#662 - Gurwinder Bhogal - 18 Psychology Lessons To Understand People Better

25:59I think it allows people to enjoy the experience of knowing that someone that they like is going to do a thing that they're going to enjoy for longer. So speaking of your peasant thing, I had a new one for you, which I came up with. This is a collaboration between me and Alexander Date Psych, who is a great Twitter follow. This is the Alpha History fantasy. Modern men who are angry at a world they believe has rejected them mistakenly feel that they would have done better in many evil 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 one million three hundred and seventy three thousand whose Fadala was sacked and destroyed.

26:42That's a brilliant one. I love that one. Yeah absolutely. I was I was reading this this article yesterday about Bronze Age pervert. Yes, I read it as well. I read the same article. Yeah, yeah, it's it's quite funny because For your audience who book might not know who he is so he's a sort of far right figure I want to say far right I actually mean genuinely far right not the kind of far right that you'll see on Wikipedia You know, but actual far right like he's a he's a neo reactionary so he's like this guy basically believes that a group of strong men Should rule over everybody with absolute authority essentially, and he's openly fascist and stuff.

27:22So this guy has become quite popular sort of on the right and particularly among certain people in the Trump White House, he was quite popular. They've used to pass out, pass around his book, Brian's Age, mindset. And his whole thing is basically about being strong. It's about working out and having a massive physique like his avatar on Twitter, it's like this hench, like Jack Guy basically. basically, and he's all about like, you know, cultivating physical strength and basically the strongest should rule and the weak should perish and all this. And it's hilarious because his identity was actually sort of revealed against his wishes and he's this guy called Amaru, who's like a, I think, a Romanian immigrant to the US and he's basically his actual appearances.

28:11He's like some scrawny little sort of pale kid, you know, who's, who's nothing like he was presenting himself out to be on Twitter and on his Caribbean rhythms podcast, because he was making out like, he was this massive bodybuilder, like Beefcake, monster, basically, like a barbarian. That's what his whole thing is based around. But in real life, he's like, this really wimpy looking like scrawny kid. And it's absolutely hilarious, because I think that a lot of these people who claim that they want to live in these old sort of gengast car and style worlds where, you know, it's just all about brutality.

28:46A lot of them wouldn't survive like, you know, even a couple of days. They would be landed precisely on what Alex started having an argument about online. So he came up with with half of this and then I fleshed it out and give it the name. And he was having an argument with the at in cells co Twitter account, which is super, super super antagonistic and really fascinating to observe, absolutely fascinating to observe, to be honest. These haven't been a big argument with them and his point was, hang on a second, so you are unsuccessful in the competence dominance hierarchy and sociosecually with, or socioeconomically in terms of being able to attract women sexually in 2023.

29:29three and somehow the belief is that half a millennia ago in 1523, you would have done better that you like a guy twice your size would have worn you to fuck a girl with like there is there he would have he would have happily beheaded you he would have happily taken your what you know so I do think that it's just an important redress to the balance that things were, you know, it was a pure time. It was a better time. Don't get me wrong way. Yeah. I think that a lot of the people who claim to want to live in a sort of idyllic past are really yearning for their childhood, I think, a lot of the time.

30:12Because when they say that they want a simpler time, a simpler world, that is essentially their childhood. That's a world where things were much simpler where, you know, they didn't have to worry with all about all the kind of complexities of adulthood and all that kind of stuff. So this is me being kind of armchair psychologists here, but like I do think that a lot of people really are secretly yearning for their childhood when they claim to want to return to this idealic past because this idealic past didn't actually ever exist. It's always been brutal. Like I mean there was this one really there's this this kind of far right another far right lady she's half Indian I think her name's mega or something and she's uh she's always tweeting about how the past was so much better than than the present.

30:54And she wrote this one thing about how, you know, in the past, it was much easier to grow food because all you had to do was just have your own little patch of land and then you could grow any food you wanted. And, you know, you had enough to feed your whole family and everything. And it's just complete nonsense because the kinds of, in the past, food was so hard to grow. Like, you had to have the perfect soil, you had to have the perfect pH, you know, you had to, you had to constantly ensure that insects were getting at the food pests and stuff. You had to ensure that the weather was right. There were so many things that would just go wrong.

31:28Things that we take for granted now. Now we've got pesticides, we've got fertilizers, we've got greenhouses, we've got UV, sorry, infrared lights. We've got all this different stuff that helps stuff grow. We can grow stuff at length now. We can grow as much food as we want. But this wasn't always the case. It wasn't food, it wasn't always as plentiful. In the past, your crops could fail within a day. You know, you could be, you could have a massive field of crops and within a day they could get ruined by a single flood You know, we were completely at the mercy of nature You know and people don't seem to realize this people seem to think that oh, you know We're living in the past is just like living around nature man, you know like you know Just basically yeah free love No, the people and this is true of the trads on the right as well as the kind of the kind of hippies that you might find who are more on the left, but like it's this sort of idealization of the past.

32:21One that you just don't, one that doesn't reflect reality. I wonder if, a lot of the stuff, I wonder if we could fold in the like the horticulturalist's history fantasy as well, or the agriculturalist history fantasy as well as the alphas. Exactly, you know, there's, for instance, like there, you know, there's, if you look at sort of the famines that are happening in places like Sudan, for instance, and Somalia, those things were widespread, they were happening every one point. And the only reason they don't happen in the West anymore is because we have the technology to prevent them from happening.

32:52So this is not like, oh, we're just lucky to, because nature's on our side and nature wants us to eat well. No, nature doesn't give a shit about us. Nature's desires are not aligned with us. If it wants to ruin our crops, it will just ruin our crops. It doesn't care about what humans want. and entire populations in the past died of starvation. We are lucky because we are the ones that descended from those who just happened to make it. Here's another way to look at it. So for the people that are on the left that would maybe the climate 100 years ago, it was so much more balanced. Look at these extreme weather events that we're having, et cetera, et cetera.

33:28Climate -related deaths have decreased by 98 % in the last century. There's been a 50X decrease. And more people die from cold weather than dry from hot weather. more people die from cold than die from heat and there's been a 50 x decrease in climate related deaths over the last century. So, you know, I think, yeah, you're right. There's something going on whereby if you can convince yourself that a past time would have been better, it alleviates some of the pressure of now not being as good as it could be because you You are no longer culpable for the reason that it's not as good as it could be.

34:09I've outsourced the challenges that I'm facing to the fact that there is something structural or systemic or systematic that's stopping it from happening. Yeah, absolutely. I think there is a desire for people to shift the blame to things outside of themselves. I mean, I'll cover this in my most recent article where we've seen this happen actually a bit more. It's actually quite disturbing how, I think Jonathan, Height and Gene Tweng, they found that there has been an externalisation of the locus of control. So for the audience, the locus of control is the degree to which one believes that they, as opposed to external circumstances, shape their destiny.

34:53So people who have an internal locus of control, they believe that their own decisions are what dictate what happens in their life. And people who have an external locus of control, they believe that what they do doesn't really matter because their lives are dictated by what happens in the external world. And interestingly, there seems to have been an externalisation of the locus of control over the past sort of 40 years, and particularly since the 1990s. I actually think that people in the in the distant past didn't have the luxury of having an external locus of control most of the time. I mean, there was still skate -goating and things like that when people form triumphs.

35:31But I think when you're trying to survive, you don't have that luxury. You don't have the luxury of, you know, blaming other things. You have to take responsibility for what's going wrong in your life. But when you arrive in a world like ours where pretty much everything is done for you, you have that luxury. You can now suddenly start blaming everything else except for yourself. And that's why I think we have these people who are yearning for this distant past where, you know, everything was in their eyes much better because they can easily just blame the modern age. It's easy to blame modernity because you don't have to take responsibility for modernity because modernity is doing everything for you.

36:08Modernity is growing your food. Modernity is keeping you safe from invasions. Modernity is keeping you warm. Modernity is giving you the information that you need to help yourself in pretty much any situation that you could possibly find yourself in. Modernity is a map for you that you can find your way through anywhere. Modernity gives you pretty much everything and that allows you the luxury to blame modesty for your products. Yeah, there's a there's one there's one that I came up with the existential crisis luxury only when the bottom levels of Maslow's hierarchy are filled. Can you ask questions like, am I truly self actualizing?

36:43Therefore, having a crisis of life direction should be a reason for gratitude, not despondency. Absolutely, we are so lucky, you know, to have what we have gratitude is something that to have the kinds of problems we have, we have to be living lives that are essentially, you know, the whole thing about first world problems. You know, this is what we worry about most of the time now. We worry pretty much, I would say 90 % of my problems now are first world problems. Am I enacting my logos? Am I speaking my truth forward? this really my highest self showing update today. Yeah, and this is why, you know, it's, we, you know, if you look at the kinds of things that T people are talking about now, people are talking about trauma, for instance.

37:30Trauma has become probably one of the most common buzzwords in the world today in the, in the West. And what trauma means now is it usually just means being a little bit disappointed. Whereas what trauma meant in the past would probably mean something like having your arm -carf. There's been a massive amount of concept creep with regard to what we really regard as a problem because we live lives as a luxury now. The people who were living 200, 300 years ago, they were probably laughing at our problems. They would be just conceiving it. I don't disagree. I'd sing from the same hymnsheet as yourself, but as we said before, hedonic adaptation is a hell of a drug and it's going to continue to come in.

