#865 - Matthew Syed - How High Performers Build An Unbreakable Mindset
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Hello friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Matthew Syed. He's a journalist, author, and former champion table tennis player. To master anything, you have to put in the time. But what else are the key mindset principles that all resilient high performers have? And how can we build them in ourselves?

Expect to learn how people can learn more effectively from failure, the skill you need to develop to overcome the fear of risk, whether the 10,000 hours rule is actually the key to mastery, Matthew's new theory on why modern generations are struggling so much, and much more.

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But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Matthew Syed. How do you describe what you do?

What I do now, well, it's quite eclectic, to be honest. I write columns for The Times and The Sunday Times, two British newspapers. I have a podcast on BBC Radio 4, which sounds quite establishment, doesn't it? The Times and the BBC. I also have a small business and write books, give the occasional talk.

So I've got quite a diverse career. Coming off the back, by the way, 20 years or so ago, I was a sports person, a different sport to you, but I was a ping ponger. You shouldn't call it ping pong. It sounds slightly offensive to people who play table tennis because it makes it sound like a parlor game, like tiddlywinks.

But that was my main thing for most of my early life. Table tennis was everything until I retired in my early 30s. And then that led to a career which has been broadly interested in performance and mindset and how we make the most of our lives.

Is there a single thread going through that? Is it excellence, sort of the psychological underpinnings of becoming good at doing a thing? Yeah, I think as I was coming to the end of my table tennis career, you know, it's very monomaniacal.

To be the best that you can be, you privilege this rather arbitrary game above everything else. And if you don't have that hunger and that uniqueness of discipline, you don't really have any chance to win in an internationally competitive environment. But then I did become curious about what it is

about people that helps them to become successful. And I'm not saying that I've had, you know, a uniquely successful life or career. I hate trying to build myself up in those terms.

But that, I think, is the thread. I became very interested in whether these lessons are transferable to things beyond sport and trying to learn more after I retired about psychology and culture and teamwork, how we evolve as individuals, institutions, without wanting to sound too grand, how societies evolve and become successful. So if there is any logic or thread, then that's probably it.

Do you think that people outside of the sporting world could learn a lot by treating themselves more like athletes? Yes and no. I mean, I think big picture, often I found that sports people are invited to go and talk to businesses about the lessons they learned. And there are certain transferable lessons for sure.

But what I think I would say now is that businesses often are tackling more complex challenges than sports teams, and that sport could probably learn more from business

than the other way around. In sport, the rules don't tend to change very much. Football is still a game of 11 against 11, as it has been for probably more than 100 years. This is soccer, by the way. Cricket's rules haven't changed that much. Whereas in business, you're trying to change the rules all the time. Technology is changing. And there aren't really any rules beyond the legal or potentially regulatory. And so the domain of

You know, the degrees of freedom, I think, are higher in business. The complexity is higher. And therefore, some of the challenges that businesses face are, I think, more interesting and require greater agility than perhaps in sport. One of the things that I've been pretty fascinated in learning about from yourself has been failure and how people can learn better from failure. How have you come to conceptualize that?

Well, the biggest table tennis event of my career was playing in the Olympic Games in Sydney. And the Olympics is interesting to be in because it's a four-year build-up effectively for just a few days of performance. And I was in with an outside chance of winning a medal.

And the preparation had been excellent. We went to the Gold Coast for the preparation camp. I had a left-hander from Germany as my first-round opponent, so we flew two players out to the Gold Coast to spar with in the build-up to the big day, both of whom were left-handers and left-handers.

replicated the style I was going to face. And the hall had the same floor as the competition venue. The level of lighting was the same. So we were meticulous in trying to make sure we had everything in place for me to perform and deliver on the day. And I was anxious, like you would expect, with all of this buildup. But just before I went out to play, Peter Franz of Germany

In the opening match, my opening game at the Sydney Olympics, the competition venue manager, lovely guy called Neil, came over and said, Matthew, I just thought I'd let you know we've heard from the International Broadcast Centre that this match is going out live on BBC One, which is the biggest channel in the UK. And I was like, oh, great, fantastic. And then my coach, Swedish guy called Søren, said, Matthew,

What happens over the course of the next 40 minutes will determine whether the last four years were a waste of time or not. And he insists to this day that he's trying to spur me on and motivate me. But I remember going out and there was a megawatt light. And I remember looking from behind on the corridor. It was quite a full auditorium. And I saw some Union Jacks out there.

And I went out to play. We did the warm-up. And table tennis is very subtle. Spin is a very important variable in table tennis. And you have to read the spin in order to get the ball back. And quite small variations in racket angle can have quite a big impact.

magnified effect on where the ball lands. I remember thinking, right, what I need to do here is I need to get the racket angle absolutely spot on in my first shot in order to get the ball back into play. But I was so focused on

on getting the racket angle right, that I wasn't moving my feet, I wasn't reading my opponent, I wasn't anticipating what he was doing, I wasn't thinking strategically, and it all fell catastrophically apart. Back then, table tennis games were up to 21. I lost the first game 21-2. This is almost unheard of in Olympic competition. And then I lost the second game, I think 21-7, and the dream was over very rapidly. In other words, I choked.

I had the classic problem of overthinking one component of the performance and everything else falling apart. It can happen in a job interview that you're really keen to get where you just can't get your tongue and mouth and larynx working effectively. You can't think of the answer. You freeze. And that was a failure in a dramatic and highly humiliating way.

And it could have been that I thought, okay, I don't have what it takes to perform under pressure. I haven't got the nerves of steel that is required. And I could have given up putting myself in pressurized situations. What I think I learned from that experience is that when it comes to performing under pressure or anything else, if you have what's sometimes called a growth mindset, a willingness to see failure as an opportunity to learn, rather than as evidence you lack some innate gift

that means he really oughtn't to bother trying anymore, that that can have transformative impact in how you engage with almost everything that happens in life. And that redefinition of failure, I think, is one of the key attributes for me of life.

It's odd. The last few years, the glorification, I think this pushback against victimhood culture, against the kind of fragility that every generation is adamant that the future generation has. And it feels like maybe it is just more of the same. Maybe it is whatever history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes that every generation's consideration of the next generation doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes.

And I think that part of that has been trying to find an acceptable vector to empower people

future generations? What is it that we can do? Whether it's Nassim Taleb with anti-fragility, whether it's Shane Parrish teaching people about mental models and about the fundamental attribution error, whether it's stuff like Rick and Morty saying, your boos mean nothing, I've seen what makes you cheer. Lots of different ways to say the social world doesn't care that much about you. It's very much about how you deal with setbacks as opposed to how many setbacks that you have. Resilience and the ability to sort of come back from challenges is very important.

But even with all of that, swimming in this milieu of very lovely, very positive people

pro-failure messaging, I imagine that that doesn't make the experience of failure any more comfortable at the time. Well, that's definitely true. And I think it's worth looking at this in a historical context. There was something called the self-esteem movement that really originated on the West Coast of the United States and then migrated around the world where the idea was you try and protect young people from failure.

You give them easy success experiences so they get used to succeeding and you praise them lavishly for their talent and they'll develop so much self-esteem they'll be able to go out and change the world. And it was great in theory, but it failed in practice.

Because if a young person associates life with being perfect, if they're only ever used to succeeding, then the first time they fail, it can be devastating. The walls of their world can come crumbling down. I don't think we want young people to have lots of fragile self-esteem. We want them to have, I think the word you used, resilience.

