17 Shocking Lessons About Human Psychology - Gurwinder Bhogal - #742

Gurwinder Bhogal is a programmer and a writer. Gurwinder is one of my favourite Twitter follows. He’s written yet another megathread exploring human nature, cognitive biases, mental models, status games, crowd behaviour and social media. It's fantastic, and today we go through some of my favourites. Expect to learn whether cynical people are actually smarter, why people tend to find uncertain outcomes so intolerable, why people would rather lie than say what they really think, whether people would rather be hated than unknown, why appearing to do good has become more important than actually doing good and much more... Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period from Shopify at https://www.shopify.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) Get a 20% discount on Nomatic’s amazing luggage at https://nomatic.com/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours with your first box at https://www.drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) Timestamps: (00:00) Are Cynical People Actually Smarter? (09:08) Trust in the Information Era (19:04) Why People Hate Uncertainty (32:36) The Truth About Censorship (42:18) People Would Rather Be Hated Than Unknown (50:02) Society’s Trend of Toxic Compassion (58:31) Don’t Base Decisions on Emotion (1:03:30) The Dynamic of Lazy Internet Insults (1:10:05) Being Intentional About Content Consumption (1:20:54) Convincing Ourselves of Our Own Beliefs (1:25:46) Why You Shouldn’t Neglect Reading (1:35:22) The Most Ignorant People (1:40:42) Is the News Just Entertainment? (1:51:04) What’s Next for Gurwinder Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: This Is How To Master Your Life - David Goggins - #577: ⁠⁠⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Goggins⁠⁠⁠ How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs - Dr Jordan Peterson - #712: ⁠⁠⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Peterson⁠⁠⁠ The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain - Dr Andrew Huberman - #700: ⁠⁠⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Huberman⁠⁠ - Get In Touch: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  Every single time, dude, you keep releasing these mega threads with cool ideas. I keep loving going through them. So today, we're going to go through as many of your ideas and some of mine that I've already made from home and we'll see what we can get to. First one, cynical genius illusion. Cynical people are seen as smarter, but sizable research suggests they actually tend to be dumber. Cynicism is not a sign of intelligence, but a substitute for it. A way to shield oneself from betrayal and disappointment without having to actually think.

• 0:32Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, so this is actually based on a pretty large study, which was conducted in 2018 by Stavrova et al. And it's basically what they did was they did a series of surveys to test the hypothesis that cynical people are more intelligent. Because a lot of sort of TV, popular culture portrays cynical people as intelligent. So you see characters like Dr. House, played by Hugh Laurie in that show, Sheldon from Big Bang Theory. A lot of these characters tend to be very cynical, very pessimistic, but also geniuses. So it's become a bit of a stereotype.

• 1:11Gurwinder Bhogal?

  So these researchers decided to test this by actually doing a massive study, which involved like 200,000 people in 30 different countries. And it was a series of surveys firstly to test their cynicism and secondly to test their competence, their sort of essentially their IQ. And it was interesting because they actually found the opposite of what a lot of people believe, which is that cynical people actually tend to be lower IQ or at least lower in their performance of cognitive tests. And it's actually very interesting because they sort of posit the, as an explanation for this,

• 1:52Gurwinder Bhogal?

  the idea that cynicism is basically a evolutionary heuristic to basically save people from having to think. It's basically a way to...

• 2:08Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Protect yourself against betrayal, to protect yourself against any form of kind of treachery, including treachery of your own expectations. And I can see how this would have probably been a useful heuristic, say about a hundred thousand years ago. They, they, in the study, they describe it as the better safe than sorry heuristic. So it's this idea that, for instance, if you're out there and you're in a low information environment, so let's go, let's go a hundred thousand years back into the past, right? So we don't have the internet, we don't have TV, we don't have books, we don't have real knowledge, we're in a low information environment, we're in the middle of a forest, and we see this alien looking fruit on a tree.

• 2:50Gurwinder Bhogal?

  And we have the choice whether we can eat it or not eat it. And we don't know what this fruit is, we've never, we've got no books, we've got no understanding of it, we've never seen it before. So in that situation, the best thing to do is to default to believing that it's dangerous. Because obviously, one fruit, if you eat it and it turns out to be harmless, it's not going to benefit you that much. But if you eat that fruit and it turns out to be poisonous, that's the end. So obviously, from that point of view, it makes sense to have this kind of pessimistic, risk averse sort of approach to life. Now, the thing is, is obviously the world now is very, very different from the world that we had. And yet we retain the same basic psychology, the same kind of biology.

• 3:35Gurwinder Bhogal?

  We are averse to risk, and that involves being sort of distrusting of other human beings, you know, because we don't know these other.

• 3:45Chris Williamson?

  One thing that I'm trying to bifurcate here, what's the difference between cynicism and conservatism, or risk aversion, or something like that?

• 3:53Gurwinder Bhogal?

  So cynicism is a kind of pessimism, but it's a pessimism with respect to other people's intentions. So it's believing that people are always doing things for the worst possible reasons. It's usually, you can summarize it as saying that people are only in it for themselves. You know, so basically, you can't trust people, basically. So.

• 4:16Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Obviously, could some conservatism could be a function of cynicism. But I think that obviously conservatism is much more broader than that. And it takes into account many other different heuristics. So the thing with cynicism is it's very low cognitive effort. It doesn't require you to really expend much mental effort to do anything. All you've got to do is not trust something, you know. And to basically just say to yourself, oh, wow, you know, I don't, I shouldn't do this because something bad might happen. And our brains are very, very good at finding reasons not to do something. So there's, you know, there's this idea where if you have a hole in your roof, you could reason to yourself.

• 5:01Gurwinder Bhogal?

  On a sunny day, you don't need to repair that hole in your roof. So you would just not do it. It'd be like, oh, what's the point? I don't need to do it. It's sunny outside. It's just letting sunshine into my house. It's actually a good thing. On the other hand, if it's raining, you could also say, oh, wow, it's raining. So I don't want to get wet, so I won't go out. I might slip from the ladder and fall, you know. So your brain is very good at inventing reasons not to do things. And so we have this natural kind of cynicism. And it actually takes mental effort to overcome that. It actually takes mental effort. In the study, they actually found that people with higher IQs actually tend to be more trusting, which is quite an unusual thing. You would expect it to be the other way around. You'd expect high intelligent people to be less trusting, but they're actually more trusting.

• 5:44Gurwinder Bhogal?

  And this is because they tend to be, they're not necessarily better at determining whether they should trust someone or not. But they're better at determining whether cynicism is warranted or not, which is slightly different.

• 5:56Chris Williamson?

  Why does this sort of presumption that hoping for the best or that believing in people is naive? And smart people would never be naive. One of the worst things that you could do is have the wall pulled over your eyes. It's seen as kind of juvenile or innocent or unsophisticated. And the converse of that is, you know, cynicism or skepticism is more mature intellectually in some way.

• 6:24Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, I mean, this is sort of like a very popular misconception, I think. And that's why cynicism is very popular, because it has the illusion. Because obviously, if you take no risks in life, then you're not going to fail ever at anything. Because you didn't go out, you didn't put yourself out there. You know, you have this idea that I've heard you speak about called the cynicism safety blanket, which I think really sort of jives with this very well, because obviously cynicism is a form of protection. It's sort of like this front that you put up, which protects you from any risk-taking. If you don't take any risks, if you don't go out there and if you don't try to succeed at anything, then you won't fail at anything.

• 7:05Gurwinder Bhogal?

  So, you know, it's basically like a way to guard yourself against any form of failure. And that's why I think people who maybe don't want to expend mental effort or emotional effort, because there's an emotional aspect to this as well. They will instead just choose not to take the risk. It's much easier to say, oh, I'm not going to take a risk because everything's gone to shit. Everybody's out for themselves. I'm not going to trust this person. I'm not going to love this person because, you know, they might betray me. They might, they might not return the affection. I'm not going to go out and try this new thing because I might fail. It's much easier just to not do any of that stuff. And then you can just say to yourself, oh, well, I've never failed. You know, it's like a kind of ego trip that you put yourself on.

• 7:50Gurwinder Bhogal?

  But the thing is, is the truly sort of intelligent people will say to themselves, well, look, yeah, I might fail. But at the end of the day, it's worth, it's worth trying. Because at the end of the day, if you don't try, you'll never achieve anything. You're not actually going to better yourself. You're just going to remain in the same situation whatsoever. And even failure can be good if you're intelligent. Failure can be good because you learn from failure. In fact, failure is pretty much the only thing we learn from, you know. It's the only lesson that we learn from. We don't learn when we succeed. We don't learn when we're happy. So intelligent people will tend to put themselves out there. They will risk engaging in ambitious endeavors. Because they know that at the end of the day, even if they fail at that endeavor,

• 8:35Gurwinder Bhogal?

  they're actually still improving their station because they're improving their knowledge. They're learning from it. So I think that's ultimately what it comes down to is. If you're not, if you don't have a high IQ, you can feign a high IQ by criticizing other people, their efforts and saying, oh, look at this fool, he failed, you know, whereas you'll never fail. So you say, oh, you'll always have that, you know, I've never failed, but then you've never actually succeeded either. So I think it's, it's, it's a guard, it's an emotional guard and it's an intellectual guard.

• 9:08Chris Williamson?

  Seagull's Law. A man with a watch knows what time it is. A man with two watches is never sure. Ancient societies followed a single narrative. Modern societies are cacophonies of competing narratives. Without trust, more data doesn't make us more informed, but more confused.

• 9:28Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah. So if you talk to a lot of these sort of disinformation academics, people who study disinformation and stuff, they'll often say that there's a problem of people not getting enough information, you know, there's this whole idea of low information voters and stuff, you know, that's what people tend to call euphemistically call people that they regard as stupid is low information. But the thing is, is the problem in society at the moment is not actually a lack of information, it's a lack of trust. That's the bottleneck that is stopping progress. Because look, we have, we have more information

• 10:08Gurwinder Bhogal?

  than we've ever had in whole of human history. I think I read somewhere that sort of every year, more information is produced than in all of the preceding years of human history. That's how much information is exploding.

• 10:22Chris Williamson?

  The most exponential of exponentials.

• 10:25Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, yeah. And so information is not the problem. We have more than enough information. The thing that's holding people back is a lack of trust. And I think this got particularly bad since sort of the pandemic, because, you know, obviously our mainstream institutions, which we sort of rely on to navigate the world for us. They showed that they were flawed during the pandemic, you know, for instance, um, at the beginning of the pandemic, the World Health Organization said that COVID is not airborne. And if you go on Twitter and you look at their page, the tweet's still up, you know, which says that COVID is not airborne, but we very quickly found out that COVID was airborne. And it was actually disastrous because people obviously were lulled into a false sense of security. So that was obviously a big problem. And then we also had the problem with the masks.

• 11:09Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Uh, you know, how efficacious are they? Um, then there was a problem of vaccines, like how efficacious are vaccines and what are the side effects? And then of course, there was the lab leak hypothesis. And, uh, you know, that was instantly dismissed as a conspiracy theory, despite the fact that there is at least as good an argument that that COVID escaped from a lab as that it was naturally, um, that it was a result of a natural spillover. So these events, I think, really destroyed trust in institutions. But I mean, obviously, this problem began before COVID. It just COVID exacerbated it a lot. And obviously, things have not gotten any better since then. You know, we've seen, um, for instance, the whole Harvard scandal, the plagiarism scandal. Um, this year, we've seen

• 11:54Gurwinder Bhogal?

  many big academic studies which have been shown to be completely bunk. Um, there was a, there's a famous professor, his name escapes me, but he did a series of studies about systemic racism, in which he basically showed that systemic racism is a thing. And this was picked up by the New York Times, the Washington Post to basically say, hey, look, systemic racism is a real thing. Look at these disparities in treatment of white people and black people. That was all shown to be complete nonsense. It was all fabricated. All the data was fabricated. And, uh, Dan Ariely, who's a famous psychologist, his work was also found to be fabricated. And ironically, there was a Harvard professor who was studying, um, faking of information,

• 12:35Gurwinder Bhogal?

  who ended up, her own work was, was faked. So, yeah, you know, so that this year has been really bad for academia. There's been a lot of, there's been a massive drop in trust. And if you look at any poll regarding trust in the media, you see a gradual slope. You see people. You see decline on both sides of the aisle, but particularly amongst people on the right. Because obviously, you know, there's this sort of idea that that most of the mainstream institutions in the West lean left. But even the left, even the left have less trust over time in institutions. And obviously, this has gotten a lot worse, a lot worse over the the few, the past few years. So the problem with trust is it's like, it's like a tree.

