16 Surprising Psychology Truths - 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 one of the best things I've read this year, so I just had to bring him on. Expect to learn how bad things can sometimes feel better than good things, why people die on the hill of opinions they've only just begun believing, why intelligence plus ideology is a nightmare, how comedy can be a troll's last line of defence, the biggest lesson I learned from Joe Rogan, why regret minimisation should be a priority, why authoritarians lose sight of rationality and much more... Sponsors: Get over 37% discount on all products site-wide from MyProtein at https://bit.ly/proteinwisdom (use code: MODERNWISDOM) Get 20% discount & free shipping on your Lawnmower 4.0 at https://www.manscaped.com/ (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get the Whoop 4.0 for free and get your first month for free at http://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Check out Gurwinder's Substack - https://gurwinder.substack.com/ Follow Gurwinder on Twitter - https://twitter.com/G_S_Bhogal Gurwinder's new MegaThread - https://twitter.com/G_S_Bhogal/status/1545510413982474253 Adam Mastroianni's post - https://experimentalhistory.substack.com/p/underrated-ideas-in-psychology Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #psychology #mentalmodels #humannature - 00:00 Intro 01:20 Bespoke Bullshit 06:35 Ideology Makes Wise People Stupid 10:46 The Fading Affect Bias 16:58 Naval’s Razor 21:42 Poe’s Law 26:48 Chris’s Biggest Insight from Rogan 33:54 The Nova Effect & Modern Complacency 53:16 Apatheia 1:04:23 Regret Minimisation 1:12:36 Howard Hughes Syndrome 1:22:33 Deferred Happiness Syndrome 1:27:37 Does Beauty Cause Prejudices? 1:35:43 Alder’s Razor 1:45:56 Where to Find Gurwinder - Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ Listen to all episodes on audio: Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

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

• 0:00Gurwinder Bhogal?

  A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance if the need for illusion is high. And so if you really need to believe something, no matter how absurd it is, if you have the intelligence, you can make yourself believe it through your own arguments. And that's the danger of intelligent people is that they can convince themselves of stupid arguments.

• 0:18Chris Williamson?

  Gwinda Bogle, welcome to the show.

• 0:20Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Thanks, Chris. Nice to be here.

• 0:22Chris Williamson?

  Dude, you're crushing it at the moment. That audience capture article that you wrote on Substack has gone absolutely everywhere. When someone posts something that's one of my friends' work in a group chat, but I don't post it, there's this weird sense of like ownership or jealousy. I'm like, no, that's my friend. That's no, that's supposed to be me that's posting that. But dude, I'm so happy to see how everything's blowing up for you at the moment.

• 0:45Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Thanks, man. Yes, appreciated. I think a lot of it's probably due to you as well, like spreading word about me, you know, so thanks for that.

• 0:51Chris Williamson?

  That's part of the Bogle cult. But so for people that aren't familiar with these episodes, you do these huge mega threads on Twitter, you talk about cognitive biases, human nature, psychological effects, group think, all this stuff. I fall in love with them. And then we go through them today. I've got some, I actually brought some from home. I've got some that I've made already. So I'll bring some of mine into it as well. We're just going to go through them and we'll break some down. So the first one, and this is my favorite one from your most recent mega thread, which will be linked in the show notes below. Gwinda's theory of bespoke bullshit. Many don't have an opinion until they're asked for it, at which point they cobble together a viewpoint from whim and half remembered hearsay before deciding that this two minute old makeshift opinion will be their hill to die on.

• 1:37Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah. So I think the last time I was on this show, we talked about how social media has made opinions more important than deeds. And people are judged by their opinions. And I think one of the sort of side effects of that is that now everybody feels the need to have an opinion on everything. But obviously, the problem with this is that, you know, people can't really um do the research to actually back up all the opinions that they have. And so what do they do? They just make shit up, you know? And I've seen this on social media since I joined Twitter in 2014. I've seen this happen with regular occurrence, with regular consistency. And it's kind of, I think it's something that really is just, it comes naturally to people

• 2:22Gurwinder Bhogal?

  to feel the need to opine on subjects, because it makes them feel connected and it makes them feel like they're part of the conversation. And it also, obviously, because of the opinion economy, it's something that people feel the need to do in order to bolster their own status. And so people just end up just talking. And, you know, it it's it's remarkable how often this happens. It happens with pretty much everything. I mean, if you look at, for instance, let's take a subject like fracking, for instance. Most people have probably read like one or two articles on fracking, right? Maybe from the BBC or from New York Times, right? And suddenly, everybody becomes an expert on fracking. You know, it's just after reading one article on fracking, everybody has a strong opinion on this, you know, oh,

• 3:07Gurwinder Bhogal?

  yes, great, you know, for the energy efficiency or it's really bad for the environment. And none of these people really know what they're talking about, you know? And I think this is one of the dangerous things about this is that the need to have an opinion sort of compels people to take a stance on things that they don't know anything about. And what that does is it just pollutes the sort of conversation, it pollutes the national conversation or the global conversation, excuse me, it pollutes the global conversation with garbage, basically, you know, people just ill-thought-out opinions, things that people don't really understand, they're just sort of talking. And I think it's one of the

• 3:50Chris Williamson?

  What I find, what I find interesting here is the fact that it's their new hill to die on. So not only is the opinion brand new, but for some reason, people feel existentially connected to it, that letting go of the opinion would be tantamount to their own destruction.

• 4:06Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, I mean, so one of the things with this is that Once people utter an opinion in public, even if it's a really, really poorly thought out opinion, they feel the need to defend that opinion because if they don't, then they're going to look inconsistent. You know, if they, if they go back on that opinion, if they change their mind, they have this perception that they're gonna be, they're gonna sort of be perceived as weak or stupid. And so their egos compel them to defend even the worst opinions. You know, because the fact is they want to remain consistent and.

• 4:40Chris Williamson?

  Do you think that part of this is to do with the fact that typically our opinions wouldn't have been set in stone and referenceable for almost all of human history, whereas our entire lives now are there to be linked and screenshotted until the day we die?

• 4:57Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think what people would have done in the past, because human ego is as old as humans. So people always want to be right. They've always wanted to be right throughout history. But I think the way that people did this before the internet was that they quietly changed their opinions and hoped that nobody would notice, you know. But now people can't do that because there's a public record of everything, you know. So people are compelled by the record, by the public ledger, to just defend the worst opinions that they've ever had, you know.

• 5:28Chris Williamson?

  The blockchain of opinion errors. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 5:31Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah. And this is, I think, a very dangerous thing because it means that people are stifled. They're not allowed to grow. They're not allowed to develop. They're not allowed to change. People sort of remain static in their, in their lives because of this, you know, they think, oh my God, you know, if I change my opinion, you know, everybody's gonna know, they're gonna see this, this post from like 2014 and they're gonna see this post from 2020. And that's, that fear, I think, is responsible for a lot of people being very pigheaded and stubborn, I think, in their. In their beliefs, they double down on their worst beliefs.

• 6:03Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, this links in with so many of the previous ones that we've spoken about. One of my favorites from all of our conversations was an absurd ideological belief is a show of fealty and a threat display. So this kind of explains why people might choose a group ideology or group think over rationality and reason itself. Then the fact that our opinions are significantly more visible than our deeds adds another layer on top of that because we are our opinions rather than our actions now. And then, you know, you continue to roll this a little bit further forward. Dude, I love that. Right, next one, next one. When intelligent people affiliate themselves to ideology, their intellect ceases to guard against wishful thinking and instead begins to fortify it, causing them to inadvertently

• 6:45Chris Williamson?

  mastermind their own delusion and to very cleverly become stupid.

• 6:50Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, so this is actually a very robust finding in psychology. This is one that's been sort of replicated many, many times. So it's a very reliable finding. And there's so much evidence for it. I mean, you know, there was one experiment, I've forgotten the name of the researcher, but what they did was they basically, they got people to sort of post their opinions. And then what they did is they rearranged the opinions, they sort of reworded the opinions so that they were disguised as other people's opinions. And then they asked these people like, what do you think of this opinion? And they would suddenly be like, oh, you know, this is wrong.

• 7:26Gurwinder Bhogal?

  I don't believe this at all. You know, this is whoever wrote this is stupid, you know? Even though it was their own opinion. And so, you know, when people were asked, why, why do you object with this? They had a whole list of like reasons. They'd be like, oh, well, this part is wrong, that part's wrong. So they were actually critically analyzing their own opinions. And they were dissecting them, they were finding what's wrong with their own opinions, but they were doing this unwittingly, which showed that they actually possessed mental faculties, but that these mental faculties were being misdirected in a way to sort of essentially destroy their own opinions. And this, I mean, this is something that you see every day on Twitter as well. You see people using logic and, you know, things like syllogisms and.

• 8:09Chris Williamson?

  What's a syllogism?

• 8:11Gurwinder Bhogal?

  So syllogism is like a logical argument where you say like, if A, if A then B, if B then C, therefore A then C.

• 8:22Gurwinder Bhogal?

  So it's like just a way of making a simple argument and you know, people will use logic and things like that. They'll they'll use sometimes very sophisticated arguments and they'll often you they'll mention cognitive biases. This is the irony of it. They'll mention cognitive biases, but they'll always apply these cognitive biases to other people, never to themselves. You know, and I'm guilty of this as well. I mean, I'm sure, you know, I've made many, many errors as a result of my own cognitive biases. But I'm much, it's much easier for me to see them in other people than it is for me to see it in myself. And so all of our knowledge of mental models, cognitive biases, all of these things, you know, we can be the most knowledgeable people in the world. We can have all of this knowledge of all the biases that other people, uh, that, well, that human beings, um, you know, suffer from. And we would only really see these in other people because of that blindness.

• 9:07Gurwinder Bhogal?

  And that blindness is why intelligent people, when they affiliate themselves to ideology, they become more dangerous than stupid people who are affiliated to ideology. Because the intelligent people can come out with rationalizations and they can come out with very clever arguments that support stupid positions. You know, and so, I mean, like Thomas Sowell, he had this great line, which he said that, you know, he spoke of this idea, said it was an idea so absurd, only an academic could believe it. You know, and that really sums it up because you can spend your whole life, you know, sort of just coming out with the best arguments. But if you are, if your mind is blinded by ideology or by tribalism, then you will put your great intellect

• 9:51Gurwinder Bhogal?

  to the service of stupid ends, idiotic ends, basically.

• 9:56Chris Williamson?

  It's a very, a very fast, powerful car being driven in the wrong direction.

• 10:01Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah.

• 10:01Chris Williamson?

  Oddly, a slower car would do less destruction.

• 10:04Gurwinder Bhogal?

  That's it. It's like this, this other saying, I think it was, um, Saul Bellow, uh, who said that, uh, uh, a great deal of ignorance can be invested in, no, sorry, a great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance if the need for illusion is high. And so if you, if you really need to believe something, no matter how absurd it is, if you have the intelligence, you can make yourself believe it through your own arguments. You know, you can convince yourself and that's the danger of of intelligent people is that they can convince themselves of stupid arguments.

• 10:40Chris Williamson?

  Dude, I love it. Alright, next one. This is one of, this is one of mine. So I found a guy, Adam Mastrostroni, butchering his surname, but he's got a Substack as well that people should go and check out. So this is the fading affect bias. The goodness and badness of memories fade over time, but the badness fades faster. Some bad memories even become good memories, while good memories rarely become bad memories. It makes sense that both joy and pain fade with time. Stuff just feels less intense when it's farther away, but why does pain fade faster? It's because when bad stuff happens to us, our psychological immune systems turn on. We start to rationalize why we don't want to be in a relationship with someone who doesn't want to be with me. We downplay. Breakups happen all the time in high school. It's no big deal. We distance. I never liked her that

• 11:23Chris Williamson?

  much anyway. And we distract. I'm going to go and play video games. These emotional processes function like emotional antibodies, taking the sting out of bad memories. We don't use them on good memories, so good memories keep their luster longer. Everything is temporary, bad stuff especially. Tragedy plus time equals comedy is the closest thing psychology has to a chemical equation.

