a radical political movement, of which there will always be a lot in the country,
has managed to do something that a radical movement is not supposed to be able to do in the U.S.,
which is they've managed to hijack institutions all across the country and hijack medical journals
and universities and, you know, the ACLU, you know, all the activist organizations and nonprofits
and many tech companies. And the way I view a liberal democracy is it is a bunch of these
institutions that were trial and error crafted over, you know, hundreds of years. And they all
rely on trust, public trust, and a certain kind of feeling of unity that actually is critical
to a liberal democracy's functioning. And what I see this thing as is as a parasite on that,
that whose goal is, and I'm not saying each, by the way, each individual in this is I don't think
they're bad people. I think that it's the ideology itself has the property of its goal is to tear
apart the pretty delicate workings of the liberal democracy and shred the critical lines of trust.
The following is a conversation with Tim Urban, his second time in the podcast.
He's the author and illustrator of the amazing blog called Wait But Why, and is the author of
a new book coming out tomorrow called What's Our Problem? A Self-Help Book for Societies.
We talk a lot about this book in this podcast, but you really do need to get it and experience
it for yourself. It is a fearless, insightful, hilarious, and I think important book in this
divisive time that we live in. The Kindle version, the audiobook, and the web version should be all
available on date of publication. I should also mention that my face might be a bit more beat up
than usual. I got hit in the chin pretty good since I've been getting back into training jiu-jitsu,
a sport I love very much, after recovering from an injury. So if you see marks on my face during
these intros or conversations, you know that my life is in a pretty good place. This is the
Lex Friedman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.
And now, dear friends, here's Tim Urban. You wrote an incredible book called What's Our Problem?
A Self-Help Book for Societies. In the beginning, you present this view of human history as a
thousand-page book where each page is 250 years. And it's a brilliant visualization because almost
nothing happens for most of it. So what blows your mind most about that visualization when you just
sit back and think about it? It's a boring book. So 950 pages, 95% of the book, hunter-gatherers
kind of doing their thing. I'm sure there's obviously some major cognitive advancements
along the way and language. And I'm sure the bow and arrow comes around at some point. So
tiny things, but it's like, oh, now we have 400 pages till the next thing. But then you get to
page 950 and things start moving. Recorded history starts at 976. Right, right. So basically the
bottom row is when anything interesting happens. There's a bunch of agriculture for a while
before we know anything about it. And then recorded history starts. Yeah, 25 pages of
actual recorded history. So when we think of prehistoric, we're talking about pages 1 through
975 of the book. And then history is page 976 to 1,000. If you were reading the book, it would be
like epilogue AD, you know, the last little 10 pages of the book. And we think of AD is super
long, right? 2000 years, the Roman empire 2000 years ago, like that's so long. Yeah. Human
history has been going on for over 2000 centuries. Like that is, it's just, it's hard to wrap your
head around. And this is, I mean, even that's just the end of a very long road. Like, you know,
the hundred thousand years before that, it's not like, you know, it's not like that was that
different. So it's just, there's been people like us that have emotions like us, that have physical
sensations like us for so, so long. And who, who are they all? And what was their life like? And
it's, you know, I think we have no idea what it was like to be them. The thing that's craziest
about the people of the far past is not just that they had different lives, they had different
fears, they had different dangers and different responsibilities, and they lived in tribes and
everything, but they didn't know anything. Like, we just take it for granted that we're born on
top of this tower of knowledge. And from the very beginning, we, we know that the earth is a ball
floating in space. And we know that we're going to die one day. And we know that, you know, we
evolved from animals and all the, those were all like incredible, you know, epiphanies quite
recently. And the people a long time ago, they just had no idea what was going on. And like,
I'm kind of jealous because I feel like it, you know, might've been scary to not know what's going
on, but it also, I feel like would be, you'd have a sense of awe and wonder all the time and, and
you don't know what's going to happen next. And it's, once you learn, you're kind of like, oh,
that's like, it's a little grim. But they probably had the same capacity for consciousness
to experience the world, to wander about the world, maybe to construct narratives about
the world and myths and so on. They just had less grounded, systematic facts to play with.
They still probably felt the narratives, the myths that constructed as intensely as we do.
Oh yeah. They also fell in love. They also had friends and they had falling outs with friends.
They didn't shower much though.
No, they did not smell nice. Maybe they did.
Maybe beauty's in the eye of the beholder. Maybe it's all like relative.
How many people in history have experienced a hot shower? Like almost none. That's like,
what more hot showers I've been to, a hundred years ago, like less. So like George Washington
never had a hot shower. It's like, it's just kind of weird. Like he, he, he took cold showers all
the time or like, and again, we just take this for granted, but that's like an unbelievable
life experience to have a rain, a controlled little booth where it rains hot water on your
head. And then you get out and it's not everywhere. It's like contained. That was like, you know,
they, a lot of people probably lived and died with never experiencing hot water. Maybe they,
they had a way to heat water over a fire, but like, then it's, I don't know. It's just like,
there's, there's so many things about our lives now that are completely just total anomaly.
It makes you wonder, like, what is the thing that would notice the most? I mean,
the sewage system, like it doesn't smell in cities. What does the sewer system do? I mean,
it gets rid of waste efficiently, et cetera. We don't have to confront it both with our,
with any of our senses and that's probably wasn't there. I mean, what else? Plus all the medical
stuff associated with, I mean, how about the disease? How about the cockroaches and the rats
and the, and the disease and the, the, the plagues and, you know, and, and then when they got, so
they, they caught more diseases, but then when they caught the disease, they also didn't have
treatment for it. So they often would die or they would just be in a huge amount of pain. They also
didn't know what the disease was. They didn't know about microbes. That was this new thing,
the idea that these tiny little animals that are causing these diseases. So what did they think,
you know, in the bubonic plague, you know, in the black death, the 1300s, people thought that it
was an act of God because, you know, God's angry at us. Cause why would, you know, why would you
not think that if, if you didn't know what it was? And so the crazy thing is that these were
the same primates. So I do know something about them. I know in some sense what it's like to be
them because I am a human as well. And to know that this particular primate, that I know what
it's like to be experienced such different things. It's and like, this isn't, our life is not the
life that this primate has experienced almost ever. So it's just a, it's just a bit strange.
I don't know. I have a sense that we would get acclimated very quickly. Like if we threw ourselves
back a few thousand years ago, it would be very uncomfortable at first, but the whole hot shower
thing, you'll get used to it after a year, you would not even like miss it. Cause there's a few,
trying to remember which book that talks about hiking that Appalachian trail,
but you kind of miss those hot showers. But I have a sense like after a few months,
after a few years. Well, you used to your scale recalibrates. Yeah. Yeah. I was saying the other
day to a friend that whatever you used to, you start to think that, Oh, that the people that
have more than me are more fortunate. Like it's just sounds incredible. I would, I would be so
happy, but you know, that's not true because you experienced what would happen is you would, you
would, you would get these new things or you would, you would get these new opportunities and then
you would get used to it. And then you would this, the hedonic treadmill, you'd come back to where
you are. And likewise though, cause you think, Oh my God, what if I had to, you know, have this
kind of job that I never would want, or I had this kind of marriage that I never would want. You know
what, if you did, you would adjust and you get used to it and you might not be that much less
happy than you are now. So on the other side of the, you being okay going back, you know, you,
we would survive if we had to go back. Um, you know, we'd have to learn some skills and, but,
but we would buck up and, you know, people have gone to war before that we're in the, you know,
shopkeepers a year before that they were in the trenches the next year. But on the other hand,
if you brought them here, you know, I always think it'd be so fun to just bring, forget the
hunter gatherers, bring a 1700s person here and tour them around, take them on an airplane and
show them your phone and all the things that can do show them the internet, show them that grocery
store, imagine taking them to a whole foods. Likewise, I think they would be completely
awestruck and on their knees, crying tears of joy. And then they'd get used to it. And they'd
be a complaint about like, they don't, you don't have the oranges in stock is like, you know,
and that's, you know, the grocery store is a tough one to get used to. Like when I,
when I first came to this country, the, uh, the abundance of bananas was the thing that struck
me the most or like fruits in general, but food in general, but bananas somehow struck me the most.
That you could just eat them as much as you want. That took a long time for me,
probably took several years to really get acclimated to that. Is that why didn't you
have bananas? Uh, the number of banana, fresh bananas. I don't, that that wasn't available
bread. Yes. Bananas. No. Yeah. It's like, we don't even know what to have. Like we don't even know
the proper levels of gratitude, you know, walking around the grocery store. I don't know to be like
the bread's nice, but the bananas are like, we're so lucky. I don't know. I'm like, oh,
I could have been the other way. I have no idea. Well, it's interesting then where we
point our gratitude in the West, in the United States, probably.
Do we point it away from materialist possessions towards, or do we just aspire that to do that
towards other human beings that we love? Because in the East and the Soviet Union, growing up
poor, it's having food is the gratitude. Having transportation is gratitude. Having warmth and
shelter is gratitude. And now, but see within that, the deep gratitude is for other human
beings. It's the penguins huddling together for warmth in the cold. I think it's a person by
person basis. I mean, I'm sure. Yes, of course, in the West, we will, on average, feel gratitude
towards different things or maybe a different level of gratitude. Maybe we feel less gratitude
than some countries that, um, you know, obviously I think the easiest that the person that's most
likely to feel gratitude is going to be someone who's on whose, whose life happens to be one
where they just move up, up, up throughout their life. A lot of people in the greatest generation,
you know, people who were born in the twenties or whatever. And in a lot of the boomers too,
this story is the greatest generation grew up dirt poor and they often ended up middle class. And the
boomers, some of them started off middle class and many of them ended up quite wealthy. And I feel
like that life trajectory is naturally going to foster gratitude, right? Because you're not going
to take for granted these things because you didn't have them. You know, I didn't go out of
the country really in my childhood very much. You know, like, you know, we traveled, but it was
to Virginia to see my grandparents or Wisconsin to see other relatives or, you know, maybe Florida
for going on to the beach. And then I started going out of the country like crazy in my twenties.
Cause I, I really, you know, became my favorite thing. And I feel like because I, if I had grown
up always doing that, it would have been another thing. I'm like, yeah, that's just something I do.
But I still, every time I go to a new country, I'm like, Oh my God, this is so cool. And in
another country, this thing I've only seen on the map, I'm like, I'm there now. And so I feel like
it's, it's a lot of times it's a product of what you didn't have and then you suddenly had.
But I still think it's case by case in that there is a, there's like a meter in, in everyone's head,
you know, uh, that I think on, on, on, uh, at a, at a 10, you are, you're experiencing just immense
gratitude, right? Which is a euphoric feeling. It's a great feeling. Um, and it's, um, it's,
it makes you happy. It's, it's to savor what you have to look down at the mountain of stuff you
have that you're standing on, right? To look, to look down at and say, Oh my God, I'm so lucky.
And I'm so grateful for this and this and this. And I, you know, obviously that's a happy exercise.
Now when you move the meter, a meter down to six or seven, maybe you think that sometimes, but you're,
you're not always thinking that, um, uh, cause you're sometimes looking up at this cloud of
things that you don't have and the things that they have, but you don't or the things you wished you
had, or you thought you were going to have or whatever. And that's the opposite direction to
look right. And, and that's the, either that's, that's envy, that's yearning. Um, or often it's,
it's, it's, if you think about your past, um, it's, it's grievance, right? And so then you go
into a one and you have someone who feels like a complete victim. They are just a victim of the
society of their, their, their, their siblings and their parents and their, their loved one.
Um, and they are, um, they're wallowing in everything that's happened wrong to me,
everything I should have that I don't, everything that has gone wrong for me.
And so that's a very unhealthy, mentally unhealthy place to be. Um, anyone can go there,
you know, there's an endless list of stuff you can, it can be aggrieved about and an endless
list of stuff you can have gratitude for. And so it's, it's, in some ways it's a choice and
it's a habit and maybe it's part of how we were raised or our natural demeanor, but it's such a
good ex. You are really good at this, by the way, your Twitter is like, go on. Well, like, uh, like
you're, you, you, you, you are constantly just saying, man, I'm lucky or like, I'm, I'm so
grateful for this. And that's, it's, it's a good thing to do because you're reminding yourself,
but you're also reminding other people to think that way. And it's like, we are lucky. Um, you
know, and, um, and so anyway, I think that scale can go from one to 10 and I think it's hard to be
a 10. I think you'd be very happy if you could be, but I think trying to be above a five and looking
down at the things you have more often than you are looking up at the things you don't or being,
you know, resentful about the things that people have wronged you. And well, the interesting thing,
I think was an open question, but I suspect that you can control that knob for, for the individual,
like you yourself can choose like the stoic philosophy. You could choose where you are
as a matter of habit, like you said, but you can also probably control that on a scale
of a family, of a tribe, of a, of a nation, of a society. I mean, a lot, you can describe a lot
of the things that happens in Nazi Germany and different other parts of history through a sort of
societal envy and resentment that builds up. Maybe certain narratives pick up and then they
infiltrate your mind and then now your knob goes to, from the gratitude for everything,
it goes to resentment and envy and all this. Germany between the two world wars, you know,
like, like you said, the Soviet kind of mentality. So yeah, and then when you're soaking in a culture,
so there's this kind of two factors, right? It's, it's, it's what's going on in your own head and
then what's surrounding you and what's surrounding you kind of has concentric circles. There's your
immediate group of people because that group of people, if they're a certain way, they feel a lot
of gratitude and they talk about it a lot. That kind of insulates you from the broader culture
because you know, the, the, the, the people are gonna have the most impact on you are the ones
closest, but often they're all the, all the concentric circles are, are saying the same
thing that people around you or are they feeling the same way that the broader community, which
is feeling the same way as the broader country. And, you know, I think this is why I think
American patriotism, you know, nationalism, you know, can be tribal, can be very, not,
not a good thing. Patriotism I think is, is a great thing because really what is patriotism?
I mean, it's, if you love your country, you should love your fellow countrymen, you know,
Patriot, you know, that's a Reagan quote. It's like, patriotism is like, I think a feeling of
like, um, unity, um, and, but it also comes along with an implicit kind of concept of gratitude
because it's like, we are so lucky to live in, you know, people, you know, think it's chauvinist to
say we live in the best country in the world. Right. And you know, yes, when Americans say
that no one likes it. Right. But actually it's not a bad thing to think. It's a nice thing to
think it thinks it's a way of saying I'm so grateful for all the great things this country
gives to me in this country has done. And, and I think, you know, if you heard the Phillip, you
know, a Filipino person say, you know what, the Philippines is the best country in the world. No
one in America would say that's chauvinist. They'd say awesome. Right. Because when they're coming
from someone, you know, who's not American, it sounds totally fine. Um, but I think, I think,
you know, national pride is actually good. Now again, that can quickly translate into xenophobia
nationalism. And so, you know, you have to make sure it doesn't go off that cliff, but.
Yeah. There's good ways to formulate that. Like you talk about, we'll talk about like
high rung progressivism, high rung conservatism. Those are two different ways of, of, uh, embodying
patriotism. So you can talk about maybe loving the tradition that this country stands for,
or you can talk about loving the people, the, uh, that ultimately push progress. And those are
from an intellectual perspective, a good way to represent a patriotism. We've got to zoom out
because this, this graphic is Epic. A lot of images in your book are just Epic on their own
is brilliantly done, but this one has a famous people for each of the cards,
like the best of, uh, for you. And by the way, good for them to be the person that,
that it's not that I could have chosen lots of people for each card, but I think most people
would agree, you know, that's a pretty fair choice for each, each page and to good for them to be,
you know, you did, you crushed it. If you can be the person for your whole 250 year page. So,
well, I noticed he put Gandhi didn't put Hitler. I mean, there's a lot of people are going to
argue with you about that particular last page. True. Yes, you're right. I could have,
I could have put an, I actually, I was thinking about Darwin there too. Um, yeah, exactly. You
really could have put anyone. You think about putting yourself for a second? Yeah, I should
have, I should have, that would have been awesome. Uh, I'm sure that would have endeared the readers
to me from right from the beginning of the first page of the book. A little bit of a messianic
complex going on, but yeah, so the list of people just, you know, so these are 250 year chunks,
the last one being from 1770 to 2020. And so it goes, Gandhi, Shakespeare, Joan of Arc,
Genghis Khan, Charlemagne, Muhammad, Constantine, Jesus, Cleopatra, Aristotle, Buddha.
That's so interesting to think about this very recent human history. That's 11 pages. So it would
be 2750, almost 3000 years. Just that there's these figures that stand out and that define
the course of human history. It's like the crazy, the craziest thing to me is that like,
Buddha was a dude. He was a guy with like arms and legs and fingernails that he may be bit and like,
he liked certain foods and maybe he got like, uh, you know, he had like digestive issues sometimes
and like he got cuts and they stung and like he was a guy. Um, and he had hopes and dreams and
he probably had a big ego for a while before he, I guess Buddha totally overcame that one. But like,
and it's like, who knows, you know, you know what the myth, the mythical figure of Buddha,
who knows how similar he was, but the fact is, Jesus, like this was a guy like to me,
it's, he's a primate. Yeah. What a impact. He was a cell first and then a baby. Yeah.
And it was a fetus at some point, a dumb baby trying to learn how to walk. Yeah. Like having
tantrum. Yeah. Um, because he's frustrated because he's in the terrible twos. Jesus was
in the terrible twos. Never had a tantrum. Let's be honest. The myth, the mother was like, this,
this baby's great. Like, wow. Let's figure something out. It just, but I mean, this,
I mean, listen, hearing, learning about Genghis Khan, it's incredible to me because it's just
like, this was some, um, Mongolian, you know, herder guy who was taken as a slave and he was
like dirt poor, you know, catching rats is a, you know, young teen with, you know, to feed him and
his mom and his, I think his brother. Um, and it's just like the, the, the odds on when he was born,
he was just one of, you know, probably tens of thousands of random teen boys living in Mongolia
in the 1200s. The odds of that person, any one of them being a household name today that we're
talking about, it's just crazy. Like what had to happen. Um, and it's for that guy to, for that poor
dirt, poor herder to take over the world. I don't know. So history just like continually blows my
mind. Like, you know, and he's the reason you and I are related probably. Yeah, no. I mean,
we're, it's, it's also, that's the other thing is that some of these dudes by becoming King,
by being, having a better army at the right time, you know, William the conqueror or whatever has,
is in the right place at the right time with the right army, you know, and there's a weakness at
the right moment and he comes over and he exploits it and ends up probably having, you know, I don't
know, thousand children. And those children are high up people who might be have a ton of,
this species is different now because of him. Like if that is, forget England's different or,
you know, European borders look different. Like, like we are like, we look different
because of a small handful of people. You know, when I, sometimes I think I'm like, oh,
you know, this part of the world, I can recognize someone's Greek, you know, someone's Persian,
someone's wherever, because, you know, they kind of have certain facial features. And I'm like,
it may have happened. I mean, obviously it's, that's a population, but it may be that like
someone 600 years ago that looked like that really spread their seed. And that's why the ethnicity
looks kind of like that now. So anyway. Yeah. Yeah. Do you think individuals like that can turn
the direction of history or is that an illusion that narrative we tell ourselves?
Well, it's both. I mean, so I said that William the conqueror, right. Or Hitler, right.
