Shocking Psychology Lessons To Understand People Better - Gurwinder Bhogal

you've become the intellectual Nick ocado avocado you are obese obese with interesting ideas so we're going to go through as many as we can get through today my first one one of my favorites idiocy saturation online people who don't think before they post are able to post more often than people who do as a result the average social media post is stupider than the average social media user worth remembering whenever Twitter dumbassery drives you to despair yeah so by Twitter domassery what I mean is if you just go onto Twitter and unfiltered and you're not sort of you don't have a curated feed and you just look at the posts it makes you want to blow your brains out just because there's just so much garbage it's just an avalanche of garbage um and it kind of like when I first went on to Twitter I got a really low opinion of humanity because I was fooled into believing that this was reflective of what humans actually think um but it actually took me a bit of time to realize that the stuff that you see on social media is overwhelmingly cons it consists of stuff that people have posted hastily without thought because the people who really think about what they're posting they take a lot longer to post and so naturally it's going to be filled with stuff like um oh I'm tired LOL you know I'm gonna go to bed and I'll and stuff like meaningless nonsense like that is going to be the stuff that makes the majority of social media posts and I think this is why it's so important to curate your feed um because I always say that a social media feed is the worst possible source of information you can have but a well-curated social media feed is amongst the very best sources of information you can have it makes such a difference it's the difference between hell and heaven and um a large part of that really consists of filtering out people who don't think before they post people who just give in to their worst impulses and just follow their whims rather than actually following their logic and their rationality what was that Insight you had around how famous people will tweet some half-baked idea whilst they're sat on the toilet that will then be studied by the entire world for the next three weeks yeah I mean um I mean this was kind of like a guess but I think that this is true I suspect it's true I think we kind of what's happened is that people that have a tendency to over interpret information online so they'll read into information a lot more than was intended and I mean I call this the politicization of Babel basically I think that's what it what it actually is is a lot of people don't look because they don't think before they post they're just making a comment about something that just off the top of their head it's just something that's come very sort of you know quickly to their mind and it's something that they just vomit out they don't really think about it and then what happens is you get people on the other side of the world who will see that and they will assume that this is a hill that the person's willing to die on something that they've spent their entire life thinking about and they will scrutinize it and dissect it and evaluate it and write essays on it and I've seen this happen a lot you know with I mean nowadays you get whole articles whole news articles written about one tweak you know some if some famous person like Elon Musk if he just just you know farts out a tweet uh then you'll get like a BBC journalist who will basically just lock onto that tweet and then they'll just write a whole piece about it and they'll just completely scrutinize it as though they could sort of give a psychological profile based on this one tweet you know and I think that's very dangerous because most people don't think very much before they tweet it's just a whim it's like when you go and meet somebody and you have a cocktail party and then they just start just talking they're not they're not really thinking they're just trying to make conversation um so they'll just say stuff that they don't even mean half the time and I think this is something that people need to realize is that when people say things it doesn't necessarily mean that they mean what they're saying sometimes people are just they're just sort of experimenting you know they're just kind of throwing out ideas out there just to see what people think of it and to be honest I do that as well I don't actually uh firmly believe a lot of the stuff that I tweet out I just tweet it out just to see how people react and you know then I can maybe sort of calibrate what I'm thinking based on that um so yeah we shouldn't take what people tweet out or what they post seriously online most of the time because they might feel differently five minutes after in fact I do that all the time you know something and then I'll just five minutes after I've tweeted it I've got a completely different opinion and I'm like actually what I just tweeted was a load of [ __ ] you know and um yeah so I think people need to to bear that in mind Scott Adams actually had a really good uh idea where he he calls it the 48-hour rule where he says that we should never judge what a person has posted until 48 hours have passed and we've given that person a chance to retract what they've said obviously this is not feasible it's not something that you could actually do in real life because you know you can't wait 48 hours after every opinion but I like the idea behind it because I think a lot of what people say is essentially it's kind of like just a Untamed frison of some Sensations they've had in them in their mind you know something that's just kind of triggered them to just say something um and they haven't really so they haven't domesticated it they haven't really you know tamed it so it's just a wild idea that's just kind of unwrapping in their head and they've just decided to just you know let it out of the cage the uh this is this is facilitated by the frictionlessness of social media you know previously if you wanted to use the Gutenberg printing press to actually get something down onto paper the you would make sure that you'd spent some time thinking about what you were going to get this one very very small slot that you had to be able to produce your incredibly important pamphlet or whatever you're talking about but you're right the the frictionlessness allows brain to mouth or brain to fingertips to be instantaneous this is something that I realized around the Jordan Peterson uh Sports Illustrated girl furore was it last year I think and yeah I love Jordan he's been a massive influence on me and he's very very kind to me but things like that people tried to dissect exactly what was going on in the inner recesses of Jordan's mind when he said sorry not beautiful and no amount of totalitarian overreach will convince me otherwise everything about that tweet and almost everything really that the older guys on Twitter are putting out can be understood if you remember that they're Boomers all that you need to do is just remember the fact that they're about right filter it through this isn't somebody who has a a particularly additionally sophisticated Twitter habit or or process that they go through before they construct a tweet you know our friends some of our friends who are way way less famous George Mack yourself you know these guys craft tweets over over weeks takes weeks and weeks to come up with these huge mega threads and George will show me his notes and he's building him up over time and all this sort of stuff I guarantee that Jordan took less than three minutes probably to type that tweet out and yet it's then going to be indicative of his pathologization let's get the psychiatrists in to work out oh is this something to do with his unrequited jungian archetype from the like no no no no like it's just he saw an image of it he saw an image of a girl on Sports Illustrated that he didn't like and he had a crack and maybe you know maybe he'd been gassy that day yeah maybe exactly maybe he'd had a [ __ ] night's sleep because of Builders next door like yeah the frictionlessness facilitates this and I think I think it's the tweets that people don't think about very much that tend to be the ones that people talk about most oh absolutely yeah because because if it's reasonable if you've actually spent a long time thinking about it then it's going to be reasonable and if it's reasonable it's not gonna outrage people it's not gonna uh make people sort of it's not going to stir up emotions in people because it's going to be the antithesis of that it's going to be something calm measured reasonable but if you are just firing off what's the first thought that instantly comes into your head then it's by definition not going to be reasonable it's going to be something that's impulsive and that's going to make other people impulsive and they're going to react to it in that same kind of language as it were the language of sort of the animal language of of human nature rather than the language of reason and so I think that's one of the dangerous things about social media is that it tends to favor ideas that people don't think very much about people that just sort of are a product of human whim rather than human reason there's a Associated idea you had Shaker's law those who announced their departure from an online discussion almost never actually leave yeah I mean I I've got no way of knowing whether this is true as a kind of general rule of law but I think um it's it's probably it's something I suspect is probably true because I personally haven't really sort of engaged in in arguments with people very much recently um but when I used to I used to spend a lot of time on on Twitter just arguing with people and I'd often get people who would just say oh I've had enough of this you know this this I'm it's not worth my time you know and all this stuff and then I would say something that would just bait them out again and then they'd come back and they'd be like so you know this happened so many times that I just thought yeah this has got to be real it needs to be a name yeah yeah absolutely and it does happen on on websites where it's where blocking is less of a thing so websites like Reddit you can block on Reddit but it's a lot more torturous a lot more harder to do um and so people are more vulnerable to that but I think on places like Twitter you just block people nowadays you know so it's not it's not as much of a thing now it's uh you know if you don't want to talk to somebody now you decide to block them or you can mute them one of the most interesting things that I see on the internet is people who do announce that they're going to one follow somebody as if that announcement of them are unfollowing them wasn't the first time that that person they were following had ever heard of them it's like I I wasn't even aware of your existence up until this moment but it's like saying goodbye on the way out of the door or like hello I don't know but there's another one as well Godwin's law to add on to this as an online discussion grows the probability of a comparison to Nazis our Hitler approaches 100 most people are quick to compare things to Nazi Germany because it's the only history they know yeah so I think this is an instance of the availability heuristic so um one of the ideas that comes most sort of freshest to mind in people's minds when they think of history is is Hitler and the Nazis because it's one thing that we constantly taught at school it's it's the one thing that is is basically because it's it's got all the sort of it's got all the elements of a narrative sort of uh box office smash you know it's a story of good against evil uh to an extent I mean if you don't include styling on the Allies you know um and it's basically about kind of you know um people who wanted freedom from tyranny against essentially a tyrant and the good guys weren't in the end you know obviously this is a simplification but this is the general sort of way it's portrayed and um and it's it's just a Timeless classic it's it's something that you'd find in a movie and so because it's so cinematic and because of all the stuff involved I mean it's got so many crazy stories in there you know and the story of the Enigma machine we've got Oppenheimer now which is going to be a hit film and all these crazy stories within the sort of remit of World War II make it something that is very memorable and a lot of people will focus on that a lot of people who don't know anything about history know about World War II and they know about the Nazis and they never think they know they think they know about World War II do you not know that Nazi was actually socialist it was actually the part of the Socialist Party and then it just gets into a game of linguistic there should be a rule you need to come up with one uh which is almost all arguments online devolve into a game of lexical Brazilian Jiu Jitsu over time because almost all of it is just that's not the term that I mean precisely you're using that word in the wrong way what is the word woman in any case do you not know that Nazi meant socialist Nazis were far left not far right Stalin wasn't do you know what I mean absolutely yeah I mean there is actually a uh a law uh about this actually uh let me see if I can find it in my list of rules because I've forgotten the name of it but it's uh there's actually a uh let me just quickly go through them right so I can find it uh so I find it Lane's law so um every debate is ultimately a debate about the definition of words um so for instance you know there are many examples of this but one example would be gender for instance so if you're you know if there's an argument between a gender critical person and a transwise activist the debate will almost always end with them discussing what gender is um and if there's a debate about free will it will almost always end with them discussing what free will is and likewise socialism you know like socialism will mean a different thing to a leftist as it will mean to a right rightist and so it's called Lane's law and it's basically the the idea that every debate ultimately is a debate about the definition of words and I think that's actually accurate I don't think it's it's probably not like a universal law it's not it's not true in every single instance but I think it's a true enough law that it's a good rule of thumb agreed and that's why yeah I think in most debates it becomes like a contest between it's like one play one person's playing tennis and one person is playing baseball because they using different definitions for terms based on their tribe because every tribe has got its own definitions you know it has its own definitions of what certain words mean and so when people from two different tribes are arguing they're using their own tribe's definitions and that's why they'll never ever see eye to eye and that's why if I am going to debate somebody I don't really do it very often but if I am going to do it I'll always be sure to ensure that I'm we're actually on the same page in terms of definitions I think that's absolutely essential there's just no point in having any debate unless you are willing to agree on the definitions of words yup next one arrival fallacy we didn't evolve to be happy but to believe we'll be happy if we just accomplish the latest goal so we seldom taste true Joy but we often pick up its scent just enough to keep us in Pursuit Paradise is not a destination or a journey but a horizon yeah I think um so happiness we have to ask ourselves why did happiness evolve and obviously it didn't evolve for us to you know meet one goal and then be satisfied for the rest of our lives because if we did that we wouldn't live very long we would just fulfilled one goal and then we would die because we wouldn't have any motivation to do anything else so in a sense happiness is like a carrot constantly being dangled in front of your your head uh except it's tied to your head so every time you move forward the carrot moves forward so you're constantly reaching for the carrot but you can't quite get it and what this does is it keeps you moving forward under the impression that you're going to eventually get that