#865 - Matthew Syed - How High Performers Build An Unbreakable Mindset AI transcript and summary - episode of podcast Modern Wisdom

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Episode: #865 - Matthew Syed - How High Performers Build An Unbreakable Mindset

Author: Chris Williamson
Duration: 01:27:27

Episode Shownotes

Matthew Syed is a journalist, author and former champion table tennis player. To master anything, you have to put in the time. But what are the key mindset principles that all resilient, high performers have? 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 the actual key to mastery, Matthew's new theory on why the modern generations are struggling so much and much more... Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Get 15% off every Plunge, all month long, at https://plunge.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) Get up to $600 off the Pod 4 Ultra at https://eightsleep.com/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get a 25% discount on the best supplements from Momentous at https://livemomentous.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: https://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: https://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: https://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - Get In Touch: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Summary

In episode #865 of the Modern Wisdom podcast, Chris Williamson interviews Matthew Syed, who discusses the mindset principles underlying high performance and resilience. Syed emphasizes learning from failure, adopting a growth mindset, and navigating risks as crucial for personal and professional growth. He shares insights from his experiences in sports and public speaking, highlighting the significance of adaptability and the complex interplay of genetics and environment in achieving excellence. The conversation also explores societal trends like instant gratification and declining patience, examining their implications for individual fulfillment and collective progress.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (#865 - Matthew Syed - How High Performers Build An Unbreakable Mindset) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_00
Hello, friends. Welcome back to the show. My guest today is Matthew Seid. He's a journalist, author, and former champion table tennis player. To master anything, you have to put in the time.

00:00:11 Speaker_00
But what else are the key mindset principles that all resilient high performers have? And how can we build them in ourselves?

00:00:18 Speaker_00
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.

00:00:36 Speaker_00
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00:04:01 Speaker_01
How do you describe what you do? 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?

00:04:19 Speaker_01
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.

00:04:32 Speaker_01
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. I actually shouldn't call it ping pong.

00:04:43 Speaker_01
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.

00:05:00 Speaker_01
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.

00:05:11 Speaker_00
Is there a single thread going through that? Is it excellence, the psychological underpinnings of becoming good at doing a thing?

00:05:23 Speaker_01
Yeah, I think as I was coming to the end of my table tennis career, it's very monomaniacal. to be the best that you can be, you privilege this rather arbitrary game above everything else.

00:05:38 Speaker_01
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.

00:05:49 Speaker_01
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 a uniquely successful life or career i hate. trying to build myself up in those terms. But that, I think, is the thread.

00:06:06 Speaker_01
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

00:06:19 Speaker_01
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.

00:06:34 Speaker_00
Do you think that people outside of the sporting world could learn a lot by treating themselves more like athletes?

00:06:42 Speaker_01
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.

00:06:59 Speaker_01
But what i think i would say now is that businesses often are tackling more complex challenges and sports teams and the sport could probably learn more from business than the other way around in sport the rules don't tend to change very much.

00:07:17 Speaker_01
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.

00:07:29 Speaker_01
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.

00:07:43 Speaker_01
And therefore, some of the challenges that businesses face are, I think, more interesting and require greater agility than perhaps in sport.

00:07:57 Speaker_00
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?

00:08:11 Speaker_01
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 buildup, effectively, for just a few days of performance.

00:08:27 Speaker_01
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.

00:08:38 Speaker_01
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 replicated the style I was going to face.

00:08:52 Speaker_01
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.

00:09:07 Speaker_01
I was anxious, like you would expect, with all of this build-up, but just before I went out to play Peter Franz of Germany.

00:09:16 Speaker_01
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.

00:09:33 Speaker_01
And I was like, oh, great, fantastic. And then my coach, a 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.

00:09:51 Speaker_01
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.

00:10:05 Speaker_01
It was quite a full auditorium, and I saw some Union Jacks out there. And I went out to play, we did the warmup, and table tennis is very subtle.

00:10:16 Speaker_01
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 magnified effect on where the ball lands.

00:10:31 Speaker_01
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.

00:10:41 Speaker_01
But I was so focused 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.

00:10:56 Speaker_01
Back then, table tennis games were up to 21, and 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.

00:11:10 Speaker_01
I had the classic problem of overthinking one component of the performance and everything else falling apart.

00:11:19 Speaker_01
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.

00:11:38 Speaker_01
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, you know, the nerves of steel that is required. And I could have given up putting myself in pressurized situations.

00:11:50 Speaker_01
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'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.

