14 Uncomfortable Truths About Human Psychology - Gurwinder Bhogal

Gurwinder Bhogal is a programmer and a writer. Gurwinder is one of my favourite Twitter follows. He’s written yet another megathread exploring human nature, cognitive biases, mental models, status games, crowd behaviour and social media. It’s fantastic, and today we go through some of my favourites. Expect to learn why our mental model of the world assumes people are just like us, why Narcissists tend to inject themselves into every story no matter how unrelated or tenuous, the role of Postjournalism in a world of fake news, why we navigate the world through stories and not statistics or facts, why people specialise in things they are actually bad at and much more… - 00:00 False Consensus Effect 04:47 Freudian’s Paradox 14:35 The Narcissist’s Bedpost 20:34 Enthymeme 30:09 Post-Journalism 41:20 Fiction Lag 51:58 The Golden Mean 1:05:55 Tarswell’s Razor 1:09:32 Package-Deal Ethics 1:17:44 Rothbard’s Law 1:24:22 Champion Bias 1:30:21 Anchored to Your Own History Bias 1:36:29 Common Knowledge Effect 1:43:19 Where to Find Gurwinder - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic here - https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

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

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

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

• 0:25Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, so I think this is a very important point because

• 0:31Gurwinder Bhogal?

  we only know ourselves and we kind of, because we're so familiar with ourselves, we tend to use ourselves as the baseline by which we judge everything else. And this can cause problems because, let's say, if you're somebody who is around somebody else, and you're inclined to find this person annoying because they're not like you. There's two ways you can look at this. Either you can look at it as that person is annoying, or I am easily annoyed. And what people tend to do is they almost always err on the side of considering the other person annoying. You know, so this is just one example, but this is

• 1:12Gurwinder Bhogal?

  pretty much what we do in our, in our lives, up and down everywhere. Like, we do it all over the shop. And the reason why I think it's important is because if we start asking ourselves, well, hang on a second, maybe I'm the issue, maybe I'm seeing things differently because of my experiences, we can actually get a more grounded understanding of actually what's going on. I've started doing this in my life a lot more, where if I feel a certain way about someone, I ask myself, is it me or is it them? You know, something that a lot of people don't do, they just assume that it's either person's that's the problem, or they assume that some thing in the world is wrong, rather than their perception. So that's the reason I included it.

• 1:56Gurwinder Bhogal?

  I think it always helps, it's a good heuristic to just double check, just to ask yourself, if there's something askew in the world, is it really askew or is it your perception? Is it your experiences that have put you askew from the world?

• 2:10Chris Williamson?

  Is this related to the fundamental attribution error?

• 2:15Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, to an extent. I mean, so with the fundamental attribution error, people have a tendency to attribute the sort of the failures of an ally to external circumstances and the failures of an enemy or opponent to their character. So, you know, if your friend is late, oh, you know, they just got held up by the bus, the bus was the problem. But if an opponent is late, ah, they're just a horrible person, they're lazy, you know, all this stuff. So it does tend to, that's more of a tribal thing, but it does have an element of this false consensus effect to it, because we tend to see things relative to ourselves in that sense. So, you know, obviously, we judge ourselves, you know, we say, oh, you know,

• 3:00Gurwinder Bhogal?

  I, I lost control because I was under pressure. They lost control because that's just who they are, you know?

• 3:07Chris Williamson?

  There's a Gen Z girl equivalent of this. I saw a meme that said, any guy who likes girls who have got smaller titties than me is a paedophile, and any guy who likes girls that have got bigger titties than me is a fatty chaser.

• 3:24Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yes. It's basically like a remix of the George Carlin quote, yeah.

• 3:30Chris Williamson?

  But yeah, man, I think, you know, this, it's like a sort of a relativistic view of morals and motivations, right? That I am the thing that's in stasis, I am the foundation, it's me, and everything sort of comes out from me. Everything else is done in relativity to me.

• 3:56Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. We have to bear in mind that we have a flawed baseline, because, you know, what we're seeing is not objective. We're all seeing the world through the filter of our own experiences and also our character, our personality. These are all filters through which we look at the world. And it's very easy to forget that those filters exist. It's like if you're looking through a window long enough, you forget that you're actually looking through a window, you know, because that window becomes invisible. Because you're so focused on what's beyond the window that you forget you see through the window. So this is why this, I think, is quite a useful heuristic. You can, if you could just bear in mind that you're seeing things through these filters, it can help you.

• 4:36Gurwinder Bhogal?

  To judge things more accurately and to also take responsibility as well for what may be a problem within yourself rather than a problem in the external world.

• 4:47Chris Williamson?

  Friedkin's Paradox. The more similar two choices seem, the less the decision should matter, yet the harder it is to choose between them. As a result, we often spend the most time on the decisions that matter least.

• 5:03Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, so we live in an age of abundance where pretty much everybody is trying to gather our attention and they're trying to do it by offering us choice, they're offering us more and more choices. So we're flooded with choices in this day and age. And that's why it's become so important to be able to decide between choices. And most of the time, these decisions are actually not even important. They're actually quite trivial. Things like, you know, what am I going to eat for dinner? Or, you know, should I buy, should I buy Colgate or should I buy another brand of toothpaste? You know, it's like, these are a lot of sort of trivial decisions and they exert a cost, not just a time cost, but also an energy cost. And if you're making

• 5:49Gurwinder Bhogal?

  hundreds of these decisions in a day, that's wearing you out without you even knowing half the time. And it's costing you time as well. And what I do is I use certain decision making heuristics. I list quite a few, I think, on my Substack. But, you know, so one of them is, for instance, to always choose the decision that is more painful in the short term, because we have a natural bias to avoid pain in the short term, would rather have the pain in the long term, because it's so far away, you know, so it doesn't seem as bad. So there's a little, you know, that's one, one sort of heuristic. Another heuristic, and this is actually a really

• 6:32Gurwinder Bhogal?

  useful one and specific to Friedkin's Paradox, which is.

• 6:38Gurwinder Bhogal?

  If you can't decide, the answer is no. And the reason why this is a good heuristic is because of the very fact that we are flooded with decisions. And so we need to actually err on the side of denying rather than approving decisions. Because if we approve all these decisions and if we go ahead, like if you know, if your friends are asking you, oh, can you do this? Can you do that? Can you do this? If you say yes to all of that, you're going to be led astray and you will have no time left to do actually what you want to do. And so it actually helps to just as a default, say no to all decisions. If you can't decide, that is, so as a last resort.

• 7:15Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, the uh, that kind of relates to that anxiety cost idea I've got, which is the longer that you spend thinking about doing a thing, the more valuable it would have been to have just done the thing in the first place. But doing the thing with regards to decision making is the same as categorically saying no to it. You can either say yes to it and do it or say no to it. And that it just closes off the loop of should I still be doing this thing? Am I going to make the decision? Well, this is good, but that's good. There was a really interesting workbook from Tony Robbins, Awaken the Giant Within, that a friend sent to me about three months ago. And I had a bunch of decisions I was really, really struggling with and I've been vacillating about for ages.

• 7:57Chris Williamson?

  And uh, it's one of those classic sort of mid two thousands, American self-help hardcore self-helpy style. You know, it's got a real sort of uplifting music in between each of the chapters. It's really funny. But he has this great idea where he says that you cannot say that you have made a decision until you have taken an action in the world that moves yourself toward it. And I think that that's just such a lovely frame, like people talk about, yeah, I've decided that I'm going to start a business, leave my job. I go and talk to that girl over there, change my relationship to alcohol or whatever. It's like, okay, well, what does that mean? What does making a decision mean? Uh, I have.

• 8:41Chris Williamson?

  Created some sort of mental contract with myself. It's some kind of internal commitment. Okay, is that the end goal of it? Well, no, it's the sort of lead measure before the first action I take. Okay, well, the first action is when you've started to make a decision toward doing something. And that just that reframe really helped. And I think raising the bar for what constitutes making a decision and committing to something is a pretty good idea because it stops us from wallowing. And it also helps to neuter that anxiety cost that we pay.

• 9:16Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, that's a great heuristic to use. I'm kind of reminded also of there's this kind of idea where Steve Jobs and Barack Obama and Mark Zuckerberg. They basically all said that on the average day, they actually just wear a single outfit. They just choose a single outfit for the week and then they just basically wear that throughout the week. Like just various versions of that outfit. And that just helps them to pare down decisions because they don't really care about how they dress. Obviously, if you're in charge of the country or if you're, you know, in charge of a multi-billion dollar company, the last thing you really care about is how you look really on the average day.

• 9:58Gurwinder Bhogal?

  And so they just basically pare down the decisions by choosing the same thing over and over again. So in that what they essentially doing is they're turning decision making into routine. And by doing that, they're eliminating the cost of actually having to make the decisions. Routine is really good for that because you can just, I mean, I kind of do it with with meals. For instance, you know, I'll have certain thing that I eat on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and just do just enough variety that I get bored, but like not so much variety that I have to actually choose every day. You know, like a new recipe or whatever. So, you know, it's very important, I think, to be able to pare down decisions because most of the decisions we make on the day just don't really matter that much. They're not going to impact our lives in the long term very much.

• 10:43Gurwinder Bhogal?

  And these decisions. It's better to just make the decision quick because if you don't make the decision quick, you're actually exerting more of a cost than if you had chosen either of the options. And again, I go back to the thing about, you know, what are you going to have for lunch? Um, really, it doesn't matter that much. And as long as you can eat it, it's not going to impact your life if you choose one or the other. But if you spend a whole hour trying to choose, now you've lost an hour. So now it is going to impact your, your life, you know? So it's always good to have these things planned in, in advance to prevent the kind of, essentially to free up time and to prevent that anxiety cost and the energy cost.

• 11:21Chris Williamson?