carrot but you will never get the carrot because it's it's tied to your head um and this is I think is a good way of looking at happiness this is not to say that you can't ever be happy in your life you will be happy in your life but that happiness will never last you know you'll you'll be happy for instance if you save up to buy a nice car the day you get that car you're going to be happy you're going to be really happy and you take it out for a test drive and you impressive friends with it and you know you'll be you'll you'll feel good but within a couple of days you'll have gotten used to having that car and it's no longer going to bring you that same joy and then you're going to want to chase something else and this is the process that a lot of people go through in their lives where they're constantly chasing something new because the things that they have have not made them happy and um Naval ravican he had this great line where he said that desire is a contract that you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want and I think that's a good way of looking at it where you're basically choosing to be unhappy because you don't have this thing that you're looking to get uh and you're you basically tell yourself you write this contract with yourself where you'll only be happy if you can get that thing but the thing is it's an illusion because once you get it you're only going to be happy for a short period of time and I think ultimately what I found in my life is that the solution to this sort of quandary is that you're not going to be happy by accumulating possessions but by relinquishing desires so you have to learn to be happy with less learn to appreciate the little things in life and I found that since I've done this I've just been so much happier how do you link off desires just to be content like with what you have like this is a bit of a complex thing and I'm going to tell you a bit of a weird story but um the other day I was in the supermarket and I saw a tomato and I was absolutely Overjoyed by this tomato I just thought this tomorrow was absolutely amazing I picked it up and it was so plump and juicy and shiny and bright and I loved it I thought this is absolutely incredible and I was so happy that I'd seen this tomorrow and you know when I got home I ate this time and I was really really happy about it and the reason why that tomato made me really happy was because I've actually thought about the amount of work that it takes to make a beautiful tomato like that right this is like tomatoes originally were not as delicious as they are now they're originally not as beautiful as they are now this is a product of many many years many centuries of selective breeding of cultivation of people learning everything that they there is to learn about agriculture and then over many many years then passing this knowledge down to their their sons and daughters and then their sons and daughters learning even more and then passing that information down and all of this this selective breeding of the Tomato over many generations and the knowledge of Agriculture of how to create the perfect tomato and all of this was done in order to create this one tomorrow essentially um to create this beautiful thing that people want to eat and I when I think about the amount of effort that it takes to create something as beautiful as a nice tomato something that feels really good in the mouth something that has a lot of flavor it makes me appreciate that so much more and I think that a lot of the value in things comes from understanding just how lucky we are to have them and that's why I try to not to take these things for granted right I I will always try to look at how hard things are to get for instance I am constantly Amazed by the fact that I can eat food from all over the world right without even leaving my apartment right that is absolutely incredible if you were to go back in time to the 18th century and you were to tell people that you could do this in the future that you could just pick up a device and talk on this device and then within half an hour you could have food from anywhere on the planet delivered to your doorstep they would be blown away they would think this is you're living a life better than a king have you heard have you heard the story behind the first ever pineapple that was imported to the United Kingdom I'll send you the link afterward I watched a YouTube video about it absolutely fantastic so pineapples cost I think the equivalent of 4 000 pounds each in I want to say maybe late 1700s something like that and it was just a signal of opulence so opulent in fact that people would get statues of pineapples placed outside of their family estates this is the sort of house you're going into it's a house that eats four thousand pound fruit like that this is the kind of place and um yeah they're talking about they're talking about the the journey that this thing goes through and then as soon as the first pineapple is grown in the UK they're able to start growing them in the UK all of the pineapple monuments go down because it's a counter signal you did a great Thread about um Marcus Aurelius as well there's a quote from him that reminds me of what you're talking about here do not indulge in dreams of having what you have not but reckon up the chief of the blessings you do possess and then thankfully remember how you would crave for them if they were not yours gratitude for what you have can cure the endless desire for what you have not yeah absolutely and that's what I do is I think of my my life relative to say a medieval peasant and how lucky I am and you remind me a lot as a medieval peasant actually well I think a medieval peasant has a lot of wisdom about them I think that kind of Lifestyle appeals to me to be honest um but like uh you know they to them like the idea that of a person like you and I that are living the kind of you know we're talking to each other from across the world like you're in the states I'm in the UK and we're having an ordinary conversation as though we were sharing the same space you know this is Magic to a medieval peasant um the things that we do are absolutely mind-blowing to pretty much all of human history apart from to our generation because we're used to it because to us we're born into this world and so it doesn't seem that special is here's the crazy thing though if that peasant there's nothing special about that particular peasant himself it's simply about the time that he was in if you place that peasant into the modern world and he was able to pick up the language and do all of the things I bet within five years he would have forgotten the fact that he used to live in 1678 or something and you're like the I was imagining there in my mind what human existence would be like if our hedonic adaptation wasn't as powerful as it is we'd be [ __ ] because we wouldn't be able to keep up with the pay case that the world changes that there's a Morgan household Court as well which is phenomenal and he says the first rule of winning the game is to stop moving the goal posts he's talking about it in a uh money saving psychology of of investing perspective but it's so true when we're thinking about the arrival fallacy you know this belief um that what we're moving toward that we eventually we will be happy what is it the uh uh the that thing about the ideal that you're moving toward was in fact your death uh the not yet started life fallacy or something yeah um uh the uh something syndrome um I forgot what it's called now anyway I know yeah yeah it's a it's a rule that where people presume that they will be happy when I will be happy when I will be happy when and then eventually what you realize is the thing that you were putting off is your death Bill Perkins that wrote die with zeros got another amazing quote where he says um delayed gratification in the extreme results and no gratification and yes absolutely yeah you keep on pushing it off it's a case of finding a balance as with most things in life I think you know um we we are like in that quote that I the original quote I said that we are all we we often pick up the scent of Happiness um and I think that that's what we need to content ourselves with is the scent of happiness because we are like essentially happiness is a reward system that we get in order to motivate us all emotions are essentially motivations and if we didn't feel desire we wouldn't do anything like we would literally just sit there and rot and until we were dead because there would be no motivation to do anything so the desire there is actually a motivational system and that little taste of happiness that we get when we accomplish a goal that is our reward for accomplishing the goal so we can find happiness you know in in fulfilling basic goals but I think ultimately if you want to be happy then you can't make your happiness dependent on circumstances because if you do that then you'll never really often be happy you're very seldom be happy and so it's all about finding a state of mind in which you are happy regardless of what goes on in circumstances if you need a reason to be happy you'll seldom be happy yeah if you can't be happy with the coffee you won't be happy with a yacht that's another exactly absolutely but yeah it's um it's one of the hacks that I have found that I think is effective for this this comes from Tim Ferriss um our anticipation of things is often more enjoyable than the things themselves so what you can do is extend the enjoyment of The Thing by planning lots and lots of stuff out far ahead me and George Mack are going to anjuna deep open air at Red Rocks in Denver in November we've had this book for nine months so I've been listening to anjunadeep releases and albums and oh there's a new DJ's been released for this thing and I think definitely as you get older you get it seems I don't know much not juvenile but maybe you're just too busy or something you don't you don't excite yourself as much about the idea of future plans because you have so many things to do in between now and the plans to allow you to have the time to go and enjoy the plans so I think that definitely protracting that as much as possible it's one of the you know I've opened the broken the fourth wall about this a million times on the show and I'll continue to do it I hack all of the audiences uh like anticipation networks every single time that I release a big episode I have this [ __ ] awful protracted drawn out launch sequence who's it gonna be I I recorded it in LA it's a person who's friends with this person oh it's [ __ ] Sam Harris this is going to come out just after a Sam Harris episode so no one knows right now no one listening to the show knows that it's going to be Sam Harris then there'll be a teaser then there'll be an announcement about Sam then there'll be Clips then the episode will drop because it gets people excited and I would want that if I was a fan of the show and I was a fan of Sam Harris I would want to be like oh like Sam Harris is coming on I can anticipate it a little bit and I don't think that there's anything nefarious or manipulative about doing that I think it allows people to enjoy the experience of knowing that someone that they like is going to do a thing that they're going to enjoy for longer so speaking of speaking of your peasant thing I had a new one for you which I came up with this is a collaboration between me and Alex and the date site who is a great Twitter follow this is the alpha history fantasy modern men who are angry at a world they believe has rejected them mistakenly failed that they would have done better in medieval times they are somehow adamant that the chance of them being Genghis Khan is greater than the chance of them being Cannon for the peasant number one million 373 000 whose Favela was sacked and destroyed that's a brilliant one I love that one yeah absolutely um I was I was reading this uh this article yesterday about Bronze Age pervert Yeah I read it as well I read the same I read the same article yeah yeah it's uh it's quite funny because for your audience uh who might not know who he is so he's a sort of far right figure and when I say far right I actually mean genuinely far right not the kind of far right that you'll see on Wikipedia you know but actual far right like he's a he's a neo-reactionary so he's like this guy basically believes that a group of strong men should rule over everybody with absolute Authority um essentially and he's openly fascist and stuff so uh this guy's become quite popular sort of on the right and um particularly um among certain people in the Trump White House he was quite popular they used to pass out pass around his book um uh Brian's age mindset and uh he's his whole thing is basically about being strong it's about um you know working out and having a massive physique like his his avatar on on Twitter is like this Hench like jacked uh guy basically and he's all about like you know um cultivating physical strength and basically the strongest should should Rule and the weak should perish and all this and it's hilarious because his identity was actually um sort of revealed against his wishes and he's this guy called amariu who's like a I think a Romanian immigrant to the U.S and he's basically his actual appearance he's he's like some scorny little sort of pale kid like you know who's who's nothing like he was presenting himself out to be on Twitter and on sort of you know on his Caribbean Rhythms podcast because he was making out like he was this massive bodybuilder like Beefcake you know Monster basically like a barbarian that's what he was his whole thing is based around but in real life he's like this really wimpy looking like scrawny kid and like it's absolutely hilarious because I think that a lot of these people who claim that they want to live in these you know old sort of Genghis Khan style uh worlds where you know it's just all about brutality a lot of them wouldn't survive like uh you know even a couple of days they would be landed precisely on what Alex started having an argument about online so he came up with with half of this and then I fleshed it out and gave it the name um and he was having an argument with the at in sales co uh Twitter account which is super super like antagonistic and it like something really fascinating to observe absolutely fascinating to observe to be honest he's having this big argument with them and his point was hang on a second so you are unsuccessful in the competence dominance hierarchy and socio-sexually with uh socioeconomically in terms of being able to attract women sexually in 2023 and somehow the belief is that half a millennia ago in 1523 you would have done better that do you like a guy twice your size would have worn you to [ __ ] a girl with like there is there he would have he would have happily beheaded you he would have happily taken your what you know so I I do think that it's just an important redress to the balance that things were you know it was a purer time it was a better time don't don't get me wrong way I think that a lot of the people who claim to want to live in a sort of idyllic past are really yearning for their childhood I think another a lot of time because when they say that they want a simpler time a simpler world that is essentially their childhood that's a world where things were much simpler where you know they didn't have to worry with all about all the kind of complexities of adulthood and all that kind of stuff so this is me being kind of armchair psychologist here but like I I do think that a lot of people really are secretly yearning for their childhood when they claim to want to return to this idyllic past because this idyllic past didn't actually ever exist it's always been brutal like I mean there was this one really um there's a this this kind of far right another far right uh um lady she's half Indian I think her name's Mega or something and she's a she's always tweeting about how the past was so much better than the present and she wrote this one thing about how um you know like in the past it was much easier to grow food because all you had to do was just have your own little patch of land and then you could grow any food you wanted and you know you had enough