The Unstoppable Power Of A Growth Mindset - Matthew Syed

how do you describe what you do what I do now well it's it's quite uh quite eclectic to be honest I write columns for the times and the Sunday Times two British newspapers uh I have a podcast on BBC Radio 4 which sounds quite establishment doesn't it the the times in the BBC uh I also have a small uh business and write books uh give the occasional uh talk so I've got a um quite a diverse career coming off the back by the way um 20 years or so ago I was a sports person a different sport to you um but I was a ping ponger actually you shouldn't call it ping pong it sounds slightly offensive to people play table tennis because it makes it sound like a kind of like a parlor game like Tiddly Winks um but like that was my main thing for most of my early life table tennis was was was everything until I retired uh in my early 30s and then that led to a career which has been broadly interested in performance and mindset and how we make the most of our Lives is there a a single thread going through that is it Excellence uh sort of the psychological underpinnings of becoming good at doing a thing yeah I I think as I was coming to the end of my table tennis career you know it's very monomaniacal to be the best You Can Be You privilege this rather arbitrary game above everything else and if you don't have that hunger and that uniqueness of discipline you don't really have any chance to win in an internationally competitive environment um but then I I did become curious about what it is about people that helps them to become successful and I'm not saying that I've had uh you know a uniquely successful life or career I hate uh trying to build myself up in in those terms but that I think is the thread I became very interested in whether these um lessons are transferable to things Beyond Sport and trying to learn more after I retired about psychology and culture and teamwork how we evolve as individuals institutions without wanting to sound too Grand how societies evolve and become successful uh so if there is any logic thread then that that's probably it do you think that people outside of the sporting world could learn a lot by treating themselves more like athletes yes and no I mean I think big picture often uh I found that Sports people are invited to go and talk to businesses about the lessons they learned uh and there are certain transferable lessons for sure but what I think I would say now is that businesses often are tackling more complex challenges than sports teams and that sport could probably learn more from business than the other way around um in sport the rules don't tend to change very much uh football is still a game of 11 against 11 as it has been for probably more than a 100 years this is soccer by the way uh crickets rules haven't changed that much whereas in business you're trying to change the rules all the time technology is changing um and there aren't really any rules beyond the legal or potentially Regulatory and so the domain of you know the degrees of freedom I think are higher in business the complexity is higher and therefore some of the challenges that businesses face are I think more interesting and require greater agility than perhaps in sport one of the things that I've been pretty fascinated in learning about from yourself has been failure and how people can learn better from failure how have you come to conceptualize that well the biggest table tennis event of of my career was playing in the Olympic Games in Sydney and the Olympics is is interesting to be in because it's a four-year buildup effectively for just a few days of performance and I was in with an outside chance of winning a medal and the preparation had been excellent we uh went to the Gold Coast for the preparation Camp I had a Leander from Germany as my firstr opponent so we flew two players out to the Gold Coast to spar with in the buildup to the big day both of whom were left-handers and replicated the style I was going to face and the hall had the same floor as the competition venue the level of lighting was the same so we were meticulous in trying to make sure we had everything in place for me to perform and deliver on the day um and I was at threat I was anxious like you would expect uh with all of this buildup but just before I went out to play Peter France of Germany in The Opening match my opening game at the Sydney Olympics the competition venue manager lovely guy called Neil came over and said Matthew I just thought I'd let you know we've heard from the international broadcast Center that this match is going out live on bbc1 which is the biggest channnel in the UK and I was like oh great fantastic um and then my coach Swedish guy uh called Surin said Matthew what happens over the course of the next 40 minutes will determine whether the last four years were a waste of time or not and he he insists to this day that he's trying to Spur me on and motivate me but I remember going out and you there was a megawatt light and I remember looking from behind the on the corridor it was a quite a full Auditorium and I saw some Union Jacks out there and I went out to play we did the warm-up and table tennis is very subtle spin is a very important variable in table tennis and you have to read the spin in order to get the ball back in quite small variations in racket angle can have quite a big magnified effect on where the ball lands and I remember thinking right what I need to do here is I need to get the racket angle absolutely spot on in my first shot in order to get the ball back into play but I was so focused on getting the racket angle right that I wasn't moving my feet I wasn't reading my opponent I wasn't anticipating what he was doing I wasn't thinking strategically and it all fell catastrophically apart I lost the back then table tennis games were up to 21 and I lost the first game 212 this is almost unheard of in Olympic competition and then I lost a second game I think 217 and the dream was over very rapidly in other words I choked I had the classic problem of overthinking one component of the performance and everything else falling apart it can happen you know in a job interview that you're really Keen to get where you just can't get your tongue and mouth and larynx working effectively you can't think of the answer you freeze um and that was a failure in a dramatic and highly humiliating way and it could have been that I thought okay I I don't have what it takes to perform Under Pressure I haven't got the you know the the nerves of Steel that is required and I could have given up putting myself in pressurized situations what I think I learned from that experience is that when it comes to performing under pressure or anything else if you have what I call what's sometimes called a growth mindset a willingness to see failure as an opportunity to learn rather than as evidence you lack some innate gift that means he really oughtn't to bother trying anymore that that can have transformative impact in how you engage with almost everything that happens in life and that redefin that redefinition of failure I think is one of the one of the key attributes for me of life it's odd you know we the last few years the glorification I think this push back against uh Vicor Hood culture against the kind of fragility that everybody's every generation is adamant that the future generation has and it feels like uh maybe it is just more of the same maybe it is whatever history doesn't repeat itself but it Rhymes that uh every generation's consideration of the Next Generation doesn't repeat itself but it Rhymes um and I think that part of that has been trying to find an acceptable Vector to empower future Generations what is it that we can do whether it's Nas t talb with antifragility whether it's Shane Parish teaching people about mental models and about the fundamental attribution era whether it's stuff like Rick and Morty saying your booze mean nothing I've seen what makes you cheer you know lots of different ways to say the social world isn't doesn't care that much about you it's very much about how you deal with setbacks as opposed to how many setbacks that you have resilience and and and the ability to sort of come back from challenges is very important but even with all of that is swimming in this millu of very lovely very positive uh Pro failure messaging I imagine that that doesn't make the experience of failure any more comfortable at the time well that's definitely true and I think it's worth looking at this in a historical context there was something called the self-esteem movement that really originated on the west coast of the United States and then migrated around the world where the idea was you try and protect young people from failure you give them easy success experiences so they get used to succeeding and you praise them lavishly for their talent and they'll develop so much self-esteem they'll be able to go out and change the world and it was great in theory but it failed in practice because if a young person Associates life with being perfect if they're only ever used to succeeding then the first time they fail it can be devastating and the walls of their world can come crumbling down I don't think we want young people to have lots of fragile self-esteem we want them to have I think the word used resilience and that requires giving them difficult challenges early in life so they learn how to fail they learn to as it were extract the lessons that can come from failure and that way they're going to cope much better with a world where failure is