#865 - Matthew Syed - How High Performers Build An Unbreakable Mindset
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Hello, friends, welcome back to the show. My yesterday is Matthew side is 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 performance 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 ten thousand hours rule is actually the key to mastery.

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How do you describe what you do?

What I do now? Well, it's it's quite, quite a collective to be onest write columns for the times and the sunday times, two british newspapers. Uh, I have a podcast on B, B, C, radio four, which sounds quite establishment doesn't IT that the time in the BBC.

Uh I also have a small uh business and write books a give the occasional uh talk. So i've got to um a quite a diverse career coming off the back, by the way. Um twenty years or so ago I was a sports person, different sport to you.

Um but I was a pink corner you should call IT pink pong. IT sounds slike the offensive to the tennis because IT makes IT sound like a kind of part like a pa game, like tidy wins. But like that was my main thing for most of my early life. Table tennis was everything until I retired uh, in my early thirties. And then that LED to a career which has been broadly interested in performance, mindset and how we make the most of our lives.

Is there A A single thread going through that is IT excEllence of the psychological independence of becoming good at doing a thing?

Yeah, I think I think as was coming to the end of my tables tennis career, you know it's very mono mane echo to be the basic you can be. You privilege this rather arbitrary me above everything else. And if you don't have that hunger and the uniqueness of discipline, you don't really have any chance to win in an international competitive environment.

Um but then I 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 a uniquely successful life for career, try to build myself up in in those terms. But that I think is the thread I became very interested in whether these lessons are transformed to things beyond sport and trying to learn more, after retired, about psychology and culture and teamwork, how we evolve as individuals, institutions without one of the same two grand, how societies evolved and become successful. So if there is any logical thread, and that 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, I 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. Uh, and there are certain transferable lessons for sure.

But when I think I would say now is that businesses often are tackling more complex chAllenges and sports teams and the sport can 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 eleven against eleven, as IT has been for probably more than one hundred years.

This is soccer, by the way. crickets. Ts rules haven't changed that much.

Well as in business, you're try to change the rules all the time. Technology is changing um and there aren't really any rules. Build the legal potential 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 um I think more interesting and require greater agility than bats in.

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 do you come to conceptualize that?

Well, the biggest table tennis event of of my career was playing the olympic games in sydney. And the olympics is 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 is my first round opponents. So we flew two players out to the gold coast to spare within the build up to the big day, both of whom were left handers and replicated.

The style is GTA face, and the hall had the same floor as the competition venue. The level of lighting was the same. So we were particularly in try to make sure we had everything in place for me to perform and deliver on the day.

And I was that I anxious, like you would expect with all of this build up. But just before I went out to play Peter, friends of germany, in the opening match, my opening game with the sydney olympics, the competition venue manager, lovely guy called nail, came over and said, Matthew, i'd just a lot let you know. We've heard from the international broadcast center that this match is going out live on BBC one which is the biggest channel in the U.

K. also. Great fantastic. Um and then my coach, swedish guy called seron, said, Matthew, what happens over the course of the next forty minutes will determine whether the last four years were a waste of time on up.

And he 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 big water light and I remember looking from behind the on the corridor. IT was a quite a full data.

And I saw some union jack out there and I went out to play. We did the warm up. And table tennis is very subtlety.

Spin is a very important variable in table tennis. And you have to read the spin in order to get the ball back in. Quite small variations in racket angle can have quite a big 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 in my first shot in order to get the ball back into play. But I was so focused on getting the racket angle right. So 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. I also the back then table tennis game, up to twenty one, and I also the first game, twenty one, two.

This is almost done. Heard of an olympic competition. And then I lost a second game.

I think twenty one, seven. And the dream was over very rapidly. In other words, I choked. I had the classic problem of over thinking, one component of the performance and everything else falling apart IT can happen.

You know, a job interview that you really came to get, where you just can't get your tongue and mouth and larrance working effectively, can't think of the answer, you freeze. And that was a failure in a dramatic and highly humiliating way. And I could have been the, I thought, okay, I I don't have what IT takes to perform under pressure.

I haven't got the, you know that the nerves of steel that is required, and I could have given up putting myself from pressurize 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 I call what sometimes called a growth mindset, a wilderness, to see failure as an opportunity to learn, rather than his evidence, you lack some in a gift. That means he really often to bother trying anymore that that can have transformative impact in how you engage with almost everything that happens in life. And that finite redefinition of fatal, I think, is one of the one of the key attributes for me of life.

It's our gain the last few years, the glorification I think this push back against victimhood culture, against the kind of fragile ity that everybody's every generation is adamant that the future generation has.

IT feels like um maybe IT is just more of the same maybe IT is whatever history doesn't repeat itself, but IT rimes that uh every generation consideration of the next generation doesn't repeat itself but IT rims um and I think that part of that has been trying to find an acceptable vector to in power future generations what is that the weekend to whether it's nothing tell with anti fragile ity, whether it's a shame parish teaching people about mental models, about the fundamental attribution era, whether IT stuff like rick and more saying your booze mean nothing. I've seen what makes you cheer. You know, lots of different ways to say the social world isn't doesn't care that much about you.

It's very much about how you deal with setbacks is 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 is swimming in this menu of very lovely, very positive 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 estee movement that really originated on the west coast of the united states. And then my greater around the world, where the idea was, you try to 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 theyll develop so much self a steam, 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 only have 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 french ourself estate. We want them to have, I think, the world resilience, and that requires giving them difficult chAllenges early in life.

So they learn how to fail. They learn to, as IT works, extract the lessons that can come from failure. And that way they are gonna cope much Better with a world where failure baked in.

Because if you think about science and technology, your putting ideas to the world, you posit theory, and it's when they fail. Let's set the stage for growth. You create a prototype and you test IT early to find out where it's not working as well as I could do.

