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

27:58but of a cognitive demand. You know, trying to work out what's true and false, it's just way too much effort for most people. And it requires statistical analysis, it requires looking at hard data, it requires sort of suppressing your own emotions. There's so much that you need to do in order to actually work out what's true. Whereas if you just an adopt a very simple us versus them, heuristic, it's so much easier. And you can still get on in your life because if you have an us per system sort of strategy, then you're going to be in the same boat with a group of other people who will help you sort of navigate the world and they'll become your allies.

28:37So it's just so less cognitively demanding to do that. And pretty much everything about our sort of mental architecture is configured to this sort of system because that's how we evolved. You know, when we were hunting gatherers, we lived in tribes and we sort of engaged in tribal warfare. So everything that we've just been talking about, this pattern matching and everything is all in the service of tribalism, ultimately. So we will see the best in what our allies say and we will see the worst in our enemies say, we'll interpret it in the worst possible way. We will see signs in the clouds that sort of pretend that God is on our side or whatever, he's on our side and he hates the enemies.

29:25Whatever it is, we'll find patterns that justify an us versus them sort of attitude, naturally. That's what comes naturally to us. It also explains why we see things in terms of drama rather than data. I think this was one of my other sort of concepts that was talking about, compassion -vain. So this idea that sort of, there were experiments that were conducted in which people, they basically engaged in sort of these appeals for charity. So what they did is it was like a sort of campaign for funding for charity and they had two different ways of doing it. One way was based on presenting famine statistics and hard data and the other was based on presenting the story of a single -starving girl.

30:17And the people tended to donate a lot more to the girl. And the reason for this is that the hard data is alien to the human brain. And statistics is just something that we're not, our brains are not formatted for that kind of data analysis, which is not, you know, it's too much effort, it requires too many calories and too much time. So what our brains do is we again, we collapse the web of causality and we collapse all the variables into a single thread, a single line, a single linear sort of vector which just has a beginning in middle and then. So, you know, the girl is starving, she needs your help, you give her your help, she is no longer starving and therefore you've saved, you know, you saved a girl, and that's it and then you're a good person, you know.

31:03So that's how we sort of we collapse the whole world down to these single narrative threads and it just makes because obviously we think in the language of story, if you want to convince people, that's how you've got to appeal to people, you've got to, you statistics aren't going to help, you can write a lot of all the numbers you want, you know, and the bigger they are, the more alien they are, and the less they'll be believed, the less they'll be really comprehended. You get the story of a single girl and you present her story in a narrative sequence in the way that people tell stories, you know, you could use a three -act structure, you could use the hero's journey, whatever system you want.

31:40But as long as it's a narrative threat, a single narrative threat, you'll reach a lot more people. So we're not donating a million times more money or feeling a million times worse when we hear the story of a million kids compared with the one of the single kid. In fact, it's probably the opposite that that pulls on our heartstrings. Yeah. the personification of data and stories. And you can see this, the charity examples perfectly, right? They are split testing into oblivion what the most effective way to pull on people's heart strings is. Like they know. So if you want to find out how to motivate people's behavior, just watch a charity advert, because they're not doing the thing that doesn't motivate behavior.

32:22They're doing precisely the thing that motivates behavior. And they'll have had behavioral scientists, behavioral economics, guys, that I'll have Rory Sutherland will be in there and the copyright is in all the rest of it, split testing everything. And that's what they've arrived at. Right, next one. Preference falsification. If people are afraid to say what they really think, they will instead lie. Therefore, punishing speech, whether by taking offense or by threatening censorship, is ultimately a request to be deceived. Yeah, I mean, so this, I think, is another reason why there's actually a distrust in institutions because they've tended to react to criticism by essentially censoring people.

33:07But its censorship is based on a very outdated way of operating. It's based on a very outdated information architecture. So censorship would have worked very well a hundred years ago when there was a centralized authority which passed information down to everybody, whether it was via printed leaflets or television screens. Information was very central. It was very centralized. But that system no longer works because the reason it worked in the past was because since the authority has provided a single system of information. So for instance, think about the TV, right? The TV tend to, in the UK, the TV tended to only have four channels originally, when I was young, very young.

33:55And those four channels all tended to have the same sort of narrative. So if you wanted to censor certain information, you could just basically, you could pass a law, because this was broadcast media, so they were beholden to government interventions. So you could pass a law saying that, you know, oh, the four channels are not allowed to talk about this. So Therefore, now, none of that information is going to get beamed into people's homes. So now, nobody can ever know what that information was. But that kind of sort of centralized information structure no longer exists. All information in the West, at least, is decentralized or it's decentralizedable in the sense that somebody can pick up on anything now and make it go viral.

34:41So now censorship doesn't work. Now what happens is people are well aware of what's being censored and you have this thing obviously the strizant Effect where when people learn what's being censored Then they want to know what that thing is even more, you know in the past like the further back into the past we go The less likely this the strizant effect Was because people wouldn't even know what was being censored since information was centralized but now because Information is everywhere where that information is going to leak out. People are going to know what's being sensitive. People are going to know, even if they don't know the precise thing that's being sensitive, they're going to know what kind of information is being sensitive from them.

35:22Because somebody's going to spill the beans somewhere because of how interconnected everything is. All it takes is just one person to spill the beans and then that's going to go viral. Everybody's going to find out about it. And we see this repeatedly, like for instance, with a lably going back to the lably hypothesis. immediately as soon as Facebook and Twitter and everybody else tried to stifle that story it went viral and everybody was talking about it because it's a Biden it just isn't possible yeah on to buy that's another perfect example there's many other examples you know as soon as one organization tries to sense something other individuals will immediately raise the alarm and as soon as that happens everybody now wants to know what that thing was censored they want to know why it was withheld from them.

36:09This is this thing called reactants, sometimes called the backfire effect, where when you withhold, when you say people can't have something, they become even more adamant that they want it, they want it even more. And so this leads to essentially a backfire, that's what's called the backfire effect. And what it happens is that people then decide that hang on a second, if this is being withheld from me, then it's gonna, obviously. I mean, I'm kind of, I'm going a little bit, I'm very off a little bit from the original thing, but so that's one aspect of it, but like, yeah, another aspect of this whole censorship thing is that when people realize that they can't say certain things, they instead will lie and they will, they're not gonna change their beliefs.

36:59like I said, the backfire effect means that people don't become, if you sense the people, they're not going to become less slightly to believe that thing. They're going to become more likely to believe that thing, you know? And the only thing that's going to change is that if they know that they're going to get banned for say something, they'll just lie. But it's not going to change their thoughts. In fact, the opposite is happening. And so it's a counterproductive thing to do in the digital age. That's why censorship just doesn't work in the digital age. Because although people, you could control what people say online, you can't control what they think.

37:30In fact, what you do is you make people more adamant to think what they were thinking. So they become more entrenched in their beliefs. Well, you taught me a couple of episodes ago about the chilling effect. When punishment for what people say becomes widespread, people stop saying what they really think and instead say whatever is needed to thrive in the social environment, thus limits on speech, become limits on sincerity. It seems very similar to preference falsification. Is there a distinction between the two? Where is the difference? Yeah, so I mean they are essentially the same thing. I mean maybe the difference would be something of scale where preference falsification really refers more to the individual actions You know, and then you have things like the spiral of silence Which is another way of saying the same thing.

38:10Spiral of silence is is the cumulative effect of preference falsification So what happens is that certain ideas become more and more verboten over time and and when they become verboten then people don't want to be the first person It's just a fancy way of saying forbidden. Okay, that's cool. The Bolton. Yeah, German. For some reason, I don't know why I said the Bolton, but I could have just said the forbidden. It's nice. I like that. I prefer it. Yeah. But yeah, what happens is that it leads to a spiral of silence. So the more that an idea becomes unsaible, the less likely people are to say it, and so the more it becomes unsaible.

38:52So it becomes a... Yeah, it's self -reliable. It's kind of like a cycle. Yeah, it's self -reinforcing. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, I just don't know what people are thinking, like these organizations, when they think that they can sense their information in the digital age. It just very, very rarely works. It might work in a place like China, but even in China, where the government has absolute control, you know, they've got the sort of the great firewall, what they call the great firewall. But even that is not enough now. there've been cases now where information has gone viral that the CCP didn't want to go viral because they were trying to stifle it.