It's not that Hitler was born and destined to be great at all. Right. I think in a lot of cases,
he's some frustrated artist with a temper who's turning over the table in his studio and hitting
his wife and being kind of a dick and a total nobody. Right. I think almost all the times you
could have put Hitler baby on earth. He's a, he's a rando. Right. You know, and maybe he's a, you
know, maybe sometimes he becomes a, you know, some kind of, you know, he uses the speaking ability
because that ability was going to be there either way, but maybe he uses it for something else.
But, but that said, I don't also do, I think, but it's not that World War II was going to happen
either way. Right. So it's, it's both. It's that like these circumstances were one way and this
person came along at the right time and those two made a match made in this case, hell.
But it makes you wonder, yes, it's a match in hell, but are there other people that could
have taken this place or do these people that stand out, they're the rare spark of that genius,
whether it take us towards evil, towards good, whether those figures singularly define the
trajectory of humanity. You know, what defines the trajectory of humanity in the 21st century,
for example, might be the influence of AI, might be the influence of nuclear war,
negative or positive, not in the case of nuclear war, but the bioengineering, nanotech,
virology, what else is there? Maybe the structure of governments and so on.
Maybe the structure of universities. I don't know. There could be singular figures that stand up
and lead the way for human, but I wonder if the society is the thing that manifests that person
or that person really does have a huge impact. I think it's probably a spectrum where there are
some cases when a circumstance was such that something like what happened was going to happen.
If you pluck that person from the earth, I don't know whether the Mongols is a good example or not,
but maybe it could be that if you plucked Genghis Khan as a baby, there was, because of the specific
way Chinese civilization was at that time and the specific climate that was causing a certain kind
of pressure in the Mongols and the way they still had their great archers and they had their horses
and they had a lot of the same advantages, so maybe it was waiting to happen. It was going to
happen either way and it might not have happened to the extent or whatever, so maybe. Or you could
go the full other direction and say, actually, this was probably not going to happen. I think
World War II is an example. I think World War II really was the work. Of course, it relied on all
these other circumstances. You had to have the resentment in Germany. You had to have the Great
Depression, but I think if you take Hitler out, I'm pretty sure World War I, World War II doesn't
happen. Well, then it seems easier to answer these questions when you look at history, even recent
history, but let's look at now. I'm sure we'll talk about social media. Who are the key players
in social media? Mark Zuckerberg. What's the name of the MySpace guy? Tom? Tom. It's just Tom, yeah.
There's a meme going around where MySpace is the perfect social media because
no algorithmic involvement. Everybody's happy and positive. Also, Tom did it right.
At the time, you were like, oh man, Tom only made like a few million dollars.
Sucks to not be Zuck. Tom might be living a nice life right now where he doesn't have this
nightmare that these other people have. He's always smiling in his profile pic.
There's Larry Page with Google that's intermingled into that whole thing, into the development of the
internet. Jack Dorsey, now Elon. Who else? I mean, there's people playing with the evolution of
social media and to me, that seems to be connected to the development of AI and it seems like those
singular figures will define the direction of AI development and social media development,
with social media seeming to have such a huge impact on our collective intelligence.
It does feel in one way like individuals have an especially big impact right now in that a small
number of people are pulling some big levers. There can be a little meeting of three people
at Facebook and they come out of that meeting and make a decision that totally changes the world.
On the other hand, you see a lot of conformity. They all pulled the plug on Trump the same day.
So that suggests that there's some bigger force that is also kind of driving them in which case
it's less about the individuals. I think this is what is leadership. I mean, to me, leadership
is the ability to move things in a direction that the cultural forces are not already taking things.
A lot of times people seem like a leader because they're just kind of hopping on the cultural wave
and they happen to be the person who gets to the top of it. Now it seems like they're, but actually
the wave was already going. Real leadership is when someone actually changes the wave,
changes the shape of the wave. I think Elon with SpaceX and with Tesla genuinely shaped a wave.
Maybe you could say that EVs were actually, they were going to happen anyway, but there's not much
evidence about at least happening when it did. If we end up on Mars, you can go to the moon
you can say that Elon was a genuine leader there. And so there are examples now like
Zuckerberg definitely has done a lot of leadership along the way. He's also potentially kind of like
caught in a storm that is happening and he's one of the figures in it. So I don't know.
And it's possible that he is a big shaper if the metaverse becomes a reality. If in 30 years
we're all living in a virtual world. To many people it seems ridiculous now that that was
a poor investment. Well, he talked about getting 10, I think it was something like a billion people
with a VR headset in their pocket in by, I think it was 10 years from now back in 2015. So we're
behind that. But when he was talking about that, and honestly, this is something I've been wrong
about because I went to one of the Facebook conferences and tried out all the new Oculus
stuff. And I was pretty early talking to some of the major players there because I was going to
write a big post about it that then got swallowed by this book. But I would have been wrong in the
post because what I would have said was that this thing is, when I tried it, I was like,
this is, some of them suck, some of them make you nauseous and they're just not that,
the headsets were big. But I was like, the times when this is good, it is, I have this feeling,
I haven't had, it reminds me of the feeling I had when I first was five and I went to a friend's
house and he had Nintendo and he gave me the controller and I was looking at the screen and I
pressed the button and Mario jumped. And I said, I said, I can make the something on the screen
move. And the same feeling I had the first time someone showed me how to send an email,
it was like really early. And he's like, you can send this. And I was like, it goes,
I can press enter on my computer and something happens on your computer. Those were obviously,
you know, when you have that feeling, it often means you're, you're witnessing a paradigm shift.
And I thought this is one of those things. And I still kind of think it is, but it's kind of weird
that it hasn't, you know, like where's the VR revolution? Like, yeah, I'm surprised because
I'm with you. My first and still instinct is this feels like it changes everything. VR feels like
it changes everything, but it's not changing anything. Like a dumb part of my brain is
genuinely convinced that that's real. And then the smart part knows it's not, but that's why the dumb
part was like, we're not walking off that cliff. The smart part's like, you're on your rug. It's
fine. The dumb part of my brain is like, I'm not walking off the cliff. So it's like, it's crazy.
I feel like it's waiting for like that revolutionary person who comes in and says,
I'm going to create a headset. Like honestly, Steve jobs, iPhone, honestly, a little bit of
a Carmack type guy, which is why it was really interesting for him to be involved with Facebook
is basically how do we create a simple dumb thing? That's 100 bucks, but actually creates that
experience. And then there's going to be some viral killer app on it. And that's going to be
the gateway into a thing that's going to change everything. I mean, I don't know what exactly was
the thing that changed everything with a personal computer. Does that understood why that maybe
graph fixed? What was the use case? I mean, exactly. Wasn't, wasn't the, the 84 Macintosh,
like a moment when it was like, this is actually something that normal people can and want to use.
Cause it was less than $5,000. I think it was. And I just think it had some like Steve jobs,
user-friendliness already to it that other ones hadn't had. I think windows 95 was a really big
deal yet. They, I remember like, cause I I'm old enough to remember the MS-DOS when I was like,
kind of remember the command. And then suddenly this concept of like a window you drag something
into, or you double click an icon, which now seems like so obvious to us was like revolutionary
because it made it, it made it intuitive. So, you know, I don't know. Yeah. Windows 95 was good.
It was crazy. Yeah. I forget what the big leaps was. Cause I was Windows 2000. It sucked. And then
windows XP was good. I moved to Mac around 2004. So I stopped. You sold your soul to the devil.
I see. Well, us, the people still use, uh, windows and Android, uh, the device and the operating
system of the people, not you elitist folk with your books and your, uh, what else and success.
Okay. Uh, you write more technology means better good times, but it also means bad or bad times.
And the scary thing is if the good and bad keep exponentially growing, it doesn't matter how
great the good times become. If the bag gets to a certain level of bad, it's all over for us. Can
you elaborate on this? Why, why is there, why does the bad have a, that property that if it's
all exponentially getting more powerful than the bad is going to win in the end was, is my
misinterpreting that? No. So the first thing is I noticed a trend, which was like the centuries,
the good is getting better. Every century, like the 20th century was the best century yet in
terms of prosperity, in terms of GDP per capita, in terms of life expectancy, in terms of poverty
and disease, every metric that matters. The 20th century was incredible. It also had the biggest
wars in history, the biggest genocide in history, the biggest existential threat yet with nuclear
weapons, right? You know, the depression was, you know, probably as big and economic. So it's this
interesting thing where the stakes are getting higher in both directions. And so the question is
like, if you get enough good, does that protect you against the bad, right? The, the, the, the,
the dream, and I do think this is possible too, is the good gets so good. You know, have you ever
read the culture series, the Iain Banks books? Not yet, but I get criticized on a daily basis by
some of the mutual folks we know for not having done so. And I feel like a lesser man for it. Yes,
I need to change. So that, that, that, that's how I got onto it. And I read six of the 10 books
and they're great. But the thing I love about them is like, it just paints one of these
futuristic societies where the good has, has gotten so good that the bad is not no longer
even an issue. Like basically, and the way that this, this works is the AI, you know, the AIs,
are benevolent and they control everything. And so like, there's one random anecdote where they're
like, you know, what happens if you murder someone in, cause you're still, you know,
there's still people with rage and jealousy or whatever. So, so someone murdered someone,
first of all, that person's backed up. So it's like, they helped to get a new body and it's,
it's annoying, but it's like, it's not death. And secondly, that person, what are they going
to do? Put them in jail? No, no, no. They're just going to send a slap drone around, which is this
little like tiny, you know, random drone that just will float around next to them forever. And by the
way, kind of be their servant. Like it's kind of fun to have a slap drone, but just making sure
that they never do anything. And it's like, I was like, oh man, it could just be, everyone could be
so safe and everything could be so like, you know, you want a house, you know, the AIs will build
you a house. There's endless space, there's endless resources. So I do think that that could be part
of our future. That's part of what excites me is like, there is, look today would seem like a
utopia to Thomas Jefferson, right? Thomas Jefferson's world would seem like a utopia to a caveman.
There is a future, and by the way, these are happening faster, these jumps, right? So the
thing that would seem like a utopia to us, we could experience in our own lifetimes, right? Like
it's, especially if, you know, life extension, you know, combines with exponential progress.
I want to get there. And I think in that part of what makes it utopia is you don't have to be as
scared of the worst bad guy in the world trying to do the worst damage because we have protection.
But that said, I'm not sure how that happens. Like, it's either easier said than done. Nick
Bostrom uses the example of if nuclear weapons could be manufactured by microwaving sand,
for example, we probably be in the Stone Age right now, because.001% of people would love
to destroy all of humanity, right? Some 16-year-old with huge mental health problems who right now
goes and shoots up a school would say, oh, even better, I'm going to blow up a city. And now
suddenly there's copycats, right? And so that's like, as our technology grows, it's going to be
easier for the worst bad guys to do tremendous damage. And it's easier to destroy than to build.
So it takes a tiny, tiny number of these people with enough power to do bad. So that to me,
I'm like the stakes are going up because what we have to lose is this incredible utopia, but also
like dystopia is real. It happens. The Romans ended up in a dystopia. They've probably earlier
thought that was never possible. Like we should not get cocky. And so to me, that trend is the
exponential tech is a double-edged sword. It's so exciting. I'm happy to be alive now overall,
because I'm an optimist and I find it exciting, but it's really scary. And the dumbest thing we
can do is not be scared. Dumbest thing we can do is get cocky and think, well, my life is always,
the last couple of generations, everything's been fine. Stop that. What's your gut? What
percentage of trajectories take us towards the, as you put, unimaginably good future versus
unimaginably bad future? As an optimist. It's really hard to know. I mean,
all like, you know, one of the things we can do is look at history. And on one hand, there's a lot
of stories. I actually listening to a great podcast right now called the Fall of Civilizations.
And it's literally every episode is like, you know, a little like two hour deep dive into
some civilization. Some are really famous, like the Roman Empire, some are more obscure,
like the Norse in Greenland. But, but it's, each one is so interesting. But what's,
it's, I mean, there's a lot of civilizations that had their peak. There's always the peak, right?
When they're thriving and they're at their max size and, and, and they have their waterways
and they have their, it's civilized and it's representative and it's fair and whatever. Not,
not always, but it's, it's the peak is a great, you know, if I could go back in time, you know,
it's not that you don't, you know, the farther you go back, the worse it gets. No, no, no. You
want to go back to a civilization during, I would go to the Roman Empire in the year 100. Sounds
great, right? You don't want to go to the Roman Empire in the year 400. We might be in the peak
right now, here, whatever this empire is. Honestly, I think about like the eighties,
you know, the seventies, the eighties. Oh, here we go. The music is so much better. No,
the eighties culture is so annoying. It's just like, I'm, I'm, I'm, when I, when I listen to
these things, I'm thinking, you know, the eighties, the nineties, America, the nineties
was popular. People forget that now. Like Clinton was, I was a superstar around the world. Michael
Jordan was exported internationally. Then basketball was everywhere. Suddenly you had like
music, the sports, whatever. It was a little, probably like the fifties, you know, you coming
out of the war, the world war and the depression before it, it was like this kind of like, everyone
was in a good mood kind of time. You know, it's like a finish a big project and it's Saturday. It
was like, I feel like the fifties was kind of like, everyone was having it, you know, the,
the, um, twenties, I feel like everyone was in good mood randomly. Um, then the thirties,
everyone was in a bad mood. Um, but the nineties, I think we'll look back on it as a time when
everyone was in a good mood and it was like, you know, again, of course at the time it doesn't feel
that way necessarily, but I look at that, I'm like, maybe that was kind of America's peak.
And like, no, maybe not, but like, it hasn't been popular since really worldwide. Um, it's,
it's gone in and out depending on the country, but like, it hasn't reached that level of like,
America's awesome around the world. And the political, you know, situations gotten,
you know, really ugly and, you know, maybe it's social media, maybe who knows, but I, I,
I wonder if it'll ever be as simple and positive as it was then. Like maybe we are in the, in the,
you know, it feels a little like maybe we're in the beginning of the downfall or not. Cause,
cause these things don't just, it's not a perfect smooth Hill. It goes up and down and up and down.
So maybe we're, there's another big upcoming and it's unclear whether public opinion,
which is kind of what you're talking to is, uh, correlated strongly with influence.
Cause you could say that even though America has been on a decline in terms of public opinion,
the exporting of technology that America has still with all the talk of China has still been leading,
leading the way in terms of AI, in terms of social media, in terms of just basically any software
related product, chips, chips. So hardware and software, I mean, America leads the way.
You could argue that Google and Microsoft and Facebook are no longer American companies.
They're international companies, but they really are still at the, you know,
headquartered in Silicon Valley, broadly speaking. So, uh, and Tesla, of course, and just all of its,
all the technological innovation still seems to be happening in the United States,
although culturally and politically it, this is not, well, maybe that could shift at any moment
when all the technological development can actually be create some positive impact in
the world that could shift it with the right leadership and so on with the right messaging.
Yeah. I, I think, um, I, I, I don't feel confident at all about whether, no, no,
I don't mean that. I don't mean, I don't feel confident in my opinion that we may be on the
downswing or that we may be, I truly don't know. It's like, I think the people, these are really
big macro stories that are really hard to see when you're inside of them. It's like, it's like
being on a, on a beach and running around, you know, a few miles this way and trying to suss
out the shape of the coastline. Like it's just really hard to see the big picture. You know,
you get caught up in the, the, the, the micro stories, the little tiny ups and downs that
are part of some bigger trend. And, and also giant paradigm shifts happen quickly nowadays.
The internet, you know, came out of nowhere and suddenly was like, you know, changed everything.
So there could be a changed everything thing on the way. It seems like there's a few candidates
for it and like, but, but I mean, it feels like the stakes are just high, higher than it even
was for the Romans, higher than it was for, because, um, that we, we're more powerful as
a species. We have God-like powers with technology that other civilizations at their peak didn't have.
And so, uh, I wonder if those high stakes and powers will feel laughable to people that live
humans, aliens, cyborgs, whatever lives on a year from now that maybe, maybe our little,
like this feeling of political and technological turmoil is, is nothing.
Well, that's the big question you could eat. So right now, you know, you know, the 1890s was like
a super politically contentious decade in the U S it was like immense tribalism. Um, and the
newspapers were all like lying and telling, you know, you know, there was a lot of like,
what we would associate with today's media, the worst of it. Um, and it was over gold or silver
being this, I don't know, it was very, it's something that I don't understand, but the
point is it was a little bit of a blip, right? It happened. It felt, it must've felt like the
end of days at the time. And then now we look, and most people don't even know about that.
Versus, you know, again, the Roman empire actually collapsed. And so the question is just like,
is yeah, you know, will in 50 years, will this be like, or like McCarthyism? Oh, they had like,
uh, Oh, that was like a crazy few years in America. And then it was fine. Um,
or is this the beginning of something really big? And then that's what.
Well, I wonder if we can predict the, what the big thing is at the beginning,
it feels like we're not, we're just here along for the ride and at the local level
and at every level, I try to do our best. Well, how do we do our best? What's the,
that's the one thing I know for sure is that we need to have our wits about us and do our best
and the way that we can do that, you know, we have to be as wise as possible, right? To proceed
forward. And wisdom is an emergent property of discourse. So you're a proponent of wisdom versus
stupidity because you can make an, uh, uh, I can steal man, the case for stupidity. Do it.
I probably can't, but there, there's some, I think wisdom and you talk about this can come with a
false confidence, arrogance. I mean, you talk about this in the book. That's too easy. That's
not wisdom then if you're being arrogant, you're being unwise, unwise. Yeah. You know, I think,
I think wisdom is doing what people a hundred years from now with the hindsight that we don't
have would do if they could come back in time and they knew everything. It's like, how do we figure
out how to have hindsight when we actually are not? What if stupidity is the thing that people
from a hundred years from now will see as wise? I mean, the idiot by the SDF ski being naive and,
uh, trusting everybody, maybe then you get lucky, then, then, then you, you know, then maybe you
get to a good, a good future by stumbling upon it. Um, but ideally you, you can get there. Like,
I think a lot of America, the great things about it have, are a product of the wisdom of previous
Americans. You know, the constitution was a pretty, you know, pretty wise system to set up.
There's not much stupid stumbling around. Well, there is, I mean, with just the Oscars, uh,
the idiot Prince Michigan and, uh, brothers Karmazov, there's, uh, uh, Alyosha Karmazov,
you err on the side of love and almost like a naive trust in other human beings. And that
turns out to be, at least in my perspective and long-term for the success of the species is
actually wisdom. It's a compass. We don't know. It's a compass when you're in the fog,
in the fog, it's a compass. Yeah. Love is a compass. Okay. But, but here's the thing. So
I think we should have a compass is nice, but you know what else is nice is a flashlight in the fog
that can help. You can't see that far, but you can see, Oh, you can see four feet ahead instead
of one foot. And that to me is discourse that is open vigorous, like discussion in a culture that
fosters that is how the species is how the, the, the, the, the American citizens as a, as a unit
can be as wise as possible can maybe see four feet ahead instead of one foot ahead. That said,
Charles Bukowski said that love is a fog that fades with the first light of reality. So I don't
know how that works out, but I feel like there's intermixing of metaphors that works. Okay. Uh,
you also write that quote as the authors of the story of us, which is this thousand page book,
we have no mentors, no editors, no one to make sure it all turns out okay. It's all in our hands.
This scares me, but it's also, it gives me hope if we can all get just a little wiser together,
it may be enough to nudge the story on to a trajectory that points towards
an unimaginably good future. Do you think we can possibly define what a good future looks like?