  It's not just the time either. It's the sort of fatigue that you have when you make lots of meaningless decisions. And I think that we know deep down, I'll never forget, dude, when I started making a little bit of money through nightlife events and I was in Asda in Gosforth near Newcastle and I was there and I must have spent, I'm not kidding, two full minutes vacillating between the Tesco own brand or the finest range or whatever it was, the Asda's finest range of yogurts. And I was like, the difference was, you know, fifty pence per yogurt and it was a pack of four, so maybe it was two pounds. And I was back and forth and back and forth and sort of came out of this fever

• 12:05Chris Williamson?

  dream and thought, you're, that's, this is, if anything is wasting time, this is wasting time. It doesn't matter. Just grab whatever yogurts you want and throw them in. But um, just that, the, the

• 12:20Chris Williamson?

  energy sapping nature of tiny pointless decisions. I think this is the reason why asynchronous communication is, is such a sap on people as well, that it just chips away all the time, this endless sort of Japanese water torture drip, drip, drip of email and Slack and WhatsApp and Telegram and Signal and iMessage.

• 12:39Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, yeah, it's true. And that's another thing is that if you don't make the decisions, then the decisions become harder to make in a sense, and they they take more of a cost because um certain problems grow. So, you know, if you, for instance, if you dither on answering an email, um what happens is now you're gonna you're gonna email that person late, and now you have to add an apology to the email. And, you know, so you're now doing making more work for yourself. And so a lot of the time, it's actually better just to make the decisions quicker and to do the things that you need to do quicker, because that actually prevents the problems from growing. Um, the way I like to look at

• 13:21Gurwinder Bhogal?

  it is, the more like, the less time you spend making decisions, the more time you spend making decisions work. So, you know, you can use that extra time to just whatever decision you made, you can make it work. So with your example of choosing different yogurts, um, if you had spent less time choosing between those yogurts, you could have used the extra time to maybe create a fancy fruit salad to go with the yogurt, you know?

• 13:48Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 13:49Gurwinder Bhogal?

  That's the example. But, you know, it's just, you can move forward and you can make, you know, you can, you can make hay with the extra time that you save.

• 13:58Chris Williamson?

  Well, there is a small number of decisions that are very, very important and probably is worth an awful lot of work being spent on them. You know, am I going to leave this job? Am I going to marry this person? What am I going to do about my finances? Invest in this company or don't? Whatever? I did go to this university or not. Um, but we are so sapped by all of the yogurt decisions that the university decisions uh feel, they get lumped into the same category of effort and sort of banal gray sludge of, oh, here's another task on the fucking to do list for today. All right, next one. This is one of mine, the narcissist's bedpost. Notice how many times a person uses the words me and

• 14:42Chris Williamson?

  I when speaking about a nonpersonal topic as a good gauge of how self centered they are. The narcissist can't resist injecting themselves into every story and example, no matter how unrelated or tenuous, because they can't imagine a story that doesn't have them at the center.

• 14:58Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, this is a good one. This is actually one that I wrote down because I was planning on adding this to a future mega thread. Um, yeah, I think it's a great heuristic because.

• 15:09Gurwinder Bhogal?

  I know that the word narcissist is probably overused, but I think it's overused for a reason. And I think the reason is that social media has kind of privileged this I culture, this me culture, where people are trying to present themselves as a product almost. You know, it's social media kind of encourages, particularly Instagram, where you try to present the best self possible. And I think that this has led to a kind of me culture. I think a lot of people now focus on trying to, instead of just getting to know other people, they try to present themselves, get other people to know them rather.

• 15:50Gurwinder Bhogal?

  And they try to do this in a sense where, you know, they're obviously trying to present their best self. And so they'll see things like a normal conversation as an opportunity to advertise themselves.

• 16:03Gurwinder Bhogal?

  To, I've seen this happen so much. I mean, this, you know, this happens on social media. It happens on X or Twitter. It happens on Substack. And I suppose it happens on probably other ones as well, where you'll, you'll talk about something. And then the replies will get filled with people talking about how it applies to them and how, you know, how they manage to use it to better themselves or whatever. So it would be something like, you know, you'll, you'll basically present some kind of heuristic. And then they'll basically say something about how they used it in their life. And I suppose it's natural for people to do that, to, to relate how it, you know, how it applies to their life. But a lot of the time, it's not just that. A lot of the time, it's actually advertising.

• 16:46Gurwinder Bhogal?

  People are trying to appear clever. They're trying to appear sort of charismatic. And I think you can actually gauge the degree to which somebody is doing this in a conversation by the number of times that they use the terms I and me and we, or, you know, all those sorts of things. Because.

• 17:04Gurwinder Bhogal?

  It just shows that they are either one of two things are happening. Either they don't really have much else to talk about apart from themselves, or they're trying to draw the conversation to themselves. In either case, this is a very solipsistic, solipsistic person. And that somebody who is really focused on themselves, either one way or another. So it might not necessarily be narcissism. Uh, it, it could be just natural, um, solipsism. You know, it could be just selfishness.

• 17:34Chris Williamson?

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

• 18:16Chris Williamson?

  And when she sat down with the other one, she left the dinner feeling like she was the smartest person in the world.

• 18:21Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Hmm. Yeah, I think, I think.

• 18:23Chris Williamson?

  The point.

• 18:24Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, yeah, Karen. Yeah.

• 18:26Chris Williamson?

  Just.

• 18:28Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, the point there being that it's so important. And, and what people actually want is to feel like they are interesting. They don't really care about how interesting you are. And it's bizarre that you can make yourself very interesting by doing nothing interesting, by just pointing it toward them. And, uh, yeah, I, I had this other idea, which is kind of related to this inverse charisma. Some people feel interesting, some people make you feel interesting. And what we think is that we want to be charismatic. And I actually, upon real closer inspection, I'm not sure if I like people that are that charismatic.

• 19:12Chris Williamson?

  Because a lot of the time, the charisma kind of comes along with, how many people do you know that have got actually well balanced, integrated, sort of holistic, good vibe, chill guy? Charisma, very few. How many people do you love spending time around where you just leave and you go, oh, man, that was so cool. I got to talk about stuff I never talk about with anybody else. And it was very generative, you know, new things came out of that conversation, even if it was about UFC knockouts or whatever it was. It was generative for both of us. And I was made to feel like my opinions were valued. And I feel like I asked them interesting questions. At no point in that exchange, did anybody really use charisma?

• 19:52Chris Williamson?

  So yeah, that sort of inverse charisma idea, I think, is a good hack, especially if you think that, ah, man, like, I'm not that outgoing. I'm not that gregarious. I don't do the funny things. Bro, that doesn't matter. If you can ask good questions and make the other person that you're with feel interesting, I think that that's actually better than charisma.

• 20:14Gurwinder Bhogal?

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

• 20:33Chris Williamson?

  Next one. Enthimeme? Enthimeme? Enthimeme?

• 20:38Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah.

• 20:39Chris Williamson?

  Enthimeme?

• 20:40Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Enthimeme, yeah.

• 20:42Chris Williamson?

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

• 21:00Gurwinder Bhogal?

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

• 21:45Gurwinder Bhogal?

  You know, so some people may feel that the economy is very important. I mean, most people would think that the economy is very important. And so what a demagogue could do is that they would talk about the economy. But then they could, if they wanted to, let's say if they were, um, let's say if they were a left wing politician. Then what they could do is while they were talking about the economy, they could talk about banks and the rigged system. You know, Bernie Sanders often does, you know, and how the problem is the banks, he could sneak in a point. About how the banks are not paying their fair share of taxes, but he would use it, but he would do it in such a way that he's not.

• 22:28Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Making the point about the banks, he would have the bank point as a sort of peripheral point. Because if it's as a peripheral point, it's more effective, because then people, they let their guard down. They're like, okay, this guy's. Not trying to convince us that banks are evil. He's just making a point about the banks. And so this kind of indirect propaganda, I think, is a lot more powerful than him just straight out saying, oh, the banks are the evil. They are not paying their fair share of taxes, because if he just says that straight. Then people are automatically putting their guard up. They're like, okay, this guy's a left wing politician. He's, he's trying to convince us that it's all the bank's fault. Whereas if he does it as a peripheral point, then it kind of sneaks into the mind while people are looking at something else.

• 23:08Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I wonder whether the sort of widespread conspiracism that has been pretty rampant over the last few years. I, I, I think an awful lot of that, you know, this usage of they, the sort of never defined sort of. New world order, deep states, the military industrial complex, you know, like pick your shadowy hooded. Goat head skull wearing figure of choice and those like a lot of that tacitly assumes. Some part of a much more tenuous, uh, a presupposition about the world.

• 23:49Chris Williamson?

  It just bakes it in as give a whoa, of course, of course, we know that the military industrial complex is X, Y and Z. But what we're talking about is how they started fires in Kauai or whatever. That that I see a lot and I suppose that it's a little bit like out of sight, out of mind. Another part of this is that who wants to be the person that seems so stupid as to question one of the premises? When this is like, starting to watch Game of Thrones, season five and asking, what's that Stark guy? Like, what's he do and why is he there? And it's like, oh, well, I just assumed that everybody else is on board with all of this because it's been baked in. It's part of the law, the mythology.

• 24:34Chris Williamson?

  Well, I'm not going to question that thing. It's obviously a part, but what we're really talking about is Fauci or whatever.

• 24:39Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah, there's a very interesting point here. I mean, there's this, so there were some experiments, the Ash conformity experiments in which you're probably familiar with, this is quite a famous experiment. So basically, the purpose of the experiment was to see the degree to which people conform to information that is blatantly wrong. And what they did is they had a group of participants. Most of these participants were stooges, so they were working for the researchers. And only some of these people were actually the test subjects. And what happened was basically they were asked to measure the length of like, measure which of these two lines was was bigger.

• 25:23Gurwinder Bhogal?

  And one of the lines was blatantly bigger than the other line. And all of the stooges basically said that the smaller line was bigger than the big one. And what this did is that it's actually caused many of the participants in the study to agree with everybody else because they just didn't want to be the odd one out, even though it was obvious which line was bigger. They thought, hang on a second, maybe I'm the problem. And so this is weird because it actually, this is sort of like an inversion of the false consensus effect. Where they actually realized, okay, so it's me who's the problem. Even though they weren't the problem, it was actually the extent of, well, that was a problem. So it was in a version of that. And it was interesting, I mean, this was, there was a gender difference here. So women were more likely to conform than men.