baked in because if you think about science and technology you're putting ideas to the world you posit theories and it's when they fail that set sustain stage for growth you create a prototype and you test it early to find out where it's not working as well as it could do and that enables you to improve we when we perform experiments if we know the result of the experiment before we conduct it it is not an experiment it a waste of time there has to be a tolerance for failure when we're seeking to innovate and to the extent that we don't wish to fail that our self-esteem is bound up with being perfect we don't take the risks that are at the absolute heart of how we develop as individuals how science grows how institutions get better so I think there was a fundamental uh era in the 1970s of which Echo still exist in society but I think it's worth saying uh Chris if I if I may that I don't think we should fetishize failure in a certain sense I think we need to be sophisticated about how we think about it you know if I'm on a flight you know I flew back from Washington DC on on Sunday just before we're we're speaking today I wouldn't want the pilot to think okay I'm going to try something new on the Final Approach I'm going to try new I'm going to try a new lever crashes a plane kills all the passengers and we say yeah great you know that's crazy what would we want a pilot to do if he or she had a hunch that trying something new in the cockpit would improve the safety of the aircraft as as you doubtless say you want to test in a simulator that way you're getting all the benefits from failing without any doubt side risk for anyone if it's a sufficiently high fidelity simulator um I think what we're trying to do when we fail in The Innovation space is try and surf the tradeoff between the massive blessings that are conferred from learning from failure while minimizing the downside risk and it's that strategic lens that we have to apply because you know a retail company that had a hunch that you know changing the configuration of shelves might improve customer experience they wouldn't bet the whole equity on it they'd want to test it in a pilot scheme but what I found in my you know foray into business is that it's very easy to try and test it in the most conducive conditions with the best store manager the best loc but you're not learning anything you're trying to corroborate the hypothesis whereas you test it in tough conditions you learn so much more there's a I know I'm going on here but EO Wilson who I think is one of the Great polyic intellects of the 20th century he was someone who's interested in insect Behavior but wrote beautifully about society and and and human behavior said you test a trivial Theory you get a trivial answer what we should be doing is testing ourselves our theories our prototypes um in in tough empowering environments so that we gain the most learning we can and so long as we're resilient to the failure is that are a part of life in learning that's how we drive progress in almost all of its uh dimensions a lot of friends from the UK have moved out to Dubai and it's a um zero tax High Sun lots of fun place for people to go and move especially young people that haven't got any responsibilities yet and uh a lot of the time you go away and holiday to a place and you have this phenomenal time uh but I think that judging whether or not I mean how many times have you been on a holiday and someone decides to Proclaim over dinner I could move here I could live I would I would love I I'd move here tomorrow um but they are the new shelf strategy being deployed in the best area with the best manager so my advice to anybody before they move anywhere is go during the shittest season ask reliably when is the worst weather too hot or too cold or too wet or too dark or something and go and work don't allow yourself to be inflated by there's a festival on and this DJ that I love and we're going to go and see this comedy show or whatever it's like no no no no you want to can I survive in this new environment as [ __ ] as it's going to become at the shittest it could be and if I still am like yep Bravo it's better than where I am at the moment then good um going back to this whole self-esteem movement I I have spent an awful lot of time thinking about the real fundamental sort of pinnings of confidence self-esteem self-belief what have you learned from a a scientific psychological lens about the component parts of where self-esteem self-belief genuinely come from I still think it's an open question um I do think that certain types of ways of thinking about self-esteem can be quite dangerous and self-defeating um I'm not sure that self-esteem is as great as it's cracked up to be I think if we my own View and my life is far from I'm 53 I I fail a lot with my kids one of them sitting next door watching Rocky four Rocky 4 at that sounds like a success to me personally the only thing that worried me is when we watch Rocky one 2 and three I thought Rocky 3 was the weakest and my son 10-year-old thought Rocky 3 was the best so that that was slightly disappointing you're concerned about his fledgling career as a film critic perhaps going down director even the ambitious father I'm kidding on Master Sayad do do you remember Rocky Rocky 3 was the one with Clubber Lang Mr T yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah you you've watched it I thought Rocky one was so great well it it descended into parody briefly right and I think Rocky 4 is particularly perodic if if that is a word um and cliched the the first one was brilliant I'm going to I've got to I've got to teach you about this and we'll come back to the self-esteem thing in a second so uh I got taught by a film critic big film critic on on YouTube called the critical Drinker swey Scottish man who who's very very cool um and he explained to me the life cycle of movies and franchises and and sort of uh sub uh genres in that regard uh and you get um introduction you get growth you get maturity and then you get parody and parody is the final stage so a good example of this would be the Marvel Cinematic Universe uh you get Captain America and Iron Man it's kind of revolutionary it's like sexy as a superhero thing it's sort of witty and cool it's not as dark or as serious as Batman in the DC Universe was trying to make things and then you get growth and that's where it starts to establish itself and you sort of you know it's uh Captain America Winter Soldier it's the number two and number three Iron Man they start to sort of um create a trend but things are still growing then they get into maturity that's when you talking like Avengers end game Infinity Wars stuff like that you you kind it's like a comfortable leather pair of shoes you know the Rhythm you know the Cadence it's like ah this is where it's going to be but then you get to parody and parody would be a great example of this would be the most recent Thor movie where Thor is no longer the hero he's the butt of all of the jokes you've taken the established archetypes and cliches that you've created and you use them it's a meta nothing is about what the movie is it's all a meta commentary about the clich of the movie It's these sort of stories within stories and stories about stories and it's him doing the jeanclaude vanam splits across two dragons and it's him being a big oath he's never competent he's never cool he's never sexy he sort of Falls flat on his face and only makes success sort of in reference to previous success and stuff but uh yeah I think you can tell when any individual Creator commentator genre movie series is on the decline when you get to parody but don't you think look that's a brilliant and compelling analysis and I don't think it's unreasonable to say that civilizations follow a not completely dissimilar path and the um work that's been done on the creative world I guess you could apply it to musicians couldn't you who plow a particular fough become highly successful but then stay within that that part of the fitness landscape and then start losing popularity because others are copying or they become cliched and what they're doing I think it's interesting that those um it's quite rare but music writers who are successful in um over many decades refresh so they bring people with a different point of view a different perspective they leverage diversity of thought in order to as it were move from where they were but to connect what they knew with new information in new ideas they create a new synthesis that avoids the cliche um I mean in a funny kind of way it goes back to what we're talking about before uh about self-esteem you can sort of imagine that if you see Life as a journey rather than as a somewhere to arrive as a destination then the way one thinks about mistakes the way one thinks about perfection is different because each time you get somewhere you think of it as a staging post to somewhere potentially new why would you want to stay within the domain that one has already created creatively and go back to films why not think about how one can move somewhere else but it's easy I think when one is successful to um to stay within one's comfort zone you have lots to lose now you've got lots to lose people are very differential uh people are looking up to you um and so the idea of taking a risk which is as we I think agreed earlier part and parcel of how one innovates becomes often tougher and I think you see that in business where complacency um and comfort you Sir Alex Ferguson a famous football manager described complacency as a virus and I think