• 11:45Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Beautiful. Yeah. I mean, yeah, I couldn't agree more. I mean, yeah, because I've heard about this, this bias. And I have a theory about it, actually, which is that I think we've covered negativity bias, didn't we? We did it in the first episode that we did. And so just for your audience, just to refresh it. So negativity bias is the tendency for people to focus on and remember bad news over good news. And the reason for this is because bad news constituted an existential threat, whereas good news didn't. So you had to pay more attention in order to survive to bad news. So one of the side effects of the negativity bias is that it fills your head up with a lot of bad memories, a lot of really, really horrific and sort of traumatic events.

• 12:32Gurwinder Bhogal?

  And you need a kind of safety valve against this. You need some way of being able to continue to live your life without, you know, wanting to commit suicide from all these negative emotions as a result of the negativity bias. And so I think that this fading affect bias acts as a kind of safety valve in that it allows us to release all of that sort of pent up negative energy as a result of all of these negative memories that we have. So that we can retain a sense of hope and retain a sense of motivation. And, you know, feeling that we can actually do things in life. So I think it's like a psychological defense mechanism, I think. Which is pretty much what Adam seems to have said, yeah.

• 13:07Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, for sure. I also think that makes a lot of sense. Imagine if you didn't have the fading affect bias and you just accumulated this ever increasing intensity of negative experiences throughout your life. Every caveman would have been a nihilist, right?

• 13:21Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah.

• 13:21Chris Williamson?

  No one would have ever got anything done because they would have been bowed under the weight of their brother that died 55 years ago or something.

• 13:28Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Exactly.

• 13:29Chris Williamson?

  It's a nice thing to remember here, though, that not only can bad things fade and become less bad, but sometimes can actually become a perverse source of joy. That tragedy plus time equals comedy is true. I look back on some of the things that I thought were kind of close to destruction back in the day. And it's now almost got a humorous quality to it because you've come out the other side. And the same doesn't happen, which really should give us reason to discount how bad bad things feel. As you're going through something, not only do you know that this isn't going to last forever, not only will you know that the memories are going to fade over time and won't feel as intense, but maybe even in five years' time, genuinely be a source of something that's, I don't know,

• 14:14Chris Williamson?

  valuable or at least funny to you.

• 14:15Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, I think, like I did, I posted a tweet about how regret is a sign of progress. And I think that. That that that basically applies to this because if you if you have a bad event in your life, if you have a bad sort of incident and you learn from it, then the then the sort of there's no more need to feel any pain because you've learned from it. You're a different person. You've grown since that that occurred. You know, there's been so many times in my life where I've just done something, you know, just god awfully embarrassing and I've just like it's made me cringe, you know, and burn up just thinking about it. But then after time, you change your behaviors and you realize that that wasn't that's no longer you. The person that did that is no longer you. You're a different person now.

• 14:56Chris Williamson?

  Oh.

• 14:57Gurwinder Bhogal?

  And it allows you to grow. And once you've grown, you no longer need to feel that negative sort of feeling in a sense. So, you know, it kind of just gets ejected as a sort of unnecessary waste product.

• 15:10Chris Williamson?

  That's a very interesting way to think about regrets. The the fact that you still regret doing something may be a little bit of an indicator that you haven't transcended it or fixed the thing that it's based on anymore. I had, um, fuck, who wrote the book? Daniel Pink, The Power of Regret. He wrote that book at the start of this year. I spoke to him while I was in New York. And he used the same thing. He basically said that regret is the opportunity to remind yourself that you're genuinely invested in something. It gives you a direction that you're supposed to look at when you move forward. But he never mentioned that it's kind of a canary in the coal mine to remind you whether or not this is still something that you probably need to work on. Because if you get yourself to the stage where you've completely ameliorated whatever the regret situation was, and you've

• 15:53Chris Williamson?

  just brought it, imbibed it into your life, the regret would by design would start to fall away. Maybe there would sort of be some something that linger, but it wouldn't be visceral and emotional in the same way, I don't think. So, yeah, that's, that's an interesting one.

• 16:08Gurwinder Bhogal?

  I think pain only really exists as a sort of warning system to prevent you from, you know, doing stupid things. Like, you know, for instance, burning yourself, you know, that's obviously the body's trying to tell you, don't put your hand in fire, you know. And it's the same with psychological pain as well. If you if you suffer as a result of something, it's your body's your way of telling you not to do that. Don't do that because this is going to be the effect. And I think that the kind of fading effect biases your body's way of telling you that this pain is nothing personal. You know, it's just, it's just there as a lesson sort of thing, you know, don't take it personally. And that's why we can kind of try and see through it after a while and just be like, okay, it just needed to teach us a lesson. It was our boss in a way just telling us, look, that's not the right way to do it. This is the way to do it. Now let's go out for a drink and have a pint, you know. So it's like.

• 16:51Gurwinder Bhogal?

  It's it's it's it's just a kind of way of just teaching us without, you know, any any sort of hard feelings, as it were.

• 16:58Chris Williamson?

  Naval's razor, if you can't decide between two choices, take the path that's more difficult or painful in the short term. Doing this will counteract the hyperbolic discounting, the brain's tendency to overestimate short term pain and underestimate long term pain.

• 17:14Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, so we we perceive objects in time similarly to how we perceive them through space. So the further something away is in space, the smaller it appears. And the same is also true of time as well. The further something into the future something is, the less it really registers in our in our lives. And it's the same thing with this further into the past.

• 17:38Gurwinder Bhogal?

  This, you know, obviously is a necessary thing. We have to focus on the present moment because if we're too focused on what's happening 10 years in the future, we're not going to be able to live our lives. But it comes with side effects in that we tend to underestimate problems in the future or even rewards in the future. And we tend to overestimate problems and rewards in the present. And this is why, you know, we tend to have this kind of short termist view of things where it makes this is why we procrastinate essentially because we just pass the book to, you know, we're like, oh, my future self will deal with it, you know, because your future self seems like he can solve every problem in the world because he seems like a superhero, do you know what I mean? Because you don't need to think too far ahead. You don't need to think about your future self very much. You just be like, ah, yeah, he'll sort it out.

• 18:21Gurwinder Bhogal?

  I'm just going to focus on just eating some ice cream and watching TV or whatever, you know.

• 18:26Gurwinder Bhogal?

  But yeah, this is, I think this is one of the things that really screws people over is this sort of belief that what's happening now is more important always than what's happening in the future. And it, you know, yeah, to a certain extent it is. You've got to obviously be aware of what's going on in the present, but you've got to always remember that your brain is.

• 18:46Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Configured to make you believe this. And so you have to take the sort of opposite view. I mean, all biases now that we have now, they're all resort to heuristics, like they're all mental shortcuts that we once had in a different environment. And now they've become biases because we're in a completely different environment. But we can use heuristics, we can use a new set of heuristics to overcome the present biases that we have. And one of these is Naval's razor. Naval Ravikant, he's a great thinker. I'm sure you know who he is. And probably most of the audience know, but yeah, he's an investor and he's a philosopher as well. And this is just, I think, a great sort of a mental model to use when you want to consider whether you should pursue a certain action.

• 19:27Gurwinder Bhogal?

  You'll always underestimate the things that are going to be happening further out in the future than you will the things that are happening closer to the present. So therefore, always take this into account when you're making decisions. You know, because your brain is very good at making you believe that the only thing that matters is the present.

• 19:45Chris Williamson?

  There's a thing that I brought science called anxiety cost, which is the longer that you take to complete an action, the more time that is taken up thinking about having not completed the action.

• 19:56Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah.

• 19:56Chris Williamson?

  So you you wake up every morning, you've got to meditate, you've got to go to the gym, you've got to do whatever. If you do it in the morning, then you've got the rest of the day to enjoy it. If you wait until the evening time, then you've spent all of that time, every single second that your mind was taken up thinking about the fact that you haven't meditated or gone to the gym yet. Could have got been gotten rid of, had you have done it in the morning. That's the anxiety cost and you can ameliorate that in a similar way by getting things done. And I think if you can't decide between two equal choices, take the path that's more difficult or painful in the short term. Is basically you trying to start to front load against that hyperbolic discounting, right? It's it's reverse procrastination. Okay, if I try and find something that seems overly difficult

• 20:35Chris Williamson?

  short term, that probably will maybe end up being about equal to what it should be rationally over the long term.

• 20:43Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, I think. It's it's hard to really, because you can't quantify value it in in very sort of accurate ways when it comes to whether I should do a certain action or another one. You can't put numbers on it. But as a sort of just general rule of thumb, it's always worth considering that you're always going to overestimate the short term over the long term, you know, what you have to do in the short term over the long term, because the long term is something that you don't want to think about most of the time, you know. And so, yeah, absolutely. It's a it's an important. It's an important way to sort of defeat procrastination, I think, because at the end of the day, postponing a problem extends it, as you said, you know.

• 21:26Gurwinder Bhogal?

  So the best thing to do is just to get it done as quick as possible. And then you have more time to just do whatever you want to do.

• 21:34Chris Williamson?

  Dude, that's fucking lovely. Postponing a problem extends it. That is absolutely lovely. Right, next one. So Poe's Law, I got taught about by my housemate a couple of weeks ago. But I I'd seen it written online and people had said it, but I never actually bothered to look at the definition of it, which I guess is probably most people with most things. Poe's Law, it's now impossible to distinguish trolling from sincerity online, partly because shitposts have become so lifelike and partly because life has become so shitpost-like.

• 22:05Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, I mean, what else is there to say? I mean, yeah, I think everybody knows this, you know, when you when you go on social media, it's just impossible to tell whether somebody's serious, whether somebody's actually saying, whether somebody actually believes what they're saying. And I think, you know, this is largely, I think, this is a result of the sort of short format of of social media in that, you know, you never really get context in in on social media. You just kind of just get a short snippet of what somebody's saying, but you don't understand sort of what led to that thought process. You don't understand the motivations or the intent behind it. You can always gauge, if you look at a book, if you read a book. Within a few pages, you'll be able to understand what the author is trying to convince

• 22:48Gurwinder Bhogal?

  you of and, you know, you'll understand a bit more about the author's background and things like that, just without them telling you directly, just from what they they write. You can't really do that with social media. You can only see just an isolated, just a couple of sentences, or just a meme that somebody's posted, you know. And that, so basically, all the information you're getting on on social media, most of it at least, is anonymous. It's it's coming from people who you have absolutely no idea what their intentions are, what their motivations are. And this problem is compounded by the fact that we have now massive amounts of manipulators online. We've got troll farms, we've got marketers, we've got culture warriors, we've got all these different people who are all, you know,

• 23:30Gurwinder Bhogal?

  just trying to manipulate the information space. And so they're putting out stuff sometimes that they think is false, you know, that they'll create an account, you know, of like Maga Mike or something, and then they'll start posting, you know, like loads of pro-Trump stuff, you know. And there's loads of these sort of fake accounts that are kind of just flooding social media. And a lot of it's just really outrageous stuff, you know, like Trump is the the son of God, and he's gonna, you know, bring about the second coming and stuff. And you know that there are people on this earth who are crazy enough to believe shit like that. So you can't discount it as just just satire or parody, or just some attempt to, you know, to just screw with people's heads.

• 24:11Chris Williamson?

  But the place that these people have to retreat to, if they do say something which is beyond the pale, or outside the Overton window, or completely unacceptable, or whatever, is, it was just a joke, bro. That's the the defence mechanism that most people fall back on. This has always been the point of envy that I've had over comedian podcasters, because they can always say anything and use the, I'm just a comedian, as an excuse. It's the get out of jail free card. He said something that was, I mean, if anyone's listened to Andrew Schultz's intros recently, he does, I don't know whether he's done it on his most recent episodes, but certainly when he first started his new studio, he does

• 24:52Chris Williamson?

  kind of a bit, maybe a 30 second to a one minute bit, which is a little bit like the old Saturday Night Style. So tonight, we've got coming up into this thing, into this thing, except for the fact that it is the most ruthless, cutting jokes that you can think of about anyone that they may be gonna bring up, or stuff that's happened in the past, or whatever. And I keep on thinking. How the living fuck does this guy get away with saying that on the internet without being cancelled? Just outrageous stuff. But because it's delivered well and because it's evidently a joke, there are different rules. So if you can accept the fact that there are different rules for jokes than things that people say seriously, what you have with Poe's law is basically a way for people to push the variance and the boundaries

• 25:37Chris Williamson?

  of what they typically say while using the "it's maybe just a joke, bro" card as an ejector seat that they can pull if they need it.

