try to do that online, especially like they want to create this kind of facade of them always being right about things. But really, nobody is right about everything. Everybody gets things wrong a lot of the time. And the difference between the people who get things right a little bit and people who gets things right a lot is that the people who get things right a lot are willing to learn from their mistakes. But in order to learn from your mistakes, you've got to first admit that you were wrong. So in order to be right, you have to first be wrong, you know, and this is something that I think people need to do more often. Because you see on social media, people are not willing to own up to their mistakes. So many times I engage people in a debate. And then I point out when they've got something wrong and they won't admit it, even though the evidence is there right in front of them.

• 1:28:36Gurwinder Bhogal?

  In their own statements, you know, where they've contradicted themselves or where, you know, something they've said about something has just turned out to be factually incorrect. Um. They won't admit it because their egos won't let them. And this is why one of my tweets, recent tweets, I said that. The greatest enemy of truth is ego. Because when you are so invested in yourself, you become less invested in the world, in the in the objective reality. You become object, you become um invested in subjective reality rather than objective reality. And that's always perilous because subjective reality is not real. It's an illusion. So you're investing in an illusion.

• 1:29:19Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Whereas if you invest in the actual objective reality, the objective reality that you are going to be wrong. That's the only way that you can really improve yourself, because that's the real world. That's the only thing that's real.

• 1:29:30Chris Williamson?

  The signal it gives to everybody else as well is that you're a, you're a good player in the game.

• 1:29:35Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Hmm. Yeah.

• 1:29:36Chris Williamson?

  It's worth their time investing in you because you're not an immovable object. That perhaps if they were to convince you of something, then maybe you'll change your mind. And that means, well, I'll actually invest in this.

• 1:29:49Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, absolutely. I think if you want to convince people, then the best way to do that is to show them that you can be convinced. Because it shows that you're a reasonable person, that you'll listen to reason. And that is, I think it gives people faith in you. Whereas if you, you know, are sort of like a kind of. Nicholas Nassim Taleb kind of character, you know, it doesn't matter how intelligent you are. If you're just kind of like, no, I'm right, I'm always right, I'm never wrong, you know, then people are going to lose faith in you, even if you are always right. They're going to lose faith in you because that confidence, I think, over the long term, it begins to grate on people and they don't, people don't like arrogance. And they sense it in people, if you, you know, if you constantly, if you never admit when you're wrong,

• 1:30:31Gurwinder Bhogal?

  if you, if you never admit when you're human, people are going to see straight through it. And I think that's what probably happened with Brendan Schaub is that he, you know, he does seem to be somebody who's quite fake. And because I've seen him on Joe Rogan and when he's on Joe Rogan, he's very different to how he is when he's on The Fighter and the Kid, when he's with Brian, forgotten surname, but yeah, Callan, that's the one, yeah. And I think people see that, they see that it's just a facade that he's put up in order to protect some kind of vulnerability that he has, you know.

• 1:31:03Chris Williamson?

  And they're going to keep tapping away, they're going to keep on going.

• 1:31:06Gurwinder Bhogal?

  And that's what they do, yeah, they'll try and open that, that wound.

• 1:31:10Chris Williamson?

  But if you were, if I was to give him advice on how to kind of deal with the current milieu that he's swimming through, I actually think that it's so far gone now that there isn't really much turning around. But if I was to give him advice, I would say, look, man, you need to take a little bit of time off from the show. You need to genuinely do some reflection and you need to come back with a 30 minute long monologue that explains to people about exactly why you've been the way you are. That says, look, this is the kind of perspective I have, this is the worldview I have, this is why the sort of actions that you've seen have been portrayed in the way that I've been doing them. And even the most hard-nosed bastard would, as long as you can convince people

• 1:31:52Chris Williamson?

  that that's genuinely the truth, and that's the sort of wolf in sheep's clothing problem that you get with performative vulnerability, that when you end up trying to fix the problem with genuine vulnerability, people say, no, we know that this isn't the truth. But you have to be a pretty hard-nosed bastard to look at somebody, do that, genuinely open up and go. No, I just still don't believe you.

• 1:32:10Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Hmm, exactly.

• 1:32:11Chris Williamson?

  It's really difficult. Look, man, dude, I, uh, I appreciate the shit out of you. The stuff that you put out online is fantastic. You've got Substack now as well.

• 1:32:21Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yep.

• 1:32:22Chris Williamson?

  Where can people get your Substack?

• 1:32:23Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, it's Gwinder.substack.com. So that's G U R W I N D E R dot Substack dot com.

• 1:32:29Chris Williamson?

  And G underscore S underscore?

• 1:32:33Gurwinder Bhogal?

  B H O G A L.

• 1:32:35Chris Williamson?

  On Twitter?

• 1:32:35Gurwinder Bhogal?

  At Twitter. Actually, it's not at Twitter now. Sorry, just it's A, it's at G underscore S underscore B H O G A L. That's my Twitter handle.

• 1:32:45Chris Williamson?

  Get another thread done. I want to do another one of these as soon as possible.

• 1:32:48Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Oh, we'll do. Nice one.

• 1:32:50Chris Williamson?

  I appreciate you. Thanks, man.

• 1:32:51Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, you too. Thanks, Chris.