19 Uncomfortable Truths About Human Nature - Gurwinder Bhogal

1. 0:00 – 8:19

   Are Empathetic People Actually Cruel?

   1. CWChris Williamson0:00

      It's been too long, man. You write these awesome things on the internet. We- this is the eighth time we've done this now.

   2. GBGurwinder Bhogal0:05

      Yeah.

   3. CWChris Williamson0:05

      For the people that haven't seen you before, you come up with some of my favorite aphorisms and insights and stuff, and we just do the... We're kind of like the Bonnie Blue of interesting insights about the internet. We're just taking whatever we get. It's high velocity stuff. Uh, the first one that I want to get into, the Oxytocin paradox, this is one of yours. Oxytocin, the love hormone, can also make people spiteful. Cruelty is not simply the opposite of compassion, it's often adjacent to it. For instance, the platform most dominated by social justice activists, Blue Sky, is also the one with the highest support for assassinations. Beware of those quick to show empathy, for they are often just as quick to show barbarity.

   4. GBGurwinder Bhogal0:47

      Yeah. So this is a finding that I sort of came across quite recently, but it confirms something I've long known, which is that people who outwardly express a lot of empathy tend to also be equally capable of cruelty to that same extent. Um, and I first learned about this, uh, from a book called Against Empathy by, um, by Paul Bloom, who's a psychologist. And in this book... I think you've had him on the show. Um, in, in this, uh, in this book, he basically talks about how people tend to assume that empathy is a, just a good thing overall. You know, that it's not... That we need more empathy, that, that empathy is, like, in short supply. Um, but really empathy is in-group loyalty. That's what it is. It's, you know, because we're tribal animals, and what empathy is, is it's when you empathize with someone. The way he describes it is you don't empathize with everybody at the same time. You empathize with select people, and the way he describes it is that it's... Empathy is like a spotlight. So you shine it on people, uh, you know, a small group of people at a time or just an individual at a time. But while you have empathy shined on that person, everybody else is in darkness, which basically is, basically means that you don't have any real feelings for that person that's outside of that spotlight. So what this can mean is that if you empathize... So let's take a real-world example. Let's say you're somebody who empathizes with the plight of the Palestinians, so you'll, you'll have a lot of love for those, for those people, and you'll be very, very concerned about them. But there's a, there's a kind of yin-yang effect where because you have so much concern for them, you have negative concern for Israelis. So it's not like, you know, you just have love for one group of people and then everybody else you're, you're sort of neutral to. It can actually have a sort of almost like a zero-sum effect. The more empathy you have for one group of people, the less empathy you have for other people. And this is a, I think, a major driver of sort of cruelty and spite in the world. When you consider, like, the people that go out there and commit political violence, what you often see is that these people empathize very strongly with one group of people. So again, you know, if we go, go with the Palestinian analogy, uh, a group like Hamas, for instance. Now, Hamas have a lot of empathy for Palestinians, at least they, they do claim to, um, but then that equates also to hostility, corresponding hostility proportionate to Israelis. Uh, you see it also with, again, with the example that I gave in that, in that piece, which is about Blue Sky. So Blue Sky obviously is where all the social justice h- uh, people hang out. You know, it's basically all the refugees from Musk's X. Uh, so, you know, these are all people that you would think would be extremely compassionate, extremely sort of empathic, and they are. They are, but only to a small group of people. For example, you know, the left, when they call for empathy, they don't, they don't call for empathy for right-wingers. They call for empathy towards immigrants or towards trans people, you know. So their empathy is very selective, and this is why when, when you look at recent research, you find that the amount of support for assassinations is strongest amongst the people that you would expect to be the most compassionate, basically.

   5. CWChris Williamson4:12

      Well, you saw that with Luigi Mangione, right? That he had a-

   6. GBGurwinder Bhogal4:16

      Yeah

   7. CWChris Williamson4:16

      ... a manifesto. He was very empathetic toward people who'd been screwed over by healthcare services, people who'd had their healthcare denied and their claims that had been rebuked due to, you know, squirrely manipulation behind the scenes, and that resulted in him shooting a guy in the head.

   8. GBGurwinder Bhogal4:34

      Yeah. Um, yeah, so I mean, yeah, so I, I sort of met Luigi, um, in 2024, uh, and, uh, he seemed like a really nice guy, you know. I can't say a single bad thing about him from our, our conversation. He really did seem like a genuinely nice person.

   9. CWChris Williamson4:50

      You spoke to him for a couple of hours, right?

   10. GBGurwinder Bhogal4:52

       Yeah. Yeah, I had a two-hour conversation with him, um, because he was, you know, he was a big fan of my writing, and so he became a founding member, and, uh, then we ended up having a two-hour video call. And, um, yeah, he seemed like... He genuinely seemed like a really nice guy, and I just, you know, did not have any idea that he was planning this. Uh, I don't even... I don't know if he was planning this at the time that I spoke to him, but-

   11. CWChris Williamson5:12

       Hmm

   12. GBGurwinder Bhogal5:12

       ... um, but I wasn't... I mean, although I was shocked obviously because when somebody you know is in the news for something like that, it's obvious- of course it's gonna be shocking. But at the same time, it didn't surprise me. From an intellectual point of view, it didn't surprise me because I've, I've interacted with some extremely dangerous people. Um, you know, early in my sort of writing career, I, I hung around with Al-Muhajiroun just, just to try and find out who they are, and Al-Muhaj- Al-Muhajiroun is the, the UK's deadliest jihadist organization. They've been responsible for quite a lot of, uh, terrorist attacks on UK soil. And, um, I was sort of hanging out with these people for a while just to find out how their m- their minds work, and they were really, really friendly people. They were... 'Cause they thought I was Muslim, um, because I speak the same language as them, and so I was able to pretend I was one of them, and they were really, really nice to me. You know, they would-You know, they would like, if they were going to the shop, they would ask me if I wanted anything. They, they were just kind of like really always concerned, you know, like, uh, and stuff, and they barely knew me. And so, you know, I was kind of like, "Well, this is a bit strange." But then I'd, I'd later learn that one of them, um, went to Syria to become a bomb maker for ISIS. He blew his arm off. Um, he-- Another thing he did was, actually, before he did that, he, he stabbed a guy in the eye for apparently insulting the prophet Muhammad. And then when he was on bail, he was able to skip, um, uh, b-he was able to skip bail. He fled, he went to Syria, became a bomb maker, uh, blew his arm off, and then he got killed in a strike. Um, so, you know, this guy's name was Abu Rahin Aziz. Uh, uh, he also used to go by the name Abu Al-Britani. And, uh, I think he was actually allowed to leave, uh, by MI6 so that they could track him and, and then blow him up. But that's a whole s-other story. But basically, he was-

   13. CWChris Williamson6:58

       Fascinating

   14. GBGurwinder Bhogal6:58

       ... he was somebody who was really nice. He was a really kind guy.

   15. CWChris Williamson7:00

       But also the s-the sort of guy that would say, "Hey, do you want a grenade bar? I'm going to the, I'm going to the corner shop. Would you, do you-

   16. GBGurwinder Bhogal7:08

       Yeah

   17. CWChris Williamson7:08

       ... do you want some, some crisps or some chocolate or something?"

   18. GBGurwinder Bhogal7:11

       Yeah, I mean, they were just, you know, they were always looking out for each other, and they had a lot of empathy for each other, you know, and for their f-fellow Muslims, they had a lot of empathy for them.

   19. CWChris Williamson7:20

       Mm.

   20. GBGurwinder Bhogal7:20

       But then they had no empathy for, for example, Jewish people. I, I witnessed a lot of antisemitism when I was in, uh, in Bury Park in Luton, which is a, just a Muslim, um, sort of enclave. Um, they were very, you know, they were very antisemitic. They, they de- they dehumanized, uh, Jews and especially Israelis, but they had all the empathy in the world for Muslims. And, you know, you see this on the other side as well. You know, you see Israelis who have all the empathy in the world for Jews but don't have any for the Palestinians. So it's, you know... This is not like just one side. This is a common human trait. You see this everywhere. You see it amongst the left, you see it amongst the right, you even see it amongst centrists. So, you know, when people say, "Oh, we need more empathy," I think, "Mm, do we?" You know, I think maybe the problem is, is that we have sort of selective empathy, and we maybe need to sort of understand that everybody's a human being, not just the people that we empathize with.

   21. CWChris Williamson8:14

       Yeah, less tribalism, not more empathy.

   22. GBGurwinder Bhogal8:17

       Exactly.

   23. CWChris Williamson8:18

       Yeah. Interesting.

2. 8:19 – 20:09

   Does a Diagnosis Actually Solve Anything?

   1. CWChris Williamson8:19

      Uh, next one. Rumpelstiltskin Effect. To name a problem is to tame it. Diagnosing one's suffering makes it feel more meaningful and thus manageable. Even if the diagnosis is wrong, major depressive disorder is easier to live with than anonymous sadness. This is one reason for the recent surge in diagnoses of disorders like depression, autism, and ADHD, and I, I pulled some data. Anxiety is now the most common mental health condition in the world. So Global Burden of Disease study, three hundred and fifty-nine million people, that's four point four%, have an anxiety disorder. Three hundred and thirty-two million, that's four%, have depressive disorders. Thirty-seven million bipolar, twenty-three million schizophrenia, and sixteen million have eating disorders. So that's, I would guess, bringing the Rumpelstiltskin Effect into real life.

   2. GBGurwinder Bhogal9:09

      Yeah, so, so the Rumpelstiltskin Effect takes its name from the fairy tale of Rumpelstiltskin, which most people should be familiar with from their childhood. I vaguely remember it, but what I remember is, um, that basically Rumpelstiltskin is an imp who steals, uh, a woman's baby, and in order to get it back, she has to find, find out his name. And then one day she hears him dancing around a fire, singing about how sh- you know, nobody knows his name because his name is Rum-Rumpelstiltskin. So he's not very bright, but, you know, after she finds out, she has power over him. So it's the idea of when you name something, you have power over it.

   3. CWChris Williamson9:45

      Mm.

   4. GBGurwinder Bhogal9:45

      And there's a lot of kind of evidence of this, because I've actually written about this in detail, actually. Um, when you look at, for example, um, the ways in which people come to understand themselves, how they come to sort of understand their own identities, often through their ailments, and this can kind of bring them a kind of a sense that they're not in control. Well, at least it gives them more of a sense of, of control over their problems. Um, so, you know, for example, if you are, if you are shy, right, then you might consider that your shyness is a, is a personality defect, and this can be quite hard on people, right? So it can co- it can compound the anxiety that you already feel from your shyness by, by making you believe that you're worthless or that you're, you know, that you're defected in some way because it's a personality trait that you can't really, you can't really grasp. You don't know why you're shy. You know, you don't know why, and so you're just kind of... You're stuck with it.

   5. CWChris Williamson10:44

      Mm.

   6. GBGurwinder Bhogal10:45

      But if somebody says to you, "Oh, no, no, no, you're not shy, you have social anxiety disorder," then suddenly you have something that you can direct all of your sort of, your frustrations towards. You know, you have something concrete now. You're like, "Oh, okay." So now you can come to understand a little bit more about yourself by learning more about social anxiety disorder.

   7. CWChris Williamson11:05

      Mm.

   8. GBGurwinder Bhogal11:06

      So it helps you to sort of come to terms with your problems. There are many incentives why you would want to label yourself in such a way. I mean, one, one of the other incentives is that it kind of takes responsibility from yourself to something that you can't really do much about. So something like, you know, your neurochemistry or, you know, your genetics or something like that. So you're like, "Oh, okay, well, I can't do anything about it because this is social anxiety disorder," you know? But then at the same time, this can also prevent you from getting that thing treated, you know-

   9. CWChris Williamson11:38

      Mm

   10. GBGurwinder Bhogal11:38

       ... because then you can kind of become quite resigned in a sense. I think, you know, with, with kind of labels like this, I think that they can be useful, right? But I think naming only helps if it leads to a tractable next step, you know, a, a real tangible next step, because if the label replaces action, then it's just an excuse, right? And that, I think that's the problem that a lot of people are facing at the moment, where they're using the label as an excuse rather than as a motivation for more action.Because if you have... Let's go back to the example of social anxiety disorder, right? There's two ways to cope with labeling your problem as social anxiety disorder. You can either resign yourself and say, "Well, you know, this is a, something biological or psychological that I can't really do anything about, so let's just not bother trying to fix it." That's one path. The other path is to say, "Oh, okay, so what are the causes of social anxiety disorder? Uh, what are the treatments for social anxiety disorder, and what's gonna work best for me?" Obviously, the latter is a much more healthier a-attitude. But I think that too many people, what they're doing is they're using the, the label as an excuse to, to prevent action, so it actually has the opposite effect.

