Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / "The Game-ification of Everything" with Gurwinder Bhogal

Transcript

"The Game-ification of Everything" with Gurwinder Bhogal · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  Get a humans, welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas.
• 0:06
  What are we all doing here?
• 0:07
  How are we all talking to each other?
• 0:09
  What technology are we doing to us?
• 0:11
  What kind of cognitive biases and thinking traps are we falling into?
• 0:16
  What's the point of it all I hear you ask?
• 0:18
  And when my mind goes to such matters, I turn to the incredible substack, or perhaps
• 0:23
  a very ultra long Twitter thread written by today's guest, Gawinda Bogal, who sort of
• 0:29
  achieved fame by writing these extraordinary, soaring, hyper-intellectual, in-depth, Twitter
• 0:35
  threads that might be 30 or 40 tweets long, explaining all kinds of different problems
• 0:41
  with the way that we think about things, our in-group and our out-group preferences that
• 0:45
  shape the way that we relate to our community, both online and off, absolutely fascinating
• 0:50
  stuff.
• 0:51
  I wanted to get him on the show, and if you want to hear more from him, he has an incredible
• 0:55
  substack called The Prism, which is essentially a guide to modern digital life, but it's
• 1:00
  really so much more.
• 1:01
  I hope you enjoy as much as I did this dance through a wonderful, exotic, intellectual playground
• 1:07
  with the one the only Gawinda.
• 1:09
  Basically, London, we'll call it London, why don't we?
• 1:20
  Yeah, it's near London, it's about 20 miles away, yeah, it's about 20 miles away.
• 1:23
  But these people who buy easy jet flights think that it's in London.
• 1:27
  Basically, it's kind of like an extension of London, London kind of just encompasses all
• 1:32
  the places around it as well, because it's just sprawling megalapolis.
• 1:37
  But Luton was quite an interesting place, because it was a stronghold of a group of probably
• 1:42
  the deadliest, jihadist group in the UK called Al-Mahadirun, and while I was there, I spent
• 1:49
  quite a lot of time researching this group, I actually even sort of went undercover as well,
• 1:54
  and I spent a lot of time talking to them and sort of getting to know them, and it was
• 1:59
  very eye-opening.
• 2:00
  I wrote a 30,000 word article about it, actually, sir.
• 2:04
  Amazing.
• 2:05
  What did you notice?
• 2:06
  What did you learn?
• 2:07
  So much.
• 2:08
  I mean, there was a lot, you know, because this was something that I did over many years.
• 2:16
  But I mean, there was all kinds of things, I mean, one of the things that I found quite
• 2:19
  interesting was that pretty much all the narratives on both the left and on the right were wrong
• 2:26
  about Islamic extremism, at least in the UK.
• 2:30
  You know, the left will claim that a lot of, or at least most Islamic extremism is a
• 2:35
  result of, you know, geopolitics.
• 2:38
  It's like, you know, western neocolonialism, people bombing Iraq or Syria or whatever, whereas
• 2:47
  this was not actually the case, because a lot of the sort of hatred that I witnessed coming
• 2:55
  from these terrorists was actually not really directed at Western foreign policy.
• 3:01
  It was, it was actually, it was interesting, because when I was there, it was around 2013-2014,
• 3:07
  and this is when the Syrian civil war was really at its height.
• 3:11
  And at that time, the Islamists were actually complaining that the West was not intervening
• 3:17
  in Syria, you know, because they were, because obviously Assad is Shia, and he was slaughtering
• 3:23
  a lot of Sunni Muslims, and these were Sunnis as well, and they were like, you know, why
• 3:26
  is the West not helping, you know?
• 3:28
  So they had, they were out in the streets, and they were giving out this leaflet saying
• 3:31
  that the Western government is useless, that it's allowing Muslims to die.
• 3:35
  So I realized that, you know, the hatred was not actually directed at Western foreign policy
• 3:39
  in the sense that, you know, that they were angry with the West bombing certain countries
• 3:44
  or as we sort of told by the Guardian and, you know, the New York Times and all that.
• 3:50
  So on that side, it was kind of wrong, and another thing was that a lot of the hatred was
• 3:58
  not really directed at any particular event.
• 4:01
  It wasn't, you know, like it wasn't sort of like the bombing of Iraq or anything like that.
• 4:06
  It wasn't actually directed at any specific thing that the West had done.
• 4:09
  It was actually just the idea that the West was inherently immoral, and so this was something
• 4:15
  that was an eye-opened for me.
• 4:18
  But then also, I found that the rights narrative was also not quite correct either, because
• 4:23
  the rights narratives is that they're getting all of this information from the Quran, that
• 4:27
  they're sort of, you know, it's all just religious sort of fundamentalism.
• 4:31
  But the interesting thing was that when I actually spoke to these people, none of them
• 4:35
  could tell me a single line from the truth.
• 4:38
  They didn't know.
• 4:39
  Yeah, they hadn't read it.
• 4:40
  They hadn't read it.
• 4:41
  And they basically, their entire world view was not based on any scripture.
• 4:45
  It was based on what people were telling them the scripture was.
• 4:49
  And it was also based on the hadith, not on the hadith itself, but on certain prophecies
• 4:53
  that had been cherry-picked from the hadith.
• 4:56
  So for example, going back to the whole Syria thing, there were prophecies about a one-eyed
• 5:01
  baby being born in Damascus, and that this would be the sign of the end times.
• 5:05
  This was actually a major reason for the rise of ISIS, prophecies like this.
• 5:09
  And what was very interesting was that they would ignore news reports that didn't fit
• 5:15
  their narrative.
• 5:16
  And then they would focus on these news reports that did.
• 5:18
  So there was this fake news that sort of circulated about a one-eyed baby being born in Damascus.
• 5:24
  And I mean, it doesn't even have to be fake news, really, am I?
• 5:26
  I'm sure there are.
• 5:27
  It's a big city or a one-eyed baby is born all the time.
• 5:30
  Yeah.
• 5:31
  In this particular case, it was later shown to be misinformation.
• 5:34
  But yeah, I mean, that easily could have been a one-eyed baby born.
• 5:37
  But I mean, this particular case was fake news.
• 5:40
  And it was interesting because there was no skepticism on that part at all.
• 5:44
  They immediately believed it.
• 5:45
  And I think this was actually even reported in a newspaper that they didn't actually
• 5:51
  trust.
• 5:52
  And yet they just trusted this because obviously it was in line with their prophecies.
• 5:57
  And any information that was later sort of divulged, which showed that this was all, was
• 6:02
  fake news, was ignored by them.
• 6:04
  So their entire worldview was just based on confirmation bias, basically.
• 6:10
  They were looking for prophecies, obscure prophecies in the old books, at least they
• 6:16
  weren't actually, but they were taking the word of people who actually did.
• 6:21
  And then they were just sort of linking it to whatever they could in the modern world.
• 6:25
  And they were using that as justification for what they were doing.
• 6:28
  That's fascinating because so much of your work today has to do with how we come to conclusions
• 6:32
  about the world, the kinds of epistemic traps that we fall into, the thought bubbles
• 6:39
  and echo chambers and how we form our pictures of the world, the biases that we have.
• 6:43
  Was that informative to your thinking?
• 6:45
  Absolutely.
• 6:46
  Yeah.
• 6:47
  One of the things that I found when I was in Luton was that the people who were the
• 6:54
  most extreme were not actually the most alienated.
• 6:57
  And again, this is contravening sort of what the left wing newspapers were telling us
• 7:01
  at the time, which was that these Islamic extremists were alienated from society, that
• 7:06
  they were essentially oppressed, that they were subject to discrimination, that they
• 7:11
  were living in impoverished areas, and they were forgotten by society.
• 7:15
  And so they were turning to something to fill the void.
• 7:18
  But this was actually the opposite of what was happening in Luton because the most extreme
• 7:23
  people in Luton were not poor.
• 7:26
  They were actually middle class.
• 7:28
  They were not poorly educated.
• 7:30
  They were well educated.
• 7:31
  Most of these people were sort of architecture students, medical students, engineering students.
• 7:38
  They were, you know, so they were, they came from pretty well to do families.
• 7:41
  There was amongst some of the well, most well off in the area.
• 7:45
  They had everything given to them by society.
• 7:47
  They had a good education.
• 7:48
  They had, they had relatively, those, those of them who were not students had good jobs.
• 7:54
  They were generally well-liked within their community, you know, these were normal people.
• 8:00
  These were not sort of people who were living on the fringes of society.
• 8:04
  And I realized that, hang on a second, you know, if you could give people the best education,
• 8:08
  you could give people a good wage, you know, you could, you could give people good parenting,
• 8:14
  good family, and they could still turn out like this, they could still become extreme.
• 8:19
  Then this must be some, there must be some mechanism by which this is happening.
• 8:23
  That's not explained by socio-economic factors or anything like that.
• 8:27
  And that was when I realized that the problem was the biases that these people had,
• 8:31
  that they had pre-existing prejudices in their minds.
• 8:34
  And that they were, in a sense, destined to become extreme.
• 8:41
  And this is not to say that everybody, you know, a person is determined at birth whether
• 8:46
  they become extreme or not, but it's just that certain types, certain personality types
• 8:50
  do tend to navigate themselves towards extreme positions over time.
• 8:56
  And we see this, interestingly, this is another thing I found out was that people who are
• 9:00
  extreme in one sort of area, so there might be Islamic extremists.
• 9:06
  If they leave Islam, if they become disillusioned with Islam, they're much more likely to become
• 9:12
  extremists of another kind.
• 9:14
  So they might become Islamic, neo-Nazi extremists, for example.
• 9:18
  And I actually know that there was one guy called David Mayat, who was originally a neo-Nazi,
• 9:25
  and then he abandoned neo-Nazi as a man, he became an Islamic extremist.
• 9:29
  And I've seen this with other people as well.
• 9:31
  I mean, you could argue that sort of someone who I used to look up to, Margin Nawaz, he
• 9:38
  was originally Islamic extremist.
• 9:40
  And then he actually, for a small number of years, he became sort of quite a reasonable person,
• 9:45
  and that was when I looked up to him quite a bit.
• 9:48
  And then his sort of extremist tendency kicked in, and he became, now he's like this kind
• 9:53
  of COVID denier sort of character, who believes in sort of some conspiracy.
• 10:00
  That COVID was all fake and everything, and he's putting out all this crazy stuff.
• 10:04
  So one of the things is that, sorry, finished that thought.
• 10:10
  No, no, no, no, sorry.
• 10:12
  Well, the claim that many of the new atheists would say is that if you remove the theological
• 10:19
  scaffolding from a person's worldview, then you're not going to get them to do the kinds
• 10:25
  of things that Islamic terrorists do, that they need to have that foundational sort of
• 10:30
  underpinning of belief in the way that the cosmos is set up and what their afterlife
• 10:34
  is going to look like in order to drive them to do things.
• 10:37
  And if it's not that, then we can sort of park the case of Marjid, because Marjid is
• 10:42
  not an example of a middle-class person who led a cushy life and just cherry-picked an
• 10:48
  ideology.
• 10:49
  He was in an Egyptian prison and he was persecuted for his beliefs and amnesty got him
• 10:53
  out.
• 10:54
  And so I regard Marjid's swerve into La La Land as being an understandable psychological
• 11:01
  reaction to a sort of a PTSD inducing trauma which has made him suspicious of all forms
• 11:08
  of authority.
• 11:11
  But in the case of the person who doesn't have that background who's just coming out
• 11:14
  of some middle-class existence in the UK, you remove the theological stuff and what is
• 11:21
  motivating them to subscribe to an extreme worldview?
• 11:24
  This is a very good question and I used to be sympathetic to this view that it was actually
• 11:31
  religious underpinning sort of that was the reason for this.
• 11:35
  I was a big follower of Christopher Hitchens and all of this stuff when I was younger.
• 11:41
  But I think the facts show that this is not the case.
• 11:46
  I mean, do you know which group is responsible for the most suicide bombings on the planet?
• 11:53
  I think it's the Sri Lankan Talmuds.
• 11:55
  Yes.
• 11:56
  Yeah, the Tamil Tigers, yeah.
• 11:59
  The interesting thing about the Tamil Tigers is that they are secular.
• 12:03
  They're a secular organization, right?