it it is something that can subvert the idea of having that pioneering sense of I now want to continue on this wonderful Journey we only get one and then it ends why stay uh where one is particularly if one's self-esteem that's what worries me about self-esteem can be bound up with uh looking and sounding perfect so I think one of the I love that I love that idea and it makes me when I hear stories like that when I'm reminded of the fact that life is a hypothesis to be tested not an argument to be proved I'm just going to keep on sort of testing these things I'm going to keep on isn't that interesting I'm playing not taking things too seriously I can feel my body downregulate it's like a parasympathetic Mantra of some kind but we can't deny the fact that humans need validation social acceptance they want prestige in the eyes of people that are around them and most of the time that involves doing something in some form impressive or competent or admirable or whatever and how do you get there you get there by finding a thing that works and then rinsing the living [ __ ] out of it and doing it over and over again at least if you have a risk averse uh mindset because you know this thing works even a little bit and you have no evidence that the new thing works quite as well yeah that's definitely true and perhaps a distinction we might make is between exploit and explore if if you have a solution even if it's a can solution to a problem and you can keep exploiting it again and again keep producing that car of the right size and dimensionality or keep giving a podcast formula that's working you can exploit The Living Daylights out of it but if it the risk of course is that people will get bored of what you're producing but let's say they're not getting bored all it takes is one person in a highly diverse Market to innovate and they can potentially take the market away or a new technology that one could be using to make that formula even more exploitable you might be Miss so only ever exploiting and not exploring seems to be a recipe for stagnation potentially except in some very unusual ecosystems I think the faster the world is changing the the more the division between exploit and explore should be moved in the direction of explore and it I suppose the only thing I'd otherwise add is that as we kind of discussed the comfort zone is in the exploit doing what we knew worked it it's a bit more comfortable and therefore you know being sufficiently tough to say hang on we need to explore a bit more you know the classic example forgive me uh of Blockbuster Video exploiting the hell out of uh of VHS vide tapes when the world is changing that's a recipe for nons survival in the marketplace yeah how can people have a better relationship with the fear of risk which I think is fear of failure masquerading with a slightly nicer sounding word how can they sort of re reframe that experience because it's all well and good and how many times have people heard it's not about the destination it's the journey it's not about how many times you get knocked down but how many times you get up you we can sort of Mantra our way through this as much as possible have you found anything tangible tacit tactical that people can be like yes that's a thing is a thing that I can use that can help me to overcome that in moment fear of risk fear of novelty fear of failure Well we I'm very interested in this concept that I I think alluded to earlier of growth mindset growth mindset I think is a tremendous asset give one quick example I don't think I've mentioned it so far but I I when I was dropping down the world rankings at table I'm still the number one in England um but I'm moving down the world rankings and I realize I'm going to have have to reinvent so I I did something that uh some of the older British viewers or listeners will know what I'm talking about I phone directory inquirers and this is uh you Chris do you know what that is by the way yeah it was you it was kind of like the Yellow Pages but on the phone is that right exactly exactly so problem a lots of Americans listen to the show and they won't know do they have yellow pages over here maybe they do anyway it was like a directory it's like a local directory for businesses and and stuff yeah you you'd phone it if you wanted to get the telephone number of a company uh in the sort of pre- Internet days so I phon 192 and got the telephone numbers of the times in Guardian two English newspapers and I I phoned and phoned and phoned and I eventually got through to the sports editor of the times David Chapel uh this is in 1999 I said look would it be possible to write for the sports pages of the time um it's Matthew side here I said you know British number one table tennis player and he said I've never heard of you which was a slightly disappointing start start the conversation but he said look this will tell you how long ago it was he said could you fax in some ideas so I went and bought a fax machine faxed in some ideas um and kept faxing articles until eventually one got published in May 1999 um and that was thrilling because I didn't think I'd ever be published in in the Times newspaper uh went and bought about 10 copies from the local news agents have you still got copy lying around somewhere I do I do and a folder upstairs terrible this is when it was broad sheet these huge huge newspapers like not like the the tabloids today um but an unintended side effect of this is I get a call from Goldman Sach uh the Investment Bank saying look we've we've read your article we thought it was great would you come in and give a talk to our top Traders and at our conferencing floor in Fleet Street and I went to Chris a comp a comprehensive school so this is a you know a state school it's not like or orrow you know completely banded comprehensive in Suburban reading which is about 40 miles west of London we didn't do any public speaking at school you know there was no debate in society believe it or not Chris the the the press conferences in pingpong were not that well attended so so I'd done I'd done no public speaking so you can I had had the practice I hadn't failed at speaking I hadn't had the chance to develop my speaking ability my communication skills so I remember going very nervous I prepared hard but I was tremendously nervous and I gave uh I gave the talk um and it wasn't great and I got heckled about 2third of the way through and I remember my first reaction was a fixed mindset response you know I obviously don't have the talent for this if I'm ever invited again by a big company I I'll politely decline but then I thought no let's have a growth mindset response to this maybe I could improve and I got a friend to to look into public speaking practice it's sort of early Yahoo search and the top uh response was Toast Masters which is a Global Network of public speaking clubs and the nearest one to me in Southwest London and Richmond where I'm still living today was in Twickenham a room in a place called York house that was hired by toart 10 or 15 people trying to improve their communication and their social confidence and it's a wonderful thing you go and if you're lucky enough to get on the program you give a talk the first one you ever give is called the ice Breer where you tell the group about yourself but you're trying to handle your anxiety you stood in front of 10 or 15 people judging you as inevitably happens when you're in front of a room and you're trying to communicate to them and you're learning how to handle the anxiety and how to I wanted to learn to speak without notes and then at the end of it someone at Toast Masters always comes to the front and gives you feedback and a rule is they have to give you at least one criticism fantastic you're finding out what you could do differently and better you know if you think of Life as a hypothesis rather than as an argument that needs to be how did you put it corroborated I think that's a wonderful way of thinking about it um then there's some spontaneous speaking two-third of the way through where you you whoever's hosting for the night writes a set of topics on cards the name's go in a hat and they pick out a name Matthew you have to go to the front pick up the card and extemporize on it immediately for 60 seconds the first time you do it it's terrifying but because I was passionate about journalism and I thought I'm going to have to give the occasional talk I'd love to be able to communicate by the way I might get invited on The Today program or the BBC News and being able to think on one's feet is something that will be of tremendous value a fantastic asset but the point of this isn't to say I'm the best Communicator in the world because I'm I'm I know that I'm not the best Communicator in the world I go to conferences where there are off the scale communicators but what it means is you get to be the best that you can be you reach the summit of your potential and if it's something you care about it's something that has a purpose view I think that's an incredibly empowering thing and that's why I think you said practical tips you can measure yourself on growth mindset and sometimes people are fixed they're a bit worried about trying new things about collaborating with people they don't know about leaving their comfort zone and it's about liberating us from some of the unconscious constraints we can place on ourselves so that we can just live that life is a hypothesis I you know love that formulation yeah I remember I started doing some striking boxing and my ey and stuff I went out to Thailand for a summer and