   11. CWChris Williamson12:45

       Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

   12. GBGurwinder Bhogal12:46

       And never, they never fix it. You know, so, so while I'm not against labeling one's problems in such a way, I think that it should always serve to further action. You should actually... It should be a step towards further action. If it's, if it's a step towards inaction, then it's just an excuse, basically.

   13. CWChris Williamson13:02

       I saw a clip of, uh, someone on some women's show talking about... Maybe it was Oprah, talking about how obesity is a disease and Ozempic is the medicine to the disease, and you wouldn't tell somebody that has diabetes that they shouldn't take their insulin because they have a disease, and this is medicine for the disease. And it, it reminds me a little bit of concept creep, that idea that you taught me about probably four years ago, where, um, over time, as racism goes down, numbers of racism, objective numbers of racism, which I know that you've done tons of research into this in your previous life, uh, objective racism goes down, but subjective racism goes up because the demand for racism outstrips its supply, and the only way that you can keep the volume of racism going so that people who comment on it have got something to talk about and campaign against, is to broaden the definition of racism until it becomes so large that basically anything could be racism, or anything could be transphobia, or anything could be xenophobia, or anything could be... And the same thing goes for diseases, right? If you're diagnosing some issue, uh, what... You had a, a passage from a book. Maybe he was a clinical psychologist or something, and he was saying how many patients he'd ever seen in his entire career who'd come in and labeled themselves as just being sad with sadness.

   14. GBGurwinder Bhogal14:27

       Yeah.

   15. CWChris Williamson14:27

       And it was three. Three patients across thousands had ever come in and said sadness. Everybody else was depression or anxiety or schizophrenia or imposter syndrome or whatever. Even, even imposter syndrome, right? The, the fear that other people expect a standard of you which you can no longer meet. That, I mean, there are a million different terms for it. Could be uncertainty. Uh, it, it could be humility, uh, and humbleness. It could be low confidence. It could be low self-esteem. It could be low self-belief. Um, but i-i-imposter syndrome, to put the word syndrome after something, uh, and it's a cool term, and I think it's a useful term to name something. But the danger, uh, is of pathologization. And yeah, you're right. If you being able to put a name to imposter syndrome, and because of that, you go, "I'm gonna learn a little bit about what the research says to do with imposter syndrome." Oh, well, actually, if I do some positive self-appraisal and I journal a little bit and I have a gratitude practice, it seems that I can overcome my imposter syndrome. How wonderful. But if it is, oh, um, let's say we're in a, a different world that didn't have Ozempic. Uh, I have obesity. It's a disease. I can't lose weight. You have outsourced all of your agency now. So yeah, you have used the naming of it as a roadblock to action as opposed to a GPS that can help you find how you should act.

   16. GBGurwinder Bhogal16:00

       Exactly, yeah. And, um, yeah, so the passage that you're talking about is from, uh, Theodore Dalrymple, um, who's a sort of like clinician, uh, come sort of writer. And, uh, yeah, he, he's sort of talked about this quite a bit. Um, but I mean, medicalization is a real problem. It's, it's been a major problem since the 1970s. Um, uh, I think, uh, it's kind of like... It's something that's sweeping across pretty much all sort of fields. Um, and it... The reason is, is because it's kind of like the alignment of perverse incentives. So you have patients, right? Patients who want easy answers to their problems, so they, they are incentivized to pathologize. Then you have the medical industry, which is both financially and ideologically, uh, incentivized to sort of treat more and more things as medical problems, uh, for obvious reasons. Uh, you know, firstly, they, they make money if they are treating more things, so they have a, a sort of incentive to sort of just creep, creep their, uh, definitions outwards. And then they have ideological, um, issues as well. And, uh, this is because obviously, uh, they are not looking for signs of, uh, health. They're looking for signs of disease. That's essentially what physicians do, right? They, they don't look for signs of health. They look for signs of disease. And because of that, there's a certain sense of confirmation bias where they're... If you're looking for something, you will tend to find it. And so it's very easy if you have that kind of mindset, the mindset of a clinician or a doctor, where you're looking for disease to see it, even if it's not there. Uh, and this is, again, this has been shown throughout, throughout history. Uh, in the sort of, you know, in the 1980s, there was the whole thing about, um, multiple personality disorder. It's now known as dissociative identity disorder. And this was basically from like... You know, you can actually trace the development of this, what is essentially like a kind of moral panic. I don't believe that, uh, multiple personality disorder or dissoc-dissociative identity disorder are real things. I think that they're actually fictions, um, because I've actually looked at the history, and it really began in sort of like the late 1970s, where I think there was one-Case of somebody claiming to have multiple personalities, and this case went kind of viral as things might go viral in those days, which was through newspapers. And after this, suddenly loads of people started coming forward saying that they also had this issue. And what's interesting is that the number of, um, uh, alternate identities that people claim to have increased over time. So I think like initially people averaged one alternative personality, and then apparently by like the 1990s, there was an average of about 17. It was absolutely ridiculous. Like just more... people were just more and more-- they're having more and more alternate identities.

   17. CWChris Williamson18:46

       Mm-hmm.

   18. GBGurwinder Bhogal18:46

       You know, and, and there's no real sort of like neurology behind it. It's, it's just complete sort of nonsense. Um, so you know, this, this to me is, is a, a very good example of this whole pathologi- pathologization sort of pandemic as I call it, uh, where even... it's not just that definitions increase, but whole diseases can be invented out of nothing-

   19. CWChris Williamson19:07

       Mm.

   20. GBGurwinder Bhogal19:07

       -simply because people want to put a name on their discomfort.

   21. CWChris Williamson19:12

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3. 20:09 – 23:09

   Why is Everyone Claiming to Be Disabled?

   1. CWChris Williamson20:09

      Uh, malingering. Between 20% and 40% of undergraduates at many elite American universities are now registered as disabled. In the UK, one quarter of the entire population now identifies as disabled. The rewards for claiming a disability now outweigh the stigma, and those hurt most by all the pretenders are ultimately those with genuine disabilities.

   2. GBGurwinder Bhogal20:31

      Yeah. So we're kind of living in a world now where I don't really see much stigma, um, towards disabled people, at least not institutional stigma. Um, I see a lot more benefits being given to people who claim to have disabilities. So in the example that I give, um, you know, if you look at universities, like elite universities such as Stanford, Harvard, Yale, they have like really high percentages of disabled students, or at least students who claim to be disabled.

   3. CWChris Williamson21:00

      Mm-hmm.

   4. GBGurwinder Bhogal21:00

      And when you look at why this is, you see it's pretty obvious. Um, if you are, if you are registered as disabled with one of these universities, then you get extra time on exams. That's just one of the benefits you get, but you also get other benefits as well. But that's the main benefit, uh, but probably the most lucrative benefit. And so, um, you get a lot of rich kids. It, it's weird because when you look at the, the people who are primarily claiming disability, it tends to be the rich kids, uh, which is quite a, quite an odd sort of correlation, right?

   5. CWChris Williamson21:30

      Mm.

   6. GBGurwinder Bhogal21:30

      And, um, you know, and it seems to be because they are the ones who can pay doctors to essentially fabricate their disabilities.

   7. CWChris Williamson21:37

      Um. [laughs] Okay.

   8. GBGurwinder Bhogal21:40

      You know, so, um, yeah, so basically these kids now are getting extra time in exams because they're basically saying, "Oh, I have AD- ADHD, I'm on the spectrum. You know, I have, um, some problem, like I have constant pain in my, in my left leg." It could be anything, right? They'll just basically say something, you know, "I'm dyslexic," or whatever. And so what happens is, is that these kids basically get the extra time in exams. And why this is bad, I mean, uh, it's obviously bad for being dishonest, but it's extra bad because it essentially makes it harder for people with genuine disabilities to be believed, like when they have a disability. Because it is true that there are some people who have disabilities that are not obvious, that require a physician to actually do a check on them, um, to find out. You know, I have an aunt, for example, who has, um, osteoporosis, and it's not, it's not obvious watching her even walk that she has osteoporosis, but she je- but she actually does have it because it's all, um, you know, she... from X-rays, you can see that her bones are basically crumbling.

   9. CWChris Williamson22:40

      Mm-hmm.

   10. GBGurwinder Bhogal22:40

       And so, um, it, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's actually quite common where somebody can have a disability, but it's not obvious. And so if you have like between 20% and 40% of everybody claiming to have a disability, then the people who actually have a disability get less attention. They get... They're, they're not believed as much. They're treated with skepticism. So not only do we-- are we creating a victimhood culture, but we're also creating a cynical culture where-

   11. CWChris Williamson23:03

       Mm.

   12. GBGurwinder Bhogal23:03

       -the people who genuinely need help won't be believed. So yeah, it's a pretty bad way. Yeah.

4. 23:09 – 25:34

   The Harmful Power of Slopaganda

   1. CWChris Williamson23:09

      Slopaganda. More online articles are now written by AI than by humans, and research is increasingly finding that AI is better at persuading people than people are. Who wins in a world of unlimited propaganda? Not those with the best arguments, but those with the most slop. This is similar to Moloch's bargain. When LLMs compete for votes or social media likes, they push lies and rage bait to win, even when explicitly instructed to stay grounded and, and honest. If chatbots conclude that getting our attention requires lying to us, is the AI misaligned or are we?

   2. GBGurwinder Bhogal23:43

      Yeah. So, you know, there's been a lot of talk about the kind of AI driven disinformation age where basically nothing will be... nobody will be able to know what's true, and everybody's gonna believe lies and all this kind of stuff. And I mean, yeah, that, that's probably a, it's part of it. I don't think it's like as, as, as serious as people are claiming. I don't think the actual... the, the serious part of this is that people are gonna believe lies, because people have always believed lies. You know, um, if you go back, you know, throughout any, any point in history-There were a lot of sort of consensus beliefs that were ultimately proved to be wrong. Um, so I don't actually think that people believing falsehoods is, is necessarily a bad thing. I think most of what people believe as opposed to what they know is, is false anyway, right? I think that the bigger problem is not, uh, the dissolution of truth, but the dissolution of trust. I think that's far more important because a society can survive without truth, um, pretty much most of the time. You know, as long as you have very basic truths like knowing that gravity is a thing, for example, you know, as long as you have basic truths, society can survive. You don't need complex truths for a so-society to survive, and history shows us that. It's demonstrated that beyond, beyond reasonable doubt. But trust is a whole different ballgame. A, a society can't survive without trust because pretty much everything depends on, um, being able to trust other people in society. If you can't... You know, if you can't trust other people, then you don't have a society. It's like literally the glue that binds a society together. And what, what I think is a problem is not that people will believe falsehoods, I think the problem is, is that the cost of determining what's actually true is gonna become so high, it's gonna require so much effort, that people are essentially gonna give up really valuing truth, uh, as a principle.

   3. CWChris Williamson25:33

      Dude, this

5. 25:34 – 33:00

   Can Truth Survive the Information Flood?