And that requires giving them difficult challenges early in life. So they learn how to fail. They learn to, as it were, extract the lessons that can come from failure. And that way, they're going to cope much better with a world where failure is baked in. Because if you think about

science and technology, you're putting ideas to the world, you posit theories, and it's when they fail that sets the stage for growth. You create a prototype and you test it early to find out where it's not working as well as it could do, and that enables you to improve.

When we perform experiments, if we know the result of the experiment before we conduct it, it is not an experiment. It is a waste of time. There has to be a tolerance for failure when we're seeking to innovate. And to the extent that we don't wish to fail, that our self-esteem is bound up with being perfect, we don't take the risks that are at the absolute heart of how we develop as individuals, how science grows, how institutions get better. So I think there was a fundamental...

uh, error in the 1970s of which echoes still exist in society. But I think it's worth saying, uh, Chris, if I, if I may, that I don't think we should fetishize failure in a certain sense. I think we need to be sophisticated about how we think about it. You know, if I'm on a flight,

I flew back from Washington, D.C. on Sunday just before we're speaking today. I wouldn't want the pilot to think, okay, I'm going to try something new on the final approach. I'm going to try a new lever, crashes a plane, kills all the passengers. We say, yeah, great. That's crazy. What would we want a pilot to do if he or she had a hunch that trying something new in the cockpit would improve safety?

the safety of the aircraft. As you doubtless say, you want to test in a simulator. That way you're getting all the benefits from failing without any downside risk for anyone if it's a sufficiently high fidelity simulator. I think what we're trying to do when we fail in the innovation space is try and surf the trade-off between the massive blessings that are conferred from learning from failure while minimizing the downside risk.

And it's that strategic lens that we have to apply because a retail company that had a hunch that changing the configuration of shelves might improve customer experience, they wouldn't bet the whole equity on it. They'd want to test it in a pilot scheme.

But what I found in my foray into business is that it's very easy to try and test it in the most conducive conditions with the best store manager, the best local, but you're not learning anything. You're trying to corroborate the hypothesis. Whereas you test it in tough conditions, you learn so much more. I know I'm going on here, but E.O. Wilson, who I think is one of the great

polymathic intellects of the 20th century. He was someone who's interested in insect behavior but wrote beautifully about society and human behavior, said, "You test a trivial theory, you get a trivial answer." What we should be doing is testing ourselves, our theories, our prototypes in tough

empowering environment so that we gain the most learning we can. And so long as we're resilient to the failures that are a part of life and learning, that's how we drive progress in almost all of its dimensions. A lot of friends from the UK have moved out to Dubai and it's a zero tax, high sun, lots of fun place for people to go and move, especially young people that haven't got any responsibilities yet.

And a lot of the time you go away on holiday to a place and you have this phenomenal time. But I think that judging whether or not, I mean, how many times have you been on holiday and someone decides to proclaim over dinner, I could move here. I could live. I would love, I'd move here tomorrow. But they are the...

new shelf strategy being deployed in the best area with the best manager. So my advice to anybody before they move anywhere is go during the shittest season, ask reliably when is the worst weather too hot or too cold or too wet or too dark or something and go and work. Don't allow yourself to be inflated by there's a festival on and this DJ that I love, am I going to go and see this comedy show or whatever? It's like, no, no, no, no. You want to

Can I survive in this new environment as shit as it's going to become, the shittest it could be? And if I still am like, yep, bravo, it's better than where I am at the moment, then good. Going back to this whole self-esteem movement, I have spent an awful lot of time thinking about the real fundamental sort of underpinnings of confidence, self-esteem, self-belief, self-reliance.

What have you learned from a scientific, psychological lens about the component parts of where self-esteem, self-belief genuinely come from? I still think it's an open question. I do think that certain types of ways of thinking about self-esteem can be quite dangerous and self-defeating. I'm not sure that self-esteem is as great as it's cracked up to be.

I think if we, my own view and my life is far from, I'm 53, I fell a lot with my kids

One of them sitting next door watching Rocky IV at the moment. That sounds like a success to me, personally. The only thing that worried me is when we watched Rocky I, II, and III, I thought Rocky III was the weakest, and my son, 10-year-old, thought Rocky III was the best. So that was slightly disappointing. Oh, so you're concerned about his fledgling career as a film critic, perhaps, going down the line. Or director, even. They're the ambitious father. I'm kidding. Oh, Master Syed.

Do you remember Rocky? Rocky three was the one with Clubber Lang. Oh yeah. Mr. T. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You've watched it. I thought Rocky one was so great. It descended into parody briefly. Right. And I think Rocky four is particularly parodic if that is a word.

and cliched. The first one was brilliant. I've got to teach you about this and we'll come back to the self-esteem thing in a second. So I got taught by a film critic, big film critic on YouTube called The Critical Drinker, sweary Scottish man who is very, very cool. And he explained to me the life cycle of movies and franchises and sort of sub genres in that regard. And you get introduction, you get growth,

You get maturity, then you get parody. And parody is the final stage. So a good example of this would be the Marvel Cinematic Universe. You get Captain America and Iron Man. It's kind of revolutionary. It's like sexy as a superhero thing. It's sort of witty and cool. It's not as dark or as serious as Batman in the DC Universe was trying to make things. And then you get growth. And that's where it starts to establish itself. And you sort of, you know, it's...

Captain America Winter Soldier. It's the number two and number three Iron Man. They start to sort of create a trend, but things are still growing. Then they get into maturity. That's when you're talking like Avengers Endgame, Infinity Wars, stuff like that. It's like a comfortable leather pair of shoes. You know the rhythm, you know the cadence. It's like, ah, this is where it's going to be. But then you get to parody. And parody would be a great example of this would be the most recent Thor movie where...

Thor is no longer the hero. He's the butt of all of the jokes. You've taken the established archetypes and cliches that you've created and you use them. It's a meta. Nothing is about what the movie is. It's all a meta commentary about the cliches of the movie. It's these sort of stories within stories and stories about stories. And it's him doing the Jean-Claude Van Damme splits across two dragons. And it's him being a big oaf. He's never competent. He's never cool. He's never sexy. He sort of falls flat on his face and only...

makes success sort of in reference to previous success and stuff. But yeah, I think you can tell when any individual creator, commentator, genre, movie series is on the decline when you get to parody. But don't you think, look, that's a brilliant and compelling analysis. And I don't think it's unreasonable to say that civilizations follow a not completely dissimilar path

And the work that's been done on the creative world, I guess you could apply it to musicians, couldn't you? Who plough a particular furrow, become highly successful, but then stay within that part of the fitness landscape and then start losing popularity because others are copying or they become cliched in what they're doing.