and fought out there and the first the most important lesson that novice Fighters learn according to the coach the first coach that I had was you're not made of glass when someone punches you in the face and it always sticks with me that because you you can see somebody that isn't used to necessarily being in a ring and sort of when punches get thrown there's like a that even if it's not much of a Flinch even if it's not the whole body there's a a closing of the eyes and then there's that really famous sequence of Conor McGregor winning the lightweight title against Eddie Alvarez and Alvarez throws this big overhand sort of looping uh right like that and it his knuckles touch the end of Conor McGregor's nose and Conor watches this thing come in the hallway [ __ ] just watches it glance off the bottom of his nose and then just un it's one of the most beautiful sequences of striking his then counter it's like five punches punctuated with two kick it's gorgeous it's beautiful and then Eddie just hits the floor and that's how he finishes it and that's how he becomes the UFC's first double Champion right just phenomenal like beautiful gorgeous story but it makes me think about learning that you're not made of glass right you're not when and that failure is again it's hard it's hard we can talk about it and everyone that's listening is go you rationally that makes sense and then the the swell of fear inside of them just one other point that's I guess kind of salient I'm going to uh Australia to do a live tour I've got this live show thing so not too dissimilar to your speaking although hopefully less heckling and I've been doing work in progress shows in Austin uh at a comedy club East of town and it's very small 40 people rooms like it kind of basically invite only on a mailing list and um the first week that I went out I was R really really really rusty I was like oh this isn't good then the second week I had Stella before I was like that's nine 10 out of 10 well I haven't lost it fantastic so last night was my final work in progress show and I thought okay I know I've got the one that I need to do in the tank which was the second one why don't I just try and be as experimental evening as possible more jokes new stories trying to weave things in a different way cutting out the bits that I think kind of probably don't need to be there but that I rely on because they feel safe because I've run them 30 times before or whatever it might be and uh last night as I was going out there I've got some jokes in there that didn't land they were too complex they were too like trying to be too clever uh and usually you have that especially trying to tell jokes in front of a group of people you feel like oh my God you sort of the inner British cringe meter the to curl inside of your trainers um but because I'd entered into that environment as this is a hypothesis to be tested as opposed to something to be proved I just had this like ah well if it doesn't work great because it means I'm not going to use it in front of three and a half thousand people in London that's so interesting because one of the other things um but first of all I I love I love that story because I used to do a podcast the the one successful podcast that I that I did I I shouldn't say that the BBC podcast of sideways is doing okay but was with two other sports people Fred flintoff who is a cricketer former England cricket captain and Robbie Savage uh who is a soccer player and it was called imaginatively flintoff Savage and the pingpong guy and it was it was a surprise smash it was a surprise smash it it did really really well and um two two things struck me about it the one that I think was really interesting is flintoff um was worried he was a bit self-conscious before a microphone or in front of a camera and that's very easy to be if anyone's ever had a you know an an iPhone pointed at them they're talking naturally and suddenly it's like oh I think that's quite a natural reaction might as well be the barrel of a gun yeah exactly um and flintoff he said uh we did one of the podcast and I said what are you up to next week he said I'm on a a tour of provincial theaters and I'm doing this um musical he was in like pantomime type stuff for a while right right and I said what are you doing he said well I'm not getting paid very much at all but if I'm going to stand in front of an audience dressed up and singing my heart out that's going to help me lose my self-consciousness and I really want to go into broadcasting I want to be a success and this is just a way of learning how to do it and he went on this tour and it wasn't long after that he got a really good gig in television the presenter of Top Gear I mean sadly he he um had an accident during Top Gear uh and it's been very difficult for him but I watch him as a broadcaster now I don't know if you saw any of the series where he went on um he went to Preston where he grew up quite a rough part of a northern English town and worked with well you'll know about this right this wonderful series about young cricketers and then he took them to India and just seeing him flourish I think he's got a wonderful wonderful growth mindset just a tremendous person one of the uh other areas of your work which I think ties in with this quite nicely is this tension between deliberate practice 10,000 hour rule time and detention and genetics Talent Advantage something innate predisposition almost predetermination I guess for the absolute magic athletes amongst us where do you stand now after spending two careers uh in in one form or another thinking about this where do you stand on 10,000 hour rule versus genetics Talent advantages Etc well um I don't think my views have changed that much on this I think that my experience in table tennis was for people to say when they saw me playing well you've got to give you must have been born with extraordinary reaction speeds and athleticism but they hadn't seen the hidden story which was I grew up I mentioned in reading but on the street that I grew up on it had 50% of the top table tennis players in Britain this is from a population of about a million recreational players so I had a series of advantages in addition probably to pretty good genes too which was um my parents bought a table for the garage when I was about eight so I'm practicing like crazy with my brother who was two years older and better than me so I'm getting stretched the whole time I'm losing a lot and learning a lot um then the school teacher at the primary school that I went to and reading which was on the road that had all the top players Silverdale Road was the best coach in Britain Peter Charters um and he invited me and my brother some other young players to a club that was open 24 hours a day you just had a set of keys and you could let yourself in and practice before school after school holidays and weekends so did I have genes that were conducive to Table Tennis yes but are there other crucial factors in explaining what enabled me to get to the top absolutely and the relationship between the contribution of genes and the contribution of luck environment circumstance probably changes depending on the activity to be good at basketball you definitely need to be I guess reasonably tall that's highly uh genetically mediated um uh there's probably other area other areas where the genetic contribution may be a little bit less but typically I would suggest it's a multifactorial um phenomenon where you really need to have the perfect storm of lots of different things happening at the same time do you know the fine-tuned theory of the universe you familiar with this yeah yeah so it sounds to me like uh your table tennis career was sort of not too dissimilar to that so for the people that don't know there's a I know it's like 10 10 different numbers 10 different forces relationship between the strong and weak nuclear force electromagnetic gravity uh this sort of weird uh cosmological constant like very slight bit of expansion that's going on and all of these things uh if only they were out by some absurdly small fraction of a lot of different numbers the uh meal that was created from the ingredients would not be a universe conducive to having matter it would have clumped together because gravity was too strong or it would have blasted apart because it was too weak or heavier atoms heavier elements would have been able to form for whatever reason and uh I I I always think about that I've got Brian Cox uh fellow coming on the showell soon I I I think this is sometimes cited by religious people as an argument for the existence of God under the rubric of the weak anthropic principle just one thing I'd throw into the mix Chris is is um explaining it in that way I think is is completely valid and if your goal is to become the best table tennis player say an England and that anything else is just a disaster then you really want to have all of those ingredients in order to bother making the attempt to use the limited time on Earth Earth to get there in a zero sum environment if we all improve by 10% the relative rankings remain the same and if you're only interested in the relative ranking that's something that one needs to bear in mind but my sense is that in many things in life it's a positive sum game if you and I and lots of other people improve our ability to communicate that's good for us probably good for the institutions we work at and good for the society if people have a growth mindset attitude towards mathematics and we'll become more numerate that's great for us and it's great for society um