38:12And whatever the opposite of hedonic adaptation, but for how you begin to zero in on an ever more high resolution, high standard high bar that you want from your life. And I don't think that this is necessarily a bad thing for society to do either. If we were to say, we only need to have healthcare standards that are at the level that they were in the 1800s, despite the fact that we've made all of this progress, that would be a rejection of the responsibility we have with unnually increased capacity. So it is important, both structurally and individually, to continue to ask more from yourself.

38:46It's the balance as with everything, the virtuous mean, as with everything you're trying to find where is the middle ground, where is the balance between these two different things. Yeah, absolutely. I wrote this tweet actually, which I think speaks to this quite a bit. And it's basically about, and this basically this, it's everything about humanity has improved throughout history except contentment, but it is only because our contentment never improves that we keep improving everything else. And I think that kind of speaks to what you were saying, which is basically that it's essential to progress.

39:23We have to be uncomfortable in order to progress. We have to keep, we have to always find ways that the world could be better in order to make the world better. And so I agree with you completely, you know, we do need to have this kind of sense of, you know, this kind of hedonic adaptation is, it's not just good, it's necessary, it's absolutely necessary, because if it weren't, we would just be, we would never, we would never progress as a species, we would just be content with what we have. So I think it, like I said, it's a case of balancing what we have with what we want. So we should be grateful for what we have, and that's what I am.

40:00I'm absolutely grateful for everything I have, but that doesn't mean that I don't want more. I can still want more and still be grateful for what I have. And it's a bit of a weird line to balance, but it can be done. Because you can always find new things to want. That's the easiest thing in the world. The harder thing is to find some sort of value in what you already have. And I think just finding that balance is the key to being happy, I think. It's definitely made a difference to me. Have I told you about that story I learned about the Buddha's quote of life is suffering? So the word suffering is duke du kk h a and some scholars argue could test that it's not suffering but unsatisfactoryness life is unsatisfactoryness and I think that that makes an awful lot more sense that it's always just about going to be Behind where your anticipation and your expectation were because your expectation is built to be out ahead of what reality can deliver to you Okay, next one, next one.

41:02St. George in retirement syndrome, many who fight injustice come to define themselves by their fight against injustice. So that as they defeat the injustice, they must invent new injustices to fight against simply to maintain their identity. Yeah, I think this is a product of people sort of tying their mission with their identity. So people will come out and they will have some kind of political cause where they'll be like, you know, I absolutely hate racism or something and then they'll go out there and be like anti -racist, you know, but what they will do is they'll make the mistake of tying their status as an anti -racist with their identity and they will actually make that part of their identity.

41:47So they will begin to define themselves as an anti -racist. And the dangerous thing with this is that if they do eventually defeat racism? Then their identity is essentially nullified. They no longer have any meaning in their lives. They're not just out of a job, they're out of personhood as well. Exactly. And they've lost their sense of purpose, they've lost their meaning in their life, they've lost their kind of narrative because we all view our lives as narratives. We're all kind of like movie characters living a movie. And if you've basically defeated the villain, then there's no point in continuing the movie, you know, that's it, the movie's over, raw credits.

42:27So these people unfortunately, how they tend to respond is that they will sort of increase the, they will project new racisms in the world, they will create new causes, new dragons to slay basically. And you can see this in the phenomenon of concept creep where, you know, when we defeat one form of harm, we will expand the definition of that harm so that it covers more things. So for instance, racism is the obvious one. So racism, obviously there's still racism, but if we look at how it was with Jim Crow,

43:14Jim society, you had white people, you had black people, and then the civil rights movement and everything kind of just destroyed that. And then the definition of racism was expanded. So then you had institutional racism, you had systemic racism, and then you had these new sub -species of racism, you had microaggressions, cultural appropriation, and basically the kind of definition of racism just kept expanding because as racism was gradually removed from society, people needed to retain that sense that they were fighting a great threat. And so they expanded it. And like I said, this is not to say that racism doesn't still exist.

43:48It does still exist. But it's nowhere near the problem that it was a hundred years ago, or even further back. So as racism has become less of an actual threat, people have expanded their definition of it in order to give themselves a purpose in order to retain this sense that they are slaying this mighty dragon. And if someone lets go of that, then who am I? Who am I? Exactly. After all of this has happened. Yeah, I think, yeah. This is one of the things, why it's almost pointless to argue with an activist, because they have tied their identity to their activism. So if you are arguing with their cause, if you're saying that their cause is meaningless, you're basically saying that their life is meaningless.

44:28You're basically saying that their entire identity is meaningless. Like, if you were to go to Ibrahim Kendi and tell him, look, racism is nowhere near them as much of a problem as you say is, that's going to be a personal attack against him because he's spent his whole life writing about racism. And so this, it comes across as a personal attack, they view it as a personal attack as not just a political disagreement. It becomes an actual attack on their whole sort of system of identity, the way that they form sort of this self -conception, which makes it very sort of hard to argue with these people.

45:02Why do you think it is that people are attaching their sense of self, that sense of self -worth, integrating art and artists together in this way? Is this a surrogate for religion? Is this that a lot of cultural technologies previously would have been so central to the way that we see the world? Is it just that the allure of fame and status and continuing to uphold whatever the causes allows you to keep charging forward? Have you got any idea of the post -mortem there? I would say that it's probably many different factors because obviously humans do things for a variety of different reasons. And I think all of the reasons that you just mentioned are probably, they all probably play a part.

45:43So I'd say, yeah, absolutely. The meaning crisis has contributed to this a lot. You know, there's this kind of vacuum that people are now trying to fill with the obviously the death of God. People are trying to fill this vacuum with whatever they can and some people are choosing to fill it with social justice and the last time I was on this podcast, we spoke of atheism plus being a kind of surrogate for it was a way that the new atheists tried to retain a sense of purpose and meaning was by going full social justice. So I think that's definitely part of it. And then I think that there are other people who perhaps are looking for cloud online, looking for some kind of, you know, some sense of belonging or something, you know, they want to be part, they want to have a kind of an audience, or a tribe to belong to.

46:30And a hill to the island as well. Yeah, an hill to die on. There are many reasons why people do it. And there are obviously there are probably just people who generally have been fooled into believing that racism is more common than it actually is, or that misogynism is more common than it actually is, or whatever, you know, whatever cause you want to talk about. I mean, I was one of those people. I used to believe racism was more common than it actually was because I used to get all my information from the Guardian and the New York Times. And this was around the time when we had the great awakening where there was a 400 % increase in the use of words like sexism and racism in the liberal media.

47:03I was reading it at that time, so I developed this idea that everybody was racist and all this kind of stuff. That goes back to what you said before about a well curated social media feed is either having a hell. Okay, next one, opinion shopping. Many who conduct research online ignore every source they disagree with till they find one they agree with and then use this source as an authority to justify what they already believe. They don't consider someone an expert unless they agree with them. So this is one that hits quite close to home because I used to do this. I was guilty of this. When I first got onto Twitter and engaged people in arguments, what I would do is whenever I wanted to prove something to my interlocutor, what I would do is I would type in what I wanted to prove.

47:54So basically, let's say if I wanted to prove that let's just say something random, I wanted to prove that the world was flat. I would just type in evidence that the world is flat. And then I would get, obviously, I would get some kind of evidence from some fringe website. And then I would basically say, hey, look, see, look, this is proof that the world was flat. So, you know, I think this is something that a lot of people do. And the reason I think that a lot of people do this is because I've also seen other people do it. In fact, they've done it in arguments with me. Like, for instance, what would happen is that I would say, oh, what evidence is there for claim X?

48:33And then they wouldn't respond for like an hour or something. And then eventually they would basically post this link to this article or whatever, which was, which claims to represent what they say it claims. And then what I would do is I'd go on Google and I would type in what they, you know, what they would try and prove. And immediately be the first, first search result. And I'd see, okay, so what you've done is you've basically just, you've gone on to Google, you've, you've typed in something, you've ignored all the search results, which disagree with your position, picked the one, which agrees with it, and then you've held the surface.

49:05But you've even, you've put a prompt in that is only going to give you things that confirm your world view. You haven't even been in the world flat. You've also you've looked for the world is flat evidence. Yeah, that's the first thing, but then even within that, that Google will sometimes will, you know, say, this is a myth or whatever. And then they'll just skip that completely and they'll go to the one. And I think this is, you know, people compare it to maybe confirmation bias. So it is a similar sort of mechanism to confirmation by us except the differences that confirmation bias is unconscious.

49:39It's something that you do unwittingly whereas opinion shopping is a conscious action. It's when you consciously are looking the information that sports your worldview. Yeah, very good. Yeah, so I do think that this is a very, very common thing because if you are good enough at Googling in fact you don't even need to be very good at Googling. If you know basic English you can always get pretty much any academic study or any kind of New York Times article or whatever, that just supports what you're trying to prove. And then you could just hold it up as proof of what you're, like anytime somebody says that they've got evidence of something, if you do a Google, you can always find evidence to the contrary.

50:16Because, and this probably goes to another concept that was in one of my megathreads, which is the idea that for every PhD, there is an equal and opposite PhD. I think it's law. It gives in law, yeah, it gives in law. In matters of law and policy, anyone can find a subject matter expert who supports their view because having a PhD doesn't necessarily make someone right, it often just makes them more skilled at being wrong. Yeah. And this is something that's sort of very common in sort of law court. In fact, I think many of your audience might have watched the Johnny Depp trial when him against Amber Heard, which was last year.

