#1073 - Gurwinder Bhogal - 19 Uncomfortable Truths About Human Nature

33:35You know, it can, I think we've we've discussed this before, where you go on social media and you just see just loads of just crap on your timeline and just the most ill-informed opinions and people getting outraged over just nonsense. And it kind of can destroy your faith in the human race. I think Sam Harris, I think the reason why he left Twitter, I think he did describe it that way. He said that when he was on social media, it made him hate humanity. And I can sympathize with that. referred to it as the most pathological type of telepathy you can imagine, where all he could hear were the worst of everybody else's thoughts.

34:11Yeah. And, you know, and sometimes, you know, it can sort of just really dishearten you. I have a few friends who, you know, on social media, and they sometimes have long breaks because they just completely just really demoralizes them when they think, oh, this is what humanity is, you know, all this noise, like all this completely irrational noise just being thrown out everywhere. But I think it's always helpful to remember that what you're seeing online is not actually representative of humanity. It's representative of the loudest and often the most obnoxious humans on the planet. And there's a lot of research to support this.

34:47There's pretty consistent findings which find that people who are high in certain dark tetrad traits particularly in narcissism and psychopathy tend to use social media more but also they tend to engage in online political participation a lot more as well they tend to engage in sort of online debates and things like that a lot more and then you also have people who are essentially close to be you know people who are really dramatic again narcissism comes up here also histrionic personality disorder naturally you know the people that are histrionic personality disorder so histrionic is basically when you're a drama queen basically it's when you um you're you know you just want to draw attention to yourself by playing the victim um or by you know just catastrophizing uh just making out like everything's worse than it actually is just a theatrical behavior basically and um so you naturally this is a good fit for social media this kind of behavior you know because obviously if you want an audience and if you want to play theatrics, where else would you want to go than a place where everybody else is freaking out and everybody's looking to be freaked out?

35:56So obviously, social media attracts the absolute worst of the human race. It attracts the most impulsive, the most theatrical, the most narcissistic, the most psychopathic, the most low IQ. These are often the worst people. I'm not saying that there aren't good people on social media. Of course there are. But when you look at it from a statistical point of view, you have over-representation of the worst elements of humankind i also imagine even if you have somebody who is compassionate and well-meaning and delicate and and and thoughtful and high iq they're operating in an environment where they regress to the mean and the mean is mean oddly enough i had one so uh for the people that haven't heard us do this before most of the stuff is me shamelessly shilling gwinda's stuff and then he says it back to me but sometimes i bring stuff from home and i've got i've got some that i brought from home so this one's kind of related recursive red pill learning most people get their information from the internet net, the stories online which garner the most attention are the most extreme, meaning that influencers' unrepresentative insights are being trained on other influencers' unrepresentative insights, leading to self-reinforcing antagonism between the sexes.

36:59And this came out of a quote that I saw online, which is, having a boyfriend is embarrassing now, which was that Variety article that came out about six months ago, has the same energy as the Kardashians made skinny go out of style in that neither is true if you just go outside. So the loudest stories, the biggest stories, the ones with the most upvotes on Reddit, by definition are the ones that are the most attention grabbing, which means that they're the most extreme or unrepresentative. And that means if you spend most of your time learning about the world through the internet, what you see is the least representative presentation of what reality is like over and over again.

37:39And it just retrains you to expect that as normality. Yeah. And I've seen this play out in real time because I've been on social media since around 2014. And in that time, I've stuck with pretty much the same group of sort of mutuals mostly. And I've actually witnessed an interesting pattern, which is that the people who spend the most time online have become more unhinged and more extreme in their beliefs. This is something I've personally witnessed. I know that this is N equals one, but it's more compelling to me than studies because it's something I've literally witnessed happen in real time.

38:13And I think this is probably, this is also supported by research as well. Some of these, you know, I wrote this article called Dramageddon about people talking about a civil war. And this talk has been going on since around 2021, like really serious talk. People like Elon Musk have like, you know, sort of promoted this idea that there's going to be a civil war between the left and the right in the US. And some people have said, you know, it will probably happen in Europe as well. But it's mainly, it seems to be much more in the US because the US is a lot more politically polarized than Europe is in general.

38:50And basically, this idea is that, you know, a lot of these people think there's going to be a civil war for precisely the reasons that you gave, which is that what we see is that What goes most viral are the so-called scissor statements, what Scott Alexander called scissor statements, which are statements that are deliberately designed to create debates, create arguments, basically. And this is one of the reasons why the media now, what they seek to do is they don't seek to just tell you things that are true. They seek to actually create statements or news reports that will divide people. because when they do that, the two sides will argue over that issue.

39:32And in so doing, they will help that thing go viral. So for example, if you're the New York Times and you want to go viral, how do you go viral? You're not going to go viral by telling the truth. If you just state facts about some sort of reporting, you're not really going to go viral most of the time. But what will go viral is if you make a divisive claim, something that's going to split the internet into two so something like um oh you know white people are privileged are too privileged uh you know if you say something like that that's going to divide the internet in half you'll have half of people be like yeah you know oh you know white people are too privileged you know we need to do something about it and then you have the other half people say no no no this is all nonsense you know this is based on you know false studies bad studies all this stuff you know and so then they'll argue over it and in arguing over it they're going to make it go viral because then it's going to appear on everybody's timeline and then people are going to be writing substack about it they're going to be making videos about it you know and so this all helps the the original claim to go viral and so this is the sort of tragic system in which we're in in which just stating true things does not go viral but but dividing people saying things that are going to divide people does and this is why i think so many people still believe that there's going to be a civil war in the u.s even though there's just when you look at reality there's just no inkling of this whatsoever.

40:52You know, the polarization does exist, but the polarization exists amongst the top like 1 % of people on social media who are mostly engaged in politics. It doesn't really exist very much in the wider world, you know. So, yeah. In other news, Shopify powers 10 % of all e-commerce companies in the United States. They are the driving force behind Gymshark, Skims, Aloe and Nutonic, which is why I partnered with them because when it comes to converting browsers into buyers, they are best in class. Their checkout is 36 % better on average compared to other leading commerce platforms. And with ShopPay, you can boost conversions by up to 50%.