• 12:06
  So this shows that you don't need religion to become a suicide bomber.
• 12:11
  You can actually do it for a political cause also.
• 12:15
  And I think what it is is that again, it goes down to the underlying personality.
• 12:19
  So some people are predisposed to having this kind of need for belonging, for believing
• 12:29
  in something greater than them and it doesn't need to be a religious belief.
• 12:33
  It could be a political belief and need to also be a hero as well.
• 12:39
  I need to do good for society and you could say you can argue that these are certain facets
• 12:46
  of narcissism, this belief that you can change the world, that you're the main character
• 12:51
  in this kind of movie.
• 12:53
  And what religion and political ideology do is that they become a sort of rationalization.
• 13:01
  They allow people to justify to themselves, behaviors that they may just naturally want
• 13:07
  to engage in.
• 13:08
  This is not to say that religion plays no part in bringing this about.
• 13:13
  And obviously, without some kind of overarching belief system, it's very hard for somebody
• 13:19
  just to justify suicide bombing to themselves.
• 13:22
  I mean, the belief in going to a paradise with 72 virgins is obviously going to make it
• 13:29
  easier to kill yourself because then you're just not really killing yourself from.
• 13:34
  Who doesn't want 72 virgins?
• 13:35
  Sure.
• 13:36
  Exactly.
• 13:37
  And I'll take that.
• 13:38
  So these do play a part.
• 13:39
  I'm not saying that they don't play a part.
• 13:40
  But I think that if somebody wants to become a suicide bomber, they don't need to be indoctrinated
• 13:45
  into some kind of religious cult.
• 13:48
  They can do that themselves through rationalization.
• 13:52
  You know, again, a lot of the people in the UK who became extreme were originally extreme
• 13:59
  in some other way.
• 14:01
  So yeah, right.
• 14:03
  Like Khaled Masood, who was in Luton.
• 14:07
  He was an extremist.
• 14:09
  Unfortunately, he was also extreme, but he was a pretty extreme criminal.
• 14:13
  In terms of he committed, he basically had but it's somebody so hard that that tooth got
• 14:20
  stuck in his head because he had but the mind seems like an own goal, really.
• 14:28
  I mean, you know, if you're going to have but someone that hard, you should be wearing
• 14:32
  a helmet for a start.
• 14:34
  I mean, that's the good.
• 14:35
  I mean, the good news, the good news, even if you go, if you go from a religious, you
• 14:43
  know, a hateful religious delusion like Islamophashism to a secular one like neo-nazism, the good
• 14:50
  news is that your view on the Jews can remain completely consistent.
• 14:53
  So there doesn't have to be so much of a difference between the two worldviews.
• 14:58
  I mean, this reminds me of one of the pieces that I love of yours is when you're talking
• 15:04
  about junk information as being distinct from misinformation or disinformation, but that
• 15:10
  the world at the moment is a wash and a kind of information that you call junk information.
• 15:16
  This may lead us into that.
• 15:17
  Do you want to just articulate what that is?
• 15:20
  Yeah.
• 15:21
  So it's probably, it's been popularized now by the term brain rot.
• 15:26
  I think brain rot was the Oxford dictionary word of the year in 2024, but I wrote about
• 15:32
  this a few years before and I called it intellectual obesity, it's pretty much the same thing.
• 15:37
  And it's the idea that information is like food, basically.
• 15:44
  And in fact, this is not, you know, it's not, it's not a metaphor like there was some
• 15:48
  research that was carried out.
• 15:50
  I think it was at Berkeley in which that we was found that basically information acts
• 15:56
  on the brain in a similar way to food.
• 15:59
  So what happens is that when we're hungry, no matter what we eat, it will make us feel
• 16:04
  good when we're hungry.
• 16:05
  If you're sufficiently hungry, you can eat anything, you know.
• 16:08
  And the same is true with information where if you're sufficiently curious, any information
• 16:15
  is going to make you feel good, basically, even if it's bad information, like the brain
• 16:20
  is not good at distinguishing good information from bad information.
• 16:23
  What do I mean by good information and bad information?
• 16:25
  So good information is information that changes you, it's information that's useful, it's
• 16:30
  information you can use.
• 16:32
  You can know that you're, you're unbibing good information by the fact that you'll
• 16:36
  be different, you'll think or act differently after consuming it than you would before.
• 16:41
  Bad information is information that it could be harmful, but it could also just be useless.
• 16:48
  So it would be information that's you're exactly the same after consuming it as you were
• 16:52
  before.
• 16:53
  And when you think about it, a lot of the information that people find on their social media feeds
• 16:59
  nowadays is bad information by that definition, it's information that doesn't change them.
• 17:04
  They're exactly the same after consuming it as they are before consuming it.
• 17:08
  And the idea of intellectual obesity is that this junk information, which is like junk
• 17:14
  food, actually has, it causes health problems in the same way that eating too much McDonald's
• 17:21
  or too much pizza hurt or whatever.
• 17:25
  Just as junk information, sorry, just as junk food is filled with, you know, additives
• 17:31
  and it tastes good, but it's lacking in nutrition and it's actually high in bad chemicals, which
• 17:38
  can make you overweight, can make you unfit, can lead to insulin resistance and all that
• 17:44
  kind of stuff.
• 17:46
  Similarly, junk info is tastes good.
• 17:50
  It makes you feel good after you've consumed it, but it's actually bad for you in the long
• 17:54
  term because what it does is it essentially distracts you and it keeps you thinking about
• 18:02
  things that you shouldn't really be thinking about, things that are not actually important
• 18:05
  to you, things that don't matter to you and things that are not going to really be consequential
• 18:09
  in the long term.
• 18:10
  And people are filling their minds with this junk info, they're filling their minds with
• 18:14
  information that's not going to change them, that's not going to change anything.
• 18:18
  It's only making them feel good for a few minutes, but which is ultimately filling their
• 18:24
  heads with junk and essentially sidetracking their attention.
• 18:29
  And I mean, the tricky thing I guess about this conundrum is that you just said that junk
• 18:34
  information, it doesn't enrich you and it doesn't have any, it's of no consequence in
• 18:39
  the long term.
• 18:41
  The tricky thing is that it doesn't have to be both those things, a lot of information
• 18:46
  that strikes me that is unconstructive for people to consume at the rates that they
• 18:50
  do might be really consequential in the long run for like the fate of the planet.
• 18:56
  It might be that they're spending a lot of time online getting really, really agitated
• 19:01
  about Donald Trump or Gaza or climate chaos or something or other, all of which are
• 19:08
  very important issues, but which are not served either in their totality globally or in
• 19:14
  the individual experience of the consumer by being poured over and shared and exercised
• 19:20
  and commented on social media.
• 19:25
  So it's like we're sort of confusing or conflating the kind of worthiness of the information
• 19:32
  that we might be receiving with its utility.
• 19:35
  Yeah, I think one of the interesting things about the sort of digital space is that
• 19:44
  people sort of get cues of what's important based on what people are talking about, but
• 19:49
  people are talking about what they're talking about based on the cues that they've received
• 19:52
  about what's important.
• 19:54
  So it's kind of like a, you know, so it's like just like it's tail, it's circular.
• 19:59
  Yeah, exactly, exactly.
• 20:01
  So what happens is that a few editors at newspapers will decide that they think a particular
• 20:06
  story is important and then they'll basically make it the sort of headline.
• 20:13
  And then a few people on social media will start talking about it.
• 20:18
  And then that will lead to sort of this kind of cascade where you'll just get more and
• 20:22
  more people who will go on and they'll see other people talking about it and then they'll
• 20:26
  start talking about it.
• 20:27
  And then more people join the conversation and over time, eventually everybody's talking
• 20:31
  about it because they think, oh, everybody else is talking about it.
• 20:34
  But really, this is just something that snowballed from the choices of a couple of people.
• 20:39
  It's not, it's not actually the most important thing that's happening.
• 20:43
  And I always like to think about the contrast between what are people talking about now and
• 20:49
  what are people?
• 20:50
  What are future historians going to talk about when they talk about this theory?
• 20:55
  And there's a big disconnect usually between what's important now and what the future
• 20:59
  historians talk.
• 21:00
  If you just look at sort of what people were talking about just 10 years ago and what
• 21:05
  people are talking about now when they look back at 10 years ago, there's this sort of
• 21:08
  disconnect there.
• 21:10
  And it's, you know, sometimes you do see a unification where you have like say 2016,
• 21:17
  for example, 2016 was a big event.
• 21:20
  It was the election of Trump, which was a sort of landmark sort of change in the culture.
• 21:26
  So yeah, at the time, a lot of people were talking about Trump and now people, when they
• 21:30
  think back to 2016, they talk about that.
• 21:32
  But then again, like when you think about what were people talking about, you know, sort
• 21:38
  of, again, COVID is another example of this, you know, but when you go back to places
• 21:44
  like 2012 or 2010, what were people talking about back then?
• 21:49
  Nobody really remembers.
• 21:50
  It was just mainly, you know, just the issues of the day that everybody's forgotten when
• 21:56
  the future started.
• 21:57
  Probably the housing crisis.
• 21:59
  Yeah, there was probably some housing crisis somewhere going on, you know, and just the
• 22:04
  news of the day people were talking about and those that was occupying most of people's
• 22:09
  concessions.
• 22:10
  When you look at what future historians or the historians of today are talking about when
• 22:13
  they talk about 2010, what they're talking about is they're talking about the rise of
• 22:17
  smartphones and the rise of social media, the digital revolution and how this is completely
• 22:24
  radically changed everything.
• 22:26
  We're not really talking about this back in 2010 very much, you know, so there's often
• 22:31
  a disconnect between what is actually important and what people talk about in the news.
• 22:37
  And this is essentially, I think, why we need to be careful about the topics that we spend
• 22:45
  our time focusing on because a lot of the time it's just entertainment.
• 22:48
  That's what we're doing.
• 22:49
  We're engaging in entertainment.
• 22:51
  First news is entertainment.
• 22:52
  It's there to act as a kind of social lubricant that people can just talk over certain issues
• 22:59
  and, you know, in that sense socially interact with other people.
• 23:04
  So yeah, I mean, you know, with going back to the whole intellectual obesity, one of
• 23:11
  the problems with getting your information from social media and sort of from the news
• 23:17
  headlines is that you can be fooled into thinking that certain things are important
• 23:21
  when they're not.
• 23:23
  You can be fooled into thinking that something is a gourmet meal when in fact it's just
• 23:26
  a fast food burger and fries, you know, that's not going to really be good for you in
• 23:32
  the long term.
• 23:34
  That's interesting.
• 23:35
  I mean, it's not, it strikes me that it's not just the things that we're talking about
• 23:38
  that we have a blind spot over that future historians will, we'll see that we can't.
• 23:44
  But it's also the way that we're talking about them.
• 23:46
  In other words, the boundaries that we're putting on the way that you're allowed to think
• 23:50
  about things.
• 23:51
  I mean, that both of those factors are reasons why I left the legacy media, both because
• 23:57
  I didn't want to be chasing the daily news cycle of being told that I have to talk about
• 24:02
  things just because they were recent rather than, you know, important.
• 24:06
  But also, secondarily, that there's a kind of agreed upon envelope of, you know, acceptable
• 24:13
  discourse that when you stray too far from it, then you seem weird.
• 24:17
  But to someone 20 years ago or 20 years hence, it wouldn't seem weird at all.
• 24:21
  It was just that we're all inside of particular framework and we're looking at things through
• 24:25
  a particular prism.
• 24:27
  And there's a penalty for stepping outside, outside the box.
• 24:30
  What's happening now, and I'd love to get your thoughts on it, is that I think people
• 24:34
  are feeling, you know, if you think about the recent run-in between Douglas Murray and
• 24:39
  Joe Rogan over whether or not we should be platforming people who, you know, think
• 24:43
  that Churchill was the bad guy in World War II, for example.
• 24:46
  What's happening now is that people have spent so long, and this comes back to margin as
• 24:49
  well, and people who have conspiracy theories about COVID, people have spent so long feeling
• 24:54
  like they're constrained by the norms of public conversation and that the legacy media and
• 25:01
  other institutions are imposing such a strict taboo on the things you're supposed to say.