50:56And anybody who watched that trial will have noticed that both people drew on psychologists and psychiatrists to support their candidate, their sort of defendant or whatever. I think candidates probably more accurate. Yeah, yeah, or plaintiff or whatever. But like, yeah, I mean, so, you know, what happened is that you had two groups of psychiatrists to the psychologists. Both of them were equally qualified. Both groups had PhDs from pretty respectable universities because they were being paid by Hollywood actors, so they were the cream of the crop. So these were prestigious psychologists and yet they had completely opposite conclusions to what was going on.

51:39And so what you see here is obviously these two groups cannot both be right at the same time. Their opinions are mutually exclusive. And so there's There's only one thing that could be happening here, which is that they are rationalizing. They are cherry picking evidence to support the narrative that they want to push. And this I think is a very good microcosm of what goes on in the real world, where you have experts who are drawn on not just by lawyers and by legal teams, but by businesses. And you see this with regards to say, for instance, in the corporate world and business, What happened is, in fact, the original term, opinion shopping, originally comes from the business world because what businesses would do is that they would hire experts who agreed with them to write papers that agreed with what they were trying to do.

52:27So for instance, Coca -Cola would hire nutritionists who would say that, oh, sugar isn't actually that bad for you, for instance, the main thing that you want to be wearing about is salt and fat. Those are much more worse for you than sugar. Obviously, this has been shown to be not quite true, but the issue was that they wanted to make people believe that Coke was healthy. So they would cherry pick experts. They would find experts who had done research, which they thought they could use to their advantage, and then they would pay this person to write a report on their behalf, which would... And you see this everywhere now.

53:02You see it in gender clinics. So, for instance, Gidds, basically the Tabestock, they were pretty cushioned up. with mermaid charity and with other similar charities and what they would do is they would work with academics who believed what they believed, people like Jack Turban, who's a well -known gender ideologue in academia. And they would basically pay these people to write academic papers using their expertise, using their sort of their knowledge to make the case for, for instance, giving puberty blockers to underage kids or whatever like, you know, to young children. and then just to be balanced, there would probably be people on the opposite side of the soil who would do the opposite.

53:44They would get the experts that agree with them to write papers to do the same things. And that's really a lot of academia is fueled by this. It's fueled by institutions paying academics to make the case for why that institution is great, in other words, basically, but to do it indirectly by just by doing it studies. And these studies are usually quoted and widely quoted by the press. So this is another reason why you can't really believe what you read in the press, because even the academic studies that are quoted by these media outlets are often a result of perverse incentives. There's a quote that I put in my newsletter today from Nat Friedman that says, better to get your dopamine from improving your ideas than having them validated.

54:30Yeah, because it feels good. Nowadays, yeah, absolutely. And nowadays what I do is I don't really read work from authors that I agree with very often anymore. I do sometimes, you know, because I feel like I mainly just so that I can kind of boost them, you know, retweet them or whatever, like, you know, I want to retweet some people that I agree with. So I naturally will read it first. But like usually what I would do now nowadays is I will actually seek out information from people I disagree with because I find that's just so much more valuable to me. I learned so much more from reading people that I think I disagree with and I say think because I'm not always sure whether I will disagree with them But people that I assume that I would disagree with because they're on they're in a different tribe or whatever, you know So like recently I've been been reading the works of People like Judith Butler this is going back to the whole gender thing again because I've never really considered her World view very much.

55:21I mean obviously I was familiar with her work, but Because she's blamed for a lot of this kind of gender ideology kind of stuff And so I thought I'd better get to the fur, get right to the source. Instead of reading what people are saying about her, which is what I've been doing for the past few years, I thought I'd actually better get to the source itself and actually read what she's actually said. And to be fair to her, I mean, she still strikes me as a little bit crazy, but not as crazy as she'd been made out to be by people like Chris Rufo, you know, and other people like that. So, you know, it's, I think it's important for getting a balanced view.

55:55and it's also, I have learned things that I wouldn't otherwise have learned because the kinds of circles that I'm moving, I would never have gotten the ideas that Judith Butler is is putting out. I would only have gotten sort of straw men of those kinds of ideas. Even though I would regard the people that I hang out with as being pretty reasonable and being pretty fair -minded, even then they are still human beings, so they're going to have the prejudices that a human being has. And you've selected them, right? You've chosen them to be around you. So your biases are at play just with the slantion effect there.

56:25Yes, exactly. I've got one here that I stole from Naval, you quoted, in Naval earlier on. And this is a real world karma. Karma doesn't need quantum energy or spiritual Wu to be real. Karma is just you repeating your patterns, virtues, and flaws until you finally get what you deserve. So I think Naval meant this in a way, when he said this, he meant it in a very specific context, right? He meant it in the context of whether you work hard or whether you don't or basically if you work hard you will eventually get the fruits of your labours and if you don't you won't. I don't think that karma exists in any kind of capacity in the wider world.

57:03I mean history is filled with nasty nasty people who got away with with everything in the end and we live very happy lives. So on the contrary history is also filled with people who you know didn't have anything but help other people and then ended up getting betrayed at the end. So I don't think karma exists in any kind of real sense of the world but I think it does exists in the sense that maybe I think Navar means it, which is that you get the fruits of your own labours with regards to productivity. So if you feel like you're not worth anything and you don't really, you're not willing to put in the work because you just feel like you know, I'm also a point and you don't really have any agency, then that's a self -fulfilling prophecy.

57:44You won't get what you want in life. But if you are adamant on getting what you want and you put everything that you want to what you know You basically sacrifice the present for the future Within reason as we were saying before Then you will get what you want and you get essentially what you deserve and what when he says the word deserve I hate the word deserve because I don't even know what the word deserve means You know, it's it basically implies a value judgment of some kind. Yeah. What does it even mean nature? Doesn't have any concept of deserve it doesn't there is no concept nature just gives people things based on cause and effect.

58:18There is no dessert. And so I do think that people deserve things only in the sense that did they put in the work. Yeah, I think if I was to reread the dessert bit at the end, calmness just you're repeating your patterns of urchuse and flaws until you finally get what you deserve. For me, it's until you finally get what is likely. It's the way that I think about when I read that quote is people rolling dice. And it also relates back to this internal external locus of control thing that you mentioned earlier on, which is if you believe that you have an internal locus of control, if you continue to roll the dice over and over and your patterns, virtues and flaws suggest that you are going to get this is not to say that there are people as you mentioned before, perfectly noble, virtuous, high integrity people who work hard, who at the end of their life or partway through their life, have some catastrophe that they wasn't basically their fault.

59:13Absolutely that can happen, but the more times that you roll the dice and the more effective your inputs are, the less likely it is that that's going to happen. Right? Yeah. The, the, the, yeah, I agree with that. Yeah. Yeah. I think, yeah, that's a good way of, of looking at it. I think, yeah, it's, it's, I think, yeah, it really comes down to like, we can't control probability, but we can control the probability space. So we can control the range of outcomes, but we can't control the specific outcome. So, for instance, if you don't work hard, then there is no chance that you're ever going to succeed, because that's not within the probability space that you've created.

59:49But if you work hard, then you are creating that probability space. You're putting that as one of the possible outcomes you can have. And so I think in that sense, yes, you will get what you deserve in that sense, because you are essentially you are creating the branching tree of possibilities that exist ahead of you. And so you'll get one of those outcomes. Miss Match Theory, Moths evolved to navigate by the Moon, a good strategy until the invention of electric lamps, which now lead them astray. Equally, humans evolved to be tribal, a good strategy until the digital age where it now leads us to act like polarized goons online.

1:00:28I think this is everything. I think this theory is the foundation of pretty much all of our problems in the modern age. The fact that we have created for ourselves a world that we didn't evolve for. The majority of our evolution and adaptation occurred over 300 ,000 years when we were on the African savannas and that's the world that our brains are configured for and pretty much everything that happens now is a result of these evolved behaviors, behaviors that we evolved for the African savannah from hunter gatherer lifestyle, not being of much use in this new environment in which we find ourselves in.

1:01:12So that the tribal thing is the one is one aspect of it. You know we are obviously When you're living in the African savannah as a hunter gatherer, it makes sense to be tribal. Because if you're not tribal, you're not going to survive very long on your own. You need the cooperation of other people, and you need to have a common purpose and a common sense of unity. Because if you don't, then another tribe that does have a common sense of purpose, and you're just going to completely wipe you out. So, a lot of these things, and this is particularly true of belief forming. So belief forming, you know, we sort of naively often believe that people believe things because they think they're true, but that's just not true at all.

1:01:50What's actually the sort of main driver of beliefs, I think, particularly true of political beliefs is whether those beliefs help us in a social context. So if they can make people like us or if they can give us a kind of identity something to belong to a common purpose with other people and this is a written in the radical about this actually the white smart people believe stupid things. There's an idea by a psychologist called Dan Cahan or Keahan, I don't know how you pronounce it, it's K -A -H -A -N, and he had an idea called Identity Protective Competition, which is this idea that when people form beliefs, what they're doing is they're looking at other people and seeing how these beliefs operate in a social context.

1:02:42So if having a certain belief makes people very, very popular, And if it makes a lot of other people love them, then that makes you feel that that belief is more true. And this is a mechanism that is designed to essentially allow us to form beliefs with people that will allow people to like us, and that will allow us to have status and a sort of sense of belonging and to how this tribal sort of arrangement around us, you know, so that it's a way of arranging tried. It's a way of forming these kind of hierarchies. So if you believe something that everybody around you believes, they're gonna like you.