39:28And in the age of, you know, even though they do all they can, it just isn't possible because of the number, because of how fast information travels in the digital age and because of the number of connections between nodes, it's just not possible to use censorship anymore. So any organization that's trying to use censorship, they're using 20th century tactics against 21st century information systems. It just doesn't work. Again, it leads to more distrust of institutions. This goes back to this whole thing that we're talking about with the problem of trust in society and it leads to more cynicism.

40:05So going between the backfire effect and the cynical thing, it just makes things worse. And I don't know when institutions are going to learn this, but eventually they will, hopefully. Well, you end up with that. You end up with that kind of game where they chase their entail in a little bit. So for instance, you see this with YouTube channels. So a YouTube channel will begin to struggle with plays. And they won't be too sure why. And everybody has on YouTube when it comes to the way that they frame their episodes and what they do, both content and framing, they have an over -to -window that they exist within.

40:40and they're not prepared usually to go beyond a particular level of boring because people aren't going to click. And there's usually an upper bound of click baitness that they're also not prepared to go past because that seems kind of hacky. And what will happen is they will begin to skew more and more toward the clickbait side. They will use more limbic hijack words, war, battle, like imagery, the whole Mr. Beastification faces. is they'll lean more down that, but the problem that you have, as you begin to pull that lever more and more to chase ever declining plays, your audience becomes increasingly desensitized to the subtlety that you want them to come back to.

41:20So it's a one way street. My point being that you chase that sort of limbic hijack game and it makes people become increasingly desensitized to the things that you can say in the same way as institutions that feel like they're losing control, increasingly apply more rigorous high levels of scrutiny, high levels of control. And what happens? It drives the trust down ever more. You can't dictate trust top down. It has to be emergent. It has to come out, bottom up. But they're chasing it more and more. Oh my god, we need to do more because the trust is declining. And that means that we need to use more, you know, ever more totalitarian techniques to do this.

41:58And it doesn't work. And the fact that they think, and the fact that they think that it's going to work. work actually makes it even harder to trust them because they're just so wrong about that. So you ask yourself, what else are they wrong about? They've got to be wrong about so many of the things. If they don't understand this basic facet of human psychology, then they're pretty much hard to trust on anything else. Yeah. Hero's stratic fame. Many people would rather be hated than unknown. In ancient Greece, Herastratus burned down the temple of Artemis purely so he'd be remembered. Now Now we have nuisance influences who stream themselves committing crimes and harassing people purely for clout.

42:40Yeah, so this has become a serious problem now, I think. So, I don't know if you know who Jack Doherty is. I do. There's sort of a world of IRL streamers and Jack Doherty tell the one I get this wrong, but he appears to kind of start fights in person and has my own way. massive bounces slash security guys with him, most of whom seem to be black. And then they will sort out whatever the issue is by punching or choking out the person that Jack just started some beef with. And then the internet goes completely crazy by saying this dude started on somebody then got his six foot seven behemoth of a security guide to step in and smash some kid in the face.

43:26And now he's getting paid millions of dollars and has a Lambo and lives in LA or something. Exactly, yeah. And he's not the only one. I mean, this is a whole trend. You know, there's people like Misi, for instance. You probably know about Misi as well, who was the guy who was going into libraries and ripping up the books, what's filming the librarians to see what they would do. And then you have like Johnny Somali, who would go out and start harassing people in streets and recording their reactions. And he actually went to Japan and it's quite interesting because he first he got knocked out, he got hit in the face and knocked out because in Japan they don't screw around, right?

44:03And then he got arrested and now he's in jail, at least the last lot of hearings in jail, okay? He's in jail in Japan, right? So there is occasionally there has come up with, but I mean most of the time there is no come up with for these influences and they just go out there and they harass people in the streets and they record it because they know again this is limbic hijacking, right? They know that they're just by appealing to the worst most basic impulses of the human brain, they can get a lot of eyeballs. And so they just basically, there's a lot of pressure on young people to have a lot of followers on social media, for instance.

44:37And they want to be popular. Everybody wants to be the cool kids. And one way to get a large following online, if you don't have other talents, is to just be an asshole. Just be an asshole and film people around you. and the people will get hate followers, they'll get hate audiences who watch them simply to hate on them. And I think, you know, people like Misee and Jack Dockety have fallen to this, this kind of strategy. I think, I think Jack Dockety, originally he was just some, he just did some other lifestyle stuff. But he obviously found this niche and he thought, wow, I'm making way more when he do this.

45:12And now he's a millionaire. I mean, he's, he's got a lot of money and, you know, he's, he's got a very glamorous lifestyle. at least it appears glamorous if you look at his Instagram account, you know, he's surrounded by fancy cars and beautiful women and all this stuff, you know, and he portrays this kind of lifestyle of, you know, I'm success. But really, when you look at what he does to earn that success now, he just goes out there and he just makes life miserable for everybody. And this is bad because this is creating a, again, this is creating a very perverse incentive structure, fueled by TikTok again.

45:43And the Chinese government probably knows that they're doing this and they're allowing that these nuisance influences to get a lot of views on TikTok because they know that it's bad for America and it's bad for the UK and it's bad for West in general. But yeah, I mean, so it's a race to the bottom now where you've got a lot of people competing to be the most nuisance, to be the biggest nuisance, to be the worst possible human being, people who formerly were pranksters, people like FuzziTube. So you'd probably never I'm not a fucking idiot. He basically had a lustful, un -psychological break on camera, got arrested by Miami police, called the coped, like on himself, pretended that he was someone had a knife or a gun or something.

46:29Yeah, wild. Wild. Exactly. And the crazy thing is, is that we don't even know if this was genuine or not. This could have all been part of, again, just being a nuisance. It might be real. It might not. We don't know. because the line between real and fiction is blaring now. And for instance, Mizzy said that all of his pranks were planned and stuff, but it's hard to believe that he would go into, say, Azda, go to a superstar and he would start riding on the disabled trolley things that they have and just smashing shelves and stuff and that the supermarkets would actually allow him to do that. It's just not, I don't believe that.

47:08But like a lot of them will say stuff like that to defend themselves if they get into a lot of hot water. And ultimately what this does is that this creates really bad incentives for kids. Because if you think about in the past, in order to be at the dawn of YouTube, for instance, in order to get a big following on YouTube, you tended to have to do something that was extraordinary in some way, an extraordinary and a positive sense. You tend to have to be talented at something. The first big YouTube is tended to be sort of musicians or sort of, you know, athletes of some kind of people who had some kind of skill.

47:43But very soon people realised that you could actually develop just as big of a following by having zero talent and just being a nuisance, just being an asold people. And once that happened, this kind of nuisance influencing went viral. And it's essentially a race to the bottom now where people are competing now to be the worst possible human being Which really sets a bad precedent is sets bad incentives for young other young kids watching this because when the kids watch it They say oh, you know, I want to be like misery. I want to be like Jack docky tea You know, I want to have all these fancy girls all these fancy cars, you know, I want to I want to be like that So I'm gonna learn how to be an insufferable human being That person is bringing no value to life and they're getting rewarded for it.

48:29People respond to it in life. Yeah, they respond to incentives. If you say rather than working really hard at a thing consistently for a long period of time and accumulating skills and making yourself worthwhile, the bottom of the brain, it's the reason I think in part that there is some distaste against silver spoon, dynasty children, and only fans influences. That there's something unfair. It feels like, well, you got that, but you didn't work for it. And in a merit to critic system, which is what we've got, that's always going to get people's backs up. I have to work harder than this person to get less.

49:08How can that be fair? Oh, well, it's because they were given a privilege that I didn't get that seems unfair. It's because they're prepared to compromise their morals in some way that I see as I wouldn't do. therefore I am somehow superior to them. There's this like Puritan sort of an ability that gets associated with it. But when we're talking about nuisance influences, which I think is a phenomenal term that I've never heard of before. And do that first sentence that you put, many people would rather be hated than unknown. Just brilliant. And I know that you've got two books in the works, one of which you may have submitted.

