14 Uncomfortable Truths About Human Psychology - Gurwinder Bhogal

you write these amazing Mega threads I love them we're going to go through as many of the concepts that we can get through today the first one False Consensus Effect everyone driving slower than you is an idiot and everyone driving faster than you is a maniac George Carlin our model of the world assumes people are like us we don't just do whatever we consider normal we also consider normal whatever we do yeah so I think this is a very important point because we only know ourselves and we kind of because we're so familiar with ourselves we tend to use ourselves as the Baseline by which we judge everything else and this can cause problems because let's say um if you're somebody who is around somebody else uh you're and you're inclined to find this person annoying because they're not like you there's two ways you can look at this either you can look at it as that person is annoying or I am easily annoyed and what people tend to do is they almost always uh on the side of considering the other person annoying you know so this is just one example but this is pretty much what we do in our in our lives up and down everywhere like we do it all over the shop and the reason why I think it's important is because if we start asking ourselves well hang on a second maybe I'm the issue maybe I'm seeing things differently because of my experiences we can actually get a more grounded understanding of actually what's going on I've started doing this in my life a lot more where if I feel a certain way about someone I ask myself is it me or is it them you know it's something that a lot of people don't do they just assume that it's either person's that's a problem or they assume that some thing in the world is wrong rather than their perception so that's the reason I included it I think it always helps it's a good horis to just double check just to ask yourself if there's something a skew in the world is it really a skew or is it your perception is it your experiences that have put you a skew from the world is this related to the fundamental attribution error yeah to an extent I mean so with the fundamental attribution error people have a tendency to attribute the sort of uh the failures of an ally to external circumstances and the failures of an an enemy or opponent uh to their character so you know if if if your friend is late oh you know they just got held up by the bus the bus was the problem but if an opponent is late ah they're just a horrible person they're lazy you know all this stuff so it does tend to that's more of a tribal thing but it it does have an element of this false consent and effect to it because we tend to see things relative to ourselves in that sense so you know obviously we we judge ourselves you know we say oh you know I I lost control because I was under pressure uh they lost control because that's just who they are you know there's a a gen Z girl equivalent of this I saw a meme that said uh any guy who likes girls who have got smaller titties than me is a pedophile and any guy who likes girls that have got bigger titties than me is a fatty Chaser yes it's basically like a a remix of the jaw Carin quote yeah funny but yeah man I think uh you know this it's like a sort of a relativistic view of morals and motivations right that I am the thing that's in stasis I am the foundation it's me and everything sort of comes out from me everything else is done in relativity to me yeah absolutely yeah we have to bear in mind that we we have a flawed Baseline because you know what we're seeing is not objective we're all seeing the world through the filter of our own experiences and also our character our personality these are all filters through which we look at the world and it's very easy to forget that those filters exist it's like if you're looking through a window long enough you forget that you're actually looking through a window you know because that window becomes invisible because you're so focused on what's beyond the window that you forget you see through the window and so this is why this I think is quite a use useful hortic you can if you could just bear in mind that you're seeing things through these filters it can help you to judge things more accurately uh and to also take responsibility as well uh for what may be a problem within yourself rather than a problem in the external World fr's Paradox the more similar two choices seem the less the decision should matter yet the harder it is to choose between them as a result we often spend the most time the decisions that matter least yeah so we live in an age of abundance where pretty much everybody is trying to gather our attention and they're trying to do it by offering us Choice they're offering us more and more choices so uh we're flooded with choices in in this day and age and that's why it's become so important to be able to decide between choices and most of the time these decisions are actually not even important they're actually quite Tri things like you know what am I going to eat for dinner or uh you know um should I buy uh should I buy Colgate or should I buy another brand of to toothpaste you know it's like these are a lot of sort of trivial decisions and they exert a cost not just a Time cost but also an energy cost and if you're making hundreds of these decisions in a day that's wearing you out without you even knowing half the time and it's it's it's costing you time as well and what I do is I use certain decision-making horis STS um I I list quite a few I think on my substack but um you know so one of them is um for instance to always choose the decision that is um more painful in the short term because we have a natural bias to um avoid pain in the short term would' rather have the pain in the long term because it's so far away you know so it doesn't seem as bad so those a little you know that's one one sort of ISC um another hortic and this is actually a really useful one and specific to fre fredkin's Paradox which is if you can't decide the answer is no and the reason why this is a good horis is because of the very fact that we are flooded with decisions and so we need to actually ER on the side of denying rather than approving decisions because if we approve all these decisions and if we go ahead if you know if your friends are asking you can you do this can you do that can you do this if you say yes to all of that you're going to be led astray and you will have no time left to do actually what you want to do and so it actually helps to just as a default say no to all decisions if you can't decide that is so as a last resort yeah the uh that kind of relates to that anxiety cost idea I've got which is the longer that you spend thinking about doing a thing the more valuable it would have been to have just done the thing in the first place but doing the thing with regards to decision- making is the same as categorically saying no to it you can either say yes to it and do it or say no to it and that it just closes off the loop of should I still be doing this thing am I going to make the well well this is good but that's good there was a a really interesting workbook from Tony Robbins awaken the giant within that a friend sent to me about three months ago and I had a a bunch of decisions I was really really struggling with and I've been vacillating about for ages and uh it's one of those classic sort of mid 2000s American self-help hardcore self-help style you know it's got a real sort of uplifting music in between each of the chapters it's really funny but he has this great idea where he says that you cannot say that you have made a decision until you have taken an action in the world that moves yourself toward it and I think that that's just such a lovely frame like people talk about yeah I've decided that I'm going to start a business leave my job uh go and talk to that girl over there U change my relationship to alcohol or whatever it's okay well what what does that mean what does making a decision mean uh I have created some sort of mental contract with myself it's some kind of internal commitment okay is that the end goal of it well no it's the sort of lead measure before the first action I take okay well the first action is when you've started to make a decision toward doing something and that just that reframe uh really helped and I think raising the bar for what constitutes making a decision uh and committing to something is a pretty good idea because it stops us from wallowing and it also helps to neuter that anxiety cost that we pay yeah that's a great sort of horis to use um I'm kind of reminded also of uh there's this kind of idea where Steve Jobs and Barack Obama and Mark Zuckerberg they've basically all said that uh on the average day they actually just wear a single outfit they just choose a single outfit for the week and then they just basically wear that throughout the week like just various versions of that outfit and that just helps them to pair down decisions because they don't really care about how they dress obviously if you're in charge of the country or if you're you know in charge of a a multi-billion dollar company the last thing you really care about is is how you look really on on the average day and so they just basically pair down the decisions by choosing the same thing over and over again so in that