1:03:22And this is something that everybody knows. If you have the same beliefs as somebody, they will like you a lot more. That's a system, that's basically a gluing system. It's a way that glues people together into tribes and allows them to form a common purpose and then allows them to succeed on the planes of Africa. Unfortunately, that doesn't work so well in this age where we now have a lot of sort of partisan thinking, we have people forming online tribes, engaging in misinformation online, where people are posting information that they agree with, but not information that's necessarily true. And so the whole system has been sort of torn apart by this new way that we're living.

1:04:01You know, now it doesn't bring us, we don't really form mobs anymore, we don't form, at least we don't form them in the real world, we form online, but we don't form these tribes that would help each other out, physically in the real world anymore. Now we form mobs online and we go after people and we've have skate goats and we have these kind of bickering with other tribes. And all of this is not serving any of us. Well, it's not actually doing anything for us. All it's doing is it's making us angry. It's making us bitter. It's making us fight with people on the other side of the world who we're never going to meet in real life.

1:04:39It's making us push out information that's not true and fake narratives everywhere. It's causing indoctrination. It's causing people to be distracted from what they really want to achieve in their lives. So all of these negative consequences have emerged from what was once an asset, which has now become a liability as a result of this new way that we're living. And this is just one aspect of the mismatch theory. The mismatch theory can be applied to so many different aspects of life. Another aspect is that our brains are sort of evolved to operate when we're moving. This is a less -enown thing, but we're supposed to be moving all the time pretty much.

1:05:20We're supposed to be on foot, traveling vast distances, and that's good for our body because that's how our bodies evolved, our bodies evolved for movement. But now we spend most of our lives indoors sitting in a sedentary position. And so the system, like our blood system, the circulatory system is sort of evolved for movement. It's supposed to, it's created under the sort of assumption that a being is going to be moving. But we're not doing that. We're just sitting still for a long period of time. And so our circulatory systems are not operating efficiently. Bloods, you know, blood's not efficiently really sort of oxygenating our organs.

1:05:59And as a result, that we're having many health problems now. So this is another, the best way that anyone who is unsure whether or not that hypothesis is real can prove it to themselves. Think about the last time that you took a phone call and you needed to think hard while you were on the phone. A huge proportion of people will find themselves just as if some hand has been placed inside of them, they'll stand up and they'll start pacing around the room. And I learned this from Kelly Starrett. I did it all the time. Yeah. Kelly Starrett says that we're built to locomot and that our brains work better when we're locomoting.

1:06:33And you know, if there was a way that I could do a podcast that didn't look too weird because if I was doing this on some sort of treadmill as I'm bouncing up and down and there may be a bit of noise. But yeah, I um, I totally agree. And I think that it's why walking is so good for writing. You know, when I wasn't walking when I just used to wake up in the morning and then go to my desk and write. It would take me ages to actually come out with good ideas. But I began sort of about shortly, it was actually quite recently, it was about three months ago, since I moved into this new place. I've been going for walks every day pretty much and I've found that the number of ideas that I come out with is just so stark.

1:07:11And I mean, this is something that brightest throughout history have said as well. It's not just me, it's not, you know, this is not just something I discovered just now, but brightest throughout history have recommended walking, like Nietzsche, for instance, Nietzsche used to go for long walks in the Swiss Alps when he was recovering from some sort of depression or anxiety that he had. They didn't call it depression back in the day, but he had some kind of mental problems and he went out into Swiss Alps and he'd go for long walks and he said that he didn't trust any idea that he didn't come out with unless it was while he was walking.

1:07:42So, you know, he was basically any idea that he came up with while he was sitting at desk, he didn't trust the idea. And I mean, I feel almost, I wouldn't go quite that far, but I think that, you know, I am walking is just such a... If you have an idea while standing at the desk, make sure that you still believe it after you've gone for a walk. That's not a bad reason to use. Okay, next one. Disrationalia, just because someone is intelligent, doesn't mean their intelligence is pursuing intelligent goals. It's possible to devote a genius level intelligence to justifying idiotic opinions and behaviors.

1:08:16So in artificial intelligence research, there is something called the orthogoniality thesis. And what this says is that basically, just because a machine is intelligently pursuing a goal, it doesn't mean that the goal itself is intelligent. So, you know, a standard sort of illustration of this idea would be the paperclip maximizer. So the paperclip maximizerism is a machine that is a hypothetical, hypothetical machine, which has been programmed to create as many paper clips as possible. And it's basically been programmed to have this as its absolute priority, to basically override all other priorities.

1:09:02And so what this machine does is it begins to turn literally everything on the planet into paper clips. And when the engineers realize what they've done and they go to change it, they go to re -d program it, it turns them into paper clips. because if it were to not, then there would be fewer paper clips. And so it ends up turning the whole world into paper clips. And so it does something extremely stupid, but it does it in a very intelligent way. And this really is a good sort of metaphor for the human brain. Because just because somebody is intelligent, and just because somebody has a high IQ, it doesn't mean that that intelligence is being put into the service of intelligent goals.

1:09:41It's very, very possible to have very, very stupid opinions, like really stupid conclusions, but to very intelligently reason for them. Yeah, fortified with an absolute genius level armory around it. Exactly. You see this a lot in academia. People who have their whole lives, they've just spent their whole lives in their head. And they become very good at thinking, but they use that thinking to come out with the most wackiest ideas because they want to be original. Because if you're in academia, you want two things, you want to be interesting and you want to be original. And because there's a publication bias in favor of those two things.

1:10:22And so you have to say something that nobody else is saying and you have to say something that shocks people or surprises people. And so you see a lot of academics who come out with the most insane opinions. and then they will use their intelligence, which is usually quite considerable, they'll use that intelligence to justify that the most moronic opinions. You know, I read this one laughable study, which was conducted by this author who said that basically, rape didn't exist in America until white people arrived on its shores, and then they introduced rape to the Native Americans. You know, just completely bizarre idea.

1:11:01that they're basically saying that Native Americans were innocent didn't have, they didn't ever commit any sexual assault. They always think about the Comancheans, Indians as being very, very civilized people up until the point at which they were invaded. Exactly. And then white people taught them how to rape. And that's why rape exists in America amongst the Native Americans. Completely like idiotic opinion. But this author then used like all these weird sort of really weird ecstatic knowledge about peculiar things that happen in history. then basically got like scientific studies, really, really cherry -picked, you know, just to kind of create this narrative, which is...

1:11:36Yeah, it's a very special narrative together. Yeah, exactly. And this would do this required a lot of intelligence because they had to get information from very disparate fields and sort of combine them together and create this weird argument, which when you look at the argument, I mean, it's a complete nonsense argument, but it's very intelligently put together. It's taken a lot of effort clearly because there's so much research involved. Do you know what it makes me think of? It makes me think about the four stoic virtues. So just this temperance courage and wisdom. And without the fourth one, which I think is going to be the final book that Ryan writes in his series on the four virtues, without the fourth one, all of the previous ones can be deployed in a stupid way.

1:12:18You can be courageous for a cause which is pointless, that you can be just towards something which doesn't require it, that your temperance can be used in the wrong sort of way. So yeah, there is a, I don't even know what it's, it's cognition and metacognition almost, right? It's like being able to step out, a George Mac calls it clouds and dirt. So he says that you need to get down to the level of the frog and you need to get up toward the level of the birds. See the map, make sure that the map and the terrain are still different, go down, go do the work, come back up, make sure that I'm still doing the right thing, go back down.

1:12:51Yes, absolutely. Yeah, I mean, I would say that, It's like looking through a microscope and a telescope at the same time. You've got to look at both. You've got to see the big picture and then you've got to focus in and zero on the details. And most, you know, a lot of academics will just look at the microscope. They'll just zero in on a very tiny part of the picture and they'll use their intelligence to interpret that little picture, but they won't look at the greater scheme of things. And I think ultimately it comes down to having intelligent goals. Because if you can create intelligent goals, then you have some kind of guiding light, you have a North Star by which you can navigate.

1:13:28But one of the problems is that people don't have intelligent goals. They would just have like a very simple goal. And then they will, you know, they will, in many cases, what they will do is they will begin with a conclusion. And they'll just say, okay, I need to get to that conclusion anyway I can. And then they will rationalize their way to that conclusion. And this is a big danger, I think, is that when you reason backwinds, instead of reason for it. Yes. So most people will begin with that conclusion and they'll try and look for a way to get there. So if you're a very, very intelligent person, you'll always find a way to get there.

1:14:03You'll always find a way to get there, no matter how crazy the conclusion is. And you've just got to look at the number of books with crazy feces, and just by intelligent people, just to know that this is true. I could, if I wanted to, I could come out, I could basically have a really, really insane conclusion, a really insane goal. So it would be something like, again, if I wanted to prove that the world is flat, I could begin from that assumption. And then I could put every waking day, researching any piece of information that would possibly be used to rationalize that argument. And I could create a book out of it.

1:14:41I could actually do that, you know, but it would take me a long time. And I would really be frying my brains trying to do it, but I could do it, I think. So I could create a compelling argument that the world is flat by ignoring all the information that I don't like and focusing only on the information that I like and this is why Intention people often believe stupid things because the capacity for reasoning is also the capacity for rationalization You know rationality is not Something that comes naturally to people rationalization is something that comes naturally to people We are, again, this goes back to identity protective cognition, Dan Khan's idea.

1:15:19The idea is that intelligence evolved not to help us to find the truth, it evolved to help us to survive. And if surviving requires us to believe crazy beliefs, like if we're living in North Korea, for instance, it makes much more sense for our intelligence to help us to believe that Kim Jong -un is the son of God or whatever, you know, he's like a divine being, and that he was born on a mountain and at the birth sang his praise when he was born. You know, obviously a normal person couldn't believe that, but if you're intelligent, you can convince yourself of that. And you know, this is something that throughout history, we needed to do.