• 13:19Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Where it takes a long period of time of nourishment and light, seeing what's going on, to actually grow it. But it can be chopped down in like a day, you know, it takes years for a tree to grow, but it can be chopped down in a single day. And it's, you know, institutions, over many years, they try to build trust with the public. But a few real bad instances of betrayal of that trust have now caused the trust to a nosedive. And what's interesting here is this dovetails with what we were talking about previously about the cynical genius illusion. Because a lack of trust leads to more cynicism.

• 14:01Gurwinder Bhogal?

  And the cynicism stops people from, you know, doing things, that people become more risk averse. They become less likely to form partnerships with people, even to form relationships with people. And so there's a lot less sort of innovation in a sense, because people distrust a lot of things, you know. You see it in in our daily lives with the ways, again, this is, I'm not saying that this distrust is unwarranted, a lot of it is warranted. I mean, if you look at what's going on in in America, in San Francisco, in places like that, where you see.

• 14:38Gurwinder Bhogal?

  You know, the the government in San Francisco had an opportunity to clean up the streets, to to take the fentanyl users off the streets, to house them in a in a decent place. And, you know, to try and give them help and to to clean up the streets generally, and they didn't do it. They only did it when the premier of China, Xi Jinping, came out, you know, they thought, okay, now we've definitely got to do something about it. So they, that just showed that they just didn't care. Obviously, you know, when when there's a foreign leader coming to visit, then they suddenly clean up the streets. So this is obviously, you know, this is this distrust isn't necessarily unwarranted. But what's happened is the result of this is that. People tend to, no matter how much information you give them, no matter how much information

• 15:21Gurwinder Bhogal?

  the World Health Organisation or governments or corporations even try to give people, the fact is that there's this paucity of trust. And I don't, to be honest, I don't think that this trust is ever going to be fully restored. I personally don't trust institutions anymore. I find that it's easier to trust individuals now. That's what I do. I don't really trust institutions. And the reason for this is although there are a lot of low integrity individuals, there are also a lot of extremely high integrity individuals. And it's much easier to gauge whether an individual is high integrity than whether an institution is high integrity. In fact, most institutions tend to fall to the level of their lowest integrity members.

• 16:06Gurwinder Bhogal?

  This is because corrupt people obviously tend to rise high in institutions because they tend to be more ruthless, they tend to be more dishonest, they tend to play the game. And so the dishonest people rise to the top in institutions.

• 16:19Chris Williamson?

  People who are trustworthy on their own in solitude also become untrustworthy due to negligence or fear or compliance or the Abilene paradox. All of those things happen. So you get honest individuals and untrustworthy, highly falsified groups, even if they're made up, even if the constituent parts are trustworthy.

• 16:43Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, that's it. Yeah. It all comes down to the perverse incentive structures that institutions have. They tend to be these closed systems of status games. They also tend to be chasing money. And a lot of the time, these people are playing against each other for status. So it leads to purity spirals, for instance. And a lot of these perverse incentives ensure that institutions can never really rise above their worst members, whereas individuals.

• 17:13Gurwinder Bhogal?

  They are a lot more variable. Not every individual is is more trustworthy than every institution. But of the high integrity individuals, they're a lot more trustworthy than high integrity institutions. And so I tend to trust individuals a lot more in the ways that that I learn whether I can trust someone or not. I have a few heuristics, but you know, for instance, one of them would be, are they willing to publicly admit when they get things wrong? Because, you know, it takes it takes integrity to admit when you're wrong, but it takes a huge amount of integrity to do it publicly. And if you can do that, and that's a very rare, rare skill, a very, it takes a huge amount of strength to be able to go out there and say, okay, I was wrong.

• 17:54Gurwinder Bhogal?

  And so that for me is a very good indicator that somebody is high integrity. It shows that they value the truth more than their own ego.

• 18:00Chris Williamson?

  Do you know what? One of my, one of my favorite heuristics for this is when was the last time that the person you're thinking about surprised you with one of their takes? If they are very predictable with the things that they do, if if you know one of their views and from it, you can accurately predict everything else that they believe. They're probably not a serious thinker. They've just absorbed some ideology wholesale. What you want is someone who you don't always necessarily agree with, but definitely you can't predict. Like, obviously, most people do fall in some sort of grouping of of ideologies. That's why we tend to have people that birds of a feather. But yeah, when was the last time that this person surprised you with something that they commented about?

• 18:40Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, that's definitely one of mine as well, because it it shows that somebody's willing to sort of think for themselves rather than sort of subscribe to a a a total package ideology, which just gives you everything, you know, tells you what to think about abortion, tells you what to think about gun control, tells you what to think about freezing speech. You know, all of these things are generally unrelated, but if somebody's got all of these predictable opinions, it shows you that they're kind of getting it all wholesale from somewhere else.

• 19:04Chris Williamson?

  There's there's something that I think is associated with this, another one of yours, ambiguity aversion. People tend to find uncertain outcomes less tolerable than bad outcomes. De Burckher et al. two thousand and sixteen found that test participants who were told they had a small chance of receiving an electric shock exhibited much higher stress levels than those who knew they'd certainly receive an electric shock.

• 19:27Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, I mean, this this explains so much. I mean, everything from sort of the world of investing. Yeah, it explains market volatility, um, you know, but it also explains things at a personal level. Where one thing I've found in my personal life is that things are never as bad as I think that they're going to be. Pretty much, but it's, you know, it's just, it's a very simple thing, but but I find that the sort of the anxiety of expecting what what. Or trying to expect what's going to happen is often worse than the actual any, even the worst eventuality. So, you know, for instance, if I were, if I were one of my old selves, you know, from, say. Ten years ago, I might be nervous having this conversation with you right now, knowing that a lot of people are listening.

• 20:10Gurwinder Bhogal?

  And I would probably be playing in my head a lot of times where it could go wrong. I might say the the wrong word, you know. I might, you know, might say something really bad. I might say the N word or something accidentally, you know, and then that's it, you know.

• 20:22Gurwinder Bhogal?

  You know, and I would think about the worst possible scenario, right? And um, that would really like, you know, give me nightmares, but then. I would find that even if the worst did happen, it probably wouldn't actually be that bad. Not that I'm actually going to say the N word, but like, you know, it just, it's, things are always worse in your mind because your mind is. Is more terrifying than reality. Your imagination is more terrifying than reality. It's a more skilled um, sort of scaremonger than reality, you know, because it it can, it knows your worst fears. And so I think when you're uncertain, you could often imagine extremely bad outcomes. Uh, because you're in that uncertainty, that's where your your imagination runs riot.

• 21:06Gurwinder Bhogal?

  That's one aspect of it. With regards to um. The ambiguity version that you're talking about with the uh, with the electric shocks. Again, it's it's managing the anxiety of uncertainty that takes a bigger toll. On somebody than actually just resigning themselves to the worst outcome. I found that this is again, you know, if if I just, if I know that something is going to happen, something bad is going to happen. It gives me a sense of peace of mind because I I know what to predict, I know what to expect. And so I don't need to expend stress and mental effort in trying to uh, find a way out of it, trying to uh, trying to sort of uh.

• 21:50Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Predict what's going to happen because trying to predict what's going to happen is a very stressful sort of thing to do. It basically requires you to consider an extremely wide swathe of possibilities and our minds are just not very good at doing that. We, you know, if we have just one path ahead of us, even if that's a bad, a bad path, even if it's got a ditch at the end of it, it's much easier to just continue along that path and say, okay, so when it happens, I'll deal with it, you know, than it is to say, okay, which of these paths has got ditch at the end, you know, what, how many steps away is it, you know, but every step you take, you have to be worried that you might fall down that ditch. So it's the, it's the stress

• 22:34Gurwinder Bhogal?

  of having to navigate possibility, which ends up causing more mental discomfort than the actual bad outcome itself.

• 22:42Chris Williamson?

  Do you think that ambiguity aversion explains some of the conspiratorial thinking, doomsday cultish like fads that we've seen, that it actually closes down the potential optionality of the world to one thing, one bad thing, but it gives you a sense of certainty as opposed to leaving you open to ambiguity?

• 23:04Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, absolutely. 100% because I think there is one thing that's scarier than a conspiracy of people plotting everything. And that is no conspiracy of people plotting everything, that everything is just rudderless, that society's rudderless, basically. Nobody knows what they're doing, you know, everybody is just kind of trying to navigate the world as best as they can. There is no overarching plan. That's scary also. And so it leads to uncertainty when you don't know what to expect, when you can't blame your problems on a single thing, when, you know, that leaves, again, it leaves so many paths ahead of you that you just become overwhelmed and you just kind of like.

• 23:47Gurwinder Bhogal?

  The stress of trying to work out which path is the true, true one, that is an underrated form of stress, whereas the stress of knowing that there is a bad, there's a group of bad people out there who are plotting everything. That actually isn't really stressful at all. In fact, it's actually quite interesting. Because then you want to go online and you want to know more about it.

• 24:05Chris Williamson?

  A degree of certainty about it. Yeah, I came up with this idea called anxiety cost. So in the same way as you have opportunity cost, the amount of time that you spend thinking about a thing that you could have gotten rid of, had you have just done the thing. When you wake up in the morning, you need to meditate, walk the dog, go to work. The longer that it takes to meditate, the more times you have to have the thought, I still need to meditate today. That is a very effortful thing to do. And this is like a protracted version of that. There was this from Matthew Syed in the Times. This is back in 2020. Psychologists have conducted experiments to shed light on why people lose or at least suspend rationality. One experiment asked people to imagine going to a doctor to hear an uncertain medical diagnosis. Such people were significantly more likely to express the belief that God was in control of their lives.

• 24:49Chris Williamson?

  Another asked participants to imagine a time of deep uncertainty when they feared for their jobs or the health of their children. They were far more likely to see a pattern in meaningless static or to infer that two random events were connected. This is such a common finding that psychologists have given it a name. Compensatory control. When we feel uncertain, when randomness intrudes upon our lives, we respond by reintroducing order in some other way. Superstitions and conspiracy theories speak to this need. It is not easy to accept that important events are shaped by random forces. This is why, for some, it makes more sense to believe that we are threatened by the grand plans of malign scientists than the chance mutation of a silly little microbe.

• 25:31Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, absolutely. I think it explains so much about why we dramatize reality. We tend to sort of turn events into stories because it's much more orderly. You know, if you try to comprehend the world as it actually is.

• 25:51Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Your mind will be overwhelmed. You know, there's just, there's so many variables going on all over the world, like that we have to reduce things down to simple patterns, which we call stories. In which we basically, we have a sim, you know, we, we collapse the sort of web of causality down to a single thread. And that makes life a lot easier to sort of comprehend, even if it's, it's not sort of, it's not completely true what we believe, but it's true enough that we can get on with our lives and just kind of, you know, not have to worry about it. So much of our brains.

• 26:24Chris Williamson?

  What you're looking for with, with any kind of sort of sense-making, truth-making system is I want to be able to move through the world with reliable predictive accuracy of what's going to happen. But really what's deeper than that is I just don't want to expend that much mental effort trying to work out what's going to happen. And the difference between those two allows this to slip in, which is what mono-thinking is, right? If, if every single problem in the world is because of capitalism, or the climate change, or the libtards, or the whatever, if every single problem is due to the same solution, that's because the demand for answers outstrips your ability to supply them. So you just retrofit one answer to all questions.

• 27:08Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, absolutely. Again, it's, it's a cognitive sort of, it's, it's an energy-saving mechanism that we people engage in. And I think, yeah, it, it, it explains so much of the current landscape, the current sort of online landscape in particular, explains tribalism. It's much easier just to, for instance, I saw this really good tweet by Michael Malice. I think he's been on this show, on your show.

• 27:37Chris Williamson?

  Many, many times, unfortunately.

• 27:38Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah. Yeah. And he said, I haven't got it in front of me, but he wrote something like in terms, he said, people don't see the world, including, sorry, most people don't navigate the world by a true and false filter, but by an us and them filter. And so it's like this, true and false is too much of a cognitive demand. You're trying to work out what's true and false. It's just way too much effort for most people. And it it requires statistical analysis. It requires looking at hard data. It requires sort of suppressing your own emotions. There's so much that you need to do in order to actually work out what's true.