I mean, this is, uh, the problem with that we ran into with communism of thinking of utopia,
of having a deep confidence about what a utopian world looks like.
Well, it's a deep confidence. That was a deep confidence about the instrumental way to get
there. It was that, you know, I think a lot of us can agree that if everyone had everything they
needed and we didn't have disease or poverty and people could live as long as they wanted to and
choose when to die and there was no existential, major existential threat because we control,
I think almost everyone can agree that would be great. That communism is a, that was, they said,
this is the way to get there and that is, that's a different question, you know? So
the unimaginably good future I'm picturing, I think a lot of people would picture and I think
most people would agree. Now, not everyone, there's a lot of people out there who would say humans are
the scourge on the earth and we should de-growth or something, but I think a lot of people would
agree that, you know, just again, take Thomas Jefferson, bring him here. He would see it as
utopia for obvious reasons for the medicine, the food, the transportation, just how the quality of
life and the safety and all of that. So extrapolate that forward for us. Now, we were Thomas Jefferson,
you know, what's the equivalent? That's what I'm talking about and the big question is,
I actually don't, I don't try to say here's the way to get there. Here's the actual specific way
to get there. I try to say how do we have a flashlight so that we can together figure it out?
Like how do we give ourselves the best chance of figuring out the way to get there? And I think
part of the problem with communists and people, ideologues, is that they're way too overconfident
that they know the way to get there and it becomes a religion to them, this solution,
and then now you can't update once you have a solution as a religion and so.
I felt a little violated when you said communists and stared deeply into myself.
In this book, you've developed a framework for how to fix everything. It's called The Ladder.
Can you explain it? Okay, it's not a framework for how to fix everything. I would never say that.
I'll explain it to Tim Urban at some point. Okay. How this humor thing works. Yeah,
the framework of how to think about collaboration between humans such that we could fix things.
I think it's a compass. It's like a ruler that once we look at it together and see what it is,
we can all say, oh, we want to go to that side of the ruler, not this side.
So it gives us a direction to go. So what are the parts of the ladder?
So I have these two characters. This orange guy, this primitive mind,
this is our software. That is the software that was in a 50,000 BC person's head that was
specifically optimized to help that person survive in that world. Not really survive,
but help them pass their genes on in that world. Civilization happened quickly and brains changed
slowly. So that unchanged dude is still running the show in our head. I use the example of skittles.
Like, why do we eat skittles? It's trash. It's obviously bad for you. And it's because
the primitive mind in the world that it was programmed for, there was no skittles.
And it was just fruit. And, you know, and if there was a dense, chewy, sweet fruit like that,
it meant you just found like a calorie gold mine, energy, energy, take it, take it,
eat as much as you can gorge on it. Hopefully you get a little fat. It would be the dream.
It would be the dream. And now we're so good with energy for a while. We don't have to stress about
it anymore. So today Mars Inc is clever and says, let's not sell things to people's higher minds,
who's the other character. Let's sell to people's primitive minds. Primitive minds are dumb,
and let's trick them into thinking this is this thing you should eat. And then they'll eat it. Now
Mars Inc is a huge company. Actually, just to linger real quick, you said primitive mind and
higher mind. So those are the two things that make up this bigger mind that is the modern human being.
Yeah, it's like, you know, it's not perfect. Obviously, there's a lot of crossover. There's
people who will yell at me for saying there's two minds and you know that. But to me, it's still a
useful framework where you have this software that has making decisions based on a world that you're
not in anymore. And then you've got this other character, I call it the higher mind. And it's
the part of you that knows that skills are not good and can override the instinct. And the reason
you don't always eat Skittles is because the higher mind says, no, no, no, we're not doing that,
because that's bad and I know that, right? Now, you can apply that to a lot of things. The higher
mind is the one that knows I shouldn't procrastinate. The primitive mind is the
one that wants to conserve energy and not do anything icky and can't see the future,
so he procrastinates. You can apply this. No, I, in this book, apply it to
how we form our beliefs is one of the ways, and then eventually to politics and political
movements. But like, if you think about, well, what's the equivalent of the Skittles tug of war
in your head for how do you form your beliefs? And it's that the primitive mind in the world that it
was optimized for, it wanted to feel conviction about its beliefs. It wanted to be sure that it
was, it wanted to feel conviction and it wanted to agree with the people around there. It didn't
want to stand out. It wanted to perfectly agree with the tribe about the tribe's sacred beliefs,
right? And so, there's a big part of us that wants to do that, that doesn't like changing our mind.
It feels like it's part of our, the primitive mind identifies with beliefs. It feels like it's a
threat, a physical threat to you, to your primitive mind when you change your mind or
when someone disagrees with you in a smart way. So, there's that huge force in us, which is
confirmation bias. That's where that comes from. It's this desire to keep believing what we believe
and this desire to also fit in with our beliefs, to believe what the people around us believe.
And that can be fun in some ways. We all like the same sports team and we're all super into it and
we're all going to be biased about that call together. I mean, it's not always bad, but it's
not a very smart way to be. And you're actually, you're working kind of for those ideas. Those
ideas are like your boss and you're working so hard to keep believing those. Those ideas
are, you know, a really good paper comes in that you read that conflicts with those ideas and you
will do all this work to say that paper's bullshit because you're a faithful employee of those ideas.
Now, the higher mind, to me, the same party that can override the skittles, can override this
and can search for something that makes a lot more sense, which is truth. Because what rational being
wouldn't want to know the truth? Who wants to be delusional? And so, there's this tug of war because
the higher mind doesn't identify with ideas. Why would you? It's an experiment you're doing and
it's a mental model. And if someone can come over and say, you're wrong, you'd say, where? Show me,
show me. And if they point out something that is wrong, you'd say, oh, thanks. Oh, good. I just
got a little smarter, right? You're not going to identify with the thing. Go, kick it, see if you
can break it. If you can break it, it's not that good, right? So, there's both of these in our
heads and there's this tug of war between them. And sometimes, you know, if you're telling me
about something with AI, I'm probably going to think with my higher mind because I'm not
identified with it. But if you go and you criticize the ideas in this book, or you criticize
my religious beliefs, or you criticize, I might have a harder time because the primitive mind says,
no, no, no, those are our special ideas. And so, yeah. So, that's one way to use this ladder is
like, it's a spectrum. You know, at the top, the higher mind is doing all the thinking. And then as
you go down, it becomes more of a tug of war. And at the bottom, the primitive mind is in total
control. And this is distinct, as you show from the spectrum of ideas. So, this is how you think
versus what you think. And those are distinct, those are different dimensions. We need a vertical
axis. We have all these horizontal axes, left, right, center, or, you know, this opinion all the
way to this opinion. But it's like, what's much more important than where you stand is how you
got there, right? And how you think. So, this helps if I can say this person's kind of on the
left or on the right, but they're up high, I think. In other words, I think they got there
using evidence and reason and they were willing to change their mind. Now, that means a lot to me
what they have to say. If I think they're just a tribal person and I can predict all their beliefs
from hearing one because it's so obvious what political beliefs, that person's views are
irrelevant to me because they're not real. They didn't come from information. They came from
a tribe's kind of, you know, sacred 10 commandments. I really like the comic you have
in here with the boxer. This is the best boxer in the world. Wow, cool. Who has he beaten?
No one. He's never fought anyone. Then how do you know he's the best boxer in the world?
I can just tell. Now, I mean, this connects with me and I think with a lot of people just because
in martial arts, it's especially kind of true that this is this whole legend about different
martial artists and that kind of would construct like action figures like, you know, thinking that
Steven Seagal is the best fighter in the world or Chuck Norris. Chuck Norris is actually backed up.
He's done really well in competition. But still, the ultimate test for particularly for martial
arts is what we now know as mixed martial arts, UFC and so on. And that's the actual
scientific testing grounds of meritocracy. Yeah, exactly. I mean, there's within certain rules and
you can criticize those rules like this doesn't actually represent the broader combat that you
would think of when you're thinking about martial arts. But reality is you're actually testing
things. And that's when you realize that Aikido and some of these kind of woo woo martial arts
in their certain implementations don't work in the way you think they would in the context of
fighting. And I think this is one of the places where everyone can agree, which is why it's a
really nice comic, because then you start to talk about map this onto ideas that people take
personally, it starts becoming a lot more difficult to basically highlight that we're
thinking with not with our higher mind, but with our primitive mind. Yeah, I mean,
if, if, if I'm thinking with my higher mind, and now here is you can use different things for an
idea as a metaphor. So here, the metaphor is a boxer. Yeah. For an, for one of your conclusions,
one of your beliefs. And if I'm, if I'm, if I'm, if all I care about is truth, in other words,
for the, that means all I care about is having a good boxer. I would say, go, go. Yeah, try. See
if this person is good. Go. I would, in other words, I would get into arguments, which is
throwing my boxer out there to fight against other ones. And if I think my argument's good,
by the way, I love boxing, right? If I think my guy is, is amazing, you know, Mike Tyson,
I'm thinking, oh yeah, bring it on. Who wants to come see? I bet no one can beat my boxer. I love
a good debate, right? In that case. Now, what would you think about my boxer? If not only had
I, was I telling you he was great, but he's never boxed anyone, but then you said, okay, well,
your idea came over to try to punch him. And I screamed and I said, what are you doing? That's
violence. And you're, you're in your, and you're an awful person. And I don't want to be friends
with you anymore. Cause you, you would think this boxer obviously sucks. And, or at least I think
it sucks deep down because, uh, why would I be so anti anyone? No boxing allowed, you know, people.
So I think if you're in, so this, I call this a ladder, right? If you're in low rung land,
you know, whether it's a culture or whatever, a debate, an argument when someone says, no,
that's totally wrong. Uh, what you're saying about that and here's why you're actually being totally
biased. It sounds like a fight. People are going to say, oh wow, we got in like a fight. It was
really awkward. Like, are we still friends with that person? Because that's not a culture of
boxing. It's a culture where you don't touch each other's ideas. That's, that's, that's,
that's insensitive versus in an, in a, in a, you know, a high rung culture. Uh, it's sport.
That's I mean, like every one of your podcasts, your, your agree, whether you're agreeing or
disagreeing, the tone is the same. It's not like, oh, this got awkward. It's like, it's,
it's the tone is identical cause you're just playing intellectually either way. Cause it's
a good high rung space at his best at his best, but people do take stuff personally. And then
that's actually one of the skills of conversation just as a fan of podcast is when you sense that
people take a thing personally, you have to like, there's sort of methodologies and little paths
you can take to like calm things down, like go around the don't, don't take it as a violation
of like, you're trying to suss out which of their ideas are sacred to them and which ones are bring
it on. And sometimes it's actually, I mean, that's the skill of it. I suppose that sometimes it's
certain wardings in the way you challenge those ideas are important. You can, you can challenge
them indirectly and then together walk together in that way. Because they're, what I've learned
is people are used to their ideas being attacked in a certain way, in a certain tribal way.
And if you just avoid those, like for example, if you have political discussions and just never
mentioned left or right or a Republican and Democrat, none of that, just talk about different
ideas and, and avoid certain kind of triggering words. You can actually talk about ideas versus
falling into this path that's well established through battles that people have previously fought.
When you say triggering, I mean, who's getting triggered? The primitive mind. So what you're
trying to do, what you're saying in this language is how do you have conversations with other
people's higher minds, almost like whispering without waking up the primitive mind. The primitive
mind is they're sleeping, right? And as soon as you say, as soon as you say something, the left
primitive mind gets up and says, what? What are you saying about the left? And now, now that
everything goes off the rails. What do you make of conspiracy theories under this framework of the
latter? So here's the thing about conspiracy theories is that once in a while, they're true,
right? Because sometimes there's an actual conspiracy. Actually, humans are pretty good at
real conspiracies, secret things. And then, you know, I just watched the Madoff doc. Great new
Netflix doc, by the way. And so the question is, how do you create a system that is good at,
you put the conspiracy theory in, and it either goes, eh, or it says, this is interesting. Let's
keep exploring it. Like, how do you put, how do you do something that it can, how do you assess?
And so again, I think the high rung culture is really good at it because a real conspiracy,
a real conspiracy, what's going to happen is you put it, it's like a little machine you put in the
middle of the table and everyone starts firing darts at it or bow and arrow or whatever. And
everyone starts kicking it and trying to, and almost all conspiracy theories, they quickly
crumble, right? Because they actually, you know, you know, Trump's election one is, you know,
I actually dug in and I looked at like every claim that he or his team made. And I was like,
all of these, none of these hold up to scrutiny. None of them. I was open-minded, but none of them
did. So that was one that as soon as it's open to scrutiny, it crumbles. The only way that conspiracy
can stick around in a community is if it is a culture where that's being treated as a sacred
idea that no one should kick or throw a dart at, because if you throw a dart, it's going to break.
So it's being, it's, and so what you want is a, is a culture where no idea is sacred.
Anything can get thrown at. And so I think that then what you'll find is that nine,
94 out of a hundred conspiracy theories come in and they fall down. The other, maybe four of the
others come in and there's something there, but it's not as extreme as people say. And then maybe
one is a huge deal and it's actually a real conspiracy. Well, isn't there a lot of gray
area and there's a lot of mystery, isn't that where the conspiracy theories seep in? So,
it's great to hear that you've really looked into the Trump election fraud claims,
but aren't they resting on a lot of kind of gray area, like fog, basically saying that there's
dark forces in the shadows that are actually controlling everything. I mean, the same thing
with, maybe you can, there's like safer conspiracy theories, more, less controversial ones. Like,
have we landed on the moon, right? Did the United States ever land on the moon?
There's, you know, like the reason those conspiracy theories work is you could construct
there's incentives, the motivation for faking the moon landing. There's a lot of,
there's very little data supporting the moon landing. Like that's very public and kind of
looks fake space. That would be a big story if it turned out to be fake. That's the art. That's
that would be the argument against it. Like are people really as a collective going to hold onto
a story that big? Yeah. So that, but, but there's a lot that the reason they work is there's mystery.
Yeah. There's a great documentary called Behind the Curve about flat earthers. And one of the
things that you learn about flat earthers is they believe all the conspiracies, not just the flat
earth. They're, they're, they're convinced the moon landing is fake. They're convinced 9-11 was
an American con job. They're convinced, you know, that name a conspiracy and they believe it. And
so it's so interesting is that I think of it as a, as a, a skepticism spectrum. Yeah. So on one
side you, it's like a filter in your head, a filter in your, in the beliefs section of your brain.
On one end of the spectrum, you are gullible, perfectly gullible. You believe anything someone
says, right? On the other side, you're paranoid. You think everyone's lying to you, right?
Everything's, everything is false. Nothing that anyone says is true, right? So obviously those
aren't good places to be. Um, now the healthy place, I think that the, so, so, so I think the
healthy place is to be somewhere in the middle and, but also you can learn to trust certain
sources and then, you know, you don't have to do as much, apply as much skepticism to them.
And so here's what, like, and when you start having a bias, just say you have a political
bias, when your side says something, you, you will find yourself moving towards the gullible
side of the spectrum. You read an article written that supports your views. You move to the
gullible side of the spectrum and you just believe it and you don't have any, where's that
skepticism that you normally have, right? And then you move and then you soon, as soon as it's
the other person talking, the other team talking, you move to the skeptical, the closer to that,
to the denial, paranoid side. Now, flat earthers are the extreme. They are either at 10 or one.
So it's like, it's so interesting because they're the people who are saying, ah, no, I won't believe
you. I'm not gullible. No, everyone else is gullible about the moon landing. I won't. And
then yet when there's this evidence like, oh, because you can't see Seattle, you can't see
the buildings over that horizon and you should, which isn't true. You should be, if you were,
if the earth were round, you wouldn't be able to see them. Therefore it's so suddenly they become
the most gullible person here. Any theory about the earth flat, they believe it. It goes right
into their beliefs. So they're actually jumping back and forth between refuses to believe anything
and believe anything. And so they're the extreme example. But I think when it comes to conspiracy
theories, the people that get themselves into trouble are the ones who they, they, they become
really gullible when they hear a conspiracy theory that kind of fits with their worldview.
And they likewise, when there's something that's kind of obviously true and it's not a big lie,
they will actually, uh, they'll, they'll, they'll think it is, they, they, they just tighten up
their kind of skepticism filter. And so, yeah, so I think the healthy places to be is where,
is where you are not, cause you also don't want to be the person who says every conspiracy,
you hear the word conspiracy theory and it sounds like a, like a synonym for like quack
job, crazy theory. Right. So yeah. So I think, yeah, I think it's somewhere in the middle of
that spectrum and to learn to fine tune it. Which is a tricky place to operate because you kind of
have to, every time you hear a new conspiracy theory, you should approach it with an open mind
and, you know, and also if you don't have enough time to investigate, which most people don't
kind of still have a humility, not to make a conclusive statement that that's nonsense.
There's a lot of, um, social pressure actually to immediately laugh off any conspiracy theory,
if it's done by the, the, uh, the bad guys. Right. You will quickly get mocked and laughed at and
not taken seriously. If you give any credence, you know, back to the lab leak was that it was
a good one where it's like, uh, turned out that that was at least very credible, if not true.
And that was a perfect example of one where when it first came out and not only so, so,
so Brett Weinstein talked about it and then I in a totally different conversation said something
complimentary about him on a totally different subject. And people were saying, Tim, you might
have gone a little off the deep end. You're like quoting someone who is like a lab leak person.
So I was getting my reputation dinged for complimenting on a different topic. Someone
whose reputation was totally sullied because they have, you know, they questioned an orthodoxy.
Right. So it's, it's, you see, so what, what does that make me want to do?
Distance myself from Brett Weinstein. That's the, at least they see incentive that's a,
and what does that make other people want to do? Don't become the next Brett Weinstein.
Don't say it out loud because you don't want to become someone that no one wants to compliment
anymore. Right. You can see the social pressure and that's, and of course, when there is a
conspiracy, that social pressure is its best friend. Mm-hmm. Because then they, they say,
they see the people from outside are seeing that social pressure enact like a Tim Urban
becoming more and more and more extreme to the other side. And so they're going to take
the more and more and more extreme to, I mean, this, what, what do you see that the pandemic
did, that COVID did to our civilization in that regard, in the forces? Why was it so
divisive? Do you understand that? Yeah. So COVID, I, you know, I thought might be,
you know, we always know the ultimate example of a topic that will unite us all is the alien attack.
Yeah. Although honestly, I don't even have that much faith. Then I think there'd be like,
some people are super like, you know, pro alien and some people are anti alien. But anyway.
I was actually starting to interrupt because I was talking to a few astronomers and they,
they're the first folks that made me kind of sad in that if we did discover life on Mars,
for example, that there's going to be potentially a division over that too,
where half the people will not believe that's real. Well, because we live in a current society
where the political divide has subsumed everything. And that's not always like that.