1:15:57We needed to believe, we needed to convince ourselves, or at least, imagine, at least pretend that we believed a crazy belief. So either we were good at acting and pretending that we believe something that we don't, or we could genuinely convince ourselves of that beliefs. And both of those things require intelligence. So our intelligence was used to make us believe bullshit. It was specifically configured and calibrated to help us to believe things that are not true because they would help us survive in social context. One of my favorite explanations for why we have theory of mind and why we have consciousness at all is that it allows us to model what other people are thinking about us.

1:16:33So in a very nimble and complex social -structured species like we are that have moving power dynamics and I know that that person doesn't quite like that person and they used to be in favor with this one and what do they think about me and how did I show up and blah blah. The whole point is to portray as best as possible to the outside world that we are not insane. I am a totally normal, fully functioning person and what's that quote about like humans are easy to to fool and you yourself for the one that's the easiest, the fact that you must fully yourself, Richard Feynman. Yes, that's Feynman thing.

1:17:10Okay, so I came up with one and then you called me out on Twitter twice with two different ideas that were my idea that had already existed. But I'm going to give you all three and we can, with the audience, can vote on whether or not mine's the coolest. I'm pretty sure it is. So I called mine vestigial pattern bias. The successful deliberate approaches, we learn during our development can become a prison which stop us from being more free -flowing and at ease when we are developed. The tools that got you from 0 to 50 are not the same ones that get you from 50 to 90 or 90 to 95, but we found success with this approach in the past so we cling on to an overly rational, effortful approach.

1:17:50We hope that applying pure cerebral horsepower to a situation will fix it. We think that the more deliberate we are, the better the outcomes will be without realizing that our subconscious has aggregated the thousands of hours of experience we've clocked up to now and not using that experience is keeping us in the same league that we've always been in. You told me that the iron -stealing effect, the iron -stealing effect occurs when pre -existing knowledge impedes one's ability to reach an optimal solution. We become unable to consider other solutions when we think we already have one, even though it may not be accurate or optimal.

1:18:24It leaves us cognitively incapable of differentiating previous experience with current problems. So we may solve a problem, but we don't actually innovate. And the final one, path dependence, the Quirty Keyboard layout was a misguided attempt to stop typewriters jamming, but despite it being inefficient for typing, it remains with us because people accepted it as the norm. We failed to notice so many problems because we let them become part of life. I think vestigial pattern bias is by far the best named of the three, but I do see that they're all part of the same. Yeah, I think that they're kind of, I would say that path dependence is the vestigial pattern bias in a social setting.

1:19:07So it's how it occurs at scale when everybody is thinking that way, when everybody is thinking with that vestigial pattern bias, then you get the result is you get path dependence. I think that the Einstein effect and the vestigial pattern bias are pretty much the same thing. I mean, there probably are subtle differences between them, but I think that the general concept is the same, which is that our methods gradually rigidify because we get used to solving problems in a certain way, and then that prevents us from considering alternatives. And I think that this is something that I've seen in my own life.

1:19:41I feel like we tend to become blind to what we're familiar with, and this is, you sent me this great idea here on Twitter actually, DMs. And I responded with the whole frog and fish thing, which is that basically the frog says to the fish, how's the water? And the fish says, what's water? And that's because the fish has lived its whole life in water, so it doesn't know anything else. I think it supplies to the vestigial pattern bites, which is that we become so used to the solutions that we use in our daily lives, that we just, it just doesn't occur to us to consider that we could do things a different way.

1:20:20I found this so many times with regards to the ways that I write essays, for instance, I've got a very standard way of doing it, and I've been using that way for a very long time, so much so that I've almost forgotten that there are other ways of doing it. And it's only been recently where I've been kind of tinkering around and trying new things that I've actually realized how much I was constraining myself in my methodology, because I just simply just didn't occur to me that I could do things a different way. I think this is probably responsible for a lot of people's stagnations. This is just this idea that people forget that things can be changed and that's why they don't change them.

1:20:57I think there's a good amount of scarcity mindset that comes into this too. I have found a particular way of wrangling reality into a form which rewards me. Oh, I can't believe I've managed to do this. Let's hold on. Let's grip it tighter. Let's not let things change. I learned this when I did Rogan's show last year. And I sat down opposite this guy and he's got, it's a different sort of episode to this, right? It's just the most meandering conversation. Like if he has a bad steak the night before, guess what, you're talking about steak for 20 minutes. But he sits down, no notes in front of him.

1:21:34And just Jamie's already pressed the button and then he just begins. And you watch this man hold a cogent conversation together with no plan beyond what's front of mind and a bit of prep that he's done for like three, four hours. And it really opened up to me as the importance of storytelling, the importance of allowing the meander to happen, the importance of leaning into it just being a hang. I've said for a long time that the job of a podcaster is to be a vibe architect rather than a blinkist for podcasts that you're not trying to index everything that's in someone's mind, you're trying to just create a vibe that the audience can enjoy.

1:22:15And you know, the vibe from this episode might be, there are amazing ideas out there that you don't know about and we're going to riff on them and you're going to learn some and maybe you take them home with you. I've got one of the guys that's a part of the sound of freedom coming in. Like the vibe from that is that there are seriously evil people out there and it is important that we're aware of it and we need to protect children. and there's another vibe from this and another vibe from that. But within that broader landscape, you can just weave however you want. And that was really, really interesting.

1:22:43And that, again, was my pattern bias was showing that I have my way of preparing. I have my way of creating a show. And then I watched Joe, and I've listened to him do it, where he's one of those guys that's gone beyond the ruleset. You know, it's like once you reach seventh Dan seventh degree black belt that you have learned the rules so well that you can then break them and you know, that's that's very very interesting. And obviously then opens up huge more ranges of learning because you're no longer constrained by just the one or two or three ways that you do things all of the different paths are open to you.

1:23:21Yeah, absolutely. I think for you, this is actually a great way to avoid the vestigial padbys because you meet so many different people who have got completely different ways of looking at the world and different ways of doing things. So you're constantly being exposed to new ideas. I think it's probably one of the greatest ways to avoid this digital patent bias would be to have the kind of podcast that you have where, like you said, you know, one minute you're talking about ideas the next minute you're talking about, you know, crazy evil people or whatever, you know, so it's constantly mixing things up, I think, is the cure to this.

1:23:53And I think one of the problems is that we, like the algorithmic sort of structure of the internet compels us to do things the same way that we've always done them. So for instance, recommendation algorithms, or, you know, if you watch one video of, say, Ben Shapiro, YouTube's just going to just flood you with Ben Shapiro videos, you know, and then now you've watched even more of them and then the more you watch of them, you get even more flooded with them. And so it basically narrows your sort of your probability space of the things that you could possibly learn and you know kind of the kinds of things that you could the kinds of information you could consume.

1:24:34So I think it is important for no other if for no of the reason than to simply keep your probability space as wide as possible to do things against your own nature, to sort of have an anti -algorithm, to basically, do things that second -guess yourself. If you feel like visiting a certain website, visit a completely different website, and just try to second -guess yourself and to not have a fixed routine. One of the things that I do, sorry, one of the things that I do now is that if I read from, say, like a left -wing new source, say, like, if I read the New York Times, then the following day I will read right -wing news.

1:25:20So I will read, like, the Wall Street Journal. You know, so I'm constantly shifting between different narratives, and that allows me to not be sort of encapsulating, not be imprisoned within one single narrative, so that I'm constantly being exposed to different ways of looking at the world, constantly being exposed to new ways of sort of being as it were. It would be awesome. It would be awesome if there was an app that was able to do that for you. I think there is. There actually is. I've forgotten the name of it, but there is actually a new AI app, which I was looking at recently. Unfortunately, in fact, I might have it as a bookmark, but yeah, this is, there's an app which basically will give you different sort of information, almost that random basically based on.

1:26:03over time, over the space of whatever two months you will end up with an even split of center, left and right. Yeah, basically gives you a wide range. Yeah, text skeptical and protect and all that stuff. Okay, next one, oppression Olympics. Social media is a war for public sympathy. So, victimhood is a status symbol that many compete for by collecting injuries real and imagined, often goading others into attacking them so they can screenshot or record and immortalize their prestigious oppression. I mean, so because we're living in an attention economy, attention is like money. It's such a currency.

1:26:44You know, if you if you could get eyeballs, then that gives you power. And one of the ways that people get attention now is by trying to make people empathic, empathetic towards them, or sympathetic or whatever, they they they try to get people's emotions and they're engaged into what their life is. And so, you know, if you could do that, if you can engage somebody's sympathies, then you can get them to do pretty much anything you want them to do. You can get them to send you money, you can get them to boost your content to other people, you can get them to give you some emotional support. So there are many ways that you can sort of, in a sense monetize people's affection.

1:27:25And the easiest way to do it, the simplest way to do it is to essentially pretend that you're oppressed. There's even a word for this now. It's known as sad fishing, which is when people go on social media and they basically pretend that they're oppressed, not oppressed, but they just pretend that they're unfortunate. They pretend that something bad has happened to them. So it might not be oppression. It might be that they might pretend that they have mental illness. They might pretend that they're depressed. they might pretend that they're up there, partner left them. Do you remember the trend last year or the year before on TikTok where loads of people were pretending they had multiple personality disorder?