• 28:19Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Whereas if you just adopt a very simple us versus them heuristic, it's so much easier. And you can still get on in your life because if you have an us versus them sort of strategy, then you're going to be in the same boat with a group of other people who will help you, you know, sort of navigate the world and they'll become your allies. So it's just so less cognitively demanding to do that. And pretty much everything about our sort of mental architecture is configured to this sort of system because that's how we evolved. You know, when we were hunter gatherers, we lived in tribes and we we sort of engaged in tribal warfare. So everything that we've just been talking about, this pattern matching and everything

• 29:02Gurwinder Bhogal?

  is all in the service of tribalism ultimately. So we will see the best in what our allies say, and we will see the worst in what our enemies say. We'll, you know, we'll interpret it in the worst possible way. We will see signs in the clouds that sort of portend that God is on our side or whatever. You know, he's on our side and he, you know, he hates the enemies, you know, whatever it is, you know, we'll find patterns that justify an us versus them sort of attitude naturally. You know, that's what comes naturally to us. And it also explains why we see things in terms of drama rather than data. You know, I think this was one of my other sort of concepts that I was talking about, compassionate aid.

• 29:46Gurwinder Bhogal?

  It's this idea that sort of there were experiments that were conducted in which people,

• 29:55Gurwinder Bhogal?

  they basically engaged in sort of these appeals for charity. So what they did is like a sort of campaign for for funding for charity. And they had two different ways of doing it. One way was based on presenting famine statistics and hard data. And the other was based on presenting the story of a single starving girl. And the people tended to donate a lot more to the girl. And the reason for this is that the hard data is alien to the human brain. And statistics is just something that we're not, it's not, our brains are not formatted for that kind of data analysis, which is not, you know, it's too much effort. It requires too many calories and too much time.

• 30:38Gurwinder Bhogal?

  So what our brains do is we, again, we collapse the web of causality. We collapse all the variables into a single thread, a single line, a single linear sort of vector, which just has a beginning, a middle and an end. So, you know, the girl is starving, she needs your help. You give her your help, she is no longer starving and therefore you've saved, you know, you saved a girl and then that's it. And then you're a good person, you know? So that's how we sort of, we've collapsed the whole world down to these single narrative threads. And it just makes, because obviously we think in the language of story. If you want to convince people, that's how you've got to appeal to people. You've got to, you, statistics aren't going to help. You, you can, you can rattle off all the numbers you want, you know?

• 31:22Gurwinder Bhogal?

  And the bigger they are, the more alien they are and the less they'll be believed, the less they'll be really comprehended. You get the story of a single girl and you present her story in a narrative sequence in, in the way that people tell stories, you know? You could use a three act structure, you could use the hero's journey, whatever system you want, but as long as it's a narrative thread, a single narrative thread, you'll reach a lot more people.

• 31:46Chris Williamson?

  So yeah, we're not donating a million times more money or feeling a million times worse when we hear the story of a million kids compared with the one of the single kid. In fact, it's probably the opposite, that that pulls on our heartstrings. Yeah, the personification of, of data and stories, and you can see this, the charity example is perfectly right. They are split testing into oblivion what the most effective way to pull on people's heartstrings is like they, they know. So if you want to find out how to motivate people's behavior, just watch a charity advert because they're not doing the thing that doesn't motivate behavior. They're doing precisely the thing that motivates behavior and they'll have had behavioral scientists and behavioral economics guys, they'll have had Rory Sutherland will be in there and the

• 32:30Chris Williamson?

  copywriters and all the rest of it, split testing everything. And that's what they've arrived at. Right, next one. Preference falsification. If people are afraid to say what they really think, they will instead lie. Therefore punishing speech, whether by taking offense or by threatening censorship is ultimately a request to be deceived.

• 32:51Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, I mean, so this, I think, is another reason why there's actually a distrust in institutions, because they've tended to react to criticism by essentially censoring people. But censorship is based on a very outdated way of operating. It's based on a very outdated information architecture. So censorship would have worked very well 100 years ago, when there was a centralized authority which passed information down to everybody, whether it was via printed leaflets or television screens.

• 33:32Gurwinder Bhogal?

  You know, information was very central, it was very centralized. But that system no longer works, because the reason it worked in the past was because since the authorities provided a single system of information. So for instance, think about the TV, right? The TV tend to, in the UK, the TV tended to only have four channels originally, when I was young, very young. And those four channels all tended to have the same sort of narrative. So if you wanted to censor certain information, you could just basically, you could pass a law, because this was broadcast media, so they were beholden to government intervention. So you could pass a law saying that, you know, oh, the four channels are not allowed to talk about this. So therefore, now, none of that information is going to get beamed into people's homes.

• 34:17Gurwinder Bhogal?

  So now, nobody can ever know what that information was. But that kind of sort of centralized information structure no longer exists. All information in the West, at least, is decentralized, or it's decentralizable, in the sense that somebody can pick up on anything now and make it go viral. So now censorship doesn't work. Now what happens is people are well aware of what's being censored, and you have this thing, obviously, the Streisand effect, where when people learn what's being censored, then they want to know what that thing is even more. You know, in the past, like, the further back into the past we go, the less likely

• 35:00Gurwinder Bhogal?

  this Streisand effect was, because people wouldn't even know what was being censored, since information was centralized. But now, because information is everywhere...

• 35:11Gurwinder Bhogal?

  That information is going to leak leak out. People are going to know what's being censored. People are going to know, even if they don't know the precise thing that's being censored, they're going to know what kind of information is being censored from them. Because somebody's going to spill the beans somewhere because of how interconnected everything is. You know, all it takes is just one person to spill the beans and then that's going to go viral. Everybody's going to find out about it. And we see this repeatedly, you know, like for instance with the lab leak, lab leak, going back to the lab leak hypothesis. Immediately, as soon as Facebook and Twitter and everybody else tried to stifle that story, it went viral and everybody was talking about it because it just isn't possible. Yeah, Hunter Biden, that's another perfect example. There's many other examples, you know.

• 35:54Gurwinder Bhogal?

  As soon as one organization tries to censor something, other individuals will immediately raise the alarm. And as soon as that happens, everybody now wants to know what that thing was censored. They want to know why it was withheld from them. This is, you know, this thing called reactants, sometimes called the backfire effect, where when you withhold, when you say people can't have something, they become even more adamant that they want it. They want it even more, you know. And so this leads to essentially a backfire, you know, that's why it's called the backfire effect. And what happens is that people then decide that, hang on a second,

• 36:35Gurwinder Bhogal?

  if this is being withheld from me, then it's going to obviously, I mean, I'm kind of, I'm going a little bit, I'm veering off a little bit from the original thing, but so that's, that's one aspect of it. But like, yeah, another aspect of this whole censorship thing is that when people realize that they can't say certain things, they instead will lie and they will, then they're not going to change their beliefs. Like I said, the backfire effect means that people don't become, if you censor people, they're not going to become less likely to believe that thing. They're going to become more likely to believe that thing. You know, and the only thing that's going to change is that, that if, if they know that they're going to get banned for saying something, they'll just lie. But they're not, it's not going to change their thoughts. In fact, the opposite is happening.

• 37:19Gurwinder Bhogal?

  And so it's, it's, it's a counterproductive thing to do in the digital age. That's why censorship just doesn't work in the digital age. Because although people, you could control what people say online, you can't control what they think. In fact, what you do is you make people more adamant to think what they want to think.

• 37:34Chris Williamson?

  And so they become more entrenched in their beliefs. Well, you taught me a couple of episodes ago about the chilling effect. When punishment for what people say becomes widespread, people stop saying what they really think. And instead say whatever is needed to thrive in the social environment. Thus, limits on speech become limits on sincerity. It seems very similar to preference falsification. Is there, is there a distinction between the two? Is there, where is the difference?

• 37:56Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah. So I mean, they are essentially the same thing. I mean, maybe the difference would be something of scale where preference falsification really refers more to the individual actions. You know, and then you have things like the spiral of silence, which is another way of saying the same thing. Spiral of silence is, is the cumulative effect of preference falsification. So what happens is that certain ideas become more and more verboten over time. And, and when they become verboten, then people don't want to be the first person.

• 38:24Chris Williamson?

  Verboten?

• 38:26Gurwinder Bhogal?

  So it's just a fancy way of saying forbidden.

• 38:28Chris Williamson?

  Okay, that's cool. Verboten?

• 38:30Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, German. But it's for some reason, I don't know why I said verboten when I could have just said forbidden.

• 38:34Chris Williamson?

  That's nice. I like, I prefer it.

• 38:36Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah.

• 38:38Gurwinder Bhogal?

  But like, yeah, it, it, what happens is that it leads to a spiral of silence. So the more that an idea becomes unsayable, the less likely people are to say it. And so the, the more it becomes unsayable. So it becomes a, it's kind of like a cycle. Yeah, it's self reinforcing system. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, I, I just don't know what people are thinking. Like these organizations, when they think that they can censor information in the digital age, it just, it, it just very, very rarely works. It might work in a place like China, but even in China, right? Where the government has absolute control, you know, they've got the, the sort of the great firewall, what they call the great firewall. But even that is not enough now.

• 39:20Gurwinder Bhogal?

  They've, there've been cases now where information has gone viral that the CCP didn't want to go viral because they were trying to stifle it. And in the age of, you know, even though they, they, they do all they can, it just isn't possible because of the number. Because of how it fast information travels in the digital age and because of the number of connections between nodes, it's just not possible to use censorship anymore. So any, any organisation that's trying to use censorship, they're using 20th century tactics against 21st century information systems. It just doesn't work. And again, it leads to more distrust of institutions. So this goes back to this whole thing that we're talking about with, you know, the, the problem of trust in society and it leads

• 40:03Gurwinder Bhogal?

  to more cynicism. So all of it, you know, so going, so between the backfire effect and the cynical, the whole cynical thing, you know, it, it just makes things worse. And I don't know when institutions are going to learn this, but eventually they will, hopefully.

• 40:18Chris Williamson?

  Well, you end up, you end up with this, uh, this kind of game where they chase their own tail in a little bit. So for instance, you see this with YouTube channels. So a YouTube channel will begin to struggle with plays and they won't be too sure why. And everybody has on YouTube, when it comes to the way that they frame their episodes and what they do, both content and framing, they have a, an Overton window that they exist within and they're not prepared usually to go beyond a particular level of boring because people aren't going to click. And there's usually an upper bound of clickbaitness that they're also not prepared to go past because that seems kind of hacky. And what will happen is they will begin to skew more and more toward the clickbait side. They will

• 40:57Chris Williamson?

  use more limbic hijack words, war, battle, uh, like, like imagery, the whole Mr. Beastification faces, they'll lean more down that. But the problem that you have, as you begin to pull that lever more and more to chase ever declining plays, your audience becomes increasingly desensitised to the subtlety that you want them to come back to. So it's a one way street. My point being that you chase that sort of limbic hijack game and it makes people become increasingly desensitised to the things that you can say in the same way as institutions that feel like they're losing control, increasingly apply more rigorous, um, high levels of scrutiny,

• 41:38Chris Williamson?

  high levels of control. And what happens? It drives the trust down ever more. You can't dictate trust top down. It has to be emergent. It has to come out bottom up. And, but they're chasing it more and more. Oh my God, we need to do more because the trust is declining and that means that we need to use more, you know, ever more totalitarian techniques to do this. And it doesn't work.

• 41:58Gurwinder Bhogal?

  And the fact that they think, and the fact that they think that it's going to work actually makes it even harder to trust them because they're just so wrong about that. So you, you ask yourself, what else are they wrong about? They've got to be wrong about so many of the things. If they don't understand this basic facet of human psychology, then you know, they're, they're pretty much hard to trust on anything else.

• 42:17Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Herostratic fame. Many people would rather be hated than unknown. In ancient Greece, Herestatus burned down the temple of Artemis purely so he'd be remembered. Now we have nuisance influencers who stream themselves committing crimes and harassing people purely for clout.

• 42:40Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah. So this has become a serious problem now, I think. So I don't know if you know who Jack Doherty is.

• 42:48Chris Williamson?

  I do. This sort of world of IRL streamers and Jack Doherty tells me when I get this wrong.

• 42:54Gurwinder Bhogal?

  There are a few of them.

