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#1073 - Gurwinder Bhogal - 19 Uncomfortable Truths About Human Nature

Modern Wisdom

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  • Oxytocin Creates Selective Compassion
    • Oxytocin-fueled empathy is tribal and can coexist with cruelty toward outsiders.
    • Bhogal cites Blue Sky and extremist groups to show empathy acts like a spotlight: intense for in-group, hostile for others. Transcript: Chris Williamson 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 yeah so this is a finding that i sort of came across quite recently but it confirms something i’ve Gurwinder Bhogal 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 we need more empathy, that empathy is in short supply. But really, empathy is in-group loyalty. That’s what it is. Because we’re tribal animals. And what empathy is, is 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 empathy is like a spotlight. So you shine it on people, 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 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 have a lot of love for those people, and you’ll be very, very concerned about them. But 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 just have love for one group of people and then everybody else you’re neutral to. It can actually have 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, I think, a major driver of sort of cruelty and spite in the world. (Time 0:00:24)
  • Friendly Faces Hid Violent Paths
    • Bhogal recounts meeting Luigi Mangione and jihadist contacts who were outwardly kind yet committed violence later.
    • He describes friendly interactions in Luton and later revelations like Abu Rahim Aziz becoming an ISIS bomb maker. Transcript: Gurwinder Bhogal So I sort of met Luigi in 2024 and he seemed like a really nice guy. I can’t say a single bad thing about him from our conversation he really did seem like a generally nice person you spoke to him for a couple of hours right yeah yeah i had a two-hour conversation With him um because he was you know he’s 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 seemed like A really nice guy. And I just did not have any idea that he was planning this. I don’t know if he was planning this at the time that I spoke to him. Although I was shocked, obviously, because when somebody you know is in the news for something like that, of course, it’s going to 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 interacted with some extremely dangerous people. Early in my writing career, I hung around with Al-Mahajroon just to try and find out who they are. Al-Mahajroon is the UK’s deadliest jihadist organization. They’ve been responsible for quite a lot of terrorist attacks on UK soil. And I was sort of hanging out with these people for a while just to find out how their minds work. And they were really, really friendly people. They were, because they thought I was Muslim 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 were just kind of like really always concerned, you know, like, and stuff. And they barely knew me. And so I was kind of like, well, this is a bit strange. But then I’d later learn that one of them went to Syria to become a bomb maker for ISIS. He blew his arm off. Another thing he did was actually, before he did that, 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 bail. He fled, he went to Syria, became a bomb maker, blew his arm off, and then he got killed in a strike. So this guy’s name was Abu Rahim Aziz. He also used to go by the name Abu al-Britani. And I think he was actually allowed to leave by MI6 so that they could track him and blow him up. But that’s a whole other story. But basically, he was somebody who was really nice. (Time 0:04:34)
  • Naming Problems Can Empower Or Entrap
    • Naming a condition (Rumpelstiltskin effect) gives sufferers meaning and perceived control, driving diagnostic surges.
    • Bhogal warns labels help only if they lead to tractable next steps; otherwise they become excuses for inaction. Transcript: Chris Williamson 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 pulled some data. Anxiety is now the most common mental health condition in the world. So global burden of disease study, 359 million people, that’s 4.4% have an anxiety disorder, 332 million, that’s 4% have depressive disorders, 37 million bipolar, 23 million schizophrenia, And 16 million have eating disorders. So that’s, I would guess, bringing the Rumpelstiltskin effect into real life. Yeah. Gurwinder Bhogal 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 that basically Rumpelstiltskin is an imp who steals a woman’s baby. And in order to get it back, she has to find out his name. And then one day she hears him dancing around a fire, singing about how nobody knows his name because his name is Rumpelstiltskin. So he’s not very bright, but after she finds out she has power over him. So it’s the idea of when you name something, you have power over it. And there 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 or 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 personality defect and this can Be quite hard on people right So it can, 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’re just kind of you’re stuck with it but if somebody says to you oh 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 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 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 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. But then at the same time, this can also prevent you from getting that thing treated, because then you can kind of become quite resigned in a sense. I think with kind of labels like this, I think that they can be useful. But I think naming only helps if it leads to a tractable next step, a real tangible next step. Because if the label replaces action, then it’s just an excuse. And 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. But 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? What are the treatments for social anxiety disorder and what’s going to work best for me? Obviously the latter is a much more healthier attitude, but I think that too many people, what they’re doing is they’re using the label as an excuse to prevent action. (Time 0:08:21)
  • Perverse Incentives Drive Pathologization
    • Medicalization expands as patients seek easy answers and clinicians look for disease, producing confirmation bias.
