#805 - Gurwinder Bhogal - 14 Uncomfortable Truths About Human Psychology

27:43Yeah. So I was at aware of that one. But yeah, I mean, it's, um, I think it's a very important point for today because a lot of politicians seem to be quite savvy to it. A lot of these politicians are actually quite sort of well -versed in rhetoric because a lot of them went to sort of, you know, these elite universities where they have to speak Latin and Greek and, you know, they learn about more of these ancient Greek rhetorical forms. And so it's why it's a good idea. I mean, I should probably do a mega thread about these rhetorical forms because they would probably help people a lot, I think, against politics.

28:14I was listening today while I was hooked up to an IV to the the Dwarkech podcast episode he did with Dominic Cummings. Have you heard this? I haven't known. Dude, it's fucking fire. I got to walk out to win Show Me to Dominic. So I'm going to try and bring him on the show. But Cummings is basically saying, at least in the UK, I don't know how much the equivalent is in the US. But basically the ministers in the UK are, they see themselves as talent, more than operators. So what they're doing all the time is this sort of bullshit PR this presses always giving speeches Dealing with with speech writers how are we positioning what's the optics who we going to speak to today You know kiss the baby on the forehead go to the the galor dinner And they don't actually see their job as making change.

29:05They see their job as communicating change and You know when you've got such a priority on output, not outcome, right? Like output, output, output. Let's broadcast as much as possible as, and no one really looks at what's going on. I mean, that's another type of end -to -meam, I suppose, all of the premises about change is happening. We are doing work. Those are baked into the rhetoric that these people are putting out there. And yet, you know, how many years of conservative government are we about to leave in the next few months, like 15 years, 16 years, 17 years? Yeah, so I think it was around 2006, I think.

29:52So, you know, like nearly 20 years, nearly two decades of conservative government. Yeah. And throughout that entire time, we are doing this and blah, blah, blah, it's like, hey, baked into the premises that you're making change. Like, you've done nothing. You've done nothing. And that's exactly why you're about to get completely side swiped. All right, next So on, which I think is actually related to this post journalism, the press lost its monopoly on news when the internet democratized info to save its business model. It pivoted from journalism into tribalism. The new role of the press is not to inform its readers, but to confirm what they already believe.

30:26Yeah. So, you know, I originally was unsure whether the media used to be less biased, but I stumbled across this really great YouTube video by a guy called Ryan Chaplin, who actually analysed whether the media used to be less biased or whether it was just a sort of cherry, cherry picking rose tinted glasses sort of thing. But like, yeah, it actually turns out that the media were less biased back in the day. And this was prior to the internet. This was when the media essentially had a lot of power and they had a lot of money because nobody else could provide the news. And so they didn't have to be partisan as partisan as they are now.

31:08They actually could afford to just tell the news because the news was actually a valuable thing back then. But that changed with the internet. What happened with the internet was suddenly anybody could tell the news. And in fact, some people could tell the news faster than the big press organizations because there would be local people reporting on things going on in their in their facility. And this obviously took a lot of the wind out of the sales of the media. They no longer had this monopoly. And so they had to find a new way to sort of a new business model basically. And that really ended up becoming less about telling the news and more about confirming what people wanted to believe.

31:53And we see it with the New York Times. The New York Times, if you look at some of the New York Times articles prior to the internet, so in the early 1990s, 1980s, you see that it's actually a lot more factual. And even the opinion pieces tend to be a lot more factual in there sort of presentation. Whereas now, even not just the opinion columns, but also the actual news itself is slanted towards a certain angle. And that's because since people can get news anywhere, they have to do something different. They have to do something new. And a lot of these people who are supposed to journalists and commentators, one thing that they're very skilled at is again rhetoric.

32:37And so they use their rhetorical skills to essentially tell stories, you know, very powerful and interesting stories. The narrative with persona. Yeah, and it's almost like a kind of TV serial. I mean, we saw this a lot during the Trump years, you know, after 2016. We saw the ways that this changed the New York Times. The New York Times became like a kind of a TV serial in which Trump was like this kind of Saturday morning cartoon villain. And it was like, you know, every article should have, it may as well have just at the end of the article in my web, may have well just said, tune in next week to see what Donald Trump is going to do.

33:22So it was like an ongoing narrative about Donald Trump and what is he going to do next, find out in the next issue of The New York Times? And so it's why I don't really read the sort of press too much. I mean, I don't want to demean it too much because I do feel that the press is a little bit probably over demeaned. I think that pretty much everybody hates the press. And I think that, yeah, they are, they are of course, they're biased, every, you know, every human being is biased. And yes, I think, you know, if you look, if you do read the New York Times for news, then God help you. But I think it's valuable anyway, because it allows you to see what they're doing, it allows you to see what they're trying to convince people of.

34:05And that's why I do still read the New York Times. And look, I don't want to be completely unfettered in New York Times. It still does break important stories. And it does still matter. It's still an important voice. It's very easy to just dismiss it and just say, oh, they're all just biased. And they're just trying to convince you of things that are not true. I don't think that's the case. I think there are some good journalists working at the New York Times. So I don't want to demean it too much. But I think, yeah, we need to be careful when we need to ask ourselves what they're trying to convince us of, I think.

34:36the sort of narrative element and this constructing of personification of both events of countries, of regimes, of ideologies, that kind of takes stories out of the realm of fact and into the realm of fiction. It means that people that are reading it don't need to actually understand the principles or the foundations of what's going on. It's an easy story between good and bad, between fair and done fair, between plight and justice. And there's this guy Craig Jones, who I had on the show a couple of weeks ago, talking about he's created this new grappling tournament, which is going head to head with essentially the Olympics of Brazilian Jiu -Jitsu.

35:25And I mentioned him as I got to, I don't, the sport of BJJ is kind of confusing. If you really know what's going on and you don't understand the intricacies of his foot position and what this side control means and all of this. I tell you what I can get on board with, a huge amount of drama between two big organizations and athletes having to make the decision between prestige that's old and money that's new. Like, anybody can understand that. Anybody can. And I have this thing in my house talking to the guys by the pool yesterday. And I was like, much of the time I want to talk about ideas and like your decision making heuristic, a conversational heuristic that I try to catch myself on is if I start talking too much about people, their motivations, what they're like, I'm like, I'm creating this sort of personified narrative thing.

36:18And I'm like, look dude, the Trump versus Biden is just, or Jordan Peterson versus some lefty person. It's just the Kardashians for people with three figure IQs. Like that's all it is. It's just reality TV for the sub -stack generation. And you're trying to, you're still doing the same thing, don't, yeah, maybe the ideas are a little bit more high for Lutin, maybe the people that are involved are a little bit smarter or intellectual or academic or something. But the fundamental foundation of this is gossip. You're gossiping about people. And that's that idea of Craig and also sort of what's going on here with this postjournalism idea.