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42:04You stress, people have more comforts and conveniences than ever, yet reports of unhappiness are at an all-time high one reason is that discomfort isn't an obstacle to happiness it's the path to it for it's only by enduring struggles that we develop the resilience necessary for lasting contentment and you had a fucking slammer that i've been thinking about so much automate only the skills you're willing to lose that those two feel like they're pretty related yeah so i mean you know we've been told again this is another sort of um error that the sort of social sciences have for a long time propagated which is that you know if somebody's exposed to stress then it's bad for their health you know it can cause trauma or whatever you know that horrible word um but i mean when you actually look at the not just the data but when you just look at pretty much all of human history right it's clear that stress can be very beneficial not all stress right there's a certain kind of stress and that's called eustress and so you know You stress is basically the stress that challenges you, that basically forces you to adjust, that forces you to improve, basically.

43:14It's not like the stress of being online and being constantly exposed to just horrific news from around the world. That's bad stress because you can't really do anything about that. right? If you're stressed because your feed is filled with horrific news stories from around the world, that's just bad stress. It's just going to stress you out. You can't do anything about it. So it's pointless. It's pointless stress. It's pointless suffering. Good stress is when you can do something about it. So it's stuff like, if you've got a date, for example, right? If you have a date with a girl, that's stressful because now you've got to be the best version of you.

44:00You've got to impress that girl. So you're under a lot of stress, right? But that forces you to become better. It's a challenge and you have to meet it. And what happens is that in so trying to meet that challenge, you become a better person. It helps you both at a psychological level, but also at a physiological level. It's hormetic stress. So hormetic stress is stress that makes you adapt, basically. It makes your body adapt to it. And constant stress of that kind is really, really good for you. And the research is very clear on this, but also ordinary human experience is clear on this as well.

44:38Anybody who's lived on this earth knows that you need a little bit of stress now and again, just to sort of push you forward and get things going. And so this whole thing that we've been told by a lot of people, which is that we need to minimize stress because then we'll live longer or whatever, that's actually it's not really true it's half true you know bad stress is bad for you it will reduce your lifespan probably you know but we need to constantly expose ourselves to discomfort if we want to be able to be happy because happiness is dependent on having a resilient mind you cannot be happy unless you have a strong mind because you have to be able to weather all the slings and arrows and the vicissitudes of life, they will be constantly throwing things at you.

45:23Life will constantly be knocking you astray from your course. It will constantly be throwing, just a lot of unexpected things are going to be happening. If you're only happy when things are going your way, you're not going to be happy most of the time. And so you have to cultivate this strength. And that essentially comes from exposing yourself to stress, the more stress of that, not stress, but you stress, the more you stress you expose yourself to, the more resilient your mind becomes and the more you are able to stay happy no matter what life throws at you. What about automate only the skills you're willing to lose?

45:57Yeah, so this is basically the same principle. So stress is also a form of learning. It's how you learn right you know i always say that you know um you know you you can you can rent wisdom but you can only purchase it with pain right so what i mean by that is you know you could tell me something you could give me some modern wisdom right and i will be like oh okay yeah that's a really cool way of living you know maybe i should do that and i'll try it a couple of days and then i'll forget it exists and i'll just carry on my life as it was but if i learn that same lesson through hardship, if I suffer, if I'm exposed to stress and I have to adopt that out of necessity, then it becomes integrated into me.

46:42And then it becomes a habit. It's something that I'll always remember because the pain engraved the lesson into my brain. And so stress can also be a form of learning. And one of the things with automating things is it completely reduces the friction. it reduces the stress you no longer need to engage in any kind of discomfort because you just get things done automatically for you and so you don't learn as a result of that because the pain the stress is a necessary component of the learning you're not going to remember the lesson unless you really suffer or expose yourself to some kind of stress that forces your body to internalize the lesson.

47:22Have you looked at that research, maybe Harvard, maybe MIT, about students that use LLMs to help them with learning and writing and the differential in terms of how much they can recall afterward? Yeah, yeah, I recall this study, yeah, I think. So this is basically, has found that essentially LLMs can cause brain rot, basically. I think that was one of the sort of clickbait titles that was given to the study, that LLMs cause brain rot. So yeah, I mean, it's the same principle, basically. When you are outsourcing your abilities to an LLM, there's no incentive for your body or your brain to learn the lessons, right?

48:11You're just kind of because it's like what Plato said in Fedras where he was talking about one of his concerns was he was writing at a time when paper and pen or parchment and pen were becoming common so this was the AI of his age and he lamented that paper or parchment was going to destroy people's memory because if they could write things down then they would have no incentive to remember it And, I mean, I don't know how true that is, but I think that there is a certain sort of analogue with what we're seeing today, which is, you know, there's a thing called the Google effect. Now, this is, it's not a robust finding, but I think that it, I think the finding does exist.

48:59I think the finding is true, but it's probably smaller than it. It's probably overstated. But the Google effect is this idea that, you know, if you can just kind of Google anything, then there's no need for you to remember facts, basically, because your mind has essentially been extended to your screen. So that's now functioning as your memory. Your laptop screen, your phone screen is basically your memory now. So your actual memory doesn't really feel the need, as it were, to kind of remember anything. So, I mean, again, the research on this is a bit shaky. I don't want to say that this is genuinely a thing because it's contradicted by some of the studies.

49:35But some studies have found that this is the case. So I don't know with this chat GPT thing, if it really does cause brain rot in the same sense, because it's only one study. And I'm very, very wary of single studies now, because of course, we've got a replication crisis. A lot of studies are not replicated now. But what I will say is one thing that we know for sure is if you don't use it, you lose it. This is a fact that's beyond dispute. It's true of your body, it's true of your brain. There's recent research, which only came out, I think yesterday, which found that people whose brains are active in late life, so from the ages of 50 to 80, they're much less likely to develop Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia.

50:22So if you basically engage in things like video games, board games like chess, if you write and read a lot if you if you keep your brain active in your sort of 50s then then your chances of developing dementia are much lower apparently and this is apparently like a pretty robust longitudinal study so um and again this fits this is not just an isolated study this fits with all the other research that has been done on this topic like the more you the more actively you use your brain the stronger your brain becomes it's you know although it's not technically a muscle it functions like a muscle in that respect and so i mean one of one of my big fears about ai is not that um the machine is going to go conscious it's going to become conscious it's that it's actually going to steal our consciousness away from us by essentially just causing us to outsource all of our agency our intelligence you know to it and causing our own brains to atrophy so i think i had a conversation with cal newport deep work man uh last week about a lot of this obviously his whole thing for 15 years now since he wrote so good they can't ignore you was how can you stand out in a field of relative equals but i think his perspective certainly my perspective now is that the the field is getting worse and worse the the bar that you need to get over is becoming ever lower.