• 42:55Chris Williamson?

  He appears to kind of start fights in person and has massive bouncers slash security guys with him, most of whom seem to be black. And then they will sort out whatever the issue is by punching or choking out the person that Jack just started some beef with. And then the internet goes completely crazy by saying this dude started on somebody, then got his six foot seven behemoth of a security guy to step in and smash some kid in the face. And now he's getting paid millions of dollars and has a Lambo and lives in LA or something.

• 43:32Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Exactly. Yeah. And he's not the only one. I mean, this, this is a whole trend, you know, there's, so there's people like Mizzy, for instance, you probably know about Mizzy as well, who was the guy who was going into libraries and ripping up the books whilst filming the librarians to see what they would do. And then you have like Johnny Somali, who would go out and start harassing people in the streets and recording their reactions. And he actually went to Japan and it's quite interesting because he first he got knocked out, he got hit in the face and knocked out because in Japan they don't screw around, right? And then he got arrested and now he's in jail, at least last I heard he was in jail. He's in jail in Japan, right? So, so there is occasionally, there is comeuppance, but I mean, most of the time, there is no comeuppance for these influencers.

• 44:15Gurwinder Bhogal?

  And they just go out there and they harass people in the streets and they record it. Because they know, again, this is limbic hijacking, right? They know that they're just, by appealing to the worst, most basest impulses of the human brain, they can get a lot of eyeballs. And so they just basically, they would, there's a lot of pressure on young people to be, to have a lot of followers on, on social media, for instance, you know? And they wanna, they wanna be popular, everybody wants to be the cool kids and, and one way to get a, a large following online, if you don't have other talents, is to just be an asshole, you know? Just be an asshole and film people around you and the people will get hate followers, they'll get hate audiences who watch them simply to hate on them.

• 44:56Gurwinder Bhogal?

  And I think, you know, people like Mizzy and Jack Doherty have fallen to this, uh, this kind of strategy. I think, I think Jack Doherty, originally, he was just some, he just did some other lifestyle stuff. But he obviously found this niche and he thought, wow, I'm making way more money doing this. And now he's a millionaire, I mean, he's, he's got a lot of money and, you know, he's, he's got a very glamorous lifestyle, at least it appears glamorous. If you look at his Instagram account, you know, he's surrounded by fancy cars and beautiful women and all this stuff, you know? And he portrays this kind of lifestyle of, you know, I'm success. But really, when you look at what he does to earn that success now, he just goes out there and he just makes life miserable for everybody. And this is bad because this is creating, again, this is creating a very perverse incentive structure.

• 45:42Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Fueled by TikTok again, and the Chinese government probably knows that they're doing this and that they're allowing that these, these nuisance influencers to get a lot of views on TikTok because they know that it's bad for America and it's bad for the UK and it's bad for West in general.

• 45:59Gurwinder Bhogal?

  But yeah, I mean, so it's a race to the bottom now where you've got a lot of people competing to be the most nuisance, to be the biggest nuisance, to be the, the worst possible human being. People who formerly were pranksters, people like Fuzi Tube, uh, so you'd probably know about.

• 46:14Chris Williamson?

  Fucking hell, yeah, he, uh, he basically had a full-on psychological break on camera, got arrested by Miami police, called the cops, like on himself, pretended that he was, someone had a knife or a gun or something. Yeah, wild, wild.

• 46:31Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Exactly. And the crazy thing is, is that we don't even know if this was genuine or not. This could have all been part of, again, just being a nuisance, you know. Uh, it might be real, you know, it might not, we don't know. Because the, the line between sort of real and, and sort of fiction is sort of blurring now. And, um, you know, for instance, Mizzy said that all of his pranks were planned and stuff. But it, it's hard to believe that he would go into, say, Asda, go to a superstore. And, you know, he would start riding on the, um, the sort of disabled, uh, trolley things that they have. And, you know, just smashing shelves and stuff and that the supermarkets would actually allow him to do that. It just, that is just not, I don't believe that, you know, but like, um. A lot of them will say stuff like that to defend themselves if they get into a lot of hot water.

• 47:13Gurwinder Bhogal?

  And ultimately, what this does is that this creates really bad incentives for kids. Because if you think about in the past, in order to be, you know, at the dawn of YouTube, for instance. In order to get a big following on YouTube, you tended to have to do something that was extraordinary in some way. And extraordinary in a positive sense. Uh, you, you tend to, you know, have to be talented at something. The, the first big YouTubers tended to be sort of musicians. Um, or sort of, you know, athletes of some kind of people who had some kind of skill. But very soon, people realized that you could actually develop just as big of a following. By having zero talent and just being a nuisance, just being an asshole to people. And once that happened, this kind of nuisance influencing went viral.

• 47:57Gurwinder Bhogal?

  And it's essentially a race to the bottom now, where people are competing now to be the worst possible human being. Which really sets a bad precedent, it sets bad incentives for young, other young kids watching this. Because when the kids watch it, they say, oh, you know, I want to be like Mizzy, I want to be like Jack Doherty. You know, I want to have all these fancy girls, all these fancy cars, you know. I wanna, I wanna be like that, so I'm gonna learn how to be a, an insufferable human being. That person's bringing, that person is bringing no value to, to life and they're getting rewarded for it.

• 48:28Chris Williamson?

  People respond to incentives. Yeah, they respond to incentives. And if, if you say, rather than working really hard at a thing consistently for a long period of time and accumulating skills and making yourself worthwhile. The bottom of the brain, it's the reason, I think in part, that there is some distaste against silver spoon dynasty children and only fans influencers. That there's something, uh, something unfair. It feels like, well, you, you got that, but you didn't work for it. And in a meritocratic system, which is what we've got, that's always going to get people's backs up. I have to work harder than this person to get less.

• 49:08Chris Williamson?

  How can that be fair? Oh, well, it's because they were given a privilege that I didn't get. That seems unfair. It's because they're prepared to compromise their morals in some way that I see as I wouldn't do. Therefore, I am somehow superior to them. There's this like Puritan sort of nobility that gets associated with it. But when we're talking about nuisance influences, which I think is a phenomenal term that I've never heard of before. And dude, that first sentence that you put, uh, many people would rather be hated than unknown. Just brilliant. And I can't, I know that you've got two books in the works, one of which you may have submitted, but I can't wait for both of them, man. Like I think I, all of the times I watch very similar stuff to what you watch. And yet what you're able to pull out of it is significantly more in depth than me. So I'm, I'm very, very excited for what you've got coming up.

• 49:55Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Thank you.

• 49:56Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Uh, so I've got one, one, here's one that I made earlier. So toxic compassion. In a world where our opinions have been separated from our deeds, appearing to do good has become more important than actually doing good. The prioritization of short-term emotional comfort over actual long-term flourishing motivates people to say the things which make them appear caring and empathetic, even if they result in negative outcomes over time. And this is seen most obviously in support for the body positivity movement. Rather than make someone feel uncomfortable about their weight, you would say that weight has no bearing on health. Even if that encourages people or discourages them from losing weight, which results in worse outcomes over the long term.

• 50:40Chris Williamson?

  Same thing could, could have been seen for defund the police, that rather than talk about some of the challenges that are faced by different groups. When it comes to policing, you say that all police are mistreating minorities. Therefore, the police should be withdrawn, even if the actual outcome over the long term is more poor policing and more negative outcomes for those precise minorities that you were looking to protect in the first place.

• 51:09Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So this brings together quite a few very, very interesting and informative ideas, one of which would be luxury beliefs, which I think you kind of alluded to at the end there. And also my idea of the opinion pageant, where the whole thing about the social media has caused us to sort of overvalue opinions as a gauge of character. You know, we're sort of judged more by what we say than by what we do. And so this goes to what you were saying initially about how it's all about looking good rather than doing good, which again echoes what Elon Musk said, I think, in a talk, I think, with the New York Times a couple of weeks ago, you know, where he just expressed a

• 51:52Gurwinder Bhogal?

  bit of outrage at how corporations are trying to look good but not actually doing good. And yeah, I think this is one of the key concepts to understand the digital age, where because we now have an image oriented sort of economy, where everything, your success in life is based on how you appear to others now, more than ever, because we're all, because social media is where people come to promote their stuff, whether you're a corporation, whether you're a politician, whether you're an influencer, you know, everybody's on social media trying to promote themselves, trying to show why their brand is the brand that you should, you know, sort of buy into. And part of this is this whole social game, this

• 52:37Gurwinder Bhogal?

  new social game. I mean, obviously, there's always been a social game as long as there's been a society, but it's been sort of pushed to the forefront by the fact that the vast majority of our lives now are spent trying to appear a certain way to people in terms of, you know, just on social media. It really explains so much of everything from sort of cancellation. Um. To uh the kinds of uh politics that we have now polarization um and even disinformation. You know, all of these things really ultimately come down to people trying to look as good as they can, rather than trying to do as good as they can. Um. So people are, you know, for peddling uh theories that that,

• 53:20Gurwinder Bhogal?

  again, the the peddling theories that they're going to hijack people's brains and um, you know, scare among them. Or they're trying to um convince people that they're morally superior. So they will uh, you know, they'll they'll sort of uh post their luxury beliefs online. And um, I think that it's hard to really work out how we go from here, where everything is image oriented and things are becoming more so. Um. I think that

• 53:54Gurwinder Bhogal?

  ultimately, I think there may be some kind of. I mean, we're kind of seeing it already where we we've seen it with there's a kind of backlash to people just going against looking good, trying to people counter signaling. Uh. There's been a rise of counter signaling. Um. I think that Trump's election in twenty sixteen was a form of counter signaling, where people elected the most obnoxious outwardly, you know, like kind of somebody who just made no effort to even appear good, or at least they did it in a really, really obnoxious and sort of overbearing cartoonish way, almost as a parody of the society that we're living in. I think that was a kind of counter signaling, but I think that, yeah, there's also, there's been the rise of vice signaling

• 54:39Gurwinder Bhogal?

  as a as a response to the sort of prevalence of virtue signaling. But even like vice signaling is where people will outwardly just say things that they know are going to upset people. Um. You could even say that this nuisance influencing is a kind of vice signaling where people are like, I don't care. You know, I'm I'm I'm over and above the morality game. I I don't have to appear good. I can just be the worst person possible. People like Andrew Tate, for instance, who have developed massive followings by saying the opposite of what is considered good by the majority of society, you know, um. You see even Elon Musk, Elon Musk is counter signaling very, very strongly on Twitter a lot of the time where he will say things that are the complete opposite of what we've been taught.

• 55:21Gurwinder Bhogal?

  We should say by the New York Times, by the Washington Post, by the World Health Organization, all these other, you know, mainstream organizations. They tell us that we should be saying these kinds of beliefs. We should be portraying this kind of person. We should be, you know, this is how we should be to be a good person. And then you've got these rogues like Elon, like Donald Trump, like Andrew Tate, who are basically saying, no, screw that. Let's do the opposite of what they say. So that's a kind of backlash. But in a strange sense, this vice signaling is itself a kind of virtue signaling. Because it is signaling to others that you are way above all of this silly sort of, you know, bickering that people are engaging in.

• 56:00Chris Williamson?

  It's the same reason why Yeezys have got progressively more ugly over time. And if you actually look at what counts for a lot of super fashionable streetwear at the moment, it's almost like hobo chic. Well, that's because you're saying, look, I have so much surplus cool in me that I can basically dress what is so orthogonal to what other people think is cool and still be cool. That's how cool I am, which oddly, because of how cool is kind of, it's just so subjective. If you call something cool and if enough people agree, it kind of is. And no one can falsify whether it is or not. But yeah, this, this toxic compassion thing I've been playing around with for ages. And it's, the interesting bit is that second part, it's a prioritization of short term emotional comfort over long term flourishing.

• 56:45Chris Williamson?