00:12:08 Speaker_01
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.

00:12:25 Speaker_00
It's odd, you know, the last few years, the glorification, I think this pushback against victimhood culture, against the kind of fragility that everybody's, every generation is adamant that the future generation has.

00:12:38 Speaker_00
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.

00:12:50 Speaker_00
And I think that part of that has been trying to find an acceptable vector to empower future generations. What is it that we can do?

00:12:59 Speaker_00
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 booze mean nothing, I've seen what makes you cheer.

00:13:12 Speaker_00
you know, 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.

00:13:21 Speaker_00
Resilience and the ability to sort of come back from challenges is very important.

00:13:26 Speaker_00
But even with all of that, swimming in this milieu 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.

00:13:43 Speaker_01
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

00:13:56 Speaker_01
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.

00:14:11 Speaker_01
And it was great in theory, but it failed in practice.

00:14:16 Speaker_01
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, and the walls of their world can come crumbling down.

00:14:29 Speaker_01
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.

00:14:36 Speaker_01
And that requires giving them difficult challenges early in life so they learn how to fail they learn to as it works track the lessons that can come from failure and that way they gonna cope much better with the world where failure is baked in.

00:14:51 Speaker_01
Because if you think about science and technology.

00:14:54 Speaker_01
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 tested early to find out where it's not working as well as it could do and that enables you to improve.

00:15:10 Speaker_01
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.

00:15:22 Speaker_01
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.

00:15:36 Speaker_01
So I think there was a fundamental error in the 1970s of which echoes still exist in society. But I think it's worth saying, Chris, if I may, that I don't think we should fetishize failure in a certain sense.

00:15:51 Speaker_01
I think we need to be sophisticated about how we think about it. If I'm on a flight I flew back from Washington, D.C. on Sunday just before we're speaking today.

00:16:01 Speaker_01
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.

00:16:14 Speaker_01
What would we want a pilot to do if he or she had a hunch that trying something new in the cockpit would improve the safety of the aircraft, as you would doubtless say, you want to test in a simulator.

00:16:27 Speaker_01
That way you're getting all the benefits from failing without any downside risk for anyone if it's a sufficiently high-fidelity simulator.

00:16:36 Speaker_01
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.

00:16:49 Speaker_01
It's a 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.

00:17:06 Speaker_01
But what i found in my you know for a 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 but you're not learning anything you're trying to corroborate the hypothesis where is you test it in tough conditions.

00:17:24 Speaker_01
You learn so much more there's a good i know i'm going on here but eo wilson i think one of the great.

00:17:31 Speaker_01
polymathic intellects of the twentieth century was someone is interested in insect behavior but wrote beautifully about society and human behavior said you test a trivial theory.

00:17:43 Speaker_01
You get a trivial answer what we should be doing is testing ourselves our theories are prototypes in tough.

00:17:53 Speaker_01
Empowering environments 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.

00:18:07 Speaker_00
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.

00:18:22 Speaker_00
And a lot of the time you go away on holiday to a place and you have this phenomenal time. But I think that

00:18:30 Speaker_00
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.

00:18:40 Speaker_00
But they are the new shelf strategy being deployed in the best area with the best manager.

00:18:48 Speaker_00
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,

00:18:58 Speaker_00
and go and work, don't allow yourself to be inflated by, oh, there's a festival on, and this DJ that I love, and we're going to go and see this comedy show, or whatever. It's like, no, no, no, no.

00:19:09 Speaker_00
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.

00:19:23 Speaker_00
Going back to this whole self-esteem movement, I've spent an awful lot of time thinking about the real fundamental sort of underpinnings of confidence, self-esteem, self-belief.

00:19:33 Speaker_00
What have you learned from a scientific, psychological lens about the component parts of where self-esteem, self-belief genuinely come from?

00:19:47 Speaker_01
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.

00:20:06 Speaker_01
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.

00:20:17 Speaker_00
That sounds like a success to me, personally.

00:20:21 Speaker_01
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, ten-year-old, thought Rocky III was the best, so that was slightly disappointing.

00:20:30 Speaker_00
Oh, so you're concerned about his fledgling career as a film critic, perhaps? Or director, even. The ambitious father, I'm kidding.

00:20:38 Speaker_01
Come on, Master Syed. Do you remember Rocky 3? Rocky 3 was the one with Clubber Lang, Mr. T. You've watched it. I thought Rocky 1 was so great. It descended into parody briefly.

