#865 - Matthew Syed - How High Performers Build An Unbreakable Mindset

29:47Fantastic. stick. You're finding out what you could do differently and better. You know, if you think of life as a hypothesis, rather than as an argument that needs to be, how did you put it? Corroborate it. I think that's a wonderful way of thinking about it. Then there's some spontaneous speaking, two thirds of the way through, where you, whoever's hosting for the night writes a set of topics on cards. The name is going to hat and they pick had a name Matthew, you have to go to the front, pick up the card and extemporize on it immediately for 60 seconds. The first time you do it's terrifying.

30:22But because I was passionate about journalism and I thought I'm going to have to give the occasional talk and I'd love to be able to communicate by the way, I might get invited on the today program or the BBC News and being able to think on one's feet is something that will be of tremendous value at a fantastic asset. But the point of this isn't to say I'm the best communicator in the world because I know that I'm not the best communicator in the world. I go to conferences where there are off -the -scale communicators, but what it means is you get to be the best that you can be. You reach the summit of your potential.

30:58And if it's something you care about, it's something that has a purpose view. I think that's an incredibly empowering thing. And that's why I think you said practical tips. You can measure yourself on growth mindset. it. And sometimes people are fixed. They're a bit worried about trying new things, about collaborating with people they don't know about leaving their comfort zone. And it's about liberating us from some of the unconscious constraints we can place on ourselves so that we can just live that life as a hypothesis. I love that formulation. Yeah. I remember I started doing some striking boxing in my tie and stuff.

31:37I went out to land for a summer and fought out there. And the first, the most important lesson that novice fighters learn according to the coach, the first coach that I had was you're not made of glass when someone punches you in the face. And it always sticks with me that because you can see somebody that isn't used to necessarily being in a ring and sort of when punches get thrown, there's like that, even if it's not much of a flinch, even if it's not the whole body, There's a closing of the eyes and then there's that really famous sequence of Conno McGregor winning the lightweight title against Eddie Alvarez.

32:17And Alvarez throws this big, overhand sort of looping right like that. And his knuckles touch the end of Conno McGregor's nose and Conno watches this thing come in the whole way. Bink! Just watches it. Glance off the bottom of his nose. and then just, and it's one of the most beautiful sequences of striking his then counter. It's like five punches punctuated with two kicks. It's gorgeous. It's beautiful. Bap, bap, bap, bap, bap, bap, and then Eddie just hits the floor and that's how he finishes it. And that's how he becomes the UFC's first double champion. Right? Just phenomenal. Like beautiful, gorgeous story.

32:53But it makes me think about learning that you're not made of glass. Right? You're not wincing. And that failure is, again, it's hard. It's hard. We can talk about it. And everyone that's listening is, goes, you're rationally that makes sense. And then the swell of fear inside of them, just one other point that's, I guess, kind of salient, I'm going to Australia to do a live tour. I've got this live show thing. So not too dissimilar to your speaking, although hopefully less heckling. And I've been doing work in progress shows in Austin, at a comedy club, East of town. And it's very small, 40 people rooms, like it would kind of basically invite only on a mailing list.

33:31And the first week that I went out, I was really, really, really rusty. I was like, oh, this isn't good. Then the second week, I had it stellar before. I was like, that's 9, 10 out of 10. Well, I haven't lost it. Fantastic. So last night was my final work in progress show. And I thought, okay, I know I've got the one that I need to do in the tank, which was the second one. Why don't I just try and be as experimental this evening as possible? More jokes, new stories, trying to weave things in a different way, cutting out the bits that I think kind of probably don't need to be there, but that I rely on because they feel safe because I've run them 30 times before or whatever it might be.

34:11And last night, as I was going out there, I've got some jokes in there that didn't land. They were too complex, they were too like trying to be too clever. And usually you have that, especially trying to tell jokes in front of a group of people, you feel like, oh my god, you sort of do in a British cringe meter, the toes curl inside of your trainers. But because I'd entered into that environment as this is a hypothesis to be tested, as opposed to something to be proved, I just had this like, ah, well, if it doesn't work, great, because it means I'm not going to use it in front of three and a half thousand people in London.

34:50I'm so interesting because one of the other things, first of all, I love that story because I used to do a podcast that the one successful podcast that I did, I shouldn't say that, the BBC podcast or the sideways is doing okay, but with two other sports people, Fred Flintoff who is a cricketer former England cricket captain and Robbie Savage who is a soccer player. Right. And it was called imaginatively, flint off savage in the ping pong guy. And it was a surprise smash. It was a surprise smash. It did really, really well. And two things struck me about it, the one that I think was really interesting is flint off was worried he was a bit self conscious before a microphone or in front of a camera.