37:03It brings news stories into a realm everybody can understand, which is the most fundamental human, which is who's hot, who's not, who's playing fair, who isn't, who's in, who's out, that's what it's focused on at the moment. Yeah, I mean, I've actually noticed this in the ways in which the sort of stories, the sort of press stories are constructed. They actually often use a lot of the same devices as actual literature. So a lot of these new stories, they will actually have fictional tropes, they'll have twists, they'll have poetic justice, they'll have irony, like dramatic irony and all of this stuff, you know, and so it shows that the writers are not telling you the facts but that they're presenting a narrative, which they're basically probably what's happened is it might be that they've just watched too many Netflix shows and that they're unconsciously projecting this onto the world when they report.

38:06But it does seem that a lot of the time, if a new story does have some of these literary devices where you have a dramatic reversal of events and then there's a happy ending or something, you're not reading news, you're reading story. But unfortunately, those kinds of stories sell so much better, they get a lot more attention. And so easier to read as well, even look at what nonfiction, great nonfiction were both big fans of Morgan Housel as a good example, right? Morgan Housel, non -fiction writer, read one of his books. It's a storybook. It's a storybook masquerading as a finance book. And yeah, the philosophical underpinnings of this might very well inform your investing strategy or how you think about wealth or how you think about stuff that never changes.

38:55But when you read it, it's just a sequence of stories from history or stories from politics or from space, or from sport, or from whatever. It's story, because it's so much easier for us to retain that kind of information. Yeah, it's one of the kinds of paradoxes, which is that you can't really, you won't get read if you just tell the truth. You have to dress it up in a story. And so you have to kind of, the only way you're going to actually be able to tell this truth is by making it a little bit fake. And so, you know, I do have to do this a little bit. Yeah, yeah. And I'll confess that I have to do this when I publish Substack articles.

39:40I try to be as honest as I can. I don't deliberately lie, but I know that, for instance, with the titles that I use, you know, I do slightly use Sensational titles, because I know that if I don't, I'm not going to get as many read -its and so it's sort of an unfortunate necessity. But I think it's possible to tell the truth in story form. I do think that's, it's possible, it's hard, but it's possible. And I think the best way to do it is to draw attention to the fact that you're telling a story. And I think that's, as long as you do that, then you can actually, you can negate the fictional aspects of it sort of thing.

40:16So it's like a kind of, it's like a beautiful packaging that you tell them to rip off, you know? And then they can actually get to the actual meat of what you're trying to say. Yeah, you know, for better or worse, there are rules to the game of garnering attention online. And you know, the guys that do the copywriting for the channel, the titles and the thumbnails and stuff like that, which I'm still very heavily involved with, all of the time, what permanently asking ourselves the question, does this tasteful? Does this fit within our confines of what we think is acceptable? But we're also thinking, is this engaging and interesting, is this going to get clicks?

40:55And you know, you can go too far down one angle, which is if you split test any website enough, you end up with porn. But on the reverse side, if you don't play by the rules of the game at all, the ideas that you care about and the message that you think is really cool, no one sees it. So you're okay. Well, I need to do something here. We've got to play within the confines of the game. And this relates, I think, to another one of yours from your most recent thread, which which was fiction lag, aka experience taking. When people are captivated by a work of fiction, they unconsciously adopt the traits of their favorite characters.

41:30We develop our identities by copying others and perhaps one reason we enjoy fiction is that it gives us ideas on who to be. Yeah, so this is quite interesting. This is from, so there's basically experiments actually, which kind of show that this is the case, where what they did is they basically got people to sort of consume various forms of fiction. And in one of the forms, there was basically, I think there was a political figure who was a really endearing figure and they were like, they were basically like an activist. And this character was, I think they would might have been a suffrage or something, but they basically campaigned for some kind of voting rights and they, you know, wanted to change the world or whatever and the people that were had consumed this fiction, they then became more like you to vote afterwards.

42:23Within the, I think what happened was that there was an election a few days afterwards and the ones that have bonded with this fictional character, they actually began to identify almost to this with this character and began to vote. They actually went out in the real world and voted. And in another example, a group of people, they browsed fiction featuring a person of an ethnic minority and they were very endearing sympathetic character. And once this person was identified with, the people that had identified with this character became more sort of open and more sympathetic towards people of that ethnicity.

43:02So, you know, these are quite small scale experiments and they're not, I mean, I don't know if they've replicated, so I'm going to put a caveat there. But the reason I included it was because I noticed it happening in my own life and in the sort of lives of the people around me. So I feel that it probably would replicate if they attempted. and you know, when I was young, for instance, you know, like I got attached to certain characters, you know, and I would sort of start acting like them in a way and use them as a model, you know, use them as a model, like for instance, one of my favorite characters when I was young was was Michael Cawley only in the Godfather and I can imagine you as an Italian mobster.

43:51Well, I mean, that's basically what I try to do. But it was more when I was drunk, weirdly enough. I noticed it was more when I was drunk. It wasn't so much when I was sober. It was when I was drunk. I found myself sort of acting and saying lines from the movie, you know? Be careful what you read. If you read too much Harry Potter, you're going to try and cast spells on people once you've had one with many. But this is three, really, that are very, very interesting here that I think link together. So post journalism, looking at using tribalism, creating a sort of us versus their mentality, their utilizing narrative to drag people together.

44:25You've got fictional act, this experience taking thing. Very rarely we expose to the inner workings of anybody else's mind with the level of resolution that you get when reading a 500 or 1000 page book. Anyone that's read the name of the wind by Patrick Rothfuss, you know, you become unbelievably familiar. It's like pedestrianly slow for chapters and chapters and chapters. You learn about this guys walk to the bar that he plays is looter and the sound of his shoes on the cobblestones and all of this. So you become really, really sort of familiar with him. So of course, if it's a well -written character, you start to have this sort of sense of affinity with them.

45:03And you think, well, he has done well by design, especially outright fiction, not just like news, news, or fiction, masquerading as news, should I say. And then this is showing up. Sorry, do you want to finish what you say? Yeah, just that it relates to compassion fade, which is that... Sorry. Sorry, this is the right. One death is a tragedy. One million is a statistic. When presented with two appeals for charity, one based on famine statistics and one based on a single starving girl, People tend to donate much more to the girl. Our minds can't grasp big numbers, so we navigate the world through stories, not statistics.

45:44We are moved by drama, not by data. Why? Because we can, it's narrative, it's being personified. We understand the emotion of this individual person. That compassion fade explains fiction lag in post journalism. Like it's one of the reasons as to why this occurs. Yeah, and I think basically I think that the sort of reason why we enjoy films and literature and fiction generally is because it presents us with certain character archetypes and many presents us with scenarios and it allows us to see what that archetype, how that archetype would perform in that scenario. And so it gives us ideas on who to be, basically.

46:26Because we are kind of memetic beings. You know, we take bits and pieces from other people and we assemble them, we cobble them together into this kind of character that we choose to become. And I think that we get ideas of who to be when we watch films and we sort of identify with certain characters that have certain similarities to us, but are different enough that they're interesting. And it's like an experiment. we see what will this set of traits do in this scenario and how will that and what will be the consequences of that. And so it allows us to essentially see how certain types of people will perform and split testing solutions.