51:52In order for you to get a partner at the moment, simply approaching somebody in person in the real world is a one in a thousand chance, as opposed to 50 years ago, that would be something that everybody was doing. And the same thing goes for what's the quality of your writing. Well, what AI is enabling is velocity and quantity, but it's regressing to the mean with regards to quality and creativity and taste especially. So if you can cultivate creativity, quality, work, writing, and good sense of taste, you are going to stand out even more. And you don't even need to cultivate it. You simply need to stop it from atrophying.

52:38If you can hold your level, if you can hold 2016 16 levels of focus and ability to write and overcome stuff. I mean, if there's somebody out there who's got sort of 2008 levels of non-distraction before Slack and before smartphones, you don't need to be better. You just need to not be worse. And that ability to kind of hold as the entropy, this sort of technological entropy of the system is trying to fucking compress you into dust. That to me, it kind of is hopeful. It's a hope as a civilization gets fatter, not great for the civilization. I think that it should be good that everyone's in health, but it does make for a pretty uncompetitive environment if you are someone that is able to avoid getting fatter.

53:24That's good for you in as much as civilization and the people around you are kind of a bit of a competition, which they are. The same thing goes for being able to read. Now, how long is it going to be before if we neural link in, we don't actually need to have the written word anymore. We don't need to have the spoken word anymore. And all of these skills that will atrophy, eventually you may get into a world where that's so redundant that you don't actually want it, that there's better ways. But at the moment, we're at a transition period where you still need to be able to have the skills from the old world in order to have a competitive advantage in the new one.

54:01So yeah, I'm increasingly thinking now about what are the things that are non-fungible? What are the things that are only human? What are the things? And that's really where most of my attention should be focused on writing without using AI to help me with my research, on coming up with ideas, on developing taste, on trying to be creative, on giving myself space, because as all of the market moves in the direction of, well, I can just publish more. If I publish more slop because I've been enabled by the magnifier that is LLMs, that is where the entirety of the market will move because it's the path of least resistance.

54:39Okay, well, what's the opposite of that? What's the more difficult choice? Yeah, the secret, I think, to surviving the future is going to be agency. Because as I said before, that is the one truly non-fungible thing. I think everything else is downstream of agency. I think what's going to happen in the sort of AI age is that essentially humanity is going to split in two. And I think I've made a reference to this before. I think we had a conversation in 2021 in which I spoke about this. But basically the analog I use is a novel called The Time Machine, which was written, I think, at the start of the 20th century.

55:12And it was basically the story of in the far future, humanity has sort of evolved into two subspecies. So you've got the Morlocks and the Eloi. And the Morlocks, basically, they do all the work. They've maintained all their faculties because they have lived lives of drudgery, and they've passed this on down from generation to generation. And they're in charge of all of the machinery, basically. And they're constantly working and constantly improving themselves mentally and physically. And then you have the Eloi, who were basically, they were the former aristocrats. They were the ones who had everything done for them.

55:47And as a result of this, they have all of their faculties have atrophied. so that their bodies are like really thin and frail their minds they've become very naive um they're like they're basically like children they've regressed into children and they're completely dependent on the morlocks who do everything for them and in the end basically it turns out that the morlocks have been farming the eloi in order to eat them basically you know and while they're doing this they're just distracting the eloi with all this like entertainment all you know basically just to keep them uh placid and i think that essentially we're going to have something probably not as horrific as that, but something similar in the sense that we'll have a class system, a new class system, where we'll have high agency people whose agency is going to be increased even more by AI.

56:31And then we'll have passive people whose passivity will be increased even more by AI. Because AI, the way I look at it, I don't look at it as artificial intelligence. I look at it as amplified intelligence. But as I say, it can also amplify stupidity. Essentially, it's an amplifier of everything. So if you're lazy, it will amplify your laziness. If you are highly agentic and conscientious, it will amplify those attributes as well. So what's going to happen is the people who already have agency, they're going to use AI to increase their options. They're going to basically use it to do more. So they're going to become even more agentic.

57:09And the people who lack agency, they're going to use it to do things for them. They're going to use AI to think for them, to basically outsource everything to them. So they're going to get even less agency. So what we're going to see is the compounding of both agency and its opposite, which is why I think there's going to be this bifurcation of people who are high agency and low agency. We're going to have extremely high agency people and extremely low agency people who will probably be the majority of humans in the future. Quite a scary prospect. This episode is brought to you by Gymshark. You want to look and feel good when you're in the gym.

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58:13Use the code modern wisdom 10 at checkout. That's gym.sh slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom 10 at checkout. All right. Next one from me, the personal Tocqueville paradox. You will always think you suck. That's good. It's okay to suck compared to your standards. As you grow, so will your standards. It doesn't mean that you actually suck. This is similar to the Matthew principle of self-improvement. there's two types of people, those who don't know how to improve their lives and those who don't know when to stop. But that personal Tocqueville paradox thing of I have standards, those standards continue to rise as my capacity rises.

58:53And now the standards always outstrip where I think my capacity is at. Well, if you didn't, you would never get any better. And it's kind of like hedonic adaptation, but for your skill set, like a habituation to what your performance level is. And the Tocqueville paradox, which I learned from you, is living standards in a society rise, people's expectations of those standards grow more quickly than the standards can deliver them to it. So this is why, given that Louis XIV, we have technology and equality of life that he not believe. And yet, we feel like quality of life is the worst that it could be, despite all of the material comforts and safety and medicine and access to the internet and air conditioning and fresh water and stuff that we've got.

59:40And I think the same thing happens with regards to personal growth as well. You just continue to outstrip your own standards over and over again with where you want to be. Yeah, absolutely. I always think of regret as a sign of progress. A lot of people think regret is a bad thing. I don't. I actually think regret is a good thing. Because what it shows is that you've grown, basically. Because if you're looking back and you're seeing an idiot in the past, then that's a sign that you have grown as a person. Basically, you have new standards of behavior that you had when you committed whatever act you are regretting.