35:39That's very easy to be. If anyone's ever had a, you know, an iPhone pointed at them, They're talking naturally in suddenly, it's like, well, I think that's quite a natural reaction. Might as well be the barrel of a gun. Yeah, exactly. And Flintoth, he said, we did one of the podcasts. And I said, what are you up to next week? He said, I'm on a tour of provincial theaters. And I'm doing this musical. Oh, he's in pantomime type stuff for a while, right? Right. And I said, what are you doing? He said, well, I'm not getting paid very much at all, but if I'm in a stand in front of an audience dressed up and singing my heart out, that's going to help me lose my self -consciousness and I really want to go into broadcasting.

36:26I want to be a success. And this is just a way of learning how to do it. And he went on this tour and it wasn't long after that. He got a really good gig in television, the presenter of Top Gear. I mean, sadly, he had an accident during Top Gear, and it's been very difficult for him. But I watch him as a broadcaster now. I don't know if you saw any of the series where he went to Preston where he grew up, quite a rough part of a Northern English town and worked. Well, you'll know about this, right? This wonderful series about young cricketers, and then he took them to India, and just seeing him flourish.

37:04I think he's got a wonderful, wonderful growth mindset, just a tremendous person. One of the other areas of your work, which I think ties him with this quite nicely, is this tension between deliberate practice, 10 ,000 hour rule, time and attention, and genetics, talent, advantage, something innate, predisposition, or almost predetermination, I guess, for the absolute magic athlete amongst us. Where do you stand now after spending two careers in one form or another thinking about this? Where do you stand on 10 ,000 -hour rule versus genetics, talent, advantages, etc.? Well, I don't think my views have changed that much on this.

37:50I think that my experience in table tennis was for people to say when they saw me playing well, you've gift. You must have been born with extraordinary reaction speeds and athleticism, but they hadn't seen the hidden story, which was I grew up, I mentioned in Reading, but on the street that I grew up on, it had 50 % of the top table tennis players in Britain. This is from a population of about a million recreational players. So I had a series of advantages, in addition probably to pretty good genes too, which was my parents bought a table for the garage when I was about eight so I'm practicing like crazy with my brother who was two years older and better than me so I'm getting stretched the whole time I'm losing a lot and learning a lot then the school teacher at the primary school that I went to and read which was on the road that had all the top players Silver Dull Road was the best coach in Britain Peter Chartres and he invited me and my brother some other young players to a club that was open 24 hours a day, you just had a set of keys and you could let yourself in and practice before school after school holidays and weekends.

39:04So did I have genes that were conducive to table tennis, yes? But are there other crucial factors and explaining what enabled me to get to the top? Absolutely. And the relationship between the contribution of genes in the contribution of luck, environment, circumstance, probably changes depending on the activity. To be good at basketball, you definitely need to be, I guess, reasonably tall. That's highly genetically mediated. There's probably other areas where the genetic contribution may be a little bit less. But typically, I would suggest it's a multifactorial phenomenon But you really need to have the perfect storm of lots of different things happening at the same time.

39:53Do you know the fine tuned theory of the universe? Are you familiar with this? Yeah. Yeah, so it sounds to me like your table tennis career was sort of not too dissimilar to that. So for the people that don't know, there's a... I know, it's like ten different numbers, ten different forces, relationship between the strong and weak nuclear force, electromagnetic, gravity, this sort of weird cosmological constant, like very slight bit of expansion that's going on and all of these things, if only they were out by some absurdly small fraction of a lot of different numbers, the meal that was created from the ingredients would not be a universe conducive to having matter.

40:37It would have clumped together because gravity was too strong or it would have blasted apart because it was too weak or heavier atoms, have you elements would have been able to form for whatever reason. And I always think about that. I've got Brian Cox, fellow of coming on the show soon. I think this is sometimes cited by religious people as an argument for the existence of God under the rubric of the weekend, the topic principle. I just one thing I'd throw into the mixed Chris is explaining it in that way I think is completely valid. And if your goal is to become the best table tennis player, say in England.

41:14And that anything else is just a disaster, then you really want to have all of those ingredients in order to bother making the attempt to use the limited time on earth to get there. In a zero -sum environment, if we all improve by 10%, the relative rankings remain the same. And if you're only interested in the relative ranking, that's something that one needs to bear in mind, but my sense is that in many things in life, it's a positive some game. If you and I and lots of other people improve our ability to communicate, that's good for us, probably good for the institutions we work at and good for the society.

41:56If people have a growth mindset attitude towards mathematics and we'll become more numerate, that's great for us and it's great for society. And for what it's worth, even though sport is often pictured as a zero some environment. No matter how much people improve at table tennis, there's only one person who can win the gold at the Olympics every four years. The journey of trying to be the best that you can be, even if it doesn't mean that you're the best in the world, is a fascinating and often very beautiful one. And I worry a bit and you'll be more connected to this than perhaps I am. This is occasionally I heard people saying, you know what's the point of being the best you can be?