I think it's interesting that those, it's quite rare, but music writers who are successful over many decades refresh. So they bring people with a different point of view, a different perspective. They leverage diversity of thought in

in order to, as it were, move from where they were, but to connect what they knew with new information and new ideas, they create a new synthesis that avoids the cliche. I mean, in a funny kind of way, it goes back to what we were talking about before, about self-esteem. You can sort of imagine that if you see life as a journey rather than as somewhere to arrive as a destination, then the way one thinks about mistakes, the way one thinks about perfection,

is different because each time you get somewhere, you think of it as a staging post to somewhere potentially new. Why would you want to stay within the domain that one has already created creatively and go back to films? Why not think about how one can move somewhere else? But it's easy, I think, when one is successful to

to stay within one's comfort zone. We have lots to lose now. You've got lots to lose. People are very deferential. People are looking up to you. And so the idea of taking a risk, which is, as we, I think, agreed earlier, part and parcel of how one innovates becomes often tougher. And I think you see that in business where complacency is

and comfort. Sir Alex Ferguson, a famous football manager, described complacency as a virus. And I think it is something that can subvert the idea of having that pioneering sense of, I now want to continue on this wonderful journey. We only get one, and then it ends. Why stay where one is, particularly if one's self-esteem, that's what worries me about self-esteem, can be bound up

with looking and sounding perfect. So I think one of the, I love that, I love that idea, and it makes me, when I hear stories like that, when I'm reminded of the fact that

Life is a hypothesis to be tested, not an argument to be proved. I'm just going to keep on sort of testing these things. I'm going to keep on. Isn't that interesting? I'm playing, not taking things too seriously. I can feel my body downregulate. It's like a parasympathetic mantra of some kind. But we can't deny the fact that humans need control.

validation, social acceptance. They want prestige in the eyes of people that are around them. And most of the time that involves doing something in some form impressive or competent or admirable or whatever. And how do you get there? You get there by finding a thing that works and then rinsing the living shit out of it and doing it over and over again. At least if you have a

risk-averse mindset because you know this thing works even a little bit and you have no evidence that the new thing works quite as well. Yeah, that's definitely true. And perhaps a distinction we might make is between exploit and explore. If you have a solution, even if it's a canned solution to a problem and you can keep exploiting it again and again, keep producing that car of the right size and dimensionality or keep giving a

podcast formula that's working, you can exploit the living daylights out of it. But the risk, of course, is that people will get bored of what you're producing. But let's say they're not getting bored. All it takes is one person in a highly diverse market to innovate, and they can potentially take the market away or a new technology that one could be using to make that formula even more exploitable. So only ever exploiting and not exploring

seems to be a recipe for stagnation potentially, except in some very unusual ecosystems. I think the faster the world is changing, the more the division between exploit and explore should be moved in the direction of explore. And I suppose the only thing I'd otherwise add is that as we kind of discussed, the comfort zone is in the exploit.

Doing what we knew worked. It's a bit more comfortable and therefore, you know being sufficiently tough to say hang on we need to Explore a bit more, you know the classic example forgive me of blockbuster video exploiting the hell out of VHS videotapes when the world is changing. That's a recipe for non survival in the marketplace Yeah, how can

people have a better relationship with the fear of risk.

which I think is fear of failure masquerading with a slightly nicer sounding word. How can they sort of reframe that experience? It's all well and good. And how many times have people heard? It's not about the destination. It's the journey. It's not about how many times you get knocked down, but how many times you get up. We can sort of mantra our way through this as much as possible. Have you found anything tangible, tacit, tactical that people can be like, yes, that's a thing. That is a thing that I can use that can help me to overcome that in moment fear.

fear of risk, fear of novelty, fear of failure. Well, I'm very interested in this concept that I think alluded to earlier of growth mindset. Growth mindset, I think, is a tremendous asset. Give one quick example. I don't think I've mentioned it so far, but when I was dropping down the world rankings at table, I was still the number one in England, but I'm moving down the world rankings and I realized I'm going to have to reinvent.

So I did something that some of the older British viewers or listeners will know what I'm talking about. I phone directory inquiries. And this is you. Chris, do you know what that is, by the way? Yeah, it was you. It was kind of like the yellow pages, but on the phone. Is that right? Exactly. Exactly. So the problem is lots of Americans listen to the show and they wonder what they have a yellow pages over here. Maybe they do.

Anyway, it was like a directory. It's like a local directory for businesses and stuff. Yeah, you'd phone it if you wanted to get the telephone number of a company in the sort of pre-internet days. So I phoned 192 and got the telephone numbers of The Times and Guardian, two English newspapers. And I phoned and phoned and phoned. And I eventually got through to the sports editor of The Times, David Chappell. This was in 1999. I said, look, would it be possible to...

to write for the sports pages of the Times. It's Matthew Side here, I said, British number one table tennis player. And he said, I've never heard of you, which was a slightly disappointing start to the conversation. But he said, look, this will tell you how long ago it was. He said, could you fax in some ideas? So I went and bought a fax machine, faxed in some ideas, and kept faxing articles until eventually one got published in May 1999.

And that was thrilling because I didn't think I'd ever be published in the Times newspaper. Went and bought about 10 copies from the local newsagents. Have you still got a copy lying around somewhere? I do. I do. In a folder upstairs. Terrible. This is when it was broadsheet, these huge, huge newspapers, not like the tabloids today. But an unintended side effect of this is I get a call from Goldman Sachs.

The investment bank saying, look, we've read your article. We thought it was great. Would you come in and give a talk to our top traders at our conferencing floor in Fleet Street? And I went to, Chris, a comprehensive school.

So this is a, you know, a state school. It's not like Eton or Harrow. You know, completely bog standard comprehensive in suburban Reading, which is about 40 miles west of London. We didn't do any public speaking at school. You know, there was no debating society.

Believe it or not, Chris, the press conferences in ping pong were not that well attended. So I'd done no public speaking. So I hadn't had the practice. I hadn't failed at speaking. I hadn't had the chance to develop my speaking ability, my communication skills. So I remember going very nervous. I prepared hard, but I was tremendously nervous. And I gave the talk.

And it wasn't great. And I got heckled about two thirds of the way through. And I remember my first reaction was a fixed mindset response. You know, I obviously don't have the talent for this. If I'm ever invited again by a big company, I'll politely decline. But then I thought, no, let's have a growth mindset response to this. Maybe I could improve.

And I got a friend to look into public speaking practice, sort of early Yahoo search. And the top response was Toastmasters, which is a global network of public speaking clubs. And the nearest one to me in southwest London and Richmond, where I'm still living today, was in Twickenham.

a room in a place called York House that was hired by Toastmart. 10 or 15 people trying to improve their communication and their social confidence. And it's a wonderful thing. You go, and if you're lucky enough to get on the program, you give a talk.

The first one you ever give is called the icebreaker where you tell the group about yourself, but you're trying to handle your anxiety. You're stood in front of 10 or 15 people judging you as inevitably happens when you're in front of a room and you're trying to communicate to them and you're learning how to handle the anxiety and how to, I wanted to learn to speak without notes. And then at the end of it, someone at Toastmasters always comes to the front and gives you feedback and

And the rule is they have to give you at least one criticism. Fantastic. You're finding out what you could do differently and better. If you think of life as a hypothesis rather than as an argument that needs to be, how did you put it? Corroborated. I think that's a wonderful way of thinking about it. Then there's some spontaneous speaking two-thirds of the way through where you...

whoever's hosting for the night writes a set of topics on cards. The names go in a hat and they pick out a name. Matthew, you have to go to the front, pick up the card,

and extemporize on it immediately for 60 seconds. The first time you do it, it's terrifying. But because I was passionate about journalism, and I thought I'm going to have to give the occasional talk, and I'd love to be able to communicate, by the way, I might get invited on the Today program or the BBC News. And being able to think on one's feet is something that will be of tremendous value, a fantastic asset.

But the point of this isn't to say I'm the best communicator in the world because I know that I'm not the best communicator in the world. I go to conferences where there are off-the-scale communicators. But what it means is you get to be the best that you can be. You reach the summit of your potential. And if it's something you care about, it's something that has a purpose for you, I think that's an incredibly empowering thing. And that's why I think...