    • Bhogal links incentives and history (e.g., multiple personality surge) to show manufactured pathologies. Transcript: Gurwinder Bhogal Yeah. And yeah, so the passage that you’re talking about is from Theodore Dalrymple, who’s sort of like clinician come sort of writer. And yeah, he’s sort of talked about this quite a bit. But I mean, medicalization is a real problem. It’s been a major problem since the 1970s. I think it’s kind of like it’s something that’s sweeping across pretty much all sort of fields. And 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 are incentivized to pathologize. Then you have the medical industry, which is both financially and ideologically incentivized to sort of treat more and more things as medical problems for obvious reasons. Firstly, they make money if they are treating more things. So they have a sort of incentive to sort of just creep their definitions outwards. And then they have ideological issues as well and this is because obviously they are not looking for signs of health they’re looking for signs of disease that’s essentially what physicians Do right 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. And this is, again, this has been shown throughout history. (Time 0:16:00)
  • Disability Claims Rise With Incentives
    • Universities report 20–40% of undergraduates as registered disabled, driven by benefits like extra exam time.
    • Bhogal notes wealthy students can pay doctors to certify conditions, harming credibility for genuinely disabled people. Transcript: Chris Williamson 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. Gurwinder Bhogal Yeah. So we’re kind of living in a world now where I don’t really see much stigma towards disabled people, at least not institutional stigma. I see a lot more benefits being given to people who claim to have disabilities. So in the example that I give, if you look at universities, elite universities such as Stanford, Harvard, Yale, they have really high percentages of disabled students, or at least Students who claim to be disabled. And when you look at why this is, you see it’s pretty obvious. 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, probably the most lucrative benefit. Because when you look at the people who are primarily claiming disability, it tends to be the rich kids, which is quite an odd sort of correlation. And it seems to be because they are the ones who can pay doctors to essentially fabricate their disabilities. Oh, no. So basically, these kids now are getting extra time in exams because they’re basically saying, oh, I have ADHD. I’m on the spectrum. I have some problem. I have constant pain in my left leg. It could be anything, right? They’ll just basically say something. I’m dyslexic or whatever. What happens is that these kids basically get the extra time in the exams. And why this is bad, I mean, 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 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 to find out. I have an aunt, for example, who has osteoporosis. And it’s not obvious watching her even walk that she has osteoporosis, but she actually does have it because it’s all… From x-rays, you can see that her bones are basically crumbling. And so 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 not believed as much. (Time 0:20:10)
  • AI Slop Threatens Trust More Than Truth
    • AI-generated content and persuasive chatbots create a flood of low-quality propaganda (slopaganda) that weakens trust.
    • Bhogal says the bigger problem is dissolving trust because truth verification becomes too costly. Transcript: Chris Williamson 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 honest. If chatbots conclude that getting our attention requires lying to us, is the AI misaligned or are we? Yeah. Gurwinder Bhogal 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 going to Believe lies and all this kind of stuff and i mean yeah that that’s probably a part of it i don’t think it’s like as as serious as people are claiming i don’t think the actual the serious Part of this is that people are going to believe lies because people have always believed lies. If you go back throughout any point in history, there were a lot of consensus beliefs that were ultimately proved to be wrong. So I don’t actually think that people believe in falsehoods is necessarily a bad thing. I think most of what people believe, as opposed to what they know, is false anyway. I think that the bigger problem is not the dissolution of truth, but the dissolution of trust. I think that’s far more important because a society can survive without truth pretty much most of the time. As long as you have very basic truths, like knowing that gravity is a thing, for example, as long as you have basic truths, society can survive. You don’t need complex truths for society to survive. History shows us that. It’s demonstrated that beyond reasonable doubt. Can’t survive without trust because pretty much everything depends on being able to trust other people in society. If you can’t trust other people, then you don’t have a society. It’s literally the glue that binds a society together. And what I think is a problem is not that people will believe falsehoods. I think the problem is that the cost of determining what’s actually true is going to become so high, it’s going to require so much effort that people are essentially going to give up really Valuing truth as (Time 0:23:10)
  • Information Overload Causes Reality Apathy
    • Reality apathy emerges when conflicting information makes seeking truth costlier than choosing the least offensive story.