49:41But I can't wait for both of them, man. Like I think all of the times, I watch very similar stuff to what you watch and yet what you're able to pull out of it is significantly more in depth than me. So I'm very, very excited for what you've got coming up. Thank you. Yeah. So I've got one, his one that I made earlier. So toxic compassion. In a world where our opinions have been separated from our deeds, appearing to do good has become more important than actually doing good. The prioritization of short -term emotional comfort over actual long -term flourishing motivates people to say the things which make them appear caring and empathetic, even if they result in negative outcomes over time.

50:22And this is seen, most obviously in support for the body positivity movement, rather than make someone feel uncomfortable about their weight, you would say that weight has no bearing on health, even if that encourages people or discourages them from losing weight, which results in worse outcomes over the long term. Same thing could have been seen for defund the police, that rather than talk about some of the challenges that are faced by different groups. When it comes to policing, you say that all police are mistreating minorities. Therefore, the police should be withdrawn. Even if the actual outcome over the long term is more poor policing and more negative outcomes for those precise minorities that you were looking to protect in the first place.

51:08Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, So this brings together quite a few very, very interesting and informative ideas, one of which would be luxury beliefs, which I think you kind of alluded to at the end there. And also my idea of the opinion pageant, where the whole thing about the social media has caused us to sort of overvalue opinions as a gadget character, we're sort of judged more by what we say them by what we do. And so this goes to what you were saying initially about how it's all about looking good rather than doing good, which again echoes what Elon Musk said, I think in a talk, I think with the New York Times a couple of weeks ago, you know, where he just expressed a bit of outrage at how corporations are trying to look good but not actually doing good.

51:57And yeah, I think this is one of the key concepts to understand the digital age where because we now have an image -oriented sort of economy where everything your success in life is based on how you appear to others now more than ever because we're all, because social media is where people come to promote their stuff, whether you're a corporation, whether you're a politician, whether you're an influencer, you know, everybody's on social media trying to promote themselves, trying to show why their brand is the brand that you should, you know, sort of buy into. And part of this is this whole social game, this new social game.

52:38I mean, obviously there's always been a social game, as long as there's been a society, but it's been sort of pushed to the forefront by the fact that the vast majority of our lives now are spent trying to appear a certain way to people in terms of, you know, just on social media. It really explains so much of everything from sort of cancellation to the kinds of politics that we have now polarization and even disinformation You know all of these things really ultimately come down to people trying to look as good as they can rather than trying to do as good as they can So people are you know peddling Tharies that that again the peddling theories that they're gonna hijack people's brains and and scare among them, or they're trying to convince people that they're morally superior.

53:32So they'll post their luxury beliefs online. And I think that it's hard to really work out how we go from here, where everything is image oriented and things are becoming more so. I think that ultimately I think there may be some kind of, I mean we're kind of seeing it already where we've seen it with there's a kind of backlash to people just going against looking good, trying to people counter -signalling. There's been a rise of counter -signalling. I think that Trump's election in 2016 was a form of counter -signalling where people or elected the most obnoxious outwardly, like kind of somebody who just made no effort to even appear good, or at least they did it in a really, really obnoxious and sort of overbearing cartoonish way, almost as a parody of the society that we're living in.

54:31I think that was a kind of counter -signal, but I think that yeah, there's also, there's been the rise of vice -signalling, as a response to this sort of prevalence of virtue -signalling. But even like, vice signalling is where people will outwardly just say things that they know are going to upset people. You could even say that this do sense influencing is a kind of vice signalling where people are like, I don't care. I'm over and above the morality game. I don't have to appear good. I can just be the worst person possible. People are Andrew Tate, for instance, who have developed massive following by saying the opposite of what is considered good by the majority of society.

55:11You know, you see even Elon Musk, you know, Elon Musk is counter signaling very, very strongly on Twitter a lot of the time where he will say things that are the complete opposite of what we've been taught, we should say by the New York Times, by the Washington Post, by the World Health Organization, all these other, you know, mainstream organizations. They tell us that we should be saying these kinds of beliefs, we should be portraying this kind of person, we should be, you know, this is how we should be to be a good person. and then you've got these rogues like Elon, like Donald Trump, like Andrew Tate, who are basically saying, no, screw that.

55:42Let's do the opposite of what they say. So that's a kind of backlash. But in a strange sense, this vice signaling is itself a kind of virtue signaling because it is signaling to others that you are way above all of this silly sort of, you know, bickering that people are engaging in. It's the same reason why Yeezies have got progressively more ugly over time. And if If you actually look at what counts for a lot of super fashionable street wear at the moment, it's almost like hobo chic. Well, that's because you're saying, look, I have so much surplus cool in me that I can basically dress what is so orthogonal to what other people think is cool and still be cool.

56:24That's how cool I am, which oddly because of how cool is kind of, it's just so subjective. If you call something cool and if enough people agree, it kind of is and no one can falsify whether it is or not. But yeah, this toxic compassion thing I've been playing around with for ages and it's the interesting bit is that second part, the prioritization of short -term emotional comfort over long -term flourishing. Saying things, you know, like you're totally correct, living life online has caused us to flatten down how we are judged to be about proclamations rather than actions. And it's the reason that people were bullied about whether they did or didn't post a black square, it's about whether you do or don't have Ukraine in your bio, it's about whether you do or don't have pronouns in your email signature, all of those things.

57:09And yeah, that the additional. Again, yeah, it's it's perverse incentives. You know, I think that's probably the running theme of today's discussion is we're creating all these perverse incentives for people to follow. And that's essentially what's driving these behaviors is that we're rewarding, we're rewarding, like you said, we're rewarding the short -term gains over the long term, the actual proper gains, which are the long -term gains, we're sort of trapping ourselves in these compulsion loops. So compulsion loops are this idea from gaming and gamification, where you trap people in these short -term cycles of FN reward that can often lead them away from what they should really be doing.

57:54And we're all getting trapped in these compulsion loops, whether it's being a nuisance, being an asshole online, or whether it's being a virtue single or a non, we're kind of all chasing these short and rewards at the expense, well not all of us, but I mean many of us are. I like to think that you and I are a little bit better. But I mean, we're not completely, we're not completely into it. I mean, do you think about how many times anyone that's ever been on a plane knowing that they don't have connection, gets their phone out, swipes up, cycles through a bunch of apps, even knowing that nothing can have happened, it's a compulsion, it's just a, it's ingrained in there.

58:29Right, next one. Tars Wells Razor, emotion causes bias, but it also causes motivation, as such, we're most likely to act when our judgment can be trusted least. Solution, don't trust thoughts you have while emotional, instead pause and wait for the feeling to pass before acting. Yeah, so I think everybody is not a single person, but is a collection of selves. and some of these selves are much more representative who we are our core than others. And I think emotion can bring out a side of us that is not really us. And it can cause us to act in ways that we would later regret. And I've found this myself like I don't really do it anymore, but back in the early days, like 10 years ago, I would get, sometimes I would get angry online.

59:26I mean, if somebody said something nasty to me, and I would be spiteful and I would say something nasty back. And I would later read back what I'd written, and I'd just be like, wow, I can't believe I actually said that. What an asshole. I was basically just as bad as them. I should be better. And I just realized that person that is saying those things was not actually me. Because if I'm later regretting when I'm calm, I'm later regretting what I actually said when I was angry, Then it's not really me. One of the things I say is that when you act when you're emotional, you are an ambuster for your most primitive self.

1:00:05You're basically acting for your most animals, because you're engaging your reptilian brain. Any decision that I've made when I've been emotional has pretty much turned out to be a bad decision. Or at least it's been suboptimal. I always make better decisions when I'm mentally balanced. And I think that's true of pretty much anybody. But if you send that email in the spur of the moment, more often than not, you're going to think, I could have waited that better. I could have waited that a lot better. So what I do now is, it's not like I'm a robot. I do feel emotions. If somebody says something nasty to me online, I get an urge to just be nasty back.