and for what it's worth even though sport is often pictured as a zero sum environment no matter how much people improve at table tennis there's only one person who can win the gold at the Olympics every four years the Journey of trying to be the best that you can be even if it doesn't mean that you're the best in the world is a fascinating and and often very beautiful one and I worry a bit and you'll be more connected to this um than perhaps I am is said occasionally I heard PE people saying you know what what's the point of being the best you can be why not just Coast in life quiet quitting just doing the minimum my sense from the evidence is that's a much less satisfying life than one where you're passionate about something you try and be the best that you can be you make a bigger contribution to the company to yourself to the society and I think the dynamical power of that when you scale it through a society is is tremendous and I think it does explain um certain Trends in history are you familiar with Asia Bin's idea of the inner Citadel no this is I I'm a big admirer of Berlin and have read the Hedgehog in the fox and two concepts of Liberty but go go on let me Citadel the inner Citadel when the natural Road toward human fulfillment is blocked human beings Retreat into themselves become involved in themselves and try to create inwardly that world which some evil Fate has denied them externally if you cannot obtain from the world that which you really desire you must teach yourself not to want it if you cannot get what you want you must teach yourself to want what you can get this is a very frequent form of spiritual retreat in depth into a kind of inoc cadel in which you try to lock yourself up against all the fearful ills of the world the friend explained it in a simple way if your leg is wounded you can try to treat the leg and if you can't then you cut off your leg and announce that the desire for legs is misguided and must be subdued basically if you can't win at a game you stop playing say that you never cared about the game and create your own game with rules which you can win more easily at well that's a in Psychology it's often goes under thank you by the way it's really interesting Berlin was such a w when I was at o I was at a college called bael and I remember um Berlin walking through the the the back quad no way yeah and he he was a I I I knew people who knew Berlin um I didn't agree with everything he wrote about philosophically but he was such a Humane and rounded thinker which isn't often the often always the way in Academia um but but a great great person but in Psychology for what it's worth there is a phenomenon called self self handicapping where if people are in a fixed think of a young person in a bit of a fixed mindset they want to be perfect and the self-esteem is bound up with being pretty perfect and they have an exam for the piano let's say they love the piano they've got an exam next week and I think most parents will have seen this at one time or another with their kids suddenly the kid stops practicing and you're like what why are they not practicing they got the exam next week they love the piano and what's often happening is that they're so worried about the possibility they might fail in the exam they want to create proactively an excuse that they can point to in the event of failure in other words if I don't practice if I said I'm not bothered about it if I deliberately go out and get drunk the night before I saw that in finals by the way at Oxford some people this is like three years of work for the exam which is the only thing that determines your grade and I'm not saying grades important exams are important but these people actually did care about their exams but they were so worried about failing and that it would call into question their intellect they wanted to be able to say you know what I got drunk the night before they actually made the outcome that they most feared more likely as a consequence of what you're describing and I think that is not dissimilar to The Retreat into the in a cadel I think it has very similar underlying psychological Dynamics well in that way the upside of never trying is never having to feel the pain of failure exactly you avoid public failure by assuring failure privately so you mentioned before we got started uh you've done your research I was impressed um I was a cricketer that was what I dedicated my teenage years to uh and for the people that kind of know how the CR cricket season Works um especially as a a junior you can play you know under 15s under 17s maybe a Saturday game as you start to play adults and a Sunday game too plus you're netting two or three times a week so this is a seven it's a full-time job alongside going to school or whatever and uh there was a period toward the end of my teens where I did that purposeful handicapping what was it called self-handicapping self-handicapping so um I would be called by the uh head of Durham Academy Cricket on a on a Monday he'd ring me every Monday he'd ask I get on because I wasn't placed by uh the Academy I hadn't been placed in a team I was playing for the club that I'd always grown up playing for and he would ask how I'd got on and I knew he was going to ask and I was so worried about not performing that I was a leg spinner right again for the non crickety inducted it's a unique form of bowling the conditions need to be very specific the uh position of the game needs to be very specific as well it's kind of high risk but it's also potentially High reward it's very complex anyway I often had what was called a TFC a thanks for coming which is where you don't bat and you don't bowl because I'd be batting you know seven or8 and uh the bowling um offering that I had was very bespoke very very specific and often the conditions wouldn't uh lend itself to that especially being up north it was raining a lot it was you know pitches were wet Etc and uh there was this oddd degree of satisfaction that I would have when I ended up having a TFC that I knew when I got to speak to Jeff or John on a Monday that I was able to say you know I just really I I just didn't get the opportunity like I really wanted kind of the opportunity to do this thing I didn't in some ways because I was scared of doing it and by being tested finding myself coming up short that if I'd been handed the ball and I wanted to and it's this odd duality you know one week I was braver and I just [ __ ] really wanted the captain and maybe even try and push him a little bit and nudge him and be like look I've got this like put me in coach so to speak um but then other ones on my you know my weaker more um fragile sort of mental weeks where I didn't have that same amount of confidence in myself there would be this sort of bizarre melancholic satisfaction that uh I didn't get the opportunity to succeed but at least I didn't have to have the threat of failure and I think it's yeah it's really interesting Chris I think it's worth saying that um I I I should have perap said this earlier it is understandable uh not wanting to fail and I think it's perhaps even more understandable in the digital age where often people can post pictures that makes their life look pretty perfect and airbrush photographs and if young people look at that and think life is about looking and acting perfectly you can see why it becomes more difficult to take the risks that I think we both agree are so important for for growth in life the quote that I think you might like is JK Rowling um this is her 2008 Harvard Commencement Address somebody I admire very much it is impossible to live without failing at something unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all in which case you fail by default yeah beautiful I mean what a one other thing I'll just throw in Chris if I may you may um something I've become very interested in um and might form my next book have you heard of the concept of time preference no th this is um if I asked you would you rather have uh1 or $100 now or 200 in a year's time oh like hyperbolic discounting in a way yeah exactly exactly the yeah that's another way of describing the discount rate um and humans do tend to Discount hyperbolically which is not dissimilar to other other organisms we tend to want to have the immediate gain even if we could have more in the future but of course in life we need to invest in order to gain more in the long term you know we save we get compound interest in order to be fit we have to turn down the instant gratification of watching the movie and go for a run which is more painful in the present but if we always prioritize now over the future the chocolate over the run the lying down rather than the training the Netflix rather than the homework the consuming rather than the investing over the course of a life it is crippling for a society it's disastrous because you can't have economic growth without the willingness to defer gratification but if you defer today and you get more in the next period and then you defer again you're constantly growing your life and I think my hunch is it's not well studied actually in economics are quite interested in the discount rate and hyperbolic discounting it's quite a literature in Psychology they're interested in self-control and certain types of habit formation as a way of enabling you to do what's good in the long term and overcoming the tempt not to do in the short but I don't think there's a sufficiently good integration between these two things and my sense is that for societ for individuals and for societies reducing time preference