    • Chris shares a listener overwhelmed by Epstein content as an example of people giving up on certainty. Transcript: Chris Williamson Reality apathy. When the sheer volume of conflicting information makes the effort of finding the truth costlier than the value of knowing it, 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 sort of overwhelm. 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 just, I, I’m 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, is anybody else’s algorithm getting peppered with all Of this Epstein stuff at the moment? These are blue collar dudes from the Northeast of the UK. Maybe they’re working in London or something. Epstein is not supposed to sort of cross their their threshold and it’s obviously hit a limit at a volume where they think holy shit like this is so much epstein stuff um i’ve just seen I’m now convinced that he’s playing fortnight in fucking israel i don’t know what to believe anymore and that’s that’s literally reality apathy and it was so funny to see that message Come in and think that this is the overwhelm of information and conflicting points of view going in opposite directions, literally happening in front of my eyes. Yeah. Gurwinder Bhogal And I think one of the challenges going forward is going to be trying to convince people that it’s actually worth pursuing the truth. (Time 0:25:36)
  • Regulation Shapes Which AI Leads
    • Different markets favor different AI advances: China may lead video generation; the West leads text models due to differing laws.
    • Bhogal links copyright laxity to ByteDance’s edge in video generation like the Dragon Ball recreation. Transcript: Chris Williamson Whichever market whichever market has the poorest protections will get the most progress yeah basically yeah because that seems to me to be the bottleneck funny yeah so you can you Can make oh is that who made i saw a pretty famous uh uh dragon ball z recreation yeah 3d have you seen this yeah is that made from that yeah okay i know exactly what you mean and i saw it last Night and i remember thinking fucking hell that’s really good and they’re still trying to use um cell shading to make it it’s not supposed to look like people it’s supposed to look like Cartoon people but it’s in 3d and it’s i mean significantly better than dragon ball z from a design standpoint so yeah, I wondered what that was. Is that Sora? That seems really good. Is that fucking Nano Banana 5? What the fuck is going on? But it was this new thing that you’re talking about. Gurwinder Bhogal Yeah, I think it’s from ByteDance, which is the company that created TikTok and… CapCut. Yeah, basic CapCut and all the rest of that stuff. Yeah. But it’s wild. (Time 0:28:23)
  • Social Media Is A Loud Unrepresentative Minority
    • Roughly 1% of users create most online content, so social media reflects loud, extreme minorities not humanity.
    • Bhogal cites research linking dark-triad traits to heavy social media use and political participation. Transcript: Chris Williamson 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 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. Gurwinder Bhogal 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 discussed this before, where, you know, you go on social media and you just see just loads of just crap on your timeline and just the most ill-informed opinions And you know people getting outraged over just nonsense and it kind of can like 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 could yeah he referred to it as uh the most pathological type of Chris Williamson Telepathy you can imagine where all he could hear were the worst of everybody else’s thoughts yeah and you know and sometimes you know it can sort of just really disheartening you i have Gurwinder Bhogal 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, this is what Humanity is. All this noise, all this completely irrational noise just being thrown out everywhere. 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 a pretty consistent findings which Which find that people who are high in um in certain dark tetrad traits 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 people who are really dramatic again narcissism comes up here also histrionic personality disorder naturally you know the people that are histrionic personality disorder So histrionic is basically when you’re a drama queen, basically. It’s when you just want to draw attention to yourself by playing the victim or by just catastrophizing, just making out like everything’s worse than it actually is. Just theatrical behavior, basically. And so naturally, this is a good fit for social media this kind of behavior you know because obviously if you want an audience and if you want to play theatrics where else would you want To go than a place where everybody else is freaking out and everybody’s looking to be freaked out you know so obviously social media attracts the absolute worst of the human race it attracts The most impulsive the most theatrical the most narcissistic the most psychopathic, the most low IQ. These are 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 over-representation of the worst elements of humankind. (Time 0:33:01)
  • Influencers Train Each Other Into Extremes
    • Recursive red pill learning occurs when influencers train on each other, amplifying extreme, unrepresentative insights.