1:00:45We all do. We're all humans. But I don't, I never, I never do it now. I never, you know, I never like just, I'm never spiteful. If I, if I reply to somebody and sometimes I'm snarky, I am snarky, but I tend to do it in a way that I think is more productive. But what I always do is I, if I'm feeling particularly emotional, I'll always wait for that emotion to pass because it will pass. And it's amazing how often when you let that emotion pass and then you consider what you would have done when you were emotional and you realize how idiotic you would have be. You know, that's happened to be so many times that it's, I actually am afraid of acting when I'm emotional, because I just realized how, how, how demented I am.

1:01:24I'm emotional. And I think this is true of everybody. Yeah, it is deranging because I mean, emotions ultimately are the opposite of rationality. They are a shortcut. There's this thing called the effect heuristic, which is this idea that emotions evolve. I mean, I would say emotions have all for two purposes. One of them is they are involved for motivation. And the other is that they evolved for decision making and low information environments. You know, your gut feeling, for instance, your gut feeling is how you make decisions when you don't have enough information. And the thing with gut feeling is it's actually often wrong.

1:02:02People will say, oh, I swear by, you know, I've got a really good gut, I've got a really good gut feeling. I'm always, you know, I always trust my gut. But what they're doing is they're engaging in confirmation bias. They will usually remember when their gut feeling is right, but they won't remember when their gut feeling is wrong. And so they're obviously going to naturally be skewed towards believing that their gut feeling is more accurate than it actually is. And that's why I don't really trust it so much. I mean, there's something called intuition, which is a little bit more than gut feeling, which is more something that you've learned to trust over time.

1:02:33It's something that you certain cues that you just see and then from that you can build it before picture. But just relying on emotional loan is usually not a good strategy for decision making because again, emotion favors short term impulses and favors short term compulsion loops over long term compulsion loops. And so this is why I think you should always, if you're going to make an important decision, just wait for the emotion to pass. It will pass. Most emotions don't last very long. Most emotions last a few minutes, you know, and then they're usually they weaken and they fade and that's all you've got to just wait a couple of minutes and then see compare your actions when you're not emotional to how you were going to act when you were emotional and you will realize there's a massive difference and that way you will you'll prevent yourself from many regrets, I think.

1:03:29semantic stop sign. One way people end discussions is by disguising descriptions as explanations. For instance, the word evil is used to explain behavior, but really only describes it. It resolves the question by not creating understanding, but by killing curiosity. Yeah, so we see this online a lot again with people calling other people names in order to sort of dismiss anything that they've said. So an example of this might be calling somebody a bigger, you know, saying, oh, you're a bigger and stuff. And basically saying, Why does he feel this? Why does he think that? Oh, because he's a bigot.

1:04:17And for many people, that's enough. Oh, OK, he's a bigot. So I don't need to listen to what he has to say anymore. But really, what is bigotry? Bigotry is not an explanation for behavior. It's a description of behavior. It's a description. Basically, it's a statement that somebody is prejudiced towards somebody. So that's, it's not really, I mean, but it doesn't really explain much. If you really want to know, if you really want the explanation that you've got to delve a little bit deeper, you've got to go a bit further back and you've got to say, okay, so this person's a bigger, so that's a description.

1:04:54So now we need an explanation for why is that person a bigger? Why would they say that thing? And then you would say, oh, okay, it could be many things. For instance, let's use an example of a classical bigotry. So somebody might, for instance, hate immigrants. They might say, oh, I hate immigrants. I just don't want these boats to just keep coming to Ashur or whatever. And the standard response from many people in positions of power is to say, oh, that's just bigoted. Move on, next question. But if you really want to understand, you've got to ask yourself, why is this person bigoted? And it may be a pretty enlightening answer.

1:05:36So it might be that they had their jobs taken away. They might have their job taken away by immigrants. And now they're out of work. And they're on the doll or whatever. They're on welfare or whatever. And all their plans have been destroyed by this fact that they've just been superseded by somebody from another country. Or it might be that their family member was a victim of a crime by an immigrant. So if you can actually go past the instinct to dismiss somebody by disguising a description as an explanation, then you can actually get to the real explanation. And then you can start to actually resolve the question.

1:06:16You can actually say, okay, well, so if this is the case, then I can go out there and I can convince this person that hang on a second, immigration, it might have taken your job, but some immigrants also create jobs or whatever. I mean, I'm not going to go into the hole where the immigration is good or not or bad or not, but this is just an example of what somebody could do. You know, so you could maybe if you were interested in getting people to accept immigrants, if you were one of these people, you could basically, that's what you could do. And you could actually, instead of dismissing them and making them hate you even more and hate immigrants even more, which is going to happen.

1:06:53You know, if you dismiss somebody's concerns, they're only going to react again. What we were talking about earlier, reactants, a backfire effect. If you tell people that there are pins of bigoted, it's not going to stop them from being bigoted. It's going to make them more bigoted. And they're going to start thinking, oh, there's a conspiracy now to stop. There's a conspiracy by the Jews to flood the West with immigrants and all this. And these people are calling me a bigger because they're trying to destroy my life because they don't want the truth to come out. So it's going to create, well, it's going to basically just have a negative effect for everybody.

1:07:24It's just going to make things worse for everybody. And that's why these semantic stop signs are bad because they don't resolve the question. They don't really, they don't solve anything. They just make the problem worse. And that's why I don't call people racist. I don't call people bigoted. I don't call people transphobic. What I do is I might call something that they've said bigoted. I don't really even do that. But if I were, if I were going to use the word bigoted, because I don't like the word bigoted, I feel it's overused. I don't like the racist word racist. I feel it's overused. I don't think that these words really mean anything anymore.

1:07:56But if I were going to use those words, I wouldn't call people racist. I would call people bigoted. I would call their actions bigoted. I would call their actions racist because I think that's much more helpful. Because if you call somebody bigoted or call them racist or you call them transphobic or sexist or misogynistic or fascist or any of these other words that are thrown around so casually these days, if you use those terms to describe a person, you're essentially really implying that that person is irredeemable, that they are, you know, you can't help that person because they're a lost cause because they're just a bigger, you know, whereas if you call their actions bigger, if you call their actions racist or transphobic, and I'm not advocating this, but I'm just saying it's better than calling them a bigger, because if you call their actions bigger, that actually allows you to still see them as a human, because I feel that calling somebody a racist is actually dehumanizing in a sense.

1:08:45You know, you kind of, because especially when you consider that terms like fascist, Nazi, a lot of these terms are used to sort of paint people as the worst possible human beings. Because when you think of the term fascist, when you think of the term Nazi racist, when you think of these terms, you think of the pretty much the worst human beings, you think of the Nazis, you know, the sort of the Nazis of Germany in the 1930s. You think of the Ku Klux Klan, You think of really bad human beings. You think of people who lynched black people. You think of the worst human beings And so it's it's dehumanizing in a sense because you're pet your portraying people as villains You're saying this person is a villain, you know, so I can just discount everything that they say Whereas when you call their actions Bigoted or whatever then you can say okay well, we can actually convince this person to behave differently so I think these semantic stop signs are are sort of very harmful aspect of our society.

1:09:45And you know, that's just one example that I just gave you. We have many other examples in which these kinds of questions that people have are just sort of dismissed by disguising explanations as descriptions. Sorry, describe disguising descriptions as a explanation. Yes, Max content razor. So this is from mutual friend George Mac, would you consume your own content if not, don't post it? And it's just the easiest way to work out whether or not what you're producing is actually something that you should continue producing. And I had a similar idea, a tangential idea, post content clarity. If we presume that your body is made up of what you put in your mouth, your mind is made up of what you put in your eyes and ears, your content diet should be spirulina for your soul, not fast food for your amygdala.

1:10:38Yeah, 100 % agree. I'm very selective now about the kind of content that I consume. I used to be very careless. I used to just mindlessly browse my Twitter feed and just whatever got my attention, you know, I would follow it. But the thing is, I found that that just leads to a lot of wasted time and very low information. Social media is not very information -dense. I mean, your feed is probably a lot better than mine because you only follow like about 100 people, whereas I follow like 600, that's why I never hardly have a bras on my feet. I usually just use lists. But yeah, I mean, yeah, I do absolutely go by that, that razor because I find that it's a good heuristic to use.