   1. CWChris Williamson25:34

      is, this is one of my favorites from you. Reality apathy, when the sheer volume of conflicting information makes the effort of finding the truth costlier than the value of knowing it, people give up trying to be accurate and instead choose whatever bullshit stinks least. Slop doesn't just threaten the truth, but the very worth of truth. And it's this, um, this sort of overwhelm. The, the, the, the goal of propaganda isn't to make you believe any one narrative. Sometimes it's simply to make you more pliable at not wanting to believe anything. So ah, I, I just... I, I... Earlier on today in one of the old group chats from the guys that used to work for me in Newcastle, one of the guys said, um, "Is anybody else's algorithm getting peppered with all of this Epstein stuff at the moment?" Like these are blue collar dudes from the northeast of the UK, maybe they're working in London or something. This is not... Epstein is not supposed to sort of cross their, their threshold, and it's obviously hit a, a limit at a volume where they think, "Holy shit, like this is so much Epstein stuff." Um, I've just seen... Uh, I, I'm now convinced that he's playing Fortnite in fucking Israel. I don't know what to believe anymore. And that's-

   2. GBGurwinder Bhogal26:41

      Mm

   3. CWChris Williamson26:41

      ... that's literally reality apathy. And I... It was so funny to see that message come in and think-

   4. GBGurwinder Bhogal26:47

      Mm

   5. CWChris Williamson26:47

      ... that, that it... This is the overwhelm of information and conflicting points of view going in opposite directions literally happening in front of my eyes.

   6. GBGurwinder Bhogal26:54

      Mm. Yeah, and I think one of the challenges going forward is gonna be trying to convince people that it's actually worth pursuing the truth. I think more than actually convincing them of anythi-any particular truth, just convincing them of the value of truth is gonna be extremely important because we're essentially entering a world of virtual reality. You know, you, you can essentially create your own reality now. You can do it both figuratively through social media echo chambers, but you can also do it literally by essentially just sequestering yourself in your bedroom and living your entire life, um, through your, you know, your headset or your, your, your laptop screen or whatever, and just using AI to just generate whatever you want, uh, whatever, you know, reality you want. Um, this is not far away. I mean, you know, there's, there's recently been, um, I think it's CDance, this new, uh, Chinese, um, sort of video generation tool-

   7. CWChris Williamson27:48

      CDance?

   8. GBGurwinder Bhogal27:48

      ... which is just insane. CDance, yeah. I think it's-

   9. CWChris Williamson27:52

      Okay

   10. GBGurwinder Bhogal27:52

       ... called CDance, yeah.

   11. CWChris Williamson27:53

       Is that like Sora?

   12. GBGurwinder Bhogal27:54

       Yeah, it's, it's-

   13. CWChris Williamson27:54

       It's Chi-Chinese Sora?

   14. GBGurwinder Bhogal27:56

       Much, much, much better than Sora. It, it's like a whole generation ahead of Sora, ahead of Veo 3, ahead of all the best, uh, f-frontier models in the West. This is something completely wild. Uh, I think China has got an edge in video generation because they don't have copyright laws, or at least they don't really care about copyright very much, whereas the West has an advantage in text-based, uh, generative AI because they don't have censorship laws. So, um, you know, there's this trade-off between-

   15. CWChris Williamson28:24

       It's whichever market, whichever market has the poorest protections will get the most progress.

   16. GBGurwinder Bhogal28:28

       Yeah. Basically, yeah.

   17. CWChris Williamson28:29

       That's-

   18. GBGurwinder Bhogal28:30

       Because that seems to me to be the bottleneck

   19. CWChris Williamson28:31

       ... so [chuckles] funny.

   20. GBGurwinder Bhogal28:32

       Yeah.

   21. CWChris Williamson28:32

       Yeah. So you can-

   22. GBGurwinder Bhogal28:33

       Yeah

   23. CWChris Williamson28:33

       ... you can make... Oh, is that who made... I saw a pretty famous, uh, uh, Dragon Ball Z recreation-

   24. GBGurwinder Bhogal28:41

       Yeah

   25. CWChris Williamson28:42

       ... 3D.

   26. GBGurwinder Bhogal28:42

       Yeah. Absolutely.

   27. CWChris Williamson28:42

       Have you seen this?

   28. GBGurwinder Bhogal28:43

       Yeah.

   29. CWChris Williamson28:43

       Is that made from that?

   30. GBGurwinder Bhogal28:44

       Yeah, absolutely.
6. 33:00 – 36:41

   Why Social Media Isn’t Real Life

   1. CWChris Williamson33:01

      1% rule. In online communities, around 1% of users produce almost all of the content. As such, what you see online is not representative of humanity, but merely a loud, obsessive, and often, uh, narcissistic, psychopathic, and low IQ minority. Social media is literally a freak show, and consuming only content that reinforces your views is intellectual incest, producing beliefs that are increasingly frail and deformed.

   2. GBGurwinder Bhogal33:26

      Yeah. So, you know, when I go online on social media, I often can sometimes... Well, I sometimes feel disheartened. You know, it can... I think we've dis- we've discussed this before, uh, where, you know, you go on social media and you just see just loads of just crap on your timeline, and just the, the w- most ill-informed opinions and, you know, people getting outraged over just nonsense. And it kind of can, like, de-destroy your faith in, in the human race, you know. I think, um, Sam Harris, I think the reason why he left Twitter, I think he did describe it that way. He said that, you know, when he was on social media, it made him hate humanity. You know, and I, I can sympathize-

   3. CWChris Williamson34:02

      Yeah. He, he referred to it as, uh, the most pathological type of telepathy you can imagine-

   4. GBGurwinder Bhogal34:08

      Yeah

   5. CWChris Williamson34:08

      ... where all he could hear were the worst of everybody else's thoughts.

   6. GBGurwinder Bhogal34:12

      Yeah. And, you know, and sometimes, you know, it, it can sort of just really dishearten you. I, I have a few friends who, you know, on social media, and they, they sometimes have long breaks because they just completely just, just really demoralizes them when they think, "Oh, this is what humanity is," you know, all this noise, like, all this completely irrational noise just being thrown out everywhere. Um, but I think it's always helpful to remember that what you're seeing online is not actually representative of humanity. It's representative of the loudest and often the most obnoxious humans on the planet, and there's a lot of research to support this. You know, there's, uh, pretty consistent findings which, which find that people who are high in, um, in certain dark tetrad traits, uh, particularly in narcissism and psychopathy, uh, tend to use social media more. But also they tend to engage in online political participation a lot more as well. They tend to engage in, in sort of online debates and things like that a lot more. Um, and then you also have, um, people who are essentially cluster B, you know, uh, people who are really dramatic. Again, narcissism comes up here. Um-

   7. CWChris Williamson35:16

      Mm

   8. GBGurwinder Bhogal35:16

      ... also histrionic personality disorder. Naturally, you know, the people that are attention-

   9. CWChris Williamson35:20

      What's, what's histrionic personality disorder?

   10. GBGurwinder Bhogal35:23

       So histrionic is basically when you're a drama queen, basically. It's, it's when you, um-

   11. CWChris Williamson35:27

       Mm

   12. GBGurwinder Bhogal35:27

       ... you're attract... You know, you just want to, to draw attention to yourself by playing the victim, um, or by, you know, just catastrophizing, uh, just making out like everything's worse than it actually is, just to... through a theatrical behavior, basically. And, um, so you... Naturally this is a good fit for social media, this kind of behavior, [chuckles] you know. Because obviously if you want an audience and if you want to play theatrics, where else would you wanna go than a place where everybody else is freaking out and everybody's looking to be freaked out?

   13. CWChris Williamson35:55

       Mm.

   14. GBGurwinder Bhogal35:56

       You know? So obviously social media attracts the absolute worst of the human race. It attracts the most impulsive, the most theatrical, the most, uh, narcissistic, the most psychopathic, the most low IQ. You know, these are the, you know, often the worst people. I'm not saying that there aren't good people on social media. Of course there are. But when you look at it from a statistical point of view, you have overrepresentation of the worst elements of humankind on these, on these-

   15. CWChris Williamson36:17

       I also imagine even if you have somebody who is compassionate, and well-meaning, and delicate, and, and, and thoughtful, and high IQ, they're operating in an environment where they regress to the mean, and the mean-

   16. GBGurwinder Bhogal36:28

       Yeah

   17. CWChris Williamson36:29

       ... is meanOddly enough-

   18. GBGurwinder Bhogal36:30

       Yeah

   19. CWChris Williamson36:31

       ... I had one. So, uh, for the people that haven't heard us do this before, most of the stuff is me shamelessly shilling Gwinder's stuff, and then he says it back to me. But sometimes I bring stuff from home, and I've got, I've got some that I brought from home.

7. 36:41 – 42:04

   The Influx of Red Pill Content

   1. CWChris Williamson36:41

      Uh, so this one's kind of related. Recursive Red Pill learning. Most people get their information from the internet. The stories online which garner the most attention are the most extreme, meaning that influencers' unrepresentative insights are being trained on other influencers' unrepresentative insights, leading to self-reinforcing antagonism between the sexes. And this came out of a quote that I saw online, which is, "Having a boyfriend is embarrassing now," which was that Variety article that came out about six months ago, has the same energy as the Kardashians made skinny go out of style, in that neither is true if you just go outside. So this, um, the, the loudest stories, the biggest stories, the ones with the most upvotes on Reddit, by definition, are the ones that are the most attention grabbing, which means that they're the most extreme or unrepresentative. And that means if you spend most of your time learning about the world through the internet, what you see is the least representative presentation of what reality is like over and over again, and it just retrains you to expect that as normality.

   2. GBGurwinder Bhogal37:42

      Yeah. And I've seen this play out in real time because I've been on, on social media since, uh, around 2014. And in that time, you know, I've stuck with pretty much the same group of sort of mutuals mostly, and I've actually witnessed a, an interesting pattern, which is that the people who spend the most time online have become more u-unhinged and more extreme in their beliefs. This is something I've personally witnessed. I know that this is n, n, n equals one, but it's, it's more compelling to me than studies because it's something I've literally witnessed happen in real time. Um, and I think this is... it, it's probably, um, this is also supported by research as well. Um, some of these, uh, you know, I wrote this article called "Dramageddon" about people talking about civil war. Um, and this talk has been going on since around 2021, like really serious talk. People like Elon Musk have like, you know, sort of promoted this idea that there's gonna be a civil war between, um, the left and the right in the US and some people have said, you know, it's, it will probably happen in the Europe as well. But it's mainly, it seems to be much more in the US because the US is a lot more politically polarized than, than Europe is, um, in general. And, um, basically this idea is, is that, you know, a lot of these people think there's gonna be a civil war for precisely the reasons that you gave, which is that what we see is that what goes most viral are the so-called scissor statements. You know, what, what Scott, uh, Alexander called scissor statements, which are statements that are deliberately designed to, um, create debates, create, um, arguments basically. Like, and this is, you know, this is, this is one of the reasons why the, the media now, what they seek to do is they don't seek to just tell you things that are true. They seek to actually create statements or news reports that will divide people. Because when they do that, the two sides will argue over that issue, and in so doing, they will help that thing go viral. So for example, if you are, you know, if you're The New York Times and you wanna go viral, how do you go viral? You're not gonna go viral by telling the truth. If you just state facts like, um, you know, about some sort of reporting, uh, you're not really gonna go viral, uh, most of the time. But what you... what will go viral is if you make a divisive claim, something that's gonna split the internet into two. So something like, um, "Oh, uh, you know, white people are privileged, are too privileged." Uh, you know, if you say something like that, that's gonna divide the internet in half. You'll have half of the people be like, "Yeah, you know. Oh, you know, white people are too privileged. You know, we need to do something about it." And then you'll have the other half of people say, "No, no, no, no, this is all nonsense. You know, this is based on, you know, false s-studies, bad studies, all this stuff, you know?" And so then they'll argue over it, and in arguing over it, they're gonna make it go viral because then it's gonna appear on everybody's timeline, and then people are gonna be writing Substack, uh, about it. They're gonna be, uh, making videos about it, you know. And so this all helps the, the original, uh, claim to go viral. And so this is the sort of tragic system in which we're in, in which just stating true things does not go viral, but, but dividing people, saying things that are gonna divide people does. And this is why I think so many people still believe that there's gonna be a civil war in the US even though there's just... When you look at reality, there's just no inkling of this whatsoever. You know, the polarization does exist, but the polarization exists amongst the top like 1% of people on social media who are most engaged in politics. It doesn't, it doesn't really exist very much in, in the wider world, you know.