42:40Why not just coast in life, quiet quitting, just doing the minimum? My sense from the evidence is that's a much less satisfying life than one where you're passionate about something, you try and be the best that you can be, you make a bigger contribution to the company to yourself, to the society. And I think the dynamical power of that when you scale it through a society is tremendous. And I think it does explain certain trends in history. Are you familiar with Icyabalyn's idea of the inner citadel? No, this is great. I'm a big admirer of Berlin and I'll give you hedgehog in the fox and two concepts of liberty.

43:25But go on. The inner citadel. The inner citadel. When the natural road toward human fulfillment is blocked, human beings retreat into themselves, become involved in themselves, and try to create inwardly that world, which some evil fate has denied them externally. If you cannot obtain from the world that which you really desire, you must teach yourself not to want it. If you cannot get what you want, you must teach yourself to want what you can get. This is a very frequent form of spiritual retreat in depth into a kind of inner citadel in which you try to lock yourself up against all the fearful ills of the world.

44:01The friend explained it in a simpler way. If your leg is wounded, you can try to treat the leg, and if you can't, then you cut off your leg and announce that the desire for legs is misguided and must be subdued. Basically, if you can't win it a game, you stop playing, say that you never cared about the game and create your own game with rules which you can win more easily. Well, that's in psychology. It's often goes under thank you, by the way. It's really interesting. Berlin was such a wide... When I was at Oxford, I was at a college called Baleal and I remember Berlin walking through the back quad.

44:33No way. Yeah, and he was a... Yeah, I knew people who knew Berlin. I didn't agree with everything he wrote about philosophically, but he was such a humane and rounded thinker, which isn't often always the way in academia, but a great person. But in psychology for what it's worth, there is a phenomenon called self -handicapping where if people are in a fixed, so think of a young person in a bit of a fixed mindset. They want to be perfect. And their self -esteem is bound up with being pretty perfect. And they have an exam for the piano, let's say. They love the piano, they've got an exam next week.

45:15And I think most parents will have seen this at one time or another with their kids, suddenly the kid stops practicing. And you're like, why are they not practicing? I got the exam next week, they love the piano. And what's often happening is that they're so worried about the possibility they might fail in the exam. They wanna create proactively and excuse that they can point to in the event of failure. In other words, if I don't practice, if I sound not bothered about it, if I deliberately go out and get drunk the night before, Well, I saw that in finals, by the way, at Oxford. Some people, this is like three years of work for the exam, which is the only thing that determines your grade.

45:56And I'm not saying grades are important, exams are important, but these people actually did care about their exams, but they were so worried about failing and that it would call into question their intellect. They wanted to be able to say, you know what, I got drunk the night before. They actually made the outcome that they most feared more likely as a consequence of what you're describing. And I think that is not dissimilar to the retreat into the in a set adult that I think it has very similar underlying psychological dynamics. Well, in that way, the upside of never trying is never having to feel the pain of failure.

46:32Exactly. You avoid public failure by assuring failure privately. So you mentioned before we got started, you've done your research. I was impressed. I was a cricketer. That was was what I dedicated my teenage years to, and for the people that kind of know how the cricket season works, especially as a junior you can play, under 15s and 17s, maybe a Saturday game as you start to play adults and a Sunday game too, plus you're netting two or three times a week. So yeah, this is a full -time job alongside going to school or whatever. And there was a period toward the end of my teens where I did that purposeful handicapping, what was it called?

47:16Self handicapping. Self handicapping. So I would be called by the head of Durham Academy, cricket on a Monday. He'd bring me every Monday and he'd ask how I'd get on because I wasn't placed by the academy. I hadn't been placed in a team. I was playing for the club that I'd always grown up playing for. And he would ask how I'd gone on. And I knew he was going to ask and I was so worried. about not performing that I was a legsbanner, right? Again, for the non -crickety inducted, it's a unique form of bowling. The conditions need to be very specific. The position of the game needs to be very specific as well.

47:57It's kind of high risk, but it's also potentially high reward. It's very complex. Anyway, I often had what was called a TFC, thanks for coming, which is where you don't bat and you don't bowl because I'd be batting seven or eight and the bowling offering that I had was very bespoke, very, very specific and often the conditions wouldn't lend itself to that, especially being up north, it was raining a lot, it was, you know, pitches were wet, et cetera. And there was this odd degree of satisfaction that I would have when I ended up having a TFC that I knew when I got to speak to Jeff or John on a Monday that I was able to say, you know, I just really, I just didn't get the opportunity.

48:43Like I really wanted kind of the opportunity to do this thing. I didn't in some ways because I was scared of doing it and by being tested, finding myself coming up short, that if I'd been handed the ball and I wanted to, and it's this odd duality, you know, one week I was braver and I just fucking really wanted the captain and maybe even try and push him a little bit and nudge him and be like, look, I've got this, like put me in coach, so to speak. But then other ones on my, you know, my weaker, more fragile, sort of mental weeks where I didn't have that same amount of confidence in myself. There would be this sort of bizarre melancholic satisfaction that I didn't get the opportunity to succeed, but at least I didn't have to have the threat of failure.