It goes into stages like that. We're in a really bad one where it's actually in the book,
I call it like a vortex, like a, like a, like a, almost like a whirlpool that pulls everything
into it. It pulls, it pulls. Um, and so normally you'd say, okay, you know, immigration,
naturally going to be contentious. That's always political. Right. But like,
COVID seemed like, Oh, that's one of those that will unite us all. Let's fight this not human
virus thing. Like obvious is no, no one's sensitive. No, one's like getting hurt when
we insult the virus. Like let's all be, we have this threat, this common threat. That's a threat
to every one of every nationality and every country, every ethnicity. And, and what it didn't
do that at all. It, the whirlpool is too powerful. So it pulled COVID in and suddenly masks. If you're
on the left, you like them. If you're on the right, you hate them. And suddenly lockdowns,
if you're on the left, you like them. And on the right, you hate them. And vaccines, this is,
people forget this. When, when Trump first started talking about the vaccine, Biden, Harris, Cuomo,
they're all saying, I'm not taking that vaccine, not from this CDC because it was too rushed or
something like that, but because I'm not, I'm not trusting anything that Trump says Trump wants me
to take it. I'm not taking it. I'm not taking it from this CDC. So this was Trump. This Trump was
almost out of office, but at the time, if that, if Trump had been, it would have been, I'm pretty
sure it would have stayed right. Likes vaccines. The left doesn't like vaccines. Instead, the
president switched and all those people are suddenly saying they were actually specifically
saying that if you, you know, that, that, that like, if you're saying the CDC is not trustworthy,
that's misinformation, which is exactly what they were saying about the other CDC. And they
were saying it because they genuinely didn't trust Trump, which is fair, but now when other people
don't trust the Biden CDC, suddenly it's this kind of misinformation that needs to be censored.
So it was a sad moment because it was a couple of months at the very, even a week or so at the,
I mean, a month or so at the very beginning when it felt like a lot of our other squabbles were
kind of like, oh, I feel like they're kind of irrelevant right now. And then very quickly the
whirlpool sucked it in. And, and, and in a way where I think it damaged the reputation of these,
a lot of the, the trust in a lot of these institutions for the long run.
But there's also an individual psychological impact. It's like a vicious negative feedback
cycle where they were deeply affected on an emotional level and people just were not their
best selves. That's definitely true. Yeah. I mean, talk about the primitive mind. I mean,
what, one thing that we've been dealing with for our whole human history is pathogens and it's,
it's emotional, right? It, it brings out, you know, there, there's really interesting studies
where like, if what they, they, they studied the, the, the, the phenomenon of a disgust,
which is one of these, like ha you know, smiling is universal. You don't have to ever translate
a smile, right? Certain, you know, you know, throwing your hands up when you're,
when your sports team wins is universal because it's part of our, we're coding.
And so it was discussed to kind of make this like, you know, face where you wrinkle up your nose and
you kind of put out your tongue and maybe even gag that's to expel, expel whatever. Cause it's,
it's the reaction when something is potentially a pathogen that might harm us, right? Feces, vomit,
whatever. But they did this interesting study where people who in, in two, two groups,
the control group, you know, was shown images of, um, and I might be getting two studies mixed up,
but they were showing, they were showing images of like car crashes and like disturbing,
but not disgusting. And the other one was showing like, you know, like, you know,
rotting things and just things that were disgusting. And then they were asked about
immigration. These were Canadians and the group that was, had the disgust feeling going, pulsing
through their body was way more likely to prefer like immigrants from white countries. And the
group that was, had been shown car accidents, they were, they, they still prefer the groups
from white countries, but much less so. And so what does that mean? It's because the disgust
impulse makes us scared of, you know, sexual practices that are foreign of ethnicities that
are not looked, they don't look like us of, of, of it stokes xenophobia. So it's, it's ugly.
It's this really ugly stuff. This is of course also how, you know, the Nazi propaganda with
cockroaches and, uh, or, or it was, uh, that Rwandan was cockroaches, you know, the Nazis
with rats and, you know, it's, it's specifically, it's a dehumanizing emotion. So anyway, we were,
we were, we were talking about, um, COVID, but I think it does, it taps deep into like the human
psyche and it, and it's, I don't think it brings out our, I think, like you said, I think it brings
out an ugly side in us. You describe an idea lab as being opposite of echo chambers. So we know
what echo chambers are. And you said like, just basically no good term for the opposite of an
echo chamber. So what's an idea lab? Yeah, well, first of all, both of these, we think of an echo
chamber as like a group maybe, or even a place, but it's, it's a culture, it's an intellectual
culture. And this goes along with the high rung, low, so high rung and low rung thinking is
individual. That's what I was talking about what's going on in your head, but this is very connected
to the social scene around us. And so groups will do high rung and low rung thinking together.
Basically, it's collect. So an echo chamber to me is a collaborative low rung thinking it is,
it's a culture where the cool it's based around a sacred set of ideas. And it's the coolest thing
you can do in an echo chamber culture is talk about how great the sacred ideas are and how bad
and evil and stupid and wrong. The people are who have the other views. And this and and it's quite
boring. You know, it's quite boring, you know, it's very hard to learn. And changing your mind
is not cool in an echo chamber culture. It makes you seem wishy washy. It makes you seem like, you
know, like you're waffling and you're flip flopping or whatever it showing conviction about
the sacred ideas and echo chamber culture is awesome. If you're just like, you know, obviously
this makes you seem smart, while being, you know, humble makes you seem dumb. So now flip all of
those things on their heads and you have an you have the opposite which makes you seem smart.
Which is idea lab culture, which is collaborative high rung thinking. It's collaborative truth
finding. But it's also just, it's just a totally different vibe. It's, it's a place where arguing
is a fun thing. It's not no one's getting offended. And and criticizing like the thing
everyone believes is actually it makes you seem like interesting, like, Oh, really? Why do you
think we're all wrong? And expressing too much conviction makes people lose trust in you doesn't
make you seem smart. It makes you seem stupid if you don't know really know what you're talking
about, but you're acting like you do. I really like this diagram of where on the x axis agreement
on the y axis is decency. That's in an idea lab and echo chamber. There's only one axis. It's
asshole to non asshole, right? I said a really important thing to understand about the difference
between you call it decency here about assholishness and disagreement. So my college
friends, we love to argue, right? And no one thought anyone was an asshole for it was just
for sports. Sometimes we'd realize we're not even disagreeing on something and that would be
disappointing and be like, Oh, I think we agree. And it was kind of like sad. It was like, Oh,
well, there goes the fun. And one of the members of this group has this, she brought her new
boyfriend to one of our like, hangouts. And there was like a heated, heated debate, you know, just,
just, just one of our typical things. And afterwards, you know, the next day, he said,
like, is everything okay? And she was like, what do you mean? And he said, like, after the fight,
and she was like, what fight? And he was like, you know, the fight last night, and she was like,
and she had to, then she was like, you mean like the arguing and she and he was like, yeah, and
she and so that's someone who is not used to idea lab culture coming into it. And seeing it is like,
that was like, this is like, are they still friends? Right? And idea lab is nice for the
people in them, because you're it individuals thrive. You don't want to just conform that
does that makes you seem boring in an idea, but you want to be yourself, you want to challenge
things, you want to have a unique brain. So that's great. And and you also have people criticizing
your ideas, which makes you smarter, it doesn't always feel good, but you become more correct and
smarter. And echo chamber is the opposite where it's not good for the people in and it does your
learning skills atrophy. And, and I think it's boring. But the thing is, they also have emergent
properties. So the emergent property of an idea lab is like super intelligence, just you and me
alone, just the two of us. If we're working together on something, but we're being really
grown up about it, we're disagreeing, we're not, you know, no one's sensitive about anything.
We're going to each find flaws in the other one's arguments that you wouldn't have found on your
own. And we're going to have a piff and double the epiphanies, right? So it's almost like the
two of us together is like as smart as 1.5 is like 50% smarter than either of us alone, right?
So you have this 1.5 intelligent kind of joint being that we've made. Now bring the third person
and fourth person and right, you see it starts to scale up. This is why science institutions can
discover relativity and quantum mechanics and these things that no individual human, you know,
was going to come up with without a ton of collaboration, because it's this giant idea lab.
So it has an emergent property of super intelligence. And echo chamber is the opposite,
where it has the emergent property of stupidity. I mean, it has the emergent property of a bunch of
people all, you know, paying fealty to this set of sacred ideas. And so you lose this magic
magical thing about language and humans, which is collaborative intelligence, you lose it,
it disappears. But there is that access of decency, which is really interesting because
you're kind of painting this picture of you and your friends arguing really harshly.
But underlying that is a basic camaraderie, respect. There's all kinds of mechanisms
we humans have constructed to communicate, like mutual respect or maybe communicate the
you're here for the idea lab version of this. Totally. It doesn't, you don't take it,
you don't get personal, right? You're not getting personal. You're not taking things personally.
People are respected in an idea lab and ideas are disrespected. And there's a ways to signal that.
So like with friends, you've already done the signaling, you've already established a
relationship. The interesting thing is online, I think you have to do some of that work.
To me, the sort of steel manning the other side or no, having empathy and hearing out,
being able to basically repeat the argument the other person is making before you and showing
like respect to that argument. I could see how you could think that before you make a counter
argument. There's just a bunch of ways to communicate that you're here not to do kind of,
what is it, low rung, shit talking, mockery, derision, but are actually here ultimately
to discover the truth in the space of ideas and the tension of those ideas. And I think
that's a skill that we're all learning as a civilization of how to do that kind of
communication effectively. Because I think disagreement, as I'm learning on the internet,
it's actually a really tricky skill, like high effort, high decency disagreement.
I got to listen to, there's a really good debate podcast, Intelligent Squared,
and they can go pretty hard in the paint.
It's a classic idea lab.
Exactly. But how do we map that to social media? When people will say,
well, Lex or anybody, you hate disagreement. You want to censor disagreement. No,
I love Intelligent Squared type of disagreement. That's fun.
You want to reduce assholery.
And for me personally, I don't want to reduce assholery. I kind of like assholery. It's fun
in many ways. But the problem is when the asshole shows up to the party, they make it less fun for
the party that's there for the idea lab. And the other people, especially the quiet voices
at the back of the room, they leave. And so all you're left is with assholes.
Political Twitter to me is one of those parties. It's a big party
where a few assholes have really sent a lot of the quiet thinkers away.
So if you think about this graph again, a place like Twitter, a great way to get followers
is to be an asshole with a certain, pumping a certain ideology. You'll get a huge amount
of followers. And for those followers and the followers you're going to get, the people who
like you are probably going to be people who are really thinking with their primitive mind
because they're seeing you're being an asshole, but because you agree with them, they love you.
And they don't see any problem with how you're being.
Yeah, they don't see the asshole. This is a fascinating thing.
Well, because look at the thing on the right. Agreement and decency are the same. So if you're
in that mindset, the bigger the asshole, the better. If you're agreeing with me, you're my man.
I love what you're saying. Yes, show them. And the algorithm helps those people.
Those people do great on the algorithm.
There's a fascinating dynamic that happens because I have currently hired somebody that
looks at my social media and they block people because the assholes will roll in.
They're not actually there to have an interesting disagreement, which I love.
They're there to do kind of mockery. And then when they get blocked,
they then celebrate that to their echo chamber. Like, look at this. I got them or whatever.
Or they'll say some annoying thing like, oh, so it's, so he talks about, he likes, you know,
if I, if I'd done this, they'll say he, oh, he says he likes idea labs, but he actually
wants to create an echo chamber. But I'm like, nope, you're an asshole. I'm not, I, I just
look at the other 50 people and this thread that disagreed with me respectfully. They're not
blocked. Yep. Exactly. You know? And so they see it as some kind of hypocrisy because again,
they only see the thing on the right and that they're not understanding that there's two axes
or that I see it as two axes. And so you seem petty in that moment, but it's like, no, no,
no. You're, this is very specific what I'm doing. You're actually killing the conversation.
I, I, in generally, I give all those folks a pass and just send them love telepathically,
but yes, like it's getting rid of assholes in the conversation is the way you allow for the
disagreement. You do a lot of like, when I think when like primitive mindedness comes at you,
at least on Twitter, I don't know what you're feeling internally in that moment, but you do
a lot of like, I'm going to meet that with my higher mind and you come out and you'll be like,
and you'll be like, thanks for all the criticism. I love you. And that's the, that, that, that's
actually a, an amazing response because it just, it, what it does is it, it, it, that it, it
unrials up that person's primitive mind and actually wakes up their higher mind who says,
Oh, okay. You know, this guy's not so bad. And suddenly like civility comes back. So it's a very
powerful, hopefully long-term, but the thing is they do seem to drive away high quality
disagreement. Cause like, cause it takes so much effort to disagree in a high quality way.
I've noticed this on my blog. Like my, one of the things I pride myself on is like my
comment section is awesome. Like there's, there's, there's every, everyone's being respectful.
No one's afraid to disagree with me and tell them and say, say, you know, tear my post apart,
but in a totally respectful way where the underlying thing is like, I'm here cause I
like this guy and his writing and people disagree with each other and they get in these long
interest and it's interesting and I read it and I'm learning. And then I, you know, I have
a couple posts, especially the ones I've got written about politics. It's not like it seems
like any other comment section, people are being nasty to me. They're being nasty to each other.
And then I looked down one of them and I realized like almost all of this is the work of like,
almost all of this is the work of like three people. That's who you need to block. Those
people need to be blocked. You're not being thin skinned. You're not being petty doing it.
You're actually protecting an idea lab because what people would really aggressive people like
that do is they'll turn it into their own echo chamber because now everyone is scared to kind
of disagree with them. It's unpleasant. And so people who will chime in or the people who agree
with them and suddenly like they've taken over the space. And I kind of believe that those people
on a different day could actually do high effort disagreement. It's just that they're in a, in a,
in a certain kind of mood. And a lot of us, just like you said, with a primitive mind could get
into that mood. And it's, I believe it's actually the job of the technology, the platform to
incentivize those folks to be like, are you sure this is the best you can do? Like, if you really
want to talk shit about this idea, like do better, like, and then we need to create incentives where
you get likes for high effort disagreement. Cause currently you get likes for like, uh,
something that's slightly funny and is a little bit like mockery. Like, um,
yeah, basically signals to some kind of echo chamber that this person is a horrible person
is a hypocrite is evil, whatever that feels like it's solvable with technology. Cause I think in
our private lives, none of us want that. I wonder if it's making me think that I want to like,
because a much easier way for me to do it just for my, my world would be to say something like,
you know, here's this access, this high, this is, this is part of what I, part of what I like
about the ladder is it's a language that we can use. It's like specifically what we're talking
about is high rung disagreement, good, low rung disagreement, bad. Right. And so, so it gives us
like a language for that. And so what I would say is I would, you know, my, you know, I would have
my readers, you know, understand this access and then I would specifically say something like,
please do the, the, do the, do it, but why a favor and upvote, regardless of what they're saying
horizontally, right. Regardless of what their actual view is upvote high rungness, they can
be tearing me apart. They can be saying great. They can be praising me, whatever upvote high
rungness and downvote low rungness. And if enough people are doing that, suddenly there's all this
incentive to try to say, no, I need to calm my emotion down here and not be at personal because
I'm going to get voted into oblivion by these people. I think a lot of people would be very
good at that. They, they, and they not are only would they be good at that. They would want that,
that task of saying, I know I completely disagree with this person, but this was a high effort,
a high rung disagreement. It gets everyone thinking about that other axis too. You're not
just looking at where do you stand horizontally? You're saying, well, how did you get there? And
how are you, you know, are you treating ideas like machines or are you treating them like little,
you know, babies. And that there should be some kind of labeling on personal attacks versus
idea disagreement. Sometimes people like throw in both a little bit. That's like, all right, no,
there should be a disincentive at personal attacks versus idea attacks. Well, you can also,
one metric is a respectful disagreement. If I see just say someone else's Twitter and I see,
you know, you put out a thought and I see someone say, you know, you know, someone say,
you know, I don't see it that way. Here's, here's where I think you went wrong. And they're just
explaining. I'm thinking that if Lex reads that he's going to be interested. He's going to,
he's going to want to post more stuff, right? Cause he's going to like that. If I see someone
being like, um, uh, wow, this really shows the kind of person that you become or shows up.
I'm thinking that person is making Lex want to be on Twitter less. It's making him it's,
and so what's that doing? What that person is actually doing is they're putting,
is they're actually shut their chilling discussion because they're making it unpleasant to,
they're making it scary to say what you think. And the first person isn't at all. The first person is
making you want to say more stuff. So, and those are both disagree. Those are people who are both
disagree with you. Exactly, exactly. I want to great disagreements with friends in meat space
is like, you're, they disagree with you. They could be even yelling at you. Honestly,
they could even have some shit talk where it's like personal attacks. It is still feels good.
Cause you know them well and you know that that shit talk cause like, yeah,
friendship talk all the time playing us, playing a sport or a game. And again, it's, it's, it's
because they know each other well enough to know that this is fun. We're having fun. And obviously
I love you like, you know, and, and that's, that's important online. It's a lot harder. Yeah. That
obviously I love you. That underlies a lot of human interaction seems to be easily lost online.
I've seen some people on Twitter and elsewhere just behave their worst. Yeah. And it's like,
I know that's not who you are. Like, why are you actually, you know, I know who's this human.
I know someone personally who is one of the best people. Yeah. I'm just, I love this guy. Like
one of the best, like fun, funny, like nicest dudes. And he, if you would, if you looked at
this Twitter only, you would think he's a culture warrior, an awful culture warrior and, you know,
you know, biased and just stoking anger. And, and it, and it comes out of a good place and I'm not
going to give any other info about, you know, specific, but like describing a lot of people,
it comes out of a good place because he really cares about what he, you know, it comes out,
but it's just, I can't square the two. It's so, and that's it. You have to, once you know someone
like that, you can realize, okay, apply that to everyone. Cause a lot of these people are lovely
people and it just brings even just, you know, back in the, before social media, did you ever
had a friend who like was just like, they had this like dickishness on text or email that they didn't
have in person. And you're like, wow, like email you is like kind of a dick. And it's like, it just,
certain people have a different persona behind the screen. It has for me personally become a
bit of a meme that, uh, Lex blocks with love, but there is a degree to that where this is,
I don't see people on social media as representing who they really are. I really do have love for
them. I really do think positive thoughts of them throughout the entirety of the experience.
I see this as some weird side effect of, uh, online communication. And so it's like to me,
blocking is not some kind of a derisive act towards that individual. It's just like saying,
well, a lot of times what's happened is they have slipped into a very common delusion
that dehumanizes others. So that doesn't mean they're a bad person. We all can do it,
but they're dehumanizing you or whoever they're, they're being nasty to because they, in a way
they would never do in person because in a person they're reminded that's a person.
Remember I said the dumb part of my brain when I'm doing VR, like won't step off the cliff,
but the smart part of my brain knows I'm just on the rug. That dumb part of our brain
is really dumb in a lot of ways. Um, it's the part of your brain where you can
set the clock five minutes fast to help you not be late. The smart part of your
brain knows that you did that, but the dumb part will fall for it, right?
That same dumb part of your brain can forget that the person behind that screen that behind that
handle is a human that has feelings. And, and, and that doesn't mean they're a bad person for
forgetting that because it's, it's possible. Well, this really interesting idea, and I wonder if it's
true that you're right, is that both primitive mindedness and high mindedness tend to be
contagious. I hope you're right. That it's possible to make both contagious because our,
our sort of, um, popular intuition is only one of them. The primitive mindedness is contagious
as, as exhibited by social media. To compliment you again, don't you think that your, your Twitter
to me is like, I was just looking down and I mean, it is a, it's just high mindedness.
It's just high mindedness down, down, down, down, down. It's, it's, it's gratitude. It's optimism.
It's love. It's forgiveness. It's all these things that are the opposite of grievance and victimhood
and resentment and pessimism. Right. And there's, I think a reason that a lot of people follow you
because it is contagious. It makes other people feel those feelings. I don't know. I just been,
I've been recently over the past few months, attacked quite a lot. It is fascinating to watch
because there's over things that I think I probably have done stupid things, but I'm being
attacked for things that are totally not worthy of attack. I got attacked for a book list. I saw that
by the way. I thought, I thought it was great, but like, you can always kind of find ways to,
you know, I guess the assumption is this person surely is a fraud or some other explanation.