  Saying things, you know, like you're totally correct. Living life online has caused us to flatten down how we are judged to be about proclamations rather than actions. And it's the reason that people were bullied about whether they did or didn't post a black square. It's about whether you do or don't have Ukraine in your bio. It's about whether you do or don't have pronouns in your email signature, all of those things. And yeah, that. The additional

• 57:12Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Again, yeah, it's perverse incentives. You know, I think that's probably the running theme of today's discussion is we're creating all these perverse incentives for people to follow. And that's essentially what's driving these behaviors is that we're rewarding, we're rewarding, like you said, we're rewarding the short term gains over the long term, the actual proper gains, which are the long term gains. We're sort of trapping ourselves in these, in these compulsion loops. So compulsion loops are this idea from gaming and gamification, where you trap people in these short term cycles of effort and reward that can often lead them away from what they should really be doing. And we're all getting trapped in

• 57:55Gurwinder Bhogal?

  these compulsion loops, whether it's being, you know, being a nuisance, being an asshole online, or whether it's being virtue singular online, you know, we're kind of all chasing these short term rewards at the expense, well, not all of us, but I mean, many of us are, you know, I like to think that you and I are a little bit better. But I mean, we're not, we're not completely, you know, we're not completely immune to it.

• 58:14Chris Williamson?

  I mean, think about how many times anyone that's ever been on a plane, knowing that they don't have connection, gets their phone out, swipes up, cycles through a bunch of apps, even knowing that nothing can have happened, it's a compulsion. It's just a, it's ingrained in there. Right, next one. Tarzwell's razor. Emotion causes bias, but it also causes motivation. As such, we're most likely to act when our judgment can be trusted least. Solution: don't trust thoughts you have while emotional. Instead, pause and wait for the feeling to pass before acting.

• 58:49Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Hmm. Yeah, so I think everybody is not a single person, but is a collection of selves. And some of these selves are much more representative of who we are at our core than others. And I think emotion can bring out a side of us that is not really us. And it can cause us to act in ways that we would later regret.

• 59:17Gurwinder Bhogal?

  And I've found this myself, like I don't really do it anymore, but back in the early days, you know, like 10 years ago, I would get, sometimes I'd get angry online. If somebody said something nasty to me and I would be spiteful and I would say something nasty back. And I would later read back what I'd written and I'd just be like, wow, you know, I can't believe I actually said that, you know, what an asshole I was, you know, I basically was just as bad as them. Like, you know, I should be, I should be better. And I just realized that that person that is saying those things was not actually me, because if I'm later regretting when I'm calm, I'm later regretting what I actually said when I was angry, then I'm not, it's not really me.

• 59:58Gurwinder Bhogal?

  I'm, I'm, one of the things I say is that, you know, when you act, when you're emotional, you are an ambassador for your most primitive self. You're basically acting for your most animal self, because you're engaging your reptilian brain and any decision that I've made when I've been emotional has pretty much turned out to be a bad decision. I mean, or at least it's been suboptimal. I always make better decisions when I'm mentally sort of balanced. And I think that's true of pretty much any, anybody, but if you send that email in the spur of the moment, more often than not, you're going to think, ah, I could have weathered that better, you know, I could have weathered that a lot better. So what I do now is, it's not like I'm a robot. I do feel emotions, you know, if somebody says something nasty to me online,

• 1:00:42Gurwinder Bhogal?

  I get an urge to just be nasty back, you know, I get it, like we all do, we're all humans. But I don't, I never, I never do it now. I never, you know, I never like, just, I'm never spiteful. If I, if I reply to somebody and sometimes I'm snarky, I am snarky, but I tend to do it in a way that I think is more productive. But what I always do is I, if I'm feeling particularly emotional, I'll always wait for that emotion to pass because it will pass. And it's amazing how often, when you let that emotion pass, and then you consider what you were, would have done when you were emotional and you realize how idiotic it would have been. You know, that's happened to me so many times that it's, I actually am afraid of acting when I'm emotional now. Because I just realized how, how demented I am when I'm emotional.

• 1:01:25Gurwinder Bhogal?

  And I think this is true of everybody. Yeah, it is deranging because I mean, emotions ultimately. Are the opposite of rationality. They are a shortcut. There's this thing called the effect heuristic, which is this idea that emotions evolve. I mean, I would say emotions evolve for two purposes. One of them is they evolve for motivation. And the other is that they evolved for decision making in low information environments. And, you know, you're in your gut feeling, for instance, your gut feeling is how you make decisions when you don't have enough information. And the thing with gut feeling is it's actually often wrong. People will say, oh, I swear by, you know, I've got a really good gut. I've got a really good gut feeling. I'm always, you know, I always trust my gut.

• 1:02:08Gurwinder Bhogal?

  But what they're doing is they're engaging in confirmation bias. They will usually remember when their gut feeling was right, but they won't remember when their gut feeling is wrong. And so they're obviously going to naturally be skewed towards believing that their gut feeling is more accurate than it actually is. And that's why I don't really trust it so much. I mean, there's, there's something called intuition, which is a little bit more than gut feeling, which is more something that you've learned to trust over time. It's something that you, certain cues that you just see, and then from that you can build a full picture. But, but just relying on emotion alone is usually not a good strategy for decision making. Because, again, emotion favors short term impulses, it favors short term compulsion loops over long term compulsion loops. And so

• 1:02:54Gurwinder Bhogal?

  this is why I think you should always,

• 1:02:59Gurwinder Bhogal?

  if you're going to make an important decision, just wait for the emotion to pass. It will pass. Most emotions don't last very long. Most emotions last a few minutes, you know, and then they're usually, they weaken and they fade and, and that, and that's all you've got to do. Just wait a couple of minutes. And then see, compare your, your actions when you're not emotional to how you were going to act when you were emotional and you will realise there's a massive difference. And that way you will, you'll, you'll prevent yourself from many regrets, I think.

• 1:03:30Chris Williamson?

  Semantical stop sign. One way people end discussions is by disguising descriptions as explanations. For instance, the word evil is used to explain behaviour, but really only describes it. It resolves the question by not creating understanding, but by killing curiosity.

• 1:03:50Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, so we see this, um, see this online a lot again, uh, with people calling other people names in order to sort of dismiss anything that they've said. So, um, an example of this might be calling somebody a bigot, you know, saying, oh, you know, you're a bigot and stuff and, and basically saying, oh, why did he, why did he, why does he feel this? Why does he think that? Oh, because he's a bigot. And for many people, that's enough. Oh, okay, he's a bigot. So I don't need to listen to what he has to say anymore. But really, what is, uh, what, what is bigotry? Bigotry is not an explanation for behavior. It's a description of behavior, right? It, it, it's a description. Basically, it's a statement that somebody is prejudiced

• 1:04:35Gurwinder Bhogal?

  towards somebody, right? So that's, it's not really, I mean, you could use it as a very shallow explanation, but it doesn't really explain much. If you really want to know, if you really want the explanation, then you've got to delve a little bit deeper. You've got to, you've got to go a bit further back. And you've got to say, okay, so this person's a bigot. So that's, that's a description. So now we need an explanation. Why is that person a bigot? Why would they say that thing, you know? And, you know, then you would say, oh, okay, it could be many things. Like, for instance, let's, let's use an example of, uh, classical bigotry. So, um, somebody might, for instance, hate immigrants. You know, they might, they might say, oh, you know, I hate immigrants. I, I just don't want, I don't want these boats to just keep coming to our shores or whatever.

• 1:05:19Gurwinder Bhogal?

  And the standard response from many people in positions of power is to say, oh, that's just bigoted. Move on, next, next question, you know, but if you really want to understand, you've got to ask yourself, why is this person bigoted? And it may be a pretty enlightening answer. They might, it might be that they had their jobs taken away, you know, they might have their, their job taken away by uh, immigrants and now they're out of work and they're, you know, on the dole or whatever. They're, they're on welfare or whatever. And that their life is, you know, all their plans have been, you know, destroyed by this fact that they've just, they've been superseded by somebody from, you know, another country.

• 1:05:57Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Or it might be that their their family member was a victim of a crime by an immigrant, you know. So if you can actually go past the instinct to dismiss somebody by disguising a description as an explanation, then you can actually get to the real explanation. And then you can start to actually resolve the question. You can actually say, okay, well, so if this is the case, then I can go out there and I can convince this person that, hang on a second, immigration, it might have taken your job, but some immigrants also create jobs or whatever. I mean, I'm not, I'm not going to go into the whole whether immigration is good or not or bad or not. But this is just an example of what somebody could do. You know, so you could, you could maybe, if you were interested in, in getting

• 1:06:41Gurwinder Bhogal?

  people to accept immigrants, if you were one of these people, you could basically, that's what you could do. And you could actually, instead of dismissing them and making them hate you even more and hate immigrants even more, which is going to happen, you know, if you dismiss somebody's concerns, they're only going to react again. What we talked about earlier, reactance, backfire effect. If you tell people that their opinions are bigoted, it's not going to stop them from being bigoted. It's going to make them more bigoted. And it's going to, you know, they're going to start thinking, oh, there's a conspiracy now to stop, you know, there's a conspiracy by the Jews to, you know, flood the West with immigrants and all this. And these people are calling me a bigot because they're trying to destroy my life because they don't want the truth to come out. So it's going to create, or it's going to basically just have a negative effect for everybody. It's just going to

• 1:07:24Gurwinder Bhogal?

  make things worse for everybody. And that's why these semantic stop signs are bad because they don't resolve the question. They don't really, they don't solve anything. They just make the problem worse. And that's why I don't call people racist. I don't call people bigoted. I don't call people transphobic. What I do is I might, I might call something that they've said bigoted. I don't, I don't really even do that. But if I were, if I were going to use the word bigoted, because I don't like the word bigoted, I feel it's overused. I don't like the race, the word racist, I feel it's overused. I don't think that these words really mean anything anymore. But if I were going to use those words. I wouldn't call people racist, I wouldn't call people bigoted, I would call their actions bigoted, I would call their actions racist, because I think that's much more helpful.

• 1:08:07Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Because if you call somebody bigoted, or you call them racist, or you call them transphobic, or sexist, or misogynistic, or fascist, or any of these other words that are thrown around so casually these days, if you use those terms to describe a person, you're essentially implying that that person is irredeemable, that they are, you know, you can't help that person, because they're a lost cause, because they're just a bigot, you know, whereas if you call their actions bigoted, if you call their actions racist or transphobic, and I'm not advocating this, but I'm just saying it's it's better than than calling them a bigot. Because if you call their actions bigoted, that actually allows you to still see them as a human, because I feel that calling somebody a racist is actually dehumanizing in a sense, um, it it, you know, you kind of, because especially when you consider that,

• 1:08:49Gurwinder Bhogal?

  you know, terms like fascist, Nazi, a lot of these terms are used to sort of paint people as the worst possible human beings, because when you think of the term fascist, when you think of the the term Nazi, racist, when you think of these terms, you think of the pretty much the worst human beings, you think of the Nazis, you know, the sort of the Nazis of Germany in the nineteen thirties, um, you think of the Ku Klux Klan, you think of really bad human beings, you think of people who lynched black people, you think of the worst human beings, and so it's it's dehumanizing in a sense, because you're you're portraying people as villains, you're saying this person is a villain, you know, so, uh, I can just discount everything that they say, whereas when you call their actions bigoted or whatever,

• 1:09:32Gurwinder Bhogal?

  then you can say, okay, well, we can actually convince this person to behave differently. So I I think these semantic stop signs are are a sort of very harmful aspect of our society, and and, you know, that's just one example that I just gave you, we have many other examples in which these kinds of questions that that people have are just sort of Dismissed by disguising explanations as descriptions. Sorry, disguising descriptions as explanations.

• 1:10:02Chris Williamson?

  Yes, Max's content razor. So this is from mutual friend George Mack. Would you consume your own content? If not, don't post it. And it's just the easiest way to work out whether or not what you're producing is actually something that you should continue producing. And I had a similar idea, tangential idea, post content clarity. If we presume that your body is made up of what you put in your mouth, your mind is made up of what you put in your eyes and ears. Your content diet should be spirulina for your soul, not fast food for your amygdala.

• 1:10:38Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, 100% I agree. I'm very selective now about the kind of the sort of content that I consume. I used to be very careless. I used to just mindlessly browse my Twitter feed and just whatever got my attention. You know, I would follow it. But the thing is, I found that that just leads to a lot of wasted time and very low information. There's a lot of social media is not very information dense. I mean, your your feed is probably a lot better than mine because you only follow like about 100 people, whereas I follow like 600. That's why I never hardly ever browse my feed. I usually just use lists, but yeah, I mean, yeah, I do absolutely go by that razor because I find that it's a good heuristic to use.

• 1:11:20Gurwinder Bhogal?