• 25:07
  We're allowed to say that there's this backlash, this Trumpy Elon style, Farage like backlash
• 25:15
  where it's like, oh yeah, watch me, I can throw shit at the world just as well as anybody
• 25:18
  can and there's not a thing you can do about it.
• 25:21
  How do you try to pay your, you know, how do you, how do you find reason in a universe
• 25:26
  in which you don't want to be contrarian just for the sake of being contrarian, but you
• 25:30
  want to be contrarian when it matters?
• 25:33
  Yeah, so I think a lot of this sort of backlash is a result of the, there being too much
• 25:40
  of an active effort to suppress certain types of discourse.
• 25:44
  I think when you, when you try to stop people from doing something, they become more sort
• 25:52
  of interested in doing that thing, you know, this is a strange quirk of human nature.
• 25:57
  And it, I mean, it's known as, it's got various names, but in psychology, some people
• 26:02
  refer to it as the backfire effect.
• 26:05
  I've written a piece about it, calling it the imp of the perverse based on an old short
• 26:10
  story, but yeah, it's this, it's this strange phenomenon that people have where the more you
• 26:16
  try to get them to not do something, the more they want to do it.
• 26:20
  And over the sort of past, say 20 to 30 years, there's been a gradual effort to limit certain
• 26:28
  kinds of conversation people might refer to it as political correctness, you know,
• 26:32
  wochism, whatever you want to call it.
• 26:35
  But it was basically, you know, you're not allowed to criticize immigration.
• 26:40
  You're not allowed to point out, for instance, that there are differences between the genders
• 26:44
  in behavioral differences during the pandemic.
• 26:48
  You're not allowed to say that COVID may have risen from a lab, you know, may have escaped
• 26:53
  from a lab.
• 26:54
  So there's certain things that were off limits for for a long period of time.
• 26:59
  And what's happened is that the internet has allowed information to be transmitted, even
• 27:07
  if it's censored.
• 27:09
  So the old method of censoring certain kinds of information worked in the 20th century
• 27:13
  very well, because there were only a small number of outlets of information.
• 27:19
  You know, there was a very centralized newspaper system.
• 27:21
  There were only a few big newspapers.
• 27:24
  There was a few TV channels.
• 27:27
  There wasn't really a big selection.
• 27:28
  And all of it came from essentially establishment, you know, you had to be a big
• 27:32
  corporation or at least a big business to be able to circulate the information,
• 27:37
  whether it was in print form or in broadcast form.
• 27:41
  But what the internet did was that it allowed anybody to basically say anything.
• 27:47
  And in that sort of system, censorship no longer worked.
• 27:50
  This the old model of censorship no longer worked because you can't restrict what the world
• 27:57
  is going to say.
• 27:58
  You can restrict what a few big organizations are going to say.
• 28:02
  But if you try to do that with the internet, it's just not going to work.
• 28:05
  There's always going to be someone who can just type anything they want, no matter what you say.
• 28:09
  So the old 20th century model quickly became obsolete, but it didn't just become obsolete.
• 28:15
  It backfired because what happened was that when you try to censor something in a decentralized
• 28:22
  information environment, what happens is that knowledge of the censorship spreads quickly
• 28:28
  rather than suppression of the information itself, knowledge of the censorship spreads.
• 28:32
  And this can lead to the Barbara Streisand effect, or the Streisand effect, as it's known,
• 28:39
  where this is named after I think Barbara Streisand tried to suppress information about her
• 28:45
  home.
• 28:46
  She'd bought some big home or something, and she wanted to suppress private details of
• 28:50
  her life and what she'd been spending her money on.
• 28:53
  And so she said she tried to create a gag order and this led to knowledge of the gag order
• 28:59
  basically spreading.
• 29:01
  And now suddenly everybody wanted to know all about Barbara Streisand's business.
• 29:05
  So it basically backfired and everybody was curious to know what she was trying to hide.
• 29:09
  And this is what happened to how much I, how interested I could be in Barbara Streisand's
• 29:13
  real estate until I had to make me not know about it.
• 29:17
  Yeah, exactly.
• 29:18
  And so this Streisand effect is a very interesting thing.
• 29:20
  So basically what happens is that when you have a decentralized information space where
• 29:24
  anybody composts and then you try to censor some kind of information, knowledge of that
• 29:28
  censorship spreads quickly.
• 29:30
  And everybody now wants to know why that thing's being censored.
• 29:33
  So it's very different to how it was in the 20th century.
• 29:36
  And it took the establishment, and when I say the establishment I'm talking about, you
• 29:40
  know, the sort of general managerial class, it took them a while to adjust to this.
• 29:45
  So they've now adjusted to this, or at least they're in the process of just this.
• 29:50
  But that for a long period of time, they were under the impression that all they had to
• 29:53
  do was censor information in order to remove it from society.
• 29:56
  And that doesn't work.
• 29:57
  The opposite happens.
• 29:58
  And so what we're seeing now with the rise of Trump and the rise of Farage and the rest
• 30:02
  of that, we're seeing this kind of populist backlash to these, to this kind of, this backfire,
• 30:08
  backfiring that occurred as a result of the managerial class just having no understanding
• 30:14
  of the modern digital age and trying to use 20th century methods to, you know, restrict
• 30:20
  or control information in the 21st century.
• 30:23
  I think that now there's academics now are starting to understand that you can't, you
• 30:29
  can't change the discourse, you can't control the discourse through censorship anymore.
• 30:33
  It just doesn't work in this environment that we're living in now.
• 30:37
  So now they're looking at other methods, but, you know, things like, sort of pre-bunking
• 30:43
  and all this kind of stuff.
• 30:44
  But like, we're still obviously society lags behind technological changes slightly.
• 30:52
  It takes culture a few years to adjust to the technological changes and we're still adjusting
• 30:57
  to this change in the way that information is transmitted because it's only been really
• 31:04
  30 years that the internet has been sort of widespread, not even, I mean, not even that,
• 31:09
  more like 25, about 25 years.
• 31:14
  And that's not really long enough if that's, you know, it's not really long enough for
• 31:17
  us to have adjusted fully to the kind of new world that we're living in.
• 31:21
  So I think that alone is the thing.
• 31:24
  You're using the word censorship pretty liberally there in the sense that it's a natural thing
• 31:29
  for a society or a culture to try to always be renegotiating the boundaries of acceptable
• 31:35
  discourse and redefining what taboos are.
• 31:38
  And if there's a significant minority of people who think that the conversation around
• 31:42
  race or gender differences or immigration or whatever it might be is a little bit off
• 31:50
  and a little bit smelly and a little bit offensive to them or demeaning or denigrating
• 31:55
  or the way we talk about trans people or something, then isn't it legitimate for them to
• 31:59
  use the organs of popular culture and the institutions of governance not to throw people
• 32:05
  in jail for saying those things, but to instantiate new taboos about saying them and say, actually
• 32:09
  no, it's not okay to be debating, I don't know, whether or not women aren't as good
• 32:15
  as men at doing engineering or whether or not, you know, we should be preventing Muslims
• 32:22
  from coming into the country.
• 32:24
  Those are topics that we just want to, we want there to be a social penalty for talking
• 32:28
  about stuff like that.
• 32:29
  Otherwise how would the taboos ever get renegotiated?
• 32:33
  So the populist argument against that would be, who are they to decide what we are allowed
• 32:39
  to say?
• 32:40
  Why should they get to decide?
• 32:41
  What speciality do they have, what special information do they have that we don't
• 32:45
  that allows them to dictate what we can say?
• 32:48
  And they will point to how these senses have got it wrong, you know, for example, the
• 32:53
  lably hypothesis that was suppressed and yet now it's the dominant theory.
• 33:00
  I like to think about this, this, I mean, was it suppressed or was it just, was it just
• 33:04
  that people who said that were unduly, you know, were unperhaps unfairly mocked?
• 33:10
  No, no, it was suppressed.
• 33:11
  On Facebook, you could have your account deleted and essentially completely terminated without
• 33:16
  appeal if you mentioned the lably hypothesis, for example.
• 33:20
  And that was just one, that was just Facebook.
• 33:22
  There were, there was also Twitter as well.
• 33:24
  Twitter also suppressed it at one point, you know, this was pretty, pretty bad.
• 33:29
  And also you'd be called a racist, which is one of the worst things you could be called.
• 33:33
  You know, and so, you know, this, this is an example of how they got it wrong.
• 33:38
  And I like to use another example, which is the word retard.
• 33:43
  So the word retard was, for a very long period of time, considered offensive to the sense,
• 33:50
  in, to the extent that it could actually get you banned, like if you, if you use the word
• 33:55
  retard on Twitter, for example, at one point, you know, you could actually get your account
• 34:00
  at least suspended if not, if not terminated.
• 34:03
  And obviously polite society wouldn't want to deal with you.
• 34:06
  They wouldn't want to be friends with you if you used the word retard, because I think
• 34:10
  you were, you know, mocking disabled people, mentally disabled people.
• 34:14
  Why I find this interesting is that the, the reasoning for why the word retard is offensive
• 34:20
  is because it was once used as a word to describe mentally disabled people, right?
• 34:26
  But what's interesting is the word idiot was also used in exactly the same way.
• 34:32
  And so was the word moron.
• 34:33
  And so was the word imbecile.
• 34:35
  These were all classes of mental disabled month.
• 34:41
  And yet those words are completely acceptable, and the word retard is not.
• 34:45
  And there's nothing to distinguish them in, in any other way.
• 34:48
  And so what happened is somebody decided at some point in time that the word retard should
• 34:52
  be offensive.
• 34:54
  And then it just stuck on, it caught on and it became, it became offensive because they
• 34:58
  had decided, no, I just wondered to myself, why did this person get to decide that this
• 35:04
  word is offensive arbitrarily, you know, everybody just unquestioningly, unquestioningly decided
• 35:11
  to follow this person's advice that this word was offensive.
• 35:14
  It just, it became an emergent phenomenon.
• 35:17
  But nobody, nobody has a good reason for why it's offensive, nobody can give you a good
• 35:20
  reason for why it's offensive.
• 35:22
  It's just because everybody else thinks it's offensive.
• 35:25
  So what we're seeing here is an, I mean, isn't that just how norms evolve?
• 35:28
  I mean, it, I don't think it's the case that an individual made that decision and then
• 35:33
  decreed it.
• 35:34
  There's some kind of organic, I mean, there is, there is certainly a phenomenon I'll grant
• 35:38
  you that, you know, there might be a particular activist group that has a particular beef about
• 35:44
  some word, and, you know, let's suppose that instead of media organizations like the BBC,
• 35:50
  you might be too cowed by some LGBTQIA plus activist group that encourages them to change
• 35:56
  the way that they talk about, I don't know, gender transition surgery to call it gender
• 36:00
  affirming care or to talk about sex as if it was assigned at birth or, you know, that
• 36:04
  we all know that there's kind of a, a jargony sort of slogan way of talking that social
• 36:10
  justice types will adopt.
• 36:13
  And in that, in that sense, there is something a little bit sensory about it because it's
• 36:16
  coming, sense or like, rather, about it because it's coming from the top down rather than
• 36:22
  the bottom up.
• 36:23
  But it is also possible for norms to just change because there's a very passionate group
• 36:29
  of people who want to impose a new taboo around them.
• 36:32
  I mean, yes, it's arbitrary that the R word is bad and I have to call it the R word and
• 36:38
  I don't call it idiot the I word.
• 36:41
  At the same time, it's also arbitrary that we don't call females in the workplace honey
• 36:46
  circle and tuts and slap them on the bum in the workplace, which would have been fine
• 36:53
  in the 1950s, you know, they decided they didn't like it.
• 36:57
  They made a big ruckus when people did it and we all sort of agreed and then moved on
• 37:02
  because there was all of a sudden a taboo against it.
• 37:06
  And 40 years ago, there could have been people in your position saying like, it's totally
• 37:10
  arbitrary.
• 37:11
  Why don't I allow to call her babe in the workplace like the babe is just an endearing
• 37:15
  word for.
• 37:16
  I would say that.
• 37:17
  I would say that these are different cases because in the case of, you know, slapping
• 37:21
  a woman on the on the book or whatever, that was something that was decreed to be bad
• 37:26
  because the people that would actually, the victims of it, came forward and said, this
• 37:31
  is not okay.