49:28And I think it's, yeah, it's really interesting, Chris. I think it's worth saying that I should have perhaps said this earlier, it is understandable, not wanting to fail. And I think it's perhaps even more understandable in the digital age, where often people can post pictures that makes their life look pretty perfect, and the airbrush photographs. And if young people look at that and think life is about looking and acting perfectly, you can see why it becomes more difficult to take the risks that I think we both agree are so important for growth in life. The quote that I think you might like is J .K.

50:06rolling. This is a 2008 Harvard commencement address. Somebody I admire very much. It is impossible to live without failing at something unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all. In which case you fail by default. Yeah, beautiful. I mean, what a... One other thing, I'll just throw in Chris, if I may. You may. Something I've become very interested in, and might form my next book. Have you heard of the concept of time preference? No. No. If I asked you, would you rather have a hundred pounds or a hundred dollars now or 200 in the years time? Like hyperbolic discounting?

50:56Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's another way of describing the discount rate. And humans do tend to discount hyperbolicly, which is not dissimilar to other organisms. We tend to want to have the immediate gain, even if we can have more in the future. But of course, in life, we need to invest in order to gain more in the long term. You know, we save, we get compound interest in order to be fit. We have to turn down the instant gratification of watching the movie and go for a run, which is more painful in the present. But if we always prioritize now over the future, the chocolate over the run, the lying down rather than the training, the Netflix rather than the homework, the consuming rather than the investing.

51:47Over the course of a life, it is crippling. For a society, it's disastrous because you can't have economic growth without the willingness to defer gratification. But if you defer today and you get more in the next period and then you defer again, you're constantly growing your life. And I think my hunch is, it's not well studied actually. An economics they're quite interested in the discount rate and the hyperbolic discounting is quite a literature. In psychology, they're interested in self -control and certain types of habit formation as a way of enabling to do what's good in the long term and overcoming the temptation not to do in the short.

52:28But I don't think there's a sufficiently good integration between these two things. And my sense is that for individuals and for societies, reducing time preference, in other words, seeing the long term and deferring gratification is absolutely central. And that there are people, and there may be people listening who can do it in one part of life, but not in others. So you're probably familiar with the NFL players who must have had incredible discipline in order to be successful in a highly competitive sport But are not insignificant proportion go bankrupt within a few years of retiring They show that discipline that long -termism That deferment of gratification in their sport But when it comes to their money, they've got it all at the end of the day They'll blow it and then they'll blow up now This I think is quite pervasive so when I talked about growth mindset I think it's great to be able to apply more broadly in one's life rather than just necessarily to one thing.

53:33I think you have a better life, a better adventure, a better journey, a better period of hypothesis testing. If you're able to be low time preference in a more generalized way, and if you're, I know you're interested in politics, who I've been listening to some of your podcasts today, I think if you look at Western civilization as a whole, you can explain the key dynamics through this prism. How so? Well, I hope it's not controversial to say that the West was something of a backwater for many thousands of years and was not the center of innovation and creativity for much of the period that we sometimes call the Dark Ages, but that the West took off in the early modern period and became the dominant economic and cultural power on Earth.

54:29So sometimes as you know called the Great Divergence between the West and the rest. Now, what is the explanation for this? Historians have sought for a very long time to explain the rise of the West. You've interviewed one of the great thinkers in this space, Joseph Henrich of Harvard University. It explains this divergence through the ban on cousin marriage that across the world you had tribal societies and it's great having a tribe. You're working together with your kin in order to do things, but it also can restrict the success of a society because if you have lots of different tribes within a given geographical area, they're often fighting with each other and don't trust each other.

55:10And the Roman Catholic ban on cousin marriage, which went up to six cousins, I think, by the 10th century, effectively forced people to marry outside the tribe, rather than within the cousin group. So you dissolve the tribes and create a national identity, and it drives innovation and change. And I think this is a great argument. But he also mentions in his book, The Weirdest People in the World, something that I think has been underplayed, which is over the course of the Middle Ages, partly because of what I've already mentioned about that breakdown in the tribal structures. The interest rate in England drops dramatically between about a thousand AD and 1500.

55:50You can think of the interest rate as the society's time preference if that makes sense. If you require 20 % interest in order to save, you're somebody who's more interested in now than later. But can you see that makes it difficult to save and invest and do great things? But the interest rate dropped from 20, 30 % in England to 5 % by 1500. And I think, and there are some economists who agree with this, that Western Europe was becoming more patient. Puritanism, the Protestant work ethic, these came later, of course. The bourgeois values of prudence and self -restraint, the industrious revolution, this is all indicative of Western consciousness prioritizing more than other parts of the world, the future above the present, allowing for cumulative compound economic growth that eventually takes off during the Industrial Revolution.

