16 Lessons From 600 Episodes - Douglas Murray, Andrew Schulz & Alex Hormozi

Your neurosis is not helping your performance. How different do you think the outcomes in your life would be if you didn't worry about them so much, if you didn't anxiously obsess and overthink and fear? How different do you think the results that you're achieving would be? All of the concern and worry and strife and thought loops and sleepless nights, distracted consciousness, all for the sake of between five and 15% better results. Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the show. It is episode 600. And as is now becoming tradition, I thought I would go through some of my favorite lessons from the last 100 episodes, some stuff that I've picked up from guests, from research that I've been doing, reading, and just life in general outside of the show. So let's get into it. First one is, "It's not coordination, it's cowardice." So this is something that Andrew Schulz taught me toward the back end of last year. What he taught me was, a lot of the time we believe that there is a, a grand plan at work to try and push a narrative or to hurt people from a particular group, and from the outside it looks like a coordinated assault. It's collusion. It's orchestrated by some malign overlord conspiracy. But on the ground, it doesn't look anything like that. From inside of said conspiracy, it doesn't look anything like that at all. It's just individuals trying to save their own skin and not get fired because they have an expensive house that they need to pay for and a wife who wants a new car and a private school for their kids. And it is much easier for them to just adhere to whatever ideology will keep them in their job rather than go against it. So sure, it might mean that they push an unhinged story about trans story hour for toddlers or someone saying something innocuous kick- getting kicked off a platform, but it doesn't mean that they've been indoctrinated into some grand plan 'cause the incentives encourage execs and influential actors and the people in power to behave in particular aligned ways, but their coordination isn't consciously conducted. It's just the path of least resistance for each person. Now, this doesn't make them any less culpable. Like, it, it's, it's still awful. It's, it's still... The outcome is still not good, but this presumption that there is a shadowy organization with hooded figures and one of those long-nose things all sacrificing children's blood and drinking adrenochrome and shadow banning you on (laughs) TikTok doesn't seem that realistic to me. Like, you can't have it both ways. You can't have it that the government is completely incompetent and inept and they can't get anything done, and also the government have managed to collude themselves and collaborate in order to stop my Instagram posts from reaching as many people as I think that they do. Like, you don't get to have it both ways. And there is a, uh, theory, Bonhoeffer's theory of stupidity, which says, "Evil can be guarded against, stupidity cannot. And the world's few evil people have little power without the help of the world's many stupid people. As a result, stupidity is a far greater threat than evil." And you can combine Hanlon's razor, that you'll probably be familiar with, which is, "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." You could replace stupidity with cowardice or compliance if you like. But the bottom line is that people will forego principles and rationality if it means keeping their job. Like, you know, almost everybody at some point, apart from the most staunch, integral advocates, philosophy, moral reasoning, first principles people have compromised the values at some point in their lives in order to appease a person in power or keep status or do whatever it is that they need to do to keep food on the table, even if the table is very long and expensive and in Beverly Hills. Like, coordination, to me, seems significantly less likely than cowardice. And although it is annoying in a way because it suggests that individual actors now aren't even smart enough to be part of some grand conspiracy, um, it does make it feel less insurmountable, right? If there isn't this coordination, it means that pushback and change can be done more easily through, uh, influence, through, um, a, a desire from the ground floor up, from outside of these institutions to say, "Look, we don't like what's going on." Uh, and it should be easy for all of the dominoes to fall. It's not like the people in there believe what they're doing all the time. It's just that they don't want to lose their jobs. Okay, next one. "Original thinkers are very rare." I guess this kind of relates. "The rise of social media as the primary form of social interaction changed the way that we judge people. We once used to judge people mostly based on their deeds, but in the age of social media, we judge people mostly based on their words and opinions because that's really all that we see of them. Since we're defined by our opinions, there is pressure to have an opinion on everything. The problem is people generally don't have the time or the will to research everything they are expected to have an opinion on, so they copy the opinions of others, and this results in very few precious original thinkers. In this way, the culture war is largely two armies of NPCs being ventriloquized by a handful of actual thinkers." And that is from the fantastic Gwenda Bogle. And it is, it is very, very true. If you think about what most people's opinions are, they are a carbon copy, a, a, a poor rough-hewn version, a counterfeit of whatever the people that they look up to believe. And, you know, this is true for almost everybody. It's very hard to come up with a fresh idea. It's that, uh, quote about, um, everything is a footnote after Plato, that basically all of the ideas w- had already been come up with-... 2,000, two and a half thousand years ago, uh, and all that we're doing now is making-