to feel your whole family and everything and it's just complete nonsense because the kinds of in the past food was so hard to grow like you had to have the perfect soil it had to with the perfect pH uh you know you had to you had to constantly ensure that insects weren't getting at the food pests and stuff um you had to ensure that the weather was right there were so many things that would just go wrong things that we take for granted now right now we've got pesticides we've got fertilizers uh we've got like greenhouses we've got uh UV sorry infrared lights we've got all this um different stuff that helps stuff grow right we can grow stuff at length now we can grow as much food as we want but this wasn't always the case it wasn't food wasn't always there's plentiful in the past your crops could fail like within a day like you know you could you could be you could have a massive field of crops and within a day they could get ruined by a single flood you know it was we were completely at the mercy of nature um you know and people don't seem to realize this people seem to think that oh you know living in the past is just like um living around nature man you know like just basically yeah free love like the people and this is true of the trads on the right as well as as the kind of the kind of hippies that you might find who are more on the left but like it's it's this sort of idealization of the past one that you just don't one that doesn't reflect reality I wonder if a lot of the stuff I wonder if we could fold in that like the horticulturalists history fantasy as well or that the agriculturalist history fantasy as well as the Alphas exactly you know there's for instance like there you know there's if you look at sort of the famines that are happening in places like Sudan for instance and Somalia those things were widespread they were happening everywhere at one point um and the only reason they don't happen in the west anymore is because we have the technology to prevent them from happening so this is not like oh you know we're just looking at uh to to because Nature's on our side and nature wants us to eat well no nature doesn't give a [ __ ] about us you know Nature's Nature's desires are not aligned with us if it wants to ruin our crops it will just ruin our crops it doesn't care about what humans want and you know entire populations in the past died of starvation we are lucky because we are the ones that descended from those who just happen to to make it here's another way to look at it so for the people that are on the left that would maybe um you know the climate 100 years ago it was so much more balanced look at these extreme weather events that we're having etc etc climate related deaths have decreased by 98 in the last century there's been a 50x decrease and more people die from cold weather than dry from hot weather more people die from cold than die from heat and there's been a 50 50x decrease in climate related deaths over the last century so you know I think yeah you're right there's there's something going on whereby if if you can convince yourself that a past time would have been better it alleviates some of the pressure of now not being as good as it could be because you are no longer culpable for the reason that it's not as good as it could be ah I've outsourced this the the challenges that I'm facing to the fact that there is something structural or systemic or systematic that's stopping it from happening yeah absolutely I think there is a desire for people to blame to shift the blame to things outside of themselves and um I mean I'll cover this in in my my most recent article um where we've seen this happen actually a bit more it's actually quite disturbing how um I think Jonathan height and Gene twang uh they found that there has been an externalization of the locus of control so for your audience uh the locus of control is the degree to which one believes that they as opposed to external circumstances shape their Destiny so people who have an internal locus of control they believe that their own decisions are what dictate what happens in their life and people who have an external locus of control they believe that what they do doesn't really matter because their lives are dictated by what happens in the external world and interestingly uh there seems to have been an externalization of the locus of control over the past sort of 40 years and particularly since the 1990s um I actually think that people in the in the distant past didn't have the luxury of having an X most of the time I mean there was still scapegoating and things like that when people form tribes but I think when you're trying to survive you don't have that luxury you don't have the luxury of uh you know blaming other things you have to take responsibility for for what's going wrong in your life but when you arrive in in a world like ours where pretty much everything is done for you you have that luxury you can now suddenly start blaming everything else except for yourself and that's why I think we have these people who are yearning for this distant past where you know everything was in their eyes much better because they can easily just blame the Modern Age it's easy to blame identity because you don't have to take responsibility for me because virginity is doing everything for you modernity is growing your food modernity is keeping you safe from uh invasions modernity is keeping you warm you know modernity is giving you the information that you need to help yourself in pretty much any situation that you could possibly find yourself in modernity is a map for you that you can find your way through anywhere you know modernity gives you pretty much everything and that allows you the luxury to blame modernity for your problems yeah there's a there's one there's one that I came up with the existential crisis luxury only when the bottom levels of Maslow's hierarchy are filled can you ask questions like am I truly self-actualizing therefore having a crisis of Life direction should be a reason for gratitude not despondency absolutely we are so lucky you know to have what we have gratitude is something that in order to have the kinds of problems we have we have to be living lives that are essentially you know this the whole thing about first world problems you know this is this is what we worry about most of the time now we were pretty much I would say 90 of my problems now our first world problems am I enacting my Logos am I speaking my truth forward is this really my highest self showing up day today yeah and this is why you know it's you know if you look at the kinds of things that people are talking about now if people are talking about trauma for instance trauma has become probably one of the most common buzzwords in the world today um in the in the west and what trauma means now is it usually just means being a little bit disappointed whereas what trauma meant in the past would probably mean something I'll have your arm cut off you know so there's been a there's been a massive amount of concept creep with regard to what we really regard as a problem um because we live lives of such luxury now uh the people sort of who were living 200 300 years ago they would probably be laughing at our problems they would be just considering I I don't disagree and I'm I'd sing from the same hymn sheet as yourself but as we said before hedonic adaptation is a hell of a drug and it's going to continue to come in and whatever the opposite of hedonic adaptation but for how you begin to zero in on an Ever more high resolution high standard High bar that you want from your life and I don't think that this is necessarily a bad thing for society to do either if we were to say we only need to have health care standards that are at the level that they were in the 1800s despite the fact that we've made all of this progress that would be a rejection of the responsibility we have with our newly increased capacity so it is important both structurally and individually to continue to ask more from yourself it's the balance as with everything the virtuous mean as with everything you're trying to find where is the middle ground where is the balance between these two different things yeah absolutely um I wrote this tweet actually which I think speaks to this uh quite a bit and it's basically about uh and this basically this it's um everything about Humanity has improved throughout history except contentment but it is only because our contentment never improves that we keep improving everything else and I think that that kind of speaks to what you were saying which which is basically that it's it's essential to progress we have to be uncomfortable in order to progress we have to keep we have to always find ways that the world could be better in order to make the world better and so I agree with you completely you know we do need to have this kind of sense of you know this kind of hedonic adaptation is it's not just a good it's necessary it's absolutely necessary because if it weren't we would just be we would never we would never progress as a species we would just be content with what we have so I think like I said it's a case of balancing um what we have with what we want so we should be grateful for what we have and and that's what I am I'm absolutely grateful for everything I have but that doesn't mean that I don't want more I can still want more and still be grateful for what I have and that's it's a bit of a weird sort of line to to balance but it can be done um because you can always find new things to one that's that's the easiest thing in the world the harder thing is to be find some sort of value in what you already have and I think just finding that balance is is the key to being happy I think yes it's definitely made a difference to me have I told you about that story I learned about uh the Buddha's quote of life is suffering so the word suffering is Duca d-u-k-k-h-a and some Scholars argue contest that it's not suffering but unsatisfactoriness life is unsatisfactoriness and I think that that makes an awful lot more sense that it's always just about going to be behind where your anticipation and your expectation were because your expectation is built to be out ahead of what reality can deliver to you okay next one next one uh Saint George in retirement syndrome many who fight Injustice come to Define themselves by their fight against Injustice so that as they defeat the Injustice they must invent new injustices to fight against simply to maintain their identity yeah I think this is a product of people uh sort of tying their their mission with their identity so people will come out and they will have some kind of political cause where they'll be like you know oh I absolutely hate racism or something and then they'll go out there and be like anti-racist you know but what they will do is they'll make the mistake of tying their status as an anti-racist with their identity and they will actually make that part of their identity so they will begin to Define themselves as an anti-racist and the dangerous thing with this is that if they do eventually defeat racism then their identity is essentially nullified they no longer have any meaning they're not just out of a job they're out of personhood as well exactly and they've lost their sense of purpose they've lost their meaning in their life they've lost their kind of narrative because we all view Our Lives as narratives we're all kind of like movie characters living a movie and if you've basically defeated the villain then there's no point in continuing the movie you know that's it the movie's over role credits so these people unfortunately what they uh how they tend to respond is that they will sort of increase the uh they will project new racisms in the world they will uh create new cause of new dragons to slay basically and you can see this in the phenomenon of concept creep where you know when we defeat one form of harm we will expand the definition of that harm so that it covers more things so um for instance uh racism is is the obvious one so racism obviously there's still racism but it if we look at how it was with Jim Crow Jim Crow was uh was actual genuine hardcore systemic racism where you had two tiers of society you had white people and you had black people and then the civil rights movement and everything kind of just destroyed that and then the the definition of racism was expanded so then you had institutional racism you had systemic racism and then you had these new subspecies of racism you had microaggressions cultural appropriation and basically the kind of definition of racism just kept expanding because as racism was gradually removed from society people needed to retain that sense that they were fighting a great threat and so they expanded it and like I said this is not to say that racism doesn't still exist it does still exist but it's nowhere near the problem that it was 100 years ago or even further back so as racism has become less of an actual threat people have expanded their definition of it in order to give themselves a purpose in order to retain this sense that they are slaying this this Mighty dragon and if someone lets go of that then who am I who am I exactly after all of this has happened yeah I think yeah people this is one of the the things why it's almost pointless to argue with an activist because they have tied their identity to their activism so if you are arguing with their cause if you're saying that their cause is meaningless you're basically saying that their life is meaningless you're basically saying that their their entire identity is meaningless you know like if you were to go to Ibraham Kennedy and tell him look racism is nowhere near them as much of a problem as you say is that's going to be a personal attack against him because he spent his whole life writing about racism and so this it comes across as a personal attack they view it as a personal attack it's not just a political disagreement it becomes an actual attack on their whole sort of system of identity uh the way that they've they form sort of this uh self-conception uh which makes it very sort of hard to argue with these people because why do you think it is that people are attaching their sense of self their sense of self-worth uh integrating art and artists together in in this way is this a surrogate for religion is this that a lot of cultural Technologies previously would have been so Central to the way that we see the world is it just that the Allure of Fame and status and continuing to you know uphold whatever the cause is allows you to keep charging forward have you got any idea of the post-mortem there I would say that it's probably many different factors because obviously humans do things for a variety of different reasons and I think all of the reasons that you just mentioned are probably they all probably play a part so I'd say yeah absolutely the the meaning crisis has contributed to this a lot you know there's there's this kind of vacuum that people are now trying to fill with obviously with the death of God people are trying to fill this vacuum with whatever they can and some people are choosing to fill it with social justice and the last time I was on this podcast we spoke of atheism plus um being a kind of surrogate for for it was a way that the new atheists tried to retain a sense of purpose and meaning was by going for social justice um so I think that's definitely part of it and then I think that there are other people who perhaps are looking for clout online looking for some kind of uh you know some sense of belonging or something you know they want a big part they want to have a kind of uh an audience um you know or are trying to belong to and a Hilton as well yeah and able to die on you know there's so there are many things many reasons why people do and they're obviously they're probably just people who genuinely have been fooled into believing that racism is more common than it actually is or you know that misogyny is more common than it actually is or whatever like you know whatever cause you wanna you wanna talk about I mean I was one of those people I used to believe racism was more common than it actually was because I used to get all my information from the guardian