in other words seeing the long term and deferring gratification is absolutely Central and that there are people and there may be people listening who can do do it in one part of life but not in others probably familiar with the NFL players who must have had incredible discipline in order to be successful in a highly competitive sport but a not in significant proportion go bankrupt within a few years of retiring they show that discipline that long-termism that deferment of gratification in their sport but when it comes to the money they've got it all at the end of their career they they'll blow it and then they'll blow up now this I think is quite pervasive so when I talked about growth mindset I I you know I think it's great to be able to apply it more broadly in one's life rather than just necessarily to one thing I think you have a better life a better Adventure a better Journey a better um uh period of hypothesis testing if you're able to be low time preference in a more generalized way and if you're I know you're interested in politics I've been listening to some of your podcasts today I think if you look at Western Civilization as a whole you can explain the key Dynamics through this prism how so well um I I I hope it's not controversial to say that the West Was something of a a Backwater for many thousands of years um and was not the center of innovation and creativity for much of the period that we sometimes call the Dark Ages um but that the West took off in the early modern period and became the dominant e ecomic and cultural power on Earth this is sometimes as you know called the Great Divergence between the west and the rest now what is the explanation for this now historians have sought for a very long time to explain the rise of the West you've interviewed one of the great thinkers in this space Joseph Henrik of Harvard University who explains this Divergence through the ban on cousin marriage that across the world you had tribal societies and it's great having a tribe you know you're working together with your kin um in order to do things but it also can restrict the success of a society because if you have lots of different tribes within a given geographical area they're often fighting with each other and don't trust each other and the Roman Catholic ban on cousin marriage which went up to six cousins I think by the 10th Century effectively forced people to marry outside the tribe rather than within the cousin group so you dissolve the tribes and create a national identity and it drives Innovation and change and I think this is a great argument but he also mentions in his book the weirdest people in the world something that I think has been underplayed which is over the course of the Middle Ages partly because of what I've already mentioned about the breakdown in the tribal structures the interest rate in England drops dramatically between about a, ad and 1500 you can think of the interest rate as the society's time preference if that makes sense if if you require 20% interest in order to save you're somebody who's more interested in now than later but can you see that makes it difficult to save and invest and do great things but the interest rate uh dropped from 20 30% in England to 5% by 1500 and I think and I there are some economists who agree with this that Western Europe was becoming more patient puritanism the Protestant work ethic these came later of course um the bouro values of prudence and self-restraint the industrious Revolution this is all indicative of Western Consciousness prioritizing more than other parts of the world the future above the present allowing for cumulative compound economic growth that eventually takes off during the Industrial Revolution now I think if I'm not sending you to sleep yet Chris that there is a reversal in about 1970 where I think Western Civilization started becoming less patient there was an advert for a credit card called access one of the first two credit cards which said access takes the waiting out of wanting in other words spend now don't worry about the future let it look after itself I think this came out in 1972 but if you look at England between 1670 and 1970 there was never a fiscal deficit outside a major war ever because they're saving for a rainy day during this period since 1970 the British government has run deficits every year bar five they're trying to consume and that means that the national debt is rising to now above 100% of GDP America is maybe even a better example where there has been a deficit every year bar four we're talking a few days out from the presidential election both Trump and Harris promising huge deficits according to the Congressional office for I think it's called budget responsibility Trump will add they say on their Central estimate 7.5 trillion to the debt Harris 3.5 trillion two sides of the same coin because the public is not willing to hear that it's no good consuming now because we're putting problems onto future Generations where it will become Starker and starer isn't it is it's so interesting this has happened when life EXP expectancy has been going up as well you know from 1670 to 1970 over that time you have ever more reason yeah one of the arguments for hyperbolic discounting is that if you're in a uh High volatility environment all well and good maybe getting $200 in a year's time but you don't know if you're going to be here in in a year's time you know that you're here right now and you know that it's $100 that's exactly correct so a lot of economists argue that uh time preference it's not a great phrase we need to come out with a need to be remed y exactly if You' got any good ideas I'd love love to hear it but it's partly to do with life expectancy certain sections of American society have suffered a reduction in life expectancy but on average as you say it has gone up so there has to be an alternative explanation by the way quantitative easing is another example of this you're printing money enabling consumption to continue in the here and now but you're storing up lots of long long term problems with capital misallocation asset price inflation making difficult for younger people to get on the housing ladder that has been a disaster I think um and and in some ways that was permitted by coming off the gold standard um complicated story in itself but I do Wonder Chris if the self-esteem movement comes from the same basic place that we want kids to succeed because it's so nice in the Here and Now give them lots of success experiences but what does it mean you're depriving them of the resilience that is necessary for longterm growth and an interesting life grade inflation and education starts taking off in the 1970s it's lovely to get a grade A and the here and now but if everyone's getting a grade day you can't really you're devaluing the currency of all exams and I do wonder if part of the and I'm only going to say this tentatively part of the Mental Health crisis that we're seeing is if one is feeling anxious it's quite nice to get a label in the Here and Now M for why that is being um why you're not feeling great um but if everyone or or ever higher proportion have mental health issues for which they have a label it makes it very difficult to provide the psychological support for the people who are the most so the most needy I could give you other examples Chris but what fascinates me is that many if not all of these start to change around 197 70 fiscal monetary policy the self-esteem movement um uh mental health issues I have a whole list of these things and I'm trying to drill down at the moment into seeing whether or not one can provide a convincing unifying explanation for all this that that doesn't diverge too far from but it does a bit from henrik's analysis very interesting have you got a potential overarching Dynamic that's I think explanation is complacency the West has been near the this is my tentative explanation if you think about Rome um Ancient Rome or many other civilizations when they've been at the top for all all your creative people doing their movie franchises you've been at the top for a while your expectations of your consumption start to rise but it becomes less easy to as it were absorb the necessary costs in order for that to continue and if you think about Rome um you know they devalued they they effectively had a you know 97 to 100% silver in the Denarius and they just cut it they debase the currency and it led to inflation um and Gibbon the historian argues about this complacency this decadence that had set in and I think it as I say it's attentive explanation but the period of Western dominance I think is now at a place where people have expectations that have run ahead of our material capacity to meet them which means we're effectively borrowing for the future to continue consuming now storing up the problems that we're now facing ever more the crisis will get bigger as we continue to build the deficits continue with the QE continue with diagnosing everyone or an Ever growing population of people with mental illness higher grade inflation and so on and then when you fold birth rate decline on top of this uh you know it's a very unpopular it's a very I'm aware that I I keep banging this drum and I have done for a long time uh but this week it's actually Justified because the UK I'm sure that you saw the Census Data just came out 1.4 uh is the birth rate for the UK which means that for every hundred British people today there will be 30 great grandchildren or 36 I think so you're talking about a 60% Extinction rate within a 100 years which