You said practical tips. You can measure yourself on growth mindset. And sometimes people are fixed. They're a bit worried about trying new things, about collaborating with people they don't know, about leaving their comfort zone.

It's about liberating us from some of the unconscious constraints we can place on ourselves so that we can just live that life as a hypothesis. I love that formulation. Yeah, I remember I started doing some striking, boxing and Muay Thai and stuff. I went out to Thailand for a summer and fought out there. The most important lesson that novice fighters

fighters learn according to the coach the first coach that I had was you're not made of glass when someone punches you in the face

And it always sticks with me that because you can see somebody that isn't used to necessarily being in a ring and sort of when punches get thrown, there's like that. Even if it's not much of a flinch, even if it's not the whole body, there's a closing of the eyes. And then there's that really famous sequence of Conor McGregor winning the lightweight title against Eddie Alvarez. And Alvarez throws this big,

big overhand sort of looping right like that and his knuckles touch the end of Conor McGregor's nose and Conor watches this thing come in the hallway. Bink! Just watches it glance off the bottom of his nose and then just... It's one of the most beautiful sequences of striking his then counter. It's like...

five punches punctuated with two kick it's gorgeous it's beautiful and then eddie just hits the floor and that's how he finishes it and that's how he becomes the ufc's first double champion right just phenomenal like beautiful gorgeous story but it makes me think about learning that you're not made of glass right you're not wincing and that failure is again it's hard it's hard we can talk about it and everyone that's listening is because you have rationally that makes sense

And then the swell of fear inside of them. Just one other point that's, I guess, kind of salient. I'm going to Australia to do a live tour. I've got this live show thing, so not too dissimilar to your speaking, although hopefully less heckling. And I've been doing work-in-progress shows in Austin at a comedy club east of town. And it's very small, 40-people rooms, kind of basically invite-only on a mailing list. And...

The first week that I went out, I was really, really, really rusty. I was like, oh, this isn't good. Then the second week I had Stella before. I was like, that's nine, 10 out of 10. Well, I haven't lost it. Fantastic. So last night was my final work in progress show. And I thought, okay, I know I've got the one that I need to do in the tank, which was the second one.

Why don't I just try and be as experimental this evening as possible? More jokes, new stories, trying to weave things in a different way, cutting out the bits that I think kind of probably don't need to be there, but that I rely on because they feel safe because I've run them 30 times before or whatever it might be. And last night, as I was going out there, I've got some jokes in there that didn't land. They were too complex. They were too like trying to be too clever.

And usually you have that, especially trying to tell jokes in front of a group of people, you feel like, oh my God, you sort of do in a British cringe meter, the toes curl inside of your trainers. But because I'd entered into that environment as this is a hypothesis to be tested as opposed to something to be proved, I just had this like, ah, well, if it doesn't work, great, because it means I'm not going to use it in front of three and a half thousand people in London.

It's so interesting because one of the other things, first of all, I love that story because I used to do a podcast. The one successful podcast that I did, I shouldn't say that, the BBC podcast of Sideways is doing okay, but it was with two other sports people.

Fred Flintoff, who is a cricketer, former England cricket captain, and Robbie Savage, who is a soccer player. And it was called imaginatively Flintoff, Savage and the Ping Pong Guy. And it was a surprise smash. It was a surprise smash. It did really, really well. And two things struck me about it. The one that I think was really interesting is Flintoff was

was worried he was a bit self-conscious before a microphone or in front of a camera. And that's very easy to be. If anyone's ever had an iPhone pointed at them, they're talking naturally and suddenly it's like, oh, I think that's quite a natural reaction. Might as well be the barrel of a gun. Yeah, exactly. And Flintoff, he said, we did one of the podcasts, and I said, what are you up to next week? He said, I'm on a tour of provincial theatres

And I'm doing this musical called Fat Friends. He was in like pantomime type stuff for a while, right? Right. And I said, what are you doing? He said, well, I'm not getting paid very much at all. But if I'm going to stand in front of an audience dressed up and singing my heart out, that's going to help me lose my self-consciousness. And I really want to go into broadcasting. I want to be a success. And this is just a way of learning how to do it. And he went on this tour.

And it wasn't long after that he got a really good gig in television, the presenter of Top Gear. I mean, sadly, he had an accident during Top Gear and it's been very difficult for him. But I watch him as a broadcaster now. I don't know if you saw any of the series where he went on...

He went to Preston where he grew up, quite a rough part of a northern English town and worked with, well you know about this right? This wonderful series about young cricketers and then he took them to India and just seeing him flourish, I think he's got a wonderful growth mindset, just a tremendous person. One of the other

Other areas of your work, which I think ties in with this quite nicely, is this tension between deliberate practice, 10,000-hour rule, time under tension, and genetics, talent advantage, something innate, predisposition, almost predetermination, I guess, for the absolute magic athletes amongst us. Where do you stand now after spending...

two careers in one form or another thinking about this? Where do you stand on 10,000-hour rule versus genetics, talent advantages, et cetera? Well, I don't think my views have changed that much on this. I think that my experience in table tennis was for people to say when they saw me playing well, you've got a gift. You must have been born with extraordinary reaction speeds and athleticism. But they hadn't seen

The hidden story, which was I grew up, I mentioned in Reading, but on the street that I grew up on, it had 50% of the top table tennis players in Britain. This is from a population of about a million recreational players. So I had a series of advantages.

In addition, probably, to pretty good genes too, which was my parents bought a table for the garage when I was about eight. So I'm practicing like crazy with my brother, who was two years older and better than me. So I'm getting stretched the whole time. I'm losing a lot and learning a lot. Then the school teacher at the primary school that I went to in Reading, which was on the road that had all the top players, Silverdale Road, was the best coach in Britain.

Peter Charters. He invited me and my brother, some other young players, to a club that was open 24 hours a day. You just had a set of keys and you could let yourself in and practice before school, after school, holidays, and weekends. Did I have genes that were conducive to table tennis? Yes. But are there other crucial factors in explaining what enabled me to get to the top? Absolutely.

And the relationship between the contribution of genes and the contribution of luck, environment, circumstance probably changes depending on the activity. To be good at basketball, you definitely need to be, I guess, reasonably tall. That's highly genetically mediated. There's probably other areas where the genetic contribution may be a little bit less than

But typically, I would suggest it's a multifactorial phenomenon where you really need to have the perfect storm of lots of different things happening at the same time. Do you know the fine-tuned theory of the universe? Are you familiar with this? Yeah. Yeah. So it sounds to me like your table tennis career is...

was sort of not too dissimilar to that. So for the people that don't know, there's a, I know it's like 10, 10 different numbers, 10 different forces, relationship between the strong and weak nuclear force, electromagnetic gravity, this sort of weird cosmological constant, like very slight bit of expansion that's going on. And all of these things, if only they were out by some absurdly small fraction of a lot of different numbers, the, uh,

that was created from the ingredients would not be a universe conducive to having matter. It would have clumped together because gravity was too strong or it would have blasted apart because it was too weak or heavier atoms, heavier elements would have been able to form for whatever reason.