00:20:51 Speaker_01
Right, and I think Rocky 4 is particularly parodic, if that is a word, and clichéd. The first one was brilliant.

00:21:01 Speaker_00
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's very, very cool.

00:21:13 Speaker_00
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. Parody is the final stage.

00:21:30 Speaker_00
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.

00:21:40 Speaker_00
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

00:21:50 Speaker_00
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.

00:21:59 Speaker_00
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.

00:22:11 Speaker_00
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 clichés that you've created, and you use them.

00:22:24 Speaker_00
It's a meta... Nothing is about what the movie is. It's all a meta-commentary about the clichés of the movie. It's these sort of stories within stories and stories about stories.

00:22:34 Speaker_00
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...

00:22:45 Speaker_00
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.

00:23:01 Speaker_01
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

00:23:15 Speaker_01
The creative world, I guess you could apply it to musicians, couldn't you, who plow 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've become

00:23:34 Speaker_01
cliched and 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.

00:23:52 Speaker_01
They leverage diversity of thought 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 cliché.

00:24:05 Speaker_01
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 a somewhere to arrive as a destination.

00:24:21 Speaker_01
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.

00:24:36 Speaker_01
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 stay within one's comfort zone.

00:24:56 Speaker_01
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.

00:25:10 Speaker_01
And I think you see that in business where complacency and comfort. Sir Alex Ferguson, a famous football manager, described complacency as a virus.

00:25:21 Speaker_01
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.

00:25:31 Speaker_01
and that it ends why stay where one is particularly if one 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.

00:25:46 Speaker_00
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.

00:25:59 Speaker_00
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

00:26:14 Speaker_00
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?

00:26:30 Speaker_00
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.

00:26:48 Speaker_01
Yeah, that's definitely true. And perhaps a distinction we might make is between exploit and explore.

00:26:55 Speaker_01
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.

00:27:12 Speaker_01
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.

00:27:23 Speaker_01
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.

00:27:36 Speaker_01
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.

00:27:52 Speaker_01
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.

00:28:07 Speaker_01
And therefore, being sufficiently tough to say, hang on, we need to explore a bit more. The classic example, forgive me, of blockbuster video exploiting the hell out of

00:28:22 Speaker_01
of VHS videotapes when the world is changing, that's a recipe for non-survival in the marketplace.

00:28:30 Speaker_00
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.

00:28:45 Speaker_00
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.

00:28:53 Speaker_00
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 of risk, fear of novelty, fear of failure.

00:29:07 Speaker_01
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.

00:29:19 Speaker_01
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 realize I'm going to have to reinvent.

00:29:31 Speaker_01
So I did something that some of the older British viewers or listeners will know what I'm talking about. I phoned directory inquiries. And this is, uh, you Chris, do you know what that is by the way?

00:29:44 Speaker_00
Yeah, it was you. It was kind of like the yellow pages, but on the phone. Is that right? Exactly. Exactly. So probably there's lots of Americans listen to the show and they want to know, do they have a yellow pages over here? Maybe they do.

00:29:58 Speaker_00
Anyway, it was like a directory. It's like a local directory for businesses and stuff.

00:30:03 Speaker_01
Yeah. You'd, 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.

00:30:15 Speaker_01
So 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 write for the sports pages of the Times?

00:30:31 Speaker_01
It's Matthew Side here, I said, you know, British number one table tennis player. And he said, I've never heard of you, which was a slightly disappointing start, start conversation. But he said, look, this will tell you how long ago it was.

00:30:41 Speaker_01
He said, could you fax in some ideas? So I went and bought a fax machine, faxed in some ideas, um, and kept faxing articles until eventually one got published in May, 1999. Um, and that was thrilling because.

00:30:59 Speaker_01
I didn't think I'd ever be published in the Times newspaper. I went and bought about 10 copies from the local newsagents.

00:31:06 Speaker_00
Matthew Feeney Have you still got a copy lying around somewhere?

00:31:08 Speaker_01
Richard Dawkins I do. I do. And 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,

00:31:27 Speaker_01
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 state school. It's not like Eton or Harrow.

00:31:50 Speaker_01
Completely bog-standard comprehensive in suburban Reading, which is about 40 miles west of London. We didn't do any public speaking at school. There was no debating society.

00:32:01 Speaker_01
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.

00:32:13 Speaker_01
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. Um, and it wasn't great.

00:32:28 Speaker_01
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. Uh, if I'm ever invited again by a big company, I'll politely decline.