56:48Now, I think if I'm not sending you to sleep yet, Chris, there is a reversal in about 1970, where I think Western civilization started becoming less patient. There was an advert for a credit card called Access, one of the first two credit cards, which said Access takes the waiting out of wanting. In other words, spend now. Don't worry about the future. Let it look after itself. I think this came out in 1972. But if you look at England between 1670 and 1970, there was never a fiscal deficit outside a major war ever, because they're saving for a rainy day during this period. Since 1970, the British government has run deficits every year, bar five.

57:39They're trying to consume, and that means that the national debt is rising to now above 100 % of GDP. America's maybe even a better example where there has been a deficit every year bar four. We're talking a few days out from the presidential election. Both Trump and Harris are promising huge deficits. According to the Congressional Office, I think it's called budget responsibility, Trump will add, they say, on their central estimate, 7 .5 trillion to the debt, Harris 3 .5 trillion. Two sides are the same coin because the public is not willing to hear that it's no good consuming now, because we're putting problems on to future generations where it will become starker and starker.

58:22Isn't it interesting? I can give you many other. It's so interesting this has happened when life expectancy has been going up as well. You know, from 1670 to 1970 over that time, you have ever more reason. Yeah, you, one of the arguments for hyperbolic discounting is that if you're in a high volatility environment, you're all well and good, maybe getting $200 in a year's time, but you don't know if you're gonna be here in a year's time. You know they get here right now and you know that it's a hundred dollars. That's exactly correct So a lot of economists argue that time preference. It's not a great phrase.

58:56We need to come out with Remained. Yeah, exactly. If you've got any good ideas, I'd love to hear it But it's partly to do with life expectancy Certain sections of American society have suffered a reduction in life expectancy, but on average it has you say it has gone up So there has to be an alternative explanation. By the way, quantitative easing is another example of this. You're printing money, enabling consumption to continue in the here and now, but you're storing up lots of long -term problems with capital misallocation, asset price inflation, making difficult for younger people to go on the housing ladder.

59:34That has been a disaster, I think. And in some ways that was permitted by coming off the gold standard, complicated story in itself. But I do wonder, Chris, if the self -esteem movement comes from the same basic place that we want kids to succeed because it's so nice in the here and now, give them lots of success experiences. But what does it mean? You're depriving them of the resilience that is necessary for long term growth and an interesting life. Grade inflation and education starts taking off in the 1970s. It's lovely to get a grade A in the here and now, but if everyone's getting a grade A, you can't read it.

1:00:13You're devaluing the currency of all exams. And I do wonder if part of the, and I'm only going to say this tentatively, part of the mental health crisis that we're seeing is if one is feeling anxious, it's quite nice to get a label in the here and now for why that is being, why you're not feeling great. But if everyone or ever higher proportion have mental health issues for which they have a label, it makes it very difficult to provide the psychological support for the people of the mother. So the most needy, I could give you other examples, Chris, but what fascinates me is that many if not all of these start to change around 1970 fiscal monetary policy, the self -esteem movement, mental health issues.

1:01:05I have a whole list of these things, and I'm trying to drill down at the moment into seeing whether or not one can provide a convincing unifying explanation for this. It doesn't diverge too far from, but it does a bit from Henrik's analysis. very interesting. Have you got a potential overarching dynamic? I think the explanation is complacency. The West has been near that this is my tentative explanation. If you think about Rome, ancient Rome, or many other civilizations, when they've been at the top for all your creative people doing their movie franchises, you've been at the top for a while, your expectations of your consumption start to rise, but it becomes less easy to, as it were, absorb the necessary costs in order for that to continue.

1:02:03And if you think about Rome, they devalued, they effectively had a 97 % to 100 % silver in the denarius, and they just cut it, they debased the currency, and it led to inflation. and Gibbon, the historian argues about this complacency, this decadence that it's set in. And I think it, as I say, is attentive explanation, but the period of Western dominance, I think, is now at a place where people have expectations that have run ahead of our material capacity to meet them, which means we're effectively borrowing for the future to continue consuming now, storing up the problems that we're now facing ever more.

1:02:46Well, the crisis will get bigger as we continue to build the deficits, continue with the QE, continue with diagnosing everyone or never growing population of people with mental illness, higher grade inflation and so on. And then when you fold birth rate decline on top of this, it's a very unpopular. It's a very un... I'm aware that I keep banging this drum and I have done for a long time, but this week get actually justified because the UK, I'm sure that you saw the census data just came out 1 .4 is the birth rate for the UK, which means that for every hundred British people today, there will be 30 great grandchildren or 36, I think.

1:03:31So you're talking about a 60 % extinction rate within 100 years, which is wild. And then on top of that, let's consider And there's always comes from like, I often get slime thrown at me that this is like some trad con you need to go back to being an armaged version of a person like talking point, but Almost everybody agrees that economic prosperity and helping to raise up the lower classes is something that's good I know that you spent a good bit of time in my hometown of Middlesbrough along maybe a while ago, but um, you know, that's The most spitt and sawdusts, rough around the edges, northern British town that you're going to find.