And that enables you to improve we when we perform experiments, if we know the result of the experiment before we conducted IT is not an experiment, is a waste 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 a steam is bound up with being perfect, we don't take the risk that the absolute heart of how we develop as individuals, how science grows, how institutions get Better.

So I think there was a fundamental era in the nineteen seventies of which echo still exist, society. But I think it's worth saying a cry, if I, if I may, that I don't think we should feticide failure in a certain sense. I think we need to be sophisticated about how we think about, you know, if i'm on a flight, you know, I flew back from washington, D.

C. On on sunday just before we we're speaking today. I wouldn't want the pilot to think, okay, I want to try something you want to find.

I know you, i'm to try. You leave crashes a plane, kills all the passengers we say, yeah, great. You know, that's crazy. What would we want a pilot to do if he or SHE had a hunch that trying something you in the copy would improve the safety of the aircraft? As as you don t 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 sufficiently high fidelity simulator.

I think what we trying to do when we fail in the innovation space is trying to serve the trade off between the massive blessings that are conferred from learning from failure while minimizing the downside risk. And it's strategic lens that we have to apply because a retail company that had a hunch that you changing the configuration of shelves might improve customer experience, they wouldn't get the whole equity on IT theyd want to test that in a pilot scheme. But what I found in my you know for into businesses that it's very easy to try and test that in the most conducive conditions with the best store manager, the best look.

But you're not learning anything. You're trying to corrupt the hypothesis whether you test IT in tough conditions, you learned so much more. There's I know i'm i'm going on here, but E. O. Wilson, I thinks one of the great polymax intellects of the twenty century, he was, someone is interested in insect behavior beautifully about society and and and human behavior said, you test a trivial theory. You get a trivial answer but we should be doing is testing ourselves, our theory, our prototypes um in tough empire environment so that we gain the most learning we can and so long as we are resilient to the failure are a part of life in learning. That's how we drive progress in almost all of its dimensions.

A lot of friends from the U. K. 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.

I'm got new responsibility. And a lot of the time you go away in a holiday to a place and you have this phenomenal time. But I think that judging weather on, I mean, how many times we've been on holiday, someone decides to proclaim over a dinner I could move here.

I could live. I would. I would love i'd move here tomorrow um 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 shitty season as reliably. When is the worst weather too hot or too cold or too wet or too dog or something? And go and work. Don't allow yourself to be inflated by the festival on. And D, J, that I love and i'm going to go to see this comedy shot, whatever, say, no, no, no, no, you want to.

Can I survive in this new environment as shit as it's going to become at the shit as that could be? And if I still am like, yeah, bravo, it's Better than where I am at the moment then good going back to this whole selves. Steam moving.

I. I spent an awful lot of time thinking about the real fundamental side of the pennings of confidence, self, a steam self belief. What have you learned from scientific psychological lens about the component parts of our self steam, 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 a steam can be quite dangerous and self defeating. I'm not sure that self estee is is great as it's cracked up to be. I think if we, my own view, and not my life is far from per. On fifty three, I fell a lot with my kids, one of them sitting next to watching rocky .

rocket success. To me personally.

the only thing that worried me is when we watch rocky one, two and three, I thought rocky three was a weakness in my son, ten old thought rocky .

three was the best, was so so concerned about his fledged career as a film critic, perhaps going director.

even that the ambitious .

felt up. Kid.

you remember rocky? Rocky three was one with club lank. Yeah, I thought rocky one was so descended .

into parody briefly.

right? And I think rocky is particularly period if if there is a word appreciated, the first one was brilliant.

I've to i've got to teach you about this and we'll come back to the of the same thing in the second so I got told by a film critic, big film critic on on youtube pull the critical drinker swear Scottish man who is very, very and he explained to me the life cycle of movies and franchise instead of sub uh journals in that regard. Uh and you get um introduction, get growth, get maturity, then you get parody. Parody is the final stage.

So a good example of this would be the marvel cinematic universe. H you get capital amErica and iron man is kind of revolution rates, like sexy as a super ho thing is sort of whitty 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 know it's capt.

In amErica went to soldier. It's the number two, number three, iron man. They started to sort of um created trend, but things are still going and they get into maturity.

That's when talking avenges and game infinity wars stuff like that. You it's like a comfortable leather power of shoes. You know the rythm, you know the k, it's like, this is what it's going be, but then you get to parody.

Parody would be a great example of this would be the most recent thor movie where throw is no longer the hero. He's the butt of all of the jokes. You've taken the established architecture and cliches that you've created, and you use them as a matter nothing is about what the movie is.

It's all the meta commentary about the cliches of the movie at the of stories within stories and stories about stories. And it's him doing the jung clad van dam split across two dragons. And it's him being a big goof.

He's never competent. He's never cool. He's never sexy. He sort of false flat on his face and only makes success that have been references to previous success and still but uh yeah I think you can tell when any individual creator, commentator, jona movie series is on the decline when you yet to parody.

But don't you think I look as a brilliant and compelling analysis, and I don't think it's unreasonable to say that civilizations following not completely the similar path and the work let's been done on the creative world, I guess you could apply to musicians couldn't knew who flower particular farrow.

Become highly successful, but then stay within that that part of the fitness landscape and then to start losing popularity because others are copying or they become cliched. And what they're doing, I think, is interesting that those is quite rare. But music writers who are successful in over many decades refresh.

So they bring people with a different point of view, a different perspective. They leverage diversity of thought in order to, as IT will 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 class. I mean, the funny kind of way IT goes back to what we talking about before, about self, a steam.

You can sort of imagine that if you see life is a journey, rather than is a somewhere to arrive as a destination, then the way one looks about mistakes, the way one thinks about perfection, is different. Because each time you get somewhere, you think of IT is a staging post to somewhere potentially knew. Why would you want to a stay within the domain that one has already created creatively 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, though, we have nothing to lose.