00:32:43 Speaker_01
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. It's sort of early Yahoo search.

00:32:55 Speaker_01
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.

00:33:07 Speaker_01
A room in a place called your house that was hired by toast mark ten or fifteen people trying to improve their communication and the social confidence and it's a wonderful thing you go if you're lucky enough to get on the program you give a talk.

00:33:21 Speaker_01
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.

00:33:27 Speaker_01
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.

00:33:40 Speaker_01
And then at the end of it, someone at Toastmasters always comes to the front and gives you feedback. 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.

00:33:54 Speaker_01
If you think of life as a hypothesis rather than as an argument that needs to be, how did you put it? I think that's a wonderful way of thinking about it.

00:34:04 Speaker_01
Then there's some spontaneous speaking, two-thirds of the way through, where 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.

00:34:18 Speaker_01
and extemporize on it immediately for 60 seconds. The first time you do it, it's terrifying.

00:34:24 Speaker_01
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.

00:34:36 Speaker_01
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.

00:34:51 Speaker_01
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.

00:34:59 Speaker_01
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.

00:35:07 Speaker_01
And that's why i think you said practical tips you can measure yourself on growth mindset and sometimes people are fixed there a bit worried about trying new things. about collaborating with people they don't know, about leaving their comfort zone.

00:35:22 Speaker_01
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 as a hypothesis. I love that formulation.

00:35:33 Speaker_00
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. And the first, the most important lesson that novice

00:35:47 Speaker_00
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 you can see somebody that isn't used to necessarily being in a ring and sort of when punches get thrown there's 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 Conor McGregor winning the

00:36:15 Speaker_00
lightweight title against Eddie Alvarez and Alvarez throws this big overhand sort of looping right like that and it his knuckles touch the end of Conor McGregor's nose and Conor watches this thing come in the hallway. Bink!

00:36:32 Speaker_00
Just watches it glance off the bottom of his nose and then just and 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.

00:36:46 Speaker_00
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. Just phenomenal, like beautiful, gorgeous story. But it makes me think about learning that you're not made of glass. Right?

00:36:58 Speaker_00
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 goes, yeah, rationally, that makes sense. And then the swell of fear inside of them.

00:37:11 Speaker_00
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.

00:37:23 Speaker_00
in Austin at a comedy club east of town. And it's very small, 40 people rooms, like it was 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.

00:37:40 Speaker_00
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.

00:37:49 Speaker_00
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?

00:38:00 Speaker_00
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.

00:38:12 Speaker_00
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.

00:38:21 Speaker_00
And usually you have that, especially trying to tell jokes in front of a group of people, you feel like, oh my god, you're sort of the inner British cringe meter, the toes curl inside of your trainers.

00:38:31 Speaker_00
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.

00:38:51 Speaker_01
It's so interesting because one of the other things, first of all, I love that story because I used to do a podcast.

00:39:01 Speaker_01
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.

00:39:10 Speaker_01
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.

00:39:26 Speaker_01
It did really, really well. And two things struck me about it. The one that I think was really interesting is Flintoff was worried he was a bit self-conscious before a microphone or in front of a camera. And that's very easy to be.

00:39:42 Speaker_01
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.

00:39:59 Speaker_01
I said, what are you up to next week? He said, I'm on a tour of provincial theaters 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?

00:40:13 Speaker_01
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.

00:40:27 Speaker_01
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.

00:40:38 Speaker_01
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 to Preston where he grew up.

00:40:55 Speaker_01
quite a rough part of a northern english town and what will you know about this right this wonderful series about young cricketers 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 other areas of your work which i think ties in with this quite nicely is this tension between deliberate practice.

00:41:19 Speaker_00
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.

00:41:33 Speaker_00
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, etc. ?

00:41:48 Speaker_01
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.

00:41:59 Speaker_01
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.

00:42:17 Speaker_01
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.

00:42:31 Speaker_01
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.

00:42:39 Speaker_01
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 players, Silverdale road was the best coach in Britain. Peter charters.

00:42:53 Speaker_01
And 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.

00:43:06 Speaker_01
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.

00:43:18 Speaker_01
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.

00:43:31 Speaker_01
That's highly genetically mediated. There's probably other areas. other areas where the genetic contribution may be a little bit less, but typically I would suggest it's a multifactorial phenomenon.

00:43:50 Speaker_01
where you really need to have the perfect storm of lots of different things happening at the same time.