• 25:45Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Absolutely, yeah. Yeah, I think this is spot on. I think a lot of people, I've seen this happen as well on social media where a lot of people will say this and they'll use it, they'll use it as a get out of jail card. Basically, if you point out that what they've said is stupid, they can always just say, "I'm only joking, bro", you know.

• 26:00Chris Williamson?

  And then they try and make you look like the idiot for having not got the joke.

• 26:04Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Exactly.

• 26:05Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you threw something out there that had it have landed as a genuine insight, you would have happily taken that road. And you threw something else, the same thing, and if it gets lambasted and you need to call it a joke, then so be it. It's kind of unfalsifiable in a way.

• 26:22Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, absolutely. It gives them plausible deniability at all times. So they can just say whatever they like and get away with it, you know, like, there'll be anything that is taken seriously and is like, you know, appreciated, they'll be like, "Yeah, that's what I really mean, but that's not, I didn't mean that, you know, I'm just joking". So, you know, it's like, so it's a very clever, very digital defence mechanism in a sense.

• 26:45Chris Williamson?

  So, I, on Rogan, the biggest insight that I learned when I went on his show, I've given a name to, so it's Rogan's Difficulty and Value Conflation. So this is from my Three Minute Monday Newsletter. So some people may be familiar with this already, but I really loved it. This is a quote from him, quote, "Look at the car he's driving, look at the watch he's wearing, look at the girl he's with." That's so unattainable to many people, so it seems like it's valuable, but then you attain it. And then you realise, oh, this is not valuable, this is just difficult to get. And there's a difference, there's a big difference.

• 27:19Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah.

• 27:20Chris Williamson?

  Some things aren't valuable, they're just difficult to get. In a world which has never been more convenient, our ability to avoid discomfort is very high. It means we can sail through life in a chasm of comfortable complacency. Most smart people also realise that there is value in stepping outside of discomfort, that on the other side of the discomfort is something valuable. We're told that worthwhile things are difficult to attain, because if they weren't difficult to attain, they wouldn't be worthwhile. This is how non-valuable but difficult things get slipped into our desires without us noticing. Attaining something worthwhile is often going to be difficult, but just because it's difficult doesn't mean it's worthwhile. We use the challenge as a proxy for virtue or value or alignment or integrity. There's some signalling going on here, too. Difficult things by design will be attained by a small number of people, which makes them desirable simply because

• 28:04Chris Williamson?

  it's an easy way to stand out from the crowd. We realise, too, that sometimes easiness can be a signal of value. In my opinion, valuable relationships shouldn't be hard. Your partner should be someone you would take to war, take into war, not someone you're at war with. Your friends should make your life better, not more difficult. Your parents should make you feel enough, not insufficient. Valuable work, on the other hand, is a beautiful blend of difficulty and ease. An Apple employee once asked Tim Cook about whether it should still feel like hard work when you do something you love. Tim replied, "You'll have to work harder than you ever have in your, before in your life, but the tools will feel light in your hands." Beware the difficult things masquerading as the valuable ones.

• 28:40Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Perfect, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I was a big fan, actually, of your, your Rogan podcast. I remember that line as well.

• 28:45Chris Williamson?

  Thank you.

• 28:47Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, and I think that this is actually, this explains a lot of the sort of incentive structures that we see in the world today. For example, I'll give you an example of this. I used to be quite addicted to video games. And one of the things I used to play was a game called Diablo III. It's basically you run around just killing zombies and demons and stuff like that. And And what they did is they basically had this concept called loot boxes. And this is something that you've probably heard about since then, because I think Diablo three was the first one that really did this. Um, there were loot boxes which you could ob- obtain, but they made these loot boxes extremely difficult to get. And the reason that they did it, I think, is to make them valuable.

• 29:31Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Um, for no other reason than just to make them valuable, because a lot of these, um, I remember like the actual things themselves weren't that great. Like, um, there were, there were legendary weapons, for instance, that you could get. And these weapons would be like a bit more, they'd have bonus effects. Like, for instance, they'd freeze enemies if you hit them with, with the sword, you know, like an ice sword or whatever. Um, and they would have these bonus effects, but they wouldn't actually be that powerful. They would just be extremely hard to get. So that when people did get them, they'd get a sense of achievement and it would create like a dopamine reward. In their, in their brain, they'd be like, oh my God, I got this sword, it's a rare sword. And even though it's just a piece of crap, you know, and you will eventually, you'll need another better weapon as the. Levels progress, you know, because this weapon isn't gonna, isn't gonna cut it, literally, you know.

• 30:15Gurwinder Bhogal?

  And so, um, you know, you're basically, uh, kind of, you're in this. Loop where you're constantly looking for the next legendary, legendary weapon. Legendary weapons drop like once every. Two hundred enemies or something. You have to kill about two hundred enemies. And then you, it drops a treasure box and then in that treasure box, you'll get this thing that glows and it's like a legendary weapon. So. They would make these really, really hard to get. And after a while, there were a lot of complaints. I think there was even talk of a class action lawsuit because. They were making people, um, buy these, um, weapons, you know, people, because it's, it takes so much time just to get one of these weapons that people would just fork out money instead. But the weapons wouldn't last very long, so you wouldn't get that effect very long. And they were milking it, they were making so much money. And this was the thing that kickstarted this whole.

• 30:59Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Uh, loot box thing. If you, if you know anything about video games, you'll know about loot boxes. It's a very manipulative practice that is used, um, in video games. And I think, I mean, I'm. I'm not really sure that they that you could apply it to something like social media. Um. But there is a certain difficulty in acquiring a large follower follower account and getting that kind of social approval. And I think one of the reasons why people value that so much is because of the amount of effort that you have to put into it. It's not really that special to have a a large number of followers because it's anybody can do it if you've got enough time. Um. You don't actually even have to be an interesting person. You can just just talk shit and you'll you'll you'll go. You know, everybody grows an audience over time.

• 31:38Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 31:39Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Um. You know, you just have to look at some of the people who have audiences to see that you don't need any special skill to to be. You just need to labor away and just post consistently. And so it creates this kind of this sort of sense that, yeah, if you've got a lot of followers, that you're a special person. But you're not really. All you've done is just posted consistently over a period of years.

• 32:00Chris Williamson?

  Well, this is it's kind of a little bit like Goodhart's Law, right? When a measure becomes an outcome, it ceases to be a good measure that people use follower count as a proxy for value or integrity or insight or whatever, right? Entertainment, whatever it is that people are following these people for. Did you ever find when you were playing Diablo three that you would use a suboptimal web weapon that signaled um difficulty ahead of a more effective weapon that would be more valuable?

• 32:28Gurwinder Bhogal?

  I can't say I did, but I think there probably were other people who did.

• 32:32Chris Williamson?

  You understand the dynamic though, right? The fact that you want to swing, you want to swing the cool sword that doesn't do much damage rather than the effective sword that doesn't look so good.

• 32:40Gurwinder Bhogal?

  I mean, I I didn't see it with Diablo three, but I do remember seeing it with um with Street Fighter. That was another game that I used to play. Street Fighter, I think it was Street Fighter three, right? Um. Because there's this character on Street Fighter called Dan. And he's got a pink, um, sort of got a pink, what they called the overalls they were, I forgot what they're called. Um. But he basically, he was like a Ryu, like a Ken kind of character, except he was pink instead of white or red. And he was deliberately really weak, like the the guys Capcom who made the game. They made him deliberately weak as a kind of handicap to, um, you know, to so that people who are really good at the game, they could basically beat somebody with Dan and just humiliate them, basically.

• 33:20Chris Williamson?

  Oh, okay. Yeah, that's very funny.

• 33:23Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so there were, there were people who would do this and some people would actually take Dan to these tournaments as well. Like there's these big tournaments in Street Fighter where you can earn like hundreds of thousands of dollars. And people, some people were so cocky, they would actually take Dan and they would play as Dan in these tournaments, these world tournaments with some of the best players. Most of them would get their asses kicked, but I mean, you would see like exhibition games against less skilled players where Dan would just completely wipe the floor with, you know, like Ryu or one of the other characters.

• 33:50Chris Williamson?

  That's funny, man.

• 33:51Gurwinder Bhogal?

  So that thing does happen, yeah. Um, yeah.

• 33:54Chris Williamson?

  All right, Nova Effect. You may think losing your job is bad, but what if staying at your job would have led to you dying in a fire? You can't truly know if an outcome is good or bad because fortune can lead to misfortune and vice versa. So don't be quick to judge the cards you're dealt.

• 34:11Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, so the thing with outcomes is that outcomes never end. Every outcome has another outcome, you know, so if, if, if something happens, then that's going to cause other things to happen and then that thing's going to cause other things to happen. And it's a chain that's just going to continue forever into the future. So when you actually zoom out of the present moment and you actually look at the entire span of your life, or even just, you know, it could just be a year, it doesn't even have to be that long. You can see that fortunes change very quickly. Uh, what seemed to be an advantage to you is now a disadvantage or what seemed to be a disadvantage is now an advantage. And there's an old Chinese proverb about this called good luck, bad luck.

• 34:52Gurwinder Bhogal?

  It's a long story and it's about, um, basically just about a story of how, um, you know, a guy gets, uh, he gets thrown off his horse and he breaks his leg and he thinks it's bad luck. But then what happens is that some, uh, soldiers come to his village and they, they ask him to, they ask for conscription in the army because they want to fight some war. And because he's got a broken leg, he doesn't have to go to the, into the war. So what was initially a bad accident has turned out to be fortuitous to him. And I think this is something that people don't appreciate enough because we tend to just look at a single outcome and just be like, oh, that's a bad thing. But we don't look at the effects of the effects and this is obviously links into second order thinking.

• 35:35Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Um. You know, the idea that we should consider the consequences of consequences and not just the consequences. And so I think people really need to take a zoom out and just take a wider look at things and try not to be too hasty in judging things as good or bad. It's this is something that I suffer from myself. I think it's instinctive in us all where we all are quick to judge something good or quick to judge something bad. But I think when we take a longer longer term view of things, we start to realise that, um, you know, that there's this kind of dynamic of oscillation of of things that will be good one moment and they'll become bad and they'll become good and they'll become bad. And I think that if you remember this, it can help you to

• 36:17Gurwinder Bhogal?

  not be not be crushed by bad events in your life and and likewise not be um not be sort of not let good things go to your head and make you cocky and.

• 36:28Chris Williamson?

  Yes, yeah, I think this links in nicely with the fading affect bias as well, right? Just the hyperbolic discounting thinking long term. So there's something here that I've been thinking about for ages about what happens in reverse, about the stories that we tell ourselves about when bad or good things happen to us. I always got irritated for ages and I couldn't work out why when people said, um, it was meant to be. So something bad occurs and then a situation ends up spiralling around and then they end up in a better place. And they go, you know, I lost my job, but that meant that I met my partner because while I was doing training or art class or whatever that I wouldn't have been able to go through. And I think the reason that I don't like that type of

• 37:11Chris Williamson?

  narrative is that it's incredibly disempowering to the agency of the individual over them to take a bad situation and turn it good. Why would you attribute the success that a situation has had from something suboptimal to something optimal to anything that isn't you? But why not take credit for it? People want to take credit for almost everything, but for some reason, in these situations, looking in retrospect to a bad situation, a lot of the time, people will claim that the outcome was some mystical, it was meant to be force. And it seems like it's related to what we're talking about here, the Nova Effect, but but in reverse.

• 37:51Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, absolutely. Um, I think this kind of segues um quite well into the concept of the region beta paradox.

• 38:00Chris Williamson?

  Yes, there it is. Let's go.

• 38:05Gurwinder Bhogal?

  So, you know, like, so circumstances can sometimes drive us to be better than we are, you know. So if we are in a sort of really, really bad situation, if we, um, I mean, you use this example when you, when you gave the example, you basically spoke of how if something is a certain distance from you, um, your, your walk, the distance, you know, but then if something's just a tiny bit further away, then you'll think, oh, okay, I might as well just drive the way there, you know. So that, that tiny change in the environment is causing a completely different outcome in your behavior. And this is how, I think, negative events in your life can actually turn you, uh, can actually be turned to your fortune. They can actually make you into a better person.