and the New York Times and this was around the time when we had the great awokening where there was a 400 increase in the use of words like sexism and racism in the the liberal media and I was reading at that time so I developed this idea that you know everybody was racist and all this kind of stuff and that goes back to what you said before about a well-curated social media feed is either Heaven or Hell uh okay next one opinion shopping maybe many who can worked research online ignore every Source they disagree with till they find one they agree with and then use this source as an authority to justify what they already believe they don't consider someone an expert unless they agree with them so this is one that hits quite close to home because I used to do this I was guilty of this um when I was when I first sort of like got onto Twitter and stuff and I used to engage people in arguments what I would do is whenever I wanted to prove something uh to to my interlocutor what I would do is I would type in what I wanted to prove so um so basically you know like so like let's say if I wanted to prove that let's just say something randomly I wanted a proof that the world was flat you know I would just type in um evidence that the world is flat and then I would get obviously I would get some kind of evidence from some Fringe website and then I would basically say hey look see look this is proof that the world is flat so you know I think this is something that a lot of people do and the reason I think that a lot of people do this is because I've also seen other people do it I've in fact they've done it in arguments with me like um for instance what would happen is that I would I would say oh um what evidence is there for claim X and and then they wouldn't respond for like an hour or something and then eventually they would they would basically um post this link to this article or whatever which was which claims to represent what they say it claims and then what I would do is I'd go on Google and I would type in uh what they'd you know what they were trying to prove and immediately would be the first first search result and I'd see okay so what you've done is you've basically just you've gone on to Google you've you've typed in something you've ignored all the search results which disagree with your position and pick the one which agrees with it and then you've held the support you've put a prompt in that is only going to give you things that confirm your worldview you haven't exactly but even isn't the world flat yeah you've also you've looked for the world is for that evidence yeah that's the first thing but then even within that they'll Google will sometimes will you know say this is a myth or whatever and then they'll just skip that completely and they'll go to the one yeah and and I think this is you know people compare it to maybe confirmation bias so it is a similar sort of mechanism to confirmation bias except the difference is that confirmation bias is uh unconscious it's it's something that you do unwitting whereas opinion shopping is a conscious action it's when you consciously are looking for information that supports your worldview yeah very good yeah yeah so I do think that this is a very very common thing because if you are good enough at Googling in fact you don't even need to be very good at Googling if you know basic English you can always get pretty much any academic study or any kind of New York Times article or whatever that just supports what you're trying to prove and then you can just hold it hold it up as proof of what you're you know like anytime somebody says that they've got evidence of something if you do a Google you can always find evidence to the contrary because and this probably goes to another concept that was in one of my mega threads um which is the idea that for every PhD there is an equal and opposite PhD Gibson's law yeah it matters in matters of Law and policy anyone can find a subject matter expert who supports their view because having a PhD doesn't necessarily make someone right it often just makes them more skilled at being wrong yeah and this is this is something that's a sort of very common in um sort of Law Courts in fact I think many of your audience might have watched the Johnny Depp trial where you know when him against Amber Heard uh which was last year and anybody who watched that trial will have noticed that both uh both people drew on psychologists and psychiatrists to support their candidate uh their their sort of um defendant or whatever I think candidate I think candidate's probably more accurate yeah yeah or plaintiff or whatever but like yeah I mean um so you know they what what happened is that you had two groups of psychiatrists and psychologists both of them were equally qualified they're both you know that both groups had phds from pretty respectable universities because they had they were you know being paid by Hollywood actors so they were the cream of the crop um so these were prestigious psychiatrists and yet they had completely opposite conclusions to what was going on and so what you see here is obviously these two groups cannot both be right at the same time their opinions are mutually exclusive and so there's only one thing that could be happening here which is that they are rationalizing they are they're cherry picking evidence to support the narrative that they want to push and this I think is a very sort of good microcosm of what goes on in the real world where you have experts who are drawn on not just by um you know by lawyers and by legal teams but by businesses and you see this uh with with regards to say um for instance in the in the corporate world in business what what happened is in fact the original term opinion shopping originally comes from the business world because what businesses would do is that they would hire experts who agreed with them to write papers that agreed with what they were trying to do so for instance Coca-Cola would hire nutritionists who uh would say that you know oh um sugar isn't actually that bad for you for instance you know the main thing that you want to be worrying about is salt and fat those are much more worse for you than sugar obviously this you know this has been shown to be not quite true but um the the issue was that they wanted to make people believe that coke was healthy so they would cherry pick experts they would you know they would find experts who had done research which they thought they could use to their advantage and then they would pay this person to write a report on their behalf uh which would you know and you see this everywhere now you see it uh in gender clinics so you know for instance kids or basically the the Tavistock you know they they were pretty cushy with mermaid's charity and um with other similar Charities and what they would do is they would they would work with academics who believed what they believed people like Jack turbine who's a well-known gender ideologue in Academia and they would they would basically pay these people to write academic papers using their expertise using their uh their sort of their knowledge to make the case for for instance giving puberty blockers to underage kids or whatever like you know to young young children and then you know just to be balanced there would probably be people on the opposite side of this aisle who would do the opposite they would get the they would get the um the experts that agreed with them to write papers to do the same things and that's that really is a lot of Academia is fueled by this it's fueled by institutions paying academics to make the case for why that institution is great in other words basically but to do it indirectly by just by doing its studies and these studies are usually quoted and widely quoted by the Press so this is another reason why you can't really believe what you read in the Press because even the academic studies that quoted by these media Outlets or often they are often a result of perverse incentives there's a quote that I put in my newsletter today from Nat Friedman that says better to get your dopamine from improving your ideas than having them validated yeah because it feels good nowadays yeah absolutely and nowadays what I do is I don't really read um work from authors that I agree with very often anymore I do sometimes you know because I feel like I mainly just so that I can kind of um boost them you know retweet them or whatever like you know I want to retweet some people that I agree with uh so I naturally will read it first but like usually what I would do now nowadays is I will actually seek out information from people I disagree with because I find that's just so much more valuable to me I learn so much more from reading people that I think I disagree with and I say think because I'm not always sure whether I will disagree with them but people that I assume that I would disagree with because they're on they're in a different tribe or whatever you know um so like recently I've been I've been reading the works of um people like Julius Butler this is going back to the whole gender thing again because I've never really considered her worldview very much I mean obviously I was familiar with her work but uh because she's blamed for a lot of this kind of gender ideology kind of stuff and so I thought I'd better get to the first get right to the source instead of reading what people are saying about her which is what I've been doing for the past few years I thought I'd actually better get to the source itself and actually read what she's actually said and to be fair to her I mean she still strikes me as a little bit crazy but not as crazy as she'd be made out to be by people like Chris Ruffo um you know and other people like that so you know it's I think it's important for getting a balanced View and it's also I have learned things that I wouldn't otherwise have learned because the kinds of circles that I move in I would never have gotten the ideas that Judith Butler is is putting out I would only have gotten um sort of Straw Men of those kinds of ideas even though I I would regard my the people that I hang out with as being pretty reasonable and being pretty fair-minded even then they are still human beings so they're going to have the prejudices that a human being has and you've selected them right you've chosen them to be around you so your biases are at play just with the selection effect there yes yeah I've got one I got one here that I stole from Naval you quoted Naval earlier on and this is uh real world karma karma doesn't need Quantum energy or spiritual woo to be real karma is just you repeating your patterns virtues and flaws until you finally get what you deserve so I think Naval meant this in a when he said this he meant it in a very specific context right he meant it in the context of um whether you work hard or whether you don't or you know basically if you work hard you will eventually get the fruits of your labors and if you don't you won't I don't think that Karma exists in any any kind of capacity in the in the wider world I mean history is filled with with nasty nasty people who got away with with everything in the end and we live very happy lives so and on that contrary history is also filled with people who you know did nothing but help other people and then ended up getting Betrayed at the end so I don't think Karma exists in any kind of real sense of the world but I think it does exist in the sense that maybe I think Navarre means it which is that you get the fruits of your own labors with regards to productivity and um so if you if you feel like you know you're you're not worth anything and you don't really you're not willing to put in the work because you just feel like you know what's the point and you don't really have any agency then that's the self fulfilling proper prophecy you know you won't get you won't get what you want in life but if you if you are adamant on getting what you want and you you put everything that you want to what you know you basically sacrifice the present for the future um within reason as we were saying before um then you will get what you want and you'll get essentially what you deserve and more when he says the word deserve I hate the word deserve because I don't even know what the word deserve means you know it basically implies a value judgment of some kind yeah what does it even mean nature doesn't have any concept or deserve it doesn't there is no concept you know nature just gives people things um based on cause and effect there is no deserve and so um I do think that people deserve things only in the sense that did they put in the work yeah I think if I was to if I was to reread the deserve bit at the end uh karma is just you repeating your patents virtues and flaws until you finally get what you deserve for me it's until you finally get what is likely it's uh the way that I think about it when I read that quote is um people rolling Dice and it also relates back to this internal external locus of control thing that you mentioned earlier on which is if you believe that you have an internal locus of control if you continue to roll the dice over and over and your patterns virtues and flaws suggest that you are going to get this is not to say that there are people as you mentioned before perfectly Noble virtuous high integrity people who work hard who at the end of their life or part way through their life have some catastrophe that they it wasn't basically their fault uh absolutely that can happen but the more times that you roll the dice and the more effective your inputs are the less likely it is that that's going to happen right the the the uh yeah I agree with that yeah yeah I think yeah that's a good way of of looking at it I think um yeah it's it's I think yeah it it really comes down to like we can't control probability but we can control the probability space so we can control the range of outcomes but we can't control the specific outcome so for instance if you don't work hard then there is no chance that you're ever going to succeed because that's not within the probability space that you've created but if you work hard then then you are creating that probability space you you're putting that as one of the possible outcomes you can have and so I think in that sense yes you will get what you deserve in that sense um because you are essentially you are creating the the branching tree of possibilities that exist ahead of you and so you'll get one of those outcomes mismatch Theory moths evolved to navigate by the moon a good strategy until the invention of electric lamps which now lead them astray equally humans evolve to be tribal a good strategy until the digital age where it now leads us to act like polarized goons online I think this is everything I think this theory is the foundation of pretty much all of our problems in the Modern Age the fact that we have created for ourselves a world that we didn't evolve for uh you know where our our sort of the majority of our Evolution and adaptation occurred over sort of 300 000 years when we were on the African savannas and that's the world that we that our brains are configured for and pretty much everything that happens now is a result of this these evolved behaviors behaviors that we evolved for the African Savannah from hunt together a lifestyle not being of much use in this new environment in which we find ourselves in so that the tribal thing is the one is one aspect of it you know we are obviously when we're when you're living in the African Savannah as a hunter-gatherer it makes sense to be tribal because if you're not tribal you're not going to survive very long on your own you know you need you need the cooperation of other people and you need to have a common purpose and a common sense of unity because if you don't then the another tribe that does have a common sense of purpose is going to completely wipe you out so a lot of these things and this is particularly true of belief for me so belief forming you know we sort of naively often believe that people believe things because they think they're true but that's just not true at all uh what's actually the sort of main driver of beliefs I think a particularly this is particularly true of political beliefs is