He sure has dead bodies in the basement. He's hiding or something like this. And then I'm going
to construct a narrative around that and mock and attack that. I don't know how that works,
but there, there is, um, there does. And I think you read this in the book. There seems to be a
gravity pulling people towards the primitive mind. It's like anything political, right? Religious,
certain things are bottom heavy, you know, for our psyche. They, they, they, they, they, they have a
magnet that pulls our psyches downwards on the ladder. And, and why, why does politics pull our
psyches down on the ladder? Because it, for, for the 10, tens of thousand years that we were
evolving, um, you know, during human history, it was life or death. Politics was life or death.
And, and, and so, um, it was actually an amazing study where it's like, um, they challenged like
20 different beliefs of a person and different parts of the person's brain. And then you had an
MRI going. Different parts of the person's brain lit up when nonpolitical beliefs were challenged
versus political beliefs were challenged. When political beliefs were challenged, when, when,
when, when nonpolitical beliefs were challenged, the, like the, the rational, like the prefrontal
cortex type areas were, were lit up. When the political beliefs were challenged, and then I'm
getting over my head here, but it's like the, the parts of your brain, the default mode network,
the parts of your brain associated with like introspection and like your own identity were
lit up and they were much more likely to change their mind on all the beliefs, the nonpolitical
beliefs. When that default mode network part of your brain, uh, lit up, you were, you were gonna,
if anything, get more firm in those beliefs when you, when you had them challenged. So politics is
one of those topics that just, it literally, literally lights up different part of our brain.
It's again, I think we come back to primitive mind, higher mind here. It's like it, it, it gets
our higher, this is one of the things our primitive mind comes programmed to care a ton about. And so
there, it's going to be very hard for us to stay rational and calm and, and looking for truth
because we have all this gravity. Well, it's weird because politics, like what is politics?
Like talk about it's a bunch of different issues and each individual issue. If we really talk
about it, tax policy, like why are we being emotional about this? I don't think we're actually
that, I mean, we're, yeah, we're emotional about something else. Yeah. I think what we're emotional
about is this, my side, the side I've identified with is in power and making the decisions and your
side is out of power. And if your side's in power, that's really scary for me because that goes back
to, you know, the idea of who is making, who's, who's pulling the strings in this tribe, right?
Who's in, who's the chief? Is it your family's patriarch or is it mine? You know, I, I, you might
not have food if, if, if, if we don't win this, you know, kind of whatever, you know, chief
election. So I think that it's not about the tax policy or anything like that. And then, then, and
then it gets tied to this like broader, I think a lot of our tribalism has really coalesced around
this. We don't have that much religious tribalism in the US, right? It's not the, you know, the, the,
the Protestants and the Catholics hate each other. We don't have that really. Right. And honestly,
you say people like to, you know, say we have racial tribalism and everything, but a white,
you know, a white, even a kind of a racist white conservative guy, I think takes the black
conservative over the woke white person any day of the week right now. So that's the strongest
it tells me that way stronger tribalism right now. I think that, that, that, that white racist guys,
you know, loves the black conservative guy compared to the white woke guy. Right. There's
no, so, so to me, I think not, again, not that racial tribalism isn't a thing. Of course,
it's always a thing, but like political tribalism is the number one right now. So race is almost
a topic for the political division versus the actual sort of element of the tribe. It's a
political football it's yeah. So there there's a, I mean, it's, this is dark because, so this is
a book about human civilization. This is a book about human nature, but it's also a book of
politics about politics. Um, it is just the way you listed out in the book. It's kind of dark,
how we just fall into these left and right checklists. So if you're on the left,
it's maintained where we weighed universal healthcare, good mainstream media, fine guns,
kill people. Us as a racist country, protect immigrants, tax costs, bad climate change, awful
raise minimum wage. And on the right is the flip of that reverse where we weighed, you know, so
healthcare bad mainstream media, bad people, kill people, not guns, kill people. Us was a racist
country, protect borders, tax cuts, good climate change, overblown. Don't raise minimum wage. I
mean, it has, you almost don't have to think about any of this. Well, it's like literally,
so when you say it's a book about politics, it's interesting because it's a book about the vertical
axis, right? It's specifically not a book about the horizontal axis and that I'm not talking,
I don't actually talk about any of these issues. I don't put out an opinion on them. Um, those are
all horizontal, right? But when you, so rather than argue, you know, having, you know, another
book about those issues about right versus left, I wanted to do a book about this other axis.
And so on this axis, the reason I had this checklist is that this is a low part of the
low rung politics world, right? Low rung politics is a checklist and that checklist evolves, right?
Like Russia suddenly is like popular with the right as opposed to, you know, it used to be,
you know, in the sixties, the left was the one defending Stalin. Like, so they'll switch. It
doesn't even matter. The substance doesn't matter. It's that this is the approved checklist of the
capital P party. And this is what everyone believes. That's a low rung thing. The high rungs,
this is not what it's like. High rung politics. You, you tell me your one view on this. I have
no idea what you think about anything else, right? And you're going to say, I don't know
about a lot of stuff because inherently you're not going to have that strong an opinion because
you don't have that much info. These are complex things. So there's a lot of, I don't know,
and people are all over the place. It's when it's, you know, you're in, you know,
you're talking to someone who has been subsumed with low rung politics. When,
if they tell you their opinion on any one of these issues, you could just, you know,
you could just rattle off their opinion on every single other one. And if, and if in three years
it's becomes fashionable to, to have this new view, they're going to have it. That's,
you're not thinking that's echo, that's echo chamber culture.
And I've been using kind of a shorthand of centrist to describe this kind of
high rung thinking, but people tend to, I mean, it seems to be difficult to be a centrist or
whatever high rung thinker. It's like, people want to label you as a person who's too cowardly
to take stance somehow as opposed to asking, saying, I don't know, as a first statement.
Well, the problem with centrist is that would mean that in each of these tax cuts bag,
tax cuts good. It means that you are saying, I am in that. I think we should have some tax cuts,
but not that many. You might not think that you might actually come do some research and say,
actually, I think tax cuts are really important. That doesn't mean, Oh, I'm not a centrist anymore.
I guess I'm a far, you know, no, no, no. That's why we need the second access. So what you're
trying to be when you say centrist is high rung, which means you might be all over the place
horizontally. You might agree with the far left on this thing, the far right on this thing that
you might agree with the centrists on this thing, but, but calling yourself a centrist actually like
is putting yourself in a prison on the horizontal axis. And, and it's saying that, you know, I,
whatever the, on the, on the different topics, I'm right in between the two policy wise. That's
not what you are. So yeah, that's what we, we're badly missing this other axis.
Yeah. I mean, I still do think it's like, for me, I am a centrist when you project it down to the
horizontal, but the point is you're missing so much data by not considering the vertical,
because like on average, maybe it falls somewhere in the middle, but in reality,
there's just a lot of nuance issue to issue that involves just thinking and uncertainty and
changing the, given the context of the current geopolitics and economics and just always considering,
always questioning, always evolving your views, all of that.
Not just, not just about like, oh, I think we should be in the center on this,
but another way to be in the center is if there's some phenomenon happening, you know,
there's a terrorist attack, you know, and one side wants to say, this has nothing to do with Islam.
And the other one, the other side wants to say, this is radical Islam, right? What's in between
those is saying, this is complicated and nuanced and we have to learn more. And it probably has
something to do with Islam and something to do with the economic circumstances and something
to do with, you know, geopolitics. So in a case like that, you actually do get really
a nuance when you go to the extremes and all of that nuance, which is where all the truth
usually is, is going to be in the middle. So, yeah. But there is a truth to the fact that if
you take that nuance on those issues, like war in Ukraine, COVID, you're going to be attacked
by both sides. Yes. People who have, who are really strongly on one side or the other hate
centrist people. I've gotten this myself. And, you know, the, this, the, the slur that I've
had thrown at me is I'm an enlightened centrist in a very mocking way. So what are they actually
saying? What does enlightened centrist mean? It means someone who is, you know, Steven Pinker or
Jonathan Haidt gets accused of is, you know, that they're highfalutin, you know, intellectual world,
and they don't actually have any, they don't actually take a side. They don't actually get
their hands dirty and they can be superior to both sides without actually taking a stand. Right. So I
see the argument and I disagree with it because I firmly believe that the hardcore tribes,
they think they're taking a stand and they're out in the streets and they're pushing for something.
I think what they're doing is they're just driving the whole country downwards. And I think they're,
they're hurting all the causes they care about. And so it's not that, it's not that, you know,
it's not that we need everyone to be sitting there, you know, refusing to take a side. It's
that you can be far left and far right, but be upper left and upper right. If we talk about the,
you use the word liberal a lot in the book to mean something that we don't in modern political
discourse mean. So it's this higher philosophical view. And then you use the words progressive to
mean the left and conservative to mean the right. Can you describe the concept of liberal games
and power games? So the power games is, is what I call the, like, basically just the laws of nature
as the, when laws of nature are the laws of the land, that's the power game. So animals,
watch any David Attenborough special. And when the little lizard is running away from the,
you know, the bigger animal or whatever, and I use an example of a bunny and a bear, I don't
even know if bears eat bunnies, they probably don't, but pretend bears eat bunnies. Right.
So it's like in the power games, the bear is chasing the bunny. There's no fairness.
There's no, okay, well, what's right. But you know, what, what, what, what, what's legal? No,
no, no. If the bear is fast enough, it can eat the bunny. If the bunny is, can get away,
it can stay living. And so that's it. That's the only rule. Now, humans have spent a lot of time
in essentially that environment. So when you have a totalitarian dictatorship, it's, and so
what's the rule of the power games? It's everyone can do whatever they want if they have the power
to do so. It's just a game of power. So if the bunny gets away, the bunny actually has more
power than the bear in that situation. Right. And likewise, the totalitarian dictatorship,
there's no rules. A dictator can do whatever they want. They can, they can, they can torture,
they can, you know, flatten a rebellion with a lot of murder because they have the power to do so.
What are you going to do? Right. And that's, that's kind of the state of nature. That's our
natural way. You know, that, you know, when you look at a mafia, watch a mafia movie,
you know, there's, we do a lot of, we have it, we have it in us. We all have, we all can snap
into power games mode when it becomes all about, you know, just, just actual raw power. Now,
the liberal games is, is, you know, something that civilizations for thousands of years have
been working on. It's not invented by America or modern times, but America's kind of was like
the latest crack at it yet, which is this idea instead of everyone can do what they want if they
have the power to do so, it's everyone can do what they want as long as it doesn't harm anyone else.
Now that's really complicated. How do you define harm? And, and the idea is that everyone has
their, a list of rights, which are protected by the government. And then they have their
inalienable rights and they're, they're protected, you know, those are protected, uh, uh, again,
by, you know, um, from, from an invasion by other people. And so you have this kind of
fragile balance. And so the idea with the liberal games is you, that there are laws,
but it's not totalitarian. They will build very clear, strict laws, kind of around the edges
of what you can and can't do. And then everything else, freedom. So unlike a totalitarian dictatorship,
actually it's, it's very loose. You can, there's a lot of things can happen and it's kind of up
to the people, but there are still laws that protect the very basic inalienable rights and
stuff like that. So it's this much looser thing. Now the vulnerability there is that it, so, so,
it, so, so, so the, the benefits of it are obvious, right? Freedom is great. It seems like
it's the most fair. They, you know, that, that equality of opportunity seemed like the most fair
thing. And, um, and you know, equality before the law, you know, due process and all of this stuff.
So it seems fair to the founders of the US and other enlightenment thinkers. And it also is a
great way to manifest productivity, right? You know, you have, um, you have Adam Smith saying,
it's not from the benevolence of the butcher or the baker that we get our dinner, but from their,
from their own self-interest. So you have, you can harness kind of selfishness for, for progress.
But, um, it has a vulnerability, which is that because the laws, it's like the totalitarian laws,
they don't have an excess of laws for no reason. They want to control everything. And the US,
you know, in the US we say, well, they're not going to do that. And so the, the second,
it's almost two puzzle pieces. You have the laws and then you've got a liberal culture. Liberal
laws have to be married to liberal culture, kind of a defense of liberal spirit in order to truly
have the liberal games going on. And so that's vulnerable because free speech, you can have
the first amendment, that's the law's part. But if, if you're in a culture where anyone who,
you know, speaks out, uh, against orthodoxy is going to be shunned from the community.
Well, you're lacking the second piece of the puzzle there. You're lacking liberal culture.
And so therefore you, um, you might as well be in a, you might as well not even have the
first amendment. And there's a lot of examples like that where the culture has to do its part
for the true liberal games to be enjoyed. So it's just much more complicated, much more nuanced
than the power games. It's kind of, it's kind of a set of basic laws that then are coupled with a
basic spirit to create this very awesome human environment that's also very vulnerable. So what
do you mean the culture has to play along? So for something like a freedom of speech to work,
there has to be a basic, what, decency? That if all people are perfectly good, then perfect
freedom without any restrictions is great. It's where the human nature starts getting a little
iffy. We start being cruel to each other. We start being, uh, greedy and, uh, desiring of harm and
also the narcissist and sociopaths and psychopaths in society, all of that. That's when you start to
have to inject some limitations on that freedom. Yeah. I mean, if, if, um, so that, what the
government basically says is we're going to let everyone be mostly free. Um, but no one, no one
is going to be free to physically harm other people or to steal their property. Right. Um,
and so we're, we're also, we're all agreeing to sacrifice that, you know, that, that 20%
of our freedom. And then in return, all of us in theory can be 80% free. And that's kind of the,
the bargain. Um, but now that's a lot of freedom to leave people with. And a lot of people choose,
it's like, you're so free in the U S you're actually free to be unfree. If you choose,
that's kind of what an echo chamber is to me. It's, you know, um, you can, you can choose
to kind of be friends with people who, uh, essentially make it, make it so uncomfortable
to speak your mind that it's no actual effective difference for you. Then if you lived in a
country, if, if you can't, you know, criticize Christianity in a certain community that you have
a first amendment, so you're not going to get arrested by the government for criticizing
Christianity. But if you, but if, but if you have this, if the social penalties are so extreme
that it's just never worth it, you might as well be in a country that imprisons people for
criticizing Christianity. And so that same thing goes for, for wokeness, right? This is what people
get, you know, cancel culture and stuff. So when the reason these things are bad is because they're
actually, they're depriving Americans of the beauty of the freedom of the liberal games by,
you know, imposing a social culture that is very power games-esque. It's basically a power games
culture comes in and you might as well be in the power games now. And so liberal, if you live in a
liberal democracy, it's, it's, you, there will be always be challenges to a liberal culture,
lowercase L, liberal. There'll always be challenges to a liberal culture from people who
are much more interested in playing the power games. And, and, and, and there has to be kind
of an immune system that stands up to that culture and says, that's not how we do things here in
America. Actually, we don't excommunicate people for not having the right religious beliefs or not,
you know, we don't disinvite a speaker from campus for having the wrong political beliefs.
And if it doesn't stand up for itself, it's, it's, it's like the immune system of the community
like the immune system of the country failing and power games rushes in.
So, uh, before chapter four in your book, uh, and the chapters that will surely result in you being
burned at the stake, you write quote, we'll start our pitchfork tour in this chapter by taking a
brief trip through the history of the Republican party. Then in the following chapters, we'll take
a Tim's career tanking deep dive into America's social justice movement as you started to talk
about. Okay, so let's go. Uh, what's the history of the Republican party? I'm looking at this
through my vertical ladder. I'm saying, what is this, this familiar story of the Republicans from
the sixties to today? What does it look like through the vertical lens? Right? Does it look
different? And, and, and is there, is there an interesting story here that's been kind of hidden
because we're always looking at the horizontal. Now the horizontal story, you'll hear people
talk about it and it's, they'll say something like they're, the Republicans have moved farther
and farther to the right. And, um, and to me that that's not really true. Like it was Trump
more right wing than Reagan. I don't think so. I think he's left. Yeah. So it's, so we're using
this again, it's just like you're, you're calling yourself centrist when it's not exactly what you
mean, even though it also is. Yeah. So I, again, this, I was like, okay, look, this vertical lens
helps with other things. Let's, let's apply it to the Republicans. And here, here's what I saw is
I looked at the sixties and I saw an interesting story, which is, I don't think that, you know,
not everyone's familiar with like what happened in the early sixties, but the 1960, the Republican
party was very, it was a plurality. You had progressives like genuine, you know, Rockefeller,
you know, pretty progressive people, um, all the way to, you know, then you had the, you know,
moderates like Eisenhower and Dewey, and then you go all the way to the farther, right. You had
Goldwater and you know what you might call, I call them the fundamentalists. Um, and so
it's this interesting plurality, right? Something we don't have today. And what happened was the,
the Goldwater contingent, which was the underdog, they were small, right? The Eisenhower was the
president, uh, had just been the president and was, it seemed like the moderates were,
you know, that was the, that's the, he said, you have to be close to the center of the chessboard.
That's where that's, that's how you maintain power. These people were very far from the
center of the chessboard, but they ended up basically have like a hostile takeover.
They conquered their own party and they did it by breaking all of the kind of unwritten
rules and norms. So they did things like they first started with like the college Republicans,
which was like this feeder group that turned in, you know, a lot of the politicians started there
and they, they, they went to the election and they wouldn't let the, the current president,
the incumbent speak and they were throwing chairs and they were fistfights and eventually people
gave up and they just sat there and they sat in the chair talking for, you know, their,
their candidate until everyone eventually left and then they declared victory. So
they basically, they, they, they, they, they came in, there were, there was a,
there was a certain set of rules, agreed upon rules and they came in playing the power games
saying, well, actually if we do this, you won't have the power, you know, we have the power to,
to take it if we just break all the rules. Right. And so they did and they won and that
became this hugely influential thing, which then they, then they conquered California through again,
these, these people were taken aback, these, you know, these, these, these proper Republican
candidates were appalled by the kind of like, you know, the insults that were being hurled
to them and the intimidation and the bullying. And eventually they ended up in the national
convention, which was called like the right-wing Woodstock. It was like, you know, the Republican
national convention in 64 was just, they, again, there was jeering and they wouldn't let their
moderates or the progressives even speak. And there was racism, you know, you know,
Jackie Robinson was there and he was a proud Republican. And he said that like,
he feels like he was a Jew in Hitler's Germany with the way that blacks were being treated there
and it was nasty. And, but what did they do? They, they had to had fiery, you know,
plurality enough to win and they won. They ended up getting crushed in the general election and
they kind of faded away. But to me, I was like, what's, that was an interesting story. I see it
as, I have this character in the book called the Golem, which is a big, kind of a big, dumb,
powerful monster. That's the, you know, the emergent property of like a political
echo chamber. It's like this big giant. It's stupid, but it's powerful and scary.
And to me, I was like a Golem rose up, conquered the party for a second, knocked it on its ass,
and then, and then faded away. And to me, when I look to the Trump revolution and a lot,
and not just Trump, the last 20 years, I see that same lower right, that lower right monster,
kind of making another charge for it, but this time succeeding and really taking over the party
for a long period of time. I see the same story, which is the power games are being played in a
in a situation when it had always been, the government relies on all these unwritten rules
and norms to function. But for example, you have in 2016, Merrick Garland gets nominated by
Obama and the unwritten norm says that when the president nominates a justice, then you pass them
through unless there's some egregious thing. That's what has happened. But they said, actually,
this is the last year of his presidency and the people should choose. I don't think we should set
a new precedent where the president can't nominate people, nominate a Supreme Court justice in the
last year. So they pass it through and it ends up being Gorsuch. And so they lose that seat.