• 38:50Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 38:50Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Because if you're under discomfort, that can drive you to do, to be better and to do things that you want to do in life rather than if you're comfortable. And I think that this is something, another thing that people underestimate is that the discomforts that occur in our lives make us stronger overall. They make us go out there and do things. Um, they make us think about, they, they make us think outside the box. You know, if you are comfortable your whole life, if you have everything given to you, that's not actually a good outcome, even though you might think it is. It's not a good outcome because it's what's happening is that your, your brain and your body is going to be atrophying because you're not using it. You don't need to use it because you're comfortable. It's only when you're not comfortable that you begin to think and begin to actually do things.

• 39:34Gurwinder Bhogal?

  And this is when you think outside the box. So if a bad event occurs in your life, there are two ways of looking at it. You can either feel sorry for yourself and say, oh, you know, this is horrible, you know, um, what, what's the point, you know, what's the point doing it when fate's just gonna throw it in my back, back in my face? Or you can use it and say, okay, this is a problem, I need to solve it. And then you start solving it. And in solving it, you actually benefit from that bad event.

• 40:03Chris Williamson?

  Yes. That's like alchemy. That's like

• 40:05Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah.

• 40:06Chris Williamson?

  psychological alchemy.

• 40:08Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Absolutely. Yeah. You turn, you turn the lead that would weigh you down into gold, you know. So it's, um, yeah, this is, this is a form of Of this kind of oscillation that I was talking about, you know, you you take something bad and then you turn it into something good. And so you you get the the trough of experience and you turn it into the peak of experience, you become better through adversity. And so this is another reason not to believe that bad things that happen to you are are bad, because they they drive you to be better than you actually are. I think this is one of the the sort of defining philosophies of of Stoicism, which I recently released an article about. And you also, I think you had a a guest on talking about Stoicism quite recently as well.

• 40:48Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 40:48Gurwinder Bhogal?

  And this is why Stoicism, I think, is such a powerful philosophy and why it's so widespread in places like Silicon Valley and and Wall Street, is because it allows you to turn stress and misfortune and things like that, things that would ordinarily be considered negative, and to turn them into empowering actions, you know, to to actually make the most of them and and to actually become better as a result of them. So you turn misfortune into force into fortune, which I think is a one of the most powerful things you can do.

• 41:19Chris Williamson?

  I

• 41:19Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Because they're invincible.

• 41:21Chris Williamson?

  I never realized that Amor Fati wasn't Stoic, it's Nietzsche, right?

• 41:27Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Well, the idea originates with the Stoics. Nietzsche sort of appropriated it from the Stoics a little bit, even though he he despised Stoics, because he he misunderstood what they meant by living according to nature. But he he did still read a lot of Stoicism and he he took this idea and he made it his. I mean, the the idea is more famously associated with Nietzsche, but it actually originates with, I think it originates with Seneca. As far as we know, anyway, it probably precedes Seneca to someone like Cleander or Chrysippus, but we don't know about that thought very much, because not much of that work survives. So the first, I think, known incident of of this is, I think, in the work of Seneca, in which he talks about how

• 42:10Gurwinder Bhogal?

  You know, people think that amorphati means that you should just be resigned to fate, that you should just allow whatever happens to happen and just be passive. And this is couldn't be further from the truth. It's not about being passive. It's about understanding the difference between what you can control and what you can't control. And focusing your energies on what you can control and just accepting the things you can't control. Because if you don't accept the things you can't control, you can't focus on the things that you can control. So you're not living optimally.

• 42:37Chris Williamson?

  Because you're constantly going to be fighting against that which can't be changed.

• 42:41Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Exactly. It's like trying to swim against the tide, you know, you just you're wasting your energy. You're you're just and you're going nowhere. So what you're going to do is you've got to surf that tide. You know, ride it, no matter how where it takes you, ride that tide because you can't do anything about it. But what you can do is you can control how you surf. You know, you can control your balance, you can control your positioning of your feet on the board.

• 43:06Chris Williamson?

  The story that you tell yourself about the waves that you're on top of.

• 43:09Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, that that's one thing that you can definitely do something about. But most of all is is your actions. Your actions are what you have complete control over. And your actions are the things that ultimately determine your fate. Because it's not like, as Epic Ted has said, it's not what happens to you, it's how you react to it that matters. Because, you know, we're all going to die one day when we're all, you know, we're all aging, we're all rotting, slowly decaying. We can't do anything about that. So there's no point in getting upset about it. What we can do about is if we can, we could be healthy, we can live healthy lives. We can make the most of the time that we're on this planet. And so drawing a distinction between the things we can't control and things we can is very important.

• 43:51Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Because it allows you to direct your energies towards the areas where you can actually make an impact. And that's what amorphati is. It's about it's about essentially accepting the things you can't change because.

• 44:04Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Not accepting them is not going to matter. It's not going to change anything.

• 44:07Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 44:07Gurwinder Bhogal?

  It's not gonna, you know, it's, it's just, it's like being upset that you're going to die. It's just, it's not going to change anything. It's not going to change the fact that you're going to die. You're still going to die. So you have to focus on what you can do something about. And I think that's, yeah, that's the essence of stose.

• 44:21Chris Williamson?

  What I really liked about the region beta paradox, which is another Adam Mastroianni. I'm going to link his stuff in the show notes because I butchered his name so much. Yeah, well, the example was if you have a rule that you walk whenever you're traveling a mile or less, or you drive when you're traveling more than a mile, then paradoxically you get two miles faster than you get one mile. The important insight here is that if you only take action when things cross a certain threshold of badness, sometimes better things can feel worse than worse things. And this is, I had, I think it's episode 13 or something with a friend of mine, a guy called Michael Kazu. And he was a drug addict from the age of 11 or 12, heroin by 13 or 14.

• 45:02Chris Williamson?

  And then by the age of 22, 23, he was two times CrossFit Games affiliate cup champion in the team. And then started a multimillion pound business and then married a woman who started another multimillion pound business with him. And he now lives here in Austin. They've got this beautiful kid and another one on the way and blah, blah, blah. And even at the time, I remember using this example about the fact, anyone that's ever tried to squat something very heavy, but you've only done a three quarter squat. It's actually easier to bounce out of the bottom because you get a little bit of elasticity from the bottom of your squat than it is to take it just above that and then have to drive it up yourself. And it's kind of the same here. If you don't act until you cross a particular threshold of badness, you get stuck in region beta.

• 45:45Chris Williamson?

  And region beta is comfortable complacency, right? It's the job which is pretty crap, but maybe has good benefits and you don't have to do much. Or it's the relationship which isn't bad and traumatic, but it isn't that good either. Or it's the flat, which, you know, is pretty terrible to live in and has a bit of mold, but not that much mold. And maybe it's cheap and in an all right location or something. If any of these situations got a little worse, you would have the activation energy to get yourself out of them and to move on to something else. And this is, I think, I mean, Taleb's got that barbell strategy thing, right? Where the gray zone is where you go to die. You want to be in black and white. And it kind of gets reflected here as well that. If something's unbelievably good, then fantastic, keep it going. If something's unbelievably bad, then you'll be motivated to change it. If something's just about comfortably numb enough

• 46:29Chris Williamson?

  in the middle, that is precisely where you can spend decades in complacency.

• 46:37Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, so someone said, I've forgotten who they were, but they said that life begins at the end of your comfort zone. And I think that's so true. I think when you test yourself, when you put yourself in situations where you're not comfortable, that's when you actually begin to really feel alive. And that's when you tend to actually begin to make the most of who you are. Your brain works faster because you're thinking about unfamiliar surroundings, you're thinking about an unfamiliar environment. It's when, for instance, when you go to sleep in a new place, your brain, half of your brain actually stays awake.

• 47:14Chris Williamson?

  Yes, you have more micro awakenings because it's uncertain about whether it's safe or not. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 47:20Gurwinder Bhogal?

  And your brain's more active when you're in a completely new environment than when you're in the same environment over and over again. And so really, what your brain really needs to develop is it needs to be uncomfortable. It needs to be in a situation that you can't predict, one where you're unfamiliar with what the rules of the game are. So I think that this really applies a lot to life is that if you, I think one of the dangers of the world that we're living in at the moment is that everything is just so easy in terms of compared to how it used to be.

• 47:52Chris Williamson?

  Well, think about it this way, we're going out of our way to artificially inject difficulty into our lives. You know, I've got a cold plunge tub outside. I have to go and buy a purpose-built piece of equipment to set outside in my yard to get into it for three minutes, whatever time of day, and then get out and do breath work and all this stuff, because I'm going from air-conditioned room to air-conditioned room to shade-covered veranda, you know?

• 48:22Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, I mean, yeah, like Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber. I mean, his work, the industrial society and its future is a pretty crazy sort of expose in a way of the sort of world that we're living in now. Even though it was written in the nineteen eighties and he basically talked to this thing called surrogate activities, which is basically the idea that our lives have become so comfortable that we have to artificially create struggles. And you know, the examples I think he he gives are things like sports and you could apply also to video games, culture wars, online, even like just po- politics itself. A lot of that is just sort of theatre.

• 49:04Gurwinder Bhogal?

  You know, we create these kind of artificial struggles just so that we feel alive because that's because the brain is a problem solving machine. And when it finds itself without problems, it invents the problem to solve itself so that it has, so it can solve the problem of having no problems to solve, you know. Um, it it's basically, you know, that this is the brain, the brain is a problem solving machine. That's why it exists. It exists to solve problems. And that's the evolutionary function of the brain. And so when we find ourselves in an environment in which we have very few problems, where, you know, we can instantly eat food just by picking up the phone and just calling someone and they'll deliver it to our doorstep.

• 49:45Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Or, you know, uh, if we are cold, we can just take a hot shower or, you know, there's this, this, this. Life is just so much easier now than it was in the past and problems, most of the problems in our lives have very easy solutions. You know, if we have a headache, we can just take an aspirin, you know, if we, if we are feeling like something strange in our belly, we can just Google the problem online. There's it's just, things are getting easier and easier. And so the brain is finding itself, uh, is finding it necessary to create more and more of these surrogate activities. And I think this is one reason why the culture wars have have just been taken over online on places like Twitter. Because people feel the need to have this struggle. They feel the need to to rage against something.

• 50:29Chris Williamson?

  Even if it's a um self-created enemy, shadow boxing and imaginary hegemon.

• 50:36Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think sports, I think this is what sports is in a sense, is that this kind of sense of competition and not just the competitors themselves, but the teams and the people who support the team.

• 50:46Chris Williamson?

  Pretend war.

• 50:48Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, it's pretend war. I mean, that's essentially what, especially in the UK, like football hooliganism. You know, you you see, I mean, I used to live in Luton and I lived right next door to the the stadium. Every Saturday night, it was absolutely crazy. You know, you had the Miggs, who were these hooligans, basically, they'd just get pissed up at the um local tavern and then they'd just basically just start parading through the streets and just, you know, just screaming at everyone and just egging themselves on and just trying to get themselves ready for, it was like the war paint on as well, you know, and they're just basically, it was like they're going to war, basically, that's what it was like every Saturday. And I just, I remember looking at them and just thinking, these guys are identical to the sort of the tribes that existed a hundred thousand years ago, you know,

• 51:28Gurwinder Bhogal?

  who were put on their war paint and just go to war, you know, this is exactly the same dynamic, that it's this atavistic sort of element of this tribal behaviour that's re-manifesting in their lives. And it happens just so often, people want struggle in their lives and I think culture war is is the the next evolution of this. It's an online video game that everybody plugs into, like when they go on Twitter and they, you know, they come across this kind of battles, virtual battlefield where, you know, their their side is on the right side of history and they're gonna they're gonna defeat the enemies of of humanity and then they're gonna be remembered as the heroes of humanity by all the sort of preceding preceding generations, you know, all of posterity. But I mean,

• 52:10Gurwinder Bhogal?

  it's all, it's all an illusion that the brain conjures in order to justify its own existence. Because if the the brain has no problems to solve, what happens? You get bored. That's what boredom is. You know, boredom is when your brain is not fulfilling its evolutionary purpose, when it's not solving problems. Um or when it's not engaged in analysis.

• 52:32Chris Williamson?

  Well, we saw, we saw probably a a good example of this at the very beginning of the pandemic. So the the the brief two-week period where everybody came together before it was politicised.

• 52:42Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah.

• 52:42Chris Williamson?