whether those beliefs help us in a social context so if they can make people like us or if they can give us a kind of identity something to belong to a common purpose with other people and this is a wrote another article about this actually uh the white smart people believe stupid things um there's an idea um called um by a psychologist called Dan Kahan or Kahan I don't know how you pronounce it if it's k-a-h-a-n and he had an idea called identity protective cognition which is this idea that when people form beliefs what they're doing is they're looking at other people and seeing how these beliefs uh operate in a social context so if if having a certain belief makes people very very popular and if it makes a lot of other people love them then that makes you feel that that belief is more true and this is a mechanism that is designed to essentially allow us to form beliefs with people that will allow people to like us and that will allow us to have status and a sort of sense of belonging and to have this tribal sort of um Arrangement around us you know so that it's it's a way of arranging tribes it's a way of forming these kind of hierarchies so if you um you know if you believe something uh that everybody around you believes they're gonna like you and this is something that everybody knows if you have the same beliefs as somebody they will like you a lot more that's a system that's that's basically a a gluing system it's a way that glues people together into tribes and allows them to form a common purpose and then allows them to succeed on this on the plains of Africa unfortunately that doesn't work so well in this age where we now have a lot of sort of partisan thinking we have people forming online tribes engaging in misinformation online where people are posting information that they agree with but not information that's necessarily true and so the whole system has been sort of torn apart by this new way that we're living you know now it doesn't bring us we don't really form mobs anymore we don't form at least we don't form them in the real world we form online but we don't form these tribes that would help each other out physically in the real world anymore now we form mobs online and we go after people and we've you know we have scapegoats and we have uh you know this kind of bickering with other tribes and all of this is not serving any of us well it's not actually doing anything for us all it's doing is it's making us angry it's uh making us bitter it's it's making us fight with people on the other side of the world who we're never going to meet in real life it's um making us push out information that's not true and you know fake narratives everywhere it's causing indoctrination it's causing people to be distracted from what they really want to achieve in their lives so all of these negative consequences have emerged from what was once an asset you know which has now become a liability as a result of this new way that we're living and this is just one aspect of the mismatch Theory the the mismatch Theory can be applied to so many different aspects of Life another aspect is that our brains are sort of evolved to operate when when we're moving this is uh this is a lesser known thing but we're supposed to be moving all the time pretty much we're supposed to be on the on foot uh traveling vast distances and that's good for our body because that's how our BR that's how our body's evolved our bodies evolved for movement but now we spend most of our lives indoors sitting in a sedentary position and so the system like our blood system uh the circulatory system is sort of evolved for movement it it's supposed to it's it's created under this sort of assumption that a being is going to be moving but we're not doing that we're just sitting still for long periods of time and so our circulatory systems are not operating efficiently our Bloods you know blood's not efficiently um sort of oxygenating our organs and as a result that we're having many health problems now the best way that anyone who is unsure whether or not that hypothesis is real can prove it to themselves think about the last time that you took a phone call and you needed to think hard while you're on the phone a huge proportion of people will find themselves just as if some hand has been placed inside of them they'll stand up and they'll start pacing around the room and absolutely I learned this from Kelly I do that all the time yeah Kelly Starrett says that we're built to locomote and that our brains work better when we're locomoting and you know if there was a way that I could do a podcast that didn't look too weird because if I was if I was doing this on some sort of treadmill as I'm bouncing up and down and there may be a bit of noise but yeah I am I totally agree and I think that yeah it's why walking is so good for writing you know when I wasn't walking when I when I just used to wake up in the morning and then go to my desk and write it would take me ages to actually come out with good ideas but I began sort of about shortly there's actually quite recent it was about three months ago since I moved into these new players I've been going for walks every day pretty much and I've found that the number of ideas that I've come out with is just so Stark and I mean this is something that writers throughout history have said as well it's not just me it's not you know it's not just something I discovered just now but writers throughout history have recommended walking like Nietzsche for instance Nietzsche used to go for long walks in the Swiss Alps uh when he was recovering uh from uh some sort of depression or anxiety that he had they didn't call it depression back in the day but but he had some kind of mental problems and he he went out into um Swiss Alps and he'd go for long walks and he said that he didn't trust any idea that he didn't come out with unless it was while he was walking so you know it was uh so basically any idea that he came up with what he was seeing at desk he didn't trust that idea and I mean I feel almost yeah I wouldn't go quite that far but I think that you know I walking is just such a if you have an idea while sat at the desk make sure that you still believe it after you've gone for a walk that's not a bad yeah that's not a bad razor to use okay next one just because someone is intelligent doesn't mean their intelligence is pursuing intelligent goals it's possible to devote a genius level intelligence to justify idiotic opinions and behaviors so in artificial intelligence research there is something called the orthogonality thesis and what this says is that basically just because uh and a machine is an intelligently pursuing a goal it doesn't mean that the goal itself is intelligent so you know a standard sort of uh illustration of this idea would be the pay-per-click maximizer so the pay-per-click maximizerism is a machine that is it's a hypothetic hypothetical thankfully hypothetical machine which has been programmed to create as many paper clips as possible and it's basically been programmed to have this as its absolute priority to basically override all of the priorities and so what this machine does is it begins to turn literally everything on the planet into paper clips and when the engineers realize what they've done and they go to change it they go to re-deprogram it it turns them into paper clips because if it were to not then they would have there would be fewer paper clips and so it ends up taking turning the whole world into paper clips and so it does something extremely stupid but it does it in a very intelligent way and this really is a good sort of sort of metaphor for the human brain because just because somebody is intelligent and just because somebody has a high IQ it doesn't mean that that intelligence is being put into the service of intelligent goals uh it's very very possible to to have very very stupid opinions like really stupid conclusions but to very intelligently reason for them yeah fortified fortified with an absolute genius level Armory around it exactly and you see this a lot in Academia you know people who have their whole lives they're just they're sort of spend their whole lives in their head and they become very good at thinking but they use that thinking to come out with the most wackiest ideas because they want to be original because if you're if you're in Academia you want to you you want two things you want to be interesting and you want to be original and you know because there's a publication bias in favor of those two things and so uh you have to say something that nobody else is saying and you have to say something that shocks people or surprises people and so you see a lot of academics Who come out with the most insane opinions um and then they will use their intelligence which is usually quite considerable they'll use that intelligence to justify that the most moronic opinions um you know I read this uh this one laughable study uh which was conducted uh by this uh by this author who said that basically rape didn't exist in America until white people uh arrived on its Shores and then they introduced rape to the Native Americans you know just completely bizarre idea that they're basically saying that Native Americans were innocent didn't have they didn't ever commit any sexual assault they always think about it Comanches Indians as being a very very civilized people up until the point at which they were invaded yeah exactly then white people taught them how to rape and that's why rape exists in America amongst the Native Americans completely like idiotic opinion but this author then used like all these weird sort of really weird esoteric knowledge about uh peculiar things that happened in history um then basically got like scientific studies really really cherry-picked you know just to kind of create this now yeah which is some very special narrative together yeah exactly and this was doing this required a lot of intelligence because they had to get information from very disparate fields and sort of combine them together and you know create this weird argument which when you when you look at the album I mean it's a complete nonsense argument but it's very intelligently put together it's taken a lot of effort clearly because there's so much research involved do you know what it makes me think of it makes me think about the four stoic virtues so Justice Temperance courage and wisdom and without the fourth one which I think is going to be the final book that Ryan writes in his series on the the four virtues um without the fourth one all of the previous ones can be deployed in a stupid way that you know you can be courageous For A Cause which is pointless that you can be just towards something which doesn't require it that your Temperance can be used in in the wrong sort of way so um yeah there is a I don't even know what it's it's cognition and metacognition almost right it's like being able to step out a George Mack calls it um clouds and dirt so he says that you need to get down to the level of the Frog and you need to get up toward the level of the birds see the map make sure that the map and the terrain are still different go down go do the work come back up make sure that I'm still doing the right thing go back down yes absolutely yeah I mean I would say that um it's like looking through a microscope and a telescope at the same time you've got to look at both you've got to see the big picture and then you've got to focus in and zero on on the details and most you know a lot of academics will just look at the microscope they'll they'll just zero in on a very tiny part of the picture and they'll use their intelligence to interpret that that little picture but they won't look at the greater scheme of things and I think ultimately it comes down to having intelligent goals because if you can create intelligent goals then you have some kind of Guiding Light you have a you have a North star by which you can navigate but one of the problems is that people don't have intelligent goals they they just have like a very simple goal um and then they would you know they'll in many cases what they would do is they'll begin with a conclusion and they'll just say okay I need to get to that that conclusion any way I can and then they will rationalize their way to that conclusion and this is a big danger I think is that when you reason backwards instead of Reason forwards yes so um most people like will begin with that conclusion and they'll try and look for a way to get there so uh if you're a very very intelligent person you'll always find a way to get there you'll always find a way to get there no matter what no matter how crazy the conclusion is and you've just got to look at the number of books with crazy Theses you know and just by intelligent people just to know this is true I could you know if I wanted to I could come out I could basically have a really really insane conclusion a really insane goal um so it would be something like um again if I wanted to prove that the world is flat right I could I could begin from that assumption and then I could put every waking day researching any piece of information that would possibly be used to rationalize that argument and I could create a book out of it I could actually do that you know but it would take me a long time and it I would really be frying my brains trying to do it but I could do it I think so I could create a compelling argument that the world is flat By ignoring all the information that I don't like and focusing only on the information that I like and this is why intelligent people often believe stupid things because the capacity for reasoning is also the capacity for rationalization uh you know rationality is not something that comes naturally to people rationalization is something that comes naturally to people we are again this goes back to Identity protective cognition Dan kahan's idea the idea is that intelligence evolved not to help us to find the truth it evolved to help us to survive and if surviving requires us to believe crazy beliefs like if we're living in North Korea for instance it makes much more sense for our intelligence to help us to believe that Kim Jong-un is the Son of God or whatever you know he's like a Divine being and that he was born on a mountain and that the Birds Sang his praise when he was born you know obviously a normal person wouldn't couldn't believe that but if you're intelligent you can convince yourself of that and you know this is something that throughout history we needed to do we needed to believe we need to convince ourselves or at least imagine it might at least pretend that we believed a crazy belief so either we were good at acting and pretending that we believe something that we don't or we could generally convince ourselves of that beliefs and both of those things require intelligence so our intelligence was used to make us believe [ __ ] it was made it was specifically configured and calibrated to help us to believe things that are not true because they would help us survive in the social context one of my favorite explanations for why we have theory of mind and why we have Consciousness at all is that it allows us to model what other people are thinking about us so in a very Nimble and complex social structured species like we are that have moving power dynamics and I know that that person doesn't quite like that person and they used to be in favor with this one and what do they think about me and how did I show up and blah blah the whole point is to portray as best as possible to the outside world that we are not insane I am a totally normal fully functioning person and what's that quote about like uh humans are easy to uh to fool and you you yourself are the one that's the easiest the fact that you must inform yourself yeah Richard Feynman yeah okay so I came up I came up I thought I came up with one and then you called me out on Twitter twice with two different ideas that were my idea that had already existed but I'm gonna give you all three and we can with the audience can vote on whether or not mine's the coolest I'm pretty sure it is so I called mine vestigial pattern bias the successful deliberate approaches we learned during our development can become a prison which stop us