Now you got lots to lose. People are very deferential, people looking to you。 Um and so the idea of taking a risk, which is as we, I think, a great earlier part in parts of how one innovates becomes often tougher.

And I think you see that in business where complacency and comfort, if Serena's fergus on that, the famous foobar manager, described complacency as a virus. And I think IT is something that can subvert the idea of having that pioneering sense. If I now want to continue on this wonderful journey, we only get one, and that IT ends. Why stay where one is? Particularly if one self estee, that's what worries me about self estee, can be bound up with a looking in, sounding perfect.

So I think one of the I love that, I love that idea and IT makes me, when I hear the stories like that, when i'm reminded of the fact that life is a hypothesis to be tested, not an argument to be proved. Now i'm just gonna ep on sort of testing these things i'm gna keep isn't not interesting in playing, not taking things too seriously.

I can feel my body down, regulate like a parasympathetic mantra of some kind, but we can't deny the fact that humans need validation, social acceptance. They won 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 adorable or whatever.

And how do you get there? You get there by finding a thing that works, then rinsing the living shit out of IT and doing IT over and over again. At least if you have a risk of us at 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 that s the distinction we might make, is between exploit and explore if if you have a solution, even if it's a can solution to a problem, and you can keep expLoring IT again and again, keep producing that car of the right size and dimensionality, or give giving a podcast formula that's working, you can exploit the living daylights of IT.

But if that the risk, of course, is that people 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 exploited ble, you might be missed. So IT only ever exploiting and not expLoring seems to be a recipe for stagnation potentially, are, except in some very unusual ecosystems. I think the fast of the world is changing, the the more the division between exploit and explore should be moved in the direction of explore.

And I suppose anything other otherwise that is, as we kind of discussed, the comfort zone is in the exploit doing what we knew what is, is a bit more comfortable and therefore you being sufficiently tough to say hello. We need to explore a bit more in the classic examples, forgive me, a of blocks, the video, exploiting the hair out of of V H S. Video tapes. When the world is changing, that a recipe for not survival in the marketplace. Yeah.

how can people have a Better relationship with the fear of risk, which I think is fear of failure macerating with a slightly nicer ending word. How can they sort of reframe that experience? IT all well and good.

And how many times of people heard? It's not about the destination. It's the journey. It's not about how many times you get knocked, about how many times you get up. We couldn't sort of mantra way through this as much as possible.

Have you found anything tangible, tasted, 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 of risk, fear of novelty, fear of failure.

But we are very interested in this concept that I I think I loved 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 world rankings at 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 I did something that some of the older british viewers or listeners will know what i'm talking about, a phone directory inquiries. And this is you went, Chris, you know that is by the way.

yeah IT you IT was kind of like the yellow pages.

but on the phone, exactly.

exactly so about they probably a lots of americans list into the show and they want what do have yellow pages over here? Maybe they do. Anyway, IT was like a directory, is like a local directory for businesses.

stuff that you your phone, if you wanted to get the telephone number of the company, in the sort of preterm t day。 So I phone one, nine, two and got the telephone numbers of the time is in two english newspapers. I, I phone and phone and phone. And I eventually got through to the court side of the times, David chapel, in nineteen and ninety nine.

I said, look, would IT be possible to write for the sports pages of the times? Um math, you side here I said, you know, a british number one, table ten is play and he said, i've never heard of you, which is a sightly disappointing, still start but he said, look, this will tel you how long going as he said, could you fax in some ideas so I went to board a fax machine, faxed in some ideas and kept faxing articles until eventually one got published in may nineteen ninety nine. And that was thrilling because I didn't think i'd ever be published in the times newspaper.

Won't vote about ten copies .

from the local news and a photo upstairs. Terry, this is when he was broad cheat. These huge, huge newspapers like not like the the tabloid today um but not intended side effect of this as I get a call from golden sex the investment bank saying, look with we redd your article, we thought I was great.

Would you come in and give a talk to our top traders? And had our conference ing floor in fleet street and I went to Chris A A compress sive school so this is a you know a state school is not like how. Completely both stand the couple of in suburban reading, which is about forty miles west of them.

We didn't do any public speaking at school, you know there was no debating society you believe in or not close the press conferences and pingpong were not that well attended. So so I done, i'd done no public speaking. So you and at the practice, I hadn't failed at speaking and at the chance to develop my speaking ability, my communication skills, remember going very nervous.

I prepared hard, but I was tremendously nervous. And I gave I gave the talk um and that wasn't great and I got heckled about two thirds of the way through. I remember my first reaction was at a fixed mindset response yeah I obviously don't have the talent for this.

If I ever invited again by a big company are all politely decline. But then I thought, no, let's have a growth inset response to this. Maybe I could improve.

And I got a friend to look into public speaking practice. It's sort of early yahoo search. And the top response was toast masters, which is a global network of public speaking clubs.

In the nearest one to me, in southwest london, enrichment were am still living today, was in chicken of a room in a place called york that was hired by toast mak. Ten or fifteen people trying improve their communication and the social confidence, and is a wonderful thing. You go, if you're luckenough to get on the program, you give a talk.

The first one you ever give is called the ice break away. You tell the group about yourself, but you try to handle your anxiety is stood in front of ten, fifteen people judging you as inevitably happens when you're front of a room, and you try to communicate to them and 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, a toast miles, is always comes to the front and gives you feedback. And a rule is, I have to give you at least one criticism. fantastic. You finding out what you could do differently and Better.

You know that if you think of life is a hypothesis rather than an argo, that needs to be, how did you put in caborn? I think that's a wonderful way of thinking about IT. Um then there's some spontaneous speaking two thirds the way through whoever is hosting for the night write instead of topics on cards. The name is going ahead and they pick out Matthew, you have to go to the front, pick up the card and exemplar ize on IT immediately for sixty seconds, the first time you do.