   3. CWChris Williamson41:03

      Mm.

   4. GBGurwinder Bhogal41:03

      So yeah.

   5. CWChris Williamson41:05

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8. 42:04 – 58:21

   Is Stress the Key to Happiness?

   1. CWChris Williamson42:04

      You stress people have more comforts and conveniences than ever, yet reports of unhappiness are at an all-time high. One reason is that discomfort isn't an obstacle to happiness, it's the path to it, for it's only by enduring struggles that we develop the resilience necessary for lasting contentment. And you had a fucking slammer that I've been thinking about so much. Automate only the skills you're willing to lose. That those two feel like they're pretty related.

   2. GBGurwinder Bhogal42:30

      Yeah. So I mean-You know, we've, we've been told again, this is another sort of, um, era that the sort of social sciences have for a long time propagated, which is that, you know, if somebody's exposed to stress, then it's bad for their health. You know, uh, it can cause trauma or whatever, you know, that, that horrible word. Um, but I mean, when you actually look at the, not just the data, but when you just look at pretty much all of human history, right? It's clear that stress can be very beneficial. Not all stress, right? It, it-- There's a certain kind of stress, and that's called eustress. And so, you know, eustress is basically the stress that challenges you, that basically forces you to adjust, that forces you to improve, basically. Um, it's not like the stress of, um, you know, being online and being constantly exposed to just, you know, horrific, uh, news from around the world. That's bad stress because you can't really do anything about that, right? If you're, you know, if you, if you're stressed because your feed is filled with horrific, you know, um, news stories from around the world, that's just bad stress. It's just gonna stress you out. You can't do anything about it, so you-- it's pointless. It's pointless stress. It's pointless suffering. Good stress is when you can do something about it. So it's the, it's stuff like, you know, if you've got, um, if you've got a date, for example, right? If you have a date with a, with a girl, that's stressful because now you've got to be your best. You've got to be the best version of you. You know, you've got to, you've got to impress that girl. So you, you're under a lot of stress, right? But that forces you to become better. It's a challenge, and you have to meet it. And what happens is that in, in so trying to meet that, that challenge, you become a better person. It, it helps to... It helps you both at a psychological level, but also at a physiological level. It's hormetic stress. You know, so hormetic stress is stress that sort of makes you adapt, basically. It makes your body adapt to it, and constant stress of that kind is really, really good for you. And this, the, the research is, is, is very clear on this, but also ordinary human experience is clear on this as well. Anybody who's lived on this earth knows that you need a little bit of stress now and again just to sort of, you know, push you forward and, and get things going. And so this whole thing that we've been told by a lot of people, which is that, you know, we need to minimize stress, um, because then, then we'll live longer or whatever, that's actually, it's not really true. It's half true. You know, bad stress is bad for you. It will, it will reduce your lifespan probably, you know. But we need to constantly expose ourselves to discomfort if we want to be able to be happy, because happiness is dependent on having a resilient mind. You cannot be happy unless you have a strong mind, because you have to be able to weather all the slings and arrows of vicissitu- and the vicissitudes of life. Like, they will be constantly throwing things at you. Life will constantly be, you know, knocking you astray from your course. It will constantly be throwing, you know, just a lot of unexpected things are gonna be happening. If you're only happy when things are going your way, you're not gonna be happy most of the time.

   3. CWChris Williamson45:38

      Mm-hmm.

   4. GBGurwinder Bhogal45:38

      And so you have to cultivate the strength, and that's essentially comes from exposing yourself to stress. The more stress of that... Not, not stress, but eustress. The more eustress you, you expose yourself to, the more resilient your mind becomes and the more you are able to stay happy no matter what life throws at you.

   5. CWChris Williamson45:54

      What about automate only the skills you're willing to lose?

   6. GBGurwinder Bhogal45:58

      Yeah. So this is basically the same principle. So stress is also a form of learning. It's, it's how you learn, right? You know, I always say that, you know, um, you know, you, you can, you can rent wisdom, but you can only purchase it with pain, right? So what I mean by that is, you know, you could tell me something, you could give me some modern wisdom, right? And I will be like, "Oh, okay. Yeah, that's a really cool way of living. You know, maybe I should do that." And I'll try it a couple of days, and then I'll forget it exists, and I'll just carry on my life as it was. But if I learn that same lesson through hardship, if I suffer, if I, if I'm exposed to stress and I have to adopt that out of necessity, then it becomes integrated into me, and then it becomes a habit. It's something that will always reme- I'll always remember because it, you know, the, the sort of the pain engraved the lesson into my brain. And so stress can also be a form of learning. And one of the things with automating things is it completely reduces the friction, it reduces the stress. You no longer need to engage in any kind of discomfort because you just get things done automatically for you. And so you don't learn as a result of that because the pain, the stress is a necessary component of the learning. You're not gonna remember the lesson unless you really suffer or expose yourself to some kind of stress that forces your body to internalize the lesson.

   7. CWChris Williamson47:22

      Have you looked at that research, uh, maybe Harvard, maybe MIT, about students that use LLMs to help them with learning and writing and the differential in terms of how much they can recall afterward?

   8. GBGurwinder Bhogal47:38

      Yeah. Yeah. I, I recall this study. Yeah, I think so. Um, this is basically has found that essentially LLMs can cause brain rot, basically. I think, I think that was like the, one of the sort of clickbait titles that was given to the study, um, that LLMs cause brain rot. So yeah, I mean, it's the same principle basically, like when you are, you know, outsourcing your abilities to an LLM, there's no incentive for your, your body or your brain to learn the lessons, right? You know, you're, you're just kind of, um... Because it, it's like what Plato said, um, you know, in Phaedrus where he was talking about hi-his, one of his, uh, sort of concerns was he was, uh, writing at a time when, when sort of paper and pen, or parchment and pen were becoming common. So this was the AI of his age. And he lamented that, um, paper was gonna, or parchment was gonna destroy people's memory.Because if they could write things down, then they would have no incentive to remember it. And, uh, I mean, I, I don't know how true that is, but I think that there is a certain sort of analog with what we're seeing today, which is, you know, there's this thing called the Google effect. Now, this is... It's not a robust finding, but I think that it, it, it's-- I think the finding does exist. I think the finding's true, but it, it's probably smaller than it. It's probably overstated. But the, the Google effect is this idea that, you know, if you can just kind of Google anything, then there's no need for you to, uh, remember facts basically, because you can... Your, your mind has essentially been extended to your screen. So that's now functioning as your memory. Your, your laptop screen, your phone screen is your, is basically your memory now. So your, your actual memory doesn't really feel the need, as it were, to kind of remember anything. So I mean, you know, again, the research on this is a bit shaky. I, I don't wanna say that this is genuinely a thing because it's contradicted by some of the studies. Uh, but some studies have found that this is, this is the case. So, um, I don't know with this ChatGPT thing if, if it really does cause brain rot in the same sense, 'cause it's only one study, and I'm very, very sort of wary of single studies now because of, of course, we've got a replication crisis. A lot of studies are not replicating now. So, um, but what I will say is one thing that we know for sure is if you don't use it, you lose it. This is a f- this is a, a fact that's beyond dispute. It's true of, uh, your body, it's true of your brain, right? If you... You know, there's, there's recent research, um, which only came out, I think yesterday, which found that, uh, people who are, whose brains are active in, in late life, so from the ages of fifty to eighty, they have much, um... They're much less likely to develop Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia. Um, so if, you know, if you basically engage in things like video games, um, uh, board games like chess, uh, if you write and read a lot, if you, if you keep your brain active in your sort of fifties, then, then your chances of developing like dementia are much lower, apparently. And this is apparently like a pretty robust, uh, longitudinal study. So, um, and again, this fits... This is not just an isolated study. This fits with all the other research that has been done on this topic. Like, the more you, the more actively you use your brain, the stronger your brain becomes. It's, you know... Although it's not technically a muscle, it functions like a muscle in that respect.

   9. CWChris Williamson50:56

      Mm-hmm.

   10. GBGurwinder Bhogal50:56

       And so, I mean, one of, one of my big fears about AI is not that, um, the machine is gonna go conscious, it's gonna become conscious. It's that it's actually gonna steal our consciousness away from us by essentially just causing us to outsource all of our agency, our intelligence, you know, to it, and causing our own brains to atrophy. So-

   11. CWChris Williamson51:18

       I think... I, I had a conversation with Cal Newport, deep work man, uh, last week about, uh, a lot of this. Obviously, his whole thing for fifteen years now since he wrote "So Good They Can't Ignore You" was how can you stand out in a field of relative equals. But I think his perspective, certainly my perspective now is that the, the field is getting worse and worse. The, the, the bar that you need to get over is becoming ever lower. Um, you know, i- in order for you to get a partner at the moment, simply approaching somebody in person in the real world is a one in a thousand chance, as opposed to fifty years ago, that would be something that everybody was doing. And the same thing goes for what's the quality of your writing. Well, what AI is enabling is velocity and, uh, quantity, but it's regressing to the mean with regards to quality and creativity and taste especially. So if you can cultivate creativity, quality work, writing, and good sense of taste, you are going to stand out even more. And, and you don't even need to cultivate it, you simply need to stop it from atrophying. If you can-

   12. GBGurwinder Bhogal52:39

       Mm-hmm

   13. CWChris Williamson52:39

       ... hold your level, if you can hold twenty sixteen levels of focus and ability to write and overcome stuff... I mean, if there's somebody out there who's got sort of two thousand and eight levels of non-distraction before Slack and before smartphones, like you didn't... You don't need to be better, you just need to not be worse. And that-

   14. GBGurwinder Bhogal53:00

       Mm-hmm

   15. CWChris Williamson53:00

       ... ability to kind of hold as the entropy, this sort of technological entropy of the system is trying to fucking compress you into dust, uh, that, that to me kind of is hopeful. It's a, a, a hope inspi- as, as a civilization gets fatter, not great for the civilization. I think that it should be good that everyone's in health. But it does make for a pretty uncompetitive environment if you are someone that is able to avoid getting fatter. Uh, that's good for you, uh, in as much as civilization and, and the people around you are kind of a bit of a competition, which they are. Uh, but the same thing goes for being able to read. Now, how long is it going to be before if we neural link in, we don't actually need to have the r- written word anymore, we don't need to have the spoken word anymore, and that all of these skills that'll atrophy, um, eventually you may get into a world where that's so redundant that you don't actually want it, that there's better ways. But at the moment, we're in a transition period where you still need to be able to have the skills from the old world in order to have a competitive advantage in the new one. So yeah, I, I-

   16. GBGurwinder Bhogal54:02

       Yeah

   17. CWChris Williamson54:02

       ... I'm, I'm increasingly thinking now about w- what are the things that are non-fungible? What are the things that are only human? What are the things... And that's really where most of my attention should be focused on-

   18. GBGurwinder Bhogal54:14

       Yeah

   19. CWChris Williamson54:14

       ... writing without using AI to help me with my research, on coming up with ideas, on developing taste, on trying to be creative, on giving myself space. Because as all of the market moves in the direction of, well, I can just publish more. If I publish more slop because I've been enabled by the, the magnifier that is LLMs, uh, th- that is where the entirety of the market will move because it's the path of least resistance. Okay, well, what's the opposite of that? What's the more difficult choice?