is wild and then on top of that let's consider and this always comes from like I often get slime thrown at me that this is like some Trad conon you need to go back to being an armish version of a person like talking point but almost everybody agrees that economic Pro prosperity and helping to raise up the lower classes is something that's good I know that you spent a good bit of time in my hometown of Middlesboro uh along maybe a while ago but um you know that's the most spit and sawdust Rough Around the Edges Northern British town that you're going to find it's like the quintessential sort of Northern British Town everybody believes that we should be raising them up where's that going to come from well it's probably going to come from spending it's going to come from economic uh Freedom Independence the opportunity to invest in the places that need it tell me how we are going to overcome not only this deficit not only this sort of cultural predisposition that we have now which I think you're right which is this um kind of like a sense of honic entitlement uh Financial entitlement uh uh uh life Mastery in many ways and uh how are we going to do that when you've got less than half of the workforce I mean Ai and Robotics are going to have to carry an awful lot of that productivity burden and maybe they can which is great but I don't know I we we have enough room for the people so it seems like a shame to get rid of them just one other bit on that I've thought about this an awful lot may add something to your notion or fledgling hypothesis which is I think that the Scientific Revolution and the Advent of rationality in technology has an awful lot to answer for here because it it made a lot of promises that it was able to deliver on in many ways that are objective and in almost no ways that are subjective so um I can tell you what the weather's going to be like in Venezuela in 5 days time but I can't guarantee that I'm not going to get cancer I can't guarantee that a car is not going to hit me as I step out into the street and maybe you know given uh AI informed medicine and autonomous driving vehicles and all the rest of it maybe this is simply just a a slightly more protracted timeline line and we're in some sort of messy middle like Dark Age technological Dark Age at the moment and at some point we'll reach maybe within two three decades we'll have reached sort of full technological maturity and will have mastered most of the problems that people are feeling but right now what we have is I was promised or I feel like we know so much about the world why do I encounter challenges these feel more malignant you know if if one in two or one in three children of every couple that you know die before age one or die in child birth because it's 1,400 Yugoslavia or something and you're a surf what well what sort of degree of entitlement do you have what sort of Mastery do you think that you're supposed to get from the world but when all of the time all you're seeing is that we've got these advances and we're sending ships to Rocket and we can catch them in a pair of tweezers and we can do all of this stuff I think it sets humans up for an area that as yet we haven't been able to create Mastery in which is the subjective the meaning the day-to-day experience of of the human so I think that there is a uh tension and a contrast uh like having one hand in hot water one hand in cold water and then putting them both into lukewarm water and they both feel different things coming from two different worlds one being the objective one being the subjective one being being science the other being feeling and um you're not getting what you were promised uh from from one that the other can deliver yeah I I I um I think it's perhaps I I would say in response to that that you know Middlesboro which I knew well there was there was a table tennis hot bed back in the day the Ormsby Table Tennis Club run by Al I've been to I know Alan Ransom I grew up I grew up playing squash around Alan Ranson Alan Ransom now this is somebody that that people ought to know he's the table tennis Guru I mean he's quite old now but he ran that wonderful club and he had a he had a sports um equipment business you probably got you did you get your I I used to get my I used to get my cricket bats from Alan ransom's place just uh just around the corner from the Crown Pub in uh Middlesboro see that was not a topic I was expecting to talk about today but Alan Ransom I'm glad he's got in I'm glad he's got in but middlesbor um or anywhere else I I if people think to themselves you know it does feel quite pinched at the moment it's difficult to get on the housing ladder um I feel that my parents had it a bit easier than we're having it I think they're right I think that's a fair thing to say but it's a consequence of many years of putting the now above the future at the level of society and that becomes more and more cumulatively difficult so in the British general election not dissimilar to the US election no one talked about the debt uh both parties made promises that were completely fictitious because they knew that if they said the dead is too high they wouldn't get elected in the same way that I've just come back from a week in Washington very curious about how the election uh was going out there no one mentioned the debt no one that I spoke to did and yet the unfund you mentioned demographics Chris this means the unfunded liabilities are absolutely enormous because the dependency ratio of the older people who are not working to the younger people who are is going in the wrong direction and yet even with that context what should have been front and center of the political debate no one's interested in it much more interested in culture War trivia and things of really no historic significance whatsoever I think it's a distraction technique from the genuine challenges that we face now if somebody said to me Albert economic growth is overrated you know you can have a discussion about that but to the extent that most politicians are saying we want to have growth we want to have Prosperity want to improve our technology at the absolute heart of this is time preference we need to remem it but I think it's there now on the other point that you made about science thinking objectively about the world world and that there's a disconnect between our subjective perception of it you know tell me how you'd respond to this I don't think science ever wanted to be anything more than trying to help us solve empirical problems of various kinds and at that job I think it's been the most successful of all scientific uh forgive me of all human institutions and the the question of how we engage with the world how we enjoy the world our relationships I'm not sure that's aable um same way no it's not it's not it's not the domain of science um but I think that you know the new atheist movement uh the increasing secularization of the West the deration of a lot of the places that people used to get meaning from uh that has left people cut a drift bereft of the the the typical explanations that they would have relied on those maybe being less objectively accurate but more subjectively reassuring uh have left people in more malaise and I'm fascinated I'm fascinated by this idea of things which are literally true but functionally false and functionally true but literally false and it's yeah I I I well I think it's it's um clearly the case that you can have beliefs that are not empirically true that are conducive to success MH and vice versa you're absolutely right about that and I I I have the scars on my back here because I grew up as a Christian my father was born in India moved to pistan after partition and came to England to study law and he was grew up as a Muslim in the Shia tradition but he in his bedsit in in southeast London in the early 1960s had had a vision of Jesus Christ and converted this is very unusual from Shia Islam m to Evangelical Born Again Christianity and he then he then met my mom who is a red-headed Welsh girl from a farming community in North Wales at a church she had moved to London and she's from an Evangelical background they met in church and then they fell in love and but by the way both families were massively against the marriage because they said you can't this is the 1960s I said don't do it you'll actually have mixed race children don't do that to them um fortunately for my siblings and I they rejected the advice had us and they had a you know were married until my father passed away three years ago my mom's still alive going well coming tomorrow um to London um but we I grew up with this wonderful sense of assurance that God existed and that he was all loving and that I had an eternal future and I love church I'm one of those who went to church really enjoyed it made great friends but then decided that it was empirically or what what's the word you use functionally un anyway untrue yes I thought it was untrue and the problem is I couldn't bring myself to believe it just on pragmatic grounds this is one of the difficulties with beliefs yes they have some kind of you don't really get to choose whether or not you're going to be convinced by them there's a do you remember um Angels and Demons Dan Brown's book and he made it into a movie and uh there's this really phenomenal scene so you and McGregor the the calango is uh speaking to the protagonist and he's trying to get in Professor langdon's trying to get into the Vatican archives he's adamant that D Vinci or someone has left some secret note and in the secret note he's going to find