It's terrifying because I was passionate about journalism, and I thought, I mean, to have to give the occasion or talk, and I would love to be able to communicate, by the way, I might get find IT on the today program or the BBC news and been, I would have think on one feet is something that would be a tremendous value at 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. The world I go to conferences is whether skill communicators.

But what IT means, if you get to be the best thing you can be, you reach the summit of your potential. And if it's something you care about is something that has a purpose view, 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. There are a bit worried about trying new things, about collaborating with people they don't know, about leaving their comfort zone.

And it's about liberating us from some of the unconscious constraints we can place on ourselves so that we can just live. That life is a hypothesis. I know I love that formulation.

Yeah, I remember I started in some striking boxing and my tie and stuff, I ent out to thailand for the summer and fought out there. And the first, the most important lesson that novice 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 I was six with me, that because you you can see somebody that isn't used to necessarily being in a rain instead of when punches get thrown in. This like a 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 economic gregor winning the light weight title against edi alva.

And alva throws this big overhand sort of looping a right like that. And if his nuckles touch the end of conney greg's nose and colonna watches this thing come in the whole way, pink just watches a gLance of the bond of his nose. And then just on, it's one of the most beautiful sequences of striking his then counter.

It's like five punches puntuated with two cake. It's gorgeous. It's beautiful. And then edit just had the floor.

That's how we finished IT and that's how he becomes the us's first double champion. I just phenomenon like beautiful, gorgeous story. But IT makes me think about learning that you're not made of class, right? You're not winning.

And that failure is again, it's hard. It's hard we can talk about IT and everyone that listening because you rationally that makes sense and then the the swell of fear inside of them. Just one other point that I guess kind of silly.

And i'm going to uh, australia to do a live tour. I got this live show thing so not too similar you're speaking hopeful ly less cackling. I've been doing work in progress shows in awesome um at a comedy club east of town.

It's very small, forty people rooms like I was kind of basically invite only on a mAiling list. And um the first week that I went out, I was really a really, really, really rusty and this isn't good. Then the second week I had still up before I was like that's nine ten out of ten, but I haven't lost IT fantastic tic.

So last night was my final work in progressive, 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 deceivin 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 thirty 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. There were too complex. They were too like trying to be too clever a and usually you have that especially trying to tell jokes in front of a group of people you feel like, oh my god, you in a british cringe meter the toes cold inside of your trainers. Um but because i'd entered into that environment, as this is a hypothesis to be tested, supposed to something to be proved, I just had this like, uh, well, if IT doesn't work, great because IT means i'm not going to use IT in front of three and half thousand people .

in london as is so interesting because what one of the other things but first of all, I I love I love that story because I used to do a podcast, the one successful podcast that that I did.

I shouldn't say that the BBC podcast side ways is doing okay, but was with two other sports people, fred flintoff, who is a cricketer, former england cricket captain, and robby savage a who is a soft blue IT, was called imaginatively flint off savage in the pinnacle. G, G. And IT was IT was a surprise smash IT was a surprise smash.

They did really, really well. And um two things struck me about IT, the one that I think was really interesting as flint off um was worried he was a bit self conscious before a microphone or in front of a camera. That's very easy to be if anyone's ever had a you know an iphone pointed at them. We're talking naturally in suddenly at all. I think that's quite a natural reaction.

I as well be the body of a gun.

Yeah, exactly. And flint, though he said we did one of the politics as body to next week he said i'm on A A tour of provincial theatres and i'm doing this um musical you using like .

pantomine type stuff for a while right right?

I see what you're doing, he said about not getting paid very much at all, but if i'm in a stand in front of an audience dressed up and singing my heart out, that's gonna me, lose myself 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 they got a really good gig in television, the present of top gear. I mean, sadly, he he had an accident during top gear and it's been very difficult for him.

But I watch him as a broadcasters now. I don't, if he saw any of the series where he went on, he went to president, we grow up quite a rough part of a northern english down, and worked well. You know, about this right is one derful serious about Young cricketer's. Then he took them to india and just seeing him flourish. I think he's got a wonderful, wonderful growth mindset, just a tremendous person.

One of the the other areas of your works, I think, is sing with this quite nicely is this tension between delivery practice, ten thousand hour rule time and detention and genetics, talent advantage, something in nate previous position, almost predetermination, I guess, for the absolute magic athlete amongst, why do you stand now, after spending two careers are in in one former another thinking about this, why do you stand on ten thousand verses? Genetics, talent advantages at ta?

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 grow up, I mentioned in reading, but on the street that I grew up on, IT had fifty percent of the top table tennis yers 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 um 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 old Better than me. I'm getting stretched the whole time. I'm losing a lot and learning a lot um then the school teacher at the primary school that I went to in reading, which was on the road that had all the top place over the road.

Was the best coach in britain, Peter charters, and he invited me of my brothers, some other Young plays, to a club that was open twenty four hours a day. You just had to set keys and you could let you self in and practice before school, after school holidays and weekends. So 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, circumstances probably changes depending on the activity.

To be good at basketball. You definitely need to be, I guess, reasonably tool l that's highly h genetically mediated. Um there's probably other area, other areas where the genetic contribution may be a little bit less, but typically I would suggest it's a multi Victorian phenomenon. But 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? You familiar with this? yes. yeah. So IT sounds to me like, uh, your table tennis career was sort of not too to similar to that.

So for the people that don't know, there's I know it's like ten ten different numbers, ten different forces relationship between the strong and weak nuclear forces like Robing matic gravity, this sort of weird uh, Cosmological constant like this but a very slight bit of expansion that's going on. All of these things, if only they were out by some absurdly small fraction of a lot of different numbers. The a meal that was created from the ingredients would not be a universe conducted to having matter. IT would have clump together because gravity was too stronger, would have blasted apart because he was too weak or heavy items, a heavy elements we've been able to form for whatever reason. And I, I, I always think about i've got brian cox, fellow of right, coming on the show soon and tell you.