   20. GBGurwinder Bhogal54:43

       Yeah. The secret, I think, to, to surviving the future is gonna be agency. Because as I said before, that is the one truly non-fungible thing. You know, I think everything else is downstream of agency. I think what's gonna happen in the sort of AI age is that essentially humanity is gonna split in two, and I think I've made a reference to this before. I think in, we've had a conversation in 2021 in which I, I spoke about this. But basically, the analog I use is a, a novel called "The Time Machine," which was written, I think, at the start of the 20th century. And, um, it was basically, um, this story of in the far future, humanity has sort of ev- evolved into two subspecies. So you've got the Morlocks and the Eloy. And the Morlocks, basically, they do all the work. They've maintained, like, all their faculties because they have lived lives of, uh, drudgery, and they've passed this on down to their generation or from generation to re- generation, and they're in charge of all of the machinery, basically. And they, they've... You know, they're constantly working and constantly improving themselves, uh, mentally and physically. And then you have the Eloy, who were basically, they were the former aristocrats. They were the ones who were-- had everything done for them. And as a result of this, they have a- all of their faculties have atrophied so that their bodies h- are, like, really thin and frail. Their minds, they've become very naive. Um, they're like ch- they're basically like children. They've regressed into children, and they're completely dependent on the Morlocks, who do everything for them. Uh, and in the end, basically, it turns out that the Morlocks have been farming the Eloy in order to eat them, basically. [chuckles] You know, and while they're doing this, they're just distracting the Eloy with all this, like, entertainment, all of... You know, basically just to keep them, uh, placid. And I think that essentially we're gonna have something probably not as horrific as that, but something similar in the sense that, um, we'll have a class system, a new class system, where we'll have high agency people whose agency is gonna be increased even more by AI, and then we'll have passive people whose passivity will be increased even more by AI. Because AI, the way I look at it, I don't look at it as artificial intelligence, I look at it as amplified intelligence. But as I say, you know, it can also amplify stupidity. It amplifies... Essentially, it's an amplifier of everything. So if you're lazy, it will amplify your laziness. If you are highly agentic and conscientious, it will amplify those fact, uh, those, uh, attributes as well. So what's gonna happen is the people who already have agency, they're gonna use AI to increase their options. They're gonna use it... You know, they're gonna basically use it to do more, so they're gonna become even more agentic. And the people who lack agency, they're gonna use it to do things for them. They're gonna use AI to, to think, think for them, to basically gonna outsource everything to them, so they're gonna get even less agency. So what we're gonna see is the compounding of both agency and its opposite, which is why I think there's gonna be this bifurcation of, you know, people who are high agency and low agency. We're gonna have extremely high agency people and extremely low agency people who will probably be the m- the majority of humans in the future. Quite a scary prospect.

   21. CWChris Williamson57:37

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9. 58:21 – 1:02:23

   Do Standards Always Outweigh Capacity?

   1. CWChris Williamson58:22

      All right, next one from me, the personal Tocqueville paradox. You will always think you suck. That's good. It's okay to suck compared to your standards. As you grow, so will your standards. It doesn't mean that you actually suck. This is similar to the Matthew principle of self-improvement. There's two types of people, those who don't know how to improve their lives and those who don't know when to stop. But, uh, that personal Tocqueville paradox thing of, um, I have standards, those standards continue to rise as my capacity rises, and now th- the standards always outstrip where I think my capacity is at. Well, if you didn't, you would never get any better, and it's kind of like hedonic adaptation but for your skill set or y- like a habituation to what your performance level is and, um, the Tocqueville paradox, which I, I, I learned from you, as living standards in a society rise, people's expectations of those standards grow more quickly than the standards can deliver them to it. So this is why, given that, you know, the Louis XIV, w- we have technology and the quality of life that he could not believe, uh, and yet we feel like quality of life is the worst that it could be despite all of the material comforts and safety and medicine and g- access to the internet and air conditioning and fresh water and stuff that we've got. And, uh, I, I think the same thing happens with regards to personal growth as well. You just continue to outstrip your own standards over and over again with where you want to be.

   2. GBGurwinder Bhogal59:50

      Yeah, absolutely. I, I always think of, um, regret as a sign of progress. You know, a lot of people think regret is a bad thing. I don't. I actually think regret's a good thing because what it shows is that you've grown, basically. Because if you're looking back and you're seeing an idiot in the past, then that's a sign that you have grown as a person. You know? [chuckles] You, you basically... You have, you have new standards of behavior that you had when you did-- when you committed whatever act you are regretting. Uh, and so I think, you know, it's all... I think so many of these kinds of problems are really just base rate fallacies. You need to understand that your own standards have risen, and that's why when you look back and you think, "Oh, okay, you know, this, this person wasn't the person that I wanted to be," that's because you, you are now a new person. You wouldn't be able to do that if you were the same person, in a sense. And again, you know, like, uh, yeah, our, our sort of expectations for what isIs good do always increase as we improve. And we have to, we have to manage that. We have to always account for that, because if we don't-

   3. CWChris Williamson1:00:50

      Mm.

   4. GBGurwinder Bhogal1:00:51

      ... we're essentially living in some sort of, uh, weird kind of on, on some treadmill basically. You know, we're basically on a he- hedonic treadmill. Um, the way that I like to look at things is to try to look at objective metrics rather than, you know, whether I'm, you know, using subjective metrics. 'Cause subjective metrics are always moving around. They're always, you know, they're always... They're very malleable. And, and on a bad day, you might have certain expectations that, and then on a good day you have different ones. So I think looking at objective metrics are always much, much better. So for example, if you wanna look at, um, you know, it-- they could be really shallow ones like, um, f- if, you know, as a writer, if, if you're a writer like me, it would be like, how many likes do I get on my Substack post, you know? [chuckles] Um, or it could be something a bit more sort of in-depth like, um, you know, uh, looking at like, uh, where, you know, who, who likes the, the, the piece, you know? Is it, is it just like sycophants who like your, your article, or is it actually other people? Do people that you normally disagree with politically, are they liking y- your, your writing? Because if they do, then that's, that's a sign that you've wr- really written something good. You know, so there's many metrics you can use. Um, and again, you know, if you're, if you're using subjective metrics, it's like trying to navigate by the light of a shooting star, you know? [chuckles] Uh, you j- you just, you're gonna be all over the place. So you have to have fixed points, you have to have fixed things that you, you are aiming for. Um, and that's way, that way you can objectively measure where you're going, you know? Then your own standards are not really gonna matter too much because you've got objective metrics fixed in place.

10. 1:02:23 – 1:10:16

    Why We Specialise in Our Weaknesses

    1. CWChris Williamson1:02:23

       Rothbard's law: If a talent comes naturally to someone, they assume it's nothing special and instead try to improve at what seems difficult to them. As a result, people often specialize in things that they're bad at.

    2. GBGurwinder Bhogal1:02:35

       We've spoken about this one before.

    3. CWChris Williamson1:02:37

       Yeah.

    4. GBGurwinder Bhogal1:02:37

       This was on the, on the last, on the last episode we did.

    5. CWChris Williamson1:02:39

       Yeah.

    6. GBGurwinder Bhogal1:02:40

       I think this one came up-

    7. CWChris Williamson1:02:40

       It just relates to, it just relates to these two so much, I think.

    8. GBGurwinder Bhogal1:02:43

       Yes.

    9. CWChris Williamson1:02:44

       So-

    10. GBGurwinder Bhogal1:02:44

        You know.

    11. CWChris Williamson1:02:44

        It's so good. I have a, a friend, I think I told this story last time, Ryan Long, uh, wonderful at, at doing comedy sketches and just so fantastic. But because that comes easily to him, he's decided that other art forms are more elevated 'cause we're sort of blinded to the th- the, there is this natural assumption that if something is worthwhile, it's going to be difficult. And that I, I wrote this essay a couple of months ago about the difference between inputs, outputs, and outcomes. So inputs is, uh, sort of time spent. Outputs is work done. And outcomes is real world results. And people love to focus on the first two, not the third one, because you never have to ask the question of effectiveness. But this, the Rothbard's law thing actually plays a role in this too, because the outcome-focused assessment of your own work gets... It, it, it forces you to look at your assumptions and maybe go, "Oh, a- actually, I have a natural talent at something, and this sort of strange pattern whereby I assumed I'm not supposed to achieve things without sweat and pain and discomfort and agony, uh, maybe that's wrong. Maybe that, maybe that isn't something that I should try and build my entire worldview around."

    12. GBGurwinder Bhogal1:04:05

        Hmm. Yeah, absolutely. Uh, but I think one of the problems, and that's sort of highlighted by Rothbard's law, is that often really the issue is, is that we just never try in the first place to do something that we're good at because we assume by default that we're, you know, it's just basically a pretty easy thing that anybody can do, right? So what I would say is to overcome that is to just do what you love, right? I, I know it sounds a bit corny, right? But ultimately, I found that that is the best heuristic for you s- when you wanna try and work out what you're, what you wanna do. Do what you love. And the reason for that is because you, even if you're not good at it, the fact that you enjoy doing it shows that you will be motivated to do it, and you'll be motivated to get better at it, you know? And obviously, because our brains are neuroplastic, uh, if you keep doing something, you will get better at it, you know? And so I think, you know, even... Like, I would rather do something that I'm bad at but which I enjoy than do something that I'm good at but which I don't enjoy.

    13. CWChris Williamson1:05:04

        Mm.

    14. GBGurwinder Bhogal1:05:04

        Because you've gotta bear in mind, you're gonna do this for the rest of your life, right? This is gonna be your life. Like, this is gonna be the, the thing that essentially you get out of bed for, um, each morning. So if you're, if you're getting out of bed and you're like, "Oh, I've gotta do this," you know, that's not a life because you're gonna be... Th- that, most of your life is gonna be that. But if you're getting out of bed and you're like, "Oh, right, okay, I've got a hard challenge, you know, this is a really hard challenge. I don't know how I'm gonna do it, but I'm loving the fact that I get to tackle it," that's how you wanna live, because then your fun is gonna be the motivation, and that is gonna ensure that you will get better at that thing. Um, and so I think that's really the way around Rothbard's law, just to do what you enjoy. Forget what you're good at. It doesn't matter. If you're young enough or if you're, you know, if you're young enough in spirit even, you don't even have to be physically young enough, uh, you, you know, you keep doing something, and if you're determined, if you really enjoy it, you will get better at it.

    15. CWChris Williamson1:05:56

        There's a, an interesting challenge I think that people face with believing that their accomplishments are as big as they are. You know, there's, there's certainly some people out there who are B- BPD, narcissist, full of ego, whatever. Uh, I think, uh, so many people, especially in the modern world, are just chronically uncertain. Am I okay? Is what I'm doing good? How, how much more do I need to be until I can rest? I always think about that scene from, uh, Avengers: Endgame, where Thanos has done the snap, and he's got this cabin on a planet that overlooks a lake, and he comes and he puts his helmet down, and then he sits in this seat, and he sits down in this sort of rocking chair, and he makes this noise, and it's kind of like satisfaction, but it's much more like exhaustion. And I often think about, um, this assumption that at some point there will come a time, the provisional life, uh, or, uh, deferred happiness syndrome or the arrival fallacy, uh, this sense that at some point... But there's a personal growth version of this tooThere's a personal growth version of at some point I can s- I, I will have done the growing and the learning, and I will be able to rest. Well, I, I don't think that you're ever gonna stop learning and growing, and I think that you would probably not enjoy your life if you were to do that. But also what that means is you need to enjoy some of whatever it is that you want to do now because it will just be this. It is just going to be this convey about-

    16. GBGurwinder Bhogal1:07:21

        Yeah

    17. CWChris Williamson1:07:21

        ... up until the end of time.

    18. GBGurwinder Bhogal1:07:24

        Yeah. So, um, Naval Ravikant has a brilliant quote about this, which is, um, "If you can't be happy with a coffee, you won't be happy with a yacht," basically. And it's just a, a really great sort of quote because it sums up pretty much everything you've been describing, which is, you know, people are always looking for this moment where everything is gonna be perfect. You know, they're always chasing this, this idealized version of reality where they will have attained all the skills that they want to, they will have gotten all the things that they want to, and then they will finally be happy. But ultimately, as we, you know, as we spoke of before, real happiness ultimately comes from the resilience of your mind. If you can find happiness in just something as simple as a coffee-

    19. CWChris Williamson1:08:09

        Mm

    20. GBGurwinder Bhogal1:08:09

        ... then that is enough, right? Then that means you will, you will be happy later on when you have even more, right? Then there needs to be this kind of baseline that you're willing to be, um, happy at, right? So you need to be happy even if you have nothing because if you're, if you're tying your happiness to something, everything is, is transient, everything can be broken, everything can be destroyed in this world.

    21. CWChris Williamson1:08:33

        Yeah.