Now, three years later, it's Trump's last year and it's another election year and Ginsburg dies.
And what did they say? They say, oh, let's keep our precedent. They said, no, oh, actually,
we changed our mind. We're going to nominate Amy Barrett. So to me, that is classic power games,
right? There's no actual rule. And what you're doing is they did technically have the power to
block the nomination then and then they technically had the power to put someone in and they're
pretending there's some principle to it, but they're just, they're going for the short-term
edge at the expense of what is like the workings of the system in the long run. And then one of the
Democrats have to do in that situation, because both parties have been doing this, is they either
can lose now all the time or they start playing the power games too. And now you have a prisoner's
dilemma where it's like both end up doing this thing and everyone ends up worse off,
the debt ceiling, all these power plays that are being made where he's holding the country
hostage. This is power games. And to me, that's what Goldwater was doing in the sixties,
but it was a healthier time in a way because there was this plurality within the parties
reduced some of the national tribalism and that there wasn't as much of an appeal to that.
But today it's just like, do whatever you have to do to beat the enemies. And so I'm seeing a
rise in power games. And I talk about the Republicans because they did a lot of these
things first. They have been a little bit more egregious, but both parties have been doing it
over the last 20, 30 years. Can you place a blame or maybe there's a different term for it
at the subsystems of this? So is it the media? Is it the politicians like in the Senate and
in Congress, is it Trump? So the leadership, is it, or maybe it's us human beings, maybe
social media versus mainstream media. Is there a sense of where, what is the cause of what is
the symptom? It's very complex. So Ezra Klein is a great book, Why We're Polarized, where he talks
about a lot of this and there's, there's, there's some of these are, you know, it's really no one's
fault. First of all, it's the environment has changed in a bunch of ways you just mentioned.
And what happens when you take human nature, which is a constant, and you put it into an environment,
behavior comes out. The environment is the independent variable. When that changes,
the dependent variable, the behavior changes with it, right? And so the environment has changed in
a lot of ways. So one major one is it used to for a long time, actually, the, the, the first
it was the Republicans and then the Democrats just had a stranglehold on Senate, on Congress.
There was no, it was not even competitive. The Democrats for 40 years had the majority.
And so therefore it actually is a decent environment to compromise it because now we can
both, you know, what you want is Congress people thinking about their home district and, and,
you know, voting yes on a national policy because we're going to get a good deal on it back at home.
That's actually healthy as opposed to voting in lockstep together because this is what the
red party is doing, regardless of what's good for my home district. You know, an example is
Obamacare. You know, there were certain Republican districts that would have actually officially been
benefited by Obamacare, but every Republican voted against it. So, and part of the reason
is because there's no longer this obvious majority. Every few years it switches. It's a 50-50 thing.
And that's, you know, partially because it's become so, we've been so subsumed with this
one national divide of left versus right that, that, that, that the people are not,
people are whoever, you know, they're voting for the same party for president
all the way down the ticket now. And so you have this just kind of 50-50 color war
and that's awful for compromise. So there's like 10 of these things, you know, that have redistricting,
but also it is social media. It is, you know, I call it hypercharged tribalism. We've, you know,
in the sixties you had kind of distributed tribalism. You had some people that are worked
up about the USSR, right? They're national. That's what they care about. US versus foreign. You had
some people that were saying left versus right, like they are today. And then other people that
were saying that they were fighting within the party. But today you don't have that. It's, it's
you have ideological realignment. So you kind of got rid of a lot of the in-party fighting.
And then there hasn't been that big of a foreign threat, nothing like the USSR for a long time.
So you kind of lost that. And what's left is just this left versus right thing. And so that's kind
of this hypercharged whirlpool that subsumes everything. And, and so, yeah, it's, I mean,
people point to Newt Gingrich, you know, and people like there's certain characters that
enacted policies that stoked this kind of thing. But I think this is a much bigger kind of
environmental shift. Well, that's going back to our questions about the role of individuals in
human history. So the interesting, one of the many interesting questions here is about Trump.
Is he a symptom or a cause? Because he seems to be from the public narrative, such a significant
catalyst for some of the things we're seeing. This goes back to what we were talking about
earlier, right? Like, is it, is it the person or is the times? I think he's a perfect example of
it's a both situation. I don't think that, I don't think if you pluck Trump out of this situation,
I don't think that Trump was inevitable, but I think we were very vulnerable to a demagogue.
And if you hadn't been, Trump would have had no chance. And so why were we vulnerable to a
demagogue is because you have these, I mean, I think it's specifically on the right.
If you actually look at the stats, it's pretty bad. Like the people who, because, because it's
not just who voted for Trump. A lot of people just vote for the red, right? What's interesting
is who voted for Obama against Romney and then voted for Trump? Who, you know, these are not
racists, right? These are not hardcore Republicans. They voted for Obama. And where did the switch
come from? Places that had economic despair, where bridges were not working well. That's a
signifier, you know, where, where, where paint's chipping in the schools, you know, these little
things like this. So I think that, you know, you had this, a lot of these kind of rural towns,
you have true despair, and then you also have a, the number one indicator of voting for Trump
was distrust in media and the media has become much less trustworthy, you know? And so you, you,
you have the, the, all these ingredients that actually make us very vulnerable to a demagogue
and a demagogue is someone who takes advantage, right? There's someone who comes in and says,
I can pull all the right strings and pull it and, and, and push all the right emotional
buttons right now and get myself power by taking advantage of the circumstances. And that is what
and that is what Trump totally did. It makes me wonder how easy it is for somebody who's a
charismatic leader to capitalize on cultural resentment when, when there's economic hardship
to channel that. So John Haidt wrote a great article about like, we basically we like truth
is in an all time low right now. Like, it's the media is not penalized for lying. Yeah. Right?
MSNBC, Fox News, these are not penalized for being inaccurate. They're penalized if they stray from
the orthodoxy. On social media, it's not the truest tweets that go viral, right? And so Trump
understood that better than anyone, right? He, he, he took advantage of it. He, he was living
in the current world when everyone else was stuck in the past and he saw that and he just
lied. He, everything he said, you know, it doesn't, truth was not relevant at all, right?
It's just, it's just truly, it's not relevant to him when what he's talking about. He doesn't care.
And, and, and he knew that neither do as a subset of the country. I was thinking about this, just
reading articles by journalists, especially when you're not a, um, a famous journalist in yourself,
but you're more like in your times journalists. So the big famous thing is the institution you're
part of that like, you can just lie because you're not going to get punished for it. You're going to
be rewarded for the popularity of an article. So if you write 10 articles, it's, there's a huge
incentive to just make stuff up. You got to get clicks. To get clicks. That's the first and foremost,
and like culturally people will attack that article to say, it's not like one half the country
will attack that article for saying it's dishonest, but they'll kind of forget the, um, you will not
have a reputational hit, right? There won't be a memory. Like this person made up a lot of stuff
in the past. No, they'll take one article at a time and they'll attach the reputation hits will
be to New York times, the institution. And so for the individual journalist, there's a huge incentive
to make stuff up. Totally. It's, it's, it's, and it's scary because it's almost that you can't
survive if you're just an old school, honest journalist who really works hard and tries to get
it right and does it with nuance. Like you, what you can be is you can be a big time sub stacker
or big time podcaster. A lot of people do have a reputation for accuracy and rigor and they have
huge audiences. But, um, if you're working in a big company right now, um, it's, I mean, especially,
I mean, like I, I, I think that many of the big media brands are very much controlled by the left
and, but I will say that that the ones that are controlled by the right or even more egregious,
um, not just in terms of accuracy, but also in terms of, you know, the New York times for all
of its criticisms, they have a handful of, uh, they, they, every day here and there, they put
out a pretty, you know, uh, uh, an article that strays from the handle Barry Weiss wrote there
for a long time. And then you've got, um, they wrote an article criticizing free speech on campus
stuff, you know, recently. Um, and they have, you know, they have a couple very, you know,
left, uh, progressive friendly conservatives, but they have conservatives that are operating the
op-eds. Fox news, you know, you're not seeing thoughtful, uh, Breitbart. You're not seeing
thoughtful progressives writing there, right? There's some degree to which the New York times,
I think still incentivizing the values, the vertical, the high effort. So you're allowed to
have a conservative opinion if you do a really damn good job. Like if it's a very thorough,
in-depth kind of, and if you kind of pander to the progressive senses and all the right ways,
you know, I always joke that, you know, Ted, they always have a couple, you know,
token conservatives, but they get on stage and they're basically like, so totally you're all,
you know, the progressivism is, it's right about all of this, but maybe, maybe, you know,
libertarianism isn't all about, you know, so there, there is an element, but you know what,
it's, it's something it's better than the, than being a total tribal. I think you can,
you can see the New York times tug of war, the internal tug of war. You can see it because then
they also have these awful instances, you know, or like, you know, the firing of James Bennett,
which is this whole other story, but like they have you, yeah, you can see it going both ways,
but in the sixties, what did you have? You had ABC, NBC, CBS, you know, the seventies,
you know, you had these three news channels and they weren't always right. And they definitely
sometimes spun a narrative together, maybe about the Vietnam or whatever, but they, if one of them
was just lying, they'd be embarrassed for it. They would be penalized. They'd be dinged and they'd be
known as this is the trash one. And that would be terrible for their ratings because they weren't
just catering to half the country. They were kidding. They all were kidding to the whole
country. So both on the axis of accuracy and on the axis of neutrality, they had to,
you know, try to stay somewhere in the, the, the reasonable range. And that's just gone.
One of the things I'm really curious about is I think your book is incredible. I'm very curious
to see how it's written about by the press. Cause I could see, click, I could myself, right. With
the help of Chad GPT, of course, click bait articles in either direction. Yeah. It's easy
to imagine your whole book is beautifully written for click bait articles. If any journalists out
there need help, I can, I can help. I can write the most atrocious criticisms. Yeah. I'm I'm, I'm,
I'm, I'm, I'm ready. I'm braced. Yeah. So speaking of which, you write about social justice,
you write about two kinds of social justice, liberal social justice and S J F social justice
fundamentalism. What are those? Yeah. So like the term wokeness is so loaded with baggage.
It's kind of like mocking and derogatory. And that's, I was trying not to do that in this book.
Um, if it's the terms loaded with baggage, you're already kind of, you're out, you're out,
you're from, from the first minute you're already behind. Um, so to me, uh, it, it also that when,
when people say wokeness is bad, social justice is bad, they're throwing the baby out with the
bathwater. Um, because the, the, you know, the proudest tradition in the U S is liberal social
justice. And what I mean by that, again, liberal meaning with lowercase L it is, it is intertwined
with liberalism. So Martin Luther King classic example, his, I have a dream speech. He says stuff
like this country, you know, is, you know, has, has made a promise to all of its citizens and it
has broken that promise to its black citizens, right? In other words, liberalism, the constitution,
the core ideals, those are great. We're not living up to them. We're failing on some of them.
So civil disobedience, the goal of it wasn't to, to hurt liberalism is to specifically break the
laws that were already violating liberal that were the laws that were a violation of liberalism
to expose that this is illiberal, that the constitution should not have people of different
skin color sitting in different parts of the bus. And so it was, it was kind of a, it was really
patriotic. You know, the civil rights movement was saying, this is a beautiful, you know, we have a,
we have a liberalism is this beautiful thing and we need to do better at it. So I call it liberal
social justice. And it used the tools of liberalism to try to, uh, to try to, uh, improve the flaws
and that were going on. So free speech, you know, Mario Savio in the sixties was the, you know,
he's a leftist and what, what would the leftist doing in the sixties on Berkeley campus? You know,
they were saying we need more free speech, um, because that's what social, liberal social justice
was fighting for. But you can also go back to the twenties women's suffrage. I mean, so the, the,
you know, the emancipation, the, the, the thing that America obviously has all of it's these,
these are, these are all ugly things that it had to get out of, but it got out of them, you know,
one by one and it's still getting out of them. That's, what's cool about America and liberal
social justice basically is the practice of saying, where are we not being perfect liberals?
And now let's fix that. So that that's the idea of liberalism that permeates the history
of the United States, but then there's interplay. You have so many good images in this book,
but one of them is a highlighting the interplay of different ideas over the past, uh, let's say
a hundred years. So liberalism is on one side. There's that thread there's Marxism on the other,
and then there's post-modernism. How do those interplay together? So it's interesting because
Marxism is, and all of its various, you know, descendants, obviously there's a lot of things
that are rooted in Marxism that aren't, you know, the same thing as what Karl Marx preached,
but what do they all have in common? They think liberalism is bad, right? They actually think that,
um, that the opposite of what Martin Luther King and other people, uh, in the civil rights and
other movements, they think the opposite. They think he thinks, you know, liberalism is good.
We need to preserve it. They said liberalism is the problem. These other problems with racism and
inequality that we're seeing, those are inevitable results of liberalism. Liberalism is a rigged game
and it's just the power games in disguise. There is no liberal games. It's just the power games
in disguise and there's the upper people that oppress the lower people and they convince the
lower people. It's all about false consciousness. They convinced the lower people that everything
is fair and now the lower people vote against their own interests and they, and they, and they
work to preserve the system that's oppressing them. And what do we need to do? We need to
actually, there's much more revolutionary. We need to overthrow liberalism, right? So
people think is, oh, you know, like what we call a wokeness is just, you know, a normal social
justice activists activism, but it's like more extreme, right? It's this, no, no, it's the
polar opposite, polar opposite. And so, um, now that's, that's, that's the Marxist threat. Now,
postmodernism is kind of, you know, this term that is super controversial and I don't think
anyone calls themselves a postmodernist or take all of this with a grain of salt in terms of the
term, but what's the definition of radical? The definition of radical to me is how deep
you want change to happen at. So, so, um, a liberal progressive and, uh, and a conservative
progressive will disagree about policies. The liberal progressive wants to, you know, change
a lot of policies and change, change, change, right? And the conservative is more wants to
keep things the way they are, but they're both conservative when it comes to liberalism, um,
beneath it, the liberal kind of foundation of the country. They both want to, they both become
conservatives about that. The Marxist is more radical because they want to go one notch deeper
and actually overthrow that foundation. Now what's below, what's below liberalism is kind of the
core tenets of modernity. Um, this idea of reason and, um, the notion that there is an objective
truth and, um, uh, science as the scientific method, right? These things are actually beneath
and even the Marxist, if you look at the Frankfurt school, you know, these, these, these, these
post Marxist thinkers and, and Marx himself, they were not anti science. They believed in that
bottom, bottom foundation. They were, they were, they were, they were actually wanted to preserve
modernity, but they wanted to get rid of liberalism on top of it. The postmodernist is
even more radical because they want to actually go down to the bottom level and overthrow it.
They think science itself is a tool of oppression. They think it's a tool, uh, where oppression kind
of flows through. You know, they think that the white Western world has invented these concepts.
Like, you know, they, they claim that there's an objective truth and that there's, you know, reason
in science and they think all of that is just one meta narrative and right. And it, and it goes a
long way to serve the interests of the powerful. So in the sense that it's almost caricatured,
but they, that is to the core of their beliefs that math could be racist, for example. Oh yeah,
not the education of math, but literally math and mathematics notion in math, that there's a right
answer and a wrong answer that they believe is a meta narrative that serves white supremacy or in,
in, in the, the postmodernist might've said it serves just the powerful or the wealthy,
but so what social justice fundamentalism is, is you take the Marxist thread that has been going on
in lots of countries and has, and whoever the upper and lower is, that's what they all have
in common, but the upper and lower, you know, and for, for Marx was the ruling class and the
oppressed class, it was economic. And then, but you come here and, and, and the economic class
doesn't, you know, it doesn't resonate as much here as it did maybe in some of those other places,
but what does resonate here in the sixties and seventies is race and gender and these kind of
social justice disagreements. And so what social justice fundamentalism is, is it's basically this,
this tried and true framework of, of Marx, you know, this Marxist framework kind of with a new
skin on it, which is American social justice, and then made even more radical with the infusion of
postmodernism where, you know, not just as liberalism bad, but actually the sign, you know,
that, that, like you said, math can be racist. So it's this kind of like philosophical Frankenstein,
this like stitched together of these and has, and so again, it's called you, you know, they,
they wear the same uniform as the liberal social justice. They say social justice, right? You know,
racial equality, but it has nothing to do with liberal social justice. It is directly opposed
to liberal social justice. It's fascinating. The evolution of ideas, if, if we ignore the harm done
by it, it's fascinating how humans get together and involve these ideas. So as you show Marxism
is the idea that society is a zero sum. I mean, I guess the zero sum is a really important thing
here. A zero sum struggle between the ruling class and the working class with power being exerted
through politics and economics. Then you add critical theory, Marxism 2.0 on top of that,
and you add to politics and economics, you add culture and institutions. And then on top of that,
for postmodernism, you add science, you have morality, basically anything else you can think
of. To stitch together Frankenstein. And if you notice, and which is not necessarily bad,
but in this case, I think it's actually violating the Marxist tradition by being anti-science.
And it's violating the postmodernism because what postmodernists were, they were radical skeptics,
not just of, they were radical skeptics, not just of the way things were, but of their own beliefs.
And what, and social justice fundamentalism is suddenly is not at all self critical. It says
that we have the answers, which is the opposite of what postmodernists would ever say. They say,
no, you're just have another meta narrative. So, and it's also violating, of course, the tradition
of like liberal social justice in a million ways, because it's anti-liberal. And so this Frankenstein
comes together. Meanwhile, liberal social justice doesn't have a Frankenstein. It's very clear.
It's very, it's a crisp ideology that says we need, they're trying to make, we're trying to
get to a more perfect union. They're trying to keep the promises made in the constitution.
And that's what it's trying to do. And so it's much simpler in a lot of ways.
So you, you write that my big problem with social justice fundamentalism isn't the ideology itself.
It's what its scholars and activists started to do sometimes around 2013 when they began to wield a
cudgel that's not supposed to have any place in the country like the US. So it's the actions,
not the ideas. Well, to be clear, I don't like the ideology. I think it's a low rung ideology.
I think it's in morally inconsistent based on, you know, it's flip flops on, on its morals,
depending on the, the, the group. I think it's echo chamber-y. I think it's, um, I think it's,
it's, it's full of inaccuracies and kind of can't stand up to debate. So I think it's a low, but,
but there's a ton of low rung ideologies. I don't like, I don't like a lot of religious doctrines.
I don't like a lot of political doctrines, right? The US is a place inherently that is a mishmash
of a ton of ideologies and I'm not going to like two thirds of them at any given time.
So my problem, the reason I'm writing about this is not cause I'm like, by the way,
this ideology is not something I like. That's not interesting. The reason that it must be written
about right now, this particular ideology is because it's not playing nicely with others.