00:43:55 Speaker_00
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 was sort of not too dissimilar to that. So for the people that don't know, there's a

00:44:09 Speaker_00
I know it's like 10 different numbers, 10 different forces, the relationship between the strong and weak nuclear force, electromagnetic, gravity, this sort of weird cosmological constant, like a very slight bit of expansion that's going on.

00:44:24 Speaker_00
And all of these things, if only they were out by some absurdly small fraction of a lot of different numbers, the meal that was created from the ingredients would not be a universe conducive to having matter.

00:44:38 Speaker_00
It would have clumped together because gravity was too strong, or it would have blasted apart because it was too weak, or heavier elements would have been able to form for whatever reason. And I always think about that.

00:44:50 Speaker_00
I've got Brian Cox, a fellow coming on the show soon.

00:44:53 Speaker_01
Brian Cox Right. 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.

00:45:02 Speaker_01
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,

00:45:16 Speaker_01
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,

00:45:33 Speaker_01
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.

00:45:49 Speaker_01
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.

00:45:58 Speaker_01
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.

00:46:06 Speaker_01
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

00:46:20 Speaker_01
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.

00:46:29 Speaker_01
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?

00:46:48 Speaker_01
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.

00:47:02 Speaker_01
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.

00:47:12 Speaker_00
Are you familiar with Isaiah Berlin's idea of the inner citadel? No.

00:47:19 Speaker_01
I'm a big admirer of Berlin and I've read the Hedgehog and the Fox and two concepts of liberty, but go on. The inner citadel.

00:47:29 Speaker_00
The inner 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.

00:47:42 Speaker_00
If you cannot obtain from the world that which 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.

00:47:54 Speaker_00
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. Nefrand explained it in a simpler way.

00:48:04 Speaker_00
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.

00:48:13 Speaker_00
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.

00:48:21 Speaker_01
Well, that's in psychology. It's often goes under. Thank you, by the way. It's really interesting. Berlin was such a while. When I was at Oxford, I was at a college called Balliol and I remember Berlin walking through the back quad.

00:48:34 Speaker_01
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.

00:48:55 Speaker_01
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.

00:49:07 Speaker_01
And this 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. And I think most parents will have seen this at one time or another with their kids.

00:49:21 Speaker_01
Suddenly the kid stops practicing and you're like, what, why are they not practicing? They've got the exam next week. They love the piano. And what's often happening is that they're so worried about the possibility they might fail in the exam.

00:49:36 Speaker_01
They want to create. proactively an excuse that they can point to in the event of failure.

00:49:43 Speaker_01
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.

00:49:50 Speaker_01
Some people, this is like three years of work for the exam, which is the only thing that determines your grade.

00:49:57 Speaker_01
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

00:50:07 Speaker_01
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.

00:50:17 Speaker_01
And I think that is not dissimilar to the retreat into the inner citadel. I think it has very similar underlying psychological dynamics.

00:50:26 Speaker_00
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, you've done your research, I was impressed.

00:50:43 Speaker_00
I was a cricketer, that was what I dedicated my teenage years to, and for the people that kind of know how the cricket season works, especially as a junior, you can play, you know, under 15s and 17s,

00:50:57 Speaker_00
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 uh there was a period toward the end of my teens where i did that with purposeful handicapping what was it called

00:51:17 Speaker_00
Self-handicapping. Self-handicapping. So, I would be called by the head of Durham Academy cricket on a Monday. He'd ring me every Monday. He'd ask how I get on because I wasn't placed by the Academy. I hadn't been placed in a team.

00:51:32 Speaker_00
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?

00:51:47 Speaker_00
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.

00:52:03 Speaker_00
Anyway,

00:52:06 Speaker_00
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, you know, seven or eight and the bowling offering that I had was very bespoke, 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, etc.

00:52:29 Speaker_00
And there was this odd degree of satisfaction that I would have when I ended up having a TFC 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.

00:52:45 Speaker_00
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.

00:52:54 Speaker_00
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 the captain.

00:53:02 Speaker_00
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.

00:53:08 Speaker_00
But then other ones on my, you know, my weaker, more fragile sort of mental weeks where I didn't have that same amount of confidence in myself, there would be this

00:53:20 Speaker_00
sort of bizarre melancholic satisfaction that I didn't get the opportunity to succeed, but at least I didn't have to have the threat of failure.

00:53:30 Speaker_01
Yeah, it's really interesting, Chris. I think it's worth saying that, I should have perhaps said this earlier, it is understandable

00:53:38 Speaker_01
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.