1:00:15I think so many of these kinds of problems are really just base rate fallacies. You need to understand that your own standards have risen. And that's why when you look back and you think, oh, okay, this person wasn't the person that I wanted to be, that's because you are now a new person. You wouldn't be able to do that if you were the same person, in a sense. And again, our expectations for what is good do always increase as we improve. And we have to manage that we have to always account for that because if we don't we're essentially living in some sort of uh weird kind of on some treadmill basically you know we're basically on a hedonic treadmill um the way that i like to look at things is to try to look at objective metrics rather than you know whether i'm you know using subjective metrics because subjective metrics are always moving around they're always you know they're always they're very malleable and and on a bad day you might have certain expectations and then on a good day you have different ones so i think looking at objective metrics are always much much better so for example if you want to look at um you know they could be really shallow ones like um if you know as a writer if you're a writer like me it would be like how many likes do i get on my sub stack post you know um or it could be something a bit more sort of in depth like um you know uh looking at like uh where you know who who likes the piece you know is it is it just like sycophants who like your your article or is it actually other people do people that you normally disagree with politically are they liking that you're writing because if they do then that's that's a sign that you've really written something good you know so there's many metrics you can use um and again you know if you're if you're using subjective metrics it's like trying to navigate by the light of a shooting star you know it's just you're gonna be all over the place so you have to have fixed points you have to fix things that you you are aiming for.

1:02:12And that way you can objectively measure where you're going. Then your own standards are not really going to matter too much because you've got objective metrics fixed in place. Rothbard's law, if a talent comes naturally to someone, they assume it's nothing special and instead try to improve at what seems difficult to them. As a result, people often specialize in things that they're bad at. We've spoken about this one before. This was on the last episode we did it just relates to it just relates to these two so much i think yes so it's so good i have a friend i think i told this story last time ryan long uh wonderful at doing comedy sketches and just so fantastic but because that comes easily to him he's decided that other art forms are more elevated because sort of blinded to the there is this natural assumption that if something is worthwhile, it's going to be difficult.

1:03:06And I wrote this essay a couple of months ago about the difference between inputs, outputs, and outcomes. So inputs is sort of time spent, outputs is work done, and outcomes is real world results. And people love to focus on the first two, not the third one, because you never have to ask the question of effectiveness. But this the Rothbard's law thing actually plays a role in this too because The outcome-focused assessment of your own work, it forces you to look at your assumptions and maybe go, oh, actually, I have a natural talent at something and this sort of strange pattern whereby I assume that I'm not supposed to achieve things without sweat and pain and discomfort and agony.

1:03:58uh maybe that's wrong maybe that maybe that isn't something that i should try and build my entire worldview around yeah absolutely but i think one of the problems and that's sort of highlighted by rothbard's law is that often really the issue is is that we just never try in the first place to do something that we're good at because we assume by default that we're you know it's just basically a pretty easy thing that anybody can do right so what i would say is to overcome that is to just do what you love, right? I know it sounds a bit corny, right? But ultimately, I found that that is the best heuristic for you when you want to try and work out what you want to do, do what you love.

1:04:39And the reason for that is because even if you're not good at it, the fact that you enjoy doing it shows that you will be motivated to do it. You'll be motivated to get better at it. And obviously, because our brains are neuroplastic, if you keep doing something, you will get better at it. you know? And so I think, you know, even like, I would rather do something that I'm bad at, but which I enjoy than do something that I'm good at, but which I don't enjoy. Because you've got to bear in mind, you're going to do this for the rest of your life, right? This is going to be your life. Like this is going to be the thing that essentially you get out of bed for each morning.

1:05:12So if you're, if you're getting out of bed and you're like, Oh, I've got to do this. You know, that's not a life because you're going to be that most of your life is going to be that. But if you're getting out of bed and you're like, Oh, right. Okay. I've a hard challenge. This is a really hard challenge. I don't know how I'm going to do it, but I'm loving the fact that I get to tackle it. That's how you want to live because then your fun is going to be the motivation and that is going to ensure that you will get better at that thing. And so I think that's really the way around Rothbard's law, just to do what you enjoy.

1:05:42Forget what you're good at. It doesn't matter if you're young enough or if you're young enough in spirit even, you don't even have to be physically young enough. You keep doing something and if you're determined, And if you really enjoy it, you will get better at it. There's an interesting challenge, I think, that people face with believing that their accomplishments are as big as they are. You know, there's certainly some people out there who are BPD, narcissist, full of ego, whatever. I think so many people, especially in the modern world, are just chronically uncertain. Am I okay? Is what I'm doing good?

1:06:20How much more do I need to be until I can rest? I always think about that scene from Avengers Endgame where Thanos has done the snap and he's got this cabin on a planet that overlooks a lake and he comes and he puts his helmet down and then he sits in this seat. He sits down in this sort of rocking chair and he makes this noise and it's kind of like satisfaction, but it's much more like exhaustion. And I often think about this assumption that at some point there will come a time, the provisional life or deferred happiness syndrome or the arrival fallacy, this sense that at some point, but there's a personal growth version of this too.

1:06:57There's a personal growth version of at some point I will have done the growing and the learning and I will be able to rest. Well, I don't think that you're ever going to stop learning and growing. And I think that you would probably not enjoy your life if you were to do that. But also what that means is you need to enjoy some of whatever it is that you want to do now because it will just be this it is just going to be this convey about up until the end of time yeah so um naval ravikant has a brilliant quote about this which is um if you can't be happy with a coffee you won't be happy with a yacht basically and it's just a really great sort of quote because it sums up pretty much everything you've been describing, which is, you know, people are always looking for this moment where everything is going to be perfect.

1:07:46You know, they're always chasing this, this idealized version of reality where they will have attained all the skills that they want to. They will have gotten all the things that they want to, and then they will finally be happy. But ultimately, as you know, as we spoke of before, real happiness ultimately comes from the resilience of your mind. If you can find happiness in just something as simple as a coffee, then that is enough right then that means you will you will be happy later on when you have even more right then there needs to be this kind of baseline that you're willing to be happy at right so you need to be happy even if you have nothing because if you're if you're tying your happiness to something everything is is transient everything can be broken everything can be destroyed in this world and if you tie your happiness to that thing and that thing gets destroyed, you're going to lose your whole purpose of existence.

1:08:41So the only thing that is going to survive all of the slings and arrows of life is to tie your happiness to just the basic fact of existence, just the fact that you are alive and you get to live what is essentially such an improbable life. There's this crazy statistic, which is that if you look at genetically the number of people that could have been born you know the chances of you being born um are like one in n where n is greater than the number of atoms in the universe right so it's extraordinarily like improbable for us to even be here right now talking and you know this is assuming um that we were essentially selected randomly um from from the sort of genetic lottery uh but like you know it's so improbable that we're even here.