• 37:32
  Right.
• 37:33
  And so, you know, that's that's a very different thing from the word retard becoming outlawed.
• 37:39
  It wasn't a case that mentally disabled people came forward and said, we don't want to
• 37:43
  be called the word what probably was wasn't it was it was it was probably it was probably
• 37:48
  active.
• 37:49
  No, I could.
• 37:50
  I mean, I looked into it.
• 37:51
  I looked into the how the word retard became outlawed.
• 37:57
  And there is no suggestion that this was part of an active campaign by mentally disabled
• 38:03
  people to stop people from using that word.
• 38:05
  If it had been, then maybe that would have been different.
• 38:07
  But the fact is it was an arbitrary decision.
• 38:10
  This is what's interesting about it.
• 38:12
  Like I said, the word idiot, the word imbecile, the word moron, all of these words, what
• 38:16
  we use in the equal capacity to also refer to mentally disabled people.
• 38:21
  In some cases, it was, these words were used to refer to people who were more mentally
• 38:26
  disabled than people who were traditionally regarded as retards.
• 38:29
  So, you know, this again, you know, who decided this?
• 38:34
  We don't know.
• 38:35
  It just you said that it's an evolving norm, but how did it begin?
• 38:39
  Who who who set off the chain?
• 38:42
  The chain reaction that led to, you know, this becoming an outlawed word.
• 38:46
  And so for me, to go to the original point, so I use this to describe, you know, an example
• 38:53
  of how a lot of what is censored doesn't often have very good reasoning behind it.
• 38:59
  You know, and again, if you want a better example, the lab leak is probably a better example.
• 39:04
  You know, people, if you give people the ability to decide what is acceptable for the
• 39:09
  rest of us to say, they're going to make mistakes, they're going to make big mistakes.
• 39:13
  And the populist right would argue that we shouldn't give any single group of people the
• 39:17
  power to dictate what is acceptable for the rest of us.
• 39:20
  That these should be, in fact, evolving norms, and that these should be things that happen
• 39:26
  bottom up rather than top down, you know, and so I kind of agree with this, you know, obviously
• 39:31
  I'm not in favor of, I don't think, I don't like the word retard, I don't, I mean, it
• 39:36
  can be good in a certain sense, but I wouldn't, I would never use it to describe somebody
• 39:41
  who was mentally disabled.
• 39:42
  I would never use it under those circumstances.
• 39:44
  I use, I call myself a retard, you know, if I, if I just got something wrong sometimes,
• 39:48
  you know, I think it's, it's a, it's a pretty good word in that sense.
• 39:51
  I use it in the same word that I'd use the word idiot or moron.
• 39:53
  I don't, I don't use it to attack mentally disabled people, but like, you know, I think
• 39:59
  that the general sort of hatred for censorship that's emerged over the past 10 years is largely
• 40:08
  a result of these faceless individuals somewhere having the power to dictate what is acceptable
• 40:13
  for the rest of us to say, without any real reasoning given, you know, it's arbitrary,
• 40:18
  there's no real reasoning for it.
• 40:20
  It's like, you know, well, it's also, I mean, it's also, this reminds me of another point
• 40:25
  that I've read in your work, which is that the difference between sort of creating
• 40:32
  norms that have some rational basis versus creating norms whose job it is to demonstrate
• 40:39
  our own goodness or our fidelity or kind of put us in a moral hierarchy in the sense that,
• 40:45
  you know, when you just made the distinction between using a word and mentioning a word,
• 40:49
  this is something that linguists, you know, are familiar with, you know, to talk about,
• 40:55
  to have a conversation the way that we are about the acceptability of the use of a particular
• 41:00
  word and use the word in that context is very different from using it as a slur.
• 41:06
  This is something that we've all been forced to reevaluate with the end word over the
• 41:10
  past 15 or 20 years, you know, 20 years ago would have been possible to talk about, you
• 41:15
  know, when, whether or not a white person can ever say that word and you would have actually
• 41:19
  used the word when you're talking about it, now we're being forced to essentially pretend
• 41:24
  that we can't tell the difference between mentioning a word and using the word in hate
• 41:29
  and the reason for that presumably is not in order to achieve any real world outcome except
• 41:35
  to demonstrate that we're signing up to, to be on the right side of history and that we've
• 41:40
  got the memo about how we're supposed to behave.
• 41:43
  So a lot of this stuff actually has less to do with how we want the world to look and
• 41:49
  how we think we should live as good people and more to do with how do we signal to other
• 41:54
  people that we're on the right tribe and that we, our heart is in the right place and that
• 41:59
  where we have status inside a certain social justice hierarchy.
• 42:04
  Yeah, yeah. And this is exactly the argument that is put forward by the populist right at the
• 42:09
  moment, which is that it's all virtually signaling, you know, that it's only words at the end of
• 42:14
  the day and words only have as much power as we imbue them with if we choose not to be offended
• 42:22
  by a certain word than it loses its power. And I think this is a very convincing argument.
• 42:28
  Again, you know, this is, this is the case of the magic managerial class not having a good
• 42:33
  understanding of human psychology and their attempts to fix the world actually making it more
• 42:38
  broken a backfire effect and this is another backfire effect where what they do is they try to make a
• 42:44
  outlawed by making it extremely offensive, but what that does is that that gives the word more
• 42:49
  power and the people that they actually want to stop from using this word use it more
• 42:55
  because it's a, you know, they want to offend, they want to be based and they want to, you know,
• 42:59
  they want to go out there and offend people. And like, you know, we see with Shiloh Hendrix,
• 43:05
  you know, who used the word, you know, I use the word nigger because I'll use it,
• 43:12
  I use it descriptively. I don't use it. I don't like to use the word n word. I think that
• 43:17
  n word is a bit of a cop out. So I'll use the word. Yeah. So she used the word nigger.
• 43:23
  And she's now close to one million dollars in donations. She's got close to one million
• 43:31
  dollars in donations from people for using that word. And so this is a backfire of what the managerial
• 43:40
  class intended. They wanted to make this word so verboten that people would never use it.
• 43:45
  But the opposites happen. Now people are being paid. They're becoming millionaires for using that word.
• 43:51
  And yes, yeah, I mean, it's completely bizarre. And in the realm of ideas, I mean, it reminds me
• 43:56
  and we can move on from the question of censorship and taboos, but it reminds me a little bit of
• 44:03
  erased immigration earlier. And you know, one of the big sort of mistakes, I think that the left
• 44:11
  has made over the past 10 or 20 years is to make it almost as taboo as the n word to talk about
• 44:17
  the problems of integration of particular communities in multicultural societies. And by making
• 44:23
  it so taboo, we've given it a frisson of kind of sexiness to be anti-immigrant or to be xenophobic.
• 44:32
  And if it had just been a normal part of everyday conversation to talk about,
• 44:36
  all right, well, how do we integrate these people? What if they come from a conservative
• 44:40
  Muslim background? How do we make sure that they're on board with liberal democratic values
• 44:45
  and that they're not sexist and so on? The insinuation that you might be more sexist if you come
• 44:50
  from a conservative Muslim community was regarded as so taboo that you couldn't have that conversation.
• 44:56
  So now you end up with entire swathes of towns and cities in the UK and France and Germany,
• 45:04
  where the lack of integration is galling and is fueling a new right-wing backlash that could have
• 45:10
  been headed off at the past, if only would have been able to have more open conversations about
• 45:14
  the challenge before it got insurmountable. I don't know if you want to comment on that before we
• 45:20
  do. Yeah, I just think that a lot of the problems really come from good intentions and I think
• 45:34
  that with the left, what they try to do is with the example of not calling out Islamic misogyny,
• 45:43
  they're obviously trying to look after one group's rights and they think obviously there's
• 45:48
  a lot of what they would call Islamophobia, so they're trying to fight Islamophobia by preventing
• 45:53
  criticism of Islam, but then by doing this, what they do is they create problems for another group,
• 45:59
  which is women, women who are in Muslim societies are suffering as a result of this. If you're
• 46:06
  not allowed to call out Islamic misogyny, then Islamic misogyny gets a free pass and what this
• 46:11
  results in is it means women can be oppressed with impunity. This is one of the fundamental
• 46:20
  problems with the left's approach to engaging in this kind of identity politics, where oftentimes what
• 46:26
  mean, when they try to do good for one group, they're actually sacrificing another group for that,
• 46:32
  and they're essentially, again, they could say the same thing about trans rights, where when they're
• 46:37
  sort of advocating for trans rights, they're usually taking rights away from women to a certain
• 46:40
  extent. And so this is why I just don't think this is a good way to try and fix the world,
• 46:50
  to try to improve relations or whatever between different cultures, between different demographics.
• 46:57
  I think ultimately, again, this is another example of managerial class having no understanding
• 47:03
  of human psychology. They think that by preventing criticism of one group, that they can actually
• 47:10
  make people more accepting of that group, but that's not what happens, the opposite happens.
• 47:14
  If you're not allowed to criticize one, then people see that group as being favoritist,
• 47:18
  that they see it being, as being a favoritist, sorry. And then why are these people getting
• 47:27
  special treatment, and then resentment towards that group grows? And we've seen this, we've seen
• 47:31
  it over the past 10 years, it's all across Europe and even in America, it's led to the rise of Trump
• 47:36
  and Brexit and forage and all of this stuff, because people are like, well, immigrants or Muslims
• 47:43
  are getting treated better than natives. And then it becomes a question of not just trading off
• 47:52
  the rights of one group, namely, oppressed women in conservative Muslim communities,
• 47:59
  or women who are being forced to compete against biological males in the case of trans athletes.
• 48:06
  But it's also an own goal for the entire society and even the Muslim community and the trans
• 48:14
  community themselves, because it leaves a vacuum of persuasion in which people haven't been
• 48:20
  actually articulating the reasons why we should have a pluralistic multicultural society,
• 48:25
  or why we should do better on trans rights, for example, because you're not having the
• 48:30
  conversation because it's been ruled out and it's taboo. So the backlash that then emerges
• 48:36
  is antithetical to all of the aspirations of people who want to live in a multicultural
• 48:41
  society or who want to live in a society that isn't prejudiced against trans people.
• 48:46
  You know, it's not just the, you know, it's at the micro and the macro level that everyone loses.
• 48:52
  I can't remember, I think it was Yasha Munk who talks about the delusion that the left has
• 48:58
  been laboring under, that they can just sort of force wins and that those wins will be sustainable,
• 49:04
  instead of doing the hard work of actually trying to persuade people as to why we're right.
• 49:09
  So, you know, you can contrast the, yeah.
• 49:13
  Yeah, I was going to say, I think this is true. I think one of the things is that the left
• 49:18
  became complacent because it was sort of, it had the entire cultural elite in the palm of its hand
• 49:24
  at one point. You know, pretty much every intellectual, every creative intellectual certainly
• 49:29
  was left leaning, especially in the 20th century, you know, all the writers, artists were left
• 49:34
  leaning. Even now, I mean, the only one majority of Hollywood, for example, is left leaning and,
• 49:39
  you know, the culture is created by left leaning people because left leaning people tend to be
• 49:43
  idealists, they tend to be imaginative and, you know, they tend to sort of imagine a better world
• 49:48
  and all of this stuff and utopian in that sense. And so, I think that the left sort of had this
• 49:53
  monopoly on culture for a long time and as a result, it grew complacent and it started to believe
• 49:59
  that whatever it put out, whatever content it put out, whatever artistic works, it created,
• 50:05
  that they would be the only voice. But obviously, again, with the internet, what this allowed
• 50:11
  to happen was it allowed the right to mobilize because an interesting thing about the difference
• 50:16
  between the left and the right, one of the differences is that left wingers tend to come from cities
• 50:21
  and right wingers tend to come from more rural areas. So left wingers tend to come from very
• 50:27
  densely packed areas and right wingers tend to come from more sparsely populated areas.