00:53:52 Speaker_01
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.

00:54:05 Speaker_01
The quote that I think you might like is J.K. Rowling. This is her 2008 Harvard commencement address, somebody I admire very much. It is impossible to live without failing at something.

00:54:17 Speaker_01
unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all, in which case you fail by default. One other thing I'll just throw in, Chris, if I may. Something I've become very interested in and might form my next book.

00:54:39 Speaker_01
Have you heard of the concept of time preference? No. If I asked you, would you rather have a hundred pounds or a hundred dollars now or two hundred in a year's time?

00:54:55 Speaker_00
Oh, like hyperbolic discounting in a way?

00:54:58 Speaker_01
Yeah, exactly. That's another way of describing the discount rate. 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.

00:55:14 Speaker_01
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.

00:55:25 Speaker_01
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.

00:55:33 Speaker_01
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.

00:55:52 Speaker_01
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

00:56:10 Speaker_01
My hunch is, it's not well studied, actually. In economics, they're quite interested in the discount rate and the hyperbolic discount. It's quite a literature.

00:56:17 Speaker_01
In psychology, they're interested in self-control and certain types of habit formation as a way of enabling you to do what's good in the long term and overcoming the temptation not to do it in the short.

00:56:29 Speaker_01
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.

00:56:43 Speaker_01
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.

00:56:57 Speaker_01
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.

00:57:10 Speaker_01
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 of the day. They'll blow it, and then they'll blow up. Now, this, I think, is quite pervasive.

00:57:25 Speaker_01
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.

00:57:34 Speaker_01
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.

00:57:46 Speaker_01
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?

00:58:02 Speaker_01
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.

00:58:24 Speaker_01
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?

00:58:37 Speaker_01
Now, historians have sought for a very long time to explain the rise of the West.

00:58:41 Speaker_01
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.

00:58:56 Speaker_01
You know, you're working together with your kin in order to do things, but it also can restrict

00:59:04 Speaker_01
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.

00:59:12 Speaker_01
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.

00:59:23 Speaker_01
So you dissolve the tribes and create a national identity, and it drives innovation and change. And I think this is a great argument.

00:59:31 Speaker_01
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.

00:59:49 Speaker_01
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.

01:00:04 Speaker_01
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. And I think

01:00:17 Speaker_01
and there are some economists who agree with this, that Western Europe was becoming more patient.

01:00:23 Speaker_01
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

01:00:38 Speaker_01
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.

01:00:50 Speaker_01
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.

01:01:04 Speaker_01
There was an advert for a credit card called Access, one of the first two credit cards, 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.

01:01:20 Speaker_01
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.

01:01:36 Speaker_01
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.

01:01:46 Speaker_01
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.

01:01:59 Speaker_01
According to the Congressional Office for 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.

01:02:16 Speaker_01
that it's no good consuming now because we're putting problems onto future generations where it will become starker and starker.

01:02:23 Speaker_00
I can give you many others. 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.

01:02:36 Speaker_00
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.

01:02:49 Speaker_00
You know that you're here right now, and you know that it's $100.

01:02:52 Speaker_01
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.

01:02:59 Speaker_00
It needs to be re-memed.

01:03:01 Speaker_01
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.

01:03:14 Speaker_01
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.

01:03:25 Speaker_01
But you're storing up lots of long-term problems with capital misallocation, asset price inflation, making it difficult for younger people to go on the housing ladder. That has been a disaster, I think.

01:03:37 Speaker_01
And in some ways, that was permitted by coming off the gold standard.

01:03:43 Speaker_01
complicated story itself but i do wonder chris if the self esteem movement comes from the same basic place that we want kids to succeed cuz it's so nice in the here and now give them lots of success experiences but what does it mean.

01:03:57 Speaker_01
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.

01:04:09 Speaker_01
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,

01:04:19 Speaker_01
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, why you're not feeling great.

01:04:36 Speaker_01
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.

01:04:48 Speaker_01
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.

01:05:06 Speaker_01
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. It doesn't diverge too far from, but it does a bit from Henrik's analysis.

01:05:20 Speaker_01
Very interesting.

01:05:21 Speaker_00
Have you got a potential overarching dynamic? I think the explanation is complacency.

01:05:30 Speaker_01
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 of all your creative people doing their movie franchises.

01:05:46 Speaker_01
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.

01:06:09 Speaker_01
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.

01:06:27 Speaker_01
And I think, as I say, it's a tentative 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.