1:09:30So I try to find happiness in the most basic things, because then if you can do that, then everything else that you get is just going to be a bonus. But if you tie your happiness to something that you haven't yet achieved, then your entire life's journey up until that point is going to be miserable. And then you can't even be sure that when you attain that thing, it's actually going to be as good as you thought it was, because often we inflate our hopes and dreams beyond reality. So what we think is going to make us happy. When we finally get it, it doesn't actually make us happy. And this has happened to pretty much everybody.

1:10:01Everybody will recognize this. So you've got to, I think, if you want to be happy, you've got to be happy no matter what the external world is like. You have to cultivate internal happiness. You have to have that happiness with a coffee, and then you'll be happy with a yacht. Original position fallacy. Far leftists favor planned economies because they imagine themselves as the planners, not the planned. Far-rightists favor a return to feudalism because they imagine themselves as the lords, not the peasants. Many delusional worldviews stem from main character syndrome. And I had this from three or four years ago, one of our first episodes, the alpha history fantasy.

1:10:39Modern men who are angry at a world they feel has rejected them, mistakenly believe that they would have done better in medieval times. They are somehow adamant that the chance of them being Genghis Khan is greater than the chance of them being cannon fodder peasant number 1373, whose favela was sacked and destroyed. Yeah. So the original position fallacy really has its origins in the work of John Rawls. John Rawls was a liberal philosopher, basically, a political philosopher. And so his argument was that basically people, when they think of future states, They tend to assume that they're going to be amongst the elites, basically.

1:11:21So, you know, and this is true whether you're on the left or on the right. You know, if you're on the left, you think you're going to be one of the planners. If you're on the right, you think you're going to be one of the nobles, right? History, again, history has shown this to be completely false. So, for example, if you look at all the communist revolutions that occurred in the 20th century, you know, whether you're looking at Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Ceausescu, you know, all of these people, one of the first things that they did was to either imprison or murder the intellectuals, right? So the elites basically - Is that because they were the ones who could have come up with ideas to reverse their proposed direction for the civilization?

1:12:04Basically, yeah. So if we take one of these examples, so if we look at Pol Pot, so Pol Pot wanted to basically reset history to year zero. And he wanted nobody to remember anything from below before year zero like for him that was literally the beginning of time so he wanted to completely wipe out all traces of the past beyond year zero and one thing he knew about intellectuals was that they read books and that they wrote and obviously writing and reading are essentially society's memory so if you can eliminate all the intellectuals then you eliminate society's memory basically you wipe society's memory and you can start fresh you can create a new fresh without any bourgeoisie, without any of the ideas of capitalism to pollute the modern world.

1:12:51Would die along with the intellectuals. Exactly. And there's an irony because there were a lot of intellectuals that were supporting Pol Pot. They were some of his fiercest defenders. They were the guys that were advocating writing the propaganda for him. They were the ones who were like, and this is not just with Pol Pot, this is with all the communist revolutions. Even Western intellectuals, many of them, there was one guy, I've forgotten his name, but he was a western intellectual he went to pol pot he was like a he was one of the biggest cheerleaders for the khmert rouge and he went to um basically have a meeting with pol pot and he ended up getting assassinated you know nobody knows who killed him but i mean it was probably on pol pot's orders but i mean a lot of you know so the left-wing intellectuals believe that if they were to create a socialist uh sort of society that they would be at the top of society they would be planning things they would be you know everything would go according to their vision of society and that's why it's such an intoxicating vision that's why you know academics and other elites will tend to you know tend towards kind of these kinds of uh these sort of views of of society and they want uh either a socialist uh republic if they're you know they're on the left or if they're on the right they'll probably advocate for something it could be like neo-monarchy you know with the mencius mole bugs curtis yarvins whatever the world who believe that they would be, you know, I'm sure Curtis Yavin believes that if there was a right-wing revolution, that he would be at the right-hand side of, you know, the monarch, he would be the advisor, he would be the Bengali.

1:14:20But I mean, again, you know, usually it's the revolutionaries who end up getting murdered themselves, you know. This is true of the French Revolution too, as well, you know, the biggest advocates of the French Revolution ended up being the first people to get guillotined, you know uh or at least they did eventually get guillotined so uh you know all of this stuff you know so again so this is probably going off on tangent anyway but basically going back to the original idea so it was originally john rawle's idea right i kind of adapted it to extended it to the left and right but his idea was just generally that people tend to benefit they will tend to adopt whatever state that they think is going to benefit them they will tend to advocate for whatever state is going to benefit them and the solution that he proposed was um what he called the veil of ignorance and i think we might have covered this before but basically the veil of ignorance is is his belief that the best way to create a society um is to imagine is to begin by imagining that you are going to be assigned at random a position in the in the world that you advocate for.

1:15:28So if you advocate for a socialist or a communist country, you can't do that with the assumption that you are going to be the planner, you are going to be the chairman of the party or anything like that. It's got to be the assumption that you will be assigned a place within that state at random, because then this will motivate you to then hedge and ensure that every person in that state is well looked after, basically. So this is obviously coming from his left liberal perspective. To optimize for the sort of highest average life quality as opposed to your selected fortunate quality. Yeah, exactly.

1:16:07Yeah. So this was his way of advocating for liberalism because that's essentially what liberalism does. Liberalism is based on the idea that you want to ensure that everybody in society - Redistribution. Yeah, redistribution, but to an extent it's obviously it's not the same as a socialist uh country which is a socialist country would be complete redistribution um or or near total whereas liberalism is a is a sort of middle ground between um socialism and sort of uh free market capitalism like completely like capitalism so um it's basically the idea that um liberal liberals want to maximize freedom but they consider um freedom to also be freedom from uh for example poverty or from oppression by by higher classes of of people so so they're they're similar to libertarians from the basic point in that they value liberty more than anything it's just that liberals tend to have a slightly different definition of what liberty means like for libertarians liberty is literal it's literally just the freedom to do what you want.

1:17:13Whereas liberals, depending on the specific brand of liberalism, it might be the John Stuart Mill or the John Locke kind of liberalism, where your liberty ends at the point at which it does harm to somebody else, where it basically encroaches on their liberty. What about the coyotes law thing? Don't give the government a power you wouldn't want your political enemies to wield because one day they may well be in charge of it yeah yeah so this is the sort of a kind of pre a preventative to the original fallacy position this is what i advocate for personally i think that the best way to determine what policies to support uh are the ones that will you are the ones that will be not harmful if the government were to be taken over by somebody that you despise basically, by the worst government that is possible in your country.