    22. GBGurwinder Bhogal1:08:33

        And if you tie your happiness to that thing and that thing gets destroyed, you're gonna lose the very... the... your whole purpose of existence. So the only thing, the only thing that is gonna survive all of the, the slings and arrows of life is to tie your happiness to just the basic fact of existence. Just the fact that you are alive and you get to live what is essentially such an improbable life. You know, there's a, there's a crazy sort of statistic, which is that if you look at genetically the number of people that could've been born, you know, the chances of you being born, um, are like one in N, where N is greater than the number of atoms in the universe, right? So it's extraordinarily, like, improbable for us to even be here right now talking and, you know, this is as- assuming, um, that we were s- essentially selected randomly, um, from, from the sort of genetic lottery. Uh, but like-

    23. CWChris Williamson1:09:28

        Yeah

    24. GBGurwinder Bhogal1:09:28

        ... you know, we're... it's so improbable that we're even here. So I try to find happiness in the most basic things, like, because then if you can do that, then everything else that you get is just gonna be a bonus, right? But if you tie your happiness to something that you haven't yet achieved, then your entire life's journey up until that point is gonna be miserable, and then you can't even be sure that when you attain that thing, it's gonna be... it's actually gonna be as good as you thought it was. Because often we inflate our hopes and dreams beyond reality. So what we think is gonna make us happy, when we finally get it, it doesn't actually make us happy, and this has happened to pretty much everybody. You know, so everybody will recognize this. Um, so you've gotta... I think if you wanna be happy, you've got to be happy no matter what the external world is like. You know, you have to cultivate internal happiness. You have to have that happiness with a coffee, and then you'll be happy with a yacht.

11. 1:10:16 – 1:17:28

    Is Main Character Syndrome Driving Delusional Worldviews?

    1. CWChris Williamson1:10:16

       Original position fallacy. Far leftists favor planned economies because they imagine themselves as the planners, not the planned. Far rightists favor a return to feudalism because they imagine themselves as the lords, not the peasants. Many delusional worldviews stem from main character syndrome, and I had this from, uh, three or four years ago, one of our first episodes, the alpha history fantasy. Modern men who are angry at a world they feel has rejected them mistakenly believe that they would've 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 fodder peasant number 1,373, whose favela was sacked and destroyed.

    2. GBGurwinder Bhogal1:10:56

       Yeah. [chuckles] Yeah. So, um, so yeah, so the original position fallacy, uh, is really has its origins in the work of John Rawls. John Rawls was like a, a liberal philosopher, basically, a political philosopher, and, uh, so his, his argument was, um, that basically people when they, when they think of, like, future states, they tend to assume that they're gonna be amongst the elites basically. So, you know, and this is true whether you're on the left or on the right. You know, if you're on the left, you, you think you're gonna be one of the planners. Uh, if you, if you're on the right, you think you're gonna be one of the nobles, right? Um, history, again, history has shown this to be completely false. So for example, if you look at all the communist revolutions that occurred in the 20th century, you know, whether you're looking at, um, Stalin, Mao, um, Pol Pot, Ceaușescu, you know, all of these people were... one of the first things that they did was to either imprison or murder the intellectuals, right? [chuckles] So the elites basically, the people-

    3. CWChris Williamson1:11:55

       Is that, is that because they were the ones who could have come up with ideas to reverse their proposed direction for the civilization?

    4. GBGurwinder Bhogal1:12:04

       Basically, yeah. So if we take one of these examples, so if we look at Pol Pot. So Pol Pot wanted to, um, basically re- reset s- history to year zero, and he wanted nobody to remember anything from below, before year zero. Like, for him, that was literally the beginning of time. So he, he wanted to completely wipe out all traces of, of the past beyond year zero, and one thing he knew about intellectuals was that they read books and that they wrote, and obviously writing and reading are essentially the society's memory. So if you can eliminate all the intellectuals, then you eliminate society's memory. Basically, you wipe-

    5. CWChris Williamson1:12:42

       Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm

    6. GBGurwinder Bhogal1:12:42

       ... society's memory and you can start fresh. You can create a new fresh without any bourgeoisie, without any of the capitalism, uh, the ideas of capitalism to, to pollute the modern world. Um-

    7. CWChris Williamson1:12:52

       Would die along with the intellectuals

    8. GBGurwinder Bhogal1:12:54

       Exactly. And there's an irony because there were a lot of, uh, intellectuals that were supporting Pol Pot. They were like, they were some of his fiercest-

    9. CWChris Williamson1:13:00

       [laughs]

    10. GBGurwinder Bhogal1:13:01

        ... you know, defenders. Like, uh, you know, [laughs] they were the guys that were advocating, like writing the propaganda for him. They were the ones who were like, you know... And this, this is not just with Pol Pot, this is with all the communist revolutions. Uh, even, you know, Western intellectuals, many of them. There was one guy, I've forgotten his name, but he was a Western intellectual. He went to Pol Pot. He was like a, he was one of the biggest cheerleaders for the Khmer Rouge, and he went to, um, uh, basically, uh, have a meeting with Pol Pot, and he ended up getting assassinated, you know. And nobody knows who killed him, but I mean, it was probably on Pol Pot's orders. But I mean, a lot of, you know, f- so the left-wing intellectuals believed that if they were to create a socialist, uh, sort of society, that they would be at the top of society, they would be planning things, they would be, you know, everything would go according to their vision of society. And that's why it's such an intoxicating vision. That's why, you know, academics and other elites will tend to, you know, tend towards kind of these kinds of, uh, these sort of views of, of, of, of a society. And they want, uh, either a socialist, uh, republic if they're, you know, if they're, uh, on the left, or if they're on the right, they'll probably advocate for something, it could be like neo-monarchy, you know, with the momentous mole bugs, Curtis Yarvins, whatever of the world, who believe-

    11. CWChris Williamson1:14:09

        Uh-huh

    12. GBGurwinder Bhogal1:14:09

        ... that they would be, you know... I'm sure Curtis Yarvin believes that if there was a right-wing revolution, that he would be at the, the right-hand side of, you know, the monarch. He would be the advisor, he would be the Svengali. Um, but I mean, again, you know, uh, usually it's, it's the, it's the, the revolutionaries who end up getting murdered themselves, you know. Uh, this is true of the French Revolution too, too as well. You know, the, the biggest advocates of the French Revolution ended up being the first people to get guillotined, you know. Uh, or at least they, they did eventually get guillotined. So-

    13. CWChris Williamson1:14:39

        Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm

    14. GBGurwinder Bhogal1:14:39

        ... uh, you know, all of this stuff, you know... So, again, so this is probably going off on a tangent anyway, but basically going back to the original idea, so it was originally John Rawls' idea, right? I kind of adapted it to, extended it to the, the left and right. But his idea was just generally that people tend to benefit... They would tend to adopt, uh, whatever s- uh, state that they think is gonna benefit them. They would tend to advocate for whatever state is gonna benefit them. And the solution that he proposed was, um, what he called the veil of ignorance. And I think we might have covered this before, but basically the veil of ignorance is, is his belief that the best way to create a society, um, is to imagine, is to begin by imagining that you are gonna be assigned at random a position in the, in the world that you advocate for.

    15. CWChris Williamson1:15:27

        Mm-hmm.

    16. GBGurwinder Bhogal1:15:28

        So if you advocate for a socialist or a communist country, you can't, you can't do that with the assumption that you are gonna be, uh, the planner, you, you are gonna be, you know, the chairman of the party or anything like that. It's got to be the assumption that you will be assigned a place within that state at random, because then this will motivate you to then hedge and ensure that every person in that state is well looked after, basically. So this, this is obviously coming from his left liberal perspective.

    17. CWChris Williamson1:15:58

        To, to optimize, to optimize for the sort of highest average life quality-

    18. GBGurwinder Bhogal1:16:02

        Yeah

    19. CWChris Williamson1:16:02

        ... as opposed to-

    20. GBGurwinder Bhogal1:16:03

        Exactly. Yeah

    21. CWChris Williamson1:16:03

        ... your selected fortunate quality.

    22. GBGurwinder Bhogal1:16:07

        Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So, you know, this was his way of advocating for liberalism, because that's essentially what liberalism does. Liberalism is based on the idea that, you know, you want to ensure that everybody in society, um-

    23. CWChris Williamson1:16:17

        Redistribution.

    24. GBGurwinder Bhogal1:16:19

        Yeah, re- redistribution, but to an extent. It's obviously, it's not the same as a socialist, uh, country, which is... A socialist country would be complete redistribution, um, or, or, or near total. Whereas liberalism is a, is a sort of middle ground between, um, socialism and sort of, uh, free market capitalism, like completely lai- laissez-faire capitalism. So, um, it's basically the idea that, um, liberal- li- liberals want to maximize freedom, but they consider, um, freedom to also be freedom from, uh, for example, poverty or from oppression by, by, uh, higher classes of, of people.

    25. CWChris Williamson1:16:56

        Mm-hmm.

    26. GBGurwinder Bhogal1:16:56

        So, so they're, they're, they're similar to libertarians from the basic point in that they value liberty more than anything. It's just that liberals tend to have a slightly different definition of what liberty means. Like for libertarians, liberty is literal. It's literally just freedom, freedom to do what you want. Um, whereas liberals, you know, depending on the specific brand of liberalism, it might be the John S- John Stuart Mill or the John Locke, you know, kind of liberalism, where your liberalis- where your liberty ends, uh, at the point at which it does harm to somebody else, where it basically encroaches on their liberty

12. 1:17:28 – 1:22:01

    Why You Should Argue Like Your Opponent Will Win

    1. GBGurwinder Bhogal1:17:28

       sort of thing. So-

    2. CWChris Williamson1:17:28

       What about, um, w- what about the coyote's law thing? Don't give the government a power you wouldn't want your political, political enemies to wield, because one day they may well be in charge of it.

    3. GBGurwinder Bhogal1:17:40

       Yeah. Yeah. So this is the, the sort of, uh, a kind of pre... a preventative to the-

    4. CWChris Williamson1:17:45

       Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm

    5. GBGurwinder Bhogal1:17:46

       ... original fallacy position. Uh, this is what I advocate for personally. I think that the best way to determine what policies to support, uh, are the ones that will, you, are the ones that will be not harmful if the government were to be taken over by somebody that you despise, basically, uh, by the worst government that, that is possible in, in your country. So, um, you know, if you're on the left, then you should advocate for policies that would not harm your interests or the interests of those you advocate for if the government was to suddenly become right-wing and vice versa, you know. So I think this is... It's a pretty s- sort of straightforward common sense rule, because I think one of the problems with people is that they tend to think about the short term at the expense of the long term. This is one of the fundamental problems with human beings, and, uh, extends to politics as well. People tend to only f- they tend to imagine that whoever they're supporting is gonna be in power forever. And this is why, you know, when I see people like right-wingers, for example, on Twitter, um, actively suppressing and censoring left-wingers after advocating for free speech for so long, I just think, "Well, you're just shooting yourselves in the foot because this is gonna be used against you. The apparatus you're, you're, you're creating is gonna be used against you, you know." Um-

    6. CWChris Williamson1:19:00

       Mm-hmm

    7. GBGurwinder Bhogal1:19:01

       ... so for example, if like, you know, if we go with, um, if, if Trump, for instance, were to, uh, pass new laws which were to make it illegal-For people to criticize him, this is obviously a hypothetical situation, this is not something he's actually done, but this is a hyp-hypothetical. You would see people on the right supporting it. A lot of people on the, on the right would support it. They'd be like-

    8. CWChris Williamson1:19:20

       Yeah

    9. GBGurwinder Bhogal1:19:20

       ... "Yes, you know, yeah, j-just stick it to the left, you know. Yeah, you know, trigger the libtards," and all this stuff, yeah, and they'd be cheering. But then Trump's not gonna be in power forever, and then you're gonna have probably a Democrat in charge, and he's gonna have... Now he's gonna have the power to do exactly to the right what Trump was doing to the left. So, you know, it's basically like the leopard's ea-eating your own face kind of thing, you know, where, uh, a lot of this stuff can backfire if you don't think about it on a long enough timescale.