What, what, what I, if you, if you want to be a hardcore, you know, evangelical Christian,
go in the US says live and let live. Not only are you allowed to have an echo chamber of some kind,
you're, it's actively protected here. Live and let live. They can do what they want. You do what you
want. Now, if the evangelical Christian started saying, by the way, anyone who says anything
that conflicts with evangelical Christianity is going to be severely socially punished and they
have the cultural power to do so, which they don't in this case, they might like to, but they don't
have the power, but they're able to get anyone fired who they want. And they're able to actually
change the curriculum in all of these schools in class to suddenly not conflict with no more
evolution in the, in the textbooks because they don't want it. Now I would write a book about
why I, about evangelical Christianity, because that's what every liberal, regardless of what
you think of the actual horizontal beliefs, it doesn't matter what they believe when,
when they start violating live and let live and shutting down other area, other segments of
society. And in kind of, it's almost like a, you know, not to, you know, it's not the best analogy,
but like a, it's like a, an echo chamber is like a benign tumor. And what you, what you have to watch
out for is a tumor that starts to metastasize, starts to forcefully spread and damage the tissue
around it. And that's what this particular ideology has been doing. Do you worry about it,
you know, as an existential threat to, to liberalism in, in the West and the United States,
is it a problem or is it the biggest problem that's threatening all of human civilization?
It's, I would never, I would not say it's the biggest problem. It might be. I wouldn't,
if someone, if it turns out in 50 years, someone says actually it was, I wouldn't be shocked.
But I also, I would, I wouldn't bet on that because there's a lot of problems.
I'm a little sorry to interrupt. It is popular to say that kind of thing though.
And it's less popular to say the same thing about AI or nuclear weapons, which worries me that I'm
more worried about nuclear weapons even still than I am about wokeism. So I've gotten, I've
had probably a thousand arguments about this. That's one nice thing about spending six years
procrastinating on getting a book done is you end up test battle testing your ideas a million times.
So I've heard this one a lot, right? Which is, there's kind of three groups of former Obama
voters. One is super woke now. Another one is super anti-woke now. And the third is what you
just said, which is sure, wokeness is over the top, right? They're not, you're not woke, but
I think that the anti-woke people are totally lost their mind and it's just not that big a deal,
right? Now here's why I disagree with that. Because it's not, it's not wokeness itself.
It's that a radical political movement of which there will always be a lot in the country
has managed to do something that a radical movement's not supposed to be able to do in
the US, which is they've managed to hijack institutions all across the country and hijack
medical journals and universities and, you know, the ACLU, you know, all the activist organizations
and nonprofits and NGOs. Yeah, and many tech companies. And so it's not that I think this
thing is so bad. It's a little like we said with Trump. It's that the reason Trump scares me is not
because Trump's so bad. It's that because it shows, it reveals that we were vulnerable to a
demagogue candidate. And what wokeness reveals to me is that we are currently, and until something
changes, we'll continue to be vulnerable to a bully movement and a forcefully expansionist
movement that wants to actually destroy the workings, their liberal gears and tear them
apart. And so here's the way I view a liberal democracy is it is a bunch of these institutions
that were trial and error crafted over, you know, hundreds of years, and they all rely on trust,
public trust, and a certain kind of feeling of unity that actually is critical to a liberal
democracy's functioning. And what I see this thing is, is as a parasite on that, that whose goal
is, and I'm not saying each, by the way, each individual in this is I don't think they're bad
people. I think that it's the ideology itself has the property of its goal is to tear apart
the pretty delicate workings of the liberal democracy and shred the critical lines of trust.
And so you talk about AI and you talk about all these other big problems, nuclear, right?
The reason I stopped, I like writing about that stuff a lot more than I like writing
about politics. This wasn't a fun topic for me is because I realized that like all of those things,
if we're going to have a good future with those things and they're actually threats,
like I said, we need to have our wits about us and we need the liberal, you know, gears and,
and levers working. We need the liberal machine working. And so if something's threatening to
undermine that, it affects everything else. We need to have our scientific mind about us,
about these foundational ideas. But I guess my sense of hope comes from observing the immune
system respond to wokeism. There seems to be a pro-liberalism immune system. And not only that,
and not only that, so like there's intellectuals, there's people that are willing to do the fight.
You talk about courage, being courageous, and there is a hunger for that such that those ideas
can become viral and they take over. So I just don't see a mechanism by which wokeism accelerates
like exponentially and takes over, like it's expand. It feels like as it expands,
the immune system responds. The immune system of liberalism, of basically a country,
at least in the United States, that still ultimately at the core of the individual values
the freedom of speech, just freedoms in general, the freedom of an individual.
But that's the battle, which is stronger. So to me, it is like a virus and an immune system.
And I totally agree. I see the same story happening. And I'm sitting here rooting for
the immune system. Well, here's the thing. So a liberal democracy is always going to be vulnerable
to a movement like this, right? And there will be more because it's not a totalitarian dictatorship,
because if you can socially pressure people to not say what they're thinking, you can suddenly
start to just take over, right? You can break the liberalism of the liberal democracy quite easily,
and suddenly a lot of things are illiberal. On the other hand, the same vulnerability,
the same system that's vulnerable to that also is hard to truly conquer.
Because now the Maoists, right, similar kind of vibe. They were saying that science is evil
and that the intellectuals, it's all this big conspiracy. But they could murder you.
And they had the hard cudgel in their hand, right? And the hard cudgel is scary and you
can conquer a country with the hard cudgel, but you can't use that in the U.S. So what they have
is a soft cudgel, which can have the same effect. Initially, you can scare people into shutting up.
You can't maybe imprison them and murder them, but if you can socially ostracize them and get
them fired, that basically is going to have the same effect. So the soft cudgel can have
the same effect for a while, but the thing is, it's a little bit of a house of cards,
because it relies on fear. And as soon as that fear goes away, the whole thing falls apart,
right? The soft cudgel requires people to be so scared of getting canceled or getting whatever.
And as soon as some people start, you know, Toby Lutka of Shopify, I always think about,
you know, he just said, you know what, I'm not scared of this soft cudgel, and spoke up
and said, we're not political at this company, and we're not a family, we're a team, and we're
going to do this. And you know what? Like, they're thriving.
He will be on this podcast. He seems like a fascinating human.
He's amazing.
He spoke up. He's saying that we're not going to do this.
He's one of the smartest and like, kindest dudes, but he's also,
he has courage at a time when it's hard. But here's the thing, is that it's different than
that you need so much less courage against a soft cudgel than you do the Iranians throwing
the Iranians throwing their hijabs into the fire. Those people's courage just, just blows
away any courage we have here because they might get executed. That's the thing is that
you can actually have courage right now. And it's so don't worry about it.
Oh man, the irony of that. And you talk about the two things to fight this. There's two
things, awareness and courage. What's the awareness piece?
The awareness piece is, um, is, is under first, just no understanding the stakes,
like getting our heads out of the sand and being like, technology is blowing up exponentially.
We're our society's trust is devolving. Like we're, we're kind of falling apart in some
important ways. We're losing our grip on some stability at the worst time. That's the first
point. Just the big picture. And then also awareness of, I think this vertical axis or
whatever your version of it is, this concept of how do I really form my beliefs? Where
do they actually come from? Where do you know, did they, are they someone else's beliefs?
Am I following a checklist? Um, how about my values? It, you know, I used to identify
with the blue party or the red party, but now they've changed and I suddenly am okay
with that. Is that because my values changed with it or am I actually anchored to the party?
Not to any principle, asking yourself these questions, um, asking your, you know,
looking for where do I feel disgusted by fellow human beings? You know, that maybe I'm being
a crazy tribal person without realizing it. How about the people around me? Am I being bullied
by some echo chamber without realizing it? Um, am I the bully somewhere? Right. So that's the
first, just, just, just, I think just to kind of do a self audit and, and, and, um, and I think
that like, just, just some awareness like that, just a self audit about these things can, can go
a long way. But if you don't, if you keep it to yourself, it's almost useless because if it
doesn't, if you don't have, without, you know, awareness without courage does very little. So
courage is when you take that awareness and you actually export it out into the world and it
starts affecting other people. And so courage can happen on multiple levels. It can happen
by, first of all, just stop saying stuff you don't believe. If you're being pressured by a
kind of a ideology or a movement to say stuff that you don't actually believe, just stop, just,
just, just staying your ground and don't say anything. That's, that's courage. That's one
first step. Start speaking out in small groups. Start, you know, actually speaking your mind,
see what happens. The sky doesn't usually fall. Actually, people usually respect you for it. Like,
you know, and there's not, not every group, but like, you'd be surprised. And then eventually,
you know, maybe start speaking out in bigger groups, start going public, you know, go, go
public with it. But, and you don't need everyone doing this, but some people will lose their jobs
for it. I'm not talking to those people. Most people won't lose their jobs, but they have the
same fear as if they would. Right. And it's like, what are you going to get criticized? Or are you
going to get a bunch of people, you know, angry Twitter people will, will criticize you like it?
Yeah, it's not pleasant, but actually that's a little bit like our primitive minds fear that
really back when it was programmed, that kind of ostracism or criticism will get, leave you out of
the tribe and you'll die. Today, it's kind of a delusional fear. It's not actually that scary.
And the people who realize that it can, can exercise incredible leadership right now.
So, you have a really interesting description of censorship, of self-censorship also,
as you've been talking about. Who's king mustache? And this gap, I think, I hope you write even more,
even more than you've written in the book about these ideas because it's so strong.
This, this censorship gaps that are created between the dormant thought pile and the kind
of thing under the speech curve. Yeah. So, first of all, so I like to think of,
I think it's a useful tool is this thing called a thought pile, which is if you have a, on any given
issue, you have a horizontal spectrum and just say, I could take your brain out of your head
and I put it on the thought pile right where you happen to believe about that issue. Now,
I did that for everyone in the, in the community or in a society. And you're going to end up with
a big mushy pile that I think will often form a bell curve. If it's really politicized,
it might form like a camel with two humps because it's like concentrated here. But
for a typical issue, it'll just form, you know, a fear of AI. You're going to have
a bell curve, right? You know, things like this. That's the thought pile.
Now, the second thing is a line that I call the speech curve, which is what people are saying.
So, the speech curve is high when not just a lot of people are saying it, but it's being said from
the biggest platforms, being said in the, you know, on the, you know, in the New York Times,
and it's being said by the president on, you know, in the State of the Union. You know,
those things are the top of the speech curve. Now, and then, you know, and then when the speech
curves lower, it means it's being said either whispered in small groups or it's just not very
many people are talking about it. Now, a healthy, when a free speech democracy is healthy on a
certain topic, you've got the speech curve sitting right on top of the thought pile. They mirror
each other, which is naturally what would happen. More people think something is going to be said
more often and from higher platforms. What censorship does, and that censorship can be
from the government, so I use the tale of King Mustache, and King Mustache, he's a little tiny
tyrant, and he's very sensitive, and people are making fun of his mustache, and they're saying
he's not a good king, and he does not like that. So, what does he do? He enacts a policy, and he
says, anyone who has heard criticizing me or my mustache or my rule,
will be put to death. And immediately, at the town, because his father was a very liberal,
there was always free speech in his kingdom, but now King Mustache has taken over, and he's saying
this is a new rules now. And so, a few people yell out, and they say, that's not how we do things
here. And that moment is what I call a moment of truth. Did the king's guards stand with the
principles of the kingdom and say, yeah, King Mustache, that's not what we do, in which case
he would kind of have to, he's nothing he can do. Or are they going to execute? So, in this case,
it's as if he laid down an electric fence over a part of the stockpile and said, no one's allowed
to speak over here. The speech curve, maybe people will think these things, but the speech curve
cannot go over here. But the electric fence wasn't actually electrified until the king's guards,
in a moment of truth, get scared and say, okay, and they hang the five people who spoke out.
So, in that moment, that fence just became electric. And now, no one criticizes King
Mustache anymore. So, I use this as an allegory. Now, of course, he has a hard cudgel, because he
has a hard cudgel, because he can execute people. But now, when we look at the US, what you're
seeing right now is a lot of pressure, which is very similar. An electric fence is being laid
down saying, no one can criticize these ideas. And if you do, you won't be executed, you'll be
canceled. You'll be fired. Now, is that fence electrified from there? No, they're not working
the company, they can't fire you. But they can start a Twitter mob when someone violates that
speech curve, when someone violates that speech rule. And then the leadership at the company
has the moment of truth. And what the leaders should do is stand up for their company's values,
which is almost always in favor of the employee and say, look, you know, even if they made a
mistake, people make mistakes, we're not going to fire them. Or maybe that person actually said
something that's reasonable and we should discuss it. But either way, we're not going to fire them.
And if they said no, what happens is that the Twitter mob actually doesn't have,
they can't execute you. They, they, they go away. And the fence has proven to have no electricity.
What's been the problem with the past few years is what's happened again and again
is the leader gets scared and they don't, they get scared of the Twitter mob when they fire them.
Boom, that fence has electricity. And now actually, if you cross that, it's not just,
you know, a threat, like you will have, you'll be out of a job. Like it's really bad. Like you'll
have a huge penalty. You might not be able to feed your kids. So that's an electric fence that goes
up. Now what happens when an electric fence goes up and it's proven to actually be electrified?
The speech curve morphs into a totally different position. And now these new people say, instead
of having the kind of marketplace of ideas, you know, turns into a kind of a natural bell curve,
they say, no, no, no, these ideas are okay to say, not just okay, you'll be socially rewarded.
And these ones don't, that's the rules of their own echo chamber that they're now applying to
everyone and it's working. And so the speech curve distorts. And so you end up with now,
instead of one region, which is a region of kind of active communal thinking,
what people are thinking and saying, you now have three regions. You have a little active
communal thinking, but mostly you now have this dormant thought pile, which is all these,
these opinions that suddenly everyone's scared to say out loud. Everyone's thinking,
but they're scared to say, everyone's thinking, but no one's saying. And then you have this other
region, which is this, the, the, the approved ideas of this now cultural kind of dictator.
And those are being spoken from the largest platforms and they're being repeated by the
president and they're being repeated all over the place, you know, even though people don't believe
it. And that's this distortion. And what happens is the society becomes really stupid because
active communal thinking is the region where we can actually think together. And now no one can
think together. And it gets, it gets siloed into small private conversations. It's really powerful
what you said about institutions and so on. It's not trivial to, from a leadership position,
to be like, no, we, we defend the employee or defend the, um, yeah, the employee, the person
with us on our, like, cause we don't there's cause there's no actual, uh, ground to the,
any kind of violation we're hearing about. So the mob, they resist the mob and it's
ultimately to the leader, I guess, of a particular institution or a particular company. And it's
difficult. Oh yeah, no, no, it's not, I don't, if it were easy, it wouldn't, it's not, there
wouldn't be all of these failings. And by the way, this is, that's the immune system failing.
That's the liberal immune system of that company failing. But also then it's an example, which
means that a lot of other, you know, it's failing kind of to the country. It's not easy. Of course,
it's not because what, because we have primitive minds that are wired to care so much about what
people think of us. And even if we're not going to, you know, maybe first of all, we're scared
that it's going to start a, cause there's, you know, what, you know, what, what do moms do?
They don't just say, I'm going to criticize you. I'm going to criticize anyone who still
buys your product. I'm going to criticize anyone who goes on your podcast. So it's not just you.
It's now suddenly if, if, if, if, if Lex becomes tarnished enough,
now I go on the podcast and people are saying, oh, I'm not buying his book. He went on Lex
Friedman. No, no thanks. Right. And now I get by there. It's a call. I call it a smear web. Like
you've been smeared and it's so we're in such a, you know, bad time that it smeared travels to me.
And now meanwhile, someone buys my book and tries to share it. Someone said, you're buying that
guy's book. He, you know, he goes on Lex Friedman. You see how this happens, right? So that hasn't
happened in this case, but that, so we are so wired. A that is kind of bad, right? Like that
is actually like bad for you, but, but we're wired to care about it so much because it meant life or
death back in the day. Yeah. Yeah. And luckily in this case, we're both, uh, probably can smear
each other in this conversation. This is wonderful. I smear you all. Given, given the nature of your
book. Um, what do you think about freedom of speech as a term and as an idea, as a way to
resist the mechanism, this mechanism of a dormant thought pile and artificially generated speech,
this ideal of the freedom of speech and protecting speech and celebrating speech.
Well, so this is, this is kind of the point I was talking about earlier about
king mustache made a rule against for he's created official guys. Just, I just love the,
the, one of the amazing things about your book, as you get later and later in the book,
you cover more and more difficult issues as a way to illustrate the importance of the vertical
perspective. But there's something about using hilarious drawings throughout that make it much
more fun. And it takes you away from the personal somehow. And you start thinking in the space of,
and you start thinking in the space of ideas versus like outside of the tribal type of thinking.
So it's, it's a really brilliant, I mean, I would advise for any way to do con when they
write controversial books to have hilarious drawings. It's true. Like put the silly stick
figure in your thing and it lightens, it does it lightens the mood. It gets people's guard down a
little bit, you know, and it works. It reminds people that like, we're all friends here,
right? Like we're, you know, let's like laugh, you know, laugh at ourselves, laugh at the,
laugh at the fact that we're like in a culture where a little bit, and now we can talk about
it, right? As opposed to like getting like religious about it. But, but basically like
King mustache had no first amendment. He said, we, the government is censoring, right? Which is
very common around the world, right? Government central them, the U S you know, again, there's
some, you can argue there's some controversial things recently, but basically the U S the first
amendment isn't the problem, right? No one is being arrested for saying the wrong thing,
but this graph is still happening. And so, so freedom of speech, when people, what, what if,
what people like to say is if someone's camp complaining about a cancel culture and saying,
you know, this is, this is an anti free speech. People like to point out, no, it's not the
government's not arresting you for anything. This is called like, you know, the free market buddy.
Like this is called, you know, you're, you're putting your ideas out and you're getting
criticized and your precious marketplace of ideas. There it is. Right. And I've gotten this a lot.
And this is not making a critical distinction between cancel culture and criticism culture.
Criticism culture is a little bit of this kind of high rung idea lab stuff we talked about.
Criticism culture attacks the idea and, and, and, and, and encourages further discussion,
right? It enlivens discussion. It makes everyone smarter. Cancel culture attacks the person very
different. Criticism culture says, here's why this idea is so bad. Let me tell you,
cancel culture says, here's why this person is bad and no one should talk to them and they should be
fired. And what does that do? It doesn't enliven the discussion. It makes everyone scared to talk
and it's the opposite. It shuts down discussion. So you still have your first amendment, but first
amendment plus cancel culture equals, you might as well be in King, you might as well have government
censorship, right? First amendment plus criticism culture. Great. Now you have this vibrant
marketplace of ideas. So there's a very clear difference. And so when, when people criticize
the cancel culture and then someone says, oh, see, you're so sensitive. Now you're doing the cancel
culture yourself. You're trying to punish this person for criticizing. No, no, no, no, no.
Every good liberal. And I, and I mean that in the lower case, which is that anyone who believes in
liberal democracies, regardless of what they believe, should stand up and say no to cancel
culture and say, this is not okay. Regardless of what the actual topic is. And that makes them a
good liberal versus if they're trying to cancel someone who's just criticizing, they're doing
the opposite. Now they're shutting. So it's the opposite things, but it's very easy to get
confused. You can see people take advantage of the, and sometimes they just don't know it
themselves. The lines here can be very confusing. The wording can be very confusing and without
that wording, suddenly it looks like someone who's criticizing cancel culture is canceling,
but they're not. You applied this thinking to universities in particular. There's a great,
yet another great image on the trade-off between knowledge and conviction. And it's what's commonly,
actually you can maybe explain to me the difference, but it's often referred to as
the Dunning-Kruger effect, where you, when you first learn of a thing, you have an extremely
high confidence about self estimation of how well you understand that thing. You actually
say that Dunning-Kruger means something else. So yeah, when I post this, everyone's like
Dunning-Kruger and it's what everyone thinks Dunning-Kruger is. Dunning-Kruger is a little
different. It's you have a diagonal line like this one, right? Which is the place you are.