47:10But the yeah, I guess the problem is especially in again in outright fictional even in news, of fiction, of fiction, of creating his news that the outcultons aren't true. This isn't how the behavior of this protagonist, yeah, the behavior of this protagonist isn't that. And what's maybe even more sort of nefarious and manipulative is assuming that this is fact, that this is in the New York Post, to New York Times or Hollywood magazine or whatever. And that this does explain something because it delivers a story that you can buy into and gives you the illusion that this is how things are and that is how things turned out.

47:58But it doesn't. So if you then begin to model your behavior off how this protagonist dealt with it or whatever it might be, think, well, you may be convinced to actually do something which is totally wrong. Yeah, I mean, there's an interesting paradox where when we watch a movie, we know we're watching a movie and yet once we get engrossed in it, we forget that we're just watching a movie. It seems real to us because if it didn't seem real, it wouldn't be interesting and we wouldn't actually be glued to it like we are. And so the very fact that we're able to fool ourselves into believing something that we know is not true shows that there's this sort of, we have this kind of vulnerability stories where, you know, we can even, we can know from the outset, you know, who, like we'll see the opening credits and we'll see, you know, directed by, produced by, obviously, we're watching a movie.

48:48But then as soon as the film begins and as soon as the drama begins, we forget all of that and we're completely sucked into this picture. Well, why do people cry? Why do people cry at movies? Why do they get sad when they read books? Because they're invested that genuinely emotionally invested and they no longer see this situation as a work of fiction, they see it as a work of reality. Yeah, yeah. It's something that we need to sort of be aware of, I think, a lot of the time, our affinity to stories. We're so attracted to stories that we kind of, we need to keep our garden whenever we're presented with them because we're just, we're naturally, I think it's probably a spandrol, it's probably an evolutionary spandrol.

49:27So it's a byproduct of evolution. So it's It's not something that was intended, it's not adaptive, it's maladaptive in a sense, because we're so used to watching other people. And maybe in the old days before we were hunting gatherers, we would watch people in our tribe and see how they acted and what the consequences of that action would be. And that's how we learned who to be. And that's now being exploited by movies where we kind of our brains haven't caught up. And so - How long has the written words been around for like 12 ,000 years? Something like that? I think yes, probably. Yeah, about 10 ,000 I'd say probably.

49:59Yeah. But it's the real and word has only been commonplace for about 500 years. It's only been sort of like something that a lot of people know. Because in the past it was an extremely esoteric thing that was confined usually to priesthood. And only in the past 500 years, I mean with the printing press I suppose was that's the only time writing and that kind of stuff because we had the oral tradition before that where stories were completely just told through around a campfire or whatever, you know, just and the stories were passed down through generations. Sometimes the constellations were used as a sort of projector screen, you know, a cinema screen and they were used to tell stories but yeah, I mean, I think that part of mythology is to give us moral lessons about who we should be and what the consequences of that are.

50:54If you look at Greek mythology, in fact, if you look at any mythology, it tends to deal with this concept of sort of, you know, like hubris and nemesis, for instance, where you have mortals who will act in a certain way and then they'll receive a judgment from the gods. And I think that that's the same thing that we're seeing in movies today where it's that of the gods, it's fate and chance or destiny or whatever. But like, you know, it presents you with a certain character and says, if you are this character, this will be the consequences of being this character. And that sort of, in our primal hunter gather a brain, we sort of associate that with reality.

51:34We sort of, because we're so used to watching other people and learning from other people, as I said, with memetic beings. And so we get fooled into thinking that these fictional worlds are real in that sense. We think that this is the real consequences of beings' weight. If you're arrogant, like Icarus, and you fly too close to the sun, then your wings will melt and you'll fall to earth. Sort of thing. Golden mean. Good character is not about maximizing virtues but moderating them. To be sensitive without being fragile, confident without being cocky, steadfast without being stubborn, driven without being reckless, focused without being obsessed.

52:14Yeah, so I think trying to be a good person is kind of being the opposite of a movie character. So movie characters tend to be very exaggerating. They tend to have very sort of almost, they tend to be caricatures, you know, because they have to be larger than life in order to be interesting. And I think that in fact, what we were just saying is actually quite interesting because really, if you want to be somebody who's successful and charismatic and all that kind of stuff, it's not to actually emulate the movie characters, it's not to do what the movies are designed to do. It's actually to do the opposite.

52:52So fiction lag can actually be a bad thing in that sense. It's better to actually have a smaller than life, personal, I'd say, in a sense, not to be too much of anything but to have moderation in all things because that prevents because all of these character traits can be a weakness if they're taken to excess. Even the best character trait, you know, even if you're if you're extremely compassionate, for instance, like if you have a little bit of compassion, you'll be a nice person, you'll be a good person, you'll also be well -liked because people like compassion. But if you have too much compassion, then you will end up giving everything you own to other people and you'll be left with nothing, you know, for instance, or you'll spend your whole day on social media crying about all the suffering in the world.

53:34And so, there are every single good attribute that a person can possess. It's possible for them to have too much of it. The original golden mean is Aristotle, right? Neither a vice of excess nor a vice of scarcity. Yeah, that's true. Yeah. And I think it's a very powerful idea because it's very easy to just get one trait or a couple of traits and just to run with it and try and maximize it. We live in a world where everybody is trying to max things. You've got like looks, maxing and health, maxing and all this different maxing thing. There's a culture of maxing. I think that really we should focus less on maxing and more on moderating.

54:17I think that's more important because even health, maxing is, I don't think, a very healthy think I run it me enough because if you spend all of your energy on trying to be super healthy and I think of Brian Johnson here, I actually respect Brian Johnson. I think he's doing a great thing. He's obviously a guinea pig. He's a self -confessed guinea pig who's trying out these new things. So I couldn't, you know, I can understand why he's doing what he's doing, but if you try to live that kind of lifestyle just to be healthy, you actually lose out on so many things that make life good and worth living.

54:54And you know, like he has like, I think a two hour skin routine every morning, you know, and I've seen his daily routine where he just spends like, you know, five hours to go through the rounds and doing all this stuff. And I'm just wondering to myself, like, you know, he's obviously trying to live long enough. He's trying to he's trying to maximize his longevity. But he's actually, in a sense, reducing his longevity, because he's actually, although he's living longer, his life is shorter because he's not actually doing the things he wants to do. He's spending so much of that time doing banal, arduous sort of things, you know.

55:29And again, you know, I'm not going to knock him because I think he's fantastic. I think he's contributing to the knowledge of the human race with the things that he's doing. He's contributing to longevity science. But if you were to do that just purely for longevity, for your own longevity and nothing else, It would be bad because you'd be missing out on your life. You wouldn't be living. And so you're actually shortening your life. And so yeah, he's a, he's a sweetie man. He's in town this week actually. He's in Austin this week. So I've got a nut pudding dinner with him. I think tomorrow, the other day.

56:02And he's a real sweetie. I met him in Rootana a couple of weeks ago. He's been on the show and he's nice. That being said, the way that I see Brian, the way I've kind of sort of conceptual, I've told him this. I think he's kind of like a scout in an army. And I am more than happy for him to go behind enemy lines, put himself, his time, his money, his effort, all of that out there in an attempt to try and find out all of this stuff. And then come back and tell us, tell us what you found. When you looked over that ridge and you saw all of the army and where were they moving and what was going on, but it wouldn't do to have an army full of scouts.