  And what you saw was In the presence of a real crisis, everybody re-centered our values. But in the absence of a real crisis, we created our own. And it feels very much like that was an example of what humanity could get to if everybody was facing a little bit of discomfort on a daily basis, because everybody did face a little bit of discomfort. There was some uncertainty, there was a requirement for everybody to bind together. And then very, very quickly, everyone was like, well, we're probably going to be okay. Therefore, what is the next problem that I can manifest in order to solve? Right, this next one. Apotheker, is that how I say it?

• 53:19Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, apotheker, yeah.

• 53:20Chris Williamson?

  Apotheker. Often, fear is more crippling than that which is feared. Rage is more maddening than that which enrages. Hate is more toxic than that which is hated. Few foes crush us more than our emotions. So victory over our enemies requires victory over our feelings about them.

• 53:38Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, so this is another core concept in Stoicism. And this is, I think, something that's extremely relevant today because we are essentially, we're overstimulated in the digital age. We're just being barraged with stimuli. And these stimuli are making us feel emotions. And they're calculated to make us feel emotions as well. That's the reason that we're being bombarded with the stimuli, is to basically just make us feel, and these feelings then drive our behaviours in ways that are beneficial to the people that are bombarding us with the stimuli. So, you know, one example would be the sort of dopamine rush that we get from being approval

• 54:22Gurwinder Bhogal?

  on social media, getting approval on social media. The whole system is set up in a way as to make us chase social approval. We want more followers, we want more engagement with our posts. And so we seek out to do that. We're rats in the Skinner box, we're basically pulling that lever to get that pellet, that food pellet. And it's not just with this emotion, it's with pretty much every emotion that we can possibly feel. If you look at anxiety. They make us anxious, like the news, the news agencies, they make us anxious because they want us to be fearful. Because if we're fearful, we're gonna wanna read more articles about the thing that's we're scared of. So if they make us fearful of terrorism, then we're gonna read more articles about terrorism because we're gonna be worried. So we're gonna wanna know what's going on.

• 55:07Gurwinder Bhogal?

  And so they're gonna get more income because they're gonna get more page views. So it works out for them. So it's in their interest to make us anxious. And then outrage is also another classic example. If you make people angry, then they're gonna complain about it on Twitter. They're gonna spread their outrage to other people. And we all know that outrage spreads like wildfire, you know, online. And it's one of the most consistent ways that you can get attention and get your message out there is just by outraging people. So now we have things called rage bait. And even the New York Times, you know, the old sort of bastions of journalistic integrity. They are engaging in this sort of stuff now as well, where what they'll do is they'll say something that they know is stupid.

• 55:49Gurwinder Bhogal?

  So it'll be something like, you know, I mean, I'm just gonna make something up, but this is the kind of thing that I'd oppose. Something like refrigerators are an expression of white supremacy or something like that, you know. You know, TVs are racist or whatever, you know, they'll just get a random object and call it, you know, racist. And they do that on purpose. I don't think that they're stupid enough to actually believe what they're writing, but they're doing it because they know that it's gonna anger their enemies. It's gonna anger people in the Republican Party, it's gonna anger the anti SJW kind of people.

• 56:16Chris Williamson?

  The retweet of somebody that agrees with you is worth precisely the same as the retweet of somebody that doesn't. In fact, it might be worth even more. I think I saw a map of you showing just how bifurcated online communication is between left and right. So what you're actually optimizing for maybe in order to reach new viewers is to get people who typically wouldn't engage with your content to engage with your content, which probably means people on the other side, not the same side.

• 56:43Gurwinder Bhogal?

  That's a very good way, a good point, actually. Yeah. And I think that's probably, that that figures into the sort of calculations. I think with the, with the sort of these kinds of, these divisive articles.

• 56:56Gurwinder Bhogal?

  I mean, like Scott Alexander, the Bay Area psychiatrist, he spoke of scissor statements, which are statements that are supposed to make people angry and to make them take a strong stance on, you know, one of the issues. So for instance, you could say something like, trans women are women. You post that, you know that's just going to set fireworks, you know, because there's going to be some people who agree with it, and they're going to agree with it very strongly. And then there are going to be people who disagree with it, and they're going to be, they're going to think about it very strongly. And so these two groups are going to argue with each other. And in arguing with each other, they're going to spread the idea. They're going to spread it across all domains. And so this is, this is the interesting thing that he found is that it's actually the things that divide people that spread furthest, not the things that people agree with, not the things that everybody agrees with.

• 57:41Chris Williamson?

  Was that the toxoplasma of rage? Was that that one?

• 57:44Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yes, this is it. Yeah, this is exactly what he called it. So I think we did cover this on a previous episode. But this, this is essentially what it is. It's that ideas that unify people don't spread as far as ideas that divide people. And so this is why we have Ragebait. This is, it's a business decision, you know, it's to basically spread the ideas, not just in the, in the circle of the New York Times readers, but also in the rival gang, in the sort of right wing sort of groups. So, so all these emotions that we're feeling, they're all, they're all sort of promoted by the online ecosystem. Anxiety, you know, anger, desire, even happiness, you know, all these feelings that they're

• 58:26Gurwinder Bhogal?

  artificially sort of almost inserted into our brains, just to make us, to control us. And so the Stoic idea that the emotions cause us more harm than the things that, that cause them is actually very apt, I think is more relevant now, even now than it was in ancient Greece when the idea was first formulated, which is why I opposed the idea. Because these emotions are used to control us. You know, if you are sort of easily outraged, then you're easily manipulated. If you're, you know, sort of, any, any emotion that you feel will be used to control you, basically. So Epic Tetus has this great line where he says, anyone capable of angering you becomes your master.

• 59:12Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Because they're essentially, what they're doing is they're getting your attention, they're redirecting your attention into where they want it to be. And they're making you dance like a monkey, essentially. They're just making you move and they're making you act in ways that you don't necessarily want to, but which you can't control because your emotions are overpowering you. So I think it's very important that we control our emotions in this digital age because those emotions are used to manipulate us and to control us more than they ever have throughout history.

• 59:39Chris Williamson?

  Sam Harris has a really interesting insight here where he talks about, try and be angry without maintaining your anger. The point being that the sensation of whatever made you angry is super, super brief. And almost all of the area under the curve of your anger for the rest of time is you perpetuating some story or framework or narrative or little mantra about how you could have, would have, should have changed what that person would have done to you. And it's you that ends up becoming, your own mind has caused way more suffering than whatever occurred in the first instance. That's the pebble that caused the avalanche perhaps, but it's you that perpetuates it. There's another thing, another thing here as well, which I think is very interesting,

• 1:00:22Chris Williamson?

  that if you look at it from the other side, should be quite reassuring to most people, which is that your own mind is able to torture you in significantly more sophisticated ways than anything or anybody that's outside of you. And this is one thing for anyone that's gone through depression or low mood periods, anxiety and stuff, which, you know, we all have, some more than others. If that's been you, you can find firm ground and reassurance in the fact that there is very little out there in the world that can hurt you as much as your own mind already has.

• 1:00:57Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, that's a great way of looking at it. I think what I tend to do with emotions is it's impossible to not feel emotions. You know, you can't just stop yourself from feeling emotions. But what you can do is you can, you can develop some distance between yourself and your emotions. And that's what I try to do, is that when I feel an emotion, I don't automatically react. I put a gate between stimulus and response. So when I feel that anger or whatever, what I do is I use it as information. That's what emotions are to me. Emotions are information. It's your body's way of telling you that something has upset or provoked your evolutionary ancestors. Not you, but your ancestors, your distant, distant ancestors.

• 1:01:42Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Uh, so if somebody, you know, if somebody angers you, that's basically your ancient ancestors telling you that a line has been crossed. But whether you actually choose to believe that is up to you because you're living in a completely different world to the world of your ancestors. You know, they lived in tribes, they lived out in the, on savannah or in the jungle, you know. So they had a completely different environment. So the things that they might think were lines that were crossed may not be like what you think is a line that was crossed. So you use it as information, you use your emotions as advisors, not as masters. You know, never be controlled by emotions, but understand that they're telling you something about, about the present environment. So if somebody's angered you, what does that really mean? What does it actually mean? You know, I try to look at, you know, what does this actually mean when somebody angers me? What, what was actually happening there?

• 1:02:27Gurwinder Bhogal?

  And it's basically, if you go back to the evolutionary history, we needed a way to enforce boundaries. Before we had police, before we had, you know, a legal system. There needed to be some sort of way of reinforcing our own personal boundaries or even the tribe's boundaries. And anger became a way to do that because if you, if there's a cost to with screwing with somebody else. Then obviously you're not going to want to screw with that person. If the cost is that they might lose their mind for a moment. And pick up a spear and hurl it at you, you know. Obviously you don't want to engage in that behavior. So it worked as a very effective sort of regulatory system. Before the advent of police, before the advent of, of any legal system.

• 1:03:11Gurwinder Bhogal?

  And so that's carrying over now into this world where we do have police, we do have a, a system of order. We have, have a society of morals and ethics and all this kind of stuff that we've developed since those times. So it's become, anger has in a way become obsolete. It's still not completely obsolete because there are times when you should be angry. Because there are certain lines that, that should not be crossed. And you know, you should reinforce those, those lines. But most of the things that you see online are not going to be lines that you need to enforce. If you're, you know, somebody calls you, you know, a dickhead online, you know. It doesn't matter. It's not, you don't need to get angry about it because you're never going to see this guy in your life. You're never gonna, you don't even know who they are. They could just be a, a chap op, you know. Might not even be a real person. So there's no, there's no need. And you know, what is it?

• 1:03:54Gurwinder Bhogal?

  It's just a word. They've literally just put a word on a, on a screen and that's it. You know, so but people, they won't think about these things. They'll, they won't put that gate between stimulus and response. As soon as they see that word, as soon as they see that insult,

• 1:04:08Gurwinder Bhogal?

  you know, the old ancestral sort of alarm system kicks in and they start losing their, their shit. So yeah, definitely got to realise that it's just information. That's all it is. That's all emotions are, just information.

• 1:04:22Chris Williamson?

  Regret minimisation. Somewhere in the future, your older self is watching you through memories. Whether it's with regret or nostalgia depends on what you do now.

• 1:04:32Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, so this is one that I sometimes use myself when I feel that I'm not motivated to do things. I've always found that a great way to develop the sort of a, a good character is to actually zoom out of your life and to look at the whole picture. And this is something that also applies with the 10 10 10 strategy. So the 10 10 10 strategy, I think we might have mentioned this before, I don't know, but this is one of the mental models in one of the mega threads, I think, that I wrote. And basically, it's the idea that

• 1:05:05Gurwinder Bhogal?

  we can stop ourselves engaging in behaviours that we might regret if we think about how we would react to those behaviours in 10 minutes, in 10 months and in 10 years. So let me give examples. So let's say you're addicted to cigarettes and you really want to quit cigarettes. You don't want to have a cigarette, but you're, you've got an urge to just have one cigarette, like, oh, really? Just one cigarette won't hurt.

• 1:05:33Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Most of the time, it's very hard to, to overcome that, that urge. But what you can do is you can zoom out of your life and look at the whole, the totality of your life and say, okay, I'm here now. If I do have this cigarette, how will I feel about having that cigarette? Having had that cigarette in 10 minutes? How will I feel about it in 10 months? How will I feel about it in 10 years? And when you do that, you realise that it's actually not going to make much of a difference to your life at all. Because after you have smoked that cigarette, about 10 minutes later. You don't feel any happier, you know, I don't know if you've been addicted to cigarettes, but I was at one point and it kind of, you don't feel happier when you smoke, you know, it's just, you feel like you will be very happy if you could just have that cigarette.

• 1:06:17Gurwinder Bhogal?