1:18:07So if you're on the left, then you should advocate for policies that would not harm your interests or the interests of those you advocate for if the government was to suddenly become right-wing, and vice versa. So I think it's a pretty straightforward common-sense rule, because I think one of the problems with people is that they tend to think about the short-term at the expense of the long term. This is one of the fundamental problems with human beings. And it extends to politics as well. People tend to only, they tend to imagine that whoever they're supporting is going to be in power forever.

1:18:40And this is why, you know, when I see people like right-wingers, for example, on Twitter, actively suppressing and censoring left-wingers after advocating for free speech for so long, I just think, well, you're just shooting yourselves in the foot because this is going to be used against you. The apparatus you're creating is going to be used against you you know um so for example if like you know if we go with um if if trump for instance were to uh pass news laws which were to make it illegal for people to criticize him this is obviously a hypothetical situation this is not something he's actually done but this is a hypothetical you would see people on the right supporting a lot of people on the on the right would support it they'd be like yes you know yeah stick it to the left you know yeah you know trigger the libtards and all this stuff yeah and they'll be cheering but then trump's not going to be in power forever.

1:19:29And then you're going to have probably a Democrat in charge and he's going to have, now he's going to have the power to do exactly to the right what Trump was doing to the left. So, you know, it's basically like the leopards eating your own face kind of thing, you know, where a lot of this stuff can backfire if you don't think about it on a long enough timescale. In other news, this episode is brought to you by RP Strength. This training app has made a huge impact on my gains and enjoyment in the gym over the last two years now. It's designed by Dr. Mike is Rattel and comes with over 45 pre-made training programs, 250 technique videos, takes all of the guesswork out of crafting the ideal lifting routine by literally spoon feeding you a step-by-step plan for every workout.

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1:20:46You see the same thing culturally, I suppose, as well as systemically or in terms of policies. So for instance, BLM rioting and pushing as hard as it did, it would surprise me. Maybe I'm wrong, but 2020 into 2021, January 6th, was sort of the year of the riot. And I get the sense that the tone had already been set by something that seemed to be swept under the rug. It was done by the mostly peaceful and quiet protesters that I think legitimated a degree of retribution, even if it was only sort of in the minds of people that decided that that was the way that the world works, that, you know, one stupid action deserves another stupid action.

1:21:39that you see this too with the way that people behave, the sort of language that people use online. Well, you know, if your president gets shot at, then maybe their president can get shot at. And if you use a knife, then we can bring a knife too. And maybe we bring a gun and then you bring a gun and then someone brings a bazooka and you just, the tit for tat sort of ever. It's kind of like, what's that? Isn't there a law? Doesn't somebody have an idea? I think Elon's talked about this where, over time, because laws get instantiated and rarely repealed, eventually everything will be made illegal.

1:22:16That there will be a law that stops you from doing everything because you creep this forward one step at a time. Well, you shouldn't drive when it's this wet with that car, then with a different car, then with any car, then when it's a bit less wet, then when it's dry, then when it's, you know, you just end up litigating your way out of civilization and this is kind of the same sort of thing that if you allow this behavior and then the behavior can come back in a little bit more from the other side and then the other side and the other side it's this game of uh ever escalating tennis yeah i mean so there is um there is a concept which relates to this called um reciprocal radicalization which is basically where it's like a game of brinkmanship where you have one group who advocate for something um which then the the other side now feels entitled to and then they'll they'll escalate it even more and then it'll basically suck a repeating pattern you know so um it's like the left and the right almost have this symbiotic sort of relationship where you know the excesses of one group will fuel the excesses of the other group the opposing group and they're kind of in they're kind of like uh they're kind of like what is known as a mizan beam which is a mirror when you have two mirrors facing each other and they kind of infinitely reflect each other okay it's like you know they're constantly reinforcing each other in that sense so it's not just with the left and right you also see this amongst terrorists and governments as well so what will happen is that you have terrorists who will commit an act of violence and then the government will respond to that by having a crackdown and by tightening laws and then the terrorists will use this as an example of the government being tyrannical.

1:23:57And so that would justify further action against the government. And then the government will use further action to justify their own further action by saying, oh, these terrorists are even more dangerous now, so we have to ignite even tighter laws. And so it's like an ever-tightening situation where the excesses of one group fuel the excesses of the other group. And ultimately, the only way out of this is long-term thinking. Again, it's short-term thinking. It's when people are engaging in the satiation of their own impulses rather than actually engaging in long-term thinking about the consequences of their actions.

1:24:30It's first order thinking. They're only thinking about the immediate consequences. They're not thinking about the consequences of the consequences, let alone the consequences of the consequences of the consequences, which is what you really need to be doing when you're in the political game.

1:24:46That short-term, long-term thing, there's a similarity with Amara's law. We tend to overestimate the short-term impact of new tech and underestimate the long-term impact because hype inflates expectations and thus disappointment and thus skepticism. As such, it's possible for AI to both be a bubble and the most transformative tech since FIRE. Yeah, so this is an idea that's illustrated by something called the Gartner hype cycle. So if you go on Wikipedia, it will tell you that the Gartner hype cycle is pseudoscience. It's not supported by evidence. This is nonsense. The Gartner Hype Cycle is not supposed to be a scientific study of what actually happens.

1:25:27What it's supposed to be is a general rule of thumb, and it does fit most major technological developments. One of the problems with Wikipedia is it often straw man's ideas before trying to discredit them. So I wouldn't pay attention to the Wikipedia article of the Gartner Hype Cycle. basically what the garden hype cycle states is that you have when you have a new technology you have like massive surge in hype right where everybody's incentivized to sort of um just kind of get on the hype bandwagon basically because it's a new technology and people are speculating that they're sort of they're they're spitballing they're speculating about where this could go and people get excited about it people write clickbait articles about it and so this obviously inflates people's expectations.

1:26:14And so then the next stage of the hype cycle is where people start to realize, hang on a second, the hype was hype. They start to sort of realize that the reality of the new technology is not quite what people were saying it was going to be. And this causes a kind of backfire effect where people temper their expectations by overcorrecting. So what they do is they assume that because where the technology is actually headed is slightly different from where the hype claimed it was headed, therefore they were wrong about the technology completely. And therefore the technology is worthless. So then you get people now from the opposite side arguing for the opposite thing, saying it was all hype.