56:40You don't need that. And you also don't want to necessarily be a scout yourself. It's an extreme position to be in. And what you want to do is then get that and integrate the pieces, the highest value pieces into your, value set. The same thing goes, you know, in many ways for Alex Hormosi. Like Hormosi is an absolute outlier when it comes to work ethic. The guy is unrelenting and that's great. I want him to push as hard as he can and come back and tell us what he found. tell me what it's like to do 12, 16 hour days, seven days a week for years at a time and let me know what you've come up with.

57:17That's very, very important, but both Brian and Alex are outliers with their particular psychological makeup and their desire and their passion and the enjoyment that they get from doing those things. Inherent, we spoke last time about a telekinexotelic pursuits. And for them, something which for many other people would be exotellic for them is tellic. And I think that just realizing, okay, so what gives me pleasure? What I want to live longer, right? Okay, yeah, but is the dopamine that you get from finding out some slightly different methylated version of Cobalamin B12? Is that really where you get your sort of greatest sense of pleasure from?

57:59Cause that might be for Brian, or is really locking yourself in a large cupboard with no windows wearing a nose strip, pumping yourself full of nicotine and writing for six hours from six a .m. every single morning. Is that really what you want to do? Or do you want to work out how to be able to get, you know, two really great hours of writing done once a week? And, you know, that's using the extremes, using those people. But going back to the, the sort of obsession, this difficulty with the golden mean. And I remember where I was when I first heard it, I was driving again through a new castle on the way to the gym.

58:31And it made me think about dieting. So throughout a lot of, My 20s is a Jim Bro. I would, you know, hard cut for a beafer this summer, and I'm gonna get shredded. And it was very easy to be in full on degenerate bulk birthday cake for dinner mode, bro, or to be in absolute obsession, tracking the calories on my fitness pile mode. Like those two worlds are very easy to be in. If I put a packet of biscuits in front of you and say, you can eat none of them, or you can eat all of them, both of those are kind of easy decisions. If I say you're allowed to have two, it's like, ah, that's impossible. I can't have two.

59:08You let me have two, I'm gonna have half the packet. If you let me have none, you let me have all of them. Both of those are quite easy, but there is something about, and I think the way the story that we tell ourselves about the identity that we have, who am I in this moment? What am I, what am I sort of contributing to? A solution, and I find myself in this, I'm saying it like largely to myself, I'm quite an absolutist creature. I have a lot of obsession about things that I want to do and I want to dedicate myself to them. One of the ways I found that I can toggle this a little bit is to try and periodize.

59:42So to say, okay, I am going to be super, super focused on dialing in my diet and the nutrition and the calories and all the rest of it, but I'm going to do it for three months. And then at the end of those three months, I'm maybe going to have a reset and maybe I'm going to do something else. And if you actually aggregate that out across a year or a decade or a life, you end up with something that does approximate a pretty well balanced life whilst not having to use this insane amount of willpower to always be like in fourth gear, sort of your foot half press to the floor, which is really, really difficult to do.

1:00:18Yeah, I think it helps to just sort of set limits in advance on things that you're going to do, I think, because I think when people are left to their own devices, they have a tendency to go to extremes. We all have our obsessions, everybody's obsessed about something and this is why I think planning is very important to you know like I for instance when I do research for instance when I'm when I'm writing I am obsessive when it comes to research like I literally have to know everything about something before I start writing about it you know and I was in a take just so long to do it but what I've done is I've decided to because I know this about myself I create cutoff points so I will say you know I'm gonna go online and I'm going to find one thing out, right, just this one thing and once I found it out, I'm going to cut the internet.

1:01:12That's it. And then I'm just going to start writing, you know. So, and this is also good for social media addiction, where instead of going online and just browsing, because a lot of people have this obsession where they just have a habit of just taking their phone out and just scrolling through social media, instead of doing that, only allow yourself to take your phone out of your pocket for a very specific reason. So if you want to check social media, for instance, have an idea of what you actually want to see before you open your phone, before you open Twitter or whatever. And then when you've seen the thing that you wanted to see, put your phone back in, you know.

1:01:48And so if you have this deliberate nature, then it allows you to just cut off that point and prevent yourself from becoming obsessed. You can apply this to anything. You know, when you do a certain amount of things, then you stop, basically. It's a good way to moderate. Going back to sort of your original example, these are valuable and useful, especially tactically, but when we're talking about how much compassion is too much compassion, how much charisma, how much confidence, how much drive is too much, those as values that we imbue in ourselves much more difficult. How are we tolerating that?

1:02:28What does it mean to have too much compassion? Yeah, well, I mean, with me personally, I think stoicism is actually a pretty good system. And we probably talk about stoicism a lot. I think we've spoken about it before, but like, and you've probably talked about it with many other people on the show. But stoicism, I think, is a great way to know where to draw the line. Because what it does is it divides the world neatly into two things, into what you can control and into what you can't control. And so with compassion, for example, I have compassion when I can use that compassion when it actually makes a difference.

1:03:06So if I was to see somebody in the street who needed my help for whatever reason, I would have the compassion and I would help them because I can actually make the difference. But if I hear about, you know, some horrible massacre that occurred on the other side of the world, there's no real point in me getting upset about it. There's no real point about, you know, me trying to have compassion for this thing. although yeah, I had the basic baseline compassion that any human being has. I think it's awful, but I can't do anything more than that, you know. So having extra compassion and just sitting there and crying about it isn't going to change anything.

1:03:43It's not going to make their lives better. It's not going to make my life better. And so I have that cutoff point. And again, this requires self -discipline. You know, controlling your emotions is a very difficult thing to do. And it's something that I had to train myself to do. I can do it quite well now. I feel that I have pretty good control of my emotions, but I appreciate that it's not easy and it's something that you need to inculcate into yourself. You need to train yourself to be able to detach from the source of whatever is urking you, whether it's this news of a massacre or whether it's somebody annoying you online or whatever it is, you need to create a distance between yourself and that thing.

1:04:22And the thing is there's no single answer because obviously there's a difference of huge difference between limiting your compassion, limiting your anger, limiting your sexual desire, limiting all these different things. There's different strategies for doing all of these things and one size isn't going to fit all. You've got to find what works for you. What works for me is stosism. It just allows me to that neat delineation between what you can control, what you can control, and And also creating the distance between stimulus and response. I think that's also an extremely important thing. I find that if you just slow down in the ways that you respond to things, slow down in your reactions, it actually helps a great deal.

1:05:05Because I think it was Senaiko who said that the greatest remedy to anger is delay. So if you just slow down and pause before you react to whatever it is, that can actually help. and this can help, you know, if you see a beautiful woman, you can just not think about sex. I mean, you don't have to think about sex and you can create that pause and just focus on something else. If a troll is angry and you online, again, you just pause and just create that distance and just say, you know, you can also use perspective. You can say, okay, so this person doesn't even know me. They're just some person on the other side of the world.

1:05:42They never met me. They don't know me. So anything that they're saying about me is not directed towards me. It's directed to some caricature of me that they've created in their imagination. What's the tilting it when when Mills thing you had before. Well, this is super similar to Tarzwell's razor. Emotion causes bias, but it also causes motivation as such when when most likely to act is 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, well there you go. I think that's an extremely important.