1:28:02Yes, yes. I actually wrote about this quite recently. And so this is something that is crazy. I mean, this is like if you go on TikTok and you type in DID, dissociative identity disorder, you will get just video upon video upon video, get millions and millions of videos of people claiming to have dissociative identity disorder. And by the way, dissociative identity disorder is multiple personality disorder. It's just the newer, new enane for it. But yeah, there's so many of these videos online now. Like you'll just see people who will shift between these personalities on a street, right? Just do it.

1:28:42And they'll pretend that they're like some, the first they'll pretend that they're like a six year old schoolgirl in Minnesota. and they're not pretend that they're like some tribal elder in Nairobi. Is it others? Is it my other? Is that what they call it? Older. That's it, fucking others. Yeah, and so, and they basically, the truth about DID is quite very interesting actually, because there was a guy, a recently, unfortunately, he died, Ian Hacking, he's a philosopher. And he studied the spread of DID back then it was called multiple personal disorder in the 1970s. And what he found was that in 1970 there were almost no cases of multiple personited disorder.

1:29:27It was basically pretty much unheard of. There was maybe one case or two cases in the entire medical literature. And then what happened was that there was an article written I think, a cartoon on which paper was, but it was pretty paper about this issue, about people having multiple personality. And it was more of a speculative essay. It was, it wasn't really, you know, medical kind of thing. It was more just something speculating about it. And then this kind of popularize this idea. And after this happened, more and more people began to claim that they had personalities. And then what happened is that the clinicians at the time, they were trying to work out why this was happening, because they didn't really understand social contagious at the time.

1:30:08So they were trying to work out why more people were coming forward with multiple personalities at that time. They believed that simply what was happening was that just awareness of this condition was increasing. And so they began speculating and they began saying that people might be creating these alternate personalities in order to repress memories of sexual abuse. Now we now know that repressed memories are a complete bullshit. They're not, they're not real. Repressed memories are Freudian mumbo jumbo basically. they're not, people don't repress memories based on bad experiences, it just doesn't happen.

1:30:40There is something, there is a psychogenic amnesia, but that's different, but repressed memories don't happen. And so we know for a fact that these people were not creating these multiple personalities because they'd been sexually abused, what was actually happening was that they were looking at the diagnosis and they were looking at reports of multiple personality disorder and then they were essentially using that to kind of make sense of their own lives. And so they were creating these multiple personalities in order to make sense of their lives in the weird soul sort of way and what Ian Hacking found was that At the beginning the average number of altars that a person had was between two and three and Within a decade the average number was apparently 17 apparently this is according to his work So I don't know if this could be very fine, but this is what Ian Hacking found anyway in his research and So I believe that the idea is not a real disorder.

1:31:32I don't believe it's actually a real thing I believe it's a complete fabrication and people who have the idea of pretending because I've actually looked at the medical literature and There's only one one study that I found which Which in which I think that there is actually a real thing going on in which people actually do have multiple personalities and that's a thing called psychological gating It's a very very bizarre study. I'm not really sure what to make of it But what I found with this one study, and this is the only study that's convinced me that maybe there are people under who have multiple personalities is that there's a woman who actually presented to a clinic with blindness and she actually she was blind.

1:32:11And apparently she also had another alter living within her and apparently the alter within her was not blind. And apparently what the experimenter found was that when this woman shifted, there was actually a shift in the activity in her optic nerve. So something strange was going on, that when she shifted to a different state of mind, when she shifted it to another alter, suddenly she could see, a blind woman could see. So that kind of creep me out. I don't know how much to believe this because this hasn't been replicated. And I'm very wary about these kinds of studies. Psychology is a bit shady.

1:32:52You can't really trust a single study because there's so many of these, I've just made up, a lot of these psychological studies are made up. So I don't know whether to trust it. If it's true, then maybe I can be convinced that multiple personalities may be are a thing. But I have so far seen no evidence that multiple personalities are a actual thing other than what people pretend. And this is why it's crazy when you look at TikTok and you see all these videos of people pretending that they've got multiple personalities. And the reason that they're doing it is obviously because it brings them attention and impressionally simple.

1:33:24It's the impressionally limping. If you have a mental, like this is another thing, like previously people, the main way that people were oppressed was through sociological systems. So it would be the patriarch, he was a presser, he would be systemic racism or it would be capitalism. But now there's a new way of being oppressed, which is through psychology and through medicine, or rather not medicine, but through biology. And a lot of people I've seen are now doing this. They're pretending to have conditions that they don't have. And we've seen it with Tourette's. There's a famous TikToker called Tixen Roses who was core fabricating her Tourette's, basically, for the cloud.

1:34:07Because she wanted people to like her. You know, she wanted Cloud online and so she pretended to have these ticks. And people thought that the ticks were really strange because they weren't, they weren't like normal ticks and they seemed to occur only when she was, you know, only when she had a camera, when she knew that she had a camera on her because when she didn't know that she had a camera on her, suddenly the ticks went away. And there was another, there was a guy who was a Twitch streamer. I've forgotten his name, but he was quite a famous Twitch streamer. And he pretended that he couldn't walk.

1:34:36And then there was a streamer. fucking video of him. Yeah, I've seen this video. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So this is another. This is a common thing. People pretending that they've got illnesses that they don't have. And I've written an entire article about it, along like 4 ,000 word I got about it, in which, you know, I just document like why people are doing this. And well, can people get this if they want to read the article? So this is on my sub stack. So it's just go window dot sub stack .com. And the article is called the pathologization pandemic, which is my name for this phenomenon. And so, you know, it's, so I originally, actually, I won't go into it too much because I let people read it, but I'll focus on what I was talking about before, which is basically the whole TikTok thing, which is, you know, people on TikTok are doing this at crazy rates.

1:35:22There's just the number of cases of people pretending to have these conditions on TikTok. So, plus is the number of cases in real life, you know. So there are more people with multiple personality disorder on TikTok than there are in real life. And obviously, you know, this just goes to show that these people are just completely making it up. And it is obviously because people want sympathy. And I don't hold it against these people. I don't do them as bad people. I think that they're just doing what the market is demanding that they do. These people want attention and they want to be loved like every other human being wants to be loved.

1:35:58and they want a cloud. This is why your article on audience capture, I think twins with this pathologization pandemic thing. So nicely, because the audience, perils of audience capture explains the incentives and explains how you have this sort of self reinforcing recursive feedback loop between creator and audience and creator and audience. I remember I read in a book once, I think it steves to you at Williams who says, uh, sympathy is investment advice. It says that when we feel sympathy, it is advising us of the person who is so lowly that if we give them our effort, it will be rewarded and they will be grateful for it so much higher than somebody who wasn't as desperate and down than they're lucky to speak.

1:36:47Which is why sympathy, you know, you start fucking pulling that trigger and it's why, you know, these golden retriever or like rescue dog reels on Instagram to like, I saw this one the other day that had seven million likes. I've never seen a reel with seven million likes before. Anna, it was some dog and this dog's been, it was hurt and it was trying to bite the people that were getting it and it was all scraggly and then they wash it and they feed it and they give it antibiotics and they bring it back. And here it is with its owners jumping around in the yard and you're like in 60 seconds, I've got like an amazing story of this dog and I feel sympathy toward it and now I'm all happy and I'm fucking weeping and I'm like I'm watching a video of a dog by my weeping.

1:37:27So, sympathy is just such a compelling engagement reason to engage. Yeah, it's so magnetic. Yeah, it's, I mean, it is the thing that will get people likes and retweets online. You know, you see, you can see this with Twitter, for instance, you see that people who don't really the, um, if a sympathy in their audiences can have a massive follow -up count, but they won't get very many likes on their tweets. Whereas somebody who really sort of forms of connection with their audience, they can have far fewer followers, but they'll get so much more likes because their audience is engaged and they're like, they're actually invested in this person's life and they actually want to know.

1:38:12The way I look at it is it's almost like a movie character. Like what, like the structure of a movie is that the first This sort of half an hour of a film, like the Act One of a movie, is designed to get you to like the character, get you to like the main character. Why should I keep it? So you develop this sympathy, exactly. And once you've developed the sympathy for the character, then you want to watch more of that character. You want to see what happens to them, and then you're rooting for that character and you're invested in that character. And the same thing happens with social media where people will try to create this struggle that they're having.

1:38:43One of the ways that screenwriters will make a character beloved to an audience is that they will give them a struggle. They'll make life hard for them. So if somebody has a struggle, then you can you can identify with that person because everybody has a struggle in their life. And if that struggle is a universal struggle, so if it's like a guy that wants to get a girl, for instance, or somebody who wants to be a poverty or whatever, or overcoming poverty or all of that kind of stuff, these are universal struggles that everybody understands. They're like me. Yeah, exactly. It is me. Yeah. And so if you can make, you know, if you can convince people that this person has got this struggle in their life, which you can identify with, then that will make you love that person so much more because you'll begin to see yourself in that person and you'll root for them and you'll want them to have a happy ending.

1:39:29And I think this happens with social media as well. Let me give you an input there. So I learned this from baggage claim, Manisha and the critical drinker as well, both online YouTube film critics, I suppose. And Manisha is very anti this sort of new wave of female boss, boss bitch heroes that are kind of being portrayed online. That if you look at the difference between the two Milan films in the first one, she had to be innovative and crafty because she was smaller than the rest of them. And in the second one, she was better than all of the men immediately because she had like Easterg and she or something like that.

1:40:08Or in in the second Doctor Strange, there's like a the daughter the central American daughter of a lesbian couple Has the most power in the entire universe and the only reason that she can't use it is because she doesn't believe in herself because like like yeah I've seen them some of critical drinkers videos and there's one Where he's commenting about Star Wars and about how Ray is basically a Mary Sue the main character Ray What's the Mary Sue? So a Mary Sue is like a character who is basically like a fantasy character. It's like basically the author injecting themselves as an ideal figure in the movie.