01:06:48 Speaker_01
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.

01:07:04 Speaker_00
And then when you fold birth rate decline on top of this, it's very unpopular. I'm aware that I keep banging this drum, and I have done for a long time.

01:07:14 Speaker_00
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.

01:07:32 Speaker_00
So you're talking about a 60% extinction rate within a hundred years, which is wild. And then on top of that, let's consider, and this always comes from like, I often get

01:07:46 Speaker_00
slime thrown at me that this is like some trad con, you need to go back to being an Amish 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.

01:08:00 Speaker_00
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.

01:08:12 Speaker_00
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.

01:08:19 Speaker_00
It's going to come from economic freedom, independence, the opportunity to invest in the places that need it.

01:08:26 Speaker_00
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

01:08:39 Speaker_00
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?

01:08:52 Speaker_00
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.

01:09:04 Speaker_00
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

01:09:14 Speaker_00
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.

01:09:31 Speaker_00
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.

01:09:45 Speaker_00
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

01:10:04 Speaker_00
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,

01:10:19 Speaker_00
Why do I encounter challenges? These feel more malignant. You know, 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,

01:10:43 Speaker_00
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?

01:10:49 Speaker_00
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

01:11:02 Speaker_00
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.

01:11:11 Speaker_00
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.

01:11:30 Speaker_00
You're not getting what you were promised from one that the other can deliver.

01:11:37 Speaker_01
I think it's perhaps, I would say in response to that, 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.

01:11:49 Speaker_00
I know Alan Ransom. I grew up playing squash around Alan Ransom.

01:11:57 Speaker_01
Alan Ransom, now 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.

01:12:09 Speaker_00
He probably got you, did you get him? I used to get my cricket bats from Alan Ransom's place just around the corner from the Crown pub in Middlesbrough.

01:12:20 Speaker_01
See, that was not a topic I was expecting to talk about today. But Alan Ransom, I'm glad he's got in. I'm glad he's got in. But Middlesbrough, or anywhere else, if people think to themselves, you know, it does feel quite pinched at the moment.

01:12:34 Speaker_01
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.

01:12:50 Speaker_01
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.

01:13:06 Speaker_01
Uh, 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.

01:13:18 Speaker_01
Very curious about how the election was going out there. No one mentioned the debt. No one that I spoke to did. And yet the unfunded, you mentioned demographics, Chris, this means the unfunded liabilities are absolutely enormous.

01:13:34 Speaker_01
Because the dependency ratio of the older people who are not working to the younger people who are, is going in the wrong direction.

01:13:42 Speaker_01
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.

01:13:55 Speaker_01
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 can have a discussion about that.

01:14:05 Speaker_01
But to the extent that most politicians are saying we want to have growth, we want to have prosperity, we want to improve technology, at the absolute heart of this is time preference. We need to re-meme it, but I think it's there.

01:14:21 Speaker_01
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.

01:14:34 Speaker_01
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

01:14:53 Speaker_01
engage with the world, how we enjoy the world, our relationships. I'm not sure that's amenable in the same way.

01:15:02 Speaker_00
No, it's not. It's not the domain of science. But I think that, you know, 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,

01:15:16 Speaker_00
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.

01:15:32 Speaker_00
And I'm fascinated, I'm fascinated by this idea of things which are literally true, but functionally false, and functionally true, but literally false.

01:15:45 Speaker_01
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.

01:16:01 Speaker_01
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.

01:16:13 Speaker_01
But in his bedsit in Southeast London in the early 1960s, had a vision of Jesus Christ and converted, this is very unusual, from Shia Islam to evangelical born-again Christianity.

01:16:30 Speaker_01
And he then met my mum, who was a red-headed 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. they fell in love.

01:16:43 Speaker_01
And by the way, both families were massively against the marriage because they said, this is the 1960s. They said, don't do it. You'll actually have mixed race children. Don't do that to them.

01:16:54 Speaker_01
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.

01:17:09 Speaker_01
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.

01:17:21 Speaker_01
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. I thought it was untrue.

01:17:36 Speaker_01
And the problem is, I couldn't bring myself to believe it just on pragmatic grounds. This is one of the difficulties with beliefs.

01:17:43 Speaker_00
They have some kind of... You don't really get to choose whether or not you're going to be convinced by them. There's a... Do you remember Angels and Demons, Dan Brown's book? And he made it into a movie. And there's this really phenomenal scene.