  One of the reasons why I originally wrote those mega threads, started writing those mega threads on Twitter was because they were the kinds of things I wanted to read. I wanted to learn about the world and I thought, well, this would be a good exercise for me, you know, I thought if I can get like 40 concepts that are very useful, that I think can help people understand the world better. That's exactly the kind of content I would love, but nobody was doing it at the time that I was aware of. So I thought, okay, I'll do it then, you know, I'll be the person to do it. And it was interesting because.

• 1:11:52Gurwinder Bhogal?

  You know, it sort of twenty twenty, I think it was right at the beginning of twenty twenty that I I posted the the first mega thread. And it it went viral and I just realised there was so many people that actually wanted to see that kind of thing, but nobody had thought of it before. Even though Twitter had been around for quite a while, uh as far as I could tell, anyway, nobody had thought of it before. Um, but what was quite interesting was, uh, in the aftermath of that, there were a huge number of people who did exactly the same thing that I was doing. Uh, in order to kind of replicate the success I had with that first mega thread. Um, there was, I just saw like, I saw them all over the place. Um, you know, people doing their own threads and and I've got nothing, you know, I've got nothing against people who do that. I don't think. I've got like the sole rights to do it or anything, but like, um, it was interesting because it, I think it just made something click in people's minds where they thought.

• 1:12:36Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Wow, this is a great idea, you know, why didn't I think this? And then they they did it themselves and it showed that. If you do the kinds of things that you want to see, like if you if you create the kinds of content that you want to see. Um, then because you're a human being and you've got, you share like ninety nine percent of your DNA with every other human being that, you know, there's going to be a a large number of other people that will have similar enough interests. That they will actually, um, you know, want to do what you what you want to do. I suppose this this actually. Fits in quite nicely with one of the other concepts, uh, in that, in in one of my recent mega threads, which is hoteling's law. Um, which is basically this idea that. Um, people will tend to copy whatever's successful.

• 1:13:21Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Whether we're talking about business, in politics, um, in art or whatever. And as a result of that. Content tends to converge. It tends to become more similar over time. And you see it with TikTok. Um, there were a very small number of. People, um, like Bella Porch and Charlie DiMello, who became extremely popular on TikTok. Um, they they're basically the the most viewed people on TikTok. And, uh, all they did was lip syncing and dancing. Now, I I have no interest in watching that kind of stuff, but evidently they thought it was fun. Maybe that's the kind of content they wanted to see, but somehow that stuff blew up. And as a result of that. It started a whole new genre of TikTok video where you just had people lip syncing and dancing.

• 1:14:07Gurwinder Bhogal?

  And everybody was doing it now and it kind of decreased the value of doing that. And it's the same with politics, like, you know, if you look at, for instance, in the UK. You had the political parties Labour and Conservative. If you look at, say, the post-war period, you had Clement Attlee versus Winston Churchill. Clement Attlee was, he was a socialist, he was a full-on, and the Labour Party was full-on socialist. But Winston Churchill's Conservatives were proper Conservatives. They were like, you know, Burkean Conservatives. And over time, the two parties have moved towards the centre. So Labour's become more right-wing and Conservatives have become more left-wing. And it's interesting because the right-wing party of the UK, Conservatives, are now to the left of the left-wing party in the US.

• 1:14:51Gurwinder Bhogal?

  And the reason this has happened is, the reason this has happened is because of hotelings law. Because what happened is that when certain politicians in both these parties appealed to the centre, they had a huge amount of success. And the other people saw this and thought, wow, you know, we'd better capture the centre, get some of these people's audiences from them. And so these two parties gradually began to try to eat the centre, eat as much of the centre before the other party got centre. So they moved closer and together and they converged. And it's the same with content creators, they tend to converge over time. And the great thing about the max razor that you just spoke about, when you create content that you yourself would want to see is that you can avoid hotelings law because you're creating content that you want to see.

• 1:15:35Gurwinder Bhogal?

  You're not chasing what everybody else is doing. You're doing the opposite. Because the interesting thing about hotelings law is that the more it happens, the more these content creators or these politicians or whatever we're talking about, the more their content converges, the more value there is in being different. And in actually, you know, trying to do something that you want to see. You know, like, for instance, going back to my mega threads, I saw a lot of stuff about mental models, but it was not portrayed in the way that. I decided to do it. It was more about getting a single mental model than doing a thread about it. And loads of people were doing that. And I initially was going to do that, but then I thought, I'm just doing the same thing that everybody else is doing if I do that. You know, because that was that that form was originally popularized.

• 1:16:21Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Um, I think people like Tim Ferriss, you know, they popularized that stuff and they became very successful with it. And it was such a good formula that a lot of other people tried to do that. And I thought, well, why don't I do something different instead? Because I decided to just go against that. And I thought, I don't want to see this. I don't want to actually consume this kind of content because I've already consumed it because so many other people are doing it. So I thought, let me do something a little bit different and let me just create a thread of various different concepts. And so that was different enough that it actually allowed me to go viral. And when I did it, so it's a very good strategy to to chase not what other people are doing, but what you want to see, I think.

• 1:16:57Chris Williamson?

  I agree. You need, I understand some people would say that um if you copy successful content, you avoid making stuff which is absolutely atrocious. Like your instincts could just be completely off kilter. Like you're aiming at a target at the north and you shoot south, basically. So there's a a base layer, there's a foundation of understanding writing. For instance, if you were going to do the the thing, if you couldn't write, it doesn't matter how good your idea is, it's not going to work. If you don't understand how Twitter works, if you don't understand the concepts, if you can't portray them in an interesting way, there's like a lot of things that you need to get in place. But once you've got basically the rules of the game, you can then start to maybe

• 1:17:41Chris Williamson?

  step outside and completely break them. So for instance, with these listical style episodes that I do, and they're some of my favorite. And I think that they keep the episode moving really quickly. And I know that me and you, when we finish these episodes, feel like we've been in a fucking fever dream for two hours. And I'm like, how's it been two hours already? Um, and I did them with Hormozzi, I've done them with Sean Puri, I've done them with George Mack, I've done them with yourself. You know, going through a list of things, because that's, that would be fun to me if I left this like. Pressure hose Bukkaki of like insights about human behavior. I would have, I would have left an episode going, wow, that's cool. And yeah, it's, it was something that was my instinct. Now that being said, it's framed in a way that we know works for the algorithm. It's presented from a tech perspective in a way that we think is engaging.

• 1:18:24Chris Williamson?

  Dean edits these things in a way that keeps stuff engaging. So again, we're playing within the, the physics of the system in some regard, but we're also trying to give our own spin on something with something new. And Douglas Murray has said this as well, like follow your instincts. Your instincts are a pretty good guide. It allows you to be unbelievably unique and it allows, like if you were interested in something, there is a pretty good likelihood that some non insignificant minority of other people are also interested in it. And given how broad the access that you have on the internet is now, you only need some non insignificant minority of other people to have a massive audience, like millions of people.

• 1:19:01Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Absolutely. Yeah, that's one aspect of it. And another aspect is that if you are genuinely passionate about something, if you're genuinely interested in something, you will make it interesting to other people.

• 1:19:12Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:12Gurwinder Bhogal?

  You know, because you'll be passionate about it. If you're just chasing, you know, metrics, if you're just looking at what other people are doing and you're, then you just copy them. Your passion is not going to be in it. You're not going to be interested in it. You're just going to be interested in getting as many views or whatever. You'll be chasing the wrong metrics. The right metric is interestingness, interestingness to you. Because if you make it, if it's interesting to you, you'll make it interesting to other people. Because you, your passion is contagious. And I think that's the best sort of advice I'd give to somebody who wants to sort of make a start in, in sort of, you know, just being an influencer or whatever, you know, it's just to, to just find what interests you, right? Don't try to find what you think other people are going to find interesting. Because no matter what it is, even if it's something like stamp collecting or whatever, right?

• 1:19:54Gurwinder Bhogal?

  If you are passionate about, about it enough, you will make it interesting to other people.

• 1:20:00Chris Williamson?

  Dude, so me and, me and my housemate Zach love these videos of guys that watch rally cross. So it's like Colin McCray, you know, four wheel drive cars going through a dirt road. And these blokes will have gone up to fucking air in Scotland or Quebec or something. And they're stood in a poncho, under a umbrella in the pissing rain, in the middle, basically in the middle of a forest to see. To see that, right, for point three of a second. And then when these cars go past, they all turn to each other and go, ah. And we love watching it because watching anyone get fired up about anything makes you feel fired up as well. You just, I love people that love things. And yeah, if you follow your passions in that regard, you're always going to remain

• 1:20:47Chris Williamson?

  on the right.

• 1:20:47Gurwinder Bhogal?

  And you'll also be motivated as well. Yeah. And another thing is you'll be more motivated. Yeah, absolutely.

• 1:20:53Chris Williamson?

  All right, next one. Epistemic luck. You know that if you'd lived in a different place or time, read different books, had different friends, you'd have different beliefs. And yet you're convinced that your current beliefs are correct. So are you wrong or the luckiest person ever?

• 1:21:12Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah. And this is one that gets me a lot, you know, because I, I find that a lot of my opinions are in sync with the society in which I live. So, you know, I have broadly sort of kind of, I'm quite sort of liberal in a sense, you know? I mean, I wouldn't say that I'm actually a liberal, but I have very liberal views and we live in a liberal society. And I find that it, it's hard to extricate my beliefs from the time and place in which I'm living. I always wonder what would I believe if I had lived, if I'd say been born in, in sort of India, for instance, if I'd been born in India, what would I believe there? If I'd been born in the 19th century, what would I believe?

• 1:21:58Gurwinder Bhogal?

  If I, you know, if I was born into a rich family rather than a poor family, what would I believe? And all of these things make me question my beliefs because I think to myself, my beliefs seem to be quite local to where I'm living in, in time and space.

• 1:22:16Gurwinder Bhogal?

  I think this is very true of religious people in particular. So if you, you know, if you think about, say, a Muslim person, a Muslim obviously believes things that were originally sort of a belief system that was invented in the seventh century Arabia. But what would happen if that person was born before the creation of Islam? So what, what, you know, if they had been born sort of in the second century? Would they still be a Muslim? You know, uh, obviously not, you know, would they still have Muslim principles? Obviously not. And this is interesting because Islam is supposed to be a religion for all times and all places. You know, that's, that's its sort of main claim to fame. Uh, and so, you know, although there's this concept in Islam called Jahiliya,

• 1:23:02Gurwinder Bhogal?

  uh, which is about basically this idea that, um, before the coming of Islam, there was ignorance. Still, you've got to ask yourself, you know,

• 1:23:11Gurwinder Bhogal?

  surely that means then that being born before the creation of Islam means that you're not going to have the advantage in God's eyes of somebody who's born after the creation of Islam. Because the person who's born after the creation of Islam is going to be more likely to follow Islam than the person before. So there's this weird sort of, you know, disparity there. And I think you could, you could extend this to any belief system. Communism, for instance, as well, even, you know, if you were born before the creation of communism, you're not going to be a communist. And so, you know, it's, it's, it's like, would you be different if you were born, if, would a communist be different if they were born before the creation of communism? Of course they would. And so how can they be sure that their belief is right? Do they just happen to be born at the right time in history to have the right beliefs?

• 1:23:54Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Um, and you know, I, that's why when I, my solution to this problem is to try to find beliefs that are as universal as possible. So one way that I can gauge whether a belief is a good one is whether I can view myself as having believed that no matter what time or place I was living in.

• 1:24:14Gurwinder Bhogal?

  And it's not a perfect system because obviously knowledge is constantly growing. Um, and you know, obviously I wouldn't know the germ theory of disease a thousand years ago, but I do believe it now. And I think I'm pretty justified in believing in the germ theory of disease, given the evidence for it. Um, but as a general rule, I think it's a pretty good one where you think about, is this belief a product of the society in which I'm living? Or is it one that can be applied to any time and any place? And the thing with the germ theory of disease is even though it didn't exist a thousand years ago, it would still have helped me a thousand years ago. It would still have been beneficial to believe in it a thousand years ago. So I think that's a good heuristic to use in order to determine whether your beliefs are real. It doesn't matter if they're a product of your time.

• 1:24:56Gurwinder Bhogal?

  What it matters is will they be useful in any time and any place? That's the kind of universe, universality of, of a belief. Um, so if your beliefs wouldn't work very well. A thousand years ago, then that's a good sign that you're probably just imbibing what you're learning from the present day. You're you're kind of, you know, you're myopically sort of trapped in the present moment and in the present place. So yeah, I think universality of applicability is what you want to look at. So can you apply it universally? And if you can, then that's a sign that it it's a good belief.