    10. CWChris Williamson1:19:46

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13. 1:22:01 – 1:24:46

    Will Everything Eventually Become Illegal?

    1. CWChris Williamson1:22:01

       what's that? Isn't there a law... Uh, doesn't somebody have an idea, I think Elon's talked about this, where over time, because laws get instantiated and rarely repealed, eventually everything will be made illegal, that there will be a law that stops you from doing everything, because w-you, you creep this forward one step at a time. "Well, you shouldn't drive when it's this wet with that car, then with a different car, then with any car, then when it's a bit less wet, then when it's dry, then when it's..." You know, you just end up litigating your way out of civilization, and this is kind of the same sort of thing that if you allow this behavior and then the behavior can come back in a little bit more from the other side, and then the other side, and then the other side, and it, it's this game of, uh, ever-escalating tennis.

    2. GBGurwinder Bhogal1:22:49

       Yeah. I mean, so there is, um, there is a concept which relates to this called, um, reciprocal radicalization, which is basically where it's, it's like a game of brinkmanship, where you have one group who advocate for something, um, which then the, the other side now feels entitled to, and then they'll, they'll escalate it even more, and then it will basically suck a c- a repeating pattern, you know? So, um, it's like the left and the right almost have this symbiotic sort of relationship where, you know, the excesses of one group will fuel the excesses of the other group, the opposing group.

    3. CWChris Williamson1:23:25

       Mm-hmm.

    4. GBGurwinder Bhogal1:23:25

       And they're kind of in... They're kind of like a, they're kind of like a, what is known as a Misall beam, which is a, a mirror... when you have two mirrors facing each other, and they kind of infinitely reflect each other.

    5. CWChris Williamson1:23:36

       Okay.

    6. GBGurwinder Bhogal1:23:36

       Um, it's like, uh, you know, they're constantly reinforcing each other in that sense. So it's not just with the left and right, you also see this amongst, uh, terrorists and, and governments as well. So what will happen is that you have terrorists who will commit an act of violence, and then the government will respond to that by having a crackdown and by tightening laws. And then the terrorists will use this as an example of the, the government being tyrannical. And so that, that would justify further action against the government, and then the government will use further action to justify their own further action by saying, "Oh, these terrorists are even more dangerous now, so we have to enact even tighter laws." And so it's like a ever-tightening sort of, uh, situation where the, the excesses of one group fuel the excesses of the other group. And ultimately, the only way out of this is long-term thinking again, you know. So this is, again, it's, it's, it's short-term thinking. It's when people are engaging in the sort of this, the satiation of their own, uh, impulses rather than actually engaging in, in long-term thinking about the consequences of their actions. You know, it's this first order of, or first order thinking. They're only thinking about the immediate consequences. They're not thinking about the consequences of the consequences, let alone the consequences of the consequences of the consequences, which is what you really need to be-

    7. CWChris Williamson1:24:41

       Mm-hmm

    8. GBGurwinder Bhogal1:24:42

       ... when you're in the political game, you know? So yeah.

14. 1:24:46 – 1:31:32

    The Hype Cycle of New Technology

    1. CWChris Williamson1:24:46

       There's a... That short-term, long-term thing, there's a similarity with, uh, Amara's law. Uh, we tend to overestimate the short-term impact of new tech and underestimate the long-term impact because it, hype inflates expectations, and thus disappointment, and thus skepticism. As such, it's possible for AI to both be a bubble and the most transformative tech since fire.

    2. GBGurwinder Bhogal1:25:09

       Yeah. So this is an idea that's illustrated by something called the Gartner hype cycle. Um, so if you go on Wikipedia, it will tell you that the Gartner hype cycle is pseudoscience. It, it's not supported by evidence. This is nonsense.The Gar- the Gartner Hype Cycle, Cycle is not supposed to be a scientific, um, sort of like, you know, study of, of what actually happens. What it's supposed to be is a general rule of thumb, and it does fit most major technology, ma-major technological, um, sort of d-developments. One of the problems with Wikipedia is it's, is it often straw mans ideas before discrediting or trying to discredit them. So I wouldn't pay attention to the o- the Wikipedia article of the Gartner Hype Cycle. Basically, what the Gartner Hype Cycle states is that you have, uh, when you have a new technology, you have, like, massive surge in hype, right?

    3. CWChris Williamson1:25:54

       Mm-hmm.

    4. GBGurwinder Bhogal1:25:54

       Where everybody's incentivized to sort of, um, just kind of get on the hype bandwagon, basically, because it's a new technology and people are speculating. They're, they're sort of... They're, they're spitballing. They're speculating about where this could go, and people get excited about it. People write clickbait articles about it. And so this obviously inflates people's expectations. And so then the next stage of the hype cycle is where people start to realize, hang on a second, the hype was, was hype. You know? [chuckles] They start to sort of realize that the reality of the new technology is not quite what people were saying it was gonna be. And this causes a kind of backfire effect where people temper their expectations by overcorrecting. So what they do is they assume that because the, where, where the technology is actually headed is, is, is slightly different from where it was, where the hype claimed it was headed, therefore, they were wrong about the technology completely, and therefore, the technology's worthless. So then you get the, you get people now from the opposite side arguing for the opposite thing, saying, "It was all hype. You know, this... Humans are stupid. Don't listen to humans. This technology is just gonna f- fizz out. It's just crap, you know?" So people naturally react very strongly by overcorrecting. That's what humans tend to do. So you get a lot of articles arguing for the opposite. But then what will happen is everybody will go, "Oh, okay. Well, yeah, so the hype was just crap, so let's just get on with our lives." And they'll forget about the technology. And then it's when they forget about the technology, that's when the technology will start to change the world. Because even though the technology is no longer in popular discourse, it has been adopted by the sort of people at the frontier of development, the industries where it can actually be used. And these are usually not exciting industries. They're usually things like, um, you know, um, sort of bank, uh, sort of, you know, fi- sort of doing financial, financial wizardry, which is not really something that interests mo-most people, right? So it will usually be... It will have very limited, um, visibility for a long time. But then the developments in those industries will gradually compound until we have something that is really, really amazing.

    5. CWChris Williamson1:28:02

       Mm-hmm.

    6. GBGurwinder Bhogal1:28:02

       And AI is a great example of this, right? So, um, for, you know... So one of the guys, one of the main pioneers of, um, AI is a guy called Marvin Minsky, he was a major figure in the development of neural networks.

    7. CWChris Williamson1:28:16

       Mm.

    8. GBGurwinder Bhogal1:28:16

       Uh, I think it was in the 1970s, he said that in around seven to eight years, uh, we will have human-level intelligence in neural networks, basically. He said something like that anyway. And obviously, this is completely absurd because, you know, by the 1980s, you know, we had really, really basic neural networks, and that continued into the '90s. And everybody had kind of by then just forgotten about the, the hype. Everybody was like, "Ah, you know, this, this whole neural network stuff's crap. Nothing's gonna happen. You know, it was all just hype." Everybody forgot about it, apart from a small number of researchers and a small number of people who were using, um, you know, convolutional neural networks to, like, uh, do things like imaging and things like that.

    9. CWChris Williamson1:28:57

       Mm-hmm.

    10. GBGurwinder Bhogal1:28:58

        And then what happened is suddenly you have ChatGPT, boom, you know, in like 2022, and this ca- seemed to have come out of nowhere, but it didn't actually come out of nowhere. Um, the technology for it, the, the, the transformer architecture was actually developed by Google DeepMind, and this was, um, a few years before ChatGPT, uh, sort of accommodated it and actually like, you know, began to, uh, develop it themselves. Um, but like, before that, nobody really cared. Like, for, for, for 30 years, nobody really cared in the, in the mainstream about, about neural networks. So this is a good, good example of it. But the thing is, is that the Gartner Hype Cycle continues, so it's not just you have this one hype cycle and then it's over. It, it, it often repeats itself. So we're gonna see it again with things like world models now, I think, where there's-

    11. CWChris Williamson1:29:43

        What, what are world models?

    12. GBGurwinder Bhogal1:29:44

        So world models are like a stepping stone towards AGI. A world model is where you have, um, things like physics implemented in, into your LLM. Um, it's not really an LLM anymore because it can do so many other things. It's, it's more like a video model, but it's a video model that actually has real world physics. Uh, and at the moment, Google is probably be- best placed for this because they have, um, they have all the data. They've got the real-time data through search, they've got video data through YouTube, and then they've got like-

    13. CWChris Williamson1:30:11

        Mm

    14. GBGurwinder Bhogal1:30:11

        ... they've got spatial data as well through, um, uh, Google Street View and all that kind of stuff. So they'll probably... They, they have actually got the best, uh, the world model at the moment called Genie, Genie-3. But basically, a world model is basically when an LLM or, or an AI can model the world, basically, literally. You know, that's why it's called a world model. It can model the world. So it can understand things like physics, so it can understand collisions, it can understand gravity, it can understand, um, uh, the way that fluids move, like water and things like that. And we have, we have like a kind of... We have a simulacrum of that in video generation, but video generations don't understand physics. They're just copying the physics of, you know, films and, you know, other stuff like that. Whereas a world model genu- genuinely understands the physics, and so it can... That's the first step towards creating, uh, AGI because then you can actually activate AI in the, in the physical reality. And this is probably gonna be the next hype cycle. It's already begun. Uh, there's been a lot of hype around Genie-3. What will probably happen is we'll have something called the trough of dis- disillusionment, which is the next of the, um, the, the Gartner Hype Cycle. And then when everybody's forgotten about world models, we'll, we'll start to see real world models emerge.

    15. CWChris Williamson1:31:19

        Wow. There's a... I, I, I was looking at... I've spoken to a lot of, uh-Behavioural genetics guys and girls on the podcast. I've got Kathryn Paige Harden coming back on for her new book next week. And, um,

15. 1:31:32 – 1:34:41

    Nature vs Nurture: What Really Shapes Us?

    1. CWChris Williamson1:31:33

       I'd always wondered, th-there's an equivalent basically with over time things changing, and the Wilson effect feels like a biological equivalent of what we're talking about with regards to the hype. So this is from you. Heritable traits like IQ and personality become more heritable with age because as you mature, you become more independent and free to be who you really are. Many heritability studies find that nurture's influence is stronger only because they never see that nature's influence is longer.

    2. GBGurwinder Bhogal1:32:04

       Yeah. So historically, um, the, the sort of soc- the social sciences and, uh, the field of genetics has pretty consistently underestimated the heritability of a lot of traits. And just to give an, a very recent example, I think just a couple of days ago, um, there was a new study published, uh, which I retweeted onto my timeline, which basically shows, um... So initially there was the belief that heritability of, uh, lifespan is between twenty and twenty-five percent, and this new study has found that it's actually closer to fifty percent. And this is a pretty important, you know, th-this is obviously a pretty important finding because this is the heritability of your lifespan, how long you're gonna live.

    3. CWChris Williamson1:32:46

       Yeah.

    4. GBGurwinder Bhogal1:32:46

       And, um, so there's been a massive underestimation of lifespan, uh, in terms of the heritability of it. And I think this is not fully explained by the Wilson effect, but I think the Wilson effect is a contributor to this. And it's basically what it is, is because studies tend to be quite short-term, genetic studies tend to be quite short-term, so they will tend to tr- obviously, you know, it's very hard to track a human being throughout their entire life, so usually longitudinal studies, uh, in genetics will tend to sort of follow people for a few years, you know. So usually three, three years, five years, and that's not enough time to really understand the effects of these genes because a lot of these genes only become apparent later in your life. You know, people tend to sort of, um... There's a kind of, uh, what happens is that there's a masking effect. So what, early in your life, the effects of genes are masked by your upbringing, by your environment.

    5. CWChris Williamson1:33:41

       Mm.

    6. GBGurwinder Bhogal1:33:42

       So for example, if you are genetically predisposed to love reading, but in your life, your parents never buy you any books, and instead they buy you a PlayStation, right? You're gonna spend your childhood playing, playing PlayStation instead of reading books, which is what you really love to do. It's only when you get older that you start, that you're able to follow your own natural inclinations, which are books. And so it's only when you're older that you have the power to buy books, and therefore it's only when you're older that your genetic predispositi- t- uh, predisposition to books becomes apparent.