what they essentially doing is they're turning decision making into routine and by doing that they're eliminating the cost of actually having to make the decisions um routine is really good for that that because you can just um I mean I kind of do it with with meals for instance you know I'll have certain thing that I eat on Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday and just do just enough variety that I can get bored but like not so much variety that I have to actually choose every day you know like a new recipe or whatever so um you know it's very important I think to be able to pair down decisions because most of the decisions we make on the day just don't really matter that much they're not going to impact our lives in the long term very much um and these decisions it's better to just make the decision quick because if you don't make the decision quick you're actually exerting more of a cost than if you had chosen either of the options and again I go back to the thing about you know what you're going to have for lunch um really it doesn't matter that much as long as you can eat it um it's not going to impact your life if you choose one or the other but if you spend a whole hour trying to choose now you've lost an hour so now it is going to impact your your life you know so it's always good to have these things planned in in advance to prevent the kind of essentially to free up time and to prevent that anxiety cost and the energy cost it's not just the time either it's the sort of fatigue that you have when you make lots of meaningless decisions and I think that we know deep down I'll never forget dude when I started making a little bit of money through nightlife events and I was in ASDA in gosi near Newcastle and I was there and I Must Have Spent I'm not kidding two full minutes vacillating between the Tesco own brand or the finest range or whatever it was the asda's finest range of yogurts and I was like the difference was you know 50 Pence per yogurt and it was a pack of four so maybe it was 2 and I was back and forth and back and forth and I sort of came out of this fever dream and thought you're that's this is if anything is wasting time this is wasting time it doesn't matter just grab whatever yogurts you want and throw them in but um just that the the energy sapping nature of tiny pointless decisions I think this is the reason why asynchronous communication is is such a sap on people as well that it just chips away all the time this endless sort of Japanese water torture drip drip drip of email and slack and WhatsApp and Telegram and signal and iMessage yeah yeah it's true and that's another thing is that if you don't make the decisions then the decisions become harder to make in a sense and they they take more of a cost because um certain problems grow so you know if you for instance if you dither on answering an email um what happened is now you're going to you're going to email that person late and now you have to add an apology to the email and you know so you're now doing making more work for yourself and so a lot of the time it's actually better just to make the decisions quicker and to do the things that you need to do quicker because that actually prevents the problems from growing um the way I like to look at it is the more like the less time you spend making decisions the more time you spend making decisions work so you know you can use that extra time to just whatever decision you made you can make it work so with your example of choosing different yogurts um if you had spent less time choosing between those yogurts you could have used the extra time to maybe create a fancy fruit salad to go with the yogurt you know yeah I that's a very silly example but you know it's just you can move forward and you can make you know you can you can make hay with the extra time that you save Bas well there is small number of decisions that are very very important and probably is worth an awful lot of work being spent on them you know am I going to leave this job am I going to marry this person what am I going to do about my finances invest in this company or don't whatever go to this University or not um but we are so sapped by all of the yogurt decisions that the university decisions uh feel they get lumped into the same category of effort sort of Bal gray sludge of oh here's another task on the [ __ ] to-do list for today all right next one this is one of mine the narcissist's bed post notice how many times a person uses the words me and I when speaking about a non-personal topic as a good gauge of how self-centered they are the narcissist can't resist injecting themselves into every story and example no matter how unrelated are tenuous because they can't imagine a story that doesn't have them at the center yeah this is a good one this is actually one that I wrote down because I was planning on adding this to a a future Mega thread um yeah I think it's a great hortic because I know that the word narcissist is probably overused um but I think it's overused for a reason and I think the reason is is that social media has kind of privileged this ey culture this me culture where people are trying to present themselves as a product almost uh you know it social media kind of encourages this particularly Instagram where you try to present the best self possible and I think that this has led to a kind of me culture I think um a lot of people now focus on trying to instead of just getting to know other people they try to present themselves get get other people to know them rather and they try to do this in a sense where you know they're obviously trying to present their best self and so they'll see things like a normal conversation as an opportunity to advertise themselves uh to I've seen this happen so much I mean this you know this happens on social media on it happens on X or Twitter it happens on substack and I suppose it happens on probably other ones as well where you'll you'll talk about something and then the replies will get filled with people talking about how it applies to them and how you know how they manage to use it to better themselves whatever you know so it would be something like um you know you you you'll basically present some kind of uh horis and then they'll basically say something about how they used it in their life and I suppose it's natural for people to do that to to relate how it you know how it applies to their life but a lot of the time it's not just that a lot of the time it's actually advertising people are trying to appear clever they're trying to appear um sort of charismatic and I think you can actually gauge the degree to which somebody is doing this in a conversation by the number of times that they use the terms I and me and we or you know all those sorts of things because it just shows that they are either one or two things are happening either they don't really have much else to talk about apart from themselves or they're trying to draw the conversation to themselves in in either case this is a very cips solipsistic person um that somebody who is really focused on themselves either one way or another so it might not necessarily be narcissism uh it could be just natural um solipsism you know it could be just selfishness it's a degree of self-centeredness right but there's it's so interesting man like thinking about what people actually want in conversations and I always thought especially coming from a nlife background that the best people in the room were the ones with the most impressive stories with the ones who there were the ones that seemed the most cool or charismatic or outgoing or whatever it might be there's that famous example was it Winston Churchill's wife who met the two presidential candidates and she said that when she sat down with one of them she left the the dinner feeling like he was the smartest person in the world and when she sat down with the other one she left the dinner feeling like she was the smartest person in the world yeah I think I think the point yeah yeah Karen yeah I recognize that the yeah the point there being that it's so important and and what people actually want is to feel like they are interesting they don't really care about how interesting you are and it's bizarre that you can make yourself very interesting by doing nothing interesting by just pointing it toward them and uh yeah I I had this other idea which is kind of related to this inverse Charisma some people feel interesting some people make you feel interesting and what we think is that we want to be charismatic and I actually upon real closer inspection I'm not sure if I like people that are that charismatic because a lot of the time the Charisma kind of comes along with how many people do you know that have got actually well balanced integrated sort of holistic good vibe chill guy Charisma very few how many people do you love spending time around where you just leave and you go oh man that was so cool I got to talk about stuff I never talk about with anybody else and it was very generative You Know It new things came out of that conversation even if it was about both even if it was about UFC knockouts or whatever it was it was it was generative for both of us and I was made to feel like my opinions were valued and I feel like I asked them interesting questions at no point in that exchange did anybody really use