• 26:06Gurwinder Bhogal?

  And this is, and this is a finding that's been replicated as well. So that was quite interesting, but yeah, I mean. If something is seems obvious or if something is appears to be obvious to everybody that you don't want to look stupid by questioning it. Because then, you know, people are like, how could you question something so obvious, you know? And so that's why this this enthemine tends to work a lot of the time is that if somebody's making a point and they assume

• 26:35Gurwinder Bhogal?

  a certain propaganda point is a premise of the point. Then it seems obvious, it seems so obvious, because if it was obvious, it wouldn't be the premise. And so people feel that, oh, okay, nobody else is questioning it. So I'd better not question it.

• 26:50Chris Williamson?

  That's cool. That makes that makes this make a lot more sense. Where's enthemine? What's enthe? What? Why is it called that?

• 26:58Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Uh, so it's actually from Greek. It's actually a Greek term. Um, so enthemine, I can't actually remember what the enthe means. Uh, obviously, we know what the the meme means.

• 27:11Chris Williamson?

  It's even like, yeah, this is even in, I didn't even know that this is, this is just straight up. This isn't from like the annals of the of your weird mental models thing. I've just triple clicked on it on Mac and it's come up in the English language. An argument in which one premise is not explicitly stated. Mid 16th century via Latin from Greek. Enthemema from enthemematai consider from N within and thamos mind, within the mind, consider. Interesting.

• 27:41Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah. That's a good one, yeah. So I wasn't aware of that one, but yeah, I mean, it's, um. I think it's a very important point for today because a lot of politicians seem to be quite savvy to it. Uh, a lot of these politicians are actually quite sort of well versed in rhetoric. Um, because a lot of them went to sort of, you know, these elite universities where they have to speak Latin and Greek. And, you know, they learn about all of these ancient Greek rhetorical forms. And so it's it's why it's a good idea. I mean, I should probably do a mega thread about these rhetorical forms because they would probably help people a lot, I think.

• 28:13Chris Williamson?

  I I was listening today while I was hooked up to an IV to the Dworkesh podcast episode he did with Dominic Cummings. Have you heard this?

• 28:23Gurwinder Bhogal?

  I haven't known.

• 28:25Chris Williamson?

  Dude, it's fucking fire. I got Dwakesh to intro me to Dominic, so I'm gonna try and bring him on the show. But Cummings is basically saying, at least in the UK, I don't know how much the equivalent is in the US, that basically the ministers in the UK are, they see themselves as talent more than operators. So what they're doing all the time is this sort of bullshit PR, this press, it's always giving speeches, dealing with with speechwriters, how are we positioning, what's the optics, who are we going to speak to today? You know, kiss the baby on the forehead, go to the gala dinner. And they don't actually see their job as making change, they see their job as communicating change.

• 29:07Chris Williamson?

  And, you know, when you've got such a priority on output, not outcome, right? Like output, output, output, let's broadcast as much as possible and no one really looks at what's going on. I mean, that's another type of anthememe, I suppose, where all of the premises about change is happening, we are doing work, those are baked into the rhetoric that these people are putting out there. And yet, you know, how many years of conservative government are we about to leave in the next few months? Like 15 years, 16 years, 17 years?

• 29:45Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, so I think it was around 2006, I think.

• 29:51Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, so you know, like nearly 20 years, nearly two decades of conservative government.

• 29:55Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah.

• 29:55Chris Williamson?

  And throughout that entire time, we are doing this and blah, blah, blah. It's like, hey, baked into the premises that you're making change. Like, you've done nothing, you've done nothing, and that's exactly why you're about to get completely sideswiped. All right, next one, which I think is actually related to this. Post journalism, the press lost its monopoly on news when the internet democratized info. To save its business model, it pivoted from journalism into tribalism. The new role of the press is not to inform its readers, but to confirm what they already believe.

• 30:26Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, so.

• 30:29Gurwinder Bhogal?

  You know, I originally wasn't sure whether the media used to be less biased. But I stumbled across this really great YouTube video by a guy called Ryan Chapman, who actually analyzed whether the media used to be less biased, or whether, you know, it was just a sort of cherry, cherry, sort of cherry picking, rose tinted glasses sort of thing. But like, um, yeah, it actually turns out that the media were less biased back in the day. And this was prior to the internet. This was when the media essentially had a lot of power and they had a lot of money. Because nobody else could provide the news. And so they didn't have to be partisan, as partisan as they are now. They actually could afford to just tell the news because the news was actually a valuable thing back then.

• 31:13Gurwinder Bhogal?

  But that changed with the internet. What happened with the internet was suddenly anybody could tell the news. And in fact, some people could tell the news faster than the big press organizations because there would be local people reporting on things going on in their, in their vicinity.

• 31:30Gurwinder Bhogal?

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

• 32:11Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Whereas now, even not just the opinion columns, but also the actual news itself is slanted towards a certain angle. And that's because

• 32:24Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Since people can get news anywhere, they have to do something different. They have to do something new. And a lot of these people who are supposed journalists and commentators, one thing that they're very skilled at is, again, rhetoric. And so they use their rhetorical skills to essentially tell stories, you know, very powerful and interesting stories.

• 32:45Chris Williamson?

  Construct narratives with persona.

• 32:49Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah. And it's all, it's almost like a kind of TV serial. I mean, we saw this a lot during the Trump years, you know, after 2016. We saw the ways that this changed the New York Times. The New York Times became like a kind of a TV serial in which Trump was like this kind of Saturday morning cartoon villain. And it was like, you know, every article should have, it may as well have just at the end of the article, it may have, may well, may have well just said, you know, tune in next week to see what, you know, Donald Trump is gonna do, you know. So it was like an ongoing narrative about like Donald Trump and what is he gonna do next, you know, find out in the next issue of the New York Times.

• 33:29Gurwinder Bhogal?

  And so, you know, it's, it, it, it's why I don't really read the, the, the sort of press too much. I mean, I don't want to demean it too much because I do feel that the press is a little bit probably over demeaned. I think that pretty much everybody hates the press, you know, and I think that, yeah, they are, they are, of course, they're biased, every, you know, every, every human being is biased. And yes, I think, you know, if you look, if you do read the, the New York Times for news, then God help you. But I think it's valuable anyway because it, it allows you to see what they're doing. It allows you to see what they're trying to convince people of. And that's why I do still read the New York Times.

• 34:07Gurwinder Bhogal?

  And look, I don't want to be completely unfair to the New York Times. It still does break important stories and it does still, it does still matter. It's still an important voice, you know, it's very easy to just dismiss it and just say, oh, they're all just biased, you know, and they're just trying to, you know, convince you of things that are not true. I don't think that's, that's the case. I think there are some good journalists working at the New York Times. So I don't want to, I don't want to demean it too much, but I think, yeah, we need to be careful when we, we need to ask ourselves what they're trying to convince us of, I think.

• 34:37Chris Williamson?

  The sort of narrative element and this constructing of personification of both events, of countries, of regimes, of ideologies, that kind of takes stories out of the realm of fact and into the realm of fiction. It means that people that are reading it don't need to, they don't need to actually understand the first principles or the foundations of what's going on. It's an easy story between good and bad, between fair and unfair, between plight and justice. And there's this guy, Craig Jones, who I had on the show a couple of weeks ago, talking about, he's created this new grappling tournament, which is going

• 35:21Chris Williamson?

  head to head with essentially the Olympics of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. And I mentioned him, I was like, look dude, I don't, the sport of BJJ is kind of confusing if you don't really know what's going on and you don't understand the intricacies of his foot position and what this side control means and all of this. But I'll tell you what I can get on board with, a huge amount of drama between two big organizations and athletes having to make the decision between prestige that's old and money that's new. Like, I, anybody can understand that. Anybody can. And I have this thing in my house, talking to the guys by the pool yesterday, and I was like, much of the time, I want to talk about ideas and

• 36:03Chris Williamson?

  like your decision-making heuristic, a conversational heuristic that I try to catch myself on, is if I start talking too much about people, their motivations, what they're like, I'm like, I'm creating this sort of personified narrative thing. And I'm like, look dude, the Trump versus Biden is just, or Jordan Peterson versus some lefty person, it's just...

• 36:30Chris Williamson?

  The Kardashians for people with three-figure IQs. Like, that's all it is. It's just, it's reality TV for the Substack generation. And you're, you're trying to, you're, you're still doing the same thing, don't. Yeah, maybe the ideas are a little bit more highfalutin. Maybe the people that are involved are a little bit smarter or intellectual or academic or something. But the, the fundamental foundation of this is gossip. You're gossiping about people. And that's, that idea of, of Craig and also sort of what's going on here with this post journalism idea. It brings news stories into a realm everybody can understand, which is the most fundamental human, human, which is who's hot, who's not, who's playing fair, who isn't, who's in, who's out.

• 37:15Chris Williamson?

  That's what it's focused on at the moment.

• 37:18Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, I mean, I've actually noticed this in the ways in which the sort of stories, the sort of press stories are constructed. Like, they actually often use a lot of the same devices as actual literature. So a lot of these, you know, these news stories, they will actually have fictional tropes. They'll have twists, they'll have poetic justice, they'll have irony, like dramatic irony. And all of this stuff, you know, and so it's, it, it, it shows that the writers are, are not telling you the facts, but they're presenting a narrative.

• 37:57Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Which they're basically, probably what's happened is it might be that they've just watched too many Netflix shows and that they're unconsciously projecting this onto the world when they report. But it does seem that, you know, a lot of the time, if, if a news story does have some of these literary devices, you know, where you have like a dramatic reversal of events and, you know, then there's a happy ending or something. You're not, you're not reading the news, you're reading a story. But unfortunately, those kinds of stories sell so much better, they get a lot more attention. And so

• 38:29Chris Williamson?

  easier to read as well. Even look at what nonfiction, great nonfiction. We're both big fans of Morgan Housel as a good example.

• 38:36Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah.

• 38:36Chris Williamson?

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

• 39:10Gurwinder Bhogal?

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

• 39:33Chris Williamson?

  You've got to ham it up a little bit.