    7. CWChris Williamson1:34:16

       Mm-hmm.

    8. GBGurwinder Bhogal1:34:16

       And so this is a very simple example, but this is very common I think now in a lot of studies where a lot of, there's a lot of reassessment that needs to be done due to these studies being so, so short-term. You know, we really, we really need to study people at different stages of their life. We need to study them when they're children, we need to study them when they're adults, and we need to study them when they're elderly in order to actually have a good understanding of the-

    9. CWChris Williamson1:34:37

       Mm-hmm

    10. GBGurwinder Bhogal1:34:38

        ... influence of genes versus environment.

16. 1:34:41 – 1:38:04

    Your View of the World is a Confession of Your Character

    1. CWChris Williamson1:34:41

       I saw, uh, there was a line from you, uh, uh, an Emerson one, "People do not seem to realize that their opinion of the world is also a confession of their character." And Dylan O'Sullivan, that I know we're both fucking huge fans of. He-

    2. GBGurwinder Bhogal1:34:53

       Yeah, he's great. Yeah

    3. CWChris Williamson1:34:54

       ... he's so good, dude. Uh, he says, "Nothing gives you a clearer look into someone than how they misinterpret things. Every misinterpretation is a confession." And it feels like the, Emerson and Dylan are kind of agreeing with each other here. Their opinion of the world is a confession of their character, and their misinterpretation of the world is also a confession.

    4. GBGurwinder Bhogal1:35:16

       Yeah. So to give you another quote from Naval, uh, I think he said something like, um, "It's almost always possible to be both honest and optimistic." Right? So what I find is that if you are optimistic, it's not because you're deluded necessarily. It's often just because of your personality, because you choose to see the good rather than choosing to see the bad. You know?

    5. CWChris Williamson1:35:42

       Mm-hmm.

    6. GBGurwinder Bhogal1:35:42

       It's often just a choice. It is literally just often a choice. You know, then it's something that I've, I've really, has really sort of become an important force in my life now, this understanding that I can actually choose how I perceive things. I can choose whether I see things as a good or a bad thing, depending on the facts that I select and the way that I interpret them. And I'm aware that, yeah, okay, this, this often requires me to ignore certain things, but we're always ignoring things anyway, so it's not like I'm doing anything wrong here. Uh, you know, attention is selective. Attention is like empathy. It's a spotlight. You shine it on some things, and by doing so, you cast everything else in darkness. And so when you are pessimistic, this is not a sign that you see reality more clearly, as a lot of pessimists like to believe. It's actually a sign that you're choosing to shine your spotlight on shit rather than on diamonds, you know, [chuckles] to put it simply, right? You know, you have a choice where you shine your spotlight, right? And ultimately it's, it's a case of what are you looking at? What are, what are you perceiving? When you see something, what details are you picking out? And this is why when I, when I see miserable people now, I don't see realists. I just see miserable people. I see people-

    7. CWChris Williamson1:36:50

       Mm

    8. GBGurwinder Bhogal1:36:50

       ... who are s- unhappy inside, who are essentially externalizing their unhappiness by choosing to see the absolute worst in everything, right? And this is why, you know, I, I don't have much tolerance now for people who just keep complaining about things because to me, it, it, that's just a way to dig your hole deeper, basically. You're just making life worse for yourself by choosing to see the worst, right? There's no solutions in complaining. If you just keep complaining, all you're doing is just, you're just make... You're convincing yourself that the world is bad, and the world doesn't need to be bad. You don't need to lie to, to see the good.

    9. CWChris Williamson1:37:23

       But surely some, in some, in some situations, things are bad. Is it not fair to accurately represent that and, and reflect it so that maybe people try to change the thing that's bad and shouldn't be bad?

    10. GBGurwinder Bhogal1:37:34

        No, no, you should always recognize that things can be improved always. Yeah, absolutely. But this doesn't mean that you should focus on the bad and have the bad as the only thing, you know, to, to, to focus on. There's always two sides to the story. So the way I look at it is, yes, you should always be, um, cognizant of problems. You sh- I'm not saying that you should not see problems, you should choose not to see problems. You should see the problems, but instead of focusing on, on complaining about them, you should try to focus on solutions instead. You know, what can I do rather than make this

17. 1:38:04 – 1:43:29

    Is Optimistic Pessimism the Best Way to Live?

    1. GBGurwinder Bhogal1:38:04

       better? So this actually fits in with a- a- another of my ideas. So there's a, a concept called the Stockdale Paradox, and the Stockdale Paradox is quite an interesting one because it's sort of like, um... It- it's basically taken from a guy called, uh, James Stockdale. He was an admiral, right? And he survived nearly eight years of torture and isolation in the Hanoi Hilton, basically, which was so-called because it was one of the most brutal camps, um, in, in North Vietnam during the Vietnam War. Uh, he was basically a POW for quite a long time. He... Yes, so for eight years. And so basically, um, so what he observed while he was there was that there were people who were optimists and there were people who were pessimists, and they both, both groups ended up suffering hard and, and many of them died very early. Um, so the optimists would basically believe that they were gonna be released from the jail, uh, by Christmas, and then when Christmas didn't come, it would be Easter, and then, you know, Easter didn't come, so they would keep hoping, and then eventually their hope just ran out and they just kinda gave up on life. And they, uh, some of them, like, you know, they just lost the will to live because they had hoped and their hopes had been destroyed. But then on the other hand, there were the pessimists who were people who just kind of believed that their, their station was completely, you know, un- irredeemable and there was no hope in the first place. So obviously they had no motivation to improve. But what Stockdale found was what got him through the eight years was not by being an optimist, not by being a pessimist, but actually by practicing a kind of optimistic pessimism.

    2. CWChris Williamson1:39:36

       Hmm. Mm-hmm.

    3. GBGurwinder Bhogal1:39:36

       And this was essentially... So what it was is that basically the key to achieving this kind of paradoxical state of mind is to accept that bad outcomes are indeed a real possibility, but rather than let that possibility crush your hopes, you can develop hope in your ability to deal with those problems by preparing for them.

    4. CWChris Williamson1:39:55

       Mm-hmm.

    5. GBGurwinder Bhogal1:39:55

       So by acknowledging and confronting the harshest potential outcomes, you make them less of a problem and less of a reason for negativity. So, so, you know, so what I'm saying is basically healthy optimism arises through a kind of practical pessimism. It's, it's not the blind idealism that everything is always gonna turn out fine-

    6. CWChris Williamson1:40:14

       Hmm

    7. GBGurwinder Bhogal1:40:14

       ... but rather the self-belief that you can deal with things no matter how they turn out, and that's essentially what confidence is. Confidence is not the belief that everything is gonna be all right. Confidence is the belief that you will be able to handle with things even if they're not okay, right? So you'll be able... You'll always be able to deal with the eventualities, and the way that you do that is by acknowledging the worst case scenario, but preparing for any scenario, essentially. You know? So you o- you, you don't necessarily have to be pessimistic, you don't have to be optimistic, you fuse the two. So this is obviously, this is a bit separate from, from the idea of seeing the beauty in things, but it's... This is obviously a very healthy attitude to have, um, with regards to just, you know, half glass half full or glass half empty. Just understand that the glass is half, right? That's it. You don't need to... It doesn't need to be half full, doesn't need to be half empty, it's just half. You know? Look at it actually-

    8. CWChris Williamson1:41:07

       Well, the, uh, George's, George's line from the agency book is, uh, "Some people look at a glass and see it as half full, some look at a glass and see it as half empty. What you should do is realize that you are the tap."

    9. GBGurwinder Bhogal1:41:19

       Yeah.

    10. CWChris Williamson1:41:20

        And that's his li- that's his line around agency, which is-

    11. GBGurwinder Bhogal1:41:23

        Yeah, that's a good, good word

    12. CWChris Williamson1:41:23

        ... wherever, what- wherever this is, you can actually pour into it. Um-

    13. GBGurwinder Bhogal1:41:27

        Yeah.

    14. CWChris Williamson1:41:28

        Yeah, it's a... The, the, the Stockdale thing's interesting because I can see how people preparing for the bad would quite easily cause them to tumble down the rabbit hole of ruminating about it, and worrying about it, and woe is me, and concept creep, and now I've got a pathology, and I've got multiple personality disorder, or... You know, th- th- that is the genesis of it. But, um, I... The diff-

    15. GBGurwinder Bhogal1:41:54

        Ultimately, it comes down to... It, it ultimately comes down to how you interpret it, right? So there is... You know, yes, you, you could, you could just go down this rabbit hole where you're just constantly thinking of the worst case scenario. But that's only gonna happen if you haven't found a solution. Y- you know, if you have a solution, if you have developed a solution to the worst case scenario, then it's no longer gonna really dwell on your mind, you know, because you already have the solution, and that's ultimately what, what I do. Like, if I, you know, like, if I was to say, "Come on this podcast," uh, I would have the worst case scenario where I would say something... You know, let's say I, I said the N-word or something like that, you know what I mean? [laughs] Like, that, that... If, if you're somebody who, um, is really anxious, you'd be worrying about something like that so long. You know, you'd be like, "Oh my God," you know, "what if I say the wrong thing?" You know? That would just cause you to be a nervous wreck, and it would probably just make for a very bad episode. But if you have a solution, right, if you actually have, um, trained yourself to not, uh, engage in these in- kinds of intrusive thoughts that might cause you to say those words or, you know, if you have a way to sort of style it out, you know, then you don't, then it's not gonna be a problem. Do you know what I mean? It's, it's the s- same with anything. Like, anxiety is really, it's really a, a result of you not having a solution to the worst case scenario.

    16. CWChris Williamson1:43:10

        Right.

    17. GBGurwinder Bhogal1:43:10

        But as long as you have that solution, you're not gonna have the... You, I mean, you might still have, have a- have anxiety if you're a neu- you know, if you're a neurotic person.

    18. CWChris Williamson1:43:17

        Yeah.

    19. GBGurwinder Bhogal1:43:17

        But the, the thing is you can-

    20. CWChris Williamson1:43:19

        Well, you're not gonna have any less if you've got a solution.

    21. GBGurwinder Bhogal1:43:21

        Exactly.

    22. CWChris Williamson1:43:21

        And what's that line about anxiety hates a moving target?

    23. GBGurwinder Bhogal1:43:24

        Yeah.

    24. CWChris Williamson1:43:24

        Action is the o- antidote to anxiety.

    25. GBGurwinder Bhogal1:43:26

        It moves forward. Yeah.

    26. CWChris Williamson1:43:27

        Yeah.

    27. GBGurwinder Bhogal1:43:27

        That's it.

    28. CWChris Williamson1:43:27

        Yeah. Yep, yep, yep.

    29. GBGurwinder Bhogal1:43:28

        Yeah.

18. 1:43:29 – 1:44:12

    Where to Check Out Gurwinder

    1. CWChris Williamson1:43:29

       Look, Gurwinder, dude, you're a legend. Uh, I appreciate you coming on. This, this always rules. It's one of my favorite episodes. Where should people go to check out all of the stuff that you've got going on?

    2. GBGurwinder Bhogal1:43:38

       Yeah, so main place is, uh, my blog, which is just gurwinder.blog. Um, and you can also find me on Twitter at G_S_Bhogal. Or just type my name into Google and I'm sure it'll come up. Uh, yeah.

    3. CWChris Williamson1:43:51

       Heck yeah.

    4. GBGurwinder Bhogal1:43:52

       And cheers. Been a pleasure. Yeah. Thank you.

    5. CWChris Williamson1:43:55

       It's always a good one. Uh, keep writing 'cause we got more to talk about.

    6. GBGurwinder Bhogal1:43:58

       Oh, yeah, yeah.

    7. CWChris Williamson1:43:59

       [upbeat music] Congratulations, you made it to the end of an episode. Your brain has not been completely destroyed by the internet just yet. Here's another one that you should watch. Come on.

Episode duration: 1:44:12