    • Bhogal observed mutuals become more unhinged over a decade of heavy online presence and engagement. Transcript: Chris Williamson 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 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. Gurwinder Bhogal Yeah. And I’ve seen this play out in real time because I’ve been on social media since around 2014. And in that time, I’ve stuck with pretty much the same group of sort of mutuals mostly. And I’ve actually witnessed an interesting pattern, which is that the people who spend the most time online have become more unhinged and more extreme in their beliefs. This is something I’ve personally witnessed. I know that this is N equals one, but it’s more compelling to me than studies because it’s something I’ve literally witnessed happen in real time. And I think this is probably, this is also supported by research as well. Some of these, you know, I wrote this article called Dramageddon about people talking about a civil war. And this talk has been going on since around 2021, like really serious talk. People like Elon Musk have promoted this idea that there’s going to be a civil war between the left and the right in the US. And some people have said it will probably happen in Europe as well. (Time 0:36:44)
  • Seek Challenging Stress To Build Resilience
    • Expose yourself to ‘good’ stress to build resilience; avoid constant helpless news consumption that provides no agency.
    • Bhogal explains eustress and hormesis with dating and challenges as examples that strengthen mind and body. Transcript: Chris Williamson And you had a fucking slammer that I’ve been thinking about so much. Automate only the skills you’re willing to lose. Those two feel like they’re pretty related. Gurwinder Bhogal Yeah. So, I mean, you know, we’ve been told, again, this is another sort of error 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, it can cause trauma or whatever, that horrible word. 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, it’s clear that stress can be very beneficial. Not all stress, right? There’s a certain kind of stress, and that’s called eustress. And so eustress is basically the stress that challenges you, that basically forces you to adjust, that forces you to improve, basically. It’s not like the stress of being online and being constantly exposed to just horrific news from around the world, that’s bad stress, because you can’t really do anything about that. If you’re stressed because your feed is filled with horrific news stories from around the world, that’s just bad stress. It’s just going to stress you out. You can’t do anything about it. So it’s pointless. It’s pointless stress. It’s pointless suffering. Good stress is when you can do something about it. So it’s stuff like, if you’ve got a date, for example, if you have a date with a girl, that’s stressful because now you’ve got to be the best version of you. You’ve got to impress that girl. So 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 so trying to meet that challenge, you become a better person. It helps you both at a psychological level, but also at a physiological level. It’s hormetic stress. So hormetic stress is stress that makes you adapt, basically. It makes your body adapt to it. And constant stress of that kind is really, really good for you. And the research 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 push you forward and get things going. And so this whole thing that we’ve been told by a lot of people, which is that we need to minimize stress because then we’ll live longer or whatever, that’s actually not really true. It’s half true. Bad stress is bad for you. It will reduce your lifespan probably. 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 vicissitude 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 going to be happening if you’re only happy when Things are going your way you’re not going to be happy most of the time 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 you stress, the more you stress 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. Chris Williamson What about automate only the skills you’re willing to lose? Gurwinder Bhogal Yeah, so this is basically the same principle. So stress is also a form of learning. 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 with my life as it was. But if I learn that same lesson through hardship, if I suffer, 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 I’ll always remember because 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. (Time 0:42:20)
  • AI Can Erode Memory If You Stop Practicing Skills
    • Outsourcing cognition to LLMs risks brain atrophy via the Google effect and ‘use it or lose it’ memory decline.
    • Bhogal cites studies on reduced recall with LLM assistance and late-life cognitive activity protecting against dementia. Transcript: Gurwinder Bhogal 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 llmM, there’s No incentive for your body or your brain to learn the lessons, right? You know, you’re just kind of, because it’s like what Plato said, you know, in Fedras, where he was talking about his, one of his sort of concerns was he was writing at a time 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 parchment was going to destroy people’s memory, because if they could write things down, then they would have no incentive to remember it. I don’t know how true that is, but I think that there is a certain sort of analogue with what we’re seeing today, which is there’s a thing called the Google effect. Now, it’s not a robust finding, but I think the finding is true, but it’s probably smaller than it. It’s probably overstated. But the Google effect is this idea that if you can just kind of Google anything, then there’s no need for you to remember facts, basically, because your mind has essentially been extended To your screen. So that’s now functioning as your memory. Your laptop screen, your phone screen is basically your memory now. So 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 don’t want to say that this is genuinely a thing because it’s contradicted by some of the studies. But some studies have found that this is the case. So I don’t know with this chat GPT thing, if it really does cause brain rot in the same sense, it’s only one study. And I’m very, very sort of wary of single studies now, because of course we’ve got a replication crisis. A lot of studies are not replicated now. 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 fact that’s beyond dispute. It’s true of your body. It’s true of your brain, right? If you, you know, there’s recent research, which only came out, I think yesterday, which found that people who are, whose brains are active in late life. So from the ages of 50 to 80, they have a much, they’re much less likely to develop Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia. So if, you know, if you basically engage in things like video games, board games like chess, if you write and read a lot, if you keep your brain active in your 50s, then your chances of developing Dementia are much lower, apparently. And this is apparently a pretty robust longitudinal study. And again, 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 is, you know, although it’s not technically a muscle, it functions like a muscle in that respect. And so, I mean, one of my big fears about AI is not that, um, the machine is going to go conscious, it’s going to become conscious. It’s that it’s actually going to steal our consciousness away from us by essentially just causing us to outsource all of our agency, our intelligence to it, and causing our own brains To atrophy. (Time 0:47:38)
  • Protect Skills AI Can’t Replace
    • Preserve nonfungible human skills like creativity, taste, deep focus, and original idea generation to stay competitive.