• 50:32
  And what the internet did was that the internet allowed people in sparsely populated areas
• 50:39
  to mobilize for the first time because this was very hard to do before the internet for people in,
• 50:45
  you know, rural Alabama, for example, you know, to mobilize. It was very difficult because
• 50:51
  everybody's lives far away from each other. The left could easily do this because they were all
• 50:55
  tightly packed into cities. They came into contact with one of them very frequently. So they were
• 50:59
  able to launch from protests a lot more frequently and a lot more effectively. What the internet did
• 51:05
  was it leveled the playing field. It allowed right wingers to mobilize very quickly in the same
• 51:11
  speed as the left of formerly introduced and this led to essentially the formation of right wing
• 51:16
  culture, which is still very primitive. I would say right wing culture is very primitive compared
• 51:20
  to left wing culture because right wing culture is relatively new. It was formerly something that
• 51:27
  was limited to the back quarters, you know, it was the sort of the dilapidated sort of, you know,
• 51:34
  rural middle America kind of thing, you know, rust belt kind of stuff. But now it's a lot more
• 51:40
  sophisticated because you have the internet bringing right wingers together. So we're now seeing
• 51:44
  the formation of right wing culture, which is based culture, which is you're seeing sort of,
• 51:50
  you know, these organizations like the Babylon B and lips of TikTok are forming these kind of new
• 51:56
  media organizations and, you know, daily wire and all this kind of stuff. And even Fox News, Fox
• 52:03
  News is relatively new when it comes to sort of, you know, big conglomerates of media. This is
• 52:10
  Fox News has only formed in the late 20th, I think, 1990s, I think.
• 52:15
  And so, oh yeah, definitely. I mean, even it's so recent that even CNN, I mean, you know,
• 52:20
  the idea of having a 24 hour cable news channel that people actually watched was alien until the
• 52:27
  Gulf War. So what's that 92 when was the first Gulf War? But I mean, you know, that was the first.
• 52:33
  And yeah, so, you know, you see Fox, Fox certainly has to be, you know, a decade or so
• 52:40
  after that. It was probably 9-11 that put on the map. I mean, the speed of this is incredible.
• 52:46
  And when you talk about utopian left wing creative, idealistic people, I'm reminded of your
• 52:52
  amazing piece about your encounter with Luigi Mangioni, the, you know, the suspect of the shooting
• 52:58
  of the assassination, I guess, of the, that healthcare CEO who, and he had crossed your path,
• 53:04
  because I mean, just explain that to us. Like he, if people aren't aware of his background,
• 53:10
  I mean, he is a curious, you know, thinker and questioner of the kinds of ideas that we're talking
• 53:18
  about, the skepticism about institutions, the skepticism about received wisdom. How did he cross
• 53:23
  your path? Okay, so I've got to be careful about this because I can't say too much about
• 53:29
  Luigi Mangioni for legal reasons. And also, I'm basically contractually obligated because I'm
• 53:35
  working on a documentary about this. So I can't say too much about it. I can just say that, you
• 53:41
  know, what I've already said, which is that basically I, he contacted me via email because he
• 53:50
  became a founding member to my sub-stack, the prism. And, you know, he was, he seemed like a really
• 53:57
  nice guy. I mean, that's pretty much all I can say. But he seemed like a nice guy. He seemed
• 54:01
  pretty normal. I'm just amazed at it in the States, like just the other day. I heard Bill Mar,
• 54:07
  talk about claiming that he was the shooter and claiming that he was the killer. I mean,
• 54:12
  in Australia and the UK, if you said that, you know, you'd get a massive fine and the person
• 54:18
  and the suspect might walk, but I guess in the States, you just, you know, steamroll over all that.
• 54:24
  That's it. Yeah. I mean, yeah. So with the whole thing with the empathy, I mean,
• 54:30
  you know, if he did do this, and one of the potential reasons for why he might have done it
• 54:36
  would be that he believed that, you know, he was making the world a better place by killing this
• 54:43
  person because he believed this person was a villain. And it's interesting because a lot of people
• 54:47
  justified themselves that they're doing a good thing. And when they do that, they actually
• 54:53
  justify some of the most horrific things that a person can do. I mean, when you consider the
• 54:58
  atrocities that were committed throughout history, most of them were committed by people who
• 55:03
  thought they were doing good. Yeah. Pretty much any any any atrocity that you can think of was
• 55:09
  done by people who thought that they were doing the world a favor. They were actually making the
• 55:13
  world a better place. And so yeah, a lot of it was also driven by empathy. So it was driven.
• 55:20
  So if we get to the worst example that or at least the most popular example, the Holocaust,
• 55:27
  you know, you'd say, how could the Holocaust possibly have been motivated by empathy?
• 55:31
  No, that just sounds absurd, doesn't it? But when you really think about it and when you actually
• 55:35
  understand Hitler's Russian banal, it makes perfect sense. So Hitler basically believed, he had
• 55:43
  a lot of empathy for the German people. And especially for the German common man, he was the
• 55:49
  populist. He believed, you know, he wanted to he wanted the world to be sort of he wanted the
• 55:57
  world to be favorable to the the the the the the basic German citizen. He wanted the basic
• 56:04
  German citizens to live a good life. And the thing that he thought was the main obstacle to that
• 56:10
  was Jewish people. He thought that Jewish people obviously were corrupting society through
• 56:19
  what he called degenerate art. He thought they were essentially engaging in usury that they
• 56:26
  were basically taking money away from people that they were corrupting the youth and all this
• 56:32
  kind of stuff. And he believed that, you know, he tried to see things from the point of view of the
• 56:36
  average German citizen who who was trying to survive in the wake of, you know, the treaty of Versailles
• 56:43
  and, you know, the aftermath of the First World War. And his life was hard for the average German
• 56:49
  citizen. And he put himself in the average German citizen's shoes and try to work out how to make
• 56:55
  life better for them. So that's how it actually began. That was how the Holocaust began from that.
• 57:00
  Good intention, that single good intention. It snowballed into this horrific one of the worst
• 57:05
  atrocities in like in human history. It was because he generally wanted to help the German citizen.
• 57:11
  He had a completely distorted idea of how to do it. But his intentions were good. And you could say
• 57:18
  the same about Stalin, you know, Stalin wanted to create a better world. And he he empathized with
• 57:23
  the proletariat. He wanted equality. He wanted to he wanted everybody to be prosperous and the way
• 57:31
  that he saw the the best way that he saw to do that was to destroy the bourgeoisie. And so when
• 57:38
  you look at it like like that, it seems, you know, like empathy is is actually at the core of a lot
• 57:45
  of evil in the world. Even today, you know, when you look at the atrocities that are committed by
• 57:51
  Hamas, for example, you see a lot of people supporting that because they they empathize with Hamas.
• 57:57
  But the interesting thing about they probably empathize, they probably think they're empathizing
• 58:01
  with Palestinian. With the Palestinians, yeah, yeah. So yeah, so they're empathizing with the
• 58:06
  Palestinians, I meant, sorry. And you know, you see the same with Ukraine, you see with Russia,
• 58:12
  all that stuff, right? The interesting thing. So there's a great book by Paul Bloom,
• 58:19
  uh, or, uh, against empathy and yeah, yeah. And in this in this book, he he makes a very strong
• 58:27
  case for why empathy leads people to engage in in atrocities and horrific acts against people.
• 58:33
  And one of his arguments is that empathy is actually like a spotlight that you only shine it
• 58:38
  on one group or individual at a time. And when you shine it on that group, you submerge everyone
• 58:45
  around them in darkness. So you cease to have any concern for the people around them, especially
• 58:51
  the people in opposition to them. And so because empathy is selective in that sense, what it does is
• 58:57
  you have a lot of empathy, a lot of care and a lot of compassion for the object of your empathy.
• 59:02
  But that means you have none left for the people that are opposing them or whatever. And the truth
• 59:09
  is is that if you have, you know, if you really were an empathic individual, you would be able to
• 59:14
  have empathy for all individuals to a certain extent. But really what happens is that people
• 59:21
  only have specific, yeah. Yeah, I'm, I, I've argued with Paul Bloom on this show about the
• 59:30
  word empathy. I get, I understand the gist of your argument and, and he is. But there's a,
• 59:37
  it strikes me that really what was cruel and callous about Hitler and Stalin was not that they
• 59:47
  cared too much about the people who were the focus of their self-proclaimed goals, but that they
• 59:55
  had it. There's a streak of idealism, which goes along the lines of tough decisions have to be
• 1:00:02
  made. And a lot of cowards in this world aren't up to what needs to be done. And this brings
• 1:00:08
  us back to Manjony as well. I mean, we don't have to talk about Manjony, but I think there's
• 1:00:11
  that there are similarities between if he did what he was accused of doing between that mindset
• 1:00:16
  and the mindset that I'm trying to articulate, which is like, everybody complains about the problem,
• 1:00:22
  but nobody is actually willing to step up and do what it takes. And sometimes in order to create
• 1:00:26
  a better world, you do have to hold your nose a bit and do things that might on their face seem
• 1:00:32
  unseemly. But, you know, it's the Jack Nicholson character and a few good men or it's Dick Cheney
• 1:00:38
  during the war on terror. It's like, you know, you want to go to bed safe at night and you don't
• 1:00:45
  want to have to think about the things that need to get done in order to ensure your safety and
• 1:00:49
  ensure your prosperity. But I am, I alone, you know, this is now channeling Trump. I alone can fix it,
• 1:00:56
  and I am the kind of person who will actually have the guts to be able to do that, to make the hard
• 1:01:01
  decisions and to do the tough things. And to me, what's so horrendous about the idealism of
• 1:01:09
  a Hitler is not that they're not that they're overly empathetic towards people. It's that they
• 1:01:16
  are overly attached to a utopianism and to a vision. I mean, I agree with you that it, you know,
• 1:01:22
  his actions obviously didn't land as evil to him, but it required a lot of bodies being
• 1:01:30
  shoveled, you know, out of gas chambers in order to achieve his vision. And he, he knew that,
• 1:01:36
  but he thought that the, he thought the abstraction of his own, he thought his commitment to an
• 1:01:41
  abstraction should trump human concerns. Does that work, isn't it? Yeah, absolutely. I've written,
• 1:01:50
  I've written something similar, which is that, you know, idealists become so infatuated with an
• 1:01:56
  abstract ideal of humanity that they have no love left for actual humans. And yeah, and I think,
• 1:02:04
  you know, because again, this is, you know, this is the idea of sort of, yes, so you're right.
• 1:02:11
  You know, part of it is empathy, but also part of it is seeing too much of a larger picture,
• 1:02:18
  seeing this sort of vast image of a future that sort of blinds them to the present. So,
• 1:02:25
  you know, they might, they might be intoxicated by this vision of, you know, a perfect world,
• 1:02:29
  and that can blind them to sort of what they're doing in the present. But like, at the same time,
• 1:02:34
  if you look at people at a population level, then you cease to see them as humans. There's a
• 1:02:41
  sting, there's a phenomenon known as compassion fade, which is when you look at large numbers of
• 1:02:47
  people, you don't really see them as humans, you see them as sort of like a dance basically.
• 1:02:53
  And, you know, so experiments have been done where, what I did was, in this one experiment,
• 1:03:02
  there was a, there was sort of like, they did split testing with these two marketing campaigns
• 1:03:07
  for charity to alleviate poverty, basically, in Africa. And in one campaign, what I did was that they,
• 1:03:15
  they used loads of statistics, like basically about how many people were suffering and, you know,
• 1:03:22
  how much of difference you can make to their lives by sort of giving this amount of money,
• 1:03:26
  whatever. And then in the other experiment, what they did was their campaign revolved around
• 1:03:32
  a single girl, and she told her story of her life of how hard it was. And I think you know,
• 1:03:40
  the answer to how this went, but the people, the participants gave a lot more money to the,
• 1:03:45
  the girl than they did to the statistics, right? Yeah. Because they didn't really.
• 1:03:50
  Yeah, it's fascinating. Yeah. They couldn't relate to the statistics.
• 1:03:53
  I mean, we know this in our own, we know this in our own life as well. Like, I mean, you know,
• 1:03:57
  we all know people who are extremely agitated, idealistic activists, and we also know people who
• 1:04:03
  are not particularly agitated about big ideas, but our assault of the earth, you know, down to
• 1:04:08
  earth people. And if your back was against the wall, and you really needed to depend on somebody,
• 1:04:13
  and your life was on the line, you know, in whose hands would you rather place your fate?
• 1:04:19
  The hands of a keyboard warrior who spends a lot of time being highly agitated about
• 1:04:25
  climate change or Gaza on social media, or the slightly racist old farmer.