I think this is sometimes cited by religious people as an argument for existence of god under the rubrics of the weekend tropic principle. I just one thing i'd thrown into the mix crisis is explaining in that way, I think is is completely valid.

And if your goal is to become the best table tennis players, say, in england, and then anything else is just a disaster that 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 some environment, if we all improve by ten percent, the relative rankings remain the same. And if you are only interested in the relative ranking, that something that one needs to bear in mind. But my sense is that in many things in life is a positive.

Some 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 will become more numerous, that's great for us and it's great for society.

And for what it's worth, even though sport is often picture is a zero, some environment, no matter how much people improve at table tennis, only one person who can win the gold at the olympics every four years, the journey of trying to be the best you can be, even if IT doesn't mean that you're the best in the world, is a fascinating and an often very beautiful one. And I worry a bit, and you'll be more connected to this. The peps I am, is the occasional her people saying, you know what? What's the point of being the best you can be? Why not just coasts in life, quiet, quitting, just doing the minimum? My sense from the evidence is that so much less satisfying in life.

The one way your passionate about something, you try and be the best thing you can be, you make a bigger contribution to the company yourself, to the society. And I think the dynamic power of that when you scale IT through a society is is tremendous. And I think that does explain certain trends in history.

Are you familiar with assia berlins idea of the inner?

No, this is I, A bigger mire of berlin, and head talk in the folks and two concepts, liberty. But go on. Let me in a when the natural .

road toward human fulfilment 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 would you really desire, you must teach yourself not 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. Depth into a kind of innocent to, in which you try to lock yourself up again, saw the fearful ills of the world. The friend explained IT in a simple way, if your leg is wounded, you can try to treat the leg. If you can't, then you cut off your leg and announce that the desire of the legs is misguided and must be subdued. Basically, if you can't win IT 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 up in psychology often goes under. Thank you by the way, is really interesting. Berlin was such a White when I was an oxford. I was at a college ical bailer.

And I remember um berlin walking through the the the back called no way yeah and he he was A I knew people who knew berlin um I didn't agree with everything he wrote about philosophically but he was such a humane and rounded thinker which isn't often the often always away in academia but but a great great person but in psychology, for what it's worth, there is a phenomenon called self handicapping where if people are in a fixed, but I think of a Young person in a bit of a fixed mindset, they want to be perfect. And this self estee is bound up with being pretty perfect and they have an exam for the piano. Let's say they love the piano.

They're go to the exam next week. And I think most parents will have seen this at one time, another with their kids. Suddenly the kids stops practicing.

And you like what why they not present. They got the examinations, which they love, the piano. And what's often happening is that they're so worried about the possibility they might fail in the exam. They want to create proactively and excuse that they can point to in the adventure failure.

Another, if I don't practice, if I have not bothered about IT, if I deliberately going and get jump the night before I saw that and finals, by the way, to also some people, this is like three years of work for the exam, which is the only thing that determines your grade. And not 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 I would call into question their intellect. 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'll described in. And I think that is not the similar to the retreat into the inner seal that I think that has very similar underlying psychological dynamics.

Or in that way, the upside of never trying is never having to feel the pain of failure. exactly. You avoid public failure by assuming failure privately. So you mentioned before we got started, uh, in your research, I was impressed. Um I was A A cricketer that was what I dedicated my teenagers to.

And for the people that kind of know how the cricket season works, especially as a junior, you can play you know under fifteen s and to seventeen s maybe a saturday game as you start to play adult, the sunday two, plus your netting two or three times a week. So this is a seven is a full time job, alongside going to school, whatever. Ana, there was a period toward the end of my teens. Well, I did that purpose for handy capping what was .

IT called self .

handy self handicapping. So um I would be called by the a head of dorm academy cricket on on a monday. He bringing me every monday.

That's how I get on because I wasn't placed by a the academy I hadn't been placed in a team I was playing for, the club that I always grown up playing for and he would ask how I done on, and I knew he was going to ask. And I was so worried about not performing that I was a little spinner right again for the non cricket inducted. It's a unique form of bowing.

The conditions need to be very specific. The position of the game needs to be very specific as well as kind of high risk. It's also potentially high reward is very complex.

Anyway, I often had what was called A, T, F, C. Thanks for coming. Which is what you don't bad and you don't bow because everybody know eight and uh the bowling um offering that I had was very spoke very, very specific. And often the conditions wouldn't lend itself that, especially being up north that was raining a lot.

There was you know pitches were wet at such and there was this odd degree of satisfaction that I would have when I ended up having A T fc, that I knew when I got to speak to jeff john on a monday, that I was able to say, you know, I really I I 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 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 use this od duality, you know, IT, one week I was brave, and I just fucking really wanted to captain, i'd maybe even try and push in a little bit, nudge me be like luck.

I've got this like put me in coach so to speak. Um but the other ones on my you know my weaker, more um fragile sort of mental weeks so I didn't have the same amount of confidence in myself. There would be this .

sort .

of bizarre melancolique satisfaction the 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 yeah really interesting, Chris, I think it's worth saying that I I should have hap said this early IT is understandable not wanting to fail. And I think it's perhaps even more understandable in the digital age where often people can post pictures, makes their life look pretty perfect. And the air brush 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 is so important for for growth in life. The code that I think you might like is J.

K. rolling. Um this is two thousand and eight half at 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, what one of the things i'll just throw increase if I may, you may something i've become very interested in. I might form my next book if you heard of the .

conceptive time preference .

no this is um if I lost you, would you rather have uh a hundred pounds or hundred dollars now or two hundred? And the yearning like .

hyperbolic discounting yeah .

exactly exactly the yeah that's another way of described in the discount rate um and humans due tend to discount hypothetically, which is not to million other 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. And 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 is disastrous, because you can't have economic growth without the willingness to differ gratification. But if you differ today and you get more in the next period, and then you differ again, you're constantly growing your life.