    • Chris recommends writing without AI for research, cultivating taste, and holding 2016 levels of attention as a defensive edge. Transcript: Chris Williamson You just need to not be worse. And that ability to kind of hold as the entropy, this sort of technological entropy of the system is trying to fucking compress you into dust. That to me, it kind of is hopeful. It’s a hope in spite 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, That’s good for you in as much as civilization and the people around you are kind of a bit of a competition, which they are. 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 written word anymore. We don’t need to have the spoken word anymore. And all of these skills that will atrophy, 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 at 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’m increasingly thinking now about 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 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 magnifier that is LLMs, that is where the entirety of the market will move because it’s the path of least resistance. (Time 0:52:57)
  • AI Amplifies Agency Leading To Societal Bifurcation
    • AI will amplify existing traits: agentic people gain options, passive people lose agency, producing a bifurcated society.
    • Bhogal uses Wells’ Time Machine analogy: Morlocks maintain faculties; Eloi atrophy into placid dependents. Transcript: Gurwinder Bhogal Yeah, the secret, I think, to surviving the future is going to be agency. Because as I said before, that is the one truly non-fungible thing. I think everything else is downstream of agency. I think what’s going to happen in the AI age is that essentially humanity is going to split in two. And I think I’ve made a reference to this before. I think we had a conversation in 2021 in which I spoke about this. Basically, the analog I use is a novel called The Time Machine, which was written, I think, at the start of the 20th century. It was basically the story of, in the far future, humanity has evolved into two subspecies. You’ve got the Morlocks and the Eloi. The Morlocks, basically, they do all the work. They’ve maintained all their faculties because they have lived lives of drudgery, and they’ve passed this on down from generation to generation. And they’re in charge of all of the machinery, basically. And they’re constantly working and constantly improving themselves mentally and physically. And then you have the Eloi, who were basically, they were the former aristocrats. They were the ones who had everything done for them. And as a result of this, they have all of their faculties of atrophied. So their bodies are really thin and frail. Their minds, they’ve become very naive. They’re basically like children. They’ve regressed into children. And they’re completely dependent on the Morlocks, who do everything for them and in the end basically it turns out that the morlocks have been farming the eloi in order to eat them basically You know and while they’re doing this they’re just distracting the eloi with all this like entertainment all you know basically just to keep them uh placid and i think that essentially We’re going to 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, where we’ll have high agency people whose Agency is going to 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, it can also amplify stupidity. 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 attributes as well. So what’s going to happen is the people who already have agency, they’re going to use AI to increase their options. They’re going to basically use it to do more. So they’re going to become even more agentic. And the people who lack agency, they’re going to use it to do things for them. They’re going to use AI to think for them, to basically outsource everything to them. So they’re going to get even less agency. So what we’re going to see is the compounding of both agency and its opposite, which is why I think there’s going to be this bifurcation of, you know, people who are high agency and low Agency. We’re going to have extremely high agency people and extremely low agency people who will probably be the majority of humans in the future. (Time 0:54:43)
  • Rising Standards Make Growth Feel Insufficient
    • Personal Tocqueville paradox: as you improve, your standards rise faster, making you feel you ‘suck’ despite progress.