1:26:59Humans are stupid. Don't listen to humans. This technology is just going to fizz out. It's just crap. So people naturally react very strongly by overcorrecting. That's what humans tend to do. So you get a lot of articles arguing for the opposite. But then what will happen is everybody will go, oh, okay, well, yeah, so the hype was just crap. So let's just get on with our lives. And they'll forget about the technology. And then it's when they forget about the technology, that's when the technology will start to change the world. Because even though the technology is no longer in popular discourse, it has been adopted by the sort of people at the frontier of development, the industries where it can actually be used and these are usually not exciting industries they're usually things like um you know um sort of bank sort of you know sort of doing financial financial wizardry which is not really something that interests most people right so it will usually be it will have very limited um visibility for a long time but then the developments in those industries will gradually compound until we have something that is really really amazing and ai is great example of this right so um for you know so one of the guys one of the main pioneers of um ai is a guy called marvin minsky he was a major figure in the development of neural networks i think it was in the 1970s he said that in around seven to eight years uh we will have human level intelligence in neural networks basically he said something like that anyway and obviously this is completely absurd because you know by the 1980s you know we had really really basic neural networks and that continued into the 90s and everybody had kind of by then just forgotten about the hype everybody was like ah you know this this whole neural network stuff's crap nothing's gonna happen you know it was all just hype everybody forgot about it apart from a small number of researchers and a small number of people who were using um you know convolutional neural networks to like do things like imaging and things like that and then what happened is suddenly you have chat gbt boom you know in like 2022 and this case seemed to have come out of nowhere but it didn't actually come out of nowhere um the technology for the the transformer architecture was actually developed by google deep mind and this was um a few years before chat gbt uh sort of accommodated it and actually like you know began to uh develop it themselves um but like before that nobody really cared like for for 30 years nobody really cared in the in the mainstream about about neural networks so this is a good good example of it but the thing is is that the gartner hype cycle continues so it's not just you have this one hype cycle and then it's over it often repeats itself so we're going to see it again with things like world models now i think where there's what are world models so world models are like a stepping stone towards AGI.

1:29:47A world model is where you have things like physics implemented into your LLM. It's not really an LLM anymore because it can do so many other things. It's more like a video model, but it's a video model that actually has real world physics. And at the moment, Google is probably best placed for this because they have all the data. They've got the real-time data through search. They've got video data through YouTube. And then they've got spatial data as well through um uh google street view and all that kind of stuff so they'll probably they have actually got the best uh the world model at the moment called genie genie 3 but basically a world model is basically when an llm or an ai can model the world basically literally you know that's what it's called a world model it can model the world so it can understand things like physics so it can understand collisions it can understand gravity it can understand um the way that fluids move like water and things like that and we have we have like a kind of we have a simulacrum of that in video generation but video generations don't understand physics they're just copying the physics of you know films and you know other stuff like that whereas a world model genuinely understands the physics and so it can that's the first step towards creating agi because then you can actually activate ai in the in the physical reality and this is probably going to be the next hype cycle it's already begun there's been a lot of hype around genie 3 what will probably happen is we'll have something called the trough of disillusionment, which is the next thing of the Gartner hype cycle.

1:31:15And then when everybody's forgotten about world models, we'll start to see real world models emerge. Wow. I've spoken to a lot of behavioral genetics guys and girls on the podcast. I've got Catherine Page Harden coming back on for her new book next week. And I'd always wondered, there's an equivalent basically with over time things changing and the Wilson effect feels like a biological equivalent of what we're talking about with regards to the hype. So this is from you. Heritable traits like IQ and personality become more heritable with age because as you mature, you become more independent and free to be who you really are.

1:31:56Many heritability studies find that nurture's influence is stronger only because they never see that nature's influence longer?

1:32:06Historically, the social sciences and the field of genetics has pretty consistently underestimated the heritability of a lot of traits. Just to give a very recent example, I think just a couple of days ago, there was a new study published, which I retweeted onto my timeline, which basically shows... Initially, there was the belief that heritability of lifespan is between 20 and 25%. And this new study has found that it's actually closer to 50%. And this is a pretty important, you know, this is obviously a pretty important finding because this is the heritability of your lifespan, how long you're going to live.

1:32:46And so there's been a massive underestimation of lifespan in terms of the heritability of it. And I think this is not fully explained by the Wilson effect, but I think the Wilson effect is a contributor to this. and it's basically what it is is because studies tend to be quite short term genetic studies tend to be quite short term so they will tend to obviously it's very hard to track a human being throughout their entire life so usually longitudinal studies uh in genetics will tend to sort of follow people for a few years you know so usually three three years five years and that's not enough time to really understand the effects of these genes because a lot of these genes only become apparent later in your life you know people tend to sort of um there's a kind of what happens is that there's a masking effect so early in your life the effects of genes are masked by your upbringing by your environment so for example if you are genetically predisposed to love reading but in your life your parents never buy you any books and instead they buy your playstation right you're going to spend your childhood playing playing playstation instead of reading books which is what you really love to do it's only when you get older that you start that you're able to follow your own natural inclinations which are books and so it's only when you're older that you have the power to buy books and therefore it's only when you're older that your genetic predisposition to predisposition to books becomes apparent and so this is a very simple example but this is very common i think now in a lot of studies where a lot of there's a lot of reassessment that needs to be done due to these studies being so short-term.

1:34:26We really need to study people at different stages of their life. We need to study them when they're children, we need to study them when they're adults, and we need to study them when they're elderly in order to actually have a good understanding of the influence of genes versus environment. I saw there was a line from you, an Emerson one, people do not seem to realize that their opinion of the world is also a confession of their character. And Dylan O'Sullivan, that I know we're both fucking huge fans of yeah he's great yeah he's so good dude uh he says nothing gives you a clearer look into someone than how they misinterpret things every misinterpretation is a confession and it feels like the emerson and dylan are kind of agreeing with each other here their opinion of the world is a confession of their character and their misinterpretation of the world is also a confession yeah so to give you another quote from naval Wow.

1:35:20I think he said something like, it's almost always possible to be both honest and optimistic. Right. So what I find is that if you are optimistic is not because you're deluded necessarily. It's often just because of your personality, because you choose to see the good rather than choosing to see the bad. You know, it's often just a choice. It is literally just often a choice. you know them it's something that i've really has really sort of become an important force in my life now this understanding that i can actually choose how i perceive things i can choose whether i see things as a good or a bad thing depending on the facts that i select and the way that i interpret them and i'm aware that yeah okay this this often requires me to ignore certain things but we're always ignoring things anyway so it's not like i'm doing anything wrong here attention is selective.