1:11:20One of the reasons why I originally wrote those mega threads, Steve writing those mega threads on Twitter was because they were the kinds of things I wanted to read. I wanted to learn about the world and I thought, well, this would be a good exercise for me, you know, I thought if I can get like 40 concepts that are very useful that I think can help people understand the world better, that's exactly the kind of content I would love. But nobody was doing it at the time that I was aware of. So I thought, okay, I'll do it, then, you know, I'll be the person to do it. And it was interesting because, you know, sort of 2020, I think it was at the beginning of 2020 that I posted the first mega thread and it went viral and I just realized there was so many people that actually wanted to see that kind of thing but nobody had thought of it before even though Twitter had been around for quite a while as far as I could tell anyway nobody had thought of it before but what was quite interesting was in the aftermath of that there were a huge number of people who did exactly the same thing that I was doing in order to kind of replicate the success I had with that first mega thread there was I just saw like I saw them all over the place.

1:12:24People are doing their own threads. I've got nothing, I've got nothing against people to do that. I don't think I've got the sole rights to do it or anything. But it was interesting because I think it just made something click in people's minds where they thought, wow, this is a great idea. Why didn't I think this? And then they did it themselves. And it showed that if you do the kinds of things that you want to see, if you create the kinds of content that you want to see, then because you're a human being and you've got, you share like 99 % of your DNA with every other human being, that there's gonna be a large number of other people that will have similar enough interests that they will actually want to do what you wanna do.

1:13:03As opposed to this, this actually fits in quite nicely with one of the other concepts in one of my recent Megathrends, which is Hotelings Law, which is basically this idea that people will tend to copy whatever's successful, whether we're talking about business, in politics, in art or whatever. And as a result of that, content tends to converge. It tends to become more similar over time. And you see it with TikTok. There were a very small number of people like Bella Porch and Charlie D 'Amelio who became extremely popular on TikTok. They basically, the most viewed people on TikTok. and all they did was lip syncing and dancing.

1:13:50Now, I have no interest in watching that kind of stuff, but evidently, they thought it was fun. Maybe that's the kind of content they wanted to see, but somehow that stuff blew up. And as a result of that, it started a whole new genre of TikTok video where you just had people lip syncing and dancing and everybody was doing it now. And it kind of decreased the value of doing that. And it's the same with politics. like, you know, if you look at, for instance, in the UK, you had the political parties, Labour and Conservative. If you look at, say, the post -war period, you had Clement Adley versus Winston Churchill.

1:14:24Clement Adley was a socialist. He was a full on, and the Labour Party was full on socialist party. Winston Churchill's Conservatives were proper Conservatives. They were like, you know, Birke and Conservatives. And over time, the two parties have moved towards the centre. So, Labour has become more right -wing and conservatives have become more left -wing. And it's interesting because the right -wing party of the UK conservatives are now to the left of the left -wing party in the US. And the reason this has happened is because of hotelings law, because what happened is that when certain politicians in both these parties appealed to the centre, they had a huge amount of success.

1:15:04And the other people saw this and thought, wow, we better capture the centre, get some of these people's audiences from them. And so these two parties gradually began to try to eat the center, eat as much as the center before the other party got center. So they moved closer and together and they converged. And it's same with content creators, they tend to converge over time. And the great thing about the Max Razer that you just spoke about when you create content that you yourself would want to see is that you can avoid hotelings law because you're creating content that you want to see. You're not chasing what everybody else is doing.

1:15:38You're doing the opposite. Because the interesting thing about hotel in law is that the more it happens, the more these content creators or these politicians or whatever we're talking about, the more their content converges, the more value there is in being different. And in actually, trying to do something that you want to see. For instance, going back to my mega -thrends, I saw a lot of stuff about mental models, but it was not portrayed in the way that I decided to do it. it was more about getting a single mental model than doing a thread about it and loads of people were doing that. And I initially was gonna do that, but then I thought, I'm just doing the same thing that everybody else was doing if I do that.

1:16:18Because that form was originally popularized. I think people like Tim Ferris, they popularized that stuff and they became very successful with it. And it was such a good formula that a lot of other people tried to do that. And I thought, well, why don't I do something different instead? Because I decided to just go against that and I thought, I don't wanna see this. I don't wanna actually consume this kind of content because I've already consumed it, because so many other people are doing it. So I thought, let me do something a little bit different, and let me just create a thread of various different concepts.

1:16:46And so that was different enough than it actually allowed me to go viral when I did it. So it's a very good strategy to chase not what other people are doing, but what you want to see, I think. I agree. You need, I understand some people would say that that if you copy successful content, you avoid making stuff which is absolutely atrocious. Your instinct could just be completely off -kilter. You're aiming at the target at the north and you shoot south, basically. There's a foundation of understanding writing, for instance. If you were going to do the thing, if you couldn't write, it doesn't matter how good your idea is, it's not going to work.

1:17:29If you don't understand how Twitter works, if you don't understand the concept, if you can't portray them in an interesting way, there's like a lot of things that you need to get in place. But once you've got basically the rules of the game, you can then start to maybe step outside and completely break them. So for instance, with these listicle style episodes that I do, and that's some of my favorite, and I think that they keep the episode moving really quickly. I know that me and you, when we finish these episodes, feel like we've been in a fucking fever dream for two hours, and I'm like, how's it been two hours already?

1:17:56and I did them with Hormozzi, I've done them with Sean Puri, I've done them with George Mack, I've done them with yourself, you know, going through a list of things, because that's that would be fun to me. If I left this like pressure hose buccaki of like insights about human behavior, I would have I would have left an episode going, wow, that's cool. And yeah, it's it was something that was my instinct. Now that being said, it's framed in a way that we know works for the algorithm. It's presented from a tech perspective in a way that we think is engaging dean edits these things in a way that keeps stuff engaging.

1:18:28So again, we're playing within the physics of the system in some regard, but we're also trying to give our own spin on something with something new. And Douglas Murray has said this as well, like follow your instincts. Your instincts are a pretty good guide. It allows you to be unbelievably unique. And it allows, like if you were interested in something, there is a pretty good likelihood that some non insignificant minority of other people are also interested in it. and given how broad the access that you have on the internet is now, you only need some non -insignificant minority of other people to have a massive audience, like millions of people.

1:19:02Absolutely. Yeah, that's what I expect of it. And another aspect is that if you are genuinely passionate about something, if you're genuinely interested in something, you will make it interesting to other people. Yeah. Because you'll be passionate about it. If you're just chasing metrics, if you're just looking at what other people are doing, and then you just copy them, your passion is not going to be in it. You're not going to be interested in it. you're just going to be interested in getting as many views or whatever. You'll be chasing the wrong metrics. The right metric is interestingness, interestingness to you.

1:19:29Because if it's interesting to you, you'll make it interesting to other people. Because you, your passion is contagious. And I think that's the best advice I'd give to somebody who wants to make a start in sort of just being an influencer or whatever. It's just to find what interests you. Don't try to find what you think other people are going to find interesting. Because no matter what it is, even if it's something like stamp collecting or whatever, right? If you are passionate about it enough, you will make it interesting to other people. Dude, so me and my housemate Zach love these videos of guys that watch Rally Cross.

1:20:06So it's like Colin McCray, you know, four -wheel drive cars going through a dirt road. And these blocs all have gone up to fucking air in Scotland or Quebec or something. and they're stood in a poncho under umbrella in the pacing rain in the middle, basically in the middle of a forest to see, to see that, right? So point three of a second. And then when these cars go past, they all turn to each other and go, and we love watching it because it watching anyone get fired up about anything makes you feel fired up as well. You just, I love people that love things. And yeah, if you follow your passions in that regard, you're always going to remain on the right And you'll also be motivated as well.

1:20:49Yeah. Another thing is you'll be more motivated. Yeah. Absolutely. All right. Next one. Epistemic look. You know that if you'd lived in a different place or time, read different books, had different friends, you'd have different beliefs. And yet, you're convinced that your current beliefs are correct. So are you wrong or the luckiest person ever? Yeah. And this is one that gets me a lot, you know, because I find that a lot of my opinions are in sync with the society in which I live. So, you know, I have broadly sort of kind of, I'm quite sort of liberal in a sense, you know. I mean, I wouldn't say that, I'm actually a liberal, but I have very liberal views, and we live in a liberal society.