    • Bhogal and Chris recommend using objective metrics to anchor progress against shifting subjective standards. Transcript: Chris Williamson 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 that personal Tocqueville paradox thing of I have standards, those standards continue to rise as my capacity rises. And now 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, like a habituation to what your performance level is. And the Tocqueville paradox, which 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 Louis XIV, we have technology and equality of life that he could not believe, 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 access to the internet and air conditioning and fresh water and stuff that we’ve got. And 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. Yeah, absolutely. Gurwinder Bhogal I always think of 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 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 you basically you have you have new standards of behavior that you had when you did when you committed whatever act you are regretting 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, this person wasn’t the person that I wanted to be, that’s because 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, our expectations for what is 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 we’re essentially Living in some sort of uh weird kind of on some treadmill basically you know we’re basically on a 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 subjective metrics because subjective metrics are always moving around. They’re always, you know, they’re always they’re very malleable. And on a bad day, you might have certain expectations. 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 want to look at, um, you know, they could be really shallow ones. Like, um, if you know, as a writer, if you’re a writer like me, it would be like, how many likes do I get on my Substack post, you know? 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 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 your writing because if they do then that’s that’s a sign That you’ve 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 it’s just you’re gonna be all over the place So you have to have fixed points. You have to fix things that you are aiming for. And that way you can objectively measure where you’re going. (Time 0:58:25)
  • People Ignore Their Natural Talents
    • Rothbard’s law: natural ease in a talent makes people underestimate it and chase harder skills, misallocating effort.
    • Bhogal advises doing what you love because enjoyment sustains motivated practice and eventual excellence. Transcript: Gurwinder Bhogal We’ve spoken about this one before. This was on the last episode we did. Chris Williamson It just relates to these two so much, I think. It’s so good. I have a friend, I think I told this story last time, Ryan Long, wonderful 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. Because we’re sort of blinded to, there is this natural assumption that if something is worthwhile, it’s going to be difficult. And that I wrote this essay a couple of months ago about the difference between inputs, outputs, and outcomes. So inputs is 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 forces you to look at your assumptions and maybe Go, oh, actually, I have a natural talent at something. And this sort of strange pattern whereby I assume that I’m not supposed to achieve things without sweat and pain and discomfort and agony, maybe that’s wrong. Maybe that isn’t something that I should try and build my entire worldview around. Yeah, absolutely. Gurwinder Bhogal But I think one of the problems, and that’s sort of highlighted by Rothbard’s law, is that often really the issue is that we just never try in the first place to do something that we’re Good at because we assume by default that it’s just basically a pretty easy thing that anybody can do. So what I would say is to overcome that is to just do what you love. I know it sounds a bit corny, but ultimately I found that that is the best heuristic for you. When you want to try and work out what you want to do, do what you love. And the reason for that is because even if you’re not good at it, the fact that you enjoy doing it shows that you will be motivated to do it. You’ll be motivated to get better at it. And obviously, because our brains are neuroplastic, if you keep doing something, you will get better at it. And so I think 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. Because you’ve got to bear in mind, you’re going to do this for the rest of your life, right? This is going to be your life. Like this is going to be the thing that essentially you get out of bed for each morning. So if you’re, if you’re getting out of bed and you’re like, Oh, I’ve got to do this. You know, that’s not a life because you’re going to be, most of your life is going to 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 going to do it, but I’m loving the fact that I get to tackle it. That’s how you want to live because then your fun is going to be the motivation. And that is going to ensure that you will get better at that thing. 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. (Time 1:02:35)
  • Utopian Revolutions Usually Kill Their Planners
    • Original position fallacy: extremists imagine themselves as rulers in systems they romanticize, ignoring historical purges of elites.
    • Bhogal cites communist revolutions and Pol Pot’s targeting of intellectuals to show planners rarely survive power shifts. Transcript: Chris Williamson 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 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 have done better in medieval times they are somehow adamant that the chance of them Being genghis khan is greater than the chance of them being cannon fodder peasant number 1373 whose favela was sacked and destroyed yeah yeah so um so yeah so the original position fallacy Gurwinder Bhogal Uh is really has its origins in the work of John Rawls. John Rawls was like a liberal philosopher, basically, a political philosopher. And so his argument was that basically people, when they think of future states, they tend to assume that they’re going to 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’re going to be one of the planners uh if you if you’re on the right you think you’re going to 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 ma Pol Pot, Ceausescu, all of these people, one of the first things that they did was to either imprison or murder the intellectuals. Chris Williamson So the elites basically- Is that because they were the ones who could have come up with ideas to reverse their proposed direction for the civilization? Basically, yeah. Gurwinder Bhogal So if we take one of these examples, so if we look at Pol Pot, so Pol Pot wanted to basically reset history to year zero. And he wanted nobody to remember anything from before year zero. Like for him, that was literally the beginning of time. So he wanted to completely wipe out all traces 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 