And I think my hunt ches is not well studied. Actually an economics they're quite interested in the discount rate in the hyperbolic discounting is quite 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 in the short.

But I don't sufficiently good integration between these two things and my senses that for for individuals and for societies, reducing time preference, in other words, seeing the long term and deferring gratification is absolutely central. And that there are people, and there maybe people listening, who can do IT in one part of life, but not in others. So you 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 the money, they've got IT all at the end theyll blow IT, and then they're blow up. Now this, I think, is quite pervasive.

So what I talked about, growth mindset, you I think it's great to be able to apply 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 if you I know you're interested in politics, have been listening to some of your podcast today. I think if you look at western civilization as a whole, you can explain the key dynamics through this prisoner .

how well .

um I I hope it's not controversial to say that the west was something of A A back water for many thousands of years um and was not the same to of innovation and creativity for much of the period that we sometimes called the dark ages um but that the west took off in the early modern period and became the dominant economic and cultural power of so sometimes, as you know, called the great divergence between the west and the rest now what is the explanation for this now 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, josef hendrick of harvard university, that explains this divergence through the ban on cousin marriage, that across the world you have tribal societies and it's great having a tribe. You know, you're working together with your king in order to do things. But you also can restrict the success of a society, because if you have lots of different tribes within a given geographic a, they're often fighting with each other and don't trust each other.

And the roman catholic bound on cousin marriage, which went up to six cousins, I think, by the tenth century, effectively forced people to marry outside the tribe, rather 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 mentioned in his book the weirdest people in the world, something that I think has been underplayed, which is over the course in the middle ages, partly because of what I i've already mentioned about the breakdown in the tribal structures, the interest rate in england drops dramatically between about one thousand and fifteen hundred. You can think of the interest rate as the society's time preference, if that makes sense. If you require twenty percent interest in order to save you, somebody he'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 a dropped from twenty thirty percent in england to five percent by fifteen hundred. And I think, and there are also some economists to agree with this, that western europe was becoming more patient purism.

The protestant work ethic. These came later, of course, the border, our values of prudent and self restraint, the industrial revolution, this is all indicative of western consciousness prioritising more than other parts of the world, the future above the present, allowing for cumuli tive 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 nineteen and seventy.

Well, I think western civilization started becoming less patient. There was a advert for a credit card called the access, one of the first two credit cards, which said access takes the waiting out of wanting, and they would spend. Now don't worry about the future.

Let IT look after itself. I think this came out in one thousand nine hundred and seventy two. But if you look at england between sixty, seventy and one thousand nine hundred and seventy, there was never a fiscal deficit outside a major whatever because they're saving for a rainy day during this period.

Since nineteen seventy, the british government has running deficits every year by five. They're trying to consume. And that means that the national dead is rising to now above one hundred percent of GDP.

America's may be 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 promising huge deficits, according to the congressional office, I think it's called budget responsibility triple ad. They say on the central estimate, seven point five trillion into the debt. Harris, three point five trillion, two sides of the same coin, because the public is not willing to hear that it's no good consuming now because we're putting problems onto future generations where we become starker and starker.

Give me is is so interesting. This happened when life expectancy has been going up as well from sixteen and seventy to one thousand nine hundred and seventy. Over that time. You have ever more reason yeah you one of the arguments for hypothetic discounting is that if you're in a high volatility environment, all well, good, maybe getting two hundred dollars in a years time, but you don't if you going to be here in a year s time, you know they get here right now and you know that at two hundred dollars.

that's exactly correct. So a lot of economics give you the time. Preference is not a great phrase we need to come out with remained.

Yes, exactly if you're got to be good ideas. I love, love to hear IT, but is partly to do with life expectancy. Certain sections of the american society have suffered a reduction life expectancy, but on average, as you say, 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 acid Price inflation making difficult for Younger people to go on the housing ladder.

That has been a disaster, I think, and in some ways, that was permitted by coming off the gulf standard complicate ory in itself. But I do wonder, Chris, if the self first 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 that mean? You're depriving them of the resilience that is necessary for long term growth and an interesting life. Great inflation and education starts taking off in the thousand nine hundred and seventy. It's lovely to get a great day in the here and now, but if first one is getting a great day, you can't read, you're devaluing the currency of all exams.

And I do wonder if part of the and i'm only gonna 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 um why you're not feeling great um but if everyone or or ever ha proportion have mental health issues for which they have a label, IT makes IT very difficult to provide the psychological support for the people of them so the most needed I could give you other examples, Chris. But what fascinate me is that many, if not all, of these start to change around nineteen seventy fiscal monetary policy, the self fisty movement, mental health issues. I have a whole list of these things, so i'm trying to drill down at the moment into seeing whether or not one can provide a convincing unifying explanation for this doesn't diverge too far from, but IT does a bit from hendricks analysis.

Very interesting. And have you got a potential over watching dynamic that .

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 all your creative people doing their movie franchise, 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 absorbed in the necessary costs in order for that to continue. And if you think about rome, um you know they devalued. They effectively had ninety seven, two hundred percent silver in the denies and they just cut they debates the currency and IT LED to inflation.

Um and given the history and argues about this complacency, the students that is set in and I think as I say, is a tender explanation, but the period of western dominance, I think, is now at a place where people have expectations. That i've run ahead of a material capacity to make them, which means we're effectively borrowing for the future to continue consuming now storing up the problems that we're now facing anymore. The crisis will get bigger as we continue to build the continue with a we continue with diagnosing everyone or a never growing population of people with until illness at higher grade inflation and salt. And then when .

you fold birthright decline on top of this um it's very unpopular. It's very i'm aware that I I keep banging this room and I have done for a long time, but this week is actually justified because the U K. I'm sure that you saw the census data just came out one point for ah is the birthrate for the U.