And I always think about that. I've got Brian Cox, a fellow coming on the show soon. I think this is sometimes cited by religious people as an argument for the existence of God under the rubric of the weak anthropic principle. Just one thing I'd throw into the mix, Chris, is explaining it in that way I think is completely valid. And if your goal is to become the best table tennis player, say, in England,

and that anything else is just a disaster, then you really want to have all of those ingredients in order to bother making the attempt to use the limited time on Earth to get there. In a zero-sum environment,

If we all improve by 10%, the relative rankings remain the same. And if you're only interested in the relative ranking, that's something that one needs to bear in mind. But my sense is that in many things in life, it's a positive sum game.

If you and I and lots of other people improve our ability to communicate, that's good for us, probably good for the institutions we work at, and good for the society. If people have a growth mindset attitude towards mathematics and we all become more numerate, that's great for us and it's great for society. And for what it's worth, even though sport is often pictured as a zero-sum environment, no matter how much people improve at table tennis, there's only one person who can win the gold at the Olympics every four years.

The journey of trying to be the best that you can be, even if it doesn't mean that you're the best in the world, is a fascinating and often very beautiful one. And I worry a bit, and you'll be more connected to this than perhaps I am, is that occasionally I hear people saying, you know what, what's the point of being the best you can be? Why not just coast in life, quiet quitting, just doing the minimum? Yeah.

My sense from the evidence is that's a much less satisfying life than one where you're passionate about something, you try and be the best that you can be, you make a bigger contribution to the company, to yourself, to the society. And I think the dynamical power of that when you scale it through a society is tremendous. And I think it does explain certain trends in history. Are you familiar with Isaiah Berlin's idea of the inner citadel? No.

This is I'm a big admirer of Berlin and have read the Hedgehog and the Fox and two concepts of liberty. But go on. Let me be in a citadel. When the natural road toward human fulfillment is blocked, human beings retreat into themselves, become involved in themselves and try to create inwardly that world which some evil fate has denied them externally. If you cannot obtain from the world that which you really desire, you must teach yourself not to.

to want it. If you cannot get what you want, you must teach yourself to want what you can get.

This is a very frequent form of spiritual retreat in depth into a kind of inner citadel in which you try to lock yourself up against all the fearful ills of the world. The friend explained it in a simpler way. If your leg is wounded, you can try to treat the leg. And if you can't, then you cut off your leg and announce that the desire for legs is misguided and must be subdued. Basically, if you can't win at a game, you stop playing, say that you never cared about the game and create your own game with rules which you can win more easily at.

Well, that's in psychology. It often goes under. Thank you, by the way. It's really interesting. Berlin was such a wide... When I was at Oxford, I was at a college called Balliol, and I remember Berlin walking through the back quad. No way. Yeah, and he was... I knew people who knew Berlin. I didn't agree with everything he wrote about philosophically, but he was such a humane and...

rounded thinker, which isn't often always the way in academia, but a great person. But in psychology, for what it's worth, there is a phenomenon called self-handicapping, where if people are in a fixed... Think of a young person in a bit of a fixed mindset. They want to be perfect, and their self-esteem is bound up with being pretty perfect. And they have an exam for the piano, let's say. They love the piano. They've got an exam next week.

I think most parents will have seen this at one time or another with their kids. Suddenly, the kid stops practicing. You're like, why are they not practicing? They've got the exam next week. They love the piano. What's often happening is that they're so worried about the possibility they might fail in the exam, they want to create something.

proactively an excuse that they can point to in the event of failure. In other words, if I don't practice, if I say I'm not bothered about it, if I deliberately go out and get drunk the night before, I saw that in finals, by the way, at Oxford. Some people, this is like three years of work for the exam, which is the only thing that determines your grade. And I'm not saying grades are important, exams are important, but these people actually did care about their exams, but they were so worried about failing and that it would call into question their intellect and

They wanted to be able to say, you know what, I got drunk the night before. They actually made the outcome that they most feared more likely as a consequence of what you're describing. And I think that is not dissimilar to the retreat into the inner set adult. I think it has very similar underlying psychological dynamics. Well, in that way, the upside of...

never trying is never having to feel the pain of failure exactly you avoid public failure by assuring failure privately so you mentioned before we got started uh you've done your research i was impressed um i was a cricketer that was what i dedicated my teenage years to uh and for the people that kind of know how the critic cricket season works um especially as a a

a junior, you can play, you know, under 15s and 17s, maybe a Saturday game as you start to play adults and a Sunday game too. Plus you're netting two or three times a week. So this is seven, it's a full-time job alongside going to school or whatever. And there was a period toward the end of my teens where I did that purposeful handicapping. What was it called? Self-handicapping. Self-handicapping. So I would be called by the,

head of Durham Academy cricket on a on a Monday he'd ring me every Monday he'd ask how I get on because I wasn't placed by uh the academy I hadn't been placed in a team I was playing for the club that I'd always grown up playing for and he would ask how I'd got on and I knew he was going to ask and I was so worried about not performing that I was a leg spinner right a

Again, for the non-cricketly inducted, it's a unique form of bowling. The conditions need to be very specific. The position of the game needs to be very specific as well. It's kind of high risk, but it's also potentially high reward. It's very complex. Anyway, I often had what was called a TFC, a thanks for coming, which is where you don't bat and you don't bowl. Because I'd be batting seven or eight and the bowling...

offering that I had was very bespoke, very, very specific. And often the conditions wouldn't lend itself to that, especially being up north. It was raining a lot. It was, you know, pitches were wet, et cetera. And there was this odd degree of satisfaction that I would have when I ended up having a TFC that

That I knew when I got to speak to Jeff or John on a Monday that I was able to say, you know, I just really I just didn't get the opportunity. Like I really wanted kind of the opportunity to do this thing. I didn't in some ways because I was scared of doing it. And by being tested, finding myself coming up short.

that if I'd been handed the ball and I wanted to, and it's this odd duality, you know, one week I was braver and I just fucking really wanted to captain. I'd maybe even try and push him a little bit and nudge him and be like, look, I've got this, like put me in coach, so to speak. Um, but then other ones on my, you know, my weaker, more, um, fragile sort of mental weeks where I didn't have that same amount of confidence in myself, there would be this,

sort of bizarre melancholic satisfaction that uh i didn't get the opportunity to succeed but at least i didn't have to have the threat of failure and i think it's yeah it's really interesting chris i think it's worth saying that um i i should have perhaps said this earlier it is understandable uh not wanting to fail and i think it's perhaps even more understandable in the digital age

where often people can post pictures that makes their life look pretty perfect and airbrush photographs. And if young people look at that and think life is about looking and acting perfectly, you can see why it becomes more difficult to take the risks that I think we both agree are so important for growth in life. The quote that I think you might like is J.K. Rowling.

This is a 2008 Harvard commencement address, somebody I admire very much. It is impossible to live without failing at something unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all, in which case you fail by default. Yeah, beautiful. I mean, one other thing I'll just throw in, Chris, if I may. You may. Something I've become very interested in.

And might form my next book. Have you heard of the concept of time preference? No. This is, if I asked you, would you rather have £100 or $100 now or £200 in a year's time? Oh, like hyperbolic discounting in a way? Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah, that's another way of describing it, the discount rate. Hmm.

And humans do tend to discount hyperbolically, which is not dissimilar to other organisms. We tend to want to have the immediate gain, even if we could have more in the future. But of course, in life, we need to invest in order to gain more in the long term. You know, we save, we get compound interest. In order to be fit, we have to turn down the instant gratification of watching the movie and go for a run, which is more painful in the present.