1:21:36And I find that it's hard to extricate my beliefs from the time and place in which I'm living. I always wonder, what would I believe if I'd lived, if I'd say being born in sort of India, for instance, if I'd been born in India, what would I believe there? If I'd been born in the 19th century, what would I believe? If I'd, you know, if I was born into a rich family, rather than a poor family, what would I believe? And all of these things make me question my beliefs because I think to myself, my beliefs seem to be local to where I'm living in time and space. I think this is very true of religious people in particular.

1:22:19So if you think about saying, I'm Muslim person. I'm Muslim, obviously believes things that were originally sort of a belief system that was invented in the 7th century Arabia. But what would happen if that person was born before the creation of Islam. So what would, you know, if they had been born sort of in the second century, would they still be a Muslim? You know, obviously not. You know, would they still have Muslim principles? Obviously not. And this is interesting because Islam is supposed to be a religion for all times and all places. You know, that's, that's, it's sort of main claim to fame.

1:22:57And so, you know, although there's this concept in Islam called Jahelia, which is about based inside the idea that before the coming of Islam there was ignorance. Still, you've got to ask yourself, surely that means then that being born before the creation of Islam means that you're not going to have the advantage in God's eyes of somebody who's born after the creation of Islam, because the person who's born after the creation of Islam is going to be more likely to follow Islam than the person before. So there's this weird sort of, you know, disparity there. And I think you you could extend this to any belief system, communism for instance as well, even.

1:23:34If you were born before the creation of communism, you're not gonna be a communist. And so, would you be different, if you were born, would a communist be different if they were born before the creation of communism? Of course they would. And so how can they be sure that their belief is right? It didn't just happen to be born at the right time in history to have the right beliefs. And that's why when I, my solution to this problem, is to try to find beliefs that are as universal as possible. So one way that I can gauge whether a belief is a good one is whether I can view myself as having believed that, no matter what time or place I was living in.

1:24:13And it's not a perfect system, because obviously knowledge is constantly growing. And obviously I wouldn't know the germ theory of disease a thousand years ago, but I do believe it now. And I think I'm pretty justified in believing in the germ theory of disease, given the evidence for it. But as a general rule, I think it's a pretty good one where you think about, is this belief a product of the society in which I'm living or is it one that can be applied to any time in any place? And the thing with the gym theory of disease is even though it didn't exist a thousand years ago, it would still have helped me a thousand years ago.

1:24:46It would still have been beneficial to believe in it a thousand years ago. So I think that's a good, heuristic to use in order to determine whether your beliefs are real. It doesn't matter if they're a product of your time. What matters is will there be useful in any time and any place? That's the kind of universality of a belief. So if your beliefs wouldn't work very well a thousand years ago, then that's a good sign that you're probably just imbibing what you're learning from the present day. You're kind of, you know, you're myopically sort of trapped in the present moment and in the present place.

1:25:19So yeah, I think universality of applicability is what you want to look at. So can you apply it, you're diversity, and if you can, then that's a sign that it's a good belief. So Rob Henderson put something in his newsletter a couple of weeks ago, and I gave it a name. So I've come in at the end and thrown like a pretty bow on top of something which I really like as an idea. So I called this the intellectuals treadmill. Some thinkers, as they rise in prominence, as a result of their interesting ideas, gradually devote less time to reading and more time to lucrative opportunities, this is a mistake.

1:25:55They are neglecting one of the core habits that made them so interesting in the first place. I think I'm guilty of this. I tend to read less than I used to, but I think I definitely agree with it in general. I think one of the problems with a lot of thinkers is that they tend to just resort to the same set of tools that got them famous. So a classic example of this would be somebody like Nassim Taleb. He became famous through a handful of concepts, like anti -fragility, the lindy effect, skin in the game. And these, obviously, they're great ideas. They're really good ideas. And that's why they became popular.

1:26:39But since then, what I've noticed in him is that he tends to sort of try to apply these concepts to pretty much anything that happens. This is the golden hammer, isn't it? The golden hammer. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We've spoken about this before, the golden hammer. And it also sort of links in with another thing called the toothbrush problem, where the toothbrush problem is basically where intellectuals treat theories like toothbrushes. They don't want to use anybody else's. They just want to use their own. And that's the opposite of me who just shamelessly repurposes everybody else's. Well, I think that's the healthiest way to be.

1:27:16I think oftentimes, you know, it's, it's when you just rely on your own theories, you're just closing yourself off from, from so much learning and so much knowledge. And it's why I try not to do these things, you know. But I mean, it's hard because when you do become famous for a certain idea, you develop a certain brand and you want to sort of, you want to, you want to overstate the kind of importance of your ideas. So obviously, Taleb got very famous from his three major ideas and, you know, tail risk and all the other ideas that he's come out with. So he's got, and he's incentivized to, instead of learning new ideas by reading books, to just double down on his own ideas by just constantly writing about them.

1:27:59And so he's, that's obviously going to get him more clout because the more important his ideas seem, the more important he seems and the more opportunities he's going to get to sort of expound upon various social issues and apply them to, you know, apply his golden hammers to those. Well, I remember hearing Peterson a while ago, it was probably five years ago. He was on Rogan and he was, you know, really at the crest of this huge growth curve that he was on, maybe just after the Kathy Newman interview, something like that. And he said something along the lines of, I need to take some time to go away because because if you are outputting more than you are inputting, all that you're doing is just saying the same things over and over again, and you end up becoming a caricature of yourself, which is dangerous.

1:28:45There's this, I learned from critical drinker. Do you follow that guy? The... Yeah, I watch him as video, yeah, he's funny, yeah. So I learned from him that there's four stages to most media movements. So let's say like the superhero genre that we've seen since sort of the mid -naughts. There is the introduction phase, the growth phase, the maturity phase, and then the parody phase. What's interesting about that is you can track it perfectly with Thor. So you have this kind of groundbreaking, or maybe less so iron man, because he died, I guess, before he could get into parody. But certainly with Thor you get this groundbreaking one, and everyone's like, oh my god Chris Hampton's so ripped, and then he get into growth, and it's still developing.

1:29:24Then you get into maturity where it's a little bit more predictable, and you've kind of got an idea. And then he got into Love and Thunder, which was the most recent one. And you even saw bits of parody earlier on in it, but where he's in the charge. He's in the charge, supposedly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's the butt of all of the jokes. He's doing a set of splits on the top of like a pair of dragons, like John Claude Van Dam. Even Dr. Strange, I guess he featured as a sort of ancillary character in lots of other things, but he only got two. So he had the first Dr. Strange with Benedict Cumberbatch.

1:29:55He's a phenomenal actor. first one super like sincere in the way that they did it and it was very meaningful about him. The second one, a zombie version of Benedict Cumberbatch goes back in time to a different universe to tell the central American daughter of a lesbian couple called America Chavez that she just needs to believe in herself. Like it's just the most parody of the most parody that you can think. So yeah, and I think that one of the problems that you get is what he just and identified if you are outputting more than you're inputting, you end up just regurgitating ideas, you bastardize them, you don't have anything fresh, you become a caricature of yourself, you become a, you come easy to be parodied and that's dangerous.

1:30:39And he was saying, you know, you have to take some time away. It's someone that we can say absolutely has adhered to that. And there's all to do. It's how you're going to say no to another speaking gay, how you're going to say but how you gonna say no to all these things? I get it, right? But someone that definitely has done this was Naval, who just said, I did my Rogan episode and I'm now away on sabbatical because I never want to say the same thing twice and I won't be doing any more podcasts until I have three hours worth of new things to talk about. Fair play. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think Naval is very wise in that he's done this, I think to avoid audience capture.

1:31:18I think that's ultimately what we're talking about. Because when you have the same set of ideas, there's a pressure on you to continue to talk about those ideas. Again, to sort of emphasize their importance. And I think Teleb is a very good example of this going back to him because I feel he has kind of been audience captioning a sense where he's now expected that he's going to try to explain things in terms of, you know, tail risk or whatever. And it's because it's what he knows and I understand what he does it because you know It's kind of wise to a certain extent to just stick to what you know But he's he's clearly a very intelligent man and he's a man who could who could learn a lot more about many other things But he instead just chooses to pretty much talk about the same sort of things again and again He's doing what Jordan Peterson essentially what warned about where instead of learning because he's he's you know He's a smart guy, but he's arrogant as hell.