K. Which means that for every hundred british people today there will be thirty great grandchildren of thirty six, I think. So you're talking about a sixty percent extinction rate within one hundred years, which is wild.

And then on top of that, let's consider, and this always comes from like I often get. Slime throwed at me that this is like some trad cn. You need to go back to being an armah version of a person like 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 time in my hometown of needles bra a maybe a ago, but um you know that the most spitten sordust rough around the edges northern british town you going to find it's like the quintin sentier sort of northern tish town. Everybody believes that we should be raising them up. Where's that going to come from? What is probably gonna from spending? It's gonna come from economic freedom, independence, the opportunity to invest in the places that needed.

Tell me how we are going to overcome not only this deficit, not only this sort of cultural previous position that we have now, which I think you're right, which is this kind of like a sensitive hedonic entitled financial entitlements, uh, uh, uh, life mastery in many ways and uh, how we going to do that when you've got less than half of the workforce? I mean, A I and robotics are going to have to Carry an all a lot of that productivity burden. And maybe they can, which is great, but I don't know if we have enough room for the people.

So seems like a shame to get rid of them. Just one of the bit on that I thought about this and a lot may add something to your notional fledging hypothesis, which is I think that the scientific revolution and the advent of rationality and technology has not a lot to answer for here because IT IT made a lot of promises that I was able to deliver on in many ways that are objective and in almost no ways of the subjective. So um I can tell you what the weather is going to be like in venezuela five days time.

But I can't guarantee that i'm not going to get cancer. I can't guarantee that a car is not going to hit me as I step out into the street. And maybe, you know given uh, A I informed medicine and autonomous driving vehicles and all the rest of IT, maybe this is simply just A A slightly more attracted timing and were in some sort of messy middle like dark aged, a technological dark age at the moment and at some point will reach maybe within two, three decades.

We have reached sort of full technological maturity, will have mastered most of the problems that people have fear. 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.

You know if 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 fourteen hundred uga, slavia or something in your surf, what what you what kind of degree of entitlement 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 are seeing that we ve got these advances and sending ships or rocket, and we can catch them in a pair of twisted, and we can do all of this, I think IT sets humans up for an area that, as yet, we haven't been able to create mastery, an which is the subjective, the meaning, the day to day experience of of the human. So I think that there is a um tension in a contrast, like having one hand in hot water, one hand in cold water, and then putting them both into look more 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 you're not getting what you are promised from one that the other can deliver.

Yeah so I I I I think it's perps. I I would say in response to that, that middle bro, which I knew well, was there was a table tennis hot bet back in the day. The almost table tennis .

club run by I grew up playing squash around on ranson.

Alan rents that this is somebody that that people ought to know. He is the table tennis gou, and he's quite old now. But he ran that wonderful club. And he had, he had a sports equipment business he probably got to do.

I used to get my I used to get my cricket bat from alan ransoms just just round the corner from the crown pub in a middle spread.

See that was not a topic expected to talk about today. But elea i'm glad is going i'm glad is going but middle were um or anywhere else 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 that we're having IT. I think that right. I think that's a fair thing to say, but it's a consequence of many years of putting them now above the future at the level of society, and that becomes more and more cumulatively difficult.

So in the british general election, not this similar to the U. S. Election, no one talked about the dead.

Both parties made promises that were completely fictitious because they knew that if they said the dead 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, uh, was going out there. No one mentioned the debt.

No one that I spoke to did. And yet the unfed you mention, demographics cries. This means the unfunded liabilities are absolutely enormous because the dependency ratio of the older people 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 center of the political debate, no one's interested in IT, much more interested in cultural war trivia and things have really no historic significance what so ever. I think it's a distraction technique from the genuine chAllenges that we face. Now if somebody sent to me all but economic growth is overrated, you know, we can have a discussion about that.

But to the extent that most politicians the same, we want to have growth, we want to have prosperity, want to improve technology. At the absolute heart of this is time preference. We need to remember IT.

But I think it's said now on the other point 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 scientific, forgive me, of all human institutions and the question of how we engage with the world, how we enjoy the world of relationships, i'm not sure that's amenable.

It's not a place to not not it's not it's not the domain of science. But I think that you know, the new atheist movement, the increasing secular sation of the worst, the interrogation of a lot of the places that people used to get meaning from ah that has left people cut a draft bereft of the the the typical explanations that they would have relied on. Those may be 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 functioning ly false, functionally true but literally false and it's .

I I I I I think is is um clearly the case. You can have beliefs that are not imperative, true, that are consistent, the success and vice of us. You absolutely write about that.

And I, I, I have discuss on my backyard because I A Christian. My father was born in india, moved to pakistan after partisan and came to england to study law. And he was crap as a muslim in the sheer tradition.

But he, in his bed, sit in in southeast london in the early one nine hundred sixties, had had a vision of jesus Christ and converted. This is very unusual for a sheer islam to evAngelical board and Christianity. And he then, he then met my mom, who is a red headed wealth ale from a farming community in north wales at the church. He had moved to london, and she's from an event medical background. They met in church and then they fell in love.

And but by the way, both families were massively against the marriage because they said, this is a one hundred sixty, don't do IT you will 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 had a remarry until my father passed away three years ago, my mom was still alive to go well coming tomorrow um to london um but when I grow 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'd love church I one of those who went to church really enjoyed IT made great friends, but then decided that IT was imperative. Or what whats the word you use functionally? And anyway, untrue? Yes, I thought I was untrue.