But if we always prioritize now over the future, the chocolate over the run, the lying down rather than the training, the Netflix rather than the homework, the consuming rather than the investing, over the course of a life, it is crippling. For a society, it's disastrous because you can't have economic growth without the willingness to defer gratification. But if you defer today and you get more

in the next period and then you defer again, you're constantly growing your life. And I think my hunch is it's not well studied actually. In economics, they're quite interested in the discount rate and the hyperbolic discount is quite a literature. In psychology, they're interested in self-control and certain types of habit formation.

as a way of enabling to do what's good in the long term and overcoming the temptation not to do it in the short. But I don't think there's a sufficiently good integration between these two things. And my sense is that for individuals and for societies, reducing time preference, in other words, seeing the long term and deferring gratification is absolutely central

And there are people, and there may be people listening, who can do it in one part of life but not in others. So you're probably familiar with the NFL players who must have had incredible discipline in order to be successful in a highly competitive sport.

but are not in significant proportion, go bankrupt within a few years of retiring. They show that discipline, that long-termism, that deferment of gratification in their sport. But when it comes to their money, they've got it all at the end of their career, they'll blow it and then they'll blow up. Now, this I think is quite pervasive. So when I talked about growth mindset, I think it's great to be able to apply it more broadly in one's life rather than just necessarily to one thing.

I think you have a better life, a better adventure, a better journey, a better period of hypothesis testing if you're able to be low time preference in a more generalized way. And I know you're interested in politics because I've been listening to some of your podcasts today. I think if you look at Western civilization as a whole, you can explain the key dynamics through this prism. How so? Well-

I hope it's not controversial to say that the West was something of a backwater for many thousands of years and was not the center of innovation and creativity for much of the period that we sometimes call the Dark Ages, but the West took off.

in the early modern period and became the dominant economic and cultural power on earth. So sometimes, as you know, called the great divergence between the West and the rest. Now, what is the explanation for this?

Historians have sought for a very long time to explain the rise of the West. You've interviewed one of the great thinkers in this space, Joseph Henrich of Harvard University, who explains this divergence through the ban on cousin marriage, that across the world you had tribal societies. And it's great having a tribe. You're working together with your kin in order to do things, but it also can restrict society.

the success of a society because if you have lots of different tribes within a given geographical area, they're often fighting with each other and don't trust each other. And the Roman Catholic ban on cousin marriage, which went up to six cousins, I think, by the 10th century, effectively forced people to marry outside the tribe rather than within the cousin group. So you dissolve the tribes and create a national identity and it drives innovation and change. And I think this is a great argument.

But he also mentions in his book, The Weirdest People in the World, something that I think has been underplayed, which is over the course of the Middle Ages, partly because of what I've already mentioned about the breakdown in the tribal structures, the interest rate in England drops dramatically between about 1000 AD and 1500.

You can think of the interest rate as the society's time preference, if that makes sense. If you require 20% interest in order to save, you're somebody who's more interested in now than later. But can you see that makes it difficult to save and invest and do great things? But the interest rate dropped from 20%, 30% in England to 5% by 1500.

I think, and there are some economists who agree with this, that Western Europe was becoming more patient. Puritanism, the Protestant work ethic, these came later, of course. The bourgeois values of prudence and self-restraint, the industrious revolution, this is all indicative of Western consciousness

prioritizing more than other parts of the world, the future above the present, allowing for cumulative compound economic growth that eventually takes off during the Industrial Revolution. Now, I think if I'm not sending you to sleep yet, Chris, that there is a reversal in about 1970, where I think Western civilization started becoming less patient. There was an advert for a credit card called Access, one of the first two credit cards that

which said, access takes the waiting out of wanting. In other words, spend now, don't worry about the future, let it look after itself. I think this came out in 1972. But if you look at England between 1670 and 1970, there was never a fiscal deficit outside a major war, ever.

because they're saving for a rainy day during this period. Since 1970, the British government has run deficits every year bar five. They're trying to consume, and that means that the national debt is rising to now above 100% of GDP. America's maybe even a better example where there has been a deficit every year bar four. We're talking a few days out from the presidential election. Both Trump and Harris are promising huge deficits.

According to the Congressional Office for, I think it's called Budget Responsibility, Trump will add, they say on their central estimate, $7.5 trillion to the debt, Harris $3.5 trillion. Two sides of the same coin because the public is not willing to hear that.

that it's no good consuming now because we're putting problems onto future generations where it will become starker and starker. Isn't it interesting? It's so interesting. This has happened when life expectancy has been going up as well, you know, from 1670 to 1970. Over that time, you have ever more reason. Yeah, one of the arguments for hyperbolic discounting is that if you're in a high volatility environment,

all well and good, maybe getting $200 in a year's time, but you don't know if you're going to be here in a year's time. You know that you're here right now and you know that it's $100.

That's exactly correct. So a lot of economists argue that time preference, it's not a great phrase, we need to come out with a new one at some point. It needs to be re-meamed. Exactly. If you've got any good ideas, I'd love to hear it. But it's partly to do with life expectancy. Certain sections of American society have suffered a reduction in life expectancy, but on average, as you say, it has gone up.

So there has to be an alternative explanation. By the way, quantitative easing is another example of this. You're printing money, enabling consumption to continue in the here and now,

But you're storing up lots of long-term problems with capital misallocation, asset price inflation, making difficult for younger people to get on the housing ladder. That has been a disaster, I think. And in some ways, that was permitted by coming off the gold standard. Complicated story in itself. But I do wonder, Chris, if the self-esteem movement comes from the same basic place, that

We want kids to succeed because it's so nice in the here and now, give them lots of success experiences. But what does it mean? You're depriving them of the resilience that is necessary for long-term growth and an interesting life. Grade inflation in education starts taking off in the 1970s. It's lovely to get a grade A in the here and now, but if everyone's getting a grade A, you're devaluing the currency of all exams. And I do wonder...

If part of the, and I'm only going to say this tentatively, part of the mental health crisis that we're seeing is if one is feeling anxious, it's quite nice to get a label in the here and now for why that is being, why you're not feeling great. But if everyone or ever higher proportion have mental health issues for which they have a label,

It makes it very difficult to provide the psychological support for the people who are the most needy. I could give you other examples, Chris, but what fascinates me is that many, if not all of these, start to change around 1970. Fiscal, monetary policy, the self-esteem movement, mental health issues. I have a whole list of these things, and I'm trying to drill down at the moment into –

seeing whether or not one can provide a convincing, unifying explanation for all this that doesn't diverge too far from, but it does a bit from Henrik's analysis. Very interesting. Have you got a potential overarching dynamic? I think the explanation is complacency. The West has been near that. This is my tentative explanation. If you think about Rome,

ancient Rome, or many other civilizations, when they've been at the top for all your creative people doing their movie franchises, you've been at the top for a while, your expectations of your consumption start to rise, but it becomes less easy to, as it were, absorb the necessary costs in order for that to continue.

And if you think about Rome, they devalued. They effectively had 97% to 100% silver in the denarius, and they just cut it. They debased the currency, and it led to inflation. And Gibbon, the historian, argues about this.

complacency, this decadence that had set in. And I think, as I say, it's attentive explanation, but the period of Western dominance, I think, is now at a place where people have expectations that have run ahead of our material capacity to meet them, which means we're effectively borrowing for the future to continue consuming now, storing up the problems that we're now facing ever more. The crisis will get bigger,

As we continue to build the deficits, continue with the QE, continue with diagnosing everyone or an ever-growing population of people with mental illness, higher grade inflation and so on. And then when you fold birth rate decline on top of this...