1:32:15And he thinks that he sort of has the final answer. He thinks he understands things, even when he doesn't really have a grounding in it. He thinks he understands IQ, but he makes very elementary mistakes about IQ. But yeah, he tends to just sort of focus on very narrow field of maths, that's a statistical kind of tail risk analysis, risk analysis, that kind of stuff. And you know, he, so he uses a very narrow set of tools, they have very useful tools, but they're very narrow. And he uses that very narrow system of tools to explain everything from like COVID to polarization, to Israel and Palestine.

1:33:00He talks about a lot of these things often just using very narrow set of tools and it's weird because he's otherwise he's quite an erudite guy, but he just chooses not to sort of progress beyond what he what made him successful. And I see this I see this with a lot of other influences a lot of other intellectuals where they just stick to the thing that made them successful over and over again as if you know they're just sort of scared of venturing into new territory. You see it with a lot of sort of anti -work accounts online now as well where the same thing is always the case, you know, it's always about workness, everything's working, everything can be explained in terms of workness.

1:33:40And you see it in the opposite side with everything's racist, you know, racism is the explanation of everything. Oh, it's because of systemic racism, it's because of whiteness, it's because of white fragility, you know, all of this stuff. And then, you know, you just see the same sets of explanations being used over and over again because these people are not reading new things. They just regurgitate what was already in their head again and again and again that they're basically being spoon fed their own intellectual vomit and You know just kind of recycling it and vomiting out again, and you know And it just degrades.

1:34:09It's like chat GPT being trained on its own outputs. You know, it's just You know, it's kind of like just it is a very dangerous thing and that's why I think I tried to go broad rather than narrowing on one thing. I do occasionally narrowing on one thing where I write like a long read or whatever, but what I try to do is to just keep learning, learning new concepts and new things. And like I've set up pretty good thing now where I've got an audience that expects me to write about a wide range of different things, but very, very shallow things. I do write pretty shallow stuff in general, just because I've got so many ideas to cover that I can't go into too much detail.

1:34:47I mean, I'm not always shallow. I do sometimes go on deep dives into articles and essays where I write 4 ,000 words about a single concept, but usually I write sort of a wide range of things, but quite shallow in order to give people ideas for them to sort of springboard their own ideas. That's generally what I like to do. And I find that that's a healthy way to approach because it means I'm constantly learning new ideas instead of just focusing on one idea and using that one tool to explain everything, which is a temptation. It seems like this is related to another one I got from you beginner's bubble effect.

1:35:22You cannot learn that which you already know from Epic Titus. The most ignorant are not those who know nothing, but those who know a little because a little knowledge grants the illusion of understanding which kills curiosity and closes the mind. Yeah, so this would appear to go against what I've just said. It would seem like, oh, okay, you shouldn't learn just a little thing. You should really go deep into that. But in practice, that's not actually possible. You can't just learn one thing in loads and loads of detail and not learn anything else. You're always going to be in a situation where you have to learn a little bit.

1:35:57The key to overcoming the big beginners' bubble effect is not to learn more because you can't learn more about everything. The key is to recognize your limits, is to recognize how much you actually know, basically. Once you learn how much you actually know, and that comes from humility and from curiosity, then you're no longer subject to the beginner's bubble effect. The beginner's bubble effect is a product of thinking you know more than you actually do. And it usually comes from having a very shallow explanation for something. Because once you have a shallow explanation, you think you have a full explanation.

1:36:29It's just the way our brain works. It kills your curiosity. When you have a shallow explanation for something, it falls your brain into thinking that you understand it. And that's where the danger lies. So I'm not saying you shouldn't just learn little things. In fact, I actually advocate the opposite. I think you should learn a little about a lot rather than learn a lot about a little. I think you should learn a little about a little about a lot. And the reason for this is well, this goes to Philip Tetlock's work. Philip Tetlock is one of the founding sort of fathers of decision theory along with sort of people like Robert C.

1:37:05Ardini and Daniel Cunningham. and they founded the field of rationalism. And Ted Locke's all about predicting the future. He's basically, because the true measure of how rational you are and how much truth you have is whether you can predict the future consistently. If you can't, because only truth allows you to do that. Nothing, you can't bullshit your way to let it to predict in the future. That's one thing you cannot bullshit. So you have to know the truth in order to consistently predict the future. And that's why he's into the whole thing about super forecasting. And he basically found that the people who were most accurate at predicting the future, because he did some a series of trials which were actually involved, the CIA, involved like there was a massive funding from the CIA.

1:37:49He did some pretty crazy stuff in the 1980s, where he basically did these competitions to see who could predict the future the best. And people adopted various strategies, various kinds. This phenomenon became known as super forecasting. thing. And what Tetlock found was that the people who tended to be the best at predicting future were not the people who had who knew a lot about a little, but actually the people who knew a little about a lot. And this was because I think there probably are several explanations for it, but I think one of the key explanations is that the people who know a lot about a little tend to try to solve all problems by recourse to that little narrow sort of sliver of information that they know really, really well because they feel they're safe on that territory and they don't want to venture outside of it.

1:38:35So they tend to try to, they view everything to their lens of what they know really, really well. Whereas the people who know a lot about, you know, a lot about a little, they, sorry, a little about a lot, sorry, they tend to be a lot more generalist and they are more flexible in their thinking. And so this is why I would advocate if you have a choice between specializing in just a small number of topics or learning a little about a lot, I would advocate the latter because that puts you in a good territory to sort of be flexible in your thinking and learn. You can then learn if you want to know more about a certain thing, you can learn about it and this there's a concept called the curiosity zone which is when you learn a lot sorry when you learn a little about a lot what happens is that your curiosity gets stoked and you want to learn more because curiosity is not it's not stoked by an absence of knowledge.

1:39:31It's stoked by having a little knowledge because when you have a little knowledge, you know, curiosity is the desire to fill gaps in knowledge. And in order to have gaps in knowledge, you need to have things, you need to actually learn things because a complete absence of knowledge is not a gap in knowledge. You need to learn something teaches you what you don't know. Yeah, and a gap can only exist between two objects. You can't have a gap without empty space is not a gap. It's got to be in the middle of two things. So if you learn those two things, then you have a gap now. You have a gap in that knowledge.

1:40:09And that gap is where your curiosity blooms, basically. So if you want to stoke your curiosity, if you want to sort of evoke curiosity in yourself, then the best way to do that is to learn a little about a lot because that way you'll want to know more, you'll motivate you to want to know more. And so, yeah, that's what I would definitely advocate is doing. That's why I like to be more of a generalist rather than specializing in a single concept, I think it's much better to do that. A gender setting theory, most of the time what's happening in the news isn't actually important. and it only appears important because it's in the news.

1:40:49The public conversation is based on whatever's reported by the press giving the impression that this news matters most, when really it's just what was chosen by a few editors and thoughtlessly amplified by the masses. Yeah, so this is why I don't really read the news very much. I browse it very, very casually, often just once in a while. I don't really read it much because what I found is that 99 % of the time, the news doesn't make me any wiser, it doesn't make me any more informed, it doesn't really help me in my day -to -day life, it doesn't help me understand the world any better, it's just something I do for entertainment and I think most news is just that, it's just entertainment.

1:41:35I think it's entertainment that is presented in such a way that you don't feel guilty for consuming it because you think you're learning about the world and a lot of the time, the reason for this is that news is hijacking what we call shiny object syndrome. And shiny object syndrome is a concept, another concept, I think, from one of my recent threads, where evolutionarily, in our evolutionary history, we sort of evolved, I keep saying to would evolve. But basically we evolved to basically favor new information over old information because new information tended to be more useful. In a low information environment, new information can often be the difference between life or death.

1:42:24So new information, for instance, in a thousand years ago or a hundred thousand years ago, would be seeing a lion coming out from the undergrowth. That's new information. And that's crucial information. Do you has come out of the undergrowth and it's charging towards you, you need to know. So obviously we became biased towards new information because new information could be the like the difference between life or death in a way that old information wasn't. And so we have this bias towards novelty. We're attracted to the new. Anything that's new, we're just attracted to it by virtue of its novelty.