• 39:35Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, yeah. And I'll confess, I have to do this when I publish Substack articles. I try to be as honest as I can. I don't, I don't deliberately lie, but I know that, for instance, with, with the titles that I use, you know, I do slightly use sensational titles, because I know that if I don't, I'm not going to get as many readers. And so it's, it's sort of a unfortunate necessity. But I think it's possible to tell the truth in, in story form. I do think that's, it's possible. It's hard, but it's possible. And I think the best way to do it is to, is to draw attention to the fact that you're telling a story. And think that's, as, as long as you do that, then you can actually, you can negate the fictional aspects of it, sort of thing. So it's like a

• 40:16Gurwinder Bhogal?

  kind of, it's like a beautiful packaging that you tell them to rip off, you know. And then they can actually get to the actual meat of what you're trying to say.

• 40:25Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I, you know. For better or worse, there are rules to the game of garnering attention online. And the guys that do the copywriting for the channel, the titles and the thumbnails and stuff like that, which I'm still very heavily involved with, all of the time, we're permanently asking ourselves the question, is this tasteful? Does this fit within our confines of what we think is acceptable? But we're also thinking, is this engaging and interesting? Is this going to get clicks? And you can go too far down one angle, which is if you split test any website enough, you end up with porn. But on the reverse side, if you don't play by the rules of the game at

• 41:05Chris Williamson?

  all, the ideas that you care about and the message that you think is really cool, no one sees it. So you go, okay, well, I need to do something here. We've got to play within the confines of the game. And this relates, I think, to another one of yours from your most recent thread, which was fiction lag, aka experience-taking. When people are captivated by a work of fiction, they unconsciously adopt the traits of their favorite characters. We develop our identities by copying others, and perhaps one reason we enjoy fiction is that it gives us ideas on who to be.

• 41:39Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, so this is quite interesting. This is from, so there's basically experiments, actually, which kind of show that this is the case, where what they did is they basically got people to sort of consume various forms of fiction. And in one of the forms, there was basically, I think there was a political figure who was a really endearing figure, and they were like, they were basically like activists. And this character was, I think they might have been in suffragette or something, but they basically campaigned for some kind of voting rights and they wanted to change the world or whatever. And the people that had consumed this fiction

• 42:20Gurwinder Bhogal?

  They then became more likely to vote afterwards within the, I think what happened was that there was an election a few days afterwards and the ones that had bonded with this fictional character, they actually began to identify almost to this with this character and began to vote. They actually went out in the real world and voted. And in another example,

• 42:41Gurwinder Bhogal?

  that a group of people, they browsed fiction featuring a person of an ethnic minority and they were very endearing sympathetic character. And once this person was identified with, the people that had identified with this character became more sort of open and more sort of sympathetic towards people of that ethnicity. So, you know, these are quite small scale experiments and they're not, I mean, I don't know if they've replicated, so I'm going to put a caveat there. But the reason I included it was because I noticed it happening in my own life and in the sort of lives of the people around me. So I feel that it probably would replicate if they attempted. And, you know, when I was young,

• 43:26Gurwinder Bhogal?

  for instance, you know, like I, I got attached to certain characters, you know, and I would sort of start acting like them in a way and use them as a model, you know, use them as a model. Like for instance, one of my favorite characters when I was young was Michael Corleone in The Godfather. And

• 43:45Chris Williamson?

  I can imagine, I can imagine you as an Italian mobster.

• 43:51Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Well, I mean, you know, that's, that's basically what I tried to do. But it was more when I was drunk, weirdly enough. I noticed it was more when I was drunk. It wasn't, it wasn't so much when I was sober. It was when I was drunk, I found myself sort of acting and saying, saying lines from the movie, you know?

• 44:04Chris Williamson?

  Be careful what you read. If you read too much Harry Potter, you're going to try and cast spells on people once you've had one too many. But this is, there's three really that are, that are very, very interesting here that I think link, link together. So post journalism, looking at using tribalism, creating a sort of us versus them mentality, they're utilizing narrative to drag people together. You've got fiction lag, this experience taking thing. Very rarely we expose To the inner workings of anybody else's mind with the level of resolution that you get when reading a 500 or 1000 page book. Anyone that's read The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss, you know, you become unbelievably familiar. It's like pedestrianly slow for chapters and

• 44:47Chris Williamson?

  chapters and chapters. You learn about this guy's walk to the bar that he plays his lute and the sound of his shoes on the cobblestones and all of this. So you become really, really sort of familiar with him. So of course, if it's a well-written character, you start to have this sort of sense of affinity with them. And you think, well, he has done well by design, especially outright fiction, not just like news masquerading or fiction masquerading as news, should I say. And then this is showing up.

• 45:16Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Sorry. Yeah. Do you want to finish what you say?

• 45:19Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, just that it relates to compassion fade, you know, which is that.

• 45:25Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Sorry. Sorry.

• 45:27Chris Williamson?

  One, one, one death is a tragedy. One million is a statistic. When presented with two appeals for charity, one based on famine statistics and one based on a single starving goal, people tend to donate much more to the goal. Our minds can't grasp big numbers, so we navigate the world through stories, not statistics. We are moved by drama, not by data. Why? Because we can, it's narrative, it's being personified. We understand the emotion of this individual person. That, you know, compassion fade explains fiction lag and post journalism. Like, it's one of the reasons as to why this occurs.

• 46:02Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah. And I think, basically, I think that the sort of reason why we enjoy films and literature and fiction generally is because it presents us with certain character archetypes, and then it presents us with scenarios. And it allows us to see what that archetype, how that archetype would perform in that scenario. And so it gives us ideas on who to be. Basically, because we are, we are kind of mimetic beings, you know, we, we, we take bits and pieces from other people and we assemble them, we cobble them together into this kind of character that we choose to become. And I think that we get ideas of who to be when we watch films and we, we sort of identify with certain characters that have certain similarities to us,

• 46:46Gurwinder Bhogal?

  but are different enough that they're interesting. And we, we, it's like an experiment. We see what will this set of traits do in this scenario? And, and how will that, and what will be the consequences of that? And so it allows us to essentially see how, how certain types of people will perform.

• 47:06Chris Williamson?

  It's split testing.

• 47:08Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah.

• 47:08Chris Williamson?

  Split testing solutions. But the, I, I guess the problem is, especially in, again, in outright fiction, or even in news masquerading, fiction masquerading as news, that the outcomes aren't true. This isn't how the behavior of this protagonist, yeah, yeah, the behavior of this protagonist isn't that. And what's maybe even more sort of nefarious and, and manipulative is assuming that this is fact, that this is in The New Yorker, or The New York Post, or The New York Times, or Hollywood Magazine, or whatever, and that this does explain something,

• 47:45Chris Williamson?

  because it delivers a story that you can buy into and gives you the illusion that this is how things are, and that is how things turned out. But it doesn't. So if you then begin to model your behavior off how this protagonist dealt with it, or whatever it might be, think, well, you may be convinced to actually do something which is totally wrong.

• 48:11Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah. I mean, there's an interesting paradox where when we watch a movie, we know we're watching a movie. And yet, once we get engrossed in it, we forget that we were just watching a movie. It seems real to us. Because if it didn't seem real, it wouldn't be interesting, and we wouldn't actually be glued to it like we are. And so the very fact that we're able to fool ourselves into believing something that we know is not true. Shows that there's this sort of, we have this kind of vulnerability to stories. Where, you know, we can even, we can know from the outset, you know, like we'll see the, the opening credits and we'll see, you know, directed by, produced by, obviously we're watching a movie. But then as soon as the film begins and as soon as the drama begins, we forget all of that and we're completely sucked into this.

• 48:53Chris Williamson?

  Why do people cry? Why do people cry at movies? Why do they get sad when they read books? Because they're invested, they're genuinely emotionally invested and they no longer see this situation as a work of fiction. They see it as a work of reality.

• 49:08Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, yeah. It's a, it's something that we need to sort of be aware of. I think a lot of the time. Our affinity to stories, we're so attracted to stories that we kind of, we need to keep our guard up whenever we're presented with them because we're just, we're naturally. I think it's probably a spandrel. It's probably an evolutionary spandrel. So it's, it's, it's a byproduct of evolution. So it's not something that was intended. It's not adaptive. It's maladaptive in a sense. Because we're so used to watching other people and maybe in, in the old days before, you know, when we were hunter gatherers, we would watch people in our tribe and see how they acted. And what the consequences of that action would be. And that's how we learned who to be. And that's now being exploited by movies. Where we kind of, our brains haven't caught up. And so.

• 49:52Chris Williamson?

  How long's the written, what, written words been around for like 12,000 years? Something like that?

• 49:56Gurwinder Bhogal?

  I think, yes, probably, yeah, about 10,000, I'd say probably, yeah.

• 49:59Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 49:59Gurwinder Bhogal?

  And, um, but it's, but the written word has only been, um, it's only been commonplace for about 500 years, you know, it's only been sort of like a, uh, something that a lot of people know. Because in the past, it was an extremely esoteric thing that was confined usually to priesthood. And, you know, only in the past 500 years, I mean, with the printing press, I suppose, was that's the early time when writing and, and that kind of stuff. Cause we had the oral tradition before that, where stories were completely just told through, um, around a campfire or whatever, you know, just, and then. Stories were passed down through generations. Sometimes the constellations were used as a sort of projector screen, you know, cinema screen.

• 50:42Gurwinder Bhogal?

  And they were used to tell stories, but, but yeah, I mean, um, I think that part of mythology is, is to give us moral lessons about. Who we should be and what the consequences of that are. If you look at Greek mythology, in fact, if you look at any mythology, it tends to deal with this concept of sort of. You know, like hubris and nemesis, for instance, where you have mortals who will act in a certain way, and then they'll receive a judgment from the gods. Um, and I think that that's the same thing that we're seeing in movies today, where instead of the gods, it's fate and chance or destiny or whatever, but like, you know, it presents you with a certain character and says, if you are this character, this will be the consequences of being this character.

• 51:26Gurwinder Bhogal?