1:06:17And this is probably a theme in a lot of my ideas, is this idea that the thoughts that enter your head are essentially a decision that you make. And you have the power to not think about so that you could choose to see things in a different way. And what I do is I like to look at my emotions not as masters that I have to obey, but as advises because really what our emotions, emotions are alarm systems, they're things that exist to alert you to something. So for example, anger exists to alert you that a line has crossed, has been crossed, you know, some kind of moral line, ethical line has been crossed and somebody has violated something that you hold dear.

1:07:02That's what anger is. But the thing is, is that anger is somewhat obsolete as an obsolete instinct in a sense, because it existed really, because this was prior to there being a legal system, prior to there being a police force, and there needed to be a way to police tribes. And the way that we police it was through anger. So if somebody were to cross a line, if somebody were to sleep with your wife, for instance, or whatever, that would anger you and then you would probably do something pretty horrendous to that person. And so that kept order in the tribe. So anger was like a kind of a police force in a sense.

1:07:40But now we actually have a real police force, we have a real legal system. So that can take care of people crossing lines. So we don't actually need to get upset about it too much. We don't need to get angry as much because we get the dispassion of police to sort that out for us. And so it's somewhat of an obsolete instinct. I'm not saying it's completely obsolete. There is still a used to anger, but it's not as useful as it used to be. And so when you understand this, when you understand why anger exists, it allows you to create that distance between yourself and the feeling of anger. And you can do this with love, you can do it with sadness, you can do it with anything.

1:08:17I mean, humor, everything, you know, so you understand why that emotion exists. And then that allows you to see it more as a construct, as something that evolution has programmed rather than something that you must obey. And so I think that's a good way to create that pause, that distance between stimulus and response. Talab's got this interesting quote where he says, the world is broken up into two groups of people, those who don't know how to make money and those who don't know when to stop. And that little bifurcation about, I was thinking as you talking there, the world sort of being split up into people who can't stop listening to their emotions and those who don't know how to or don't respect them.

1:09:00You know, you've got the sort of cognitive cerebral horsepower praying at the rationality people for whom they probably need to actually allow more of that emotion to come through. They don't use instinct or gut particularly well. Everything has to go through a multiple checklists before spreadsheet before they can do it. And then the other side, the people who need a little bit more mindfulness gap, the people who need to not just act on impulse quite so much. And you know, this is again, it's that golden mean. It's finding this balance, not a a vice of excess, nor a vice of scarcity. All right, next one.

1:09:34Package deal ethics. If I can predict all of your beliefs from one of your beliefs, you're not a serious thinker. Being pro choice and being pro gun control don't necessarily follow from each other. Yet those who believe one usually also believe the other. This is because most people don't choose beliefs individually, but subscribe to packages of beliefs offered by a tribe. Yeah, so you'll be quite familiar with this one because that was actually a quote by yourself that you read there. And yeah, I mean, it's, this is also, I think, it explains a lot about the current political landscape. So again, this goes down to this idea that time is limited, energy is limited, and this cognitive horsepower is finite.

1:10:22And so people have to take shortcuts in their beliefs. And one of the ways in which they take shortcuts is they instead of analyzing every belief that they have and try to make a decision on whether they, that pro -control or anti -control, whether they're pro -life or pro -choice or, you know, whether they're sort of pro -tax, anti -tax, all of these different separate things instead of analyzing them all, which would take a lot of time, a lot of energy, a lot of anxiety. They instead decide to just adopt packages, just whole packages of beliefs, like a ready -made, oven -ready belief system, you know, where all they've got to do is just you know, take out the packaging and then just crack it in the oven and there's no real effort required.

1:11:16So you know, that's the one thing, but it also comes with another advantage, which is that it also gives people tribal belonging. So if you have the same package as everybody else, it makes you feel like you belong to that group and you feel a kinship with other people who have the same packages you. And so it allows people to form identity groups around these packages. And so these two advantages, the fact that it's much less costly to have a package belief than to have an individually analyzed belief system. And also that it gives people a sense of belonging is why you will find that people's beliefs are very, very easy to predict.

1:11:57If you know their beliefs about gun control, you'll be very likely to predict their beliefs about health care, about abortion, about economics, about immigration, all of these things which are not really related. I mean some of them are loosely related, but a lot of them are not. For instance, right wingers tend to be against immigration and yet right wingers are also pro -freedom. them. So, you know, there's a contradiction there, and also, you know, right wingers tend to be against abortion and yet they're pro -freedom on the whole. And so, you know, there's a lot of these kinds of contradictions that you see.

1:12:37And this shows that, you know, there's these people aren't reasoning themselves into these individual beliefs. They're just adopting these umbrella sort of beliefs. One of the most well -remembered insights, I think it may be even the first ever episode that me and you did, was that an absurd ideological belief is as much a show of fealty to your own side and a threat display to the other as it is a ideology that you imbue or some sort of philosophy that you live by. And I keep coming back to this term I think that we came up with which was an unreliable ally. So if I know that you're with me on gun control, but I know that you're not with me on abortion, the next time that something appears when Donald Trump gets convicted or there's this debate that occurs about COVID masks or about lockdown or about immigration or whatever, I think, well, I'm not really too sure what Gwendo is going to say here because you know, he was with us on that one point, but on the other one, he really wasn't.

1:13:42I'm a little bit, I'm a bit unsure about that, guys. So the idea of an unreliable ally, that sort of person, it is likely that you're going to be ostracized from the group. It's likely that there's going to be pressure placed on you by members of that group to no longer be as a satirially bespoke in your ideology and instead just put the onesy on zip it up and you know, we know where you start. You don't need to worry about Gwinda. He's a good guy. We've got him. He's like, You don't worry, he's locked in, he's always there, always where there's always sort of toes aligned. And yeah, the pressures, the pressures are so huge to do this, especially in an atomized world where everybody wears the opinion pageant, where everyone wears their opinions on their sleeve.

1:14:25It is so compelling for people to do that. And I think one other element is, I had a bunch of to work out whether or not your favorite content creator is actually telling the truth. When was the last time that they surprised you with one of their takes? And this is why Love Him or Hate Him, I think Sam Harris is an interesting person to follow because I don't always know what his takes going to be. Something he can quite happily be like pro -vaccine but anti -lockdown. He can be anti -woke, but anti -Trump. He can, you know, it's an odd sort of ugly shape that his belief structure has. It's not a smooth round ball.

1:15:13And given that he pays, and anybody else doesn't have to be Sam Harris. Anybody who pays a relatively high price for not having package deal ethics, for not necessarily being a reliable ally, they pay such a high price for holding those non -typical constellation of beliefs, you have to assume that they believe, they at least believe what they believe or they think that they believe what they believe because otherwise they would just do the easier route, they would get the backing of either the left or the right or the gun people or the abortion people or whatever, but they don't. So yeah, that's the last time that's probably followed.