• 1:25:32Chris Williamson?

  So Rob Henderson put something in his newsletter a couple of weeks ago, and I gave it a name. So I've I've come in at the end and thrown like a pretty bow on top of something which I I really like as an idea. So I called this the intellectuals treadmill. Some thinkers, as they rise in prominence as a result of their interesting ideas, gradually devote less time to reading and more time to lucrative opportunities. This is a mistake. They are neglecting one of the core habits that made them so interesting in the first place.

• 1:26:01Gurwinder Bhogal?

  I think I think I'm guilty of this. I tend to read less than I used to, but I think I think I definitely agree with it in general. I think one of the problems with a lot of thinkers is that they tend to just resort to the same set of tools that got them famous. So a classic example of this would be somebody like Nassim Taleb. You know, he became famous through a handful of concepts like anti fragility, the Lindy effect, skin in the game. And these obviously, they're great ideas. They're really good ideas. And that's why they became popular. But since then, what I've noticed in him

• 1:26:43Gurwinder Bhogal?

  is that he tends to sort of try to apply these concepts to pretty much anything that happens.

• 1:26:47Chris Williamson?

  This is the golden hammer, isn't it?

• 1:26:49Gurwinder Bhogal?

  The golden hammer. Yeah, yeah, we've spoken about this before, the golden hammer. And it also sort of links in with another thing called the toothbrush problem, where the toothbrush problem is basically where intellectuals treat theories like toothbrushes. They don't want to use anybody else's. You know, they just want to use their own. And so what happens is that

• 1:27:10Chris Williamson?

  That's the opposite of me, who just shamelessly repurposes everybody else's.

• 1:27:15Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Well, I think that's the healthiest way to be. I think oftentimes, you know, it's when you just rely on your own theories, you're just closing yourself off from so much learning and so much knowledge. And that's why I try not to do these things, you know. But I mean, it's hard because when you do become famous for a certain idea, you develop a certain brand and you want to sort of, you want to, you want to overstate the kind of importance of your ideas. So obviously, Taleb got very famous from his three major ideas and, you know, tail risk and all the other ideas that he's come out with. And so he's got, and he's incentivized to, instead of learning new ideas by reading books, to just double down on his own ideas by just constantly writing about them. And so he's,

• 1:28:00Gurwinder Bhogal?

  that's obviously going to get him more clout, because the more important his ideas seem, the more important he seems. And the more opportunities he's going to get to sort of expound upon various social issues and apply them to, you know, applies his golden hammers to those.

• 1:28:16Chris Williamson?

  Well, I remember, I remember hearing Peterson a while ago. It's probably five years ago, he was on Rogan and he was, you know, really at the crest of this huge growth curve that he was on, maybe just after the Kathy Newman interview, something like that. And he said something along the lines of, I need to take some time to go away, because if you are outputting more than you are inputting, all that you're doing is just saying the same things over and over again. And you end up becoming a caricature of yourself, which is dangerous. There's this, I learned from Critical Drinker, do you follow that guy?

• 1:28:48Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, I watched some of his videos. Yeah, yeah, he's funny.

• 1:28:51Chris Williamson?

  So I learned from him that there's four stages to most media movements. So let's say like the superhero genre that we've seen since sort of the mid noughts. There is like the introduction phase, the growth phase, the maturity phase, and then the parody phase. What's interesting about that is you can track it perfectly with Thor. So you have this kind of groundbreaking, or maybe less so Iron Man, because he died, I guess, before he could get into parody. But certainly with Thor, you get this groundbreaking one and everyone's like, oh my God, Chris Hemsworth's ripped. And then you get into growth and it's sort of still developing. And then you get into maturity where it's a little bit more predictable and you've kind of got an idea. And then you get into Love and Thunder, which was the most recent one. And you even saw bits of parody earlier on in it, but where

• 1:29:34Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Jumping the Shark, supposedly.

• 1:29:36Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:36Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:29:37Chris Williamson?

  He's the butt of all of the jokes. He's doing this sort of splits on the top of like a pair of dragons, like Jean-Claude Van Damme, even Doctor Strange, I guess he featured as a sort of ancillary character in lots of other things, but he only got two. So he had the first Doctor Strange with Benedict Cumberbatch, he's a phenomenal actor. First one, super like sincere in the way that they did it, and it was very meaningful about him. The second one, a zombie version of Benedict Cumberbatch goes back in time to a different universe to tell the Central American daughter of a lesbian couple called America Chavez that she just needs to believe in herself. Like, it's just the most parody of the most

• 1:30:20Chris Williamson?

  parody that you can think. So yeah, and I think that one of the problems that you get is what Peterson identified, if you are outputting more than you're inputting, you end up just regurgitating ideas, you bastardize them, you don't have anything fresh, you become a caricature of yourself, you become easy to be parodied, and that's dangerous. And he was saying, you know, I need to take some time away. It's someone that we can say absolutely has adhered to that. And this, oh dude, it's how are you going to say no to another speaking gig? How are you going to say no to another Joe Rogan experience episode? How are you going to say no to all these things? I get it, right? But someone that definitely has done this was Naval, who just said, I did my Rogan episode and I'm now away on sabbatical because I never want to say the same thing twice and I won't be doing any more podcasts

• 1:31:04Chris Williamson?

  until I have three hours worth of new things to talk about. Fair play.

• 1:31:11Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think Naval's very wise in that he's done this, I think, to avoid audience capture. I think that's ultimately what we're talking about. Because when you have the same set of ideas, there's a pressure on you to continue to talk about those ideas. Again, to sort of...

• 1:31:30Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Sort of emphasise their importance. And I think Taleb is a very good example of this, going back to him, because I feel he has kind of been audience captioned in a sense where he's, it's now expected that he's going to try to explain things in terms of, you know, tail risk or whatever. And it's because it's what he knows. And I understand why he does it, because, you know, it's kind of wise to a certain extent to just stick to what you know. But he's, he's a clearly a very intelligent man, and he's a man who could, who could learn a lot more about many other things. But he instead just chooses to pretty much talk about the same sort of things again and again. He's doing what Jordan Peterson essentially warned about, where instead of learning, because he's, you know, Taleb, he's a smart guy, but he's, he's arrogant as hell,

• 1:32:14Gurwinder Bhogal?

  you know, and he thinks that he sort of has the final answer. He thinks he understands things, even when he doesn't really have a grounding in it. Like, he thinks he understands IQ, but, you know, he makes very elementary mistakes about IQ. But, um, yeah, he, he tends to just sort of focus on very narrow field of maths, statistical kind of tail risk analysis, risk, risk analysis, that kind of stuff. And, um, you know, he, so he uses a very narrow set of tools. They're very useful tools, but they're very narrow. And he uses that very narrow system

• 1:32:50Gurwinder Bhogal?

  of tools to explain everything from like COVID to polarization to Israel and Palestine. You know, he, he talks about a lot of these things, often just using very narrow set of tools. And it's, it's weird because he's, he's otherwise, he's quite an erudite guy. But he just chooses not to sort of progress beyond what he, what made him successful. And I see this, I see this with a lot of other influencers, a lot of other intellectuals, where they just stick to the thing that made them successful over and over again, as if, you know, they're just sort of scared of venturing into new territory. You see it with a lot of sort of anti-woke accounts online now

• 1:33:32Gurwinder Bhogal?

  as well, where the same thing is always the case, you know, it's always about wokeness, everything's wokeness, everything's, you know, everything can be explained in terms of wokeness. And you see it on the opposite side with everything's racist, you know, racism is the explanation for everything. Oh, it's because of systemic racism, it's because of whiteness, it's because of white fragility, you know, all of this stuff. And then, you know, you just see the same sets of explanations being used over and over again, because these people are not reading new things, they're just They're just regurgitating what was already in their head again and again and again, that they're basically being spoon fed their own intellectual vomit and, you know, just kind of recycling it and vomiting it out again and, you know, and it just degrades. It's like ChatGPT being trained on its own outputs. You know, it's just, um, you know, it's a kind of like, just, it is a very dangerous thing. And, and that's

• 1:34:17Gurwinder Bhogal?

  why I think, um, I try to go broad rather than narrow in on one thing, you know, I do occasionally narrow in on one thing where I write like a long, long read or whatever. But what I try to do is to just keep learning, learning new concepts and new things. And, you know, like I've set up a pretty good thing now where I'm, I've, I've got an audience that expects me to write about a wide range of different things, but very, very sort of shallow things. I, I, you know, I do write pretty shallow stuff, like in, in general, just because I've got so many ideas to cover that I can't go into deep, too much detail. I mean, I'm not always shallow. I do sometimes go on deep dives into articles and essays where I write four thousand, five thousand words about a single concept. But usually I write sort of a wide range

• 1:35:00Gurwinder Bhogal?

  of things, but quite shallow in order to give people ideas for them to sort of springboard their own ideas, you know, that's, that's generally what I like to do. And I find that that's a healthy way to approach because it means I'm constantly learning new ideas instead of just focusing on one idea and using that one tool to explain everything, you know, which is a temptation.

• 1:35:18Chris Williamson?

  It seems like this is related to another one I got from you, beginner's bubble effect. You cannot learn that which you already know from Epictetus. The most ignorant are not those who know nothing, but those who know a little, because a little knowledge grants the illusion of understanding, which kills curiosity and closes the mind.

• 1:35:37Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah. So this is, um, this would appear to go against what I've just said, you know, it would seem like, oh, okay, you shouldn't learn just a little thing. You should really go deep into that. But in practice, that's not actually possible. You can't, you can't just learn one thing in loads and loads of detail and not learn anything else. You're always going to be in a situation where you have to learn a little bit. The key to overcoming the big beginner's bubble effect is not to, um, learn more because you can't learn more about everything. The key is to recognize your limits, is to recognize, um, what, how much you actually know, basically. Once you learn how much you actually know, and that comes from humility and from curiosity, then you're no longer subject to the beginner's bubble effect. The beginner's bubble effect is a product of thinking you know more than you actually do.

• 1:36:23Gurwinder Bhogal?

  And it usually comes from having a very shallow explanation for something. Because once you have a shallow explanation, you think you have a full explanation. It's just the way our brain works, you know, it just you kind of you're it kills your curiosity. When you when you have a shallow explanation for something, um, you know, it it it fools your brain into thinking that you understand it. And that's where the danger lies. So I'm not saying you shouldn't just learn little things. In fact, I actually advocate the opposite. I think you should learn li- a little about a lot, rather than learn a lot about a little. I think you should learn a little about a little about a lot. And the reason for this is, um, well, this goes to Philip Tetlock's work. Philip Tetlock is one of the founding sort of fathers of decision theory, along with sort of people like Robert Cialdini and Daniel Kahneman.

• 1:37:08Gurwinder Bhogal?

  They founded sort of the field of rationalism and Tetlock's all about predicting the future. He's basically because the true measure of how rational you are and how much truth you have is whether you can predict the future consistently. If you can't, because only truth allows you to do that. Nothing, you can't bullshit your way to predict in the future. That's one thing you cannot bullshit. So you have to know the truth in order to to consistently predict the future. And that's why he's into the the whole thing about super forecasting. And he basically found that the people who were most accurate at predicting the future, because he did some a series of trials, which were actually involved the CIA. Uh, involved like there was a massive funding from the CIA.

• 1:37:49Gurwinder Bhogal?

  He did some pretty crazy stuff in the nineteen eighties, where he basically did these competitions to see who could predict the future the best. And people adopted various strategies of various uh uh kinds. Uh, this phenomenon became known as super forecasting. And what Tetlock found was that the people who tended to be the best at predicting the future were not the people who had who knew a lot about a little. But actually, the people who knew a little about a lot. And this was because, I think, there probably are several explanations for it. But I think one of the key explanations is that the people who know a lot about a little. Tend to try to solve all problems by recourse to that little narrow sort of sliver of information that they know really, really well, because they feel they're safe on that territory.

• 1:38:33Gurwinder Bhogal?