from being more free-flowing and at ease when we are developed the tools that got you from naught to 50 are not the same ones that get you from 50 to 90 or 90 to 95 but we found success with this approach in the past so we cling on to an overly rational effortful approach we hope that applying pure cerebral horsepower to a situation will fix it we think think that the more deliberate we are the better the outcomes will be without realizing that our subconscious is aggregated to thousands of hours of experience we've clocked up to now and not using that experience is keeping us in the same league that we've always been in and you told me that the einstelling effect the einstalling effect occurs when pre-existing knowledge impedes one's ability to reach an optimal solution we become unable to consider other Solutions when we think we already have one even though it may not be accurate or optimal it leaves us cognitively incapable of differentiating previous experience with current problems so we may solve a problem but we don't actually innovate and the final One path dependence the QWERTY keyboard layout was a misguided attempt to stop typewriters jamming but despite it being inefficient for typing it remains with us because people accepted it as the norm we failed to notice so many problems because we let them become part of life I think vestigial pattern bias is by far the best named of the three but I do they're all part of the all part of the same yeah I think that they're kind of I would say that path dependence is is the vestigial pattern bias in a social setting so it's how it occurs at scale um when everybody is thinking that way when everybody is thinking with that vestigial patent bias then you get the result is you get path dependence um I think that the einstall effect and the and the vestigial pattern bias are pretty much the same thing I mean there probably are subtle differences uh between them but I think that the general concept is the same which is that our methods gradually rigidify because we get used to solving problems in a certain way and then that prevents us from considering Alternatives um and I think that this is something that I've seen in my own life I I feel like we tend to become blind to what we're familiar with and this is you sent me this uh great uh idea on on Twitter actually DMS and I responded with um with the whole frog frog and fish thing which is that um basically the frog says to the fish how's the water and the fish says what's water and that's because the fish has lived its whole life in water so it doesn't know anything else I think it applies to the vestigial pattern biasis which is that we become so used to the solutions that we uh use in our daily lives that we just it just doesn't occur to us to consider that we could do things a different way um I found this so many times with regards to the ways that I write essays for instance I've got a very standard way of doing it and I've been using that way for a very long time so much so that I've almost forgotten that there are other ways of doing it and it's only been recently where I've been kind of tinkering around and trying new things that I've actually realized how sort of how much I was constraining myself in my methodology because I just simply it just didn't occur to me that I could do things a different way I think this is probably responsible for a lot of people's stagnation it's the it's just this idea that people forget that things can be changed and that's why they don't change them I think there's a good a good amount of scarcity mindset that comes into this too that I I have found a particular way of wrangling reality into a form which rewards me oh I can't believe I've managed to do this let's hold on let's grip it tighter let's not let things change I learned this when I did Rogan's show last year and I sat down opposite this guy and he's got it's a different sort of episode to this right he's just the most Meandering conversation like if he has a bad stake the night before guess what you're talking about steak for 20 minutes he he sits down no notes in front of him and just Jamie's already pressed the button and then he just begins and you watch this man hold a cogent conversation together with no plan Beyond what's front of mind and a bit of prep that he's done for like three four hours and it's it really opened up to me as the the importance of um storytelling the importance of allowing the Meander to happen uh the importance of Leaning into it just being a hang uh I've said for a long time that the job of a podcaster is to be a Vibe architect rather than a a blinkist for podcasts that you're not trying to index everything that's in someone's mind you're trying to just create a vibe that the audience can enjoy and you know the vibe from from this episode might be there are amazing ideas out there that you don't know about and we're going to Riff on them and you're going to learn some and maybe you take them home with you I've got one of the guys that's a part of the sound of Freedom coming in like the vibe from that is that there are seriously evil people out there and it is important that we're aware of it and we need to protect children and there's another vibe from this and another vibe from that but within that broader sort of landscape you can just weave however you want and and that that was really really interesting and that again was you know my pattern bias was showing that I have my way of preparing I have my way of creating a show and then I watch oh and I've listened to him do it where he is he's like one of those guys that's gone beyond the rule set you know it's like once you reach seventh Dan seventh degree black belt that you have learned the rules so well that you can then break them and you know that's that's very very interesting and obviously then opens up a huge more ranges of learning because you're no longer constrained by just the one or two or three ways that you do things all of the different paths are open to you yeah absolutely I think for you this is actually a great way to avoid the vestigial pad bias because you meet so many different people who have got completely different ways of looking at the world and different ways of doing things so you're constantly being exposed to new ideas I think it's probably one of the greatest ways to avoid vestigial advice would be to have the kind of podcast that you have where like you said you know one minute you're talking about ideas the next minute you're talking about you know crazy evil people or whatever you know so it's constantly mixing things up I think is is the cure to this and I think one of the problems is um that we like the algorithmic sort of structure of the internet compels us to do things the same way that we've always done them um so for instance recommendation algorithms or you know if you watch one video of say Ben Shapiro YouTube's just gonna just flood you with Ben Shapiro videos you know and then now you're watching even more of them and then the more you watch of them you get even more flooded with them and so it it basically Narrows your sort of your probability space of the things that you could possibly learn and and uh you know kind of the kinds of things that you could uh the kinds of information you could consume so I think it is important for no other if for no other reason than to Simply uh keep your probability space as wide as possible to do things against your own nature to sort of have an anti-algorithm to basically you know do things that second guess yourself if you feel like visiting a certain website visits a completely different website you know and and just do things try to second guess yourself and to not have a fixed routine one of the things that I do sorry yeah one of the things that I do now is that um if I read uh from say like a left-wing news source say like uh if I read the New York Times then the following day I will read right wing news so I will read like The Wall Street Journal uh you know so I'm constantly shifting between different narratives and that allows me to not be sort of encapsulated and not be imprisoned within one single narrative so that I'm constantly being exposed to different ways of looking at the world constantly being exposed to new ways of of sort of being as it were it would be awesome it would be awesome if there was an app that was able to do that for you I think there is yeah I've forgotten the name of it but there is actually a new AI app which I was looking at recently unfortunately in fact I might have it as a bookmark but um yeah this is there's a app which basically will give you um different sort of information almost at random basically based on um but over time over over the space of whatever two months you will end up with an even split of Center left and right yeah basically it gives you a wide range yeah skeptical and and Pro-Tech and all that stuff okay next one oppression Olympics social media is a war for public sympathy so victimhood is a status symbol that many compete for by collecting injuries real and imagined often goading others into attacking them so they can screenshot or record and immortalize their prestigious oppression I mean so because we're living in an attention economy attention is like money it's essentially currency you know if you if you could get eyeballs then that gives you power and one of the ways that people get attention now is by trying to make people empathic empathetic towards them uh or sympathetic or whatever like they they try to get people's emotions engaged into what their their life is and so um you know if you could do that if you can engage somebody's sympathies then you can get them to do pretty much anything you want them to do you can get them to send you money you can get them to boost your content to other people you can get them to um to give you some emotional support so there are many ways that you can you can sort of uh in a sense monetize people's affection and the easiest way to do it the simplest way to do it is to essentially pretend that you're oppressed uh there's even a word for this now uh it's known as sad fishing which is when people go on social media and they basically pretend that they're oppressed not oppressed but they just pretend that they're unfortunate they pretend that something bad has happened to them so it might not be oppression it might it might be that they they might pretend that they have uh mental illness they might pretend that they're depressed they might pretend that they're their partner left them do you remember the uh Trend last year or the year before on Tick Tock where loads of people were pretending they had multiple personality disorder yes yes I actually I wrote about this uh quite recently and so this is something that is crazy I mean this is like if you go on Tick Tock and you type in did dissociative identity disorder you will get just video upon video upon video get millions and millions of videos of people claiming to have dissociative identity disorder and by the way the substitute identity disorder is multiple personality disorder it's just the newer newer name for it but um yeah there's there's so many of these videos online now like you'll just see um people who will shift between these personalities on on a stream right uh just do it and they'll pretend that they're like some first they'll pretend that they're like a six-year-old schoolgirl in Minnesota and then they'll pretend that they're like some um tribal Elder in Nairobi what's it called is it others is it my other is that's it [ __ ] others yeah yeah and so and and they basically um the truth about did is quite very interesting actually because there was a guy recently unfortunately he died um Ian hacking he's a philosopher and he studied the spread of did uh back then it was called multiple personality disorder um in the 1970s and what he found was that in 1970 there were almost no cases of multiple personality disorder it was basically it was pretty much unheard of um there was maybe one case or two cases in the entire medical literature and then what happened was that there was an article written I think um I can't remember which paper it was but it was a pretty big paper about about this issue about people having multiple uh personality and it was it was more of a speculative um essay it was it was it wasn't really you know medical kind of thing it was more just somebody speculating about it and then this kind of popularized this idea and after this happened more and more people began to claim that they had uh multiple personalities and then what happened is that the clinicians at the time they were trying to work out why this was happening because they didn't really understand they didn't understand social contagions at the time so they were trying to work out why more people were coming forward with uh multiple personalities at the time they believed that simply what was happening was that just awareness of this condition was increasing and so they began speculating and they began saying that um people might be creating these alternate Personalities in order to repress memories of sexual abuse now we now know that repressed memories are a complete [ __ ] they're not they're not real repressed memories are Freudian uh mumbo jumbo basically they're not people don't repress memories based on bad experiences it just doesn't happen and there is something um there is psychogenic amnesia but that's that's different but but repressed memories don't don't happen and so uh we know for a fact that these people were not they were not creating these multiple personalities because they've been sexually abused um what was actually happening was that they were looking at the diagnosis and they were looking at reports of multiple personality disorder and then they were essentially using that to kind of make sense of their own lives and so they were creating these multiple personalities in order to make sense of their lives in a weird sort of way and what Ian hacking found was that at the beginning the average number of altars that a person had was between two and three and within in a decade the average number was apparently 17. apparently this is according to his work so I don't know if this could be verified but this is what Ian hacking found anyway in his research and so I believe that did is not a real disorder I don't believe it's actually a real thing I believe it's a complete fabrication and people who have the idea are pretending because I've actually looked at the medical literature and there's only one one study that I found which which in which I think that there is actually a real thing going on in which people actually do have multiple personalities and that's a thing called um psychological gating it's a very very bizarre study I'm not really sure what to make of it but what I found with this one study and this is the only study that's convinced me that maybe there are people out there who have multiple personalities is that there's a woman who actually presented to a clinic with blindness and she actually she was blind and apparently she also had another altar living within her and apparently the altar within her was not blind and apparently what the uh the experimenter found was that when this woman shifted there was actually a shift in the activity in her optic nerve so something strange was going on that when she shifted to a different state of mind when she shifted it to another altar suddenly she could see a blind woman could see so that kind of creeped me out I don't know how much to believe this because this hasn't been replicated and I'm very wary about these kinds of studies psychology is a bit a bit Shady you can't really trust a single study because there's so many you know so many of these are just made up a lot of these psychological studies are made up so I don't know whether to trust it if it's true then maybe I can be convinced that multiple personalities maybe are a thing but I have so far seen no evidence that multiple personalities are actual thing other than what people pretend and this is why it's crazy when you look at Tick Tock and you see all these videos of people pretending that they've got multiple personalities and the reason that they're doing