1:40:53So there'll be somebody who is just basically good at everything and who is perfect in every way. Somebody who never ever has any sort of setbacks or if they do have a setback, they'll immediately overcome it. There's never any struggle with this character. so that the basics is perfect. And a lot of people have accused Ray of being this kind of character. I've not actually seen the newer Star Wars movies because I don't really have any interest in it, but the conversation about this is so wide that even I know who Ray is, even though I've never watched the movie. So Ray is the main character of the newer Star Wars movies of the new trilogy.

1:41:25And she's basically, I think she's related to Luke Skywalker, I don't know, but anyway, She's the main character and she is basically instantly good at everything. You know, she doesn't need to be trained by a Jedi master. Like, I've seen the original Star Wars movies and Luke Skywalker. He had to be trained by Yoda and by Obi -Wan Kenobi in order to become the great Jedi that he would become. But apparently I haven't seen this new, these new movies, so I might get this wrong. But I've heard from, I think, Critical Drinker and others that basically Ray doesn't need to learn anything. She just has the abilities already.

1:42:00She has the Jedi powers. She knows how to wield a lightsaber from the get go. She has everything already, and it's like, basically, I think he basically attributes it to this new wave of hyper feminism in Hollywood where the female characters are always more competent in the male characters. It's patronizing. I understand. We need to come up with a name for this. I have a little bit of a thing about this. If you optimize for being, let's say sympathetic or or empathetic or caring or comforting on the front end, without considering the second, third, fourth order affects down the line and how that might be adverse to the group that you are supposedly trying to help.

1:42:39So for instance, if you think about an entire generation of girls now who are growing up with these kinds of female leads, yes, maybe the initial experience is them being told, girls are great. If you're female, you can achieve whatever you want. Blah, blah, blah. Right? The second, third, fourth order effects of this are if you, all of the heroes never had to encounter difficulty. So when you do in your life, who are the role models that you look up to, any difficulty that you do encounter in your life is due to something structural and you should complain about the world as opposed to change yourself or adapt to it or accept the fact that sometimes life can be shitty.

1:43:16like it makes a according to Manisha baggage claim it makes an entire generation of fragile narcissist women and you know she uses who's fucking prince Harry's wife? Meghan Markle. Meghan Markle. She is on like a vendetta against Meghan Markle but she sees Meghan Markle as kind of like the poster child for this vulnerable narcissistic kind of like position. And I think it's right, I think that not teaching women, especially that they are not only worthy but capable of overcoming difficult things because it's somehow more inspirational to never show a woman facing any adversarial situations. To me just seems like it's stupid.

1:44:07Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, I think that one of the reasons why people watch movies is so that they can actually understand how to overcome difficult, what kind of a character must they be in order to overcome some of the sort of obstacles in life. It's one of the, obviously not the only reason, but I think it's one of them. And I think it does serve a good purpose in that way because it gives us ideals to aspire to. It gives us sort of people that we can model our own lives on. But the problem is is that if this person is unrealistic, if they're too ideal, then it can be dangerous to try to model your life on them because the kinds of things that they would deserve in Navas to a sense of the term are not going to equate, they're not going to translate to reality.

1:44:56So if somebody, for example, like this Ray character, if she can instantly overcome everything, She, you know, some guy attacks her and then she's instantly just, you know, whips his ass. That's not going to translate to the real world because the sad fact is is that for, you know, men are on average a lot stronger than women. So if a woman were to emulate Ray in the real world, and, you know, she was trying to physically take down a guy, the chances are she's going to get beaten down, you know. So it's just not going to work. Like what works in a movie is not going to work in reality. And I think this is one of the dangerous things about trying to create, turn these kinds of people into role models, because that's what they've tried to do.

1:45:41They try to turn rage to a role model for women. You know, and another thing is, is that why would, why would you make a role model, just defeat every problem with physical violence? Because I think that's what she does. She just uses the force. She just knocks people over and kills them with a sword or whatever. You know, this is not a role model for any human being. Like, you know, it's just what exactly are you supposed to learn from this? That you could just kick everybody's ass. Is that the lesson you're supposed to learn? It's not, it doesn't teach anybody anything. It's just, it's a fantasy.

1:46:11And so when they went, when a lot of these writers, because you watch these documentaries of how they made the movie and a lot of them will sort of, you know, stroke their chins and say, yes, well, we want to create a modern woman, you know, like somebody who the modern woman could relate to and all this sort of stuff, but modern women can't relate to that kind of literally the least relatable woman. Exactly. I could agree. That's what, yeah, that's it. And that's what Mary Sue is. And Mary Sue is somebody who's just so good at everything that they're just not relatable in any sense of the term.

1:46:38You just can't, you know, they're superhuman. And that's why out of all the superheroes, my least favorite is Superman. A lot of people might disagree with me on that, but I don't like Superman because he's just good at everything. He's just, he's a god basically. He's got, I mean, his only weakness is this mythical substance that doesn't even exist in the real world, like Kryptonite. So it's just like, I don't care. We've gone nuts. I like the flaws. I like characters who've got flaws. I like Batman, because he's got flaws. He's a kind of rich guy and all this sort of stuff, but he's got his dark side as well, and he's constantly trying to fight with his own craziness and his own dark side.

1:47:14He's an outcast. So you've got to have flaws, I think, in a character. If you want to make them appealing to other human beings, which is, I don't, I just don't get why they make so many you may refuse, they should have learned this by now. But let's do two more. So we'll do mine first. We'll do mine first and we'll finish on one of yours. So this is productivity purgatory. The ancient Greek word for work was not at leisure. A 21st century grind addiction has turned pursuits like walks in nature, meditation, and time and sunlight into just another productivity hack, slowly turning all leisure activities into a tribute to work.

1:47:52Yeah, so I've been thinking about this for a long time. So basically there's a Greek sort of classification of tasks. So ancient Greek classification of tasks. They divided tasks into tellyq activities and a tellyq activities. Now tellyq comes from the Greek word tellyq which means an end or a goal. And tellyq activities are activities that you do in order to reach some goal. So an example of this would be washing the dishes or washing your car or or doing some kind of chore or a job You go into a job to do your work and then opposed to this is a telek activities and a telek activities are Activities that you do for the sake of the activity itself and not for any other goal.

1:48:41So an example of this would be Anything that you enjoy so painting maybe a picture if you enjoy doing that, you know I mean, that could be both a telek and a telek because you're doing it for the love of painting but you're also doing it to have a painting at the end of it. So that maybe that's not a good example. So I would say a good example of an a telek activity would be going for a walk in the park or something, you know, assuming you're not doing it for exercise, but you're just doing it just tell it. What you could do for exercise, but you're not doing it to reach a certain destination, you're just doing it for the sake of walking, you know, you're walking for the sake of walking.

1:49:18And what I've been trying to do in my life is I'm trying to turn a lot of my TELIC activities into A -TELIC activities. I've got the I've got this I think the correct terminology for you here Autotelic derives goals joined reward mostly internally judging their own actions Exotellic derives goals joined reward externally takes care how that actions are being judged Yeah, I mean I use the words TELIC and A -TELIC Maybe I think it's simpler. Yeah, it's quite T, T E L I C. Yeah. And yeah, so it's called Tellicity. That's the terms, those are the terms that I use. Oh, well, Tellic and Tellicity. This has been hijacked by a bunch of like, Afro -Lezure companies.

1:50:01So it's taking me, all I can see, a lime green, like slip on fucking, No, no, I think the best things do is just type in T, T E L I C. I did, I did and it came up with a bunch of sandals and I'll check it out afterwards. So, telekinatallic, cool. Yeah, yeah. So, I'm trying to turn sort of my telek activities into atelic ones. I'm trying to do more things just for the sake of doing them because I think if you can enjoy the activity itself and not think too much about the goal, then you will become much more, you'll become more content with your life, I think. I think a lot of people do things just for some kind of goal and they don't enjoy the process of doing the thing that they're trying to do.

1:50:46Have you got any other results that they become less good at actually achieving the goal? Have you got any advice on how you are becoming more italic? Yeah, so I try to find enjoyable ways of doing things because there are, there are usually less enjoyable ways of doing these, there are more enjoyable ways of doing things. So for example, I used to hate working out, but I've started working out recently, and the way I've made it into more of an enjoyable activity is that I listen to music that I really, really enjoy, but I only allow myself to listen to that music when I'm working out. So if I want to hear a tune that I really, really enjoy, I can only listen to it if I'm working out.

1:51:24So that compels me to work out. So it makes the process of working out more enjoyable because I'm focusing on the music and you know, I'm just kind of like just doing that. So little things like that you can just turn activities into more enjoyable things. And also another thing is when I go for walks, for instance, I used to kind of find walking boring because I would go through the same route all the time, but now I mix up my routes and I've go down streets that I've never gone down before. I've been to parks and yeah, I'm just completely just losing myself because I'm living in a new area now.

1:51:56So all of this is alien to me, the area that I'm in now. So I just basically just wonder, I just choose a direction and I just go in that direction and then I just end up at these unexpected places and I might see some like crazy cafe in the middle of corner somewhere and just that looks nice and just go in So you just make a simple thing like walking far more enjoyable by adding that element of surprise and The suspense, you know, so going back to what you were saying about how you create that suspense for your audience You know, I think suspense can really help make things a lot more enjoyable when you when things are a little bit unpredictable When you don't know how they're gonna turn out.