  But once you've actually got that cigarette in your mouth and you're actually chugging on it, you don't feel happier. And after you've had it, you certainly don't feel happier. You feel regret and you just go, oh god, I gave in. You feel weak and you feel like you've given in and that doesn't make you feel good. So if you look at the long view, you look at what your future self would think of what you're doing, then that can help put things into perspective and it can help you to, to separate what's actually matters and what doesn't matter. And this is what I mean when I say that your future self is, is watching you through memories. Because if you look at your future self as somebody who already exists and they are actually looking at you. And in a way, I mean, I'm a subscriber to the block theory of the universe. I do believe that time, that all

• 1:06:58Gurwinder Bhogal?

  times exist, that when, time is not a river, that time is actually an ocean and that all moments exist forever, but that our brains, because they're 3D, we can only perceive a moment at a time. But I believe that every moment of our lives is, is already exist, in existence right now. And I think that viewing things like that can help us to take the long view and to see that, hang on a second, we're going to spend the rest of our lives in the future, so we should actually care about that quite a bit, you know, it's, it's a lot more important than the present moment, which is just literally going to be gone like that. I mean, does now even exist? I mean, you know, if I say now, that's now in the past, you know?

• 1:07:39Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. And the now, the now for you and the now for me is ever so slightly different in any case because of the light cone, right? There is no such thing as two, as two separate nows. Yeah. Well, one of the interesting things to consider here when it comes to considering what a life well-lived means. For me, a life well-lived is one that in retrospect, you're glad you lived. And there's two views of happiness, one by Dan Gilbert and one by Daniel Kahneman, and they don't really agree tremendously well. So Dan Gilbert says, if you were to spend the rest of your life on a Lilo with a cocktail in a pool... Just drinking and listening to tunes, that would be a life well-lived because each

• 1:08:19Chris Williamson?

  individual now was one that was filled with pleasure. This is pleasure, this is pleasure, this is pleasure. And I, at first, because that doesn't appeal to me, that's not the sort of thing that would give me pleasure, but I know that there are people that it does. I felt like that was, I don't know, like a lesser type of pleasure or something. I got on my high horse about how moral I was for wanting the more difficult, meaningful pleasure. And Daniel Kahneman says the opposite, or something different. He says that, you know, a life well-lived, a good life, one that is happy is one that in retrospect has given you meaning, that you're happy to look on in retrospect. The moment-to-moment experience of it is less important than the retrospective experience of it. What I've come to believe is that this is dependent on how introspective you are. It'll align

• 1:09:01Chris Williamson?

  with stuff to do with extroversion and introversion, how neurotic you are, all sorts of different personality biases and affects and stuff. But if you are the sort of person that spends a lot of time reflecting, doing internal work, considering the way that your life has been lived and ruminating, in a good way, I guess, or being nostalgic, what you want to do is optimize your life so that you have many different memory slots filled with things that you can be happy and proud of, because things that you've done in the past can give you pleasure in the present, in a way that doing something like a Lilo and a cocktail can't. That being said, I have a ton of friends that I know that would fucking love to just spend the rest of time on a Lilo with a cocktail, listening to tunes and throwing a ball around with their friends. And I would happily go around to that party

• 1:09:46Chris Williamson?

  every so often. For me, that wouldn't work for the rest of time, but there are people for whom it does. And I've come to believe that the reason for that is that they maybe are more forward-thinking, maybe they're more present-thinking, maybe they have, you know, fewer neuroses to deal with than I do, I'm not sure. But I think that that's an interesting way to look at it, right?

• 1:10:03Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Absolutely, yeah. Yeah, that's a perfect way of summing it up. I mean, I don't think I could add anything. I mean, it's just, it does, yeah, it does depend on how introspective you are, really, because how we live our lives is nonlinear. You know, we don't live our lives just straight through time. We live our lives darting to hopes, to the future, then memories of the past.

• 1:10:21Chris Williamson?

  Loops and loops.

• 1:10:22Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah. We're constantly darting between the future, the present, and the past. You know, we're enjoying the sort of present, even when we're enjoying the present, we're sort of sometimes just enjoying memories of the past. And so... I think, yeah, it does depend on the sort of degree to which you you introspect, because people who introspect a lot obviously are going to be darting around through time a lot more. And so the the whole of their life is going to matter more than just the present moment. But people who don't introspect very much, like actually extroverts, yeah, for them, it's just going to be party all the time, you know, just living in a present moment. But I mean, there's an interesting thing which I've, you know, going back to the whole point about does now even exist. I mean, how long does now really last? I

• 1:11:04Gurwinder Bhogal?

  mean, this is a question I've always, I I actually have come to the conclusion that now doesn't exist. I think even when you're enjoying in the present moment, what you're doing is that you're enjoying something in the immediate past. Like, if you're even, you know, let's say you're kissing someone, you're not actually enjoying the present moment of kissing, you're actually enjoying the the memory that you've created in the immediate split second past of being kissing that person and the continuation of that in the future. It's not really the present moment, because even when you receive the nerve impulses from kissing, you're you're receiving them in in the in the past.

• 1:11:40Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, Sam Sam Harris has this beautiful insight. There's a a talk he gave called Death in the Present Moment. It's about ten or fifteen years old, super, super popular. And there's an edit of it. I think it's maybe called On Life or something, which has got this beautiful music underneath it. Anyway, he's talking about the fact that our conscious experience of the present moment is, in some very relevant sense, already a memory. And, yeah, I, you know.

• 1:12:04Gurwinder Bhogal?

  It only becomes meaningful, yeah, only becomes meaningful when it's a memory.

• 1:12:07Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Once you you can't consciously process something before it's happened. That being said, we're anticipatory beings, right? Our entire setup is designed to take ourselves out of the present moment. We anticipate something before it happens, we get excited. There's a good bit of evidence that shows that people are actually, they enjoy experiences more in advance of them happening than either during or after they've happened. And then, once something has occurred, you have the opportunity to reflect on it. But, yeah, right, next one, next one. Howard Hughes Syndrome. Everyone always lies to the powerful to curry favor or avoid punishment. Hearing nothing but flattery causes the most powerful people to develop the most distorted views of reality, and their vast influence means we all pay the price.

• 1:12:51Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, so I think this is a particular problem of authoritarians. People who people are afraid of are only going to hear stuff that they want to hear, you know. And if you look at history, right, you look at history, you find that every dictator ended up getting worse and more unhinged through time. I don't know of any dictator who started off extremely severe and sane, sorry, insane, and then became less sane over time. They all went more unhinged and they went more crazy and they became more authoritarian over time. And I think part of the reason for that is that people are so afraid of telling them the truth

• 1:13:33Gurwinder Bhogal?

  that they just tell them what they want to hear and they kind of cushion them in this sort of alternate reality in which they are God and they can just, everything is going their way and it creates this, it just inflates their ego. I mean, you see it, you saw it with Gaddafi, you know. Gaddafi actually started off as quite a sane person, you know, he was, he was just basically wanted equality, you know, he was like a kind of, he was a socialist and he just, you know, he basically had this socialist revolution and then over time he began to develop this kind of, this cult personality, but it wasn't something that happened within a few years or anything like, this took decades to really emerge and it happened very gradually because as time went on, people became more and more afraid of telling him the truth.

• 1:14:14Gurwinder Bhogal?

  And so they began to cocoon him in this kind of web of lies where he was just hearing only the things he wanted to hear. And this caused him to just gradually distance himself from reality. And he became, he began to believe that he was like this grand godlike figure who was going to just bring, you know, the sort of justice to the entire world. He wanted to start off this whole Pan-African thing, you know, and his ambitions grew because he became so convinced of his own godhood, sort of, you know. But he's, he's one example, Stalin is another example, Stalin's a classic example. By the end of his life, By the end of Stalin's life, when he was dying, nobody called the police, not the police, nobody called an ambulance. And the reason they didn't was because they were absolutely terrified of doing anything without his wishes. And Even saving his life.

• 1:15:00Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, even even saving his life. People were afraid of it. And some people have said that the reason that nobody called a doctor or whatever was because. Yeah, sorry, it was calling a doctor, not calling an ambulance. They wouldn't have called an ambulance there. But yeah, nobody bothered to call a doctor because they they wanted him to die. I mean, that could be one reason as well. But but these were some of his trusted, most trusted people, people like Laurenti, Beria. And, you know, with Stalin, what happened was that he was so ruthless and so, I mean, he would, he was known to sort of. Kill people if they gave him bad news. And the same thing happened with Saddam Hussein as well. These people so bad, they'd kill people just for giving them bad news. And. So people just didn't want to tell them anything that they didn't want to hear.

• 1:15:42Gurwinder Bhogal?

  And this turned out to be very, very bad for for Stalin because. Doctors were afraid to tell him if he had a medical condition, you know, they didn't want to, they didn't want him to make make him, they didn't want to remind him that he's just a human, you know. And so what happened was overall, he just gradually became more and more distant from reality, and it became worse and worse and worse. And this is a pattern that you see throughout history. It's worse with the authoritarians. I don't know if this really happens. With every leader, because there are some leaders who are pretty open to hearing conflicting views, people like Richard Branson, for instance. You know, he was notoriously kind hearted and open minded when it came to hearing things from his employees.

• 1:16:25Gurwinder Bhogal?

  So it's not every leader, but I think authoritarians in particular and people who are. People who, any anyone who people are afraid of. Yeah. Basically, they're they're dooming themselves to this life of illusion.

• 1:16:41Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you have this, you have this sort of predisposition around tyranny or wanting, wanting things to be the way that you want them to. And then the world and your inner circle of sycophants begin to reflect back to you that which you want, which means that you become ever more attuned to anything which is even slightly outside of the thing that you want. There's this, Tim Dillon went on Rogan, and there's not many people that go on Rogan and really push back against him. But Tim has just got so much sass and wit and comedy, I think that he can get away with saying to Joe, and he's obviously got an existing relationship with him, things that very few other people could do. And

• 1:17:19Chris Williamson?

  Joe was talking about something like, I think Tim was lamenting how bad the something scene is in LA, let's say, let's say it was the comedy scene in LA or something. And Joe said something like, well, that's strange, because, you know, whenever I'm around the people in the comedy scene in LA, they've always been really kind to me. All that I've ever had from them is, you know, warmth and welcoming and stuff like that. And Tim broke the fourth wall completely and said, Joe, you do have to remember that you are Joe Rogan. People are reflecting to you a world which they wouldn't reflect to pretty much anybody else, because what they're seeing in front of them isn't a person, it's a king.

• 1:18:00Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, this is, this is one of the scary things. I think so it's not just authoritarian, there's also people that are respected a lot, you know. So if if somebody is really, really respected, then other people won't want to sort of seemingly damage their own reputation in that person's eyes by giving them bad news, you know, they'll want to, they want to like, you know, bolster their their sort of ego and and just say things that they they know that the person could be happy to hear. But I think this is actually, this is a much bigger problem than just individuals. I think that this is becoming a systemic problem. If you ever look online. The whole thing with censorship now, you've got, you've essentially got these massive tech giants now who

• 1:18:44Gurwinder Bhogal?

  can completely extinguish your online existence if you say something that they don't like. And what does this do is that this creates a chilling effect where people are now afraid to essentially tell Twitter or Facebook what it doesn't want to hear. Do you know what I mean? And so we're now entering this world where people are now posting things that they know is going to be acceptable on Twitter. And so they're actually lying, they're telling Twitter and Facebook what they think it wants to hear. And

• 1:19:18Gurwinder Bhogal?

  this, I think, is very dangerous because people are now by proxy deceiving themselves and they're deceiving other people. It's something that I think is one of the great arguments against censorship, I think, is that you essentially, you create this effect at scale. So it becomes a systemic issue. It's not just, oh, I don't want to displease Stalin or, you know, I don't want to displease Saddam Hussein. It actually becomes, you know, I don't want to, I don't want to displease the internet. You know, so what can you do? You literally have to post online nowadays if you want to have a life as a commentator, as a writer, or even as a human being, you've got to, you've got to post online. Everybody posts online.

• 1:20:00Gurwinder Bhogal?

  And so if you're entering this environment where this is the norm now, where you have to be careful of what you post.

• 1:20:06Gurwinder Bhogal?

  What Twitter is doing is it's basically, it's putting a limit on honesty. You know, that's, that's what this kind of censorship is happening with the censorship, you know, it's, it seems to be getting worse as well. I mean, you know, like we saw it, I mean, even with the recent Jerry Sadowitz

• 1:20:28Gurwinder Bhogal?

  comedy thing, his show was cancelled because he, I mean, this is Jerry Sadowitz we're talking about. He's one of the most controversial comedians and he's been this way, you know, for like.

• 1:20:38Gurwinder Bhogal?