01:18:01 Speaker_00
So, Ewan McGregor, the Camerlengo, is speaking to the protagonist. He's trying to get in, Professor Langdon's trying to get into the Vatican archives.

01:18:12 Speaker_00
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 Camerlengo turns to Professor Langdon and he says, do you believe, Professor?

01:18:27 Speaker_00
And he starts to give a politician's answer saying, the definition of belief is blah blah blah blah blah. It's a very Petersonian response actually. Ewan McGregor's guy, Camelengo, says, I didn't ask you that. I asked whether or not you believe.

01:18:43 Speaker_00
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. Oh!

01:18:55 Speaker_00
Beautiful, gorgeous line and I think that, you know, it's very difficult to convince yourself of something in that regard.

01:19:01 Speaker_00
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

01:19:15 Speaker_00
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.

01:19:31 Speaker_00
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.

01:19:43 Speaker_00
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.

01:19:55 Speaker_01
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.

01:20:14 Speaker_01
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.

01:20:23 Speaker_01
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.

01:20:37 Speaker_01
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.

01:20:58 Speaker_01
But there is a melancholy in my heart that I would perfectly happily acknowledge more than a melancholy, 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.

01:21:11 Speaker_01
There's no growth mindset that can help with not dying. There's no courage, moral or otherwise.

01:21:17 Speaker_01
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,

01:21:31 Speaker_01
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 gonna die, and that it's highly limited, and that my kids will grow up without me, and that once you die, it's forever.

01:21:47 Speaker_01
The limitlessness of it, I find quite extraordinary, and I, you know, maybe this, you might wanna edit this out, it amazes me to an extent. There's a wonderful book called Brian McGee, The Confessions of a Philosopher,

01:22:00 Speaker_01
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 impending doom that we're all facing in very rapid time.

01:22:13 Speaker_01
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.

01:22:23 Speaker_01
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.

01:22:36 Speaker_01
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.

01:22:49 Speaker_00
No, I haven't. I think one of the ways that people do is by looking at the bereavements of other people around them. You mentioned that your mom's still alive.

01:22:59 Speaker_00
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.

01:23:07 Speaker_00
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,

01:23:17 Speaker_00
That's it, unless, you know, by some awful, horrible quirk that my future wife ends up passing before I do. That's it.

01:23:23 Speaker_00
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.

01:23:40 Speaker_00
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.

01:23:49 Speaker_00
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.

01:24:06 Speaker_00
That's the best way to say it, it feels unfair. Hang on a second, you're telling me we can seed rain clouds in Dubai?

01:24:15 Speaker_00
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.

01:24:28 Speaker_00
And I think that, yeah, maybe future civilizations, future generations will look back on us as this sort of

01:24:37 Speaker_00
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.

01:24:48 Speaker_01
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.

01:25:09 Speaker_01
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.

01:25:25 Speaker_01
In other words, I think it will inevitably be finite if you don't believe in some kind of a spiritual.

01:25:33 Speaker_00
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?

01:25:50 Speaker_00
For this brief window, you get to locally reverse this unstoppable, like, eternal, omnipotent force, you get to reverse it.

01:26:15 Speaker_01
Yeah, you're going to 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.

01:26:33 Speaker_01
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.

01:26:41 Speaker_01
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.

01:26:56 Speaker_01
In other words, if you think of a cheetah chasing a gazelle, the cheetah needs to get more meat from the kill than it was expended in the chase in order to survive. Otherwise, the entropy will get them.

01:27:13 Speaker_01
They need that meat to, as it were, keep the cells going and to reverse it. 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, civilization needs quite a big return.

01:27:28 Speaker_01
The problem with oil and gas at the moment is that we're having to drill deeper. 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.

01:27:40 Speaker_01
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.

01:27:52 Speaker_00
It may do. Matthew Syed, ladies and gentlemen. Matthew, I love you. I feel like we could do this for hours and hours.

01:27:59 Speaker_00
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.

01:28:10 Speaker_01
Thank you, Chris, and I appreciate the invitation and I've loved the conversation.

01:28:14 Speaker_00
Where should people go if they want to keep up to date with everything you're doing?

01:28:18 Speaker_01
I have a website, MatthewSide, 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.

01:28:34 Speaker_01
Always gives me insights that can help. Where can they do that? At MatthewSide. That's on the website? That's on the website. Let me check. It's probably – it's MatthewSide.co.uk.

01:28:44 Speaker_00
All right. Matthew, I appreciate you. Until next time, mate. Yeah, offense