society’s memory. So if you can eliminate all the intellectuals, then you eliminate society’s memory. Basically, you wipe 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 pollute the modern world would die along with the intellectuals exactly And there’s an irony because there were a lot of intellectuals that were supporting pol pot they were like they were some of his fiercest you know defenders like you know they were the Guys that were advocating like writing the propaganda him. They were the ones who were like, and this is not just with Pol Pot, this is with all the communist revolutions. Even 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 one of the biggest cheerleaders for the Khmer Rouge. And he went to basically have a meeting with Pol Pot and he ended up getting assassinated. You know, nobody knows who killed him, but I mean, it was probably on Pol Pot’s orders. But I mean, a lot of, you know, so the left wing intellectuals believe that if they were to create a socialist 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 society And they want uh either a socialist uh republic if they’re you know they’re on the left or if they’re on the right they’ll probably advocate for something. It could be like neo-monarchy, with the Menchus, Malbergs, Curtis Yavin, whatever the world, who believe that they would be, I’m sure Curtis Yavin believes that if there was a right-wing Revolution, that he would be at the right-hand side of the monarch. He would be the advisor, he would be the Svengali. But I mean, again, usually it’s the revolutionaries who end up getting murdered themselves. This is true of the French Revolution too as well. The biggest advocates of the French Revolution ended up being the first people to get guillotined, or at least they did eventually get guillotined. So all of this stuff, again, so this is probably going off on a tangent anyway, but basically going back to the original idea. So it was originally John Rawle’s idea right i kind of adapted it to extended it to the left and right but his idea was just generally that people tend to benefit they would tend to adopt Whatever state that they think is going to benefit them they will tend to advocate for whatever state is going to benefit them and 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 going to be assigned at random a position in the world that you advocate for. So if you advocate for a socialist or a communist country, you can’t do that with the assumption that you are going to be the planner, you are going to be 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. (Time 1:10:18)
  • Refuse Powers You Fear In Opponents’ Hands
    • Don’t grant the state powers you wouldn’t want political enemies to wield; design policies defensively.
    • Bhogal frames Coyotes law as a rule: support only policies that won’t harm you if adversaries later control them. Transcript: Chris Williamson Don’t give the government a power you wouldn’t want your political enemies to wield because one day they may well be in charge of it. Gurwinder Bhogal Yeah. So this is a preventative to the original fallacy position. This is what I advocate for personally. I think that the best way to determine what policies to support are the ones that will be not harmful if the government were to be taken over by somebody that you despise, basically, by The worst government that is possible in your country. So 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 would suddenly become Right-wing, and vice versa. So I think it’s a pretty 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 it extends to politics as well people tend to only they tend to imagine that whoever they’re supporting is going to Be in power forever and this is why you know when i see people like right wingers for example on Twitter, 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 going to be used against you. The apparatus you’re creating is going to be used against you, you know. Um so for example if like you know if we go with um if if trump for instance were to uh pass news 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 hypothetical you would see people on the right supporting a lot of people on the on the right would support it they’d be Like yes you know yeah stick it to the left you know you know, trigger the libtards and all this stuff, and they’ll be cheering. But then Trump’s not going to be in power forever. And then you’re going to have probably a Democrat in charge, and he’s going to have, now he’s going to have the power to do exactly to the right what Trump was doing to the left. So, you know, it’s basically like the leopards eating your own face kind of thing, you know, where a lot of this stuff can backfire if you don’t think about it on a long enough timescale. (Time 1:17:33)
  • Hype Cycles Mask Slow Compounding Tech Change
    • Amara’s law/Gartner cycle: hype overshoots short-term impact then undercuts expectations; real transformation compounds quietly later.
    • Bhogal traces neural networks’ decades-long progress culminating in ChatGPT as an example of delayed, powerful change. Transcript: Chris Williamson There’s a similarity with Amara’s law. We tend to overestimate the short-term impact of new tech and underestimate the long-term impact because 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. Gurwinder Bhogal Yeah, so this is an idea that’s illustrated by something called the Gartner hype cycle. So if you go on Wikipedia, it will tell you that the Gartner hype cycle is pseudoscience. It’s not supported by evidence. This is nonsense. The Gartner hype cycle is not supposed to be a scientific study of what actually happens. What it’s supposed to be is a general rule of thumb, and it does fit most major technological developments. One of the problems with Wikipedia is it often straw man’s ideas before trying to discredit them. So I wouldn’t pay attention to the Wikipedia article of the Gartner-Hype Cycle. What the gartner hype cycle states is that you have when you have a new technology you have like massive surge in hype right 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 that 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 hype. They start to sort of that the reality of the new technology is not quite what people were saying it was going to be. This causes a kind of backfire effect where people temper their expectations by overcorrecting. What they do is they assume that because where the technology is actually headed is slightly different from where the hype claimed it was headed, therefore, they were wrong about the Technology completely. And therefore, the technology is worthless. So then you get people now from the opposite side arguing for the opposite thing, saying it was all hype. Humans are stupid. Don’t listen to humans. This technology is just going to fizz out. It’s just crap. 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. (Time 1:24:49)
  • Heritability Often Rises As People Age
    • Wilson effect: heritability of traits like IQ increases with age as adult choices reveal genetic predispositions.