It's a very unpopular... I'm aware that I keep banging this drum and I have done for a long time, but this week it's actually justified because the UK, I'm sure that you saw the census data just came out, 1.4 is the birth rate for the UK, which means that for every 100 British people today...

there will be 30 great-grandchildren, or 36, I think. So you're talking about a 60% extinction rate within 100 years, which is wild. And then on top of that, let's consider... This always comes from... I often get slime thrown at me that this is some trad con, you need to go back to being an Amish version of a person talking point. But

Almost everybody agrees that economic prosperity and helping to raise up the lower classes is something that's good. I know that you spent a good bit of time in my hometown of Middlesbrough along maybe a while ago. But, you know, that's the most spit and sawdust rough around the edges northern British town that you're going to find. It's like the quintessential sort of northern British town. Everybody believes that we should be raising them up. Where's that going to come from? Well, it's probably going to come from spending. It's going to come from economic prosperity.

freedom, independence, the opportunity to invest in the places that need it. Tell me how we're going to overcome not only this deficit, not only this sort of cultural predisposition that we have now, which I think you're right, which is this kind of like a sense of hedonic entitlement, financial entitlement, life mastery in many ways. And how are we going to do that when you've got

less than half of the workforce. I mean, AI and robotics are going to have to carry an awful lot of that productivity burden, and maybe they can, which is great. But I don't know, we have enough room for the people, so it seems like a shame to get rid of them. Just wanted a bit on that. I've thought about this an awful lot. May add something to your notion or fledgling hypothesis, which is, I think that

The scientific revolution and the advent of rationality and technology has an awful lot to answer for here because it made a lot of promises that it was able to deliver on in many ways that are objective and in almost no ways that are subjective. So I can tell you what the weather's going to be like in Venezuela in five days' time, but I can't guarantee that I'm not going to get cancer.

I can't guarantee that a car's not going to hit me as I step out into the street. And maybe, you know, given...

AI-informed medicine and autonomous driving vehicles and all the rest of it. Maybe this is simply just a slightly more protracted timeline and we're in some sort of messy middle, like dark age, technological dark age at the moment. And at some point we'll reach, maybe within two, three decades, we'll have reached sort of full technological maturity and we'll have mastered most of the problems that people are feeling. But right now, what we have is I was promised, or I feel like

We know so much about the world. Why do I encounter challenges? These feel more malignant. If one in two or one in three children of every couple that you know die before age one or die in childbirth because it's 1400 Yugoslavia or something and you're a serf,

What sort of degree of entitlement do you have? What sort of mastery do you think that you're supposed to get from the world? But when all of the time, all you're seeing is that we've got these advances and we're sending ships to rocket and we can catch them in a pair of tweezers and we can do all of this stuff. I think it sets humans up for success.

an area that as yet we haven't been able to create mastery in, which is the subjective, the meaning, the day-to-day experience of the human. So I think that there is a tension and a contrast, like having one hand in hot water, one hand in cold water, and then putting them both into lukewarm water, and they both feel different things coming from two different worlds, one being the objective, one being the subjective, one being science, the other being feeling. And I'm

You're not getting what you were promised from one that the other can deliver. I think it's perhaps, I would say in response to that, Middlesbrough, which I knew well, there was a table tennis hotbed back in the day, the Ormsby Table Tennis Club run by Alan Ransom. I've been to Ormsby. I know Alan Ransom. I grew up playing squash around Alan Ransom.

Alan Rantz, this is somebody that people ought to know. He's the table tennis guru. I mean, he's quite old now, but he ran that wonderful club. And he had a sports...

equipment business you probably got you did you get used to get my i used to get my cricket bats from alan ransom's place just uh just around the corner from the crown pub in uh middlesbrough see that was not a topic i was expecting to talk about today but alan ransom i'm glad he's got it i'm glad he's got it but middlesbrough um or anywhere else i i if people think to themselves you know

It does feel quite pinched at the moment. It's difficult to get on the housing ladder. I feel that my parents had it a bit easier than we're having it. I think they're right. I think that's a fair thing to say. But it's a consequence of many years of putting the now above the future at the level of society.

And that becomes more and more cumulatively difficult. So in the British general election, not dissimilar to the US election, no one talked about the debt. Both parties made promises that were completely fictitious because they knew that if they said the debt is too high, they wouldn't get elected. In the same way that I've just come back from a week in Washington, very curious about how the election was going out there, no one mentioned the debt at

No one that I spoke to did. And yet the unfunded, you mentioned demographics, Chris. This means the unfunded liabilities are absolutely enormous because the dependency ratio of the older people who are not working to the younger people who are, is going in the wrong direction. And yet even with that context, what should have been front and center of the political debate, no one's interested in it. Much more interested in culture war trivia.

and things of really no historic significance whatsoever. I think it's a distraction technique from the genuine challenges that we face. Now, if somebody said to me, Albert, economic growth is overrated, you know, you can have a discussion about that. But to the extent that most politicians are saying, we want to have growth, we want to have prosperity, we want to improve our technology, at the absolute heart of this is time preference. We need to re-meme it, but I think it's there. Now, on the other point that you made about

science thinking objectively about the world and that there's a disconnect between our subjective perception of it. Tell me how you'd respond to this. I don't think science ever wanted to be anything more than trying to help us solve empirical problems of various kinds. And at that job, I think it's been the most successful of all human institutions. And the question of how we

engage with the world, how we enjoy the world, our relationships. I'm not sure that's amenable in the same way. No, it's not. It's not the domain of science. But

I think that the new atheist movement, the increasing secularization of the West, the derogation of a lot of the places that people used to get meaning from, that has left people cut adrift, bereft of the typical explanations that they would have relied on. Those maybe being less objectively accurate, but more subjectively reassuring.

have left people in more malaise. And I'm fascinated. I'm fascinated by this idea of things which are literally true, but functionally false. Functionally true, but literally false. And...

I think it's clearly the case that you can have beliefs that are not empirically true that are conducive to success and vice versa. You're absolutely right about that. And I have the scars on my back here because I grew up as a Christian. My father was born in India, moved to Pakistan after partition and came to England to study law. And he grew up as a Muslim in the Shia tradition.

But in his bedsit in southeast London in the early 1960s, he had a vision of Jesus Christ and converted, this is very unusual, from Shia Islam to evangelical born-again Christianity. He then met my mum, who was a redheaded Welsh girl from a farming community in North Wales at a church. She had moved to London and she's from an evangelical background. They met in church and then

they fell in love. And by the way, both families were massively against the marriage because they said, this is a 1960s. I said, don't do it. You'll actually have mixed race children. Don't do that to them. Fortunately for my siblings and I, they rejected the advice, had us, and they were married until my father passed away three years ago. My mom's still alive, going well, coming tomorrow.

to London. But I grew up with this wonderful sense of assurance that God existed and that he was all loving and that I had an eternal future and I loved church. I'm one of those who went to church, really enjoyed it, made great friends, but then decided that it was empirically or what's the word you use? Functionally

Anyway, untrue. Yes. I thought it was untrue. And the problem is I couldn't bring myself to believe it just on pragmatic grounds. This is one of the difficulties with beliefs. You don't really get to choose whether or not you're going to be convinced by them. Do you remember Angels and Demons, Dan Brown's book? And he made it into a movie. And there's this really phenomenal scene

So Ewan McGregor, the Camelengo, is speaking to the protagonist. He's trying to get in, Professor Langdon's trying to get into the Vatican archives. He's adamant that da Vinci or someone has left some secret notes and in the secret note he's going to find out what the fuck's going on. And Camelengo turns to Professor Langdon and he says, do you believe, Professor?