out what the [ __ ] going on and uh cango turns to Professor Langdon and he says do you believe professor and he starts to give a politicians answer saying Definition of belief blah blah blah blah blah it's a very peterian uh response actually and uh you and McGregor's guy cango says I didn't ask you that I asked whether or not you believe he turns to the camera it's supposed to be to you and McGregor but he turns direct to the camera it's such an awesome line and he says belief is a gift that I am yet to be given oh beautiful it's gor gous line and I think that you know it's very difficult to convince yourself of of something in that regard but when we get back to that sort of this tension between rationality belief functionally true literally false literally true functionally false one of the things that happened with the derogation of belief in religion was that people were asked to let go of the thing that felt the most real to them which was story it was Persona it was narrative it was archetypes and story marks in place of the thing which feels the least real to us we have the least resonance with which is statistics and graphs data those things we are not built for that we are built to understand and interpret the World by story and the stories were derated and they were replaced with something perhaps much more accurate but significantly more sterile and that is something which is maybe literally true but functionally false well we we've talk talked a lot on this about how to get good at Stuff how to improve how to make progress how to have an interesting and empowering journey in life and I hope what we've talked about is you know has empirical Merit and will help people but if you said to me at the end of it what's the point of the journey given that it comes to an end and you then die I honestly don't have an answer to that I'm enjoying life enormously but but I do think it's a roller coaster that will come to an end and there's nothing I can do about it um I carry that with me all the time the sense of impending mortality I do have friends who have the same visceral um awareness of it some don't I don't know if it's an advantage or a disadvantage um I mean in a way it does imbue life with a certain preciousness you're very consciously aware of the importance of each day um but there is a Melancholy in my heart that I you know I would perfectly happily acknowledge more than a Melancholy you know something of a terror that it will end and I enjoy it so much but I don't think I can do anything about it there's no growth mindset can help with not dying there's no courage moral or otherwise so to the extent that you know we we're moving into philosophical terrain I would wholly acknowledge that I'm at a loss to understand where the meaning comes from and I certainly um even if I was to replace the narrative the story The archetype of God with something else wouldn't change the fact that I'm going to die um and that it's highly limited and that my kids will grow up without me and that once you die it's forever the limitlessness of it I find quite extraordinary and I you know maybe this you might want to edit this out it amazes me to an extent there's a wonderful book called Brian Mcgee the Confessions of a philosopher where he talks about his midlife crisis and the Quest for meaning is one of the other chapters that we're not more preoccupied with this impending doom that we're all facing in very rapid time you're a lot younger than me um but I've probably had half my life already and it's gone like a Flash and I know that I'll soon be on my deathbed wondering where it had gone and then that would be it um I don't know where the meaning comes from that the the the transcendental meaning that forgive me the transcendental meaning I think I do get meaning from hanging out with my friends and family doing things I enjoy living is a hypothesis but here's the thing you live as a hypothesis it will end and and that's it and that's very difficult for me perhaps for you I don't know if you found a way through it uh no I haven't um I think one of the ways that people do is by looking at the bereavements of other people around them you mentioned that your mom's still alive uh you know one of the fortunate things about being an only child is that there aren't that many family members that you need to deal with dying one of the bad things about being an only child is that you don't get much practice at understanding the role of death in life you know beyond pets and Mom and Dad that's it unless you know by some awful horrible Quirk that my future wife ends up passing before I do that's it and need friends and stuff like that I guess but yeah it's uh there are still a lot of areas of human life sort of the fundamental questions of why are we here what constitutes a good life where do we find meaning from how do we deal with the inevitability of death how do we deal with uncertainty where finite creatures surrounded by an infinite Universe um the asymmetry the anxiety sees sword that we're always sort of butting up against these are not necessarily the domains of Science and in a world where we appear to have mastered so much and we still have these problems mentally it feels like a particularly vicious pathology or some sort of personal curse it feels unfair it's the best way to say it it feels unfair wait hang on a second you're telling me we con seed rainclouds in Dubai we can literally control the weather in a country and I still have to deal with this low mood and I still have to feel scared about this particular thing and I still might get sick or I still might die before my time and I think that um yeah maybe future civilizations future Generations will look back on us as this sort of I don't know with a Little Bit of Sympathy that we knew enough to know that we might be able to get Mastery but we didn't yet have the the ability to to answer the questions see I'm not sure I I relate to that because um yeah we know stuff about the weather and there's some uncertainty about how I'll feel tomorrow but no matter how much we learn we're still going to be stuck with the finitude of life that it seems to me is not something we can ever overcome you know even with freezing our brains you know the second law of Thermodynamics tells us um that we are moving towards um some kind of a heat death in other words it will I think it will inevitably be finite um if you don't believe in some spiritual I I used to have as my uh Twitter bio um uh locally reversing entropy and uh I love that idea I love the idea of you know there is this sort of force that's trying to rip everything apart and it's trying to create disorder and what do you get to do for this brief window you get to locally reverse this yeah Unstoppable like Eternal omnipotent Force you you get to reverse it I that phrase is fantastic and I rever entropy yeah yeah and and but when when one looks extends the boundary that local reversal um yeah you're going be D soon enough yeah it will eventually turn the other way and you um the second law of Thermodynamics I didn't learn any of this at school but it does I think Einstein described it as the key fundamental law of the universe and was it uh one of the other great Quantum theorists said that it's the one least likely to be overturned by new evidence it does seem to be very deep by the way that's the other thing that I think one throws into the mix on civilizations is that this local reversal of entropy does require the ability to extract energy in order to as it were perform the reverse in other words um if you think of a a cheater chasing a gazelle the cheater has to get more energy from the CH needs to get more meat from the kill than it was expended in the chase in order to survive yeah otherwise the entropy will get them they need that meat to as it were keep the cells going and to reverse balance yeah yeah yeah but you have to get a surplus MH so the this is sometimes called the energy return on energy invested you need to have that high and civilization needs quite a big return the problem with oil and gas at the moment is that we're having to drill deeper and Frack harder as opposed to when we used to get oil from near the surface yeah so the energy return on energy invested is declining so the energy net energy available to civilization is going down making it more difficult to locally reverse entropy which might explain why productivity has declined in the last few decades it may do Matthew S ladies and gentlemen Matthew I love you I feel like we could do this for hours and hours I have so much more to talk to you about so we might need to get you back on regularly so that we can keep on chewing the fat and trying to put the world to rights I really appreciate you I really appreciate your work thank thank you Chris and I I appreciate the invitation and I've loved the conversation where should people go if they want to keep up to date with everything you're doing I have a website Matthew side uh either. co.uk or.com if they Google my name and then one of the things that I am Keen for people to try is is measure their growth mindset that's something people can do practically and I I take this tool every six months always gives me insights that can help where can they do that at Matthew that's on the website that's on the website let me check it's probably it's Matthews side. co.uk yeah all right Matthew I appreciate you until next time mate thanks thank you very much for tuning in if you enjoyed that episode there is something else you will absolutely love right here go on give it a tap