it is obviously because it brings them attention sympathy yeah it's the oppression Olympics if you have a mental like this is another thing like previously people the main way that people were oppressed was through sociological systems so it would be the patriarchy that was oppressing you would be systemic racism or it would be capitalism but now there's a new way of being oppressed which is through psychology and through medicine or rather not medicine but through biology and um a lot of people I've seen are now doing this they're pretending to have conditions that they don't have and we've seen it with Tourette's um there's a there's a famous tick tocker called ticks and Roses who was uh caught uh fabricating her Tourette's basically for the cloud because she wanted people to like her you know she she wanted clout online and so she she pretended to have these ticks and people thought the ticks were really strange because they weren't they weren't like normal ticks and they seemed to occur only when she was you know only when she had a camera when she knew that she had a camera on her because when she didn't know that she had a camera on her suddenly the ticks went away um and there was another there was a guy who was a twitch streamer um I've forgotten his name but he was quite a famous twitch streamer and he pretended that he couldn't walk and then there was a there was a stream [ __ ] video of him yeah I've seen this video yeah yeah so this is this is a common thing people pretending that they've got illnesses that they don't have and I've written an entire article about it a long like 4 000 word about it um in which you know I just document like why people are doing this and yeah can people get this if they want to read the articles so this is on my sub stack so it's just goinda.substack.com and the article is called the pathologization pandemic which is my name for this phenomenon um so you know it's so I originally um actually I won't go into it too much because I let people read it but I'll focus on what I was talking about before which is basically the whole Tick-Tock thing which is um you know people on Tick Tock are doing this at crazy rates there's just the number of cases of people um pretending to have these conditions on Tick Tock surpasses the number of cases in real life you know so so so there are more people with multiple personality disorder on Tick Tock than there are in real life and it obviously you know this just goes to show that these people are just completely making it up and it is obviously because people want sympathy and I I don't hold it against these people I don't I don't do them as bad people I think that they're just doing what the market is demanding that they do these people want attention and they they want they want to be loved like every other human being wants to be loved and they want um they want a clout this is why this is this is why your article on audience capture I think twins with this pathologization pandemic thing so nicely because it the audience cap Perils of audience capture explains the incentives and explains how you have this sort of self-reinforcing recursive feedback loop between Creator and audience and Creator and audience um I remember I read in a book once I think it's Steve Stuart Williams who says uh sympathy is investment advice so that when we feel sympathy it is advising us of the person who is so lowly that if we give them our effort it will be rewarded and they will be grateful for it so much higher than somebody who wasn't as desperate and down than the look and so to speak which is why sympathy you know you start [ __ ] pulling that trigger and it's it's why you know these golden retriever or like rescue dog um reels on Instagram do like really I saw this one the other day that had seven million likes I've never seen a reel with seven million likes before and uh it was some dog and this dog's been it was hurt and it was trying to bite the people that were getting it and it was all scraggly and then they wash it and they they feed it and they give it antibiotics and they bring it back and here it is with its owners jumping around in the yard and you're like in 60 seconds I've got like the an amazing story of this dog and I feel sympathy toward it and now I'm all happy and I'm [ __ ] weeping and I'm like I'm watching the video of a dog why am I weeping so sympathy is just such a it's such a compelling engagement a reason to engage yeah it's such it's so magnetic uh yes yeah it's it's I mean it is the thing that will get people likes and retweets online you know um you see you can see this with with Twitter for instance you see that people who don't really um evoke sympathy in their audiences can have a massive follow account but they won't get very many likes on their tweets whereas somebody who really sort of forms a connection with their audience they can have far fewer followers but they'll get so much more likes because their audience is engaged and they're like they're actually invested in this person's life and they actually want to know the way I look at it is it's almost like a movie character like what like the structure of a movie is that the first sort of half an hour of a film like the act one of a movie is designed to get you to like the character then get to like the main character why should I so you you do it yeah develop this sympathy exactly and um once you've developed the sympathy for the character then you want to watch more of that character you want to see what happens to them and then you're rooting for that character and you're invested in that character and the same thing happens with social media where people will try to create this struggle that they're having one of the ways that screenwriters will make a character um beloved to an audience is that they will give them a struggle they'll make life hard for them so if somebody has a struggle then you can you can identify with that person because everybody has a struggle in their life and if that struggle is a universal struggle so if it's like a guy that wants to get a girl for instance or you know somebody who wants overcoming poverty or whatever or overcoming poverty or you know all of that kind of stuff these are Universal struggles they're like me yeah exactly it is me yeah and so if you can make you know if you can convince people that this person has got this struggle in their life which you can identify with then that will make you love that person so much more because you'll begin to see yourself in that person and you'll root for them and you'll wanna you wanna you want them to have a happy ending and I think this happens with social media as well yeah let me give you an input there so I learned this from baggage claim uh Manisha and the critical Drinker as well uh both um online YouTube film critics I suppose and um Manisha is very um anti this sort of new wave of female boss boss [ __ ] Heroes that are kind of being portrayed online that um if you look at the difference between the two Mulan films in the first one she had to be uh Innovative and crafty because she was smaller than the rest of them and in the second one she was better than all of the men immediately because she had like estrogen she or something like that or in in the second doctor strange there's like a the daughter the the Central American daughter of a lesbian couple has the most power in the entire universe and the only reason that she can't use it is because she doesn't believe in herself because like like yeah yeah I've seen them some critical drinkers uh videos and there's one where he's commenting about Star Wars and about how Rey is basically a Mary Sue uh the main character ring what's a Mary too so a Mary Sue is like a character who is basically like a kind of like a a Fantasy character it's like basically the author injecting themselves as as an ideal figure in in the movie so there'll be somebody who's just basically good at everything and who is perfect in every way you know somebody who never ever has any sort of setbacks or if they do have a setback they'll immediately overcome it there's there's never any struggle with this character so they're basically just perfect and um a lot of people have accused Ray of being this this kind of character I've not actually seen the newest Star Wars movies but because I don't really have any interest in it but I I but the the conversation about this is so wide that even I know who Rey is even though I've never watched the movie so Rey is the main character of the newer Star Wars movies of the new Trilogy and um she's basically I think she's related to Luke Skyward I don't know but anyway she's the main character and um she is basically instantly good at everything you know she she doesn't need to be trained by a Jedi master like I've seen the original Star Wars movies and Luke Skywalker he had to be trained by Yoda and by Obi-Wan Kenobi in order to become the great Jedi that he would become but apparently I haven't seen this new these new movies so I might get this wrong but I've heard from I think critical Drinker and others that basically Ray doesn't need to learn anything she just has the abilities already she has the Jedi Powers she knows how to wield a lightsaber from the get-go she has everything already you know and it's like basically like I think he basically attributes it to this new wave of like hyper feminism in Hollywood where you know the female characters are always more competent in the male characters and it's patronizing that it's I I understand we need to come up with a name for this so have a little bit of a think about this if you optimize for being let's say sympathetic or empathetic or caring or comforting on the front end without considering the second third fourth order effects down the line and how that might be adverse to the group that you are supposedly trying to help so for instance if you think about an entire generation of girls now who are growing up with these kinds of female leads yes maybe the initial experience is them being told girls are great if you're female you can achieve whatever you want blah blah blah right the second third fourth order effects of this are if you all of the heroes never had to encounter a difficulty so when you do in your life who are the role models that you look up to any difficulty that you do encounter in your life is due to something structural and you should complain about the world as opposed to change yourself or adapt to it or accept the fact that sometimes life can be shitty like it makes a according to Manisha baggage claim it makes an entire generation a fragile narcissists women and yeah you know she uses um who's [ __ ] Prince Harry's wife Meghan Markle Meghan Markle she is on like a vendetta against Meghan Markle but she sees Meghan Markle as kind of like the poster child for this vulnerable narcissistic uh kind of um like yeah position and uh yeah I I think that I think it's right I think that um not teaching women especially that they are not only worthy but capable of overcoming difficult things because it's somehow more inspirational to never show a woman facing any ad uh like adversarial situations to me just seems like it's it's stupid so exactly yeah yeah I I think that one of the reasons why people watch movies is so that they can actually understand um how to overcome difficulties like what kind of a character must they be in order to overcome some of the sort of obstacles in life you know if it's one of the obviously not the only reason but I think it's one of them and I think it does serve a good purpose in that way because it gives us ideals to Aspire to it gives this um you know sort of people that we can model our own lives on um but the problem is is that if this person is is unrealistic if they're if they're too ideal then it can be dangerous to try to model your life on them because the the the kinds of things that they would deserve in navarre's sense of the term are not gonna equate they're not going to translate to reality so if somebody so for example like um this Ray character if she can instantly overcome everything uh she you know like some guy attacks her and then she's instantly just you know whips his ass um that's not going to translate to the real world because the sad fact is is that for you know men are on average a lot stronger than women so if a woman were to emulate Rey in the real world and you know she's trying to physically take down a guy the chances are she's gonna get beaten down you know so it's just not going to work like what works in a movie is not going to work in reality and I think this is one of the dangerous things about trying to click turn these kinds of people into Role Models because that's what they're trying to do they're trying to turn Ray into a role model for women you know and another thing is is that why would why would you make a role model um just defeat every problem with physical violence because I think that's what she does she just uses the force she just knocks people over and kills them with a sword or whatever you know this is not a role model for for any human being like you know it's just what what exactly are you supposed to learn from this that you could just kick everybody's ass is that the lesson you're supposed to learn it's not it doesn't teach anybody anything it's just it's a fantasy and so when they when a lot of these writers because you watch these documentaries of how they made the movie and a lot of them will sort of you know stroke their chins and say yes but we wanted to create a modern woman you know like somebody who the Modern Woman could relate to and all this sort of stuff but modern women can't relate to that kind of literally the least relatable woman exactly that's what yeah that's it and that's what Mary Sue is and Mary Sue is somebody who's just so good at everything that they're just not relatable in any sense of the term that you just can't you know they're superhuman and that's why out of all the superheroes my least favorite is Superman a lot of people might might disagree me on that but I don't like Superman because he's just good at everything he's just he's a god basically he's got there is his only weakness is this mythical substance that doesn't even exist in the real world but Kryptonite you know so it's just like the floors I like I like characters who've got flaws you know unlike Batman because he's got flaws he's you know he's he's a kind of rich guy and all this sort of stuff but he's got his dark side as well and he's he's constantly trying to fight with his his own craziness his own dark so he's an outcast you know so there's you've got to have flaws I think in a character if you if you want to make them appealing to to other human beings uh which is I don't you know I just don't get why they make so many Mary series they should have learned this by now but let's do two more so uh we'll do mine first we'll do mine first and we'll finish on one of yours so this is productivity purgatory the ancient Greek word for work was not at leisure a 21st century grind addiction has turned Pursuits like walks in nature meditation and time and sunlight into just another productivity hack slowly turning all leisure activities into a tribute to work yeah so I've been thinking about this for a long time um so basically there's Greek uh sort of classification of tasks so ancient Greek classification of tasks uh they they divided tasks into tele activities and antenna activities now telek comes from the Greek word Telos which means an end or a gold and telec activities are activities that you do in order to reach some goal so an example of this would be washing the dishes or um you know washing your car or doing some kind of chore or job you know going to a job to do your work and then opposed to this is atelect activities and atelect activities are activities that you do for the sake of the activity itself and not for any other goal so an example of this would be um anything that you enjoy so painting maybe a picture if you enjoy doing that you know I mean that could be both uh telek because you're doing it for the love of painting but you're also doing it to have a painting at the end of it so that maybe that's not a good example so I would say um