  It's been about twenty years he's been doing comedy, probably longer than that. But he's notorious for being really controversial. And anybody who knows the name Jerry Sadowitz knows that this guy is probably one of the most offensive comedians on the planet. And yet he was recently booked at this place called The Pleasance. And a few people complained, I think about two people complained about the show. And so they cancelled the show. They cancelled the show and they said it's racist and it's homophobic and it's transphobic and all this stuff, you know, the usual stuff. And now like there's a lot of people like really angry with The Pleasance and on The Pleasance's Twitter page, you could see they've been ratioed, you know, on their, on their posts and there's loads of just obscene stuff on there. But, but basically what this comedy show has done is it's, it's created this effect.

• 1:21:22Gurwinder Bhogal?

  It's basically now, no comedian is gonna wanna, I mean, any comedian who works for this company now is gonna have to be very careful about what they say. So they're just gonna say very bland, very polite, very, just sort of like, you know, prosaic stuff. That, that is not adventurous, it's not creative because they're, they're, they're limiting themselves because they know that if they don't, then they're gonna get cancelled. And so this is a problem that extends not just to individuals, not just powerful individuals, but powerful organisations everywhere and not just on the internet, also offline as well. I understand why, why, why organisations would do this, you know, because, I mean, the whole point of a person like Jerry Sadowitz is to cross boundaries. That's why he exists.

• 1:22:04Gurwinder Bhogal?

  You know, that's his whole shtick is to cross boundaries and to make people uncomfortable. And so they've, they've taken away the, the one thing that he was actually there to do. And in doing that, they've sanitised comedy itself because now any comedian who goes there is gonna know what they've done and he's gonna be like, oh, okay, I'm just gonna tell The Pleasance what they wanna hear, which is gonna be bland nonsense, you know, just jokes about...

• 1:22:27Chris Williamson?

  Platitudes.

• 1:22:28Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, platitudes, basically. So, so this is a big problem everywhere now.

• 1:22:33Chris Williamson?

  Deferred Happiness Syndrome. The common feeling that your life has not begun, that your present reality is a mere prelude to some idyllic future. This idyl is a mirage that'll fade as you approach, revealing that the prelude you rushed through was in fact the one to your death.

• 1:22:50Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, so I mean, this is probably another way of saying quite famous quote by, it wasn't John Lennon who actually said this, but he's remembered for saying it, which is, life is what happens when you're making other plans. And I think this is a universal problem, and it's one certainly that I've experienced in my life where you get this kind of feeling that, you know, oh, you know, my life's not, I'm not really living yet, but when I do this, when I reach this goal, that's when my life will begin, that's when I'll really enjoy things, that's when I'll, you know, truly be, you know, that's when I'll be alive and all this sort of stuff. But I've just got to get to that position. So people tend to sort of section off parts of their lives. And then they, in these sections, they kind of just automate their lives. They, they tend to just, you know, they just do what they have to do and just,

• 1:23:34Gurwinder Bhogal?

  they tend to focus their attention on to the future and to this sort of imaginary paradise where they'll be in the, in the future, when they've just, when they've just achieved X and Y. But then once they've achieved X, then they set new goals for themselves, you know, and they say, oh, okay, yeah, I just need to achieve Y and then I'll be happy, then I'll be truly alive, then I'll be able to start my life. And this just goes on and on and on, and it, it seems to just carry on into death. You know, then the point comes, you're done, you're dead, and then you can't really do anything about it. So, um, I think, yeah, this is something that is really a very seductive emotion to feel for people.

• 1:24:11Chris Williamson?

  Why do you think it's seductive?

• 1:24:13Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Because we tend to scapegoat many of our problems on things that we think, you know, like on, that are not actually affecting us now, but which will be, that we can deal with in the future. So, um, you know, we tend to scapegoat our lack of happiness on just some arbitrary thing. And we'll think that when we've resolved that thing, that we'll be happy. You know, uh, it's very easy to just find excuses for why you're not happy, basically. So, you know, you can just say, oh, the reason I'm not happy in my life is because I work at this job, but what I'll do is, you know, I'll work for about two years, I'll build up some income and then I'll just find a better job.

• 1:24:55Gurwinder Bhogal?

  So it's easy to just, you know, shrug all the problems off to the future and say, okay, yeah, that's the reason I'm, I'm, I'm unhappy. And I can resolve that in the future. You can always resolve things in the future because as I said before, your future self is a superhero, they can do everything, you know. Your future self can solve all problems, you know, it's, but when, obviously when you get there, they can't, they can't do anything there because they are you at the end of the day.

• 1:25:19Gurwinder Bhogal?

  And so, yeah, this is, this is the thing is that we tend to scapegoat our problems on just things that we think we can resolve just like that easily, one event at a time. And this happens when we do resolve that problem, then we find that we've got other problems and then we say, oh, okay. Well, I've just got to solve this problem and then I'll be happy. And it's constantly, if I just do this, then I'll be happy. And that, that thought process there is the key, that's the culprit. So I think the solution is to understand that your life is actually happening now. It's not happening in your hopes, it's not happening in your memories. It's happening at the moment now. And I know that I said that now doesn't exist. But when I say now, what I mean is that the, the, the, the space in which you can act, basically. The space in which you can decide, make decisions and act.

• 1:26:04Gurwinder Bhogal?

  That is the place where your life is happening. And yeah, that's slightly divided between the present moment and the past moment and the future. It's, it's kind of like a, a little sort of triage of, of, of different things, a triad, sorry, of different things. But um, yeah, that's the, the part of your life where really, if you want to avoid this, this problem. Um, deferred happiness syndrome, you, you have to kind of understand that your life is not going to be happening in the future. Because if you, if you delegate problems to your future self. You're, you're creating a chain because your future self tends to act a lot like you. Do you know what I mean? And so he's going to delegate to his future self. And then he's going to delegate to his future self. So you have to make a stand.

• 1:26:45Gurwinder Bhogal?

  You can't push off the problems to your future self because that person is you at the end of the day. And he's going to have the same prejudices and the same laziness and the same procrastination that you've got. Um, you're not going to magically become a superhero in the future. This is the illusion that a lot of people have. They seem to think, you know, oh, I'll just, I'll do it tomorrow. I'm feeling, I'm feeling like I've got a bit of a headache today. I'll do it tomorrow and I'm feeling better. Tomorrow I'll feel great, you know, there's always tomorrow. That's the thing. You won't feel great tomorrow. You're going to feel like you did today. And so you have to wrestle with the present. You have to embrace the present and try to understand that this is your life. This is actually happening now. It's not happening in the future. It's not happening in the past. It's happening now. And this is the opportunity for you to actually make a better life.

• 1:27:29Gurwinder Bhogal?

  This is how you make a better life for yourself by acting now, not by thinking that you're going to do in the future. So yeah.

• 1:27:35Chris Williamson?

  Dude, I absolutely love that one. Um, Taleb surgeons, you're considering two people for a job. One pretty, one ugly. In achievements, they're equal. Who do you hire? The pretty one? No, the ugly one. They accomplish just as much while having a bias against them. Always factor in other people's prejudices.

• 1:27:57Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, so um, I mean, this is quite a straightforward one. And I think what's interesting about this one is is the focus on on beauty causing prejudice. Because I think that's something that people don't really consider much of. We hear so much about white privilege. We hear so much about male privilege. But we don't hear about the privileges which actually and experimentally have a much greater influence on life outcomes. And those are pretty privilege.

• 1:28:26Chris Williamson?

  Halo effect.

• 1:28:27Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, yeah, the halo effect is is part of it, yeah. And and the pretty privilege is what I call it because it really is just that pretty people just get way more privileges in life than than ugly people. Um, this is a fact of life. It's been shown, um, you know, that they they are more likely to be hired in job interviews. They are more likely to get higher earnings. They are more likely to have the door held open for them. You know, when they're when they're going into a shop, whatever. There's just so many little things and that that attractive people, and this is particularly true of attractive women because men tend to judge people by their appearances more than women do. And um, so I mean, attractive women are some of the most

• 1:29:12Gurwinder Bhogal?

  uh, privileged people in in the world. But unattractive women are some of the most unprivileged people in in the world because there's this huge, you know, there's a particular pressure on women to to be attractive and um. And I think that this is something that nobody talks about, really. You know, like I said, we talk, we hear so much about how race or gender causes privilege. We hear it all the time. It's all encompassing on the left particularly, you know. But we never hear about attractiveness and how much of a privilege that is. Or even things like height, for instance, height or for a man like the depth of their voice. You know, leaders are more likely to be elected if they have deep voices or if they're taller.

• 1:29:55Gurwinder Bhogal?

  And things like that, you know, we don't really think about these things. And I think I've been wondering why that is. I've been wondering why there's a double standard. Why there's a sort of a pretty privilege, privilege in a sense. In that the people who have pretty privilege are privileged by the pretty privilege. In a sense that people are not going to complain about them in the way that they do about people who've got white privilege or male privilege. You know, so it's.

• 1:30:18Chris Williamson?

  Do you not think.

• 1:30:19Gurwinder Bhogal?

  I wonder about it. I think part of it is that, I think part of it, part of the reason this happens is that. Especially people on the left, they don't want to admit that there are such a thing as pretty people and ugly people. Because there's this whole thing about how beauty is subjective, fitness is subjective. You know, big, beautiful women are just as beautiful as slender women. And to a very small extent, that's true, because if you ever look in older, you know, medieval paintings and things, the. The ideal woman was sort of quite, quite podgy.

• 1:30:49Chris Williamson?

  Full.

• 1:30:50Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, yeah. And the reason for this, I think, was because it was a sign of opulence. Because if in an age of starvation, if you could eat a lot, that was a sign you were rich and you, you know, you were affluent. So I think it was, it was a socioeconomic indicator. But that's no longer the case now. In fact, it's the other way now. Being thin in an age of abundance is a sign of affluence and a sign of that you're taking care of yourself.

• 1:31:11Chris Williamson?

  Conscientious, orderly, blah, blah.

• 1:31:13Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, yeah, because being overweight is now the norm because we live in a world of opulence and abundance. So the beauty standards do, they do, they're affected by cultural standards to a certain extent. But, but there is, there is a core, there is a core to, to what is, there is a kind of universal standard, which is slightly swayed this way and that, but which remains generally the same over time.

• 1:31:35Chris Williamson?

  I wrote in my newsletter about this, that the optimal size, body size for women has indeed fluctuated over time. But the optimal waist to hip ratio has almost always stayed the same. It's about point eight two. So the same, the same waist to hip ratio. So those are some of the fundamentals that draw through. And then you can have fashions over the top. It's like saying, oh, well, the girl that's in the tight jeans and the high heels is hot. Or if it was in the sixties, it'd be the girl with the dreadlocks and the baggy boot cuts or whatever, right? Like it's fashions that can kind of be laid over the top of evolutionary precepts. But yeah, I mean, with, with this, the, the, the pretty privilege, one of the reasons that I could see for why this isn't used as a categorical identifier that gets pointed at is that it's quite hard to categorize.

• 1:32:19Chris Williamson?

  The good looks and beauty tend to be a lot more crowdsourced than race or height, say. Or sexuality.

• 1:32:27Gurwinder Bhogal?

  It's true. It's a bit more subjective. Yeah. In that sense, I mean, I think it could, it, it is possible to, to know if somebody's attractive. I think just generally like, I mean, you know, if you ever look at sort of, for instance, celebrities, like most Hollywood actors and actresses are attractive. That's one of the reasons why they're hired, because they have that universal appeal.

• 1:32:49Gurwinder Bhogal?

  You know, like, uh, uh, most people would agree that, for instance, um, Margot Robbie is attractive or Matthew McConaughey is attractive, you know? And so it's like, so there are these kinds of, um, universal standards. And I think, I think, yeah, you're right. I think it is, it's harder to gauge it. But I think part of that, that difficulty comes not from the actual difficulty of gauging the, um, the beauty, but of admitting it as well.

• 1:33:15Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 1:33:16Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Because you don't admit, you don't want to say, oh, this person is attractive, unattractive. And that's why they're being prejudiced against, you know? It's, it's quite a hurtful thing to say to somebody who's unattractive. It's that the reason that you're not getting work is because you're unattractive.

• 1:33:28Chris Williamson?

  Yes, uh, especially given, oh, it's strange because unattractive, is that maybe because it's felt like that's more, there's a bit more meritocracy in your attractiveness than there is in your race? That there's something immutable about the race that you've got or whatever. Did you see, there was a.