Charisma so yeah that sort of inverse Charisma idea I think is a a good hack especially if you think that ah man like I'm not that outgoing I'm not that gregarious I don't do the funny thing bro that doesn't matter if you can ask good questions and make the other person that you're with feel interesting I I I think that that's actually better than Charisma yeah I mean an argument could be made that that true Charisma is the ability to make other people feel charismatic uh so like yeah I think that's probably one kind of Charisma anyway I suppose there are probably different kinds but but that's definitely one kind of Charisma uh yeah so yeah it's enim eny enme yeah enme enme yeah the best propagandists convince people of a lie not by stating the LIE directly but by making statements that tacitly assume the lie as a premise a mistruth deduced in one's own mind is much harder to guard against than one that enters fully formed from elsewh why yeah so I think one of the biggest obstacles to propaganda is when people feel that they're being propagandized against you know when and so people put up their guard and one of the ways to let down that guard and to sneak past it is to make a point that doesn't seem like it's propaganda but which has propaganda as a sort of crucial part of it and I see this being done with politicians quite a lot uh you you'll see that they will um talk about certain issues that are import that they know are important to the people and what they do is they use that as a trojan horse by which to disseminate their propaganda so um you know so some people may uh feel that the economy is very important I mean most people would think that the economy is very important and so what a demagogue could do is that they would talk about the economy um but they could if they wanted to let's say if they were um let's say if they were a left-wing politician then what they could do is while they were talking about the economy they could talk about um Banks and the rigged system and you know like Bernie Sanders often does you um and how the problem is the banks you could sneak in a point about how uh the banks are not paying their fair share of taxes but he would use it but he would do it in such a way that he's not making the point about the banks he would have the bank Point as a sort of peripheral point because if it's as a peripheral point it's more effective because then people are they let their guard down they're like okay this guy's not trying to convince us that banks are evil he's just making a point about the banks and so this kind of indirect propaganda I think is a lot more powerful than him just straight out saying oh the banks are the evil they are not paying their fair share of taxes because if he just says that straight then people are automatically putting their garip they're like okay this guy's left with politician he's he's trying to convince us that it's all the bank's fault whereas if he does it as a peripheral point then it kind of sneaks into the mind while people are looking at something else yeah I wonder whether the sort of widespread conspiracism uh that has been pretty rampant over the last few years I think an awful lot of that you know this usage of they the sort of never defined sort of New World Order deep States the military industrial comp you know like pick your shadowy hooded goat head skull wearing figure of choice and those like a lot of that tacitly assumes some part of a much more tenuous uh presupposition about the world it just bakes it in as give well of course of course we know that the military industrial complex is x y and Zed but what we're talking about is how they started fires in Kawai or whatever um that that I see a lot and I I suppose that it's a little bit like out of sight out of mind another part of this is that who wants to be the person that seems so stupid as to question one of the premises when this is like starting to watch uh Game of Thrones season 5 and asking what's that Stark guy like what's he do and why is he there and it's like oh well I just assume that everybody else is on board with all of this because it's been baked in it's part of the law the mythology well I I'm not going to question that thing it's obviously part but what we're really talking about is fouchy or whatever yeah exactly yeah yeah there's a very um interesting point here I mean there's this uh so there were some experiments um the ash Conformity experiments in which um you're probably familiar with this is quite a famous experiment so basically the purpose of the experiment was to see the degree to which people conform to um information that is blatantly wrong and what they did is they had a group of participants most of these participants were stoes so they were working for the researchers and only some of these people were actually the test subjects and um what happened was basically they were asked to measure the length of like measure which of these two lines was was bigger and one of the lines was blatantly bigger than the other line and all of the Stooges basically said that the small smaller line was bigger than the big one and what this did is this actually caused many of the participants in the the study to agree with everybody else because they just didn't want to be the odd one out even though it was obvious which line was bigger they thought hang on a second maybe I'm the problem and so this is weird because it actually this is sort of like an inversion of The False Consensus Effect where they actually realize okay so it's me who's the problem even though they weren't the problem it was actually the external world that was a problem so it was in a version of that um and it was interesting I mean this was there was a gender difference here so um women were more likely to conform than men and this is this is a finding that's been replicated as well um so that was quite interesting but yeah I mean if something is seems obvious or if something is appears to be obvious to everybody then you don't want to look stupid by questioning it because then you know people are like how could you question something so obvious you know and so that's why this this enthinee tends to work a lot of the time is that if somebody's making a point and they assume a certain propaganda point is a premise of the point then it seems obvious it seems so obvious because if it wasn't obvious it wouldn't be the premise and so people feel that okay nobody else is questioning it so I better not question it stupid that's cool that makes that makes this make a lot more sense where's enther meme what's enther why is it called that uh so it's actually from Greek it's actually a Greek term um so enme I can't actually remember what the ene memes uh obviously we know what the the meme means um it's even this is even in I didn't even know that this is this is just straight up this isn't from like the annals of the of your weird mental models thing I've just triple clicked on it on Mac and it's come up in the English language an argument in which one premise is not explicitly stated mid-16th century via Latin from Greek Ena from enim consider from n within and thumos mind within the mind consider interesting yeah that's another one yeah so I wasn't 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 uh 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 all of these ancient Greek rhetorical forms and so it's it's why it's a good idea I mean I should probably do a mega threat about these rhetorical forms because they would probably help people uh a lot I think against I I was listening today while I was hooked up to an IV to the dwares podcast episode he did with Dominic Cummings have you heard this I haven't know dude it's [ __ ] fire I got dwares to intro 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 that 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 [ __ ] PR this press it's always giving speeches dealing with with speech writers how are we positioning what's the Optics who are we going to speak to today you know kiss the baby on the forehead go to the the gala dinner um and they don't actually see their job as making change they see their job as communicating change and um 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 at what's going on I mean that's another type of enem I suppose where you 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 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 um I think it was around 2006 I think yeah so you know like nearly 20 years nearly two decades of conservative government 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 sideswiped all right next one 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 yeah so you know I originally was unsure whether the media used to be less biased um but I I stumbled across this really great YouTube video by a guy called Ryan Chapman who actually analyzed whether the media used to be less biased uh or whether you know it was just a sort of cherry uh Cherry sort of cherry picking Rose tinted glasses sort of thing but like um 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 uh because nobody else could provide the news and so they didn't have to be uh partisan as partisan as they are now they actually could afford to just tell the news because the news was actually a valuable thing back then but that changed with the internet uh 