  And they don't want to venture outside of it. So they tend to try to, they they view everything through their lens of what they know really, really well. Whereas the people who know a lot about, sorry, yeah, know a lot about little, they, sorry, a little about a lot, sorry. Um, they, they tend to be a lot more generalist and they, they are more flexible in their thinking. And so this is why I would advocate, if you have a choice between specializing in just a small number of topics or learning a little about a lot, I would advocate the latter because that puts you in a good territory to sort of be flexible in your thinking and learn, uh, you could then learn, if you want to know more about a certain thing, you can learn about it. And this, there's a concept called the curiosity zone, which is when you learn

• 1:39:17Gurwinder Bhogal?

  a, a lot, sorry, when you learn a little about a lot, what happens is that your curiosity gets stoked and you want to learn more because curiosity is not, it's not stoked by an absence of knowledge. It's stoked by having a little knowledge, because when you have a little knowledge, it's, it, you know, curiosity is the desire to fill gaps in knowledge. And in order to have gaps in knowledge, you need to have things, you need to actually learn things, because a complete absence of knowledge is not a gap in knowledge.

• 1:39:49Chris Williamson?

  But learning something teaches you what you don't know.

• 1:39:54Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah. And a gap is, can only exist between two objects. You can't have a gap without, you know, the empty space is not a gap. It's got to, there's, it's got, it's got to be in the middle of two things. So if you learn those two things, you know, then you have a gap now. You have a gap in that knowledge and that gap is where your curiosity blooms, basically. So if you want to stoke your curiosity, if you want to sort of, you know, evoke curiosity in yourself, then the best way to do that is to learn a little about a lot. Because that way you'll want to know more, it'll motivate you to want to know more. And so, yeah, that's what, that's what I would definitely advocate is, is doing. That's why I like to be more of a generalist rather than specializing in a single, um, you know, sort of concept. I think it's much better to.

• 1:40:40Gurwinder Bhogal?

  To do that, yeah.

• 1:40:41Chris Williamson?

  Agenda setting theory. Most of the time, what's happening in the news isn't actually important. It only appears important because it's in the news. The public conversation is based on whatever's reported by the press, giving the impression that this news matters most. When really, it's just what was chosen by a few editors and thoughtlessly amplified by the masses.

• 1:41:03Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, so this is why I don't really read the news very much. I browse it very, very casually, often just once in a while. I don't really read it much because what I've found is that 99% of the time, the news doesn't make me any wiser, it doesn't make me any more informed. It doesn't really help me in my day to day life. It doesn't help me understand the world any better. It's just something I do for entertainment. And I think most news is just that, it's just entertainment. I think it's entertainment that you, that is presented in such a way that you don't feel guilty for consuming it because you think you're learning about the world.

• 1:41:43Gurwinder Bhogal?

  And a lot of the time, the reason for this is that news is hijacking

• 1:41:51Gurwinder Bhogal?

  what we call shiny object syndrome. And shiny object syndrome is a concept, is another concept, I think, from one of my recent threads.

• 1:42:01Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Where evolutionarily, in our evolutionary history, we sort of evolved, I'll keep saying the word evolve, but basically we evolved to, to basically favor new information over old information because new information tended to be more useful. Well, you know, in a low information environment, new information can often be the difference between life or death. So new information, for instance, in a thousand years ago or 100,000 years ago would be seeing a lion coming out from the undergrowth. That's new information and that's crucial information. Do you know what I mean? If a lion is coming out of the undergrowth and it's charging towards you. You need to know, right? So obviously, we became biased towards new information because

• 1:42:44Gurwinder Bhogal?

  new information could be the difference between life or death in a way that old information wasn't. And so we have this bias towards novelty. We're attracted to the new. Anything that's new, we're just attracted to it by virtue of its novelty. And news hijacks this evolutionary impulse by providing us with new content. People are always searching for what's new. You know, they're constantly looking for the breaking news, the big bar in red, which, you know, say, breaking news, or they're looking for, you know, see new tweets or whatever, you know, click the button, see new tweets, you know, see the latest posts, all this stuff, you know, people want to see what's the latest, they want to know what's the latest. And this is

• 1:43:27Gurwinder Bhogal?

  a maladaptive desire. Because in a world where information is mass-produced, it's no longer, it's no longer actually like valuable to have new information most of the time. Because the majority of the new information has been created for one reason and one reason only. And that is to hijack your impulse for novelty, your desire for novelty. It's, you know, it's there to just, it's basically, it's rushed out, the information is rushed out. So if you look at a lot of the latest breaking news, it's usually wrong. Because the journalist wanted to be the first person to break the story, so they just rushed it out as fast as they could. And they didn't do their due diligence, and they didn't really, you know, they didn't give you all the facts. And likewise,

• 1:44:11Gurwinder Bhogal?

  people want to be the first to retweet, you know, this news story and talk about it. And so they'll just hastily, they'll just retweet the headline without reading the article, or whatever. So, you know, a lot of this new stuff is rushed out. And that's why news is generally not that valuable. Because it's just reported, it's often reported impulsively by editors and by journalists. They just say, oh, okay, this sounds like it might do well online. So let's just post this, let's just write about this. And then what happens is that people think that because it was reported by the news, Therefore, it must be important. But it's not. A lot of the time, it's not. A lot of the time, it's there simply to hijack your attention, hijack your your desire for novelty. And you're not going to remember it.

• 1:44:56Gurwinder Bhogal?

  You're not going to benefit from it. You know, just think about just go to any news page, right? And just look at the the top stories. And a lot of the time, it's just not really stuff that it might be interesting. It might be interesting. It might interest you for a a couple of minutes. You know, you might think, oh, OK, that's OK. But most of the time, it's not really going to be that interesting. Um, the exception to this would be news of news that's directly interest, news that's directly relevant to your field, your chosen field. So for instance, if you are a biologist and you are interested in curing, let's say you're a you're a medical professional and you're interested in curing cancer or whatever.

• 1:45:39Gurwinder Bhogal?

  And then if there's a new vaccine for cancer, which there is, which is amazing story. Um, then that's obviously going to be interesting news and you you want to know about that. But that's rare. That's very rare. And you usually get that not from looking at the mainstream media. You usually get that from specialized news outlets. So you want to go to like science news outlets, you know, which will tell you about the latest breakthroughs in in technology. The mainstream media is usually just generalized just stuff that that is just not really going to be of value to many people. It's just going to be there to tickle your desire for novelty. So mainstream media news is generally not that useful. That's why I don't really read it much. I mean, I do read it, but only because a lot of people expect me to comment on it.

• 1:46:21Gurwinder Bhogal?

  If I wasn't, if I wasn't a writer, I wouldn't, I wouldn't, I wouldn't check the news. I would only just check information that's relevant to me. So maybe if I was an investor or check stock prices and stuff like that, you know, but I wouldn't check the general news because the general news is usually just is worthless. And people fooled into believing that it's important because it's reported. But it's not. It's just what was chosen by a few editors.

• 1:46:46Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's strange what we click on and what editors know will drive interest and engagement often has absolutely no correlation with something that's important. Like, how many times have we seen

• 1:47:02Chris Williamson?

  left-wing woman says that she can't get a man to hold the door open for her and it goes like super viral online and everyone's got the same take of that's a conservative and it's it's like a whatever, it's a, you know, slow medium pitch.

• 1:47:17Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, it's there to fuel engagement and it's engagement farming. It's basically a lot of it's rage bait, you know, they want to try and make you as angry as possible because they want to start a fight online because if they start a fight online, then the two factions that are fighting are going to be inadvertently promoting the story by fighting over it. Yeah. And then also, you know, just stuff that's reported just generally like, you know, like, for instance, if you're an average person, you know, you'll hear, oh, you know, 30 people died in a bombing in Gaza, you know, it's bad, it's tragic, it's horrible news. But most people are not going to ever do anything about it. They're just going to read it and then that's it. Then they're going to forget about it. And it's like, they may as well have not even learned about it because it's just,

• 1:48:02Gurwinder Bhogal?

  it's not going to change their life in any way. They're not going to go out there and, you know, stop the bombing.

• 1:48:09Chris Williamson?

  Apart from maybe they're a bit more ambiently anxious about the world and the impending general sense of doom.

• 1:48:15Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Exactly. It's just going to make them feel bad a lot of the time. And there's a negativity bias in the news reporting as well. You know, it was interesting because I think Steven Pinker recently posted a list of 66 news reports that were actually positive. There were positive developments, but they didn't get any traction because they were positive rather than negative, you know, the negative stories always get way more engagement. And so there's, you know, if you constantly are consuming news, you're going to develop this sort of more cynicism. You're going to develop greater cynicism, more pessimism, you're going to become depressed in a sense, you know, you're going to feel bad because you're just going to feel like the world's falling apart. Whereas if you actually go to, again, you go to these specialized

• 1:48:57Gurwinder Bhogal?

  news outlets, so you go to science reporting, you know, then you'll find a lot of stuff about medical breakthroughs, which is actually a lot more interesting because that will allow you to predict the future a little bit better. You know, if there's been a breakthrough, then you can maybe do something about that. You can maybe invest in it. You know, if you learn that there's a vaccine for cancer, you can invest in it and you can help the people that are actually trying to make that happen, you know. So that's a lot more useful stuff. Positive news tends to be more useful overall than the kind of negative engagement driven stuff that you see.

• 1:49:32Chris Williamson?

  Two of my favorite websites that I go to, PsyPost and Psychology Today, both just phenomenal insights about human nature. If you're interested in that, a lot of the studies that I cite on this show come from PSYPost or Psychology Today. They're great. Do you know what The Browser is? Are you familiar with that?

• 1:49:54Gurwinder Bhogal?

  The Browser? No, never heard of that.

• 1:49:55Chris Williamson?

  So The Browser is, it's been going for, I think, over a decade now. It is a daily email of five articles and there is nothing. These articles have nothing in common at all, other than the fact that the editor has found them to be interesting. And it's my favorite place to just get exposed to always new, new, new, new, new stuff. Like, here is the life story in 3,000 words of like a boot polisher from 1800s Birmingham. And here is some new drone technology that's coming out of China. And here is like a story about Genghis Khan and whatever. Like, it's just so varied. And literally, the only

• 1:50:38Chris Williamson?

  single thread between them all is the guy, Robert Cotterill, I think the dude that's in charge, has found it interesting. And on the whole, not everyone's for me, but at least one to two per day. It's amazing. And I think it's maybe like 40 bucks a year. And your Substack, something else that people should subscribe to, which they can go to gwynda.substack.com. I'm definitely some sort of premium member, which I enjoy. What can people expect from you over the next few months? What's coming up?

• 1:51:07Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, so I'm working on my most ambitious article yet, which is going to be a long read. It's going to be about 5,000 words. I'm working on it for unheard, but I'm also going to be posting the longer version on my Substack. And it's about gamification and how it can be used to control us, but how we can take advantage of it. That's going to be, I think, a very useful one for a lot of people. I've also got my, my book, I don't want to talk too much about my book yet because it's coming, it's coming. But there's something big in the works, it's going to be.

• 1:51:37Chris Williamson?

  Is this the first one or the second one? Because there's two, right?

• 1:51:40Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Yeah, there's two, yeah. The first one's coming out next year, so not long. So then the one after is probably going to come the year after, so that'll be in 2025. But yeah, there's going to be a book hopefully next year. And I'm also going to be trying to actually start doing videos as well. Because I've had a bit of demand from that. So I think by the time this comes out, I might actually have a YouTube channel, I don't know. But if you're watching this and you're interested in hearing me ramble more, then you might want to search my name on YouTube.

• 1:52:11Chris Williamson?

  I'm going to guess if people go to your Substack, everything will be on the Substack, I'm going to guess.

• 1:52:16Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Everything's on the Substack, yeah. And also Twitter, I'm going to be more active on Twitter. I've got another mega thread coming up actually, because I'm going to do one for the winter 2024. Mega thread's going to be out in about a month or two. So that's going to be the next big thing on Twitter, but I'll be, I'm going to be posting a lot more now. So because the bulk of my work on my book's done, so yeah, I'm hoping that 2024 is going to be a very productive year for me.

• 1:52:41Chris Williamson?

  I look forward to it, man.

• 1:52:45Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you want, might want a bit more sleep than I get. But yeah, dude, look, I really cherish these episodes. If that's two hours that's gone by in literally no time at all. Once the next mega thread's up, you will come back on, we will talk about it again and we will, we'll have more fun. But for now, ladies and gentlemen, Gwyneth Bhogal, thanks so much for today, mate.

• 1:53:03Gurwinder Bhogal?

  Thank you. Always a pleasure, Chris.