1:36:12Attention is like empathy. It's a spotlight. You shine it on some things, and by doing so, you cast everything else in darkness. And so when you are pessimistic, this is not a sign that you see reality more clearly, as a lot of pessimists like to believe. It's actually a sign that you're choosing to shine your spotlight on shit rather than on diamonds, to put it simply. You have a choice where you shine your spotlight. And ultimately, it's a case of what are you looking at? What are you perceiving? When you see something, what details are you picking out? And this is why when I see miserable people now, I don't see realists.

1:36:46I just see miserable people. I see people who are unhappy inside, who are essentially externalizing their unhappiness by choosing to see the absolute worst in everything. And this is why I don't have much tolerance now are for people who just keep complaining about things because to me it's it that's just a way to dig your hole deeper basically you're just making life worse for yourself by choosing to see the worst but there's no solutions in complaining if you just keep complaining all you're doing is just you just make you're convincing yourself that the world is bad and the world doesn't need to be bad you don't need to lie to to see the good but surely some in some in some situations things are bad is it not fair to accurately represent that and and reflect it so that maybe people try to change the thing that's bad and shouldn't be bad?

1:37:34No, no. You should always recognize that things can be improved always. Yeah, absolutely. But this doesn't mean that you should focus on the bad and have the bad as the only thing to focus on. There's always two sides to the story. So the way I look at it is, yes, you should always be cognizant of problems. I'm not saying that you should not see problems. You should choose not to see problems. You should see the problems, but instead of focusing on complaining about them, you should try to focus on solutions instead. What can I do rather than make this better? So this actually fits in with another of my ideas.

1:38:07So there's a concept called the Stockdale Paradox. And the Stockdale Paradox is quite an interesting one because it's basically taken from a guy called James Stockdale. He was an admiral, right? And he survived nearly eight years of torture and isolation in the Hanoi Hilton, basically, which was so-called because it was one of the most brutal camps in North Vietnam during the Vietnam War. He was basically a POW for quite a long time. Yeah, so for eight years. And so basically, so what he observed while he was there was that there were people who were optimists and there were people who were pessimists.

1:38:43And they both, both groups ended up suffering hard and many of them died very early. um so the optimists would basically believe that they were going to be released from the jail by christmas and then when christmas didn't come it would be easter and then you know easter didn't come so they would keep hoping and eventually their hope just ran out and they just kind of gave up on life and they some of them like you know they just lost the will to live because they had hoped and their hopes had been destroyed but then on the other hand there were the pessimists who were people who just kind of believed that their station was completely you know irredeemable and there was no hope in the first place.

1:39:18So obviously they had no motivation to improve. What Stockdale found was what got him through the eight years was not by being an optimist, not by being a pessimist, but actually by practicing a kind of optimistic pessimism. And this was essentially, so what it was is that basically the key to achieving this kind of paradoxical state of mind is to accept that bad outcomes are indeed a real possibility. But rather than let that possibility crush your hopes, you can develop hope in your ability to deal with those problems by preparing for them. So by acknowledging and confronting the harshest potential outcomes, you make them less of a problem and less of a reason for negativity.

1:40:03So what I'm saying is basically healthy optimism arises through a kind of practical pessimism. It's not the blind idealism that everything is always going to turn out fine, but rather the self-belief that you can deal with things no matter how they turn out. And that's essentially what confidence is. Confidence is not the belief that everything is going to be all right. Confidence is the belief that you will be able to handle with things even if they're not okay. So you'll always be able to deal with the eventualities. And the way that you do that is by acknowledging the worst case scenario, but preparing for any scenario essentially you know so you all you don't necessarily have to be pessimistic you'd have to be optimistic you fuse the two so this is obviously this is a bit separate from from the idea of seeing the beauty and things but it's this is obviously a very healthy attitude to have um with regards to just you know half glass half full or glass half empty just understand that the glass is half right that's it you don't need to it doesn't need to half full doesn't need to be half empty it's just half you know what the uh george's george's line from the agency book is uh some people look at the glass and see it as half full some look at glass and see it as half empty what you should do is realize that you are the tap and that's his line that's his line around agency which is yeah that's a good wherever wherever this is you can actually pour into it um yeah it's a the the stockdale thing's interesting because i can see how people preparing for the bad would quite easily cause them to tumble down the rabbit hole of ruminating about it and worrying about it and woe is me and concept creep and now I've got a pathology and I've got multiple personality disorder or you know that is the genesis of it but um ultimately it comes down to it ultimately comes down to how you interpret it right so So there is, you know, yes, you could just go down this rabbit hole where you're just constantly thinking of the worst case scenario.

1:42:06But that's only going to happen if you haven't found a solution. If you have a solution, if you have developed a solution to the worst case scenario, then it's no longer going to really dwell on your mind, you know, because you already have the solution. And that's ultimately what I do. like if i you know like if i was to say come on this podcast and i would have the worst case scenario where i would say something you know let's say i said the n-word or something like that you know like that that if you're somebody who um is really anxious you'd be worrying about something like that so long you know you'd be like oh my god you know what if i say the wrong thing you know that would just cause you to be a nervous wreck and it would probably just make for a very bad episode but if you have a solution right if you actually have um trained yourself to not uh engage in these kinds of intrusive thoughts that might cause you to say those words or you know if you have a way to sort of style it out you know then you don't then it's not going to be a problem do you mean it's the same with anything like anxiety is really it's really a result of you not having a solution to the worst case scenario but as long as you have that solution you're not going to have the you i mean you might still have anxiety if you're a new you know if you're a neurotic person but that the thing is you're not going to have any less if you've got a solution and what's that line about anxiety hates a moving target action is the antidote to anxiety yeah yeah that's it yeah yeah yeah look guinda dude you're a legend uh i appreciate you coming on this this always rules it's one of my favorite episodes where should people go to check out all of the stuff that you've got going on yeah so main place is uh my blog which is just goinda.blog um and you can also find me on twitter at g underscore s underscore bogle or just type my name into google and i'm sure it'll come up uh yeah yeah and cheers you know pleasure yeah thank you it's always a good one uh keep writing because we got more to talk about oh yeah yeah congratulations you made it to the end of an episode your brain has not been completely destroyed by the internet just yet, here's another one that you should watch.

1:44:10Go on. Rinse knows that greatness takes time, but so does laundry. So Rinse will take your laundry and hand deliver it to your door expertly cleaned, and you can take the time pursuing your passions. Time once spent sorting and waiting, folding and queuing, now spent challenging and innovating and pushing your way to greatness. So pick up the Irish flute or those calligraphy pens or that daunting Beef Wellington recipe card and leave the laundry to us. Rinse. It's time to be great.