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 vicinity um and this obviously took a lot of the wind out of the sales of the media uh 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 uh confirming what people wanted to believe and 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 19 early 1990s 1980s you see that it's actually a lot more factual and there's even the opinion pieces tend to be a lot more F factual in their sort of presentation um whereas now even not just the opinion columns but also the actual news itself is it 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 journalists and commentators one thing that they're very skilled at is again rhetoric and so they use their rhetorical skills to essentially tell stories um you know very powerful and interesting stories construct narratives with Persona yeah and it's Al it's almost like a kind of TV serial I mean we saw this a lot during the the Trump years um 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 a TV serial in which um 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 it might have where May well may have well just said um you know tune in next week to see what you know Donald Trump is gonna do you know so it was like an ongoing narrative about like Donald Trump and what is he going to do next you know find out in next issue of the New York Times um and so you know it's it's why I I don't really read the the to 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 um I think that pretty much everybody hates the Press you know and I think that yeah they are they are of course they're biased every you know every every human being is biased and yes I think you know if you look if you do read the the New York Times for news then God help you but I think it's valuable anyway because it it allows you to see what they're doing it allows you to see what they're trying to convince people of and that's why I do still read the New York Times and look I don't want to be completely unfair to the New York Times it still does break important stories and it does still um it does still matter it's still an important voice you know it's very easy to just dismiss it and just say oh they're all just biased you know and they're just trying to uh you know convince you of things that are not true I don't think that's that's the case I think there are some good journalists working at your time so I don't want to I don't want to demean it too much but I think yeah we need to be careful when we um we need to ask ourselves what they're trying to convince us of I think the sort of narrative element and this um 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 uh they don't need to actually understand the first principles or the foundations of what's going on it's an easy story between good and bad between fair and unfair between plight and Justice and uh 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 um going head-to-head with essentially the Olympics of Brazilian jiu-jitsu and I mentioned to him I was like look dude I don't the sport of BJJ is kind of confusing if you don't 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 I 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 uh much of the time I want to talk about ideas and like your um decision-making heuristic a conversational heris 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 ah I'm creating this sort of personified narrative thing and I'm like look dude the Trump versus Biden is just or 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 it's reality TV for the substack generation and you're you're trying to you're you're still doing the same thing don't yeah maybe the ideas are a little bit more High futing maybe the people that are involved are a little bit smarter or intellectual or academic or something but the the fundamental Foundation of this is gossip you're gossiping about people and that's that idea of of of Craig and also sort of what's going on here with this post journalism idea um it brings news stories into a realm everybody can understand which is the most fundamental human 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 sort of press stories are constructed like they actually often use a lot of the same uh devices as actual literature so a lot of these you know these news stories they will actually have fictional tropes they'll have twists they'll have uh Poetic Justice they'll have Irony like dramatic irony um and all of this stuff you know uh and so it's it shows that the writers are are not telling you the facts but 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 unconsciously projecting this onto the world when they report but it does seem that you know a lot of the time if if a news story does have some of these literary devices you know where you have like a dramatic uh reversal of events and you know then there's a happy ending or something you're not you're not reading the news you're reading a story um 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 non-fiction great non-fiction we're both uh big fans of Morgan howel as a good example yeah right Morgan howel non-fiction writer read one of his books it's a story book it's a it's a 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 but 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 yeah it's it's one of the kinds of paradoxes which is that you can't really uh you won't get read if you just tell the truth like you have to dress it up in a story uh and so you have to kind of the only way you're going to actually be able to tell the truth is by making it a little bit fake you know um and so you know got to ham it up a little bit yeah yeah and I I'll confess I have to do this when I publish substack articles I try to be as honest as I can I don't I don't deliberately lie but I know that for instance with 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 readers and so um it's it's sort of unfortunate necessity but I think it's possible to tell the truth um in 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 is to draw attention to the fact that you're telling a story 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 so it's like a kind of it's like a beautiful packaging that you tell them to rip off you know um and and then they can actually get to the actual meat of what you're trying to say yeah I you know For Better or Worse There are rules to the game of garnering attention online and uh 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 were permanently asking ourselves the question does the is 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 and you know you can go too far down one angle which is if you split test any website and if you end up with porn uh 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 okay well I like 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 was fiction lag AKA experience taking when people are captivated by a work of fiction they unconsciously adopt the traits of their favorite characters we 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 uh quite interesting this is from so there's basically experiments actually which kind of show that this is the case uh where what they did is they basically um got people to uh sort of consume various forms of fiction um and in one of the uh forms there was basically I think there was a political figure who was a really endearing figure and they were like a they were basically like an activist and this character was I think they were might have been a suff or something but they basically campaigned for some kind of voting rights and they you know wanted to change the world or whatever and um the people that were had consumed this fiction they then became more likely to vote afterwards uh within the the I think what happened was that there was an election a few days afterwards and the the ones that have had 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 another in another example um that a group of people uh they browsed fiction featuring a a person of an ethnic minority and they were very endearing sympathetic character and once this person uh was identified with the people that had identified with this character became more sort of open and more sort of sympathetic towards people of that ethnicity so you know these 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 if if they attempted and um you know when I was young for in you know like I um I I got attached to certain characters you know and I would sort of start acting like them in a way and used them as a model you know used them as a model like for instance uh one of one of my favorite characters when I was young was um was Michael Corone in The Godfather and and I imagine I could imagine you as an Italian mobster well I mean you know that's that's basically what I tried to do but it was more when I was drunk weirdly enough I noticed it more when I was drunk it wasn't it wasn't so much when I was sober it was when I was drunk I found myself so sort of acting and saying 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 too many but this is this there's three really that are that are very very interesting here that I think Link Link together so post journalism um looking at using tribalism creating a sort of US versus them mentality they're utilizing narrative to drag people together you've got fiction lag this experience taking thing um very rarely