  And that sort of in our primal hunter gather a brain, we sort of associate that with reality. We we sort of, because we're so used to watching other people and learning from other people. As I said, we're memetic beings. And so we get fooled into thinking that that's that these fictional worlds are real in that sense. You know, we think that this is the real consequences of being this way. If you're arrogant, you know, like Icarus, and you fly too close to the sun, then your your your wings will melt and you'll, you know, fall to earth sort of thing. Yeah.

• 51:57Chris Williamson?

  Golden Mean. Good character is not about maximizing virtues, but moderating them. To be sensitive without being fragile, confident without being cocky, steadfast without being stubborn, driven without being reckless, focused without being obsessed.

• 52:15Gurwinder Bhogal?

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

• 52:54Gurwinder Bhogal?

  It's better to actually have a low, a smaller than life personality in a sense, not to be too much of anything, but to have moderation in in all things. Because that prevents, because all of these character traits can be a weakness if they're taken to excess. Even the best character trait, you know, even if you're if you're extremely compassionate, for instance, like if you have a little bit of compassion, you'll be a nice person, you'll be a good person. You'll also be well liked because people like compassion. But if you have too much compassion, Then you will end up giving everything you own to other people and you'll be left with nothing, you know, for instance, or you'll spend your whole day, you'll spend your whole day on social media crying about all the suffering in the world. And so that every

• 53:35Gurwinder Bhogal?

  single good attribute that a person can possess, it's possible for them to have too much of it.

• 53:42Chris Williamson?

  The original, the original golden mean is Aristotle, right? Neither a vice of excess nor a vice of scarcity.

• 53:49Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, yeah, that's true. Yeah. And I think it's a, it's a very powerful idea because

• 53:56Gurwinder Bhogal?

  it's very easy to just get one trait or a couple of traits and just to run with it and try and maximize it. Yeah, we live in a world where everybody's trying to max things now. You've got like looks maxing and health maxing and all this different maxing thing, you know, there's a culture of maxing. And I think that really, we should focus less on maxing and more on moderating. I think that's more important because, you know, even health maxing is, is, I don't think a very healthy thing, ironically enough. Because if you spend all of your energy on trying to be super healthy, and I, I think of Brian Johnson here, I actually respect Brian Johnson. I think he's doing a great thing. He's, you know, he's obviously a guinea pig. He's, he's a self-confessed guinea

• 54:39Gurwinder Bhogal?

  pig who's trying out these new things. And so I couldn't, you know, I can understand why he's doing what he's doing. But if you try to live that kind of lifestyle just to be healthy, you actually lose out on so many things that make life good and worth living. And, you know, like he has like, I think a two hour skin routine every morning, you know, and I've seen his, his daily routine where he just spends like, you know, five hours just going through the rounds and doing all this stuff. And I'm just wondering to myself, like, you know, he's, he's obviously trying to live long enough, you know, he's trying, he's trying to maximize his longevity. But he's actually, in a sense, reducing his longevity because he's actually, although he's living longer, his life is shorter because he's not actually doing the things he wants to do. He's spending so much of that time

• 55:24Gurwinder Bhogal?

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

• 55:51Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, he's a, he's, he's a sweetie man. He's in town this week. Actually, he's in Austin this week. So I've got a nut pudding dinner with him, I think, tomorrow, Thursday. And he's, he's a real sweetie. I met him in Rowatown a couple of weeks ago. He's been on the show and he's nice. That being said, the way that I see Brian, the way I've kind of sort of conceptual, I've told him this, I think he's kind of like a scout in an army. And I am more than happy for him to go behind enemy lines, put himself, his, his time, his money, his effort, all of that out there in an attempt to try and find out all of this stuff. And then come back and tell us, tell us what you found when you looked over that ridge and, you know, you saw all of

• 56:34Chris Williamson?

  the army and what, where were they moving and what was going on. But it wouldn't do to have an army full of scouts. You don't need that. And you, you also don't want to necessarily be a scout yourself. It's an extreme position to be in. And what you want to do is then get that and integrate the pieces, the highest value pieces into your value set. The same thing goes, you know, in many ways for Alex Hormozi. Like Hormozi is an absolute outlier when it comes to work ethic. The guy is unrelenting. And that's great. I want him to push as hard as he can and come back and tell us what he found. Tell me what it's like to do 12, 16 hour days, seven days a week for years at a time. And let me know what you've come up with.

• 57:17Chris Williamson?

  That's very, very important. But both Brian and Alex are outliers with their particular psychological makeup and their desire and their passion and the enjoyment that they get from doing those things. Inherent, we spoke last time about telek and exotelic pursuits. And for them, something which for many other people would be exotelic, for them is telek. And I think that just realizing, okay, so what gives me pleasure? Well, I want to live longer. Right. Okay. Yeah. But is the dopamine that you get from finding out some slightly different methylated version of cabalamine B12, is that really where you get your sort of greatest sense of pleasure from? Because that might be for Brian. Or is really locking

• 58:02Chris Williamson?

  yourself in a large cupboard with no, no windows wearing and no strip, pumping yourself full of nicotine and writing for six hours from 6am every single morning? Is that really what you want to do? Or do you want to work out how to be able to? Get, you know, two really great hours of writing done once a week. And, you know, that's using the extremes, using those people. But going back to the, the sort of obsession, this difficulty with the, the golden mean. And I remember where I was when I first heard it. I was driving again through Newcastle on the way to the gym. And, uh, it made me think about dieting. So throughout a lot of my twenties as a gym bro, I would, you know, hard cut for Ibiza this summer. And I'm going to get shredded.

• 58:41Chris Williamson?

  And it was very easy to be in full on degenerate bulk birthday cake for dinner mode, bro. Or to be in absolute obsession, tracking the calories on my fitness pal mode. Like those two worlds are very easy to be in. If I put a packet of biscuits in front of you and say, you can eat none of them or you can eat all of them. Both of those are kind of easy decisions. If I say you're allowed to have two, it's like, ah, that's impossible. I can't have two. If you let me have two, I'm going to have half the packet. If you let me have none, you let me have all of them. Both of those are quite easy, but there is something about, and I think, you know, the way, the story that we tell ourselves about the identity that we have. Who am I in this moment? What am I, what am I sort of contributing to?

• 59:25Chris Williamson?

  A solution, and I find myself in this, I'm saying it like largely to myself. I'm quite an absolutist creature and have a lot of obsession about things that I want to do. And I want to dedicate myself to them. One of the ways I found that I can toggle this a little bit is to try and periodize. So to say, okay, I am going to be super, super focused on dialing in my diet and the nutrition and the calories and all the rest of it. But I'm going to do it for three months. And then at the end of those three months, I'm maybe going to have a reset. Maybe I'm going to do something else. And if you actually aggregate that out across a year or a decade or a life, you end up with something that does approximate

• 1:00:03Chris Williamson?

  a pretty well balanced life whilst not having to use this insane amount of willpower to always be like in fourth gear at sort of your foot half pressed to the floor, which is really, really difficult to do.

• 1:00:18Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, I think it helps to just sort of set limits in advance on things that you're going to do, I think, because I think when people are left to their own devices, they have a tendency to go to extremes. You know, we all have our obsessions. Everybody's obsessed about something. And this is why I think planning is is very important to, you know, like I, for instance, when I do research, for instance, when I'm when I'm writing, I am obsessive when it comes to research. Like, I literally have to know everything about something before I start writing about it, you know, and I was gonna take just so long to do it. But what I've done is I've decided to, because I know

• 1:01:00Gurwinder Bhogal?

  this about myself, I create cutoff points. So I will say, you know, I'm gonna go online and I'm gonna find one thing out, right, just this one thing. And once I found it out, I'm gonna cut the internet. That's it. And then I'm just gonna start writing, you know. So and this is also good for social media addiction, where instead of going online and just browsing, because a lot of people have this obsession where they just have a habit of just taking their phone out and just scrolling through social media. Instead of doing that, only allow yourself to take your phone out of your pocket for a very specific reason. So if you are like, if you wanna check social media, for instance, have an idea of what you actually want to see before you open your phone, before you

• 1:01:42Gurwinder Bhogal?

  open Twitter or whatever. And then when you've seen the thing that you wanted to see, put your phone back in, you know. And so if you have this deliberate nature, then it allows you to just cut off that point and prevent yourself from becoming obsessed. You can apply this to anything, you know, when you do a certain amount of things, then you stop, basically. It's a good way to moderate.

• 1:02:02Chris Williamson?

  Going back to sort of your original example, these are valuable and useful, especially tactically. But when we're talking about how much compassion is too much compassion, how much charisma, how much confidence, how much drive is is too much, those as values that we imbue in ourselves, much more difficult. How are we tolerating that? What does it mean to have too much compassion?

• 1:02:30Gurwinder Bhogal?

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

• 1:03:13Gurwinder Bhogal?

  would help them because I can actually make the difference. But if I hear about, you know, some horrible massacre that occurred on the other side of the world, there's no real point in me getting upset about it. There's no real point about, you know, me trying to have compassion for these people. Although, yeah, I had the basic, the baseline compassion that any human being has. I think it's awful, but I can't do anything more than that, you know. So having extra compassion and just sitting there and crying about it isn't going to change anything. It's not going to make their lives, it's not going to, you know, it's not going to make their lives better, it's not going to make my life better. And so I have that cutoff point. And again, this requires self-discipline. You know, controlling your emotions is a very difficult thing to do, and it's something that I had to train myself to do. I can do it quite well now. I feel that I have pretty

• 1:03:58Gurwinder Bhogal?

  good control of my emotions, but I appreciate that it's not easy. And it's something that you need to inculcate into yourself. You need to train yourself to be able to detach from the source of whatever is irking you, whether it's, you know, this news of a massacre or whether it's somebody annoying you online or, you know, whatever it is, you need to create a distance between yourself and that thing. And The thing is, is there's no single answer because obviously there's a difference, there's a huge difference between limiting your compassion, limiting your anger, limiting your sexual desire, limiting all these different things. There's different strategies for doing all of these things and one size isn't going to fit all. You've got to find what works for

• 1:04:41Gurwinder Bhogal?

  you. What works for me is stoicism. Like it, it just allows me to, um, that, that neat delineation between what you can control, what you can't control, and also creating the distance between stimulus and response. I think that's also an extremely important thing. I find that if you just slow down in the ways that you respond to things, slow down in your reactions, um, it actually helps a great deal because I think it was Seneca who said that the greatest remedy to anger is delay. So if you just slow down and pause before you react to whatever it is, that can actually help. And this can help. You know, if you see a beautiful woman, um, you can just not think about sex. I mean, you can, you don't have to think about sex and you

• 1:05:26Gurwinder Bhogal?

  can create that pause and just focus on something else. If somebody, if a troll is angry at you online, again, you just pause and just create that distance and just say, you know, you can also use perspective. You can say, okay, so this person doesn't even know me. They're just some person on the other side of the world. They've never met me. They don't know me. So anything that they're saying about me is not directed towards me. It's directed to some caricature that of me that they've created in their imagination.