    • Bhogal explains short longitudinal studies miss late-life genetic expression so nature’s role rises as people self-select. Transcript: Chris Williamson I’ve spoken to a lot of behavioral genetics guys and girls on the podcast. I’ve got Catherine Page Harden coming back on for her new book next week. And I’d always wondered, 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. Gurwinder Bhogal So historically um the sort of the social sciences and the field of genetics has pretty consistently underestimated the heritability of a lot of traits and just to give a very recent Example i think just a couple of days ago um there was a new study published uh which retweeted onto my timeline, which basically shows. So initially, there was the belief that heritability of lifespan is between 20 and 25%. And this new study has found that it’s actually closer to 50%. And this is a pretty important, you know, this is obviously a pretty important finding because this is the heritability of your lifespan, how long you’re going to live. And so there’s been a massive underestimation of lifespan 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, obviously, it’s very hard to track a human being throughout their entire life. So usually longitudinal studies 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 what happens is that there’s a masking effect so early in your life the effects of genes are masked by your upbringing by your environment 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 going to spend your childhood 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 predisposition to books becomes apparent. 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 short-term. We really need to study people at different stages of their life. (Time 1:31:20)
  • Beliefs Reveal Character Through Selective Attention
    • Your opinions reveal character: optimism often reflects choice of attention, not clearer realism.
    • Bhogal references Emerson and Naval to argue attention is selective and pessimism is a spotlight choice. Transcript: Gurwinder Bhogal Yeah. So to give you another quote from Naval, I think he said something like, it’s almost always possible to be both honest and optimistic. Right. So what I find is that if you are optimistic is 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, it’s often just a choice. It is literally just often a choice. It’s something that 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 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. 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, to put it simply. You have a choice where you shine your spotlight. And ultimately, it’s a case of what are you looking at? What are you perceiving? When you see something, what details are you picking out? And this is why when I see miserable people now, I don’t see realists. I just see miserable people. I see people who are unhappy inside, who are essentially externalizing their unhappiness by choosing to see the absolute worst in everything. And this is why I don’t have much tolerance now for people who just keep complaining about things. Because me 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 but there’s no solutions in complaining if you Just keep complaining all you’re doing is just you 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 Chris Williamson But surely some in some in situations, things are bad. Is it not fair to accurately represent that and reflect it so that maybe people try to change the thing that’s bad and shouldn’t be bad? No, no. Gurwinder Bhogal 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 to focus on. There’s always two sides to the story. (Time 1:35:16)
  • Prepare For The Worst While Expecting To Prevail
    • Combine realism and preparation: acknowledge worst-case scenarios but prepare solutions to keep hope practical (Stockdale paradox).
    • Bhogal recounts POW lessons: optimism alone fails; prepare for bad outcomes to sustain long-term resilience. Transcript: Gurwinder Bhogal So there’s a concept called the Stockdale paradox. And the Stockdale paradox is quite an interesting one because it’s basically taken from a guy called 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 in North Vietnam during the Vietnam War. He was basically a POW for quite a long time. Yes, for eight years. And so basically, so what he observed while he was there was that there were people who were optimists and there were people who were pessimists. And both groups ended up suffering hard and many of them died very early um so the optimists would basically believe that they were going to be released from the jail 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 eventually their hope just ran out and they just kind of gave up on Life and they 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 station was completely 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 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. So by acknowledging and confronting the harshest potential outcomes, you make them less of a problem and less of a reason for negativity. So what I’m saying is basically healthy optimism arises through a kind of practical pessimism. It’s not the blind idealism that everything is always going to turn out fine, 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 going to be all right. Confidence is the belief that you will be able to handle with things, even if they’re not okay. So 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. So you don’t necessarily have to be pessimistic. You don’t have to be optimistic. You fuse the two. (Time 1:38:07)