1:43:00And news hijacks this evolutionary impulse by providing us with new content. People are always searching for what's new. They're constantly looking for the breaking news, the big bar in red, which they're breaking news, or they're looking for, you know, seeing new tweets or whatever, you know, click the button, see new tweets, you know, see the latest posts, all this stuff, people wanna see what's the latest, they wanna know what's the latest. And this is a maladaptive desire because in a world where information is must produced, It's no longer, it's no longer actually like valuable to have new information most of the time because the majority of the new information has been created for one reason or one reason only and that is to hijack your impulse for novelty, your desire for novelty.

1:43:51It's there to just, it's basically rushed out, the information is rushed out. So if you look at a lot of the latest breaking news is usually wrong because the journalist wanted to be the first person to break the story so they just rushed it out as fast as they could and they didn't do their due diligence and they didn't really, you know, they didn't give you all the facts. And likewise, people want to be the first to retweet, you know, this new story and talk about it. And so they'll just hastily put, they'll just retweet the headline without reading the article or whatever. So, you know, a lot of this new stuff is rushed out.

1:44:23And that's why news is generally not that valuable because it's just reported,

1:44:34it's this sounds like it might do well online. So let's just post this, let's just write about this. And then what happens is that people think that because it was reported by the news, therefore it must be important. But it's not, a lot of the time it's not. A lot of the time it's there simply to hijack your attention, hijack your desire for novelty and you're not gonna remember it, you're not gonna benefit from it. You know, just think about, just go to any news page, right? And just look at the top stories. And a lot of the time, it's just not really stuff that. It might be interesting. It might be interesting.

1:45:08It might interest you for a couple of minutes. You might think, oh, OK, that's OK. But most of the time, it's not really going to be that interesting. The exception to this would be news that's directly relevant to your field, your chosen field. So for instance, if you are a biologist and you are interested in curing, let's say you're a medical professional and you're interested in curing cancer or whatever. And then if there's a new vaccine for cancer, which there is, which is an amazing story, then that's obviously going to be interesting news and you want to know about that. But that's rare, that's very rare and you usually get that not from looking at the mainstream media, you usually get that from specialized news outlets.

1:45:56So you want to go to like science news outlets, you know, which will tell you about the latest breakthroughs in technology. The mainstream media is usually just generalized just stuff that is just not really going to be a value to many people. It's just going to be there to tickle your desire for novelty. So mainstream media news is generally not that useful. That's why I don't really read it much. I mean, I do read it, but only because a lot of people expect me to comment on it. If I wasn't If I wasn't a writer, I wouldn't check the news. I would only just check information that's relevant to me.

1:46:30So maybe if I was an investor or a check stock price isn't stuff like that, but I wouldn't check the general news because the general news is usually just worthless. People fooled into believing that it's important because it's reported, but it's not. It's just what was chosen by a few editors. Yeah, it's strange what we click on and what editors know will drive interest and engagement often has absolutely no correlation with something that's important. Like how many times have we seen left wing woman says that she can't get a man to hold the door open for her and it goes like super viral online and everyone's got the same take of that's a conservative and it's like a whatever it's a you know slow picture.

1:47:16It's a pit. Yeah. It's there to fuel engagement and it's engagement farming. It's basically a lot of its rage bait. They want to try and make as angry as possible because they want to start a fight online because if they start a fight online then the two factions that are fighting are going to be inadvertently promoting. Can I stick right to fighting over it? Yeah. And then also, you know, stuff that's reported just generally like, you know, like, for For instance, if you're an average person, you'll hear, oh, 30 people died in a bombing in Gaza. It's bad, it's tragic, it's horrible news. But most people are not going to ever do anything about it.

1:47:54They're just going to read it and then that's it. They're going to forget about it. And it's like they may as well have not even learned about it because it's not going to change their life in any way. They're not going to go out there and stop the bombing. Apart from maybe there are a bit more ambient liangucious about the bombing. the world and the impending general sense of doom. Exactly. It's just going to make them feel bad a lot of the time and there's a negativity bias in the news reporting as well. It was interesting because I think Stephen Pinker recently posted a list of 66 news reports that were actually positive.

1:48:31There were positive developments but they didn't get any traction because they were positive rather than negative. The negative stories always get way more engagement. And so there's, you know, if you constantly are consuming news, you're going to develop this sort of more cynicism, you're going to develop great cynicism, more pessimism, you're going to become depressed in a sense, you know, you're going to feel bad because you're just going to feel like the world's falling apart. Whereas if you actually go to it again, you go to these specialized news outlets. So you go to science reporting, you know, then you'll find a lot of stuff about medical breakthroughs, which is actually a lot more interesting because that will allow you to predict the future a little bit better.

1:49:09If there's been a breakthrough, then you can maybe do something about that. You can maybe invest in it. If you learn that there's a vaccine for cancer, you can invest in it and you can help the people that are actually trying to make that happen. That's a lot more useful stuff. Positive news tends to be more useful overall than the negative engagement -driven stuff. that you see. Two of my favorite websites that I go to Cypost and Psychology Today, both just have a phenomenal insights about human nature. If you're interested in that, a lot of the studies that I cite on this show come from PSY Post or Psychology Today.

1:49:49They're great. Do you know what the browser is? Are you familiar with that? The browser, no. So the browser is, it's been going for, I think, over a decade now. It is a daily email of five articles and there is nothing. These articles have nothing in common at all other than the fact that the editor has found them to be interesting. And it's my favorite place to just get exposed to always new, new, new, new, new stuff. Like here is the life story in 3 ,000 words of like a boot polisher from 1800s Birmingham. And here is some new drone technology that's coming out of China. And here is like a story about Genghis Khan and whatever.

1:50:34Like it's just so varied. And literally the only single thread between them all is the guy Robert Cotterall. I think the dude that's in charge just found it interesting. And on the whole, it's not everyone's for me, but at least one to two per day. It's amazing. And I think it's maybe like 40 bucks a year. And your sub -stack, something else that people should subscribe to, which they can go to Gwinder .substack .com. I'm definitely some sort of premium member, which I enjoy. What can people expect from you over the next few months? What's coming up? Yeah, so I'm working on my most ambitious article yet, which is going to be a long read.

1:51:12It's going to be about 5 ,000 words. I'm working on it for Unheard, but I'm also going to be posting the longer version on my sub -stack. and it's about gamification and how it can be used to control us, but how we can take advantage of it. That's going to be a very useful one for a lot of people. I've also got my book, I don't want to talk too much about my book yet because it's coming, it's coming. But there's something big in the works, it's going to be... Is the first one of the second one? Because there's two, right? Yeah, there's two. Yeah, the first one's coming out next year, so not long.

1:51:43So then the one after is probably gonna come the year after so that'll be in 2025 But yeah, there's gonna be a book hopefully next year And I'm also gonna be trying to actually start doing videos as well Because I've had a bit of demand from that so I think by the time this comes out I might actually have a YouTube channel I don't know but if you're watching this and you're interested in hearing me ramble more than You might want to search my name on YouTube and I'm getting guests I can give you some more. So I can go to your sub stack. There'll everything you'll be on the sub stack, I'm gonna guess.

1:52:16Everything's on the sub stack. Yeah. And also Twitter. I'm going to be more active on Twitter. I've got another mega thread coming up actually, because I'm going to do one for the winter. 2024 mega thread's going to be out in about a month or two. So that's going to be the next big thing on Twitter. But I'll be posting a lot more now. So because of the bulk of my work on my bookstown. So yeah, I'm hoping that 2024's going to be a very productive year for me. I look forward to it, man. I'll try and use the Tegger threads. Yeah. You might want a bit more sleep than I get. But yeah, dude, look, I really cherish these episodes.

1:52:51That's two hours that's come by in literally no time at all. Once the next mega threads up, you will come back on. We will talk about it again and we will have more fun. But for now, ladies and gentlemen, Gwinder Bogel, thanks so much for today, mate. Thank you. Always a pleasure, Chris.