• 1:04:32
  You know, you'd probably go with the slightly racist old farmer, I bet. Like who probably
• 1:04:36
  actually cares about human beings in all of their messiness, rather than some abstract idea of
• 1:04:42
  what's going to save humanity in the long run. I want to talk about the, yeah, sorry, just
• 1:04:47
  finish that thought before I explore other ideas that you've thrown out there.
• 1:04:51
  So, I mean, there's a quote that's attributed to Stalin, although he didn't actually say it,
• 1:04:57
  which is, you know, that one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.
• 1:05:03
  And I think that really summarizes it. You know, I think one of the problems with when you
• 1:05:07
  are a leader of a big nation, you tend to sort of see people as statistics rather than as humans,
• 1:05:14
  and that can perhaps be one of the contributors to atrocities as well. You just don't see them as humans.
• 1:05:19
  Yeah, yeah, exactly. Another piece that I want to pick your brain on is the pathologization
• 1:05:26
  pandemic, the idea that in the 21st century, we're kind of confusing sadness for sickness in a way
• 1:05:36
  that there's like a trend of, I don't know, mistaking deep spiritual unfulfillment and
• 1:05:44
  enemy with a pathology. Can you unpack that? Yeah, so, I mean, this is originally something that I
• 1:05:56
  sort of came across when I was looking at some of the long COVID statistics. And because I was
• 1:06:04
  quite interested in the phenomenon of long COVID, I was wondering what it was. And one of the things
• 1:06:10
  that is a thing, by the way, can you get to the punchline? It's a thing, but it's actually more
• 1:06:15
  accurate to say that it's a collection of things. So it's a, it's an umbrella term that's used
• 1:06:20
  for sort of long term consequences of COVID infection. And this could range from depression
• 1:06:29
  to actual damage that's been done to perhaps the lungs autoimmune reactions is probably one of
• 1:06:36
  the major ones as well autoimmune problems as a result of COVID infection are a major class
• 1:06:42
  of long COVID. And then there's people who believe that they have long COVID, but don't. And
• 1:06:50
  this is very interesting because when I looked at who actually was suffering from long COVID,
• 1:06:56
  who was at least claiming to suffer from long COVID, what I found was that these in the hospital
• 1:07:02
  statistics, a large number of the people who claim to have long COVID had no evidence of COVID
• 1:07:09
  antibodies in their bloodstream serum, which means that they very, very likely didn't have COVID ever.
• 1:07:15
  So it's possible to have, I mean, you shouldn't really be able to have long COVID unless you've
• 1:07:19
  had COVID, but there are a large number of people who had long COVID without ever having COVID.
• 1:07:25
  And so what became clear to me was when I looked further into the statistics, what I found
• 1:07:30
  was that a large number of the people who had long COVID but didn't have COVID had
• 1:07:36
  anxiety or depression or some other mood disorder before the pandemic.
• 1:07:42
  And so it became clear to me that a large proportion of people, and not all, obviously,
• 1:07:47
  I'm not saying that long COVID is fake, obviously there are people out there who do have real
• 1:07:50
  conditions and autoimmune disorders and all that kind of stuff. I'm not saying that they're
• 1:07:55
  faking it. What I'm saying is that there is a large proportion of people who claim to have
• 1:08:00
  long COVID, who actually have some other disorder. So it could be anxiety, it could be depression,
• 1:08:06
  it could be some other kind of mood disorder. And what they've done is that they've read up about
• 1:08:11
  long COVID, they've read the symptoms of long COVID. They've applied some of the symptoms,
• 1:08:16
  themselves, they've seen, they're engaging in confirmation bias again and they're sort of
• 1:08:21
  ignoring the symptoms that they have which are not part of long COVID and they're fixating
• 1:08:26
  on the ones that they do have which are part of long COVID. And then they're basically ascertaining
• 1:08:31
  from that, they're basically concluding from that rather that they have long COVID. And this is
• 1:08:37
  allowing them essentially to identify as a long COVID patient. And so this was how I originally
• 1:08:46
  came across this idea that people might mistake their disorders, but it could be something that's
• 1:08:53
  not even really an illness, but something like depression. I mean, I suppose depression is an
• 1:08:57
  illness, but it's vague illness, depression is a spectrum and it can range from mild sadness to
• 1:09:04
  actual suicidal sort of thoughts. And so, you know, people were mistaking mood disorders for
• 1:09:13
  physiological disorders. And then what I did is I basically began to look at some of the literature
• 1:09:18
  and I found that there's actually a long history of this. In fact, there's a very interesting
• 1:09:23
  idea where I think, so let me just try to remember what this was. So so there was a condition
• 1:09:33
  where people thought they were made of glass, right? And it was known as I think glass delusion,
• 1:09:39
  right? And this was very popular in Europe in the 15th to 17th centuries. And King Charles the
• 1:09:47
  sixth of France was famously afflicted by the glass delusion. He wore clothing that was reinforced
• 1:09:53
  with iron rods and did not allow his advisors to come near him due to his fear that his body would
• 1:09:59
  accidentally shatter. He may have, you know, he may have been the first case, actually, he's
• 1:10:03
  one of the most famous cases of this case. So this was something that spread quite a lot.
• 1:10:08
  People thought that they were made of glass and this is just one. There's been, there was another
• 1:10:12
  one which was the dancing delusion where people would dance and they would feel the need to dance
• 1:10:16
  until they died of exhaustion, apparently. So there have been some strange illnesses throughout history.
• 1:10:23
  And what they show is that a lot of illnesses are psychogenic. They're not a result of physiological
• 1:10:31
  changes in the body. They're actually, at least not initially, they're actually a result of
• 1:10:35
  psychological changes. So they they stem from the way somebody thinks it's possible that if you
• 1:10:42
  think in a certain way, you can make yourself ill. And this has been shown again and again and again
• 1:10:48
  throughout history. You know, there's been strange pandemics in India. There's something called
• 1:10:53
  poppy pregnancy syndrome where people actually become so convinced that they've been
• 1:10:57
  impregnated by a puppy. Like, basically, there's a in rural India. There's this idea that if you get
• 1:11:03
  bitten by a pregnant dog that you become pregnant with that with with with with puppies, basically.
• 1:11:12
  And this is such a powerful illusion that people who have this who believe
• 1:11:18
  who believe that their pregnant will puppies will actually begin to display some of the
• 1:11:23
  symptoms of being pregnant. For example, they'll vomit a lot. They'll have a lot of nausea.
• 1:11:27
  They'll, you know, have exhaustion and they'll, you know, suffer from actual real physiological effects.
• 1:11:32
  And so and when they finally give birth to a litter of puppies, then that's the that's the effect
• 1:11:39
  going other one. Yeah. And so this was very interesting to me because it it I then realized that
• 1:11:44
  the people who are claiming to a long COVID probably actually do have something that feels a lot
• 1:11:49
  like long COVID because they believe that they have long COVID. And when you believe sufficiently
• 1:11:55
  that you have an illness, you actually can begin to feel ill. And I began to sort of look at this
• 1:12:03
  as something that is becoming a lot more common in the age of social media because if as we know,
• 1:12:11
  the glass delusion, puppy pregnancy syndrome, mass hysteria, the dancing syndrome,
• 1:12:17
  all of these really bizarre diseases that occurred throughout history. They spread
• 1:12:21
  through social contagion. So somebody would say that they had the illness and they would say that
• 1:12:27
  you could catch it. And then that would lead somebody else to believe that they'd caught it. And then
• 1:12:31
  they would then have this psychological illness and then they would spread it to somebody else.
• 1:12:36
  So it was like an actual disease. It was spreading, except it was spreading through the mind
• 1:12:40
  rather than through the body. And I thought that if that's the case, then in the age of social
• 1:12:44
  networks, this is going to be a much bigger problem. And I think I'm right there because I found
• 1:12:49
  evidence that the prevalence of many, many different disorders has increased. So anxiety has
• 1:12:59
  generalized anxiety disorder has increased. Social anxiety disorder has increased.
• 1:13:04
  Depression has decreased, has increased. Autism spectrum disorders or various kinds of
• 1:13:09
  it increased. Gender dysphoria has massively increased. There's been huge numbers of these
• 1:13:16
  psychological ailments that have increased in prevalence in the literature, in the medical literature.
• 1:13:21
  And it doesn't make sense that this is a physiological phenomenon because
• 1:13:27
  humans have actually become healthier. We have better diets than we had 50 years ago, 100 years ago.
• 1:13:35
  People have a better awareness of medical disorders now than they did 50, 100 years ago.
• 1:13:40
  One of the things is that there's something called medicalization, which is that the threshold
• 1:13:45
  for something to be classed as a medical issue has been lowered. So what was considered normal shyness
• 1:13:53
  in the 1960s, for example, is now social anxiety disorder. So if you were just shy, you just
• 1:14:00
  didn't want to be around people, that was just a normal thing. Now it's not normal. Now it's a
• 1:14:04
  medical issue. And there are many reasons for why this has happened, why things have become more
• 1:14:08
  and more medicalized. The reason for this, one of the reasons for this is that there are incentives
• 1:14:14
  for the medical industry to class more and more things as medical disorders, because obviously
• 1:14:19
  that makes them more money. If you're just shy, you can't make money from a shy person. But if
• 1:14:24
  somebody has social anxiety disorder, you can give them drugs. So you can make this even true
• 1:14:32
  with physiological things like when Viagra was discovered and the drug company was like,
• 1:14:36
  well, I mean, you know, guys, guys get older, it goes a bit limper and then they were like,
• 1:14:40
  no, no, no, no, that's not the case. There's a disease called erectile dysfunction. And now,
• 1:14:44
  you know, we can actually treat this disease. Yeah, I mean, it's amazing. It does strike me,
• 1:14:50
  though, that there are there are probably several possible explanations for the increase in
• 1:14:54
  anxiety and depression. It doesn't have to be a contagion. It could be the fact that people
• 1:14:59
  again bullied and losing social connections and you know, on social media too much. I think
• 1:15:05
  a contagion is a big part of it. I think a contagion is a big part of it. It's not the only
• 1:15:08
  explanation, but I think it's a major explanation. There are many explanations. I mean, one of the
• 1:15:13
  other explanations would be that they're actually genuinely, for example, with autism. This could
• 1:15:19
  actually be a result of pollution. So microplastics, hormone endocrine disruptors and all of this
• 1:15:28
  stuff, you know, some people speculate this could be one of the reasons. Another could be that,
• 1:15:33
  you know, people are living more sedentary lives than they used to. So, you know, that's obviously
• 1:15:38
  very unhealthy. And then there's, I think, medicalization, which is, you know, when we just
• 1:15:44
  lower the threshold of what is considered a medical disorder, is definitely one of the big things.
• 1:15:48
  Concept creep is another one. Concept creep is linked to medicalization. But I think that social
• 1:15:54
  contains just plain concepts creep. So concept creep is the loosening of a definition of a word
• 1:16:02
  over time as it pertains to some harm. So, for example, what was considered racist 50 years ago
• 1:16:12
  was a lot more narrower than what's considered racist now. What was considered sexual harassment
• 1:16:18
  50 years ago was a lot more narrower than what's considered now. What was considered poverty 50
• 1:16:24
  years ago was a lot narrower in definition than what's considered now. And one of the reasons for
• 1:16:29
  concept creep is that as social problems get solved, there is a need to redefine those problems
• 1:16:36
  to make them larger so that they continue to have equal social weight. And that the people that are
• 1:16:42
  in charge of trying to resolve these issues have something to do. So, you know, yes. I'm always
• 1:16:51
  accused of being a bad gay because I have this attitude towards like gay rights as well.
• 1:16:56
  I mean, I'm married to a guy and yet I basically feel like every major, you know,
• 1:17:02
  concession has been won in, you know, modern progressive democracies. And so LGBTQIA plus groups
• 1:17:11
  have to keep inventing new reasons for their own existence and funding by making, yeah, by making
• 1:17:17
  exactly some, so you see a trinormative evil now. Yeah, exactly. And you see it, you know,
• 1:17:23
  for example, with sort of how racism became systemic racism and, you know, then there's all these
• 1:17:29
  new forms of racism like microaggressions and cultural appropriation and all this new stuff that's
• 1:17:35
  been invented because the old racism is going, it's going away and there was a supply problem.