1:15:53Yeah, that's surprised you as a good heuristic. Yeah, I mean, in your recent conversation with Sam Harris, actually, you use this brilliant I'll get onto that in a moment, but like it was this idea that basically, so Sam is kind of like he angers the left and the right, like you know the left are really angry with him and the right R2 and uses term called ideological spit roasting. There's a brilliant, brilliant, just perfectly describes what's happening, but like, yeah, I mean anybody who has been ideologically spit roasted, it shows that they are not they're paying a heavy cost for their beliefs.

1:16:32And when somebody's paying a heavy cost for their beliefs, this is the signal that their beliefs are genuine. Because why would you pay such a heavy cost if your beliefs were not real? Why would you, what are you gonna gain from that? And so when you see people who are attacked by both the left and the right, this is usually a sign that you're dealing with someone who's sincere, unless they've done something completely egregious. But if they're being canceled by the left and the right for something that's not illegal, and it's just something that they've said or some, you know, some opinion that they hold.

1:17:01This is usually a good sign that they have some integrity because it takes a lot of integrity to not to basically go against either tribe, you know, knowing that the amount of flak you're going to get from the left and from the right. You know, so this is sort of one thing that I look out for in people. You see it with Sam Harris, you see it with Claire Laman, the editor of Quillette, she's also somebody who's pissed off the left and the right. Bill, Bill Ma Scott Galoway. Yeah, yeah. And also I suppose you and I also to a certain extent, you know, we'll, if you look at our reply section on Twitter, you'll usually see both left wingers and right wingers who are angry with them.

1:17:40Not very complimentary all the time. Yeah. All right. Next one. Rough Bards law. If a talent comes naturally to someone, they assume it's nothing special and instead try to improve at what seems difficult to them as a result, people often specialize in things they're bad at. Yeah, so this is an interesting one. I mean, it's one that's hard to really experimentally verify, right? Because obviously this is something that really is a very gradual and a long term thing that happens in people's lives. But I think it's true because I think I've noticed it in myself where for a long period of time, I was not interested in writing.

1:18:22I just didn't think that I was a good writer. And the reason I didn't think I was a good writer, I think, was because I was just kind of, again, I was looking at things from my baseline. So there's a false consensus effect comes in here. I didn't know what it was like to not be me. And so I didn't have any concept of what I was good at. I didn't know that I was good at writing until other people told me I was. And it was only after enough people, not just one person, but quite a large number of people told me I was good at writing. That's only when I actually realized I was good at writing. I'm still not even sure if I am, but a lot of people seem to think so.

1:18:59So, you know, I'll go with it. I'll go with it, you know. But like this was something that for most of my life, like I said, you know, I used to work in tech, and I was more of a numbers guy than a words guy, because I just didn't have any concept of my own talents. I didn't know what I was good at. I didn't know I was a weird guy. I thought I was a numbers guy and You know, and I think this is true of pretty much everybody because when you really think about it How are you supposed to know if you're good at something if you have spent your whole life thinking it's normal? You know if it's if it's your baseline The only way I could see that happening would be if other people constantly tell you that you're good at it because obviously other people are like a mirror and they help us to see ourselves.

1:19:41And you know, if you're like, for me, I mean, I didn't, when I grew up, I didn't really have anybody to tell me that I was good at writing. And I grew up in a working class neighborhood and nobody was really interested in reading anything I wrote. And so, you know, I didn't realize I was a writer until I was an adult. If I had known earlier, sooner, I probably would have dalled down on it earlier. But, But yeah, I think that this is something that is, it's why it's important to get feedback early on from other people and to find friends who are willing to read your work or listen to your music or whatever it is you're doing and to give you honest feedback because that can help you to really see things that you have blind spot for.

1:20:25We all have blind spots with regards to ourselves and the only way we can really learn these things is through other people. And that's why I think it's one reason why it's very important to up sincere and friends who are interested in you and interested in bearing you. Yeah. Ryan Long, the Canadian comedian that lives in New York, sent me that rough barred law from from yourself and said that he finds himself doing this all the time. You know, he's unbelievably good at comedy and writing sketches. He does things that he's like the sketch version of South Park kind of that he's able to sort of call out both left and right.

1:21:05He's very much sort of a blind spot poker. And he said, he takes me and he was like, dude, I, uh, I, I, I, like, I'm so seen by this that he focuses on all of these sort of odd things. I suppose that we use effort and challenge as a proxy for outcome in future. And if something comes easily to us, We assume that it can't be of great value on the other side. I suppose there's certain pursuits in which You know if you place sport the outcome is very quantifiable. It's sort of an obvious metric, but really I was thinking as you were talking about imagine a seven foot seven guy That was somehow born on a desert island with no other humans around him is he tall or what does that mean?

1:21:57What does it mean to be tall when there is no one to be taller than when there is no bell curve of average height? What is tall and what is short? Tall and short only exist in relation to other people and it's the same with this talent and then look at Michael Jordan like left basketball to go and play baseball and then kind of got obsessed with golf. You know, even the guys that do have tight feedback loop, objective metric of success, best in the world, all of these accolades, they go, I'm going to try this other thing. And I guess as well, one of the meta skills, perhaps, is if you're good at a thing and you begin to cultivate the ability to work hard at something, the working hard at something can actually shortcut the outcomes.

1:22:45You can focus on inputs rather than outcomes. And what you end up doing is just trying to, oh well, look at how hard I can apply myself to this other pursuit. And it's like, yeah dude, but you get 0 .2 for every hour that you spend on that. And you get 10 ,000 and two for every hour that you spend on the other thing. You should really be doubling down on the thing that you're great at, not the thing that you're like kind of average at, or the same as everybody else at, or maybe even just a little bit better than everyone else at. Yeah, I think probably a good way to avoid Rothbard's law is to focus on what interests you.

1:23:18Because if you, if something interests you, and it even if it obsesses you, that's even better, but if something really interests you, then you're going to put the time in and you're going to, you're going to put more time into that than other people would put into it. And that by itself is, it's not a guarantee, but it's an indicator that you might be talented at that thing. Because obviously, if you are interested in it, you're going to be putting more hours into it than than anybody else or than most people. And you also have the capacity to get better at it a lot more than you would at something that doesn't interest you because you're gonna do it regardless.

1:23:50And so I think if you're young and you wanna know what you're talented at, a good proxy would be what interests you. Because then you can follow that interest and you could even let it become an obsession. This might be one instance in which it's actually best to disregard the golden mean and to go fall in on this one obsession because then that's how geniuses are born is they become extremely interested in one narrow thing and they focus on it, they spend their lives thinking about it and you know that's what usually sets them apart from everybody else. Champion bias, we assume winners have the best advice but those who win rarely examine why they won while those who lose often regretfully dwell on their mistakes so you'll often obtain the best advice on winning, not from winners, but from losers.

1:24:38Yeah, so I noticed this like when I was reading autobiographies and of successful people and when I was reading these you know people would often tell you that how they became successful you know what they did and a lot of the time I just thought you know these people don't actually understand why they were successful and maybe this is also it kind of ties in a little bit with Rothbard's law and that people are not really aware of what they're actually good at and so they kind of misconstrue why they're successful. They tend to underestimate what they're actually talented at and overestimate what they're not talented at because when people are successful at something, they tend not to really question why they were successful.