1:04:11It's like the quintessential sort of northern British town. Everybody believes that we should be raising them up. Where's that going to come from? It's probably going to come from spending. It's going to come from economic freedom, independence, the opportunity to invest in the places that need it. Tell me how we're going to overcome, not only this deficit, not only this sort of cultural predisposition that we have now, which I think you're right, which is this. Kind of like a sense of hedonic entitlement, financial entitlement, life mastery in many ways. And how are we going to do that when you've got less than half of the workforce?

1:04:51I mean, AI and robotics are going to have to carry an awful lot of that productivity burden. And maybe they can, which is great. But I don't know. We have enough room for the people. So it seems like a shame to get rid of them. Just one other bit on that, I've thought about this in awful lot, may add something to your notion or fledgling hypothesis, which is I think that the scientific revolution and the advent of rationality and technology has an awful lot to answer for here because it made a lot of promises that it was able to deliver on in many ways that are objective and in almost no ways that are subjective.

1:05:31So I can tell you what the weather's going to be like in Venezuela in five days time. But I can't guarantee that I'm not going to get cancer. I can't guarantee that a car's not going to hit me as I step out into the street. And maybe, given AI -informed medicine and autonomous driving vehicles and all the rest of it, maybe this is simply just a slightly more protracted timeline and we're in some sort of messy middle, like, dark age, technological dark age at the moment, and at some point we'll reach, maybe within two, three decades, we'll have reached sort of full technological maturity and we'll have mastered most of the problems that people have been.

1:06:09But right now, what we have is I was promised, or I feel like we know so much about the world.

1:06:25Why were one in three children of every couple that you know, die before age one or die in childbirth because it's 1400 Yugoslavia or something and you're a surf. What sort of degree of entitlement do you have? What sort of mastery do you think that you're supposed to get from the world? But when all of the time all you're seeing is that we've got these advances and ascending ships to a rocket and we can catch them in a pair of tweezers and we can do all of this stuff. I think it sets humans up for an area that as yet, we haven't been able to create Masterian, which is the subjective, the meaning, the day -to -day experience of the humans.

1:07:10I think that there is a tension and a contrast, like having one hand in hot water, one hand in cold water, and then putting them both into lukewarm water, and they both feel different things, coming from two different worlds, one being the objective, one being the subjective, one being science, the other being feeling, and you're not getting what you were promised from one that the other can deliver. Yeah, I think it's perhaps, I would say in response to that, the Middlesbrough, which I knew well, there was a table tennis hotbed back in the day, the Ormese B table tennis club, run by Alan Ransom.

1:07:49I grew up playing squash. around Alan Ransom. Alan Ransom, now this is somebody that people ought to know. He's the table tennis guru. I mean, he's quite old now, but he ran that wonderful club. And he had a sports equipment business. He probably got you. Did you get his question? I used to get my cricket bats from Alan Ransom's place just around the corner from the Crown pub in Middlesbrough. See, that was not a topic I was expecting to talk about today. for Alarmanso, I'm glad he's got it, I'm glad he's got it. But the middle of the world, or anywhere else, I, if people think to themselves, you know, it does feel quite pinched at the moment.

1:08:33It's difficult to get on the housing ladder. I feel that my parents had it a bit easier than we're having it. I think they're right. I think that's a fair thing to say. But it's a consequence of many years of putting the now above the future at the level of society. And that becomes more and more cumulatively difficult. So in the British general election, not dissimilar to the US election, no one talked about the debt. Both parties made promises that were completely fictitious, because they knew that if they said the debt is too high, they wouldn't get elected. it. In the same way that I've just come back from a week in Washington, very curious about how the election was going out there, no one mentioned the debt.

1:09:23No one that I spoke to did. And yet the unfun, you mentioned demographics, Chris. This means the unfunded liabilities are absolutely enormous because the dependency ratio of the older people are not working to the younger people who are is going in the wrong direction. And yet even with that context, what should have been front and center of the political debate, no one's interested in it, much more interested in culture or trivia, and things of really no historic significance whatsoever. I think it's a distraction technique from the genuine challenges that we face. Now, if somebody said to me, Albert economic growth is overrated, you know, we can have a discussion about that.

1:10:03But to the extent that most politicians are saying, we want to have growth,

1:10:10we want to have At the absolute heart of this is time preference. We need to rememe it, but I think it's there. Now, on the other point that you made about science, thinking objectively about the world, and that there's a disconnect between our subjective perception of it, tell me how you'd respond to this. I don't think science ever wanted to be anything more than trying to help us solve empirical problems of various kinds. And at that job, I think it's been the most successful of all scientific, forgive me, of all human institutions. And the question of how we engage with the world, how we enjoy the world, our relationships, I'm not sure that's amenable.