• 1:05:51Chris Williamson?

  What's that, uh, tilting at wind, windmills thing you heard from before?

• 1:05:54Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:54Chris Williamson?

  Well, this is, this is super similar to Tarswell's razor. Emotion causes bias, but it also causes motivation. As such, when we're most likely to act is when our judgment can be trusted least. Solution, don't trust thoughts you have while emotional. Instead, pause and wait for the feeling to pass before acting.

• 1:06:13Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah. Well, there you go. Um, I think that's an extremely important, and this is probably a theme in a lot of my ideas, is this idea that The thoughts that enter your head are essentially a decision that you make. And you have the power to not think about certain things. You could choose to see things in a different way. And what I do is I like to look at my emotions not as masters that I have to obey, but as advisors. Because really, what are emotions? Emotions are alarm systems. They're things that exist to alert you to something. So for example, anger exists to alert you that a line has crossed, has been crossed.

• 1:06:55Gurwinder Bhogal?

  You know, some kind of moral line, ethical line has been crossed and somebody has violated something that you hold dear. That's what anger is. But the thing is, is that anger is somewhat obsolete. It's an obsolete instinct in a sense, because it existed. Really, because this was prior to there being a legal system, prior to there being a police force. And there needed to be a way to police tribes. And the way that we policed it was through anger. So if somebody were to cross a line, if somebody were to sleep with your wife, for instance, or whatever, that would anger you. And then you would probably do something pretty horrendous to that person. And so that kept order in the tribe. So anger was like a kind of a police force in a sense.

• 1:07:40Gurwinder Bhogal?

  But now we actually have a real police force. We have a real legal system. So that can take care of people crossing lines. So we don't actually need to get upset about it too much. We don't need to get angry as much because we get the dispassionate police to sort that out for us. And so it's somewhat of an obsolete instinct. I'm not saying it's completely obsolete. There is still a use to anger, but it's not as useful as it used to be. And so when you understand this, when you understand why anger exists, it allows you to create that distance between yourself and the feeling of anger. And you could do this with love, you could do it with sadness, you could do it with with anything. I mean, humour, everything, you know. So you understand why that emotion exists.

• 1:08:21Gurwinder Bhogal?

  And then that allows you to see it more as a construct, as something that evolution has programmed, rather than as something that you must obey.

• 1:08:30Gurwinder Bhogal?

  And so I think that's a good way to create that pause, that distance between stimulus and response.

• 1:08:37Chris Williamson?

  Taleb's got this interesting quote where he says, "The world is broken up into two groups of people, those who don't know how to make money and those who don't know when to stop." And that little bifurcation about, I was thinking as you were talking there, the world's sort of being split up into people who can't stop listening to their emotions and those who don't know how to or don't respect them. You know, you've got the sort of cognitive cerebral horsepower preying at the rationality people for whom they probably need to actually allow more of that emotion to come through. They don't use instinct or gut particularly well. Everything has to go through a multiple checklist before, spreadsheet before they can do it. And then the other side, the people who need a little bit more mindfulness gap,

• 1:09:21Chris Williamson?

  the people who need to not just act on impulse quite so much. And, um, you know, this is again, it's that golden mean, it's finding this balance, not a vice of excess nor a vice of scarcity. All right, next one. "Package deal ethics. If I can predict all of your beliefs from one of your beliefs, you're not a serious thinker. Being pro-choice and being pro-gun control don't necessarily follow from each other, yet those who believe one usually also believe the other. This is because most people don't choose beliefs individually, but subscribe to packages of beliefs offered by a tribe."

• 1:09:56Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, so you'll be quite familiar with this one because that was actually a quote by yourself that you read there. And yeah, I mean, it's, this is also, I think, it explains a lot about the current political landscape. So again, this goes down to this idea that time is limited, energy is limited, and this cognitive horsepower is finite. And so people have to take shortcuts in their beliefs. And one of the ways in which they take shortcuts is they, instead of analyzing every belief that they have and trying to make a decision

• 1:10:36Gurwinder Bhogal?

  on whether they're pro-gun control or anti-gun control, whether they're pro-life or pro-choice, or, you know, whether they're sort of pro-tax, anti-tax, all of these different separate things. Instead of analyzing them all, which would take a lot of time, a lot of energy, a lot of anxiety, they instead decide to just...

• 1:11:00Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Adopt packages, just whole packages of beliefs, like a ready-made oven-ready belief system, you know, where all they've got to do is just, you know, take out the packaging and then just crack it in the oven, there you go, you know, and there's no real effort required. So, you know, that's the one thing, but it also comes with another another advantage, which is that it also gives people tribal belonging. So if you have the same packages as everybody else, it makes you feel like you belong to that group and you feel a kinship with with other people who have the same package as you. And so it allows people to form identity groups around these packages. And so these two advantages, the fact that

• 1:11:42Gurwinder Bhogal?

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

• 1:12:24Gurwinder Bhogal?

  So, you know, there's a contradiction there. And also, you know, right wingers tend to be against abortion and yet they're pro freedom on the whole. And so, you know, there's a lot of these kinds of contradictions that you see. And this shows that, you know, there's these people aren't reasoning themselves into these individual beliefs. They're just adopting these umbrella sort of beliefs.

• 1:12:47Chris Williamson?

  One of the most well remembered insights, I think it may be even the first ever episode that me and you did, was that an absurd ideological belief is as much a show of fealty to your own side and a threat display to the other as it is a ideology that you imbue or some sort of philosophy that you live by. And I keep coming back to this term, I think that we came up with, which was an unreliable ally. So if I know that you're with me on gun control, but I know that you're not with me on abortion, the next time that something appears when Donald Trump gets convicted,

• 1:13:28Chris Williamson?

  or there's this debate that occurs about COVID masks, or about lockdown, or about immigration, or whatever. I think, well, I'm not really too sure what Gwenda's gonna say here, because, you know, he was with us on that one point. But on the other one, he really wasn't. I'm a little bit, I'm a bit unsure about that guy. So the idea of an unreliable ally, that sort of person, it is likely that you're going to be ostracized from the group. It's likely that there's going to be pressure placed on you by members of that group to no longer be as sartorially bespoke in your ideology. And instead, just put the onesie on, zip it up, and, you know, we know where you start. You don't need to worry about Gwenda. He's a good guy. We've got him. He's like, don't worry. He's locked in. He's always there, always with us, always sort of toes the line.

• 1:14:13Chris Williamson?

  And, uh, yeah, just the pressures, the pressures are so huge, dude, to do this, especially in an atomized world where everybody wears their, the opinion pageant, where everyone wears their opinions on their sleeve. It is so compelling for people to do that. And, um, I think one other element is I had as a bunch of heuristics to work out whether or not your favorite content creator is actually telling the truth. When was the last time that they surprised you with one of their takes? And this is why, love him or hate him, I think Sam Harris is an interesting person to follow, because I don't always know what his take's going to be.

• 1:14:54Chris Williamson?

  Something occurred, he can quite happily be like pro-vaccine but anti-lockdown. He can be anti-woke but anti-Trump. He can, you know, it's a odd sort of ugly shape that his belief structure has. It's not a smooth round ball. Given that he pays and anybody else, doesn't have to be Sam Harris, anybody who pays a relatively high price for not having package deal ethics, for not necessarily being a reliable ally, they pay such a high price for holding those non-typical constellation of beliefs, you have to assume that they believe, they at least, they at least believe what they believe,

• 1:15:39Chris Williamson?

  or they think that they believe what they believe, because otherwise they would just do the easier route, they would get the backing of either the left or the right, or the gun people, or the abortion people, or whatever, but they don't. So yeah, that's the last time that somebody you follow surprised you as a good heuristic.

• 1:15:55Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, I mean, in your recent conversation with Sam Harris, actually, you use this brilliant term, I'll get on to that in a moment, but like, it was this idea that basically, so Sam is kind of like, he angers the left and the right, like, you know, the left are really angry with him and the right are too. And you use this term called ideological spit-roasting.

• 1:16:19Gurwinder Bhogal?

  It's a brilliant, a brilliant term, it just perfectly describes what's happening. But like, yeah, I mean, anybody who is being ideologically spit-roasted, it shows that they are not, they're paying a heavy cost for their beliefs. And when somebody's paying a heavy cost for their beliefs, this is a signal that their beliefs are genuine. Because why would you pay such a heavy cost if your beliefs were not real? Why would you, what are you going to gain from that? And so when you see people who are attacked by both the left and the right, this is usually a sign that you're dealing with someone who's sincere, unless they've, unless they've done something completely egregious, you know. But, you know, if they're being cancelled by the left and the right for something that's not illegal, and it's just something that they've said, or some, you know, some opinion that they hold, this

• 1:17:01Gurwinder Bhogal?

  is usually a good sign that they have some integrity. Because it takes a lot of integrity to not, to basically go against either tribe, you know, knowing that the amount of flak you're going to get from the left and from the right. You know, so this is sort of one thing that I look out for in people. You see it with Sam Harris, you see it with Claire Lehman, the editor of Quillette, she's also somebody who's pissed off the left and the right.

• 1:17:26Chris Williamson?

  Bill Maher, Scott Galloway.

• 1:17:28Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, yeah. And also, I suppose you and I also, to a certain extent, you know, we'll, if you look at our reply section on Twitter, you'll usually see both left-wingers and right-wingers who are angry with-

• 1:17:40Chris Williamson?