1:25:21You know, you're only really question things when things don't go your way. Obviously, when you do things well and things work out, instead of questioning that, you're going to be busy celebrating, you're going to be like, yeah, you know, and also there's another bias where people tend to think that if they did well, then they're going to overemphasize the importance of talent, as opposed to say, look. So there are a few biases which are going to ensure that somebody who's successful at something is not going to truly interrogate it. On the other hand, if you have somebody who's failed at something, that's going to eat at them for a long period of time.

1:25:55It's going to create regret in their heart. And that's going to, that sour note is going to to provoke them into thinking over and over, turning over into their minds, what went wrong. They'll be having sleepless nights about, oh my God, how could this go wrong? And they'll interrogate themselves about it. And so they will often have a much better understanding of why they failed than the successful person would about why they were successful. I think this is a general rule. It's not true in all cases, but I think it's a good general rule to hold. I think it's easier, also another thing is it's easier to work out why something failed than why it succeeded.

1:26:35Because usually it's more important. I think it's more important. I think that avoiding pitfalls is more important than expediting success. Far more people have unforced errors and fail out of something than have insufficient success. Like insufficient success is usually a byproduct of too many failures. And if you say to the person, what was it about your business that caused it to go bankrupt, they will be able to tell you all of the ways that you could go bankrupt. And from that, you can learn how to not go bankrupt. So many, this is the same, especially in content creation. So many of the pursuits that you're doing, unless you're in VC and it's like, build it, ship it, get it to a 10 million run rate, sell it, fuck off.

1:27:23So much it's just a marathon. It's like, okay, so what you're looking to do is what are all of the ways that people who didn't keep going were forced to stop, avoid those and you kind of all that's really left is success. Yeah, that's it. Yeah, I think, yeah, I think this sort of goes to the idea of instead of trying to be right, try to be less wrong, basically. So it's easier to do that because you you can spot the pitfalls and then you can just avoid those pitfalls, rather than because there is no secret to success other than just avoiding mistakes and just being consistent in your work. That's really the best you can do.

1:28:05Avoid the mistakes and just be persistent. Those two things. If you just set yourself up to try and find the secret to success, you're going to find that it's actually very banal, it's very mundane. There's not actually much you can do other than basic things to be successful. You just got to amaptism. And don't fuck up. Yeah, basically. And so the real sort of wisdom is to be had in finding the mistakes to avoid. That's where the real sort of juice is. And that's a very fertile land. There's so much there to learn because there's so many different types of mistakes that you can make. Well, one of my favorite questions that I asked guests on the show is what do most people get wrong about X because the question of how do people do Y better is very, very open and kind of fluffy and you just usually elicit a much more boring answer.

1:28:59But the question, what do most people get wrong about protein consumption? What do most people get wrong when it comes to understanding stoicism? That makes everyone's eyes lighter because they Oh, wow, like I get the opportunity to really call out all of these fucking errors that people keep on making. And I think that we all know deep down that avoiding pitfalls is way more important than just never multiply by zero. If you can keep not multiplying by zero, you will end up with a larger number eventually. But the best example of this, you can spend all of your time working on your diet ensuring that your house is free of mold and that you've got four stage reverse osmosis filtered water and you macros and everything's organic, and one day you decide to drive your car without the seatbelt on, and you're in a car accident, and now you're very dead.

1:29:48You know, it was all of these big numbers, big number, big number, times big number, times big number, times zero. Game over. Yeah, it only takes one critical mistake for everything to go to shit, basically. You know, so you know, you could do everything else really, really well, but if there's one thing that you just get wrong, It could completely append everything else. And so for that reason, yeah, I mean, avoiding mistakes is a lot more important than trying to find some secrets to success, which just doesn't really exist, I think. Anchored to your own history, bias, your personal experiences make up maybe not point, not, not, not, not, not, not, not, not, 1 % of what's happened in the world, but maybe 80 % of how you think the world works.

1:30:34That's from Morgan Houseell. boomers and Gen X had wildly different experiences of how the economy works and this gave them different dispositions, worldviews and political preferences. Yeah, so this is a very interesting point because it kind of fits in a little bit with the false consensus effect. again, you know, we only know the world from our perspective and from our experiences. Everything we see is filtered through our life's experiences and that's how model of the world basically. That's everything we understand about the world we have seen through our own eyes. And this creates blind spot because what we've experienced, I mean, if you consider that life has been around on the surface for about a billion years.

1:31:23And we are tiny sliver of that. We're so tiny at lifetimes that we're almost like a sheet of paper like sideways, just trying to edgeways, seeing it there. We're as Vladimir Nabokov said, we're a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. That's our life. And there's a massive amount of life and just existence that we have no concept of because we're in this tiny tiny sliver of time and not just time but also space you know we only occupy a dot on a dot you know so we have like you know this kind of we have we occupy so little time and space in the grand scheme of things that our world is always going to be skewed and completely it's not going to be a representative sample in other words of what's actually the case.

1:32:22So Morgan Houser uses the example of the economy. So the boomers would have seen a flat, would have seen the stocks, the stock exchange would have been pretty flat for the boomers and they would have assumed that that's the norm, they would have assumed that's what the economy does. But that's because their sample was tiny, it was just one lifetime, one human lifetime, which is negligible. It's just not even a fraction of a representative sample. And then you look at, say, Generation X. And for them, the curve, the graph goes up, so the stocks shot up. And there was a big boom in the 1980s. And so the economy behaved completely differently.

1:33:05And so for them, that was what the economy does. It's just the natural state of things, they assumed that's what nature was. And we saw a lot of like a resurgence of the ideas of iron rand, you know, braganism, thaturism in the 1980s because of this idea that that's what stocks do, stocks just go up, you know, just free market, free market, free market. But then if you go back in time and you go to the times of like Roosevelt, you know, Roosevelt was very different economy. And so it was more protectionist and more or sort of regulation, and all that sort of stuff. So our political views are often based on our life experiences.

1:33:42They're based on how the economy behaves when we're alive, how geopolitics behaves, all of these different things. But these are not, they're all sort of anomalies because the economy, we don't even know what the economy does over the long term because the economy, we've already been tracking the economy for a couple of hundred years. and that's nothing in the grand scheme of things. I mean, when you think of how long civilization could exist, and the civilization is, well, humans have been around for about 300 ,000 years, they're projected to be around for a few million, maybe even a few billion years.

1:34:19So that's a very, very long time scale. So we're really, we're just at the beginning. We don't know what the stock exchange is going to do, a billion years from now. You know, it'll be completely alien. So everything we understand comes from our perspective. And I think the only way out of this is to try to learn from people whose lives are as unlike yours as possible. And that includes going not just beyond your space, but also beyond your time. There's actually a great quote by CS Lewis, which touches on this. I'll read it out. So it's a quote from CS Lewis. So it goes, a man who has lived in many places is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his village.

1:35:03The scholar has lived in many times and is therefore immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press of his own age. So what he's advocating there is to spend your time in other times, to basically live in other time periods through literature, through reading people who were alive a thousand years ago because that can help you understand the peculiarities and the idiosyncrasies of your own time. It gives you a broad of view. If you only consume content from your own time period and from your own country or from your own civilization, you're going to have this blind spot because you're going to only be using this base rate.