1:10:59It's not a place. No, it's not. It's not the domain of science. But I think that the new atheist movement, the increasing secularization of the West, the derogation of a lot of the places that people used to get meaning from. That has left people cut a drift, bereft of the typical explanations that they would have relied on. Those may be being less of objectively accurate, but more subjectively reassuring, have left people in more malaise. I'm fascinated by this idea of things which are literally true, but functionally false, functionally true, but literally false. And it's it. Yeah. I think it's it's it's it's it's it's clearly the case that you can have beliefs that are not empirically true that are conducive to success and vice versa.

1:11:54You're absolutely right about that. And I have the scars on my back here because I grew up as a Christian. My father was born in India, moved to Pakistan after partition and came to England to study law, and he grew up as a Muslim in the Shia tradition. But he in his bed sit in in Southeast London in the early 1960s had a vision of Jesus Christ and converted. This is very unusual from Shia Islam to evangelical born again Christianity. And he then met my mum, who was a red -headed Welsh girl from a farming community in North Wales at a church. She had moved to London and she's from an evangelical background.

1:12:38They met in church and then they fell in love. And by the way, both families were massively against the marriage because they said, you can't, this is a 1960s. They said, hey, don't do it. You'll actually have mixed -raced children. Don't do that to them. Fortunately for my siblings and I, they rejected the advice, had us and they had a, you know, were married until my father passed away three years ago. My mum was still alive, going well, coming tomorrow to London. But I grew up with this wonderful sense of assurance that God existed and that He was all loving and that I had an eternal future and I loved church.

1:13:19I'm one of those who went to church, really enjoyed it, made great friends, but then decided that it was empirically, or what's the word you use? Functionally unfurl, anyway, untrue. Yes. I thought it was untrue. And the problem is, I couldn't bring myself to believe it just on pragmatic grounds. This is one of the difficulties with beliefs. Yes. They have some kind of it. You don't really get to choose whether or not you're going to be convinced by them. There's a, do you remember, um, angels and demons, Dan Brown's book, and he made it into a movie. Uh, there's this really phenomenal scene. So, uh, you and McGregor, the, the Camelango is, uh, speaking to the protagonist and he's trying to get in Professor Langdon, trying to get into the Vatican archives.

1:14:11He's adamant that Da Vinci or someone has left some secret note and in the secret note he's going to find out what the fuck's going on. And a Kamalango turns to Professor Langdon and he says, do you believe Professor? And he starts to give a politician's answer, saying, I mean, I do definition of belief and just blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's a very Peter Sony in response, actually. And you and McGregor's guy Kamalango says, I didn't ask you that. Ask whether or not you believe. He turns to the camera, who's supposed to be to you and McGregor, he turns direct to the camera, it's such an awesome line.

1:14:47And he says, belief is a gift that I'm yet to be given. Oh, beautiful. It's gorgeous line. And I think that, you know, it's very difficult to convince yourself of something in that regard. But when we get back to that sort of this tension between rationality, belief, functionally true, literally false, literally true, functionally false, One of the things that happened with the derogation of belief in religion was that people were asked to let go of the thing that felt the most real to them, which was story, it was persona, it was narrative, it was archetypes and story arcs, in place of the thing which feels the least real to us.

1:15:30We have the least resonance with, which is statistics and graphs, data. those things. We are not built for that. We are built to understand and interpret the world by story and the stories were derogated and they were replaced with something perhaps much more accurate but significantly more sterile and that is something which is maybe literally true but functionally false. Well, we've talked a lot on this about how to get good at stuff, how to improve, how to make progress, how to have an interesting and empowering journey in life. And I hope what we've talked about is, you know, has empirical merit and will help people.

1:16:12But if you said to me at the end of it, what's the point of the journey given that it comes to an end and you then die? I honestly don't have an answer to that. I'm enjoying life enormously. But I do think it's a roller coaster that will come to an end. And there's nothing I can do about it. I carry that with me all the time, the sense of impending mortality. I do have friends who have the same visceral awareness of it, some don't. I don't know if it's an advantage or disadvantage. I mean, in a way, it does imbue life with a certain preciousness. You're very consciously aware of the importance of each day.

1:16:56But there is a melancholy in my heart that I would perfectly happily acknowledge more than a melancholy. You know, something of a terror that it will end and I enjoy it so much, but I don't think I can do anything about it. There's no growth mindset that can help with not dying. There's no courage, moral or otherwise. So to the extent that, you know, we're moving into philosophical terrain, I would wholly acknowledge that I'm at a loss to understand and where the meaning comes from. And I certainly, even if I was to replace the narrative, the story, the archetype of God with something else, wouldn't change the fact that I'm gonna die and that it's highly limited and that my kids will grow up without me and that once you die it's forever, the limitlessness of it, I find quite extraordinary.