a tele a good example of an atelic activity would be going for a walk in the park or something you know assuming you're not doing it for exercise but you're just doing it just headache well you could do it for exercise but you're not doing it to reach a certain destination you're just doing it to for the sake of walking you know you're walking for the sake of walking and what I've been trying to do in my life is I'm trying to turn a lot of my telek activities into a tele activities I've got these I've got this I think the correct terminology for you here uh autotelic derives goals joy and reward mostly internally judging their own actions exotelic derives goals joined reward externally takes care how their actions are being judged yeah I mean I use the words helic and atelic um maybe I think they're a bit simpler yeah t e l i c yeah and yeah so it's called telicity um that's the terms those are the terms that I use yeah oh well this has been hijacked by a bunch of like athleisure companies so it's taking me all I can see a lime green uh like slip-on [ __ ] uh no no I think the best thing to do is I'll just type in t t e l i c I did I did and it came up with a bunch of sandals and it will I'll I'll check it out afterwards so telekinetalic cool yeah yeah so so I'm trying to turn um sort of my tele activities into atelect ones I'm trying to do more things just for the sake of doing them because I think if you can enjoy the activity itself and not think too much about the goal uh then you will become much more you'll become more content with your life I think I think a lot of people do things just for some kind of goal and they don't enjoy the process of doing the thing that they're trying to do have you got it as a result of that they become less they'll become less good at actually achieving the goal yeah have you got any eye advice on how you are becoming more italic yeah so I try to find enjoyable ways of doing things because there are there usually are there are less enjoyable ways to do it these are more enjoyable ways of doing things so for example um I used to hate working out but I've started working out recently and the way I've I've made it into more of an enjoyable activity is that I I listened to music that I really really enjoy but I only allow myself to listen to that music when I'm working out so if I want a hero tune that I really really enjoy I can only listen to it if I'm working out so that compels me to work out so it makes the process of working out more enjoyable because I'm focusing on the music and you know I'm just kind of like uh just doing that so little things like that you can just turn activities into um into more enjoyable things and also another thing is when I go for walks for instance I used to kind of find Walking boring because I would go through the same group all this all the time but now I mix up my roots and I've go down streets that I've never gone down before yeah I love getting parks and yeah and just completely just losing myself because I'm living in a new area now so all of this is alien to me the area that I'm in now so I just basically just wonder I just choose a direction and I just go in that direction and then I just end up at these unexpected places and I might see some like crazy Cafe in the middle of corner somewhere and just that looks nice and just go in there so you just make a simple thing like walking far more enjoyable by adding that element of surprise and the suspense you know so going back to what you were saying about how you create that suspense for your audience yeah I think suspense can really help make things a lot more enjoyable when you when things are a little bit unpredictable when you don't know how they're going to turn out I think unpredictability is one of the great spices of life if you can make something unpredictable then it becomes a lot more exciting and a lot more enjoyable and you don't need to take huge risks with this unpredictability sounds like uh you know I'm gonna try and make it home on half a tank of gas even though I've got 200 miles to go or I'm gonna have to jump out of an airplane or something like that unpredictability can be as benign as you want it to be it can be you know taking a left instead of a right on the way to work yeah okay final one for today we got so many that we didn't get through uh presentism we judge history by modern standards we regard slave owners as evil but slavery was so common and familiar to our forebearers that they were blind to its iniquities as a Wii to the industrial Slaughter of animals for which we too will eventually be called evil yeah so I'm I'm one of those people who gets upset when I hear about the way animals are treated in sort of you know factory farms um I just think that the way that they're treated is absolutely horrific and if if it was something that we had no knowledge of but that just suddenly was revealed to us today I think there would be a massive movement against it to end it because of the ways that they're treated I mean pigs for instance pigs apparently according to some studies are they have similar levels of intelligence to a seven-year-old child um and that they know when they're being they're going to be killed and you know they'll resist it as much as they can and yet you know you hear stories of them being buried alive um by by Farmers because they you know they might have not even that they actually have foot and mouth disease but there's a chance that they might catch it and because of that large numbers of them are buried alive and just that's just one example I mean the treat in a horrific ways in in factory farms and I I think I'm I'm quite sort of surprised that people don't view this is more horrific than it actually than it actually is because we care about dogs we care about dogs a lot you know we wouldn't want to see dogs treated like this and yet pigs are a lot smarter than dogs they're a lot more self-aware than dogs and yet we we treat them in the most barbaric ways and I think that what's holding people back a lot of time is a people are just used to it and this goes this is like the opposite of hedonic adaptation where there's a kind of like nightmare adaptation where you know if something's horrific but we're just used to it it's just a suffering adaptation yeah yeah it's no it's no longer horrific because we're just used to it and so we're born into this world in which animals are treated in these barbaric ways so we don't really kick up a fuss about it and we just focus on the beautiful Taste of a steak or whatever and that's enough for us you know this is weird it's this weird sort of um cognitive dissonance in the mind to what I've observed amongst some people I saw this one thing once which was crazy where I saw somebody um who was watching a a video on their phone while they were in a McDonald's and they were they were they were watching a a video of a uh like a cow of a a cow and they had a Big Mac on the desk next to him they were eating their Big Mac while they were looking at this cute cow on YouTube and going oh and ah over it you know it's this weird split brain thing goes on in people's brains and everybody does this you know you see a cow you'll be like oh that's so cute you know it's it's lovely you know listen you want to stroke it and all that but then you can just go to McDonald's and pick up a Big Mac and you'll be eating probably it's cousin or something you know so it's like um this weird sort of cognitive distance that we have in our brains and I think that that's only going to be remedied when we no longer uh need to kill animals in order to have food in order to have meat um it's not that we need meat now we can survive without meat although it's not it's not quite as efficient but um I think like if we you know if we could when the time comes when we can actually create burgers in a lap and those Burgers taste just as good as natural Burgers then I think people will actually have more of a motivation to end um suffering and the reason why I think is because we have the president which is that the Industrial Revolution made slavery less necessary in order to maintain the economy um before the Industrial Revolution slavery was kind of needed to maintain the economy and so people did they turned a blind into how horrifically evil it is but it wants the Industrial Revolution came about and the Machinery became available to do the slaves work then people suddenly realized oh we don't need this anymore now we can we have the luxury of being ethical so ethics is to a certain extent a product of luxury um if you look at how history was it was often that way it was often brutal because it had to be brutal in a way and this is something that a lot of people don't like to hear but it's the truth history had to be brutal because there was no alternative at that time and now that we have the luxury of not having to be so brutal looking back at history and seeing how brutal people were makes us recoil in horror how we were but those people who engaged in these barbaric acts they were not any more evil than us they just were living in a in a world that required that kind of brutality unfortunately what's the broader lesson from presentism then so I would say that we need to be careful not to judge people too much and I'm not saying that we should go all moral relativists or anything but we need to take into account what people can do in their lives like for instance um if you look at the Ukraine war the Ukraine war is absolutely brutal you know there's cluster bombs are now being sold and you know there's a lot of very horrific Munitions which cause widespread damage are being used um unfortunately you know it's it's easy to say this is barbarican's evil and it's it's horrible but you've got to look at what what actually are there Alternatives they have to fight with everything they've got because if they don't they're going to die they're going to get killed and so they have to be as brutal as they can possibly be and this is something that a lot of people don't seem to understand it's that you know even the most horrific people and I I don't want to defend people like Assad but I remember that during the Syrian War um Assad was basically being criticized for using um chemical weapons and obviously chemical weapons are absolutely horrific and they're nasty but he was using those weapons because he didn't have uh Precision guided bombs he didn't have the technology that the West has the West can afford to be more Humane in its bombing campaigns because it's got Precision guided Weaponry so it can afford to just Target you know it can actually Target just the the enemy combatants it doesn't need to have civilian casualties but even it does have civilian casualties but it can minimize them somebody like Assad who doesn't have that kind of Technology but who feels in his what he needs to protect his family he needs to win his war from his point of view like I said I don't agree with Assad I don't I think he's horrible human being but from his point of view he needs to win that war so he's going to use what methods are available to him to win that war and that includes using chemical weapons because chemical weapons are very effective and they did prove effective in the Syrian War they managed to clear huge areas from enemy combatants and they were able to kill people behind cover in you know which is what normal Munitions can't do but you know we need to bear in mind that people are only going to behave ethically when it's within their capabilities to do so and it's not always within their capability to do so and people need to realize that this is true of their own selves I think if you eat meat you've got to reckon with the fact that you are engaging in something that is sort of causing a huge amount of suffering to sentient animals and you know I say this is somebody who hasn't eaten meat I try not to eat as much meat as I as I do as I did um I try to eat sort of more you know lower sentience uh animals sort of stuff like shelves all the time yeah yeah I try to eat that a bit more than eating the higher ordered animals but you know even I can't resist a good State now and again but I'm I try not to because even when I do eat steaks I eat sort of animals that have been able to roam the fields and stuff you know I don't eat factory farmed stuff but that's a luxury that's a luxury that I have because I can afford to buy food that's organic um that has you know been allowed to roam free I if I was poor I would have to eat factory farmed animals so I wouldn't judge that person I'm not going to judge somebody because they're they're too poor to eat organic food you know or you know um that food that has welfare standards I'm not going to judge them because they don't have that capability so I think we do need to take into account um I think that's what Chris presentism gives us it gives us the idea that we need to consider the context in which people are unethical because do they actually have the alternative do they have the ability to do otherwise and if they don't then we we need to maybe you know not not be so harsh but I do think I do think people have the ability to not be so evil to animals now so I do judge people um I judge everybody including myself for eating me because I think we're getting to the point now where it's no longer necessary to eat meat we can have uh food that's been grown in a lab and you know I think that if you don't do that then you're essentially quite unethical because you're you're choosing the suffering of an animal over the non-suffering of an animal I learned this from Alex O'Connor five years ago I think maybe four or five years ago and he'd managed to convince me someone that's been a lifelong me teacher and still is that if I do choose to continue to eat meat which I have done uh that I need to reckon with the fact that I'm causing suffering and that you know if I was being fully ethically aligned with my beliefs and my actions that I probably would stop eating meat I would certainly at least reduce it down as much as well this is it strikes me as kind of like path dependence um you know all the vestigial pattern bias this is essentially a kind of instance of that we eat meat today because we've always eaten meat and we don't think about it because we've never thought about it but if it was something that we'd never eaten in our lives if we had gone our whole lives being vegan not knowing the concept of eating other animals then suddenly if a steak was presented in front of us and we were told that this is another living being that that's been slaughtered so that we can eat it I think that would absolutely horrify us so we do it because we've always done it and it's that's why these old habits die hard and I think it will take time for us to adjust to eating lab growing I mean obviously there's all these conspiracy theories now about how lab-grown meat is is going to be pumped full of chemicals that will either sterilize this to reduce the population for or whatever or you know there's going to be all kinds of stuff about that but I mean um you know I'll be I for one would be happy to not have animals suffer anymore in the way that they've been suffered on a scale of hundreds of billions of you yeah over the years so yeah going to Bogle ladies and gentlemen dude I absolutely adore speaking to you every time we do these episodes I leave feeling fired up and and ready to go learn more stuff about the world where should people go if they want to keep up to date with all of the [ __ ] that you're doing yeah so the best thing to do is to just find me on Twitter um probably the best thing to do is just type goinda Twitter into Google that's the easiest way to do it uh or sub stack again you can just type in gowinda sub stack and uh that's where the main places that I'll be found and uh then yeah I might try some other new things soon but I'm not ready to announce them quite yet that's all right dude when you are we will run this back soon enough I appreciate the hell out of you thank you for today yeah thanks Chris it's always a pleasure to be here if you enjoyed that episode then press here for a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last few weeks and don't forget to subscribe