• 1:17:40
  They weren't enough race. Exactly. Exactly. They need to get angry about. Exactly. Yes.
• 1:17:46
  So, so I think concept creep is definitely part of it as well. But I definitely think that
• 1:17:50
  social contagion is a major part of why we're seeing it rise in the prevalence of these disorders.
• 1:17:54
  And the reason for this is because there is a big, massive culture now online, which is specifically
• 1:18:01
  about mental disorders. And we're seeing on TikTok, for example, the rise of something called
• 1:18:07
  various things called sad fishing, which is basically where people go online and they could,
• 1:18:15
  they claimed have certain problems in order to gain sympathy from their followers. And this is
• 1:18:20
  a good way to increase your clout. And one of the ways that people try to increase their clout
• 1:18:24
  and increase sympathy for themselves is by claiming that they have some kind of disorder.
• 1:18:29
  And there's been a bit of a problem, bit of an epidemic on TikTok, especially, where people will
• 1:18:34
  claim that they have multiple personality disorder, or where they will claim to have autism spectrum
• 1:18:41
  disorder, or even like, you know, it could just be depression or anxiety, or in some cases,
• 1:18:47
  Tourette syndrome. Tourette syndrome is actually a very popular one because it's very entertaining
• 1:18:51
  for people to watch. It might not be entertaining to have it, but it's entertaining for other people
• 1:18:55
  to watch. And so a lot of it's also something that's unfossifiable to the outside of. Exactly.
• 1:19:01
  There's no way you can't use someone if not having. Well, there's an interesting thing here,
• 1:19:05
  actually, about its falsifiability, because there was a, there was this one case of this,
• 1:19:10
  this lady called Tixen Roses. She was a pretty popular TikTokker, and she claimed to have Tourette's
• 1:19:18
  for a long period of time, and she grew a pretty big following based on her Tourette's. And then an
• 1:19:22
  old video surfist of her talking normally. And then her mother came out and said, well, she doesn't
• 1:19:28
  actually have Tourette. She's just been making it all up. And obviously, that was the end of her
• 1:19:33
  her Tourette's career, but like, there have been a few cases of this happening. But what's very
• 1:19:38
  interesting about the Tourette's thing is that there's actually in the medical literature, there's
• 1:19:42
  a case known as Tourette's, sorry, known as TikTok ticks. And the TikTok ticks are basically
• 1:19:52
  the case of people presenting to medical clinics with symptoms of Tourette's syndrome, who previously
• 1:19:58
  didn't have Tourette's, and who have spent a lot of time on TikTok, and have basically gained
• 1:20:05
  Tourette's from watching people pretending to have Tourette's on TikTok. So this is spread like a
• 1:20:11
  virus. So what happens is you get people pretending to have Tourette's on TikTok, they gain a big
• 1:20:16
  following. People watch these videos, especially this is particularly prominent amongst young girls.
• 1:20:21
  For some reason, young girls are particularly prone to this. They will watch these videos. And then
• 1:20:27
  they will start to develop TikTok ticks, basically Tourette's ticks artificially. And so this is a
• 1:20:34
  sign that the mechanism that I was saying by which these contagious are spreading through social
• 1:20:41
  networks. This is a real evidence that this is happening. I mean, we're just fucked, aren't we?
• 1:20:47
  I mean, let's be honest, at this stage, young girls are uniquely vulnerable to social contagion
• 1:20:54
  and always have been. And now we've got TikTok ticks and incredible rises in gender dysphoria.
• 1:21:01
  I mean, I hope that your right that social contagion explains the significant portion of things
• 1:21:06
  like anxiety and depression. My fear is that they're more pronounced in things like gender dysphoria
• 1:21:11
  than they are with anxiety and that the anxiety is real because we're depriving people of having
• 1:21:18
  the lived experience of interacting with other human beings in the flesh and bumping into each other
• 1:21:22
  and they're constantly, I mean, the performativity of it all is also so corrosive. The amount of
• 1:21:29
  and you've written about this as well, the amount of time that we now spend in our lives,
• 1:21:34
  not living, but watching ourselves live for the benefit of how we will appear to other people.
• 1:21:40
  It's unprecedented. Like the idea that you're constantly going to have this avatar of yourself
• 1:21:45
  on your shoulder, second guessing everything you do in order to curate it for other people's
• 1:21:50
  perception even when they're not around has got to do something to you.
• 1:21:55
  Yeah, absolutely. I think one of the problems, and in fact, I'm actually working on an article
• 1:22:02
  about this. One of the interesting things about the internet is it fundamentally disorients people
• 1:22:11
  from reality like the very structure of the internet. I'm not talking about any particular piece
• 1:22:16
  of information online, but the very format of the internet itself. So there's this interesting
• 1:22:23
  the history of casino development might not seem like something's quite relevant, but it's actually
• 1:22:30
  very relevant. So there's basically original casinos were designed to essentially confuse people.
• 1:22:39
  So for example, one thing you probably heard is that casinos don't have windows and they don't have
• 1:22:45
  clocks. And one of the reasons for this is that they don't want you to know what time it is,
• 1:22:50
  basically, because if you know what time it is, you might be late and you might feel,
• 1:22:54
  I need to leave this casino now. Or you know, you're kind of, it's basically a way to sort of
• 1:22:59
  distance you from reality. And the thing you might realize that you've been there for three and a
• 1:23:04
  half hours and you need to go home and feed the kids. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And another thing about
• 1:23:09
  casinos is there's another design queue that they use in casinos, which is that they tend not to have
• 1:23:17
  right angles, right angle turns in casinos. And you'll have noticed this if you've been to a casino
• 1:23:22
  where the paths tend to curve slowly, rather than having sharp turns. And the reason for this is that
• 1:23:29
  when you reach a right angle, when you reach a junction, that forces you to make a decision.
• 1:23:35
  You have to decide whether you're going to go left or whether you're right or within your
• 1:23:38
  straight. And that activates the part of your brain responsible for agency and decision making.
• 1:23:44
  And so you're taking charge of your life by doing that. And they don't want you to take charge
• 1:23:47
  of your life. They want you to be passive. And so they make their paths slowly curving so that
• 1:23:52
  you just gently follow the curve. And you don't have to make a decision about where you're going.
• 1:23:58
  And another thing that they do is they use something called the green effect, which is also used
• 1:24:01
  in supermarkets, which is that they, they make it like a maze. They make the paths like a maze.
• 1:24:06
  And they position the exits and the toilets and other necessities in certain places where you have
• 1:24:13
  to get the way to get to them. You have to pass through loads of amusement arcades, arcade
• 1:24:17
  machines, you know, crafts tables, whatever. You have to pass through a lot of distractions in order
• 1:24:22
  to get where you're going. Supermarkets do this by putting everyday items like bread and milk and
• 1:24:27
  eggs right at the back of the supermarket. So you have to go through the entire supermarket to get
• 1:24:32
  your everyday items. And that can lead you astray and cause you to buy much more than you would
• 1:24:36
  intended to buy. So casino use these, they use these methods to essentially divorce people from
• 1:24:43
  reality and to essentially shut off their brains. And what's interesting is that the internet works
• 1:24:48
  a lot like that. It works a lot like a casino. In fact, it uses many of the same techniques,
• 1:24:54
  sometimes, inadvertently, sometimes not. But it uses many of the same techniques. So for example,
• 1:25:00
  the idea about the paths not having right angle turns, right, is analogous to YouTube having an
• 1:25:06
  auto-play feature. Because when you when you stop playing it and you have to click on another video,
• 1:25:11
  that's the part where you have to engage the decision-making part of your brain. You have to take
• 1:25:14
  agency over your life. Whereas if it auto-plays, you don't need to make a decision. You can just sit
• 1:25:20
  there and wait for the next video and tick that's why Tiktok is so popular. It's at least one reason
• 1:25:25
  why Tiktok is so popular is that it's an auto-play. It's basically you don't have to do anything when
• 1:25:30
  you go on Tiktok. You don't have to click on anything. You just open Tiktok and it starts playing
• 1:25:34
  videos and then you just sit there. You don't have to scroll. You don't have to lie. You don't have to
• 1:25:38
  reply. You don't have to do anything. You don't have to favor it. It just basically will play video
• 1:25:44
  after video after video without you have to make any decision. And the same thing is true with
• 1:25:49
  what the internet does to your sense of time. So we know that the human sense of time is
• 1:25:54
  limit is is sort of dictated by the light and dark cycle. So you know, we have a part of our brain
• 1:26:02
  called the supra keyasmatic nucleus which is responsible for the production. I think the production
• 1:26:07
  of melatonin and melatonin is obviously responsible for regulating the sleep weight cycle.
• 1:26:14
  And this is actually more broadly involved in the ability of humans to dictate time. There's
• 1:26:22
  been experiments that have been done where they would put people in artificial light in environments
• 1:26:28
  without any windows, without any clocks. And they'll try to get them to estimate how long
• 1:26:32
  has passed. And people tend to just be wildly off. They tend to have absolutely no idea of how
• 1:26:37
  much time has passed. And the reason for this is because of the light because the lack of natural light
• 1:26:43
  causes the sort of the brains internal clock to malfunction. Now here's the thing. When you're
• 1:26:49
  online you're looking at a bright screen and that bright screen is generating a lot of blue light
• 1:26:54
  and that blue light is artificial light and it confuses your brain and it interferes with
• 1:27:00
  the production of melatonin. And this can destroy your sense of time. And this is why when you're
• 1:27:06
  on on social media and you're browsing internet and you're mindlessly scrolling through your feed or
• 1:27:11
  whatever you completely lose track of time. It's one of the reasons why you lose complete track of
• 1:27:15
  time. When you don't have a good idea of what's going on with time, everything else falls apart
• 1:27:20
  because obviously time is the thing that gives life order. When you don't have a sense of time,
• 1:27:25
  you don't have a sense of anything really. And so it leads to mental chaos. So the very, you know,
• 1:27:33
  this is one of the problems is that we're actually, we're living in a world where that light,
• 1:27:37
  natural light is gradually being extinct. If you got outside on a dark night, there's street lights
• 1:27:43
  everywhere, you know, even the shine of the, they're so strong that you can't even sometimes see the
• 1:27:48
  stars. And most people now are spending so long on their phones that the natural sort of system
• 1:27:56
  of timekeeping in their brains is being continually overridden and it's malfunctioning as a result.
• 1:28:03
  And people are losing track and I mean, yeah, I mean, you have to add to this the fact that we have
• 1:28:09
  very clever software engineers who are devising algorithms that rope us in and grab, you know,
• 1:28:15
  it's not just that we're looking at a bright screen, but that as you say, in the case of YouTube
• 1:28:20
  or TikTok, those bright screens are devised with only one goal in mind, which is to maximize our time
• 1:28:26
  on the site by feeding us things so they're going to arouse us and, you know, want us to continue
• 1:28:31
  to be engaged by them. It's, it's fucking evil. Yeah, it's a, and the problem is is that because
• 1:28:40
  it's disorientating people, they don't, they're not even aware of what's actually happening to them
• 1:28:46
  because the thing that's happening to them is preventing them from knowing what's happening to them,
• 1:28:50
  you know, and so it's like, you know, it's one of the reasons why I try not to spend so much time
• 1:28:56
  on the internet. I mean, I was addicted to the internet at one point. I was addicted to social media
• 1:29:00
  or spending so long on social media, but now I hardly ever go on social media now because
• 1:29:06
  I find that it just interferes with, with, you know, just basic things like timekeeping. And
• 1:29:14
  when you don't have a sense of time, then you become very, very easily manipulable to others.
• 1:29:20
  You know, it's very easy to spend your whole day being outraged about something going on in the
• 1:29:26
  news because you're not really paying attention to what's actually going on in the real world because
• 1:29:29
  your sense of time has completely gone. And one of the interesting things about the lack of
• 1:29:35
  natural light, natural light basically suppresses the production of melatonin. And what's very
• 1:29:44
  interesting is that when you have dopamine, dopamine actually causes you to, it actually causes
• 1:29:51
  time to slow down perceptually. And serotonin causes time to speed up perceptually.