• 1:33:47Chris Williamson?

  I think it was a YouTube series, it might have been based on a British TV programme, where they had people and they had to hold up signs, was it of who's got the highest IQ? And then people had to put them into order and then in the way that they predicted and then people would move around, or it was maybe who earned the most, or who something else and something else. And people's ability to choose things that are non-obvious basically seems to completely go out of the window. And I suppose as well that kind of what you were talking about earlier on, was it the Nova, the Nova effect, where you don't know what's going to happen, the effects of your effects and downstream and so on and so forth?

• 1:34:26Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:27Chris Williamson?

  You don't know what a miserable childhood could compel somebody to do as an adult. Yeah, maybe having a perfect childhood would be fantastic, but because the butterfly continues to go for a very, very, very long time, you have no idea what the, all the permutations of the different interactions that person had and the chip on their shoulder and their desire to prove their father wrong and blah, blah, blah. You know, you just simply don't know the outcomes. So part of me is like, yeah, absolutely. I think that accounting for other people's biases, if you were to give me two versions of someone and the ugly person has managed to get to the same level, you're right, that person's overcome more, they're probably more skilled. But you're trying to rationalize, you're trying to basically

• 1:35:09Chris Williamson?

  account in for the halo effect or the pretty privilege.

• 1:35:13Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, this is a very interesting point, actually, because then how does the region beta paradox factor into this? Because if somebody's unattractive, they will also sort of

• 1:35:25Chris Williamson?

  Bounce out of the bottom. So what you want, the person that's got the biggest difficulty is the person that's average looking. They're the one that's had a perfectly comfortable. Tell me about your trauma. Well, I haven't had that much trauma, but I haven't had no trauma. Right, you're amazing. You must be really, really good. Okay.

• 1:35:40Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Interesting point, yeah, yeah.

• 1:35:42Chris Williamson?

  Alder's razor, there's two here that I've grouped together because I think these two work quite nicely. Alder's razor, if something can't be settled by experiment or observation, it's probably not worthy of debate. This is because, without empirical evidence, there is just Your word against mine and everyone wants the last word. Following this rule will save so much time. And I think this goes along with Popper's falsifiability principle. For a theory to be considered scientific, it must be possible to disprove or refute it. As such, for each of your beliefs, you should have a clear idea of what would persuade you you're wrong. Otherwise, your belief is immune to reason.

• 1:36:18Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, so I think that most debates and particularly online debates, they're not fact finding exercises. They're power struggles. So the, you know, the, the purpose of a debate is not really to come to some mutual understanding of truth. It's to dominate your opponent. And this is something that has become evident to me just from sort of my own experiences. I mean, when I first joined Twitter in 2014, I was, I was just like going crazy. I was basically like anytime somebody disagreed with me, I would engage them in argument. And because I think, you know, I could just change this person, I can make this person see my point of view. And I would do this all the time. And, you know, sometimes I would waste entire days just arguing.

• 1:37:00Chris Williamson?

  You fooled, you fooled, Gwenda.

• 1:37:03Gurwinder Bhogal?

  I learned from this, believe me. But yeah, this was something that really, you know, I was doing for like a while, like probably for the first sort of few months of joining Twitter. I was arguing with everyone and I wasted pretty much just all my time because I never got anywhere. No matter how many arguments, how many good arguments I came out with, no matter how many, you know, pieces of evidence even. So this even sort of, you know, is a problem. But also I found that I was doing the same thing. I found that when people were trying to convince me of something, I wouldn't listen and I would just, just dig deeper into what I already believed. And then this is when it became clear to me that it was ego was the issue, wasn't lack of facts. It was ego. Nobody wants to admit that they're wrong and people will do everything that they can do in order to avoid admitting that they're wrong.

• 1:37:48Gurwinder Bhogal?

  They will do literally everything that they can do to avoid being wrong. And so it's, it's pointless to debate somebody when there is no hard evidence that can completely disprove. Even then, even if you've got the evidence, it's often not worth debating because, you know, you can, for instance, like if you look at, you know, I remember there was a, a guy who was, was, was reading an argument between a flat earther and a scientist. And the scientist was like just trying to come out with all this stuff like saying, you know, if you go to the shoreline and you look at the, the ocean on the horizon, you'll see that the sails of ships appear before the prowls. And so that's a sign that the world's, you know, a sphere. And the guy was going, no, no, no, no, that's not true. No, no, I, I, I've looked at this beach plenty of times.

• 1:38:32Gurwinder Bhogal?

  I live near the beach and I've never seen that happen. You know, so they just completely deny the evidence. And if you show them a picture taken from space of, of the earth being round, they'll just say, oh, it's just a doctored photoshopped. Picture, you know, that's not a real picture. Now, so any evidence, like, if, if there's any way for somebody to wriggle out of this kind of vice that you try and put them in when you debate them. They will, they'll, they'll do it, they'll, they'll use any means possible. And this is something that I've, I've learned from experience and I think. That's why it's, it's just not worth debating most things. And really, you've got to ask yourself, what really are you going to achieve by winning an argument online, especially? Not much. The only times that I would consider it worthwhile to debate is if you're actually engaged in an official debate.

• 1:39:15Gurwinder Bhogal?

  You know, with a crowd, with an actual audience watching you. Because the purpose of the debate in that case is not to convince the opponent, which you're not going to do. It's to convince the audience.

• 1:39:23Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 1:39:24Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Um, so that's a worthwhile time to debate. Or equivalently, if you're online and you're engaged in a, in a debate with somebody who's a blue tick and they've got a hundred thousand followers. And they've got a big audience. And you know that they're going to be over, over what they're going to be watching and eavesdropping on your, your, uh, your debate. Then, then, then that's worthwhile time to do it as well. But in most times, it's just simply not worth debating people because you're not going to change their, their mind. Maybe once, one in a million people, you'll be able to change their minds because they'll be humble enough to acknowledge when they're wrong. But the vast majority of people have got, their egos are way too big and they're just not going to do it. They're especially not going to do it publicly. If you want to change somebody's mind, you've got to do it privately. Because if you do it publicly, they know that they're being watched.

• 1:40:09Gurwinder Bhogal?

  And that's going to obviously make their ego even more, they're going to make, that's going to make them protect their ego even more.

• 1:40:14Chris Williamson?

  That's the, uh, the theory of bespoke bullshit all over again, right? Yeah. So I think, uh. My stance on this is I just I don't engage with people that are illogically critical online in a serious way. They either get no response or they get a silly response because the cost benefit that you have if you if you start to invest yourself psychologically, emotionally, existentially, and trying to change this person's mind, you are just it's the equivalent of pissing money away, my dad would say, right? You're just it's all downside from here. There is not

• 1:40:48Gurwinder Bhogal?

  It's worse than, yeah, it's worse than pissing money. It's pissing away time, which is even more money. Yeah, you can't get it back. Yeah. And so, yeah, I mean, I've become very jealous of my time recently, you know, I've become protective of my time of basically because I realized that it's the most important resource on the planet. There's nothing more important than time because it's required for literally everything else. You cannot obtain any other resource without time. And so, you know, and another thing, like you said, it's the only thing you can't make more of. Once it's gone, it's gone. And debates are just, I mean, going back to Stoicism, I think it was Seneca, who said that, you know, we are we jealously guard our properties, our physical

• 1:41:33Gurwinder Bhogal?

  properties, but as soon as someone starts taking away our time, we just let them have it, you know, as though it's just free, but it's not. It's, I mean, that wasn't the exact thing that he said. He said that we we fritter it away like it's our, we fritter away the one thing that we have the right to be to guard of, basically. So, so that was, yeah, that's essentially what we do. We sort of become very prodigal with our time, you know, we're very wasteful of our time. We tend to just throw it away, even though it's our most important resource. It's the thing that we need to acquire all other resources. And it's the only thing we can't make more of. And so this is why, one reason why I'm very

• 1:42:14Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Careful about not debating people because one, just one reply on, on social media can turn into a slanging match, which is going to take the rest of your day. And it's not going to just take away your time. It's going to take away your peace of mind because you're going to be constantly checking your phone for a notification from this person. And you'd be like, oh, what is this bastard saying now, you know?

• 1:42:32Chris Williamson?

  That's it, man. I mean, I've, I've come increasingly to believe that sanity and peace of mind are probably the most important things to optimize for when it comes to designing the way that you live your life. Because you could optimize your life in a way where risk was ratcheted up a little bit more. And again, this is individuals, some people's risk tolerance is maybe different to mine or whatever. But for me, optimizing for peace of mind and sanity is top of my list. I want to be, because downstream from that is a whole host of things that I really want to have. But if peace and sanity are molested or perverted in a way,

• 1:43:12Chris Williamson?

  nothing else can flow from that easily. I remember, this is why I could never be a trader. So there was a period where me and all my friends got hold of eToro and we're going to start doing bets. And our Activision is going to go up and let's put money in Netflix and Spotify and stuff. And I would check it 10 times a day because I couldn't bear not to check. So my emotions got ragged around at the mercy of the market. Well, that, that's completely removed my peace and sanity. And how much would I pay to get my peace and sanity back? I would pay way, way more, way more than whatever return I'm going to get from this. And all of the externalities, my lack of focus at work, my lack of ability to connect with my friends, the fact that now is the only time that I want to reflect on a life that's well lived.

• 1:43:57Chris Williamson?

  All of these things would be, it was ruinous for everything that I genuinely cared about to try and optimize for something that was money that I can make in a different way. So yeah, that was, uh, that was something that, that it relates to for me, I think.

• 1:44:12Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, I think everything comes from, from peace of mind because, um, you could, you know, you could have everything, you could have like, A mansion, you can have the most attractive woman by your side, you can have any, anything you could imagine, you could have, right? But if you don't have that peace of mind, then all of it's wasted because you're not actually able to enjoy it. You're not able to enjoy these things. Really, all comes from being able to actually have enough serenity in your own head to be able to enjoy things. Because if you don't have that, then everything that you acquire, everything else you acquire is worthless. You can't, you can't get the true value from it. Again, this is another idea from Stoicism. You know, this is the idea that, you know,

• 1:44:54Gurwinder Bhogal?

  ultimately, it's not about what's going on in the external world, it's about what's going on in the internal world. That's what matters to your, your wellbeing. If you, if you, if you, if you don't have peace of mind, if you're constantly stressing about things outside in the world, then you're not owning your own wellbeing. The only way to own your own wellbeing is to look inward and to actually try to clean the room inside your head, as it were, you know, to get everything organised and to not worry. Because when you've got this kind of mess in your head, that's where anxiety comes from. That's where you begin to become confused and you think, oh, okay, oh, you know, what's happening here, what's happening? Your mind starts darting

• 1:45:35Gurwinder Bhogal?

  around because it's got no order to it. You know, it's, it's just chaos. And that chaos manifests in your feelings. So you could have all the best things in the, in the world. The external world could be as ordered as you want it to be. But if the internal world is not ordered, then it's all wasted. It doesn't matter because you're not going to be able to enjoy it. So it really all just begin, begin with, with the mind.

• 1:45:56Chris Williamson?

  Gurwinder Bogle, ladies and gentlemen. Everyone needs to go and subscribe to your Substack, which they can find at?

• 1:46:02Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Gwinder.substack.com. And just to spell it out, because a lot of people have no idea how to spell it. So G U R W I N D E R dot substack dot com.

• 1:46:12Chris Williamson?

  Go and check that out. Your Twitter, G underscore S underscore Bogle, super mega threads, I'm sure that'll be coming soon. I highly recommend everyone goes and reads the audience capture article which you put out before and we're going to do a conversation on that pretty soon. So dude, I absolutely adore having these conversations with you. Every single time I rely on them. I cherish them very, very much. I'm sure that it adds tons of value. Anything else? Any other bits that you need to plug before we go?

• 1:46:40Gurwinder Bhogal?

  No, that's fine. Just follow my Substack and my Twitter and everything should be on there. I think, yeah.

• 1:46:44Chris Williamson?

  All right, man. Appreciate you.

• 1:46:46Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Nice one. Thanks.

• 1:46:47Speaker 02

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• 1:47:08Speaker 02

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• 1:47:11Speaker 03

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• 1:47:12Speaker 02

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