1:52:29I think unpredictability is one of the great spices of life Yeah, if you can make something unpredictable Then it becomes a lot more exciting and a lot more enjoyable and you don't need to take huge risks with this unpredictability sounds like, you know, I'm going to try and make it home on half a tank of gas, even though I've got 200 miles to go or I'm going to have to jump out of an airplane or something like that. Unpredictability can be as benign as you want it to be. It can be, you know, taking a left instead of a right on the way to work. Yeah, okay, final one for today. We got so many that we didn't get through.

1:53:01At presentism, we judge history by modern standards. We regard slave owners as evil but slavery was so common and familiar to our forebearers that they were blind to its iniquities as a we to the industrial slaughter of animals for which we too will eventually be called evil. Yeah, so I'm one of those people who gets upset when I hear about the way animals are treated in sort of factory farms. I just think that the way that they're treated is absolutely horrific. And if it was something that we had no knowledge of, but that just suddenly was revealed to us today, I think there would be a massive movement against it to end it because of the ways that they're treating.

1:53:41I mean pigs, for instance, pigs, apparently according to some studies, they have similar levels of intelligence to a seven -year -old child. And they know when they're going to be killed and they'll resist it as much as they can. And yet, you know, here are stories of them being buried alive by farmers because they might have... Not even that they actually have foot and mouth disease, but there's a chance that they might catch it. and because of that, large numbers of them are buried alive. And just, that's just one example. I mean, the treat in horrific ways in factory farms. And I think I'm quite sort of surprised that people don't view this as more horrific than it actually is because we care about dogs.

1:54:23We care about dogs a lot. You know, we wouldn't want to see dogs treated like this. And yet pigs are a lot smarter than dogs. There are a lot more self -aware than dogs. And yet we treat them in the most barbaric ways. And I think that what's holding people back a lot of time is A, people are just used to it. And this goes, this is like the opposite of hedonic adaptation, where there's a kind of like nightmare adaptation, where you know if something's horrific but we're just used to it. It's suffering adaptation. Yeah, it's no longer horrific because we're just used to it. And so we're born into this world in which animals are treated in these barbaric ways.

1:54:57So we don't really kick a fuss about it. And we just focus on the beautiful taste of a steak or or whatever, and that's in offer us. This is weird, it's this weird sort of cognitive dissonance in the mind to, I've observed among some people, I saw this one thing once, which was crazy, where I saw somebody who was watching a video on their phone while they were in a McDonald's. And they were watching a video of a cow, a cow, and they had a big Mac on the desk next to them. They were eating their big mac while they were looking at this cute cow on YouTube and going, oh, an R over it. It's this weird split brain thing goes on in people's brains.

1:55:39Everybody does this. You see a cow and you'll be like, oh, that's so cute. It's lovely, you want to stroke it and all that. But then you can just go to McDonald's and pick up a big mac and you'll be eating probably it's cousin or something. So it's like this weird cognitive distance that we have in our brains. And I think that that's only going to be remedied when we no longer need to kill animals in order to have food in order to have meat. It's not that we need meat now. We can survive without meat, although it's not quite as efficient. But I think like if we, you know, if we could, when the time comes when we can actually create burgers and a lap and those burgers taste just as good as natural burgers, then I think people will actually have more of a motivation to end.

1:56:26suffering. And the reason why I think is because we have the president, which is that the industrial revolution made slavery less necessary in order to maintain the economy. Before the industrial revolution, slavery was kind of needed to maintain the economy. And so people did they turned a blinder to how horrifically evil is. But once the industrial revolution came about and the machinery became available to do the slave's work, then people suddenly realized, we don't need this anymore. Now we have the luxury of being ethical. So ethics is to a certain extent a product of luxury. If you look at how history was, it was often that way.

1:57:06It was often brutal because it had to be brutal in a way. And this is something that a lot of people don't like to hear, but it's the truth. History had to be brutal because there was no alternative at that time. And now that we have the luxury of not having to be so brutal, looking back at history and seeing how brutal people were makes this recoil in horror at how we were. But those people who engaged in these barbaric acts, they were not any more evil than us. They just were living in a world that required that kind of brutality, unfortunately. What's the broader lesson from presentism then?

1:57:38So I would say that we need to be careful not to judge people too much. I'm not saying that we should go all moral, relativist or anything, but we need to take into account what people can do in their lives. Like for instance, if you look at the Ukraine war, the Ukraine war is absolutely brutal. You know, there's cluster bombs are now being sold and you know, there's a lot of very horrific munitions which cause widespread damage are being used. Unfortunately, you know, it's easy to say this is barbaric and evil and it's horrible, but you've got to look at what actually are their alternatives. They have to fight with everything they've got because if they don't, they're going to die, they're going to get killed.

1:58:21And so they have to be as brutal as they can possibly be. And this is something that a lot of people don't seem to understand, is that, you know, even the most horrific people, and I don't want to defend people like Assad. But I remember that during the Syrian war, Assad was basically being criticized for using chemical weapons. And obviously, chemical weapons are absolutely horrific and they're But he was using those weapons because he didn't have precision -guided bombs. He didn't have the technology that the West has. The West can afford to be more humane in its bombing campaigns because it's got precision -guided weaponry.

1:58:58So it can afford to just target, you know, it can actually target just the enemy combatants. It doesn't need to have civilian casualties, but even it does have civilian casualties, but it can minimize them. somebody like Assad who doesn't have that kind of technology, but who feels in his, what he needs to protect his family He needs to win his war from his point of view. Like I said, I don't agree with Assad I don't think he's a horrible human being, but from his point of view He needs to win that war. So he's gonna use what methods are available to him to win that war And that includes using chemical weapons because chemical weapons are very effective and they did prove effective in the Syrian war They managed to clear huge areas from enemy combatants and they were able to kill people behind cover in which is what normal munitions can't do.

1:59:44But we need to bear in mind that people are only going to behave ethically when it's within their capabilities to do so and it's not always within their capabilities to do so. And people need to realize that this is true of their own selves. I think if you eat meat, you've got to reckon with the fact that you are engaging in something that is sort of causing a huge amount of suffering to sentient animals. And you know, I say this is somebody who has eaten me. I try not to eat as much meat as I do as I did. I try to eat sort of more, you know, lower sentient animals, stuff like shell am. I am all the time.

2:00:21Yeah, yeah. I try to eat that a bit more than eating the higher order animals. But, you know, even I can't resist a good steak now and again. But I try not to because even when I do eat steaks, I eat sort of animals. that have been able to roam the fields and stuff. I don't eat fat, fat, fat, fat, fat, fat. But that's a luxury that I have because I can afford to buy food that's organic that has been allowed to roam free. If I was poor, I would have to eat fat, fat, fat, fat, fat, animals. So I wouldn't judge that person. I'm not going to judge somebody because they're too poor to eat organic food, that food that has welfare standards.

2:00:58I'm not going to judge them because they don't have that capability. So I think we do need to take into account, I think that's what presentism gives us, it gives us the idea that we need to consider the context in which people are an ethical because do they actually have the alternative, do they have the ability to do otherwise. And if they don't, then we need to maybe, you know, not be so harsh, but I do think, I do think people have the ability to not be so evil to animals now. So I do judge people, I judge everybody, including myself, for eating me. Because I think we're getting to the point now where it's no longer necessary to eat me.

2:01:32We can have food that's been grown in a lab. And you know, I think that if you don't do that, then you're essentially quite unethical because you're choosing the suffering of an animal over the non -suffering of an animal. I learned this from Alex O 'Connor five years ago, I think maybe four or five years ago. So he managed to convince me, someone that's been a lifelong meat eater and still is, that if I do choose to continue to eat meat, which I have done, that I need to reckon with the fact that I'm causing suffering, and that if I was being fully ethically aligned with my beliefs and my actions, that I probably would stop eating meat, or I would certainly at least reduce it down as much as I could.

2:02:17This is, it's strange to me as kind of like path dependence, or the vestigial pan bias. This is essentially the kind of instance of that. We eat meat today because we've always eaten meat and we don't think about it because we've never thought about it. But if it was something that we'd never eaten in our lives, if we had gone our whole lives being vegan and not knowing the concept of eating other animals, then suddenly if a steak was presented in front of us and we were told that this is another living being that's been slaughtered so that we can eat it, I think that would absolutely horrify us.

2:02:47So we do it because we've always done it. And that's why these old habits die hard and I think it will take time for us to adjust to eating lab grown meat. I mean, obviously there's all these conspiracy theories now about how lab grown meat is gonna be pumped full of chemicals. That will either sterilize this to reduce the population for clouds Schwab or whatever. Or you know, there's gonna be all kinds of stuff about that. But I mean, you know, I'll be, I for one would be happy to not have animal suffer anymore in the way that they've been suffered on a scale of hundreds of billions of you know over the years.

2:03:23So yeah. Go into Bogle, ladies and gentlemen, dude, I absolutely adore speaking to you. Every time we do these episodes, I leave feeling fired up and ready to go learn more stuff about the world. Where should people go? Do you want to keep up to date with all of the shit that you're doing? Yeah, so the best thing to do is to just find me on Twitter. Probably the best thing to do is just type goender twitter into google that's the easiest way to do it or sub stack again you could just type in goender sub stack and that's where the main places that I'll be found and then yeah I might try some other new things soon but I'm not ready to announce them quite yet.

2:03:56That's all right dude when you are we will run this back soon enough I appreciate the hell out of you thank you for today. Yeah thanks Chris it's always a pleasure to be here.