And he starts to give a politician's answer saying, definition of belief, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's a very Petersonian response, actually. And Ewan McGregor's guy, Camelango, says, I didn't ask you that. I asked whether or not you believe. He turns to the camera. It's supposed to be to Ewan McGregor, but he turns direct to the camera. It's such an awesome line. And he says, belief is a gift that I'm yet to be given.

Beautiful. It's a gorgeous line. And I think that, you know, it's very difficult to convince yourself of something in that regard. But when we get back to that sort of this tension between rationality, belief, functionally true, literally false, literally true, functionally false. One of the things that happened with the derogation of belief in religion was that people were asked to let go of the thing that felt the most real to them, which was story,

It was persona. It was narrative. It was archetypes and story arcs in place of the thing which feels the least real to us. We have the least resonance with, which is statistics and graphs, data, those things. We are not built for that. We are built to understand and interpret the world by story. And the stories were derogated and they were replaced with something

perhaps much more accurate, but significantly more sterile. And that is something which is maybe literally true, but functionally false. Well, we've talked a lot on this about how to get good at stuff, how to improve, how to make progress, how to have an interesting and empowering journey in life. And I hope what we've talked about has empirical merit and will help people. But if you said to me at the end of it,

What's the point of the journey, given that it comes to an end and you then die? I honestly don't have an answer to that. I'm enjoying life enormously, but I do think it's a roller coaster that will come to an end and that there's nothing I can do about it. I carry that with me all the time, the sense of impending mortality. I do have friends who have the same visceral awareness of it. Some don't.

I don't know if it's an advantage or a disadvantage. I mean, in a way, it does imbue life with a certain preciousness. You're very consciously aware of the importance of each day. But there is a melancholy in my heart that I would perfectly happily acknowledge, more than a melancholy, something of a terror that it will end.

And I enjoy it so much, but I don't think I can do anything about it. There's no growth mindset that can help with not dying. There's no courage, moral or otherwise. So to the extent that

You know, we're moving into philosophical terrain. I would wholly acknowledge that I'm at a loss to understand where the meaning comes from. And I certainly, even if I was to replace the narrative, the story, the archetype of God with something else, wouldn't change the fact that I'm going to die and that it's highly limited and that my kids will grow up without me and that once you die, it's forever.

The limitlessness of it I find quite extraordinary. Maybe you might want to edit this out. It amazes me to an extent. There's a wonderful book called Brian McGee, The Confessions of a Philosopher, where he talks about his midlife crisis and the quest for meaning is one of the other chapters there.

that we're not more preoccupied with this impending doom that we're all facing in very rapid time. You're a lot younger than me, but I've probably had half my life already and it's gone like a flash. And I know that I'll soon be on my deathbed wondering where it had gone and then that will be it.

I don't know where the meaning comes from. The transcendental meaning. I think I do get meaning from hanging out with my friends and family, doing things I enjoy, living as a hypothesis. But here's the thing. You live as a hypothesis. It will end. And that's it. And that's very difficult for me, perhaps for you. I don't know if you found a way through it.

No, I haven't. I think one of the ways that people do is by looking at the bereavement of other people around them. You mentioned that your mom's still alive. You know, one of the fortunate things about being an only child is that there aren't that many family members that you need to deal with dying. One of the bad things about being an only child is that you don't get much practice at understanding the role of death in life, you know, beyond pets and mom and dad.

that's it unless you know by some awful horrible quirk that my future wife ends up passing before i do that's it i need friends and stuff like that i guess but yeah it's uh there are still a lot of areas of human life sort of the fundamental questions of why we're here what constitutes a good life where do we find meaning from how do we deal with the inevitability of death

How do we deal with uncertainty where finite creatures surrounded by an infinite universe, the asymmetry, the anxiety seesaw that we're always sort of butting up against? These are not necessarily the domains of science. And in a world where we appear to have mastered so much and we still have these problems mentally, it feels like a particularly vicious pathology or some sort of personal curse. It feels unfair.

the best way to say it, it feels unfair. Hang on a second. You're telling me we can seed rain clouds in Dubai. We can literally control the weather in a country and I still have to deal with this low mood and I still have to feel scared about this particular thing and I still might get sick or I still might die before my time. And I think that, yeah, maybe future civilizations, future generations will look back on us as this sort of

I don't know, with a little bit of sympathy that we knew enough to know that we might be able to get mastery, but we didn't yet have the ability to answer the questions. See, I'm not sure I relate to that because, yeah, we know stuff about the weather and there's some uncertainty about how I'll feel tomorrow. But no matter how much we learn, we're still going to be stuck with the finitude of life.

That, it seems to me, is not something we can ever overcome. Even with freezing our brains, the second law of thermodynamics tells us that we are moving towards some kind of a heat death. In other words, I think it will inevitably be finite.

if you don't believe in some kind of a spiritual. I used to have as my Twitter bio locally reversing entropy. And I love that idea. I love the idea of, you know, there is this sort of force that's trying to rip everything apart and it's trying to create disorder. And what do you get to do? For this brief window, you get to locally reverse this unstoppable, like eternal force

omnipotent force you get to reverse it that phrase is fantastic and i do like it yeah and and but when when one looks extends a boundary that local reversal um yeah you're gonna be dust soon enough

Yeah, it will eventually turn the other way. The second law of thermodynamics, I didn't learn any of this at school, but I think Einstein described it as the key fundamental law of the universe. And was it…

One of the other great quantum theorists said that it's the one least likely to be overturned by new evidence. It does seem to be very deep. By the way, that's the other thing that I think one throws into the mix on civilizations is that this local reversal of entropy does require the ability to extract energy in order to, as it were, perform the reversal. In other words, if you think of a cheetah chasing a gazelle,

the cheetah has to get more meat from the kill than it was expended in the chase in order to survive. Otherwise, the entropy will get them. They need that meat to, as it were, keep the cells going and to reverse it. Energy balance, yeah, yeah. Yeah, but you have to get a surplus. So this is sometimes called the energy return on energy invested. You need to have that high. And actually, a civilization needs quite a big return. The problem with oil and gas at the moment is that we're having to drill deeper into

and fracked harder as opposed to when we used to get oil from near the surface. So the energy return on energy invested is declining. So the energy, net energy available to civilization is going down, making it more difficult to locally reverse entropy, which might explain why productivity has declined in the last few decades. It may do.

Matthew Syed, ladies and gentlemen, Matthew, I love you. I feel like we could do this for hours and hours. I have so much more to talk to you about. So we might need to get you back on regularly so that we can keep on chewing the fat and trying to put the world to rights. I really appreciate you. I really appreciate your work. Thank you, Chris. And I appreciate the invitation and I've loved the conversation. Where should people go if they want to keep up to date with everything you're doing?

I have a website, Matthew Side, either .co.uk or .com, if they Google my name. And then one of the things that I am keen for people to try is measure their growth mindset. That's something people can do practically. And I take this tool every six months. Always gives me insights that can help. Where can they do that? At Matthew Side. That's on the website? That's on the website. Let me check. It's probably, it's MatthewSide.co.uk. Yeah. All right. Matthew, I appreciate you. Until next time, mate.

Yeah