we exposed to the inner workings of anybody else's mind with the level of resolution that you get when reading a 500 or thousand page book uh anyone that's read The Name of the Wind by Patrick rothus you know you become unbelievably familiar it's like pedestrian slow for chapters and chapters and chapters you learn about this guy's walk to the bar that he plays his looa 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 you if it's a well-written character you start to have this sort of sense of affinity with them and you think well he has done well by Design especially outright fiction not just uh like new news masquerading or fiction masquerading as news should I say um and then this is showing up sorry yeah do you want to finish what you're saying yeah just that it it relates to compassion fade you know which is that sorry sor one one 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 we 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 you know 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 the sort of reason why we enjoy films and literature and fiction generally um is because it presents us with certain character archetypes and then it 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 because we are we are kind of mimetic beings you know we we 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 we sort of identify with certain characters that have certain similarities to us but are different enough that they're interesting and we we it's like an experiment we see what will this set of traits um do in this scenario and and how will that what will be the consequences of that and so it allows us to essentially um see how how certain types of people will perform and split testing split testing Solutions but the I guess the problem is especially in again in outright fiction or even in news masquerading fiction masquerading as news that the outcomes aren't true this isn't how the behavior of this protagonist yeah yeah the behavior of this protagonist isn't that and what's maybe even more sort of Nefarious and and manipulative is assuming that this is fact that this is in the New Yorker or the New York Post or the 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 but it doesn't so if you then begin to model your behavior of 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 um 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 to stories where you know we can even we can know from the outset you know like we'll see the the opening credits and we'll see you know directed by produced by obviously we're watching a movie but then as soon as the film begins and as soon as the drama begins we forget all of that and we're completely sucked in to this F World why do people cry why do people cry at movies why do they get sad when they read books because they're invested that're 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 uh 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 guard up whenever we're presented with them because we're just we're naturally I think it's probably a spandrel it's probably an evolutionary spandrel so it's it's it's a byproduct of evolution so 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 you know when 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's the written written words been around for like 12,000 years something like that probably yeah about 10,000 I'd say probably yeah yeah and um but it's but the written word has only been um it's only been common place for about 500 years you know it's only been sort of like a something that a lot of people know because in the past it was an extremely esoteric thing that was confined usually to priesthood um and you know only in the past 500 years I mean with the printing press I suppose was that's the only time when writing and and that kind of stuff because we had the oral tradition before that where stories were completely just told through um around a campfire or whatever you know just and then 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 but yeah I mean um I think that part of Mythology is is to give us moral lessons about who we should be and what the consequences of that are if you look at Greek mythology in fact if you look at any mythology it tends to deal with this concept of sort of um 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 um and I think that that's the same thing that we're seeing in movies today where instead 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 we we sort of because we're so used to watching other people and learning from other people as I said we're mtic beings and so we get fooled into thinking that that's that these fictional words are real in that sense you know we think that this is the real consequences of being this way if you're arrogant you know like Icarus and you fly too close to the Sun then your your your wings will melt and you you know fall to Earth sort of thing yeah 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 yeah 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 exaggerated 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 so fiction La can actually be a bad thing in that sense it's better to actually have a low a smaller than life personality in a sense not to be too much of anything but to have moderation in 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 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 you spend your whole day on social media crying about all the suffering in the world and so that every single good attribute that a person can possess it's possible for them to have too much of it and the original the original golden mean is uh Aristotle right neither a vice of excess nor a vice of scarcity yeah yeah that's true yeah and I think it's a it's a very powerful idea because it's very very easy to just get one trait or a couple of traits and just to run with it and try and maximize it you know we live in a world where everybody's trying to Max things now you know you've got like looks maxing and health maxing and all this different maxing thing you know there there's a culture of maxing and I think that really we should focus Less on maxing and more on moderating I think that's more important because you know even Health maxing is is I don't think a very healthy thing ironically enough because if you spend all of your energy on trying to be super healthy uh and I I think of Brian Johnson here I actually respect Brian Johnson I think he's doing a great thing he's you know he's obviously a guinea pig he's he's a self-confessed guinea pig who's trying out these new things um so I can 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 and you know like he has like I think a two hour skin routine um every morning you know and I've seen his his daily routine where he just spends like you know five hours just going through the rounds and doing all this stuff and I'm just wondering to myself like you know he's he's obviously trying to live long enough you know 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 and again you know I'm not going to knock him because I think he's he's fantastic I think he's 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 uh he's he's a sweetie man he's in town uh this week actually he's in Austin this week so I've got a nut pudding dinner uh with him I think tomorrow or Thursday and um he's he's a real Sweety I met him in Rowan 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 um 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 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 know you saw all of the army and what where were they moving and what was going on but it wouldn't do to have an Army full of Scouts you don't need that and and you 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 uh value set the same thing goes you know in many ways for Alex hosi like hosi 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 and let me know what you've come up with that'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 we spoke last time about telic and exoic um persuits and for them something which for many other people would be exoic for them is telic and I think that just realizing okay so what gives me pleasure well 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 cuz that might be for Brian or is really locking yourself in a large cupo with no no windows wearing and no strip pumping yourself full of nicotine and writing for 6 hours from 600 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 the golden mean and I remember where I was when I first heard it I was driving again through Newcastle on the way to the gym and uh it made me think about dieting so throughout a lot of my 20s as a gym bro I would you know hard cut for a bether this summer and I'm going to 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 pal 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 if you let me have two I'm going to 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 you know 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 and 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 um toggle this a little bit is to try and periodize so 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 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 at sort of your foot half pressed to the floor which is really really difficult to do yeah I think um 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 