  Not very complimentary all the time. Yeah, all right, next one Rothbard's Law. If a talent comes naturally to someone, they assume it's nothing special and instead try to improve at what seems difficult to them. As a result, people often specialize in things they're bad at.

• 1:17:58Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, so this is an interesting one. I mean, it's it's one that's hard to really experimentally verify, right? Because obviously, this is something that really is a very gradual and a long term thing that happens in people's lives. But I think it's true because I think I've noticed it in myself where for a long period of time, I was not interested in writing. I just didn't think that I was a good writer. And the reason I didn't think I was a good writer, I think, was because I was just kind of, again, you know, I was looking at things from my baseline, you know, so there's a false consensus effect comes in here. I didn't know

• 1:18:37Gurwinder Bhogal?

  what it was like to not be me. And so I didn't have any concept of what I was good at. I didn't know that I was good at writing until other people told me I was. And it was only after enough people, not just one person, but quite a large number of people told me I was good at writing. That's only when I actually realized I was good at writing. I'm still not even sure if I am, but a lot of people seem to think so. So, you know, I'll go with it. I'll go with it, you know. But like, this was something that for most of my life, like I said, you know, I used to work in tech and I was more of a numbers guy than a words guy, because I just didn't have any concept of my own talents. I didn't know what I was good at. I didn't know I was I was a words guy. I thought I was a numbers guy. And, you know, and I think this

• 1:19:19Gurwinder Bhogal?

  is true of pretty much everybody, because when you really think about it, how are you supposed to know if you're good at something if you have spent your whole life thinking it's normal? You know, if it's if it's your baseline? The only way I could see that happening would be if other people constantly tell you that you're good at it. Because obviously, other people are like a mirror, and they help us to see ourselves. And, you know, if you're like, for me, I mean, I didn't, when I grew up, I didn't really have anybody to tell me that I was good at writing. You know, I grew up in a working class neighborhood, and nobody was really interested in reading anything I wrote. And so, you know, I didn't realize I was I was a writer until I was an adult. Um. If I had known earlier sooner, I probably would have doled down on it earlier.

• 1:20:04Gurwinder Bhogal?

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

• 1:20:41Chris Williamson?

  Ryan Long, the Canadian comedian that lives in New York, sent me that Rothbard's Law from from yourself and said that he finds himself doing this all the time. You know, he's unbelievably good at comedy and writing sketches. He does things that he's like the sketch version of South Park, kind of, that he's able to sort of call out both left and right. He's very much sort of a blind spot poker. Uh, and he said, he texted me and he was like, dude, I uh, I I did, I like, I'm so seen by this, that he focuses on all of these sort of odd things. I suppose that we use effort and challenge as a proxy for

• 1:21:25Chris Williamson?

  outcome in future. And if something comes easily to us, we assume that it can't be of great value on the other side. Uh, I suppose there's certain pursuits in which um, you know, if you play sport, the outcome is very quantifiable. It's a sort of an obvious metric. But really, I was thinking, as you were talking about, imagine a seven foot seven guy that was somehow born on a desert island with no other humans around him. Is he tall? What does that mean? What does it mean to be tall when there is no one to be taller than, when there is no bell curve of average height? What what is tall and what is short? Tall and short only exist in relation to other people. And it's the same with this

• 1:22:10Chris Williamson?

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

• 1:22:52Chris Williamson?

  to this other pursuit. And it's like, yeah, dude, but you get naught point two for every hour that you spend on that. And you get 10,002 for every hour that you spend on the other thing. You should really be doubling down on the thing that you're great at, not the thing that you're like, kind of average at, or the same as everybody else at, or maybe even just a little bit better than everyone else at.

• 1:23:11Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, I think probably a good way to avoid Rothbard's law is to focus on what interests you. Because if you, if something interests you, and even if it obsesses you, that's even better. But if something really interests you, then you're going to put the time in and you're going to, you're going to put more time into that than other people would put into it. And that by itself is, it's not a guarantee, but it's an indicator that you might be talented at that thing. Because obviously, if you are interested in it, you're going to be putting more hours into it than anybody else, or than than most people. And you also have the capacity to get better at it a lot more than you would at something that doesn't interest you, because you're going to do it regardless. And so I think, you know, if you're young and you want to know what you're talented at, a good

• 1:23:55Gurwinder Bhogal?

  proxy would be what interests you. Because then you can follow that interest and you could even let it become an obsession. This might be one instance in which it's actually best to disregard the golden mean and to go full in on this one obsession. Because then that's how geniuses are born is, is they become extremely interested in one narrow thing and they focus on it. They spend their lives thinking about it. And, you know, that's what usually sets them apart from everybody else.

• 1:24:22Chris Williamson?

  Champion bias. We assume winners have the best advice, but those who win rarely examine why they won, while those who lose often regretfully dwell on their mistakes. So you'll often obtain the best advice on winning, not from winners, but from losers.

• 1:24:38Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, so I noticed this like when I was reading autobiographies and of successful people. And when I was reading these, you know, people would often tell you that how they became successful, you know, what they did. And a lot of the time I just thought, nah, you know, these people don't actually understand why they were successful. And maybe this is also, it kind of ties in a little bit with Rothbard's law in that people are not really aware of what they're actually good at. And so they kind of misconstrue why they're successful. You know, they tend to sort of underestimate what they're actually talented at and overestimate what they're not talented at. Because when people are successful at something, they tend not to really question why they were successful.

• 1:25:21Gurwinder Bhogal?

  You know, you only really question things when things don't go your way. You know, I mean, obviously, when you, when you do things well and things work out, instead of questioning that, you're going to be busy celebrating. You're going to be like, yeah, you know, and also there's another bias where people tend to think that if they did well, then they're going to over. They're going to over emphasize the importance of talent as opposed to say, look. So there are a few biases which are going to ensure that somebody who is successful at something is not going to truly interrogate it. On the other hand, if you have somebody who's failed at something, that's going to eat at them for a long period of time. It's going to create regret in their heart and that's going to, that sour note is going to provoke them into thinking over and over. Turning over into their, in their minds, what went wrong.

• 1:26:06Gurwinder Bhogal?

  They'll be having sleepless nights about, you know, oh my God, how could this go wrong? And they will interrogate themselves about it. And so they will often have a much better understanding of why they failed than the successful person would about why they were successful. Um, I think this is a general, it's not true in all cases, but I think it's a good general rule to hold. I think, um, it's, it's, but it's easier also, another thing is it's easier to work out why something failed than why it succeeded. Because usually when something.

• 1:26:36Chris Williamson?

  It's more important. I think it's more important. I think that avoiding pitfalls is more important than expediting success. You know, far more people have unforced errors and fail out of something than have insufficient success. You know, like insufficient success is usually a byproduct of too many failures. And if you say to the person, what was it about your business that caused it to go bankrupt? They will be able to tell you all of the ways that you could go bankrupt. And from that, you can learn how to not go bankrupt. So many, this is the same, especially in content creation. So many of the pursuits that you're doing, unless you're in VC and

• 1:27:18Chris Williamson?

  it's like, build it, ship it, get it to a 10 million run rate, sell it, fuck off. So much of it is just a marathon. It's like, okay, so what you're looking to do is, what are all of the ways that people who didn't keep going were forced to stop? Avoid those? And you kind of, all that's really left is success.

• 1:27:37Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, that's it. Yeah. I think, yeah, I think this sort of goes to the idea of like, instead of trying to be right, try to be less wrong, basically. So it's easier to do that because you can, you can spot the pitfalls and then you can just avoid those pitfalls rather than, because there is no secret to success other than just avoiding mistakes and just being consistent in your work. You know, that's really, that's really the best you can do. You know, avoid the mistakes and just be persistent. Those two things. And so I think, you know, if you, if you just set yourself up to try and find the secret to success, you're going to find that it's actually very banal. It's very mundane. There's not actually much you can do other than basic things to be successful. You've just got to have that.

• 1:28:22Chris Williamson?

  And don't fuck up.

• 1:28:24Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, basically. And so the real sort of wisdom is to be had in finding the mistakes to avoid. That's where the real sort of juice is. And that's a very fertile land. There's so much there to learn because there's so many different types of mistakes that you can make.

• 1:28:41Chris Williamson?

  Well, one of my favorite questions that I ask guests on the show is, what do most people get wrong about X? Because the question of how do people do Y better is very, very open and kind of fluffy and you just usually elicits a much more boring answer. But the question, what do most people get wrong about? Protein consumption, what do most people get wrong when it comes to understanding stoicism? That it makes everyone's eyes light up because they go, oh, wow. Like, I get the opportunity to really call out all of these fucking errors that people keep on making. And I think that we all know deep down that avoiding pitfalls is way more important than, like, just never multiply by zero.

• 1:29:24Chris Williamson?

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

• 1:29:55Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, yeah, it only takes one critical mistake for everything to go to shit, basically, you know?

• 1:30:01Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 1:30:01Gurwinder Bhogal?

  And so, you know, you could do everything else really, really well. But if there's one thing that you just get wrong, it could completely upend everything else. And so for that reason, yeah, I mean, make, like, avoiding mistakes is a lot more important than trying to find some secrets to success, which just doesn't really exist, I think.

• 1:30:20Chris Williamson?

  Anchored to your own history bias. Your personal experiences make up maybe naught point, naught, naught, naught, naught, naught, naught, naught, one percent of what's happened in the world, but maybe eighty percent of how you think the world works. That's from Morgan Housel. Boomers and Gen X had wildly different experiences of how the economy works, and this gave them different dispositions, worldviews and political preferences.

• 1:30:45Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, so this is a very interesting point because it kind of fits in a little bit with the false consensus consensus effect again, you know? We only know the world from our perspective and from our experiences. Everything we see is filtered through our life's experiences. And that's how, that's our model of the world, basically. That's everything we understand about the world, we have seen through our own eyes. And this creates blind spot because what we've experienced, I mean, if you consider that, you know?