And the problem is I couldn't bring myself to believe IT. Just on pragmatic ground. This is one of the difficulties with the beliefs yeah, they have some of you don't really get .

to choose whether or not you're going to be convinced by them. There's, you remember Angels and demons and Brown's book, and he made IT into a movie. This is really phenomenal sin. So are you and me, greg? A the canal ango is a speaking to the protagonist, trying to get in professor land and trying to get into the batik archives.

He's adamant that to venture or someone has left some secret note, and in the secret note is going to find out what the fox hanna, a camel gold, turns to professor and dinner he says, do believe professor and starts to give a politicians answer, saying, definitely a very peason an response actually and you and migrants guy celine says, I didn't ask you that, I ask whether or not you believe he turns to the cameras supposed to be to you in migrate. He turns direct to the cameras. Such an awesome line he says, belief is a gift that I am yet to be given.

Beautiful, it's gorgeous line. And I think you know, very difficile to convince yourself of of something in that regard. But when we get back to that sort of the tension between rationality, belief, functionally true, literally falls s literally true function false. One of the things that happened with the delegation 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. Who was persona, was narrative, who was architect es.

And story ax 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 interrogated, and they were replaced with something perhaps much more accurate, but significantly more steroid. And that is something which is maybe literally true, but functionally false.

What we've talked a lot of this about how tub get good at stuff, how to improve, how to make progress, how to have an interesting in empire journey in life. And I hope what we've talked about is has empirically merit and will help people. But if you set to meet 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 there's nothing I can do about IT. Um I Carry that with me all the time the sense of impending mortality.

I do have friends who have the same visual um a well solve IT some don't I know if it's an advantage or disadvantage um I mean the 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 I would perfectly happy knowledge more than a melon college. You know 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 can help with not dying. There's no courage, moral or otherwise.

So to the extent that you IT we're moving in to philosopher to rain, I would wholly acknowledge that I made a loss to understand where the meaning comes from and I certainly um even if I was to replace the narrative, the story, the architect of god with something else wouldn't change the fact that i'm gonna die um and that is highly limited and that my kids will grow without me and that once you diets forever the limitlessness of IT, I find quite extraordinary and I you know, maybe this might want to edit this sale IT amazes me tonic. That is a wonderful book called brian magi. The confessions of a where he talks about his midlife crisis and the quest for meaning is one of the other chapters that we're not more preoccupied with this in pending doom that we're all facing a very rapid time.

You're not 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 beyond my death bet wondering where it's gone and then that will be IT. Um I don't know where the meaning comes from the transcendental meaning that forgive me the transcendental meaning I think I do get meaning from hanging out with my friends and family doing things I enjoy. Living is a hypothesis, but he is a thing.

You live as a hypothesis. IT will end and and that's sit and that's very difficult for me. Props for you. I don't. 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 beaver ments of other people around them, you mentioned that you must still alive. You 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 in only child is you don't get much practice and understanding the role of death in life 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 and eight friends and stuff like that, I guess.

But yeah, it's there are still a lot of areas of human life so that the fundamental questions of why we hear 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 um the a simec, the anxiety he saw that we're all out of putting up against these are not necessarily the domains of science. And in a world where we appear to have masted so much and we still have these problems mentally that fail like a particularly vicious pathology or some sort of personal cost cus unfair. The best way to say that feels unfair.

What you hang on a second, you 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, and I still might die before my time. And I think that, yeah, what? Maybe future civilizations, future generations will look back on us as this sort. 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 the ability to to answer the question.

See i'm not sure I I relate to that because um yeah we know stuff ff about the weather and there's someone certainty about how i'll feel tomorrow. But no matter how much we learn, we're still gonna stuck with the vinita de of life that is seems to me is not something we can ever overcome. You know, even with freezing our brains in the second law of thermo dynamics tells us um that we are moving towards some kind of a heat death. In other words, IT will I think IT will inevitably be fine night if you don't believe. And I had this rentier .

I used to have as my twitter bio um locally reversing entropy. 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 yeah unstoppable, like eternal, omnipresent force you .

get that phrase is fantastic. And but when one looks, extends boundary, that local reversal yes IT soon enough .

yeah IT will .

eventually turn the other way you um the second of ma dynamics, I didn't learn any of this at school, but IT I think I insight described that as the key fundamental law of the universe was IT one of the other great quantum theory said that it's a one least likely to be overturned by new evidence that does need to be very deep, by the way. That's the other thing that I think one throws into the mix on civilization is that this local reversal of entropy does require the ability to abstract energy in order to, as IT will perform the reversal in other words, um if you think of a uh a cheater chasing a gazer, the cheater has to get more energy from the check, need to get more meat from the kill than I was expanded in the chase in order to survive. Otherwise the entry, roy, get them, they need that mean to as IT will keep .

the cells going into.

And yes, but you have to get a surplus. So the this is sometimes it's called the energy return on energy invested. You need to have that art. And actually civilization needs quite a big return.

The problem with oil and gas at the moment is that we're having to drill deeper and Frank harder as supposed to when used to get oil from near the surface. So the energy return, energy invested is declining. So the energy net, energy available civilization is going down, making IT more difficult to locally reverse entropy, which might explain why productivity has declined in the last few decades.

That may do mathesons, ladies and gentlemen, that I love you, what I feel like we can do this for hours and hours. I have so much more to talk you about so you might need to get you back on regularly so that we can keep on chewing the fat, trying to put the world to rights. I really appreciate you. I really appreciate your work.

Thank thank you, Chris, and I appreciate the invitation, and i've love the conversation.

Where should people go if they want to, to keep up to date with everything you do?

I have a website, Matthew side um I the dot code U K or dcr is like google my name. And then one of the things that I am keen for people to try is measured their growth mindset that something people can do practically. And I I take this told every six months, always gives me inside that can help.

Where can they do that on on the website?

That's on the website, let me check, is probably a method side docks code up.

U. K, yeah. Right for you. I appreciate you. Until next I make.