um you know we we all have our obsessions everybody's obsessed about something and this is why I think planning is is very important to um you know like I for instance when I do research for instance when I'm when I'm writing I I'm 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 take just so long to do it but what I've done is I've decided to uh because I know this about myself I create cut off points so I will say you know I'm I'm gonna go online and I'm gonna find one thing out right just this one thing and once I found it out I'm going to cut the internet that'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 are like 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 and 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 uh it's a good way to moderate going back to sort of your original example these are um 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 uh Drive is is too much those as values that we imbue in ourselves much more difficult how are we tolerating that what what does it mean to have too much compassion yeah well I mean with me personally I I think stoicism is actually a pretty good system and we probably talk about stoicism a lot um I think we've spoken about it before but like and you you've probably talked about it with many other people on the show but stoicism I think is 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 so 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 these people although yeah I have the basic the Baseline compassion that any human being has I think it's awful but um 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 it's not going to make their lives it's not going to you know it's not going to make their lives better it's not going to make my life better and so I have that cuto off 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 over my emotions but I I 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 irking you whether it's you know this news of a massacre or whether it's somebody annoying you online or you know whatever it is you need to create the distance between yourself and that thing and the thing is there's no sing answer because obviously there's a diff there's a huge difference between limiting your compassion limiting your anger limiting uh 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 as stoicism like it it just allows me to um that that neat delineation between what you can control what you can't control and also creating the distance between stimulus and response I think that's also extremely important thing I find that if you just slow down in the ways that you respond to things slow down in your reactions um it actually helps a great deal because I think it was senica 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 um you can just not think about sex I mean you can you don't have to think about sex and you can create that pause and just focus on something else if some If a troll is angering 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 they've 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 the tilting it wind windmills thing you had from before well this is this is super similar to tazwell Razer emotion causes bias but it also causes motivation as such when we're 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 and this is probably a theme in a lot of my ideas is this idea that the the thoughts that enter your head are essentially a decision that you make and you have the power to not think about certain things you can choose to see things in a different way and what I do is I like to look at my emotions not as uh Masters that I have to obey but as advisers because really what are emotions emotions are alarm systems they're they're things that exist to alert you to something so for example anger exists to alert you that a um a line has crossed has been crossed uh you know some kind of uh moral line ethical line has been crossed and somebody has violated something that you hold dear that's what anger is um but the thing is is that anger is somewhat obsolete as a it's an obsolete Instinct in a sense because it existed really because um this was prior to their being a legal system prior to their being a police force and there needed to be a way to police tribes and the way that we policed it was through anger so if somebody were to cross a line if somebody were to um 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 um so anger was like a kind of a police force in a sense but 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 Ang angry as much because we get the the dispassionate 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 use to anger but 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 could do it with um sadness you could do it with um with anything I 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 even Evolution has programmed rather than it's something that you must obey um and so I think that's that's a good way to create that that that pause that distance between stimulus and response taleb'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 bation about I was thinking as you were 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 you 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 um 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 uh of scarcity all right next one package 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 prun 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 um and yeah I mean it's this is also I think uh it explains a lot about the current political landscape um so again right this goes down to this idea that time is limited uh energy is limited and this cognitive horsepower is finite and so people have to take shortcuts in their their beliefs and one of the ways in which they take shortcuts is they instead of analyzing every belief that they have and trying to make a decision on whether they they're pro proun control or anti-gun control whether they're pro life or pro-choice or you know whether they're sort of U proax antitax 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 um anxiety they instead decide to just adopt packages just whole packages of beliefs like a ready-made oven ready uh 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 they you go you know and there's no real effort required so you know that's the one thing but it also comes with another another Advantage which is that it also gives people tribal belonging so if you have the same package as as everybody else it makes you feel like you belong to that group and you feel a kinship with with other people who have the same package as you and so it allows people to form identity groups around these packages and so these two advantages the fact that it it's much less costly to have a package belief than to have an individually analyzed belief system um 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 uh if you know their beliefs about gun control you'll be very likely to predict their beliefs about healthc care uh about abortion about economics about immigration um all of these things which are not really related I mean some of them are Loosely related but a lot of them are not um for instance you know right-wingers tend to be against immigration and yet right- wiers are also Pro Freedom so you know there's a contradiction there and also you know uh 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 um and 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 uh remembered insights I think it maybe even the first ever episode that me and you did was that uh an absurd ideological belief is as much a show of fty 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 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 appear 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 gwind is going to say here because you know he was with us on that one point but on the other one he he really wasn't I'm a little bit I'm a bit unsure about that guy 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 uh sator bespoke in your ideology and instead just put the onesie on zip it up and you know we know where you start you don't need to worry about ginda he's a good guy we've got him he's don't worry he's locked in he's always there always with us always sort of toes the line and uh yeah just the pressures the pressures are so huge dude to do this especially in a atomized world where everybody wears their op the opinion pageant where everyone wears their opinions on their sleeve it is so compelling for people to do that and um I think what one other element is I had a as a bunch of heuristics to work out whether or not your favorite content creator uh 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 uh person to follow because I don't always know what his take's going to be something occur he he can quite happily be uh like Pro vaccine but anti-lockdown he can be anti-woke but anti-trump he can you know it's a odd sort of ugly shape that his belief structure has it's not a smooth round ball and 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 um not necessarily being a reliable Ally they pay such a a high price for holding those non-typical constellation of beliefs you have to assume that they believe they at least 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 the gun people or the abortion people or whatever uh but they don't so yeah that's the the last time