• 1:29:59
  And what happens is that when you're engaged in routine behaviors such as just
• 1:30:05
  mindlessly scrolling social media, dopamine actually drops. And so your time actually speeds up
• 1:30:12
  perceptually while you're on social media because you're not really, you're not really, you enter
• 1:30:18
  essentially like a kind of dissociative state where you're not really paying attention to what you're
• 1:30:22
  looking at. But what's happening is time's actually speeding up perceptually. So you're losing time
• 1:30:27
  by going on social media. But if you engage in novel behaviors, novel behaviors actually increase
• 1:30:33
  dopamine in the brain. And dopamine and there have been experiments that have been done on,
• 1:30:40
  for example, basketball player, what people watching basketball games, where what they found was
• 1:30:46
  that dopamine levels increase when surprise occurs. So for example, if somebody's watching a
• 1:30:52
  basketball game and they're supporting a certain team, and this could be negative surprise or positive
• 1:30:56
  surprise. So if they're watching a basketball game and somebody scores out of nowhere, that leads
• 1:31:01
  to a surge in dopamine. And this can happen whether that person who scored is on your team,
• 1:31:06
  the team that you support or not on that team that you support. So it's positive surprise and
• 1:31:11
  negative surprise. And so novelty is linked to dopamine production, which is linked to the slowing
• 1:31:15
  down of time. And apparently, according to, and this is, again, I think Andrew Huberman has
• 1:31:21
  talked about this, where you basically, if you want to slow down time, if you want to make more
• 1:31:27
  out of your day, you want to increase the dopamine in your brain. And the way that you do that is by
• 1:31:31
  having more novel activities. So not engaging in routine behaviors, but doing new things and
• 1:31:38
  surprising yourself. And so the equivalent of that would be to spend less time engaging in
• 1:31:43
  wrote social media sort of scrolling, you know, doom scrolling and to engage in new things. So if
• 1:31:49
  you are going to spend time on the internet, go to a website you've never been to before and read
• 1:31:54
  news sites that you've never read before, you know, watch a completely different video to the
• 1:31:59
  one that you'd normally try to watch. And that will actually slow down time. And it actually
• 1:32:03
  makes you feel like you've had, you've done more in your day. And you'll have a probably better
• 1:32:07
  sense. I mean, we all, we've all had this experience, right? I mean, we all, we've all had the
• 1:32:10
  experience of, you know, you, you pick up your phone and it's 23 minutes past seven. And you know,
• 1:32:16
  you need to, you know, get out the door by 745. And before you know it, it's 744. And it feels like
• 1:32:22
  only three minutes has passed by. I mean, the, the, on the question of being sort of directed in,
• 1:32:30
  in ways by other people or by powerful forces like the casino designers, there's a book called
• 1:32:36
  Nudge by Cass Sunstein and Richard Taylor, you know, this, you know, we're about the way that,
• 1:32:42
  you know, public policy can actually harness people to, for their own betterment in, you know,
• 1:32:48
  the classic example is whether or not you have to opt in or by default are opted in to organ donation.
• 1:32:55
  You know, you can have exactly the same cohort of people. And the simple opt in, whether or not the
• 1:33:00
  default is set at opt in or opt out will have a massive impact on the amount of uptake just
• 1:33:07
  because you're being nudged in that direction rather than having to make a proactive choice.
• 1:33:12
  I will note that in the interests of maintaining my own light sanity and time, I will have to go
• 1:33:18
  in a few minutes and put my children to bed. That being said, the, the, the last thing I want to
• 1:33:23
  touch on is the is, you know, one of your most popular pieces is about the gamification of everything,
• 1:33:28
  about everything becoming a game. And this probably leads us into that. Do you want to just reflect
• 1:33:33
  on that and explain this thesis before we go? Yeah. So gamification is the application of game-like
• 1:33:41
  mechanics to non-game activities. So in other words, it's turning things that are not games into games
• 1:33:49
  often to get people addicted to them or at least to make people do them. And we've seen a rise of
• 1:33:55
  this since the early 20th century. But it's really kicked off, you know, in the 21st century. So
• 1:34:02
  the original examples would be, you know, frequent flyer and mile tickets, house points for boy scouts.
• 1:34:10
  You know, these are point systems. So, you know, if you do, if you do a good deed, you get a point.
• 1:34:16
  And if you get certain number of points, then you get a reward. So this is the most one of the most
• 1:34:20
  basic forms of gamification. This was very popular during, you know, the 20th century. And then
• 1:34:24
  McDonald's did it with certain things. And they had the happy meals where, you know, if you collect
• 1:34:31
  enough happy meals, you get all these different toys, you know, you get a wide range. You get a toy in
• 1:34:36
  every happy meal. So then you want to collect them. So this was originally done in the 20th century.
• 1:34:41
  What happened was that with the sort of the digital age and the digital revolution,
• 1:34:48
  gamification came into its own because what the digital age allowed people to do was to keep
• 1:34:57
  score, essentially. You know, if you have a phone in your pocket, you can always keep score of
• 1:35:02
  pretty much anything at any time. You can carry around with you. You can always know what score is.
• 1:35:07
  And so as a result of this, people began to work on ways in which they could gamify apps.
• 1:35:14
  So they could make you use them more. And the first big example of this was Facebook. So Facebook
• 1:35:22
  was basically sort of it created the like button. And this was around 2008 where they created
• 1:35:29
  the like button. And the like button, the purpose of the like button was to essentially create a
• 1:35:32
  point system so that every post that you post gets a certain number of likes based on how good the
• 1:35:38
  post is. And if it gets loads of likes, then it gets shared to more people. So, you know, it's
• 1:35:42
  like a cascade effect. And you gain status as a result of this. And so this was one of the reasons
• 1:35:51
  I think why Facebook really took off. And also why this method was copied by a lot of other websites
• 1:35:57
  that came after such as Twitter with its likes and followers and all that kind of stuff. And what's
• 1:36:04
  happened is since then the success of social media after gamification has been so profound that now
• 1:36:13
  tech giants are looking at gamifying pretty much everything because they just know that if you can
• 1:36:18
  turn something into a game, you can make people want to do that thing. So it's a great way to come
• 1:36:24
  to control behavior. Instead of, you know, the old method of forcing people to do things or
• 1:36:29
  making, you know, making them scared, fearing them and to do things, you can actually just make
• 1:36:35
  them fun. You can make an activity fun and you can get people to do what you want by doing that.
• 1:36:41
  And so now we're seeing things like, for example,
• 1:36:45
  team use, like the sort of Chinese Amazon. And it's become extremely popular over the past few years
• 1:36:52
  as a result part.
• 1:36:53
  Timo is technically, it's the Timo Amazon. I mean, it's now in the lexicon, you know,
• 1:36:59
  it's like when something is like an Erzatz version of something else, you say it's a Timo version
• 1:37:05
  because it's so crappy and tacky. But yeah, incredible. But it's so popular. People want to be
• 1:37:10
  harassed and harangued by an app the way that it does. It's the same with Dingo, Lingo and things
• 1:37:15
  like that, you know, which gamified the experience and dating apps and everything. Yeah. So, you know,
• 1:37:20
  this has got a lot worse with AI now as well. I mean, because now AI can sort of build a profile
• 1:37:25
  of you based on your inputs. And they can use that to sort of make the game more addictive for you.
• 1:37:31
  And so, you know, we're seeing sort of like dating apps, for example, if you message a certain
• 1:37:38
  number of possible matches, then you gain like these virtual flower bouquets that you can send
• 1:37:44
  to your matches and things like that. You know, so gamification is occurring in the digital world.
• 1:37:50
  Amazon have this strange thing where with their workers in their warehouses where it tracks
• 1:37:56
  how much how fast you're packaging things. So, you know, everybody's package rate is displayed
• 1:38:03
  on a massive leaderboard in the warehouse that everybody can see. So, it's in your interests
• 1:38:11
  to maintain your status in order to basically be as fast as you can to package things as fast as you
• 1:38:16
  can. And then your rate goes higher and higher. And then when you're at the top, then you become
• 1:38:21
  like the star, you become the MVP, and you gain special rewards as a result of that.
• 1:38:26
  And it's also been doing, it's been done in the real world as well, like generally speaking.
• 1:38:30
  I mean, we see it in the social credit system in China, or at least I should say the social
• 1:38:35
  credit systems, because there's not one. There's actually very many different social credit systems in
• 1:38:39
  China, all in different areas, different parts of China. And so, in one in a couple of different
• 1:38:46
  parts. So, in towns and cities such as Wang Chiu and Rong Cheng in China, there are actually leaderboards
• 1:38:53
  in the middle of the streets, just as, you know, like we have billboards or whatever, they have leaderboards.
• 1:39:00
  And you can just walk past these. These are just naturally just in the streets, for anybody can see
• 1:39:04
  them. And what these leaderboards show is they show who is the best citizen based on, you know,
• 1:39:09
  how quickly they pay their taxes, and, you know, whether they are law abiding, you know,
• 1:39:16
  whether they keep things clean and tidy, you know, all these little things, they give you points for
• 1:39:22
  that, you know. And so, you know, there's like a leaderboard of like who's the best citizen. So,
• 1:39:27
  they're actually gamified being a good citizen. And this is pretty dystopic, because I mean,
• 1:39:31
  this is like my household with my seven-year-old children, where if you clean up your room,
• 1:39:37
  then I'm going to give you a tick on the fridge, and then, you know, you get another tick, and you're
• 1:39:41
  up by your candy. It's infantilizing, it's ridiculous. Exactly. But the problem is, is that it works.
• 1:39:47
  It works. And, you know, because people like fun, and, you know, this has been proven to work now,
• 1:39:53
  like I mean, so many different, in so many different spheres in, sort of like, in environmentalism,
• 1:40:00
  for example, there were experiments that were done by Volkswagen, where they did this,
• 1:40:06
  this sort of campaign, where they basically tried to make environmentalism fun. So, one example
• 1:40:12
  was that they, in order to get people to use the stairs, sorry, this was actually for health.
• 1:40:17
  So, in order to get people to use the stairs, rather than use an elevator, what they did is they
• 1:40:22
  turned the stairs into piano keys, so that you can play a tune as you're running upstairs. And
• 1:40:27
  this actually worked. It increased the increased number of people. Yeah, it increased the number of
• 1:40:31
  people using stairs by 60%. And they, I think they did do some stuff with, there was, I think,
• 1:40:38
  one example, I don't know if this was actually implemented. I think it was, but there was, there
• 1:40:42
  was a lottery, a speed cam lottery in Sweden, where what would happen is that basically, whenever you
• 1:40:50
  drive at the limit, and you pass the speed cam at the limit, or below the limit, the speed limit,
• 1:40:57
  you get certain points, and you basically get inducted into a ruffle. And what happens is that
• 1:41:03
  if you win the ruffle, you win the prize money. And the prize money is made from the fines
• 1:41:08
  of people who were over the limit, basically. So, you know, it's like an extra incentive to, yeah,
• 1:41:15
  yeah. So, you know, there's all these different sort of ways to gamify, sort of, and it's also
• 1:41:21
  been used to find, to do science. That was, I think it was at the University of Washington,
• 1:41:30
  at the University of Washington, there was a group of biochemists, and they were trying to isolate,
• 1:41:36
  they were trying to identify the structure of a, I think it was an AIDS virus protein, I think.
• 1:41:42
  And they didn't know how to do it. They tried to do it for many years. And so eventually,
• 1:41:47
  what they decided to do was to turn it into a game. And they gave it out to, they turned it
• 1:41:51
  into a game, and they gave it to, like, loads of students to try to, try to do, they gave it to
• 1:41:55
  some professional video game players as well. And the structure of the protein was solved within two
• 1:42:02
  weeks, because it was, yeah. So, it's like, you know, we have these big, we have these big
• 1:42:09
  intellectual conversations about whether or not we're all living in a simulation, but we're
• 1:42:13
  actually just living in a video game of our own making, regardless, even in the physical world.
• 1:42:19
  It's fascinating to scratch the surface of some of these things. If people are interested in
• 1:42:23
  your work, then I highly recommend the Prism, which is a fabulous sub-stack, and you go much, much,
• 1:42:29
  much deeper than we've been able to in this limited time. But thanks for giving us a glimpse into
• 1:42:33
  what it's great to talk to you. It's been pleasure, Josh. Thank you.