• 1:31:18Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Life has been, you know, around on this earth for about a billion years, right? And, you know, we are tiny sliver of that, you know, we're we're so tiny, like our lifetimes, that we're almost like a sheet of paper, like, you know, sideways, just just trying to edgeways, seeing it there, we're, as Vladimir Nabokov said, we're a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. That's our life, right? And there's a massive amount of life and just existence that we have no concept of, because we live in this tiny, tiny sliver of time.

• 1:31:55Gurwinder Bhogal?

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

• 1:32:38Gurwinder Bhogal?

  But that's because their sample was tiny. It was just one lifetime, one human lifetime, which is negligible, you know, it's just not, it's not even a fraction of a representative sample. And then you look at, say, Generation X, and for them, uh, the the curve, the the graph goes up. So the stocks shot up, uh, and there was a big boom in the nineteen eighties, you know. Uh, and so the economy behaved completely differently. And so for them, that was what the economy does. It's just the natural state of things. They assumed that's what nature was. And we saw a lot of like. A resurgence of the ideas of Ayn Rand, Reaganism, Thatcherism in the 1980s because

• 1:33:19Gurwinder Bhogal?

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

• 1:34:04Gurwinder Bhogal?

  I mean, when you think of how long civilization could exist, civilization is, well, humans have been around for about 300,000 years. They're projected to be around for a few million, maybe even a few billion years. So that's a very, very long timescale. So we're really, we're just at the beginning. We don't know what the stock exchange is going to do a billion years from now, you know, it'll be completely alien. So everything we understand comes from our perspective. And I think the only way out of this is to try to learn from people whose lives are as unlike yours as possible. And that includes going not just beyond your space, you know, also beyond your time.

• 1:34:48Gurwinder Bhogal?

  There's actually a great quote by C.S. Lewis, which touches on this, I'll read it out. So it's a quote from C.S. Lewis. So it goes, "A man who has lived in many places is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his village. The scholar has lived in many times and is therefore immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press of his own age." So what he's advocating there is to spend your time in other times, to basically live in other time periods through literature, through reading people who are alive a thousand years ago, because that can help you understand the peculiarities and the idiosyncrasies of your own time. You know, it gives you a broader view.

• 1:35:31Gurwinder Bhogal?

  If you only read content, if you only consume content from your own time period and from your own country or from your own civilization. You're gonna be sort of, you're gonna have this blind spot because you're gonna, you're gonna only be using this base rate. So again, it's like the false consensus effect. The only way to get, escape from that is to consume content from outside of your time period and from outside of your civilization. And this is one reason why I, I watch a lot of news, a lot of Chinese news stations, I watch Russian news stations, I watch Indian news stations. Instead of the same old, you know, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, instead of all that, which I'm, I'm, I know what they're gonna report, I know what they're gonna say, I know what their takes are

• 1:36:13Gurwinder Bhogal?

  gonna be already, so I don't need to watch it. So if I watch Indian news, I'm not really familiar with Indian news very much, I get a completely new perspective because this is from another civilization.

• 1:36:22Chris Williamson?

  What are the assumptions that they have that are baked in? How do they frame these sorts of? Yeah, that's so interesting. All right, man, one more. Common knowledge effect. Groups are meant to be better decision makers than individuals because they combine many perspectives. But in practice, a group doesn't base its decisions on the info specific to each member, but only on the info common to them all. This casts doubt on the idea that two heads are better than one, and it helps explain why, despite popular wisdom, diversity generally does not make teams better.

• 1:36:57Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, so, you know, we, we live in a society that worships diversity, diversity, equity, inclusion, you know, like it's everywhere. And it's kind of like weird because there's this sort of assumption that more diverse teams are better.

• 1:37:15Gurwinder Bhogal?

  And when you actually look at the data, this doesn't really seem to be the case. In fact, I mean, it's close to null, the effect is close to null. Like, it doesn't help teams and it doesn't hinder teams. It's just a completely, it's pretty much a completely independent variable.

• 1:37:29Chris Williamson?

  Have you got any idea how they judged that sort of a thing?

• 1:37:33Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, so there was experiments where they actually had, they had diverse teams and they tested them against teams that were homogeneous. And they found that there was no great improvement in the teams that were diverse. I mean, I think it was a marginal improvement. They, they basically described it as significant but not substantial. So that means that it wasn't null, but it wasn't actually, the effect size wasn't really anything to write home about. And if you look at like other studies, you'll find some studies which have shown that there is a small, like a moderate improvement in diverse teams over non-diverse teams. But then you'll also find other studies which show that there is actually a

• 1:38:13Gurwinder Bhogal?

  that being diverse actually hinders a team. So this meta-analysis found that overall, there's not really any real relation. And

• 1:38:23Gurwinder Bhogal?

  it's interesting because we're constantly taught that sort of diverse teams make better teams, that you have, you can draw on the experience of people who have not, again, this is interesting because this goes back to what we were just talking about. So these people have different backgrounds. And so if you have different backgrounds, then you're not as likely to be, in theory at least, you're not as likely to be sort of blinded by your blind spots because you have other people to see these. But that's not what happens in real life. When you have a team, teams have a very specific dynamic. They don't actually, they don't operate in ways that we think teams would operate.

• 1:39:03Gurwinder Bhogal?

  The theoretical way that we would think that a team would operate would be, we would think that everybody would use their expertise and they would, they'd pool it together to create this sort of super expertise that, you know, is greater than the sum of its parts. But that's not what happens. Instead, when you get people in a room together, they don't make decisions based on their own specialist knowledge, most of the time. What they normally do is they make decisions based on consensus. And consensus is obviously what all of them have in common. So it's actually the opposite of what the theoretical model of teamwork is. And so this is a bit of a problem because it means that if you have diverse teams,

• 1:39:45Gurwinder Bhogal?

  then the, the, the sort of advantages of diversity are lost in, in the team because if somebody has a diverse experience, if somebody has a very different experience to everybody else. It's not gonna be integrated into the decision making process because the others don't recognise it. They don't agree with it because it's alien to them. And so it ends up being the case that people end up making consensuses only on the things that they share in common. And so really, diversity doesn't matter. It doesn't actually make much of a difference. It doesn't hinder the team in particular, but it doesn't help the team either. And so it's interesting because it's a kind of, it's a spanner in

• 1:40:28Gurwinder Bhogal?

  the works of the whole diversity makes teams better sort of narrative, which is everywhere, literally everywhere.

• 1:40:35Chris Williamson?

  I think it's the sort of thing that off the top of your head, it sounds like it would work. Well, you know, there's different perspectives and people are looking at problems from alternate points of view. And someone is coming in with a different kind of experience and this different experience may give us a novel insight or solution to whatever the challenges that we're facing. So, you know, it's kind of surprising that it doesn't work in that way.

• 1:41:03Gurwinder Bhogal?

  I mean, it can work in some contexts. So, you know, diversity can be good in some contexts. So I think it's good to have a diverse friend group, for instance, because then when you have one on one conversations with each of these friends, you learn new things that you didn't, that are completely different from your own experiences. And it allows you to grow in directions that you ordinarily wouldn't be able to grow because you have access to information that's outside of your experience. So in that sense, you know, diversity can be good. And maybe in some working context, it can be good. Obviously, you know, if you are working in translation, for instance, diversity is going to be excellent because then, you know, you have more languages to draw on and all that kind of stuff. And, you know, so there are some instances in which diversity can work. But as a general

• 1:41:47Gurwinder Bhogal?

  rule, diversity in itself is not going to help a team when those teams are making decisions based on consensus. And that's what most teams do.

• 1:41:55Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I'm gonna guess as well that the

• 1:41:59Chris Williamson?

  Idea of diversity from first principles gets kind of whitewashed when you then think about all of the social dynamics that happen when people get put into a group and their desire to sort of conform, their uncertainty about standing out, this desire to have a reliable ally, the sort of slow adoption, the regression to the mean of whatever everybody kind of feels, which sort of nerfs off the edges of all of the interesting things too. You'll have social hierarchies and strata within that as well, which triage who's the most important. And yeah, it is very interesting. I'm seeing much more push now against diversity

• 1:42:40Chris Williamson?

  as our strength, especially from the UK. I think multiculturalism has been a pretty abject failure, especially if you go to somewhere like London. I think the people that live there have got massive problems with it. It's becoming more of a problem in the US, but it's mostly abstract for people. They just don't like the idea of things being diluted down, but it's being felt very front and center, I think, by British people. And you know, I'm starting to see this kind of conversation happen more, whether it's about small microcosms at work, whether it's about the entire sort of nationalities. Obviously, it's related to a big immigration push that's happening at the moment. But yeah, fascinating stuff, man. Dude, look, let's bring this one into land. I appreciate the hell out

• 1:43:23Chris Williamson?

  of you. Every single time we get to speak, I have so much fun. What are you working on next? And where should people go to keep up to date with the stuff you're doing?

• 1:43:30Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, so I'm working on my book. It's gonna take a bit of time for that to get done. So I don't want to talk too much about that right now. But I'm also publishing on Substack. I've got a new article coming out soon, which is gonna be quite a memorable one, I hope. So the best place to keep track of me is at my blog on Substack, which is gwyndy.blog. I'm also active on X or Twitter, whichever you prefer. And I think last time I was on here, I said I was gonna set up a YouTube channel, which I'm still planning to do. I don't know if I'll have it.

• 1:44:02Chris Williamson?

  Finish the book first. No one's waiting for the, what was that thing about, what was that idea? Don't focus on the stuff that you're not necessarily good at. Fucking Rothbard's Law. Don't Rothbard's Law yourself. You know, stick to writing words until you've got the book done. Dude, I appreciate you. Everyone should go and subscribe. You're one of the few Substacks that I pay for. And I can't wait to see what you do next. Look forward to bringing you on again soon.

• 1:44:25Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Always a pleasure, Chris. Thank you.

• 1:44:27Speaker 02

  Mr. President, my company informed me of the explosion on our rig. On October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me. Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us out. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 1:44:44Speaker 03

  What would happen if I stopped drilling? You stop, you freeze to death. That's what...

• 1:44:48Speaker 02

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 1:44:51Speaker 03

  I'm not the first then.

• 1:44:52Speaker 02

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a minute without parent.