1:17:49And I, you know, maybe this, you might wanna edit this out. It amazes me to an extent. It's a wonderful book called Brian McGee, the Confessions of a Philosopher, where he talks about his midlife crisis and the quest for meaning is one of the other chapters that we're not more preoccupied with this impending doom that we're all facing. In very rapid time, you're a lot younger than me, but I've probably had half my life already, and it's gone like a flash, and I know that I'll soon be on my deathbed wondering where it gone and then that will be it. I don't know where the meaning comes from. The transcendent meaning, forgive me, the transcendental meaning.

1:18:28I think I do get meaning from hanging out with my friends and family doing things I enjoy, living as a hypothesis. But here's the thing. You live as a hypothesis. It will end and that's it and that's very difficult for me. Perhaps for you. I don't know if you found a way through it. No, I haven't. I think one of the ways that people do is by looking at the bereavements of other people around them. You mentioned that your mum still alive. One of the fortunate things about being an only child is that there aren't that many family members that you need to deal with dying. One of the bad things about being an only child is that you don't get much practice at understanding the role of death in life.

1:19:12You know, beyond pets and mum and dad, that's it. Unless, you know, by some awful, horrible quirk that my future wife ends up passing before I do, that's it. Any friends and stuff like that, I guess. But yeah, it's, uh, there are still a lot of areas of human life. So do the fundamental questions of why we hear what constitutes a good life. Where do we find meaning from? How do we deal with the inevitability of death? death. How do we deal with uncertainty where finite creatures surrounded by an infinite universe, the asymmetry, the anxiety seesaw that we're always sort of butting up against? These are not necessarily the domains of science and in a world where we appear to have mastered so much and we still have these problems mentally.

1:19:58It feels like a particularly vicious pathology or some sort of personal curse. It feels unfair. The best way to say it, it feels unfair. What you hang on a second, you're telling me we can seed rain clouds in Dubai. We can literally control the weather in a country. And I still have to deal with this low mood. And I still have to feel scared about this particular thing. And I still might get sick or I still might die before my time. And I think that, yeah, maybe future civilizations, future generations will look back on us as this sort of, I don't know, with a little bit of sympathy that we knew enough to know that we might be able to get mastery, but we didn't yet have the ability to answer the questions.

1:20:47See, I'm not sure I relate to that because, yeah, we know stuff about the weather and there's some uncertainty about how I'll feel tomorrow. But no matter how much we learn, we're still going to be stuck with the finitude of life. That, it seems to me, is not something we can ever overcome, even with freezing our brains. The second law of thermodynamics tells us that we are moving towards some kind of a heat death. in other words, I think it will inevitably be finite if you don't believe. I had this spiritual. I used to have as my Twitter bio, locally reversing entropy. I love that idea. I love the idea of, you know, there is this sort of force that's trying to rip everything apart and it's trying to create disorder.

1:21:47And what do you get to do? For this brief window, So you get to locally reverse this unstoppable, like eternal omnipotent force. That's a good way to reverse it. That phrase is fantastic. I do like it. I do like it. And when one looks, extends a boundary, that local reversal is always soon enough. Yeah, it will eventually turn the other way. And the second law of thermodynamics, I didn't learn any of this at school, but I think Einstein described it as the key fundamental law of the universe. And was it one of the other great quantum theorists said that it's the one least likely to be overturned by new evidence.

1:22:38It does seem to be very deep. By the way, that's the other thing that I think one throws into the mix on civilizations is that this local reversal of entropy does require the ability to extract energy in order to, as it were, perform the reversal. In other words, if you think of a cheetah chasing a gazelle, the cheetah has to get more energy from the... it needs to get more meat from the kill than it was expended in the chase. An order to survive. Otherwise, the entropy will get them. They need that meat to, as it were, keep the cells going into reverse. Yeah, yeah. But you have to get a surplus.

1:23:19So this is sometimes called the energy return on energy invested. You need to have that high. And actually, a civilization needs quite a big return. The problem with oil and gas at the moment is that we're having to drill deeper and frack harder as opposed to when we used to get oil from near the surface. So the energy return on energy invested is declining. meaning. So the energy, net energy available civilization is going down, making it more difficult to locally reverse entropy, which might explain why productivity has declined in the last few decades. It made it. Matthew Sion, ladies and gentlemen, Matthew, I love you.

1:23:55I feel like we could do this for hours and hours. I have so much more to talk to you about. So we might need to get you back on regularly so that we can keep on chewing the fat and trying to put the world to rights. I really appreciate you. I really appreciate at your work. Thank you Chris and I appreciate the invitation and I've loved the conversation. Where should people go if they want to keep up to date with everything you're doing? I have a website, Matthewside, either dot code .uk or dot com if they google my name and then one of the things that I am keen for people to try is measure their growth mindset.

1:24:27That's something people can do practically and I take this tool every six months always gives me insights that can help. Where can they do that? That's on the website. That's on the website. Let me check. It's metheaside .co .uk. Yeah, all right. Matthew, I appreciate you. Until next time, mate.