that someone you follow surprised you as a good heuristic yeah I mean in your recent um conversation with Sam Harris actually you Ed This brilliant term I'll get on to that a moment but like um 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 are too and um use this term called ideological spit roasting it's a brilliant a brilliant term it just perfectly describes what's happening but like um yeah I mean anybody who is being ideologically spit roasted it shows that they are not uh they're paying a heavy cost for their for their beliefs and when somebody's paying a heavy cost for their beliefs this is a 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 what you going to gain from that and so when you see people who are attacked by both the left and the right U this is usually a sign that you're dealing with someone who's sincere unless they've unless they've done something completely egregious you know um but you know if they're being canceled by the left the right for something that's not illegal uh and it's just something that they've said or some you know some opinion that they hold this 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 flack you're going to get from the left and from the right um you know so this is sort of one thing that I look out for in people I see it with uh Sam Harris you see it with Clare Layman the editor of qu the she she's also somebody who's pissed off the left and the right Bill Bill Mah Scott Galloway yeah yeah and and also I suppose you and I also to a certain extent you know we'll in if you look at our reply section on Twitter you'll usually see both left Wingers and right- Wingers who are angry with not very compliment all the time yeah all right next one rothbard's law if a talent comes naturally to someone they assume it's nothing special and instead try to improve at what seems difficult to them as a result people often specialize in things they're bad at yeah so this is an interesting one I mean it's it's one that's hard to really experimentally verify right because obviously this is something that really is a very gradual and a longterm thing that happens in people's lives um 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 um I 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 you know I was looking at things from my Baseline you know so this there's 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 con 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 was good at writing um I'm still not even sure if I am but a lot of people seem to think so so you know I'll go with it I'll go with it you know um but like this was something that for 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 U because I just didn't have any concept of my own talents I didn't know what I was going at I didn't know I was I was a words guy I thought I was a numbers Guy and um you know and I think this is true of 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 and 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 you know I grew up in in a workingclass neighborhood and nobody was really interested in Reading anything I wrote um and so you know I didn't realize I was I was a writer until I was an adult um if I had known earlier sooner I probably would have dled 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 uh 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 we all we 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 have sincere and F friends who are interested in you and in interested in bearing you yeah Ryan long the Canadian comedian that lives in New York sent me that rothbard's 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 he's very much sort of a blind spot poker uh and he said he texted me and he was like dude I uh 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 outcoming future and if something comes easily to us we assume that it can't be of great value on the other side uh I suppose there's certain Pursuits in which um you know if you play sport the outcome is very quantifiable it's a sort of an obvious metric but really I was thinking as you were talking about imagine a 7 foot7 guy that was somehow born on a desert island with no other humans around him is he tall well what does that mean what 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 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 back 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 um begin to cultivate the ability to work hard at something the working hard at something be can actually shortcut the outcomes you 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 he's like yeah dude but you get .2 for every hour that you spend on that and you get 10,000 and2 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 that yeah I think probably a good way to avoid rothbard's law is to focus on what interests you because if you if something interests you and even if it obsesses you that's even better but if 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 anybody else or than 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 going to do it regardless and so I think you know if you're young and you want to 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 uh instance in which it's actually best to disregard the golden mean and to go full in on this one Obsession because then that's how Geniuses are born is 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 yeah so I noticed this like when I was reading autobiographies and of successful people and um 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 nah 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 you know they tend to sort of 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 you know you only really question things when things don't go your way you know I mean obviously when you 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 over 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 is 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 it's going to create regret in their heart and that's going to that sour note is going to provoke them into thinking over and over turning over into their in their minds what went wrong they'll be having sleepless nights about you know oh my God how could this go wrong and they will interrogate themselves about it and so they will often have a much better understanding of why they failed than the successful person would uh about why they were successful um I think this is a general it's not true in all cases but I think it's a good general rule to hold I think um it's it's it's easier also another thing is it's easier to work out why something failed than why it succeeded because usually also more it's more important I think it's more important I think that uh avoiding pitfalls is more important than Expediting success you know far more people have unforced errors and fail out of something than have insufficient success you know like like efficient 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 in 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 [ __ ] off uh so much of it is 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 this sort of goes to the idea of like um instead of trying to be right try to be less wrong basically so it's it's it's easier to do that because you can 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 you know that's really that's really the best you can do you know avoid the mistakes and just be persistent those two things and um so I think you know if you if you just set yourself up to try and find the secret to success you're going to find that it's actually very benan it's very mundane there's not actually much you can do other than basic things to be successful you just got to have that position and don't [ __ ] up yeah basically and um so the the real sort of wisdom is to be had in finding the mistakes to avoid that's where the real sort of juices and that 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 one of my favorite questions that I ask guests on the show is what do most people get wrong about X because the question of how do people do why better is very very open and kind of fluffy and you just usually elicits a much more boring answer but the question what do most people get wrong about protein consumption what do most people get wrong when it comes to understanding stoicism that it makes everyone's eyes light up because I go oh wow like I get the opportunity to really call out all of these [ __ ] errors that people keep on making and I think that we all know deep down that avoiding pitfalls is way more important than like just never multiply by Zer if you can keep not multiplying by zero you will end up with a large number eventually but you know 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 you macros and everything's organic and one day you decide to drive your car without a seat Bel on and you're in a car accident and now you're very dead you know it was all of these big numbers big number big number times big number times big number times zero game over yeah yeah it only takes one critical mistake for everything to go to [ __ ] basically you know yeah so you know you know you could do everything else really really well but if there's one thing that you just get wrong it could completely upend everything else and so for that reason yeah I mean make like 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 