1:35:46Again, it's like the false consensus effect. The only way to get escaped from that is to consume content from outside of your time period and from outside of your civilization. And this is one reason why I watch a lot of news, a lot of Chinese news stations, I watch Russian news stations, I watch Indian news stations, instead of the same old CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, instead of all that, which I know what they're going to report, I know what they're going to say, I know what their takes are going to be already, so I don't need to watch this. So if I watch Indian news, I'm not really familiar with Indian news very much, I get a complete new perspective because this is from another civilization and the same assumptions that they have that are baked in.

1:36:26How do they frame these sorts of, yeah, that's so interesting. All right, man, one more. Common knowledge effect. Groups are meant to be better decision makers than individuals because they combine many perspectives. But in practice, a group doesn't base its decisions on the info specific to each member, but only on the info common to them all. This cast's doubt on the idea that two heads are better than one and it helps explain why despite popular wisdom diversity generally does not make teams better. Yeah, so we live in a society that worships diversity, diversity, equity, inclusion. It's everywhere.

1:37:06And it kind of like weird because there's this assumption that more diverse teams are better. And when you actually look at the data, this doesn't really seem to be the case. In fact, I mean, it's close to null, the effect is close to null. Like, it doesn't help teams and it doesn't hinder teams. It's just a completely, it's pretty much a completely independent variant. Have you got any idea how they judged that sort of a thing? Yeah, so there was experiments where they actually had, they had diverse teams and they tested them against teams that were homogenous and they found that there was no great improvement in the teams that were diverse.

1:37:47I mean, I think it was a marginal improvement. They basically described it as significant but not substantial. So that means that it wasn't null, but it wasn't actually, the effect size wasn't really anything to write home about. And if you look at like other studies, you'll find some studies which have shown that there is a small like a moderate improvement in diverse teams over non -diverse teams. But then you'll also find other studies which show that there is actually that being diverse actually hinders a team. So this meta analysis found that overall it does not really any real relation. And it's interesting because we're constantly taught that sort of diverse teams make better teams that you know you have you can draw on the experience of people who have not.

1:38:33Again this is interesting because this goes back to what we were just talking about. So these people have different backgrounds. And so if you have different backgrounds, then you're not as likely to be in theory, at least. You're not as likely to be sort of blinded by your blind spots because you have other people to see these. But that's not what happens in real life. When you have a team, teams have a very specific dynamic. They don't actually, they don't operate in ways that we think teams would operate. The theoretical way that we would think that a team would operate would be, we would think that everybody would use their expertise and they would pull it together to create this sort of super expertise that is greater than the sum of its parts.

1:39:16But that's not what happens. Instead, when you get people in a room together, they don't make decisions based on their own specialist knowledge most of the time. What they normally do is they make decisions based on consensus and consensus is obviously what all of them have in common. So it's actually the opposite of what the theoretical model of team work is. And so this is a bit of a problem because it means that if you have diverse teams, then the sort of advantages of diversity are lost in the team because if somebody has a diverse experience, if somebody has a very different experience to everybody else, it's not going to be integrated into the decision making process because the others don't recognize it.

1:40:02They don't agree with it because it's alien to them. And so it ends up being the case that people end up making consensus only on the things that they share in common. And so really diversity doesn't matter. It doesn't actually make much of a difference. It doesn't end to the team in particular, but it doesn't help the team either. And so it's interesting because it's a kind of it's a the spanner in the works of the whole diversity makes teams better sort of narrative, which is everywhere, literally every moment. I think it's the sort of thing that off the top of your head, it sounds like it would work.

1:40:42Well, you know, there's different perspectives and people are looking at problems from alternate points of view and someone is coming in with a different kind of experience and this different experience may give us a novel insight or solution to whatever the challenge is that we're facing. So, you know, it's kind of surprising that it doesn't work in that way. I mean, it can work in some contexts. So, you know, diversity can be good in some context. So, I think it's good to have a diverse friend group, for instance, because then when you have one -on -one conversations with each of these friends, you learn new things that you didn't, that are completely different from your own experiences.

1:41:18And it allows you to grow in directions that you ordinarily wouldn't be able to grow because you have access to information that's outside of your experience. So in that sense, diversity can be good and maybe in some working context, it can be good. Obviously, if you are working in translation, for instance, diversity is going to be excellent because then you have more languages to draw on and all that kind of stuff. And so there are some instances in which diversity can work. But as a general rule, diversity in itself is not going to help a team when those teams are making decisions based on consensus.

1:41:54And that's what most teams do. Yeah, I'm going to guess as well that the idea of diversity from first principles gets kind of whitewashed when you then think about all of the social dynamics that happen when people get put into a group. group and their desire to sort of conform their uncertainty about standing out. This desire to have a reliable ally, the sort of slow adoption, the regression to the mean of whatever everybody kind of feels, which sort of nerfs off the edges of all of the interesting things to. You'll have social hierarchies and strata within that as well, which triage, who's the most important and yeah it is very interesting.

1:42:35I'm seeing much more push now against diversity as our strength, especially from the UK. I think multiculturalism has been a pretty abject failure especially if you go to somewhere like London. I think the people that live there have got massive problems with it. It's becoming more of a problem in the US but it's mostly abstract for people that just don't like the idea of things being diluted down, but it's being felt very front and center, I think, by British people. And, you know, I'm starting to see this kind of conversation happen more, whether it's about small microcosms at work, whether it's about entire side of nationalities, obviously, it's related to a big immigration push that's happening at the moment.

1:43:19But yeah, fascinating stuff, man. Dude, look, let's bring this one into land. I appreciate the hell out of you. Every single time we get to speak, I have so much fun. What are you working on next? And where should people go to keep up to date with the stuff you're doing. Yeah, so I'm working on my book. It's going to take a bit of time for that to get done. So I don't want to talk too much about that right now, but I'm also publishing on Substack. I've got a new article coming out soon, which is I'm going to be quite a memorable one, I hope. And so the best place to keep track on me is at my blog on Substack, which is a Gwinda .blog.

1:43:51I'm also active on X or Twitter, whichever you prefer. And I think last time I was on here, I said I was going to set up a YouTube channel, which I'm still planning to do. I don't know if I'll have it. Finish the book first. No one's waiting for the, what was that thing about? What was that idea? Don't focus on the stuff that you're not necessarily good at. Fucking. Rothbard's law. Don't Rothbard's law yourself. Stick to writing words until you've got the book done. Dude, I appreciate you. Everyone should go and subscribe. You're one of the few substats that I pay for and I can't wait to see what you do next.

1:44:23Look forward to bringing you on again soon. Always a pleasure, Chris. Thank you. And Doug. Here we have the Lemo Emu in its natural habitat, helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual. Fascinating. It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug. Uh, Lemo, is that guy with the binoculars watching us? Cut the camera. They see us. Only pay for what you need at LibertyMutual .com. Liberty, Liberty, Liberty, Liberty, Liberty Savings very underwritten by Liberty McFill and Sharon's company and affiliate's exclusive Massachusetts.