not 1% of what's happened in the world but maybe 80% of how you think the world works that's from Morgan housel 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 um a very interesting point because it kind of fits in a little bit with The False Consensus 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 um and that's how that's our 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 you know life has been you know around on this Earth for about a billion years right and you know we are tiny sliver of that you know we we're we're so tiny like our lifetimes that we're almost like a sheet of paper like you know sideways just just trying to edgeways seeing it there we're as Vladimir naov said we're a brief crack of Light Between Two eternities Of Darkness that's our life right and there's a massive amount of life and just existence that we have no concept of because we live in this tiny tiny sliver of time and not just time but also space you know we we only occupy just a DOT on a DOT um you know so we have like you know this kind of we have we we occupy so little time and space in the grand scheme of things that our our world is is always going to be skewed and completely uh it's not going to be a representative sample in other words of what's actually the case so Morgan how uses the example of the economy you know so the uh Boomers would have seen a flat would have seen 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 you know it's just not it's not even a fraction of a representative sample and then you look at say Generation X and for them uh the the curve the the graph goes up so the stocks shot up uh and there was a big boom in the 1980s you know um and so the economy behaved completely differently and so for them that was what the economy does it's just the natural state of things they assume that's what nature was and we saw a lot of like Resurgence of the the ideas of iron Rand um you know reaganism thatcherism in the 1980s because of this idea that that's what stocks do stocks just go up you know um just free market free market free market uh but then if you go back in time and you go to the times of like Roosevelt you know Roosevelt was a very different economy and so it was more protectionist and more sort of uh regulation you know and and all that sort of stuff so our political views are often based on our life experiences they're based on how the economy behaves when we're alive um how uh geopolitics uh 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 only been tracking the economy for you know 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 you know civilization is well humans have have been around for about 300,000 years they're projected to be around for a few million maybe even a few billion years um so that's a very very long time scale so we're really we're we're just at the beginning and 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 um beyond your your space you know 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 it's a quote from from CS Lewis so um it goes a man who has lived in many places is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his village The 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 you know it gives you a broader view if you only read content uh if you only consume content from your own time period and in and from your own country or from your own civilization you're going to be sort of you're GNA have this blind spot because you're gonna you're G to only be using this base rate so again it's like the cons False Consensus Effect the only way to get escape 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 I watch a lot of news a lot of Chinese news stations I watch Russian news stations I watch Indian news stations um instead of the same old you know CNN MSNBC Fox News instead of all that which I'm I'm 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 is so if I watch Indian news I'm not really familiar with Indian news very much I get a completely new perspective because this is from another civilization and it's the that they have that are baked in how 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 casts out 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 you know we we live in a society that worships diversity you know diversity Equity inclusion you know like it's everywhere um and it's kind of like weird because there's this sort of 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 it doesn't help teams and it doesn't hinder teams it's just a completely it's pretty much a completely independent variable have you got any idea how they judged that sort of a thing yeah so there was experiments where they actually had um they had diverse teams and they tested them against teams that were homogeneous and they found that there was no great Improvement in the teams that were diverse I mean I think it was a marginal Improvement they they basically described it as significant but not substantial so that means it wasn't null but it wasn't actually the effect size wasn't really anything to write home about and um if you look at like other studies you'll find some studies which have shown that there is a small like a moderate um Improvement in diverse teams over non- diverse teams but then you'll also find other studies which show that there is actually a that being diverse actually hinders a team so this Metro analysis found that overall there's not really any real relation and um it's interesting because we 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 again this is interesting because this goes back to what we were just talking about so these people have you know 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 um uh 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 they would pull it together to create this sort of super expertise that you know is greater than the sum of its parts but 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 teamwork is and so this is a bit of a problem because it means that if you have diverse teams then the the the sort of advantages of diversity are lost in 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 they only you know they don't agree with it because they don't it's alien to them and so it ends up being the case that people end up making consensuses 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 hinder the team in particular but it doesn't help the team either and so so it's it's interesting because it it's a kind of it's a spanner in the works of the whole you know diversity makes teams better um sort of narrative which is everywhere literally everywhere moment I think I think it's the sort of thing that off the top of your head it sounds like it would work well you know there's different perspectives and and people are looking at problems from alternate points of view and someone is coming in with a A different kind of experience and this different experience May um 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 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 and it allows you to grow in directions that you ordinarily wouldn't be able to grow because you you have access to information that's outside of your experience um so in that sense you know diversity can be good and maybe in some working context it can be good obviously you know if you are working in translation for instance um diversity is going to be excellent because then you know you have more languages to draw on and all that kind of stuff and you know so there are some instances which 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 and 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 and their desire to sort of conform uh their uncertainty about standing out this desire to have a a reliable Ally the 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 too you'll have social hierarchies and strata within that as well which triage who's the most important and yeah I it is very interesting I'm seeing much more um push now against diversity is 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 uh you it's becoming more of a problem in the US but it's mostly abstract for people they 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 um 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 um entire sort of nationalities obviously it's related to a big immigration push that's happening at the moment um but 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 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 uh I've got a new article coming out soon which is going to be quite a memorable one I hope um so the best place to keep track of me is at my blog on substack which is gender. blog um I'm also active on x or Twitter whichever you prefer and uh I I think last time I was on here I said I was going to set up a YouTube channel uh 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 uh what was that idea don't focus on the stuff that you're not necessarily good at [ __ ] rothbard's law don't rothbard's law yourself you know stick 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 sub Stacks that I pay for and uh I can't wait to see what you do next look forward to bringing you on again soon always a pleasure Chris thank you if you enjoyed that episode you will love a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last couple of months and it's available right here go on give them a watch