It's the, I call it like the humility tightrope, but the humility sweet spot. It's exactly the
right level of humility based on what you know. If you're below it, you're insecure. You actually
have too much humility. You don't have enough confidence because you know more than you're
giving yourself credit for. And when you're above the line, you're in the arrogance zone,
right? You need a, you need a dose of humility, right? You think you know more than you do.
So y'all want to stay on that tightrope. And Dunning-Kruger is basically a straight line
that's just has a lower slope. So you start off, you still are, you still are getting
more confident as you go along, but you start off above that line. And as you learn more,
you end up below the line later. So, but anyway. So this wavy thing. This wavy thing is, is,
is, is a different phenomenon. And it's just, it's just related, but. So this idea, so people
are just listening. There's a child's hill, pretty damn sure you know a whole lot and
feeling great about it. That's in the beginning. And then there's an insecure Canyon. You crash
down acknowledging that you don't know that much. And then there's a growth mountain.
Grown-up mountain. Where after you feel ashamed and embarrassed about not knowing that much,
you begin to realize that knowing how little you know is the first step in becoming someone
who actually knows stuff. And that's the, the grown-up mountain. And you climb and climb
and climb. You're saying that in universities, we're pinning people at the top of the child's
hill. So, so for me, this is a very, you know, I think of myself with this because I went to
college, like a lot of 18 year olds and I was very cocky. I just thought I knew it. I know.
And, um, and when it came to politics, I was like bright blue just because I grew up in a bright
blue suburb and I wasn't thinking that hard about it. And I thought that, you know, um, and what I
did when I went to college is met a lot of smart conservatives and a lot of smart progressives.
Um, but I've met a lot of people who weren't just going down a checklist and they knew stuff.
And when I, and I, and it's suddenly, I realized that like a lot of these views I have are not
based on knowledge. They're based on other people's conviction. Everyone else thinks
that's true. So now I think it's, Whoa, no, I'm, I'm, I'm actually like, I'm, I'm transferring
someone else's conviction to me. And who knows why they have conviction? They might have conviction
because they're transferring from someone else. And I'm a smart dude. I thought, why, why am I,
why am I like giving away my own independent, you know, learning abilities here and just adopting
other views. So anyway, it was this humbling experience and it wasn't just about politics,
by the way. It was that I had strong views about a lot of stuff and I just, I got lucky or not lucky.
I sought out, you know, the kind of people I sought out were the type that love to disagree
and they were, man, they knew stuff. And so you're quickly in, you know, in, in, in an idea lab
culture, it was an idea lab. And also I also went to, I started getting in the habit. I started
loving listening to people who disagreed with me because it was so exhilarating listening to a
smart person. When I thought there was no, no credence to this other argument, right?
This side of this debate is obviously wrong. I wanted to see an intelligence squared on
that debate. I wanted to go see, I actually got into intelligence squared in college.
I wanted to see a smart person who disagrees with me talk. It became so fascinating to me,
right? It was the most interesting thing. That was a new thing. I didn't think I liked that.
And so what did that do? That, that shoved me down the humble tumble here and number three,
it shoved me down where I started to, and I, and then I, and then I went the other way where
I realized that I had been, a lot of my identity had been based on this faux feeling of knowledge,
this idea that I thought I knew everything. Now that I don't have that, I was like,
I felt really like dumb and I felt really almost like embarrassed of what I knew.
And so that's where I call this insecure canyon. I think it's sometimes when you're so used to
thinking, you know everything, and then you realize you don't, it's like, it's,
and then you start to realize that actually really awesome thinkers, they, they, they don't judge me
for this. They totally respect. If I say, I don't know anything about this and say, oh, cool. You
should read this and this and this. They don't say, you don't know anything. They don't say that.
Right. And so, and not that I'm, by the way, this is not to say I'm now on Grown Up Mountain and
you should all join me. I often find myself drifting up with like a helium balloon. Oh,
I think I read about the new thing and suddenly I think I have, I think I, you know, I read three
things about, you know, a new AI thing and I'm like, I'll go do a talk on this. I'm like, no,
I won't. I don't, I just, I'm going to just be spouting out the opinion of the person I just
read. So I have to remind myself, but it's useful. Now, what the reason my problem with colleges
today is that it's, I was, I graduated in 2004. This is a recent change is that all of those
speakers I went who disagreed with me, a lot of them were conservative. So many of those speakers
would not be allowed on campuses today. And so many of the discussions I had were in big groups
or classrooms. And this was still, you know, this was a liberal campus. So many of those disagreements
they're not happening today. And you, I've interviewed a ton of college students. It's
chilly. It is, you know, people keep to themselves. So what's happening is not only are people losing
that push off the child's hill, which was so valuable to me, so valuable to me as a thinker,
it kind of started my life as a better thinker. They're losing that, but actually what college,
a lot of the college classes and the vibe in colleges, a lot of it is now saying that there
is one right set of views and it's this kind of, you know, woke ideology. And it's right. And
anyone who disagrees with it is bad. And anyone, and don't speak up, you know, unless you're going
to agree with it. It's teaching people that child's hills that, you know, it's nailing
people's feet to child's hill. It's teaching people that these are right. This views are
right. And like, you don't have any, you're nothing to, you should feel a complete conviction
about them. Yeah. How do we fix it? Is it part of the administration? Is it part of the culture?
Is it part of the, is it part like actually instilling in the individual, like 18 year olds,
the idea that this is the beautiful way to live is to embrace the disagreement and the
growth from that? It's awareness and courage. It's the same thing. So first of all, just get,
when awareness is people need to see what's happening here, that kids are getting, losing
the, they're not going to college and becoming better, tougher, more robust thinkers. They're
actually going to college and becoming zealots. They're getting taught to be zealots. And they,
and the website still advertises, you know, wide variety of, you know, the website is a bait and
switch. You list all the universities. Yeah. It's a bait and switch. It's, it's still saying
here, you're coming here for a wide intellectual, basically they're advertising, this is an idea
lab and you get there and it's like, actually it's an echo chamber that you're paying money for.
So if people realize that they start to get mad, hopefully, and then courage, I mean, starts,
you know, yes, brave students. There's been some very brave students who have started,
you know, big think clubs and stuff like that, where it's like, we're going to have,
you know, present both sides of a debate here. And that, that takes courage, but also courage
and leadership. Like the, it's, it's like, if you look at these colleges, it's specifically the
leaders who show strength, who get, who get the best results. Remember the, the cudgel is soft.
So if a leader of one of these places says, you know, that the college presidents who have shown
some strength, um, they actually don't get as much trouble. It's the ones who pander, the ones who,
um, uh, in that, you know, in that moment of truth, they, they, they shrink away. Then
they get a lot more trouble. The mob smells blood for the listener. Uh, the, the podcast favorite
live, uh, bury just entered and your friend just entered the room. Uh, do you mind if she joins us?
Please? I think there's a story she has about you. So live, you mentioned something that there's a
funny story about. We haven't talked at all about the actual process of writing the book is, is
there, you guys made a bet of some kind. Yeah. Is this a true story? Is this a completely false
fabric? It's true. Liv is she's mean what you, I didn't, I did not know mean live. She's like,
she's like a bully. She's like scary. I have to have that, I have that screenshot. So, so Liv was
FaceTiming me and she was like, she was like being intimidating. I took a screenshot and I made it my
phone background. So every time I opened it, I was like, yeah. So to give the background of this,
it's because if you hadn't noticed, Tim started writing this book, how many years ago? Six,
2016, mid 2016. Right. As, as sort of a response to like the Trump stuff and not even, yeah,
it was just supposed to be a mini post. I was like, Oh, I'm so like, I was like, I'm looking
at all these like future tech things and I feel this like uneasiness, like, ah, we're going to
like mess up all these things. Why there's like some cloud over our society. Let me just write
a mini post and I opened it up to WordPress to write a one day little essay and things went.
On politics. It was going to be on like this feeling I had that, that like this feeling I
had that, um, we were, our tech was, was just growing and growing and we were becoming less
wise. What, what's up, what's up with that? And I just wanted to write like, just like a little,
like little thousand word essay on like something I think we should pay attention to. And that was
the beginning of this six year nightmare. Did you anticipate the blog post would take a long while?
Um, I don't remember the process fully in terms of, I remember you saying, Oh,
I'm actually writing this. It's turning into a bigger thing. And I was like,
you know, cause the more we talked about, I remember we were talking about it. I was like,
Oh, this goes deep. Cause I didn't really understand the full scope of the situation,
like nowhere near. And you sort of explained it and I was like, Oh, okay. Yeah, I see that. And
then the more we dug into it, the sort of the deeper and deeper and deeper it went. But no,
I did not anticipate it would be six years. Let's put it that way. And when was your TED talk on
procrastination? So that was, that was March of 2016. And I started this book three months later
and fell into the biggest procrastination hole that I've ever fallen into. The irony isn't lost
on me. I mean, it's like, it's, I just like, I like how much credit I have as a, as for that
TED talk. I'm like, I am legit procrastinator. That is not, I'm not just saying it like,
It wasn't just that because I mean, you did, you know, you did intend it to start out as a
blog post, but then you're like, actually this needs to be multiple. Actually, let's make it
into a full series. You know what? I'll turn it into a book. And then that's why.
And, and, and what, what, but also what Liv witnessed a few times and my wife has witnessed
like 30 of these is like these, these 180 epiphanies where I'll be like, I'll like,
I'll have a moment when I'm, and I don't know what, you know, sometimes it's that there's a
really good idea. Sometimes it's like, I'm just dreading having to finish this the way it is.
And so there's epiphanies where it's like, you know what? I need to start over from the beginning
and just make this like a short, like 20 little blog post list. And then I'll do that. And then
I'll say, no, no, no, no. I have like a new epiphany. I have to, and it's these and, and yeah,
it's kind of like the crazy person a little bit. But anyway, can I tell the story of the,
the, the, the bed? All right. So things came to a head when we were in, we were all on vacation
in Dominican Republic, Tim and his wife, me and Igor. And we were in the ocean and I remember
you'd been in the ocean for like an hour, just bobbing in there, becoming it. And we got talking
and we were talking about the book and you know, you were expressing just like this, you know,
just the, the horror of the situation, basically. You're like, look, I just, I'm so close,
but there's still this. And then there's this. And an idea popped into my head, which is the,
you know, poker players often, we, we will set ourselves like negative bets, you know, like
essentially if we don't get a job done, then we have to do something we really don't want to do.
So instead of having a carrot, like a really, really big stick. So I had the idea to ask Tim,
okay, what is the worst either organization or individual that you, if you had to, you know,
that you would loathe to give a large sum of money to? And he thought about it for a little while.
And he gave his answer. And I was like, all right, what's your net worth? He said his net worth. All
right. 10% of your net worth to that thing. If you don't get the draft, because, oh, that's all right.
But just before that, I'd ask him how long, like, if you had a gun to your head or to your wife's
head, and you had to get the book into a state where you could like send off an edit to the draft
to your editor, how long? And he's like, oh, I guess like, I could get it like 95% good in a
month. I was like, okay, great. In one month's time, if you do not have that edit handed in,
10% of your net worth is going to this thing that you really, really think is terrible,
but you're forgetting the kicker. The kicker was that, because, you know,
procrastinators, they self defeat. That's what they do. And then Liv says, I'm going to sweeten
the deal. And I am going to basically match you. And I'm going to put in, I'm going to send a huge
amount of my own money there if you don't do it. And I can't, that would be really bad.
So not only are you screwing yourself, you're screwing a friend.
And she was like, and as your friend, because I'm your friend, I will send it. I will send the
money. I mean, like that, you know, like tyranny. And I got the drafting. I got the drafting.
Just! Just!
I know. Well, I was-
Igor could attest to this.
Actually, it was funny because it was like supposed to be by the summer solstice or whatever
it was. It was like a certain date. And-
It was like four hours.
I got it in at four. No, I got it in at four a.m. like the next morning. And they were both like,
that doesn't count. I'm like, it does. It's still for me, it's the same day still. It's okay.
Can you imagine how fucked in the head you have to be?
Yeah.
So like literally technically pass the deadline by four hours for an obscene amount of money
to a thing you loathe. That's how bad his sickness is.
Because I knew the hard, hard deadline. I knew that there was no way she was going to actually
send that money because it was four a.m. So I knew I actually had the whole night. So yeah.
You know, I should actually punish you. I should send like a nominal amount to that thing.
No, thanks. No. But yeah.
Is there some micro like lessons from that, from how to avoid procrastination
and writing a book that you've learned?
Yes. Well, I've learned a lot of things. I mean, like first don't write like a dissertation about
like proving some grand theory of society because that's really procrastinating. Like I would have
been an awful PhD student for that reason. And so like I'm going to do another book and it's going
to be like a bunch of short chapters that are one offs because that's like, it just doesn't
feed into your book is like a giant like framework. There is grand theory all through your book.
I know. And I learned not to do that again. I did it once. I don't want to do it again.
Oh, with the book. So the book is a giant mistake.
Yes. Don't do another one of this. Look, look, some people should. It's just not for me.
You just did it.
I know. And it almost killed me. Okay. So that's the first one. But secondly,
yeah, like basically there's two ways to fix procrastination. One is you fix,
it's like a picture. You have a boat that's leaking and it's not working very well. You
can fix it in two ways. You can get your hammer and nails out and your boards and actually fix
the boat, or you can duct tape it for now to get yourself across the river, but it's not actually
fixed. So ideally down the road, I have repaired whatever kind of bizarre mental illness that I
have that makes me procrastinate in a very like, I just don't self defeat in this way anymore.
But in the meantime, I can duct tape the boat by bringing what I call the panic monster into
the situation via things like this and this scary person and having external pressure to have
external pressure of some kind is critical for me. Uh, it's, it's, yes, I don't have the muscle
to do the work I need to do without external pressure. By the way, Liv, is there a possible
future where you write a book? And meanwhile, by the way, huge procrastinator. That's the
funny thing about this. Yeah. I mean, how long did your last video take? Oh my God. Is there
advice that you give to Liv how to get the videos done faster? Well, it would be the same exact
thing. I mean, actually I can give good procrastination advice. Panic monster. Um,
yeah, well we should do it together. It should be like, we have this date, but you know, it's,
it's, um, we should actually just do another bet. I have to have my script done by this time.
Yeah. So I got to get the third part out because then you'll actually do it. Um, and, um, and,
and it's not the thing is the time in, but it's like, if you, if you could take three weeks on
a video and instead you take 10 weeks, it's not like, oh, well I've also, I'm having more fun in
those 10 weeks. You're, you're, the whole 10 weeks are bad, bad. So you're, you're just,
you're just having a bad time and you're getting less work done and less work out. And it's not
like you're enjoying your personal life. It's bad for you, for your relationships. It's bad for your,
your own. You keep doing it anyway. Yeah. Well, a lot of people, a lot of people, uh, have troubles
keeping a diet. Right. Primitive mind. Why'd you point at me? That was offensive. What's
your procrastination weakness? Do you have one? Everything, everything, everything. I said
everything preparing for a conversation. I had your book, amazing book. I really enjoyed it.
I started reading it. I was like, this is awesome. It's so awesome that I'm going to save it when I'm
behind the computer and can take notes like good notes. Of course that resulted in like last
minute, everything, everything, everything I'm doing in my life. Not everyone's like that,
you know, people self defeat in different ways. Some people don't have this particular problem.
Adam grant is a, he calls himself a procrastinator where he gets an assignment. He will go home and
do it until it's done and handed it, which is also not necessarily good. You know, it's like,
you're rushing it either way, but it's better. But some people have the opposite thing, um,
where they will, um, the, the, the, the, the looming deadline makes them so anxious that they
go and fix it. Right. And the procrastinator I think has a similar anxiety, but they resolve it
in a totally different way. They don't solve it. They just live with the anxiety. Right. Right.
They just live with things that now I think there's an even bigger group of people there. So
there's these people that Adam grants, there's people like me. And then there's people who have
a healthy relationship with deadlines, but they're still part of a bigger group of people that
actually they, they, um, they need a deadline there to do something. So they actually, they,
they still are motivated by a deadline. And as soon as you have all the things in life that don't
have a deadline, like working out and like working on that album, you want it to write, they don't
do anything either. So there's actually like, that's why procrastination is a much bigger
problem than people realize, because it's not just the funny last second people. It's anyone who,
um, actually can't get things done that don't have a deadline.
You dedicate your book quote to Tanis who never planned on being married to someone who would
spend six years talking about his book on politics. But here we are. Uh, what's the
secret to a successful relationship with a procrastinator? That's maybe for both of you.
Um, well, I think the, the first and most important thing, you already started with
a political answer. I can tell. Okay. No, no. The first and most important thing is
because people who don't procrastinate, if you don't, it's like you will, they,
people in the instinct is to judge it as like, uh, that's either, either just think,
think they're just being like a loser or they're taking it, they'll take it personally, you know,
uh, and instead to see this as like, this is, this is a, uh, some form of addiction or some
form of, um, ailment, you know, they're not just being a dick, right? Like they have a problem and
so some compassion, but then also maybe finding that line where you can, you know, maybe apply
some tough love, some middle ground. On the other hand, you might say that, you know, you don't want
the significant other relationship where it's like, they're the one nagging you. Maybe that's,
you don't want them even being part of that. And I think maybe it's, you know, better to have a live,
do it instead. Right. Having someone who can like create the infrastructure where they aren't the
direct stick. You need a bit of carrot and stick, right? Maybe they can be the person who keeps
reminding them of the carrot. And then they set up the friend group to be the stick. And then that
keeps your relationship in a good place. Like looming in the background. That's your friend
group. Okay. At the beginning of the conversation, we talked about how all of human history can be
presented as a thousand page book. Uh, what are you excited about for the one thousands,
how do you say that, first page? Uh, so the next 250 years, what do you, what do you,
what are you most excited about? I'm most excited about, um, have you read the Fable of the Dragon?
No. Okay. Well, it's an allegory for death and it's, you know, Nick Bostrom and he talks about
the, he compares death to a dragon that eats 60 million people or whatever the number is every
year. And you just, every year we shepherd those people up and they feed them to the dragon and
that there's a Stockholm syndrome. When we say that's just a lot of man and that's what we have
to do. And anyone who says maybe we should try to beat the dragon, they get called vain and
narcissistic. Um, but someone who tries to, someone who goes, does chemo, no one calls them vain or
narcissistic. They say they're, they're, you know, good, good for you, right? You're a hero. You're,
you're, you're, you're fighting, fighting the good fight. So I think there's some disconnect here.
And I think that if we can get out of that Stockholm syndrome and realize that death is
just the machine that the human physical machine failing and that there's no law of nature that
says you can't with enough technology, um, uh, repair the machine and keep it going until no one,
I don't think anyone wants to live forever. People think they do. No one does, but until people are
ready. And I think when we hit a world where we can, we have enough tech that we can continue
to keep the human machine alive until the person says, I'm done, I'm ready. I think we will look
back and we will think that anything before that time, that'll be the real ADBC. You know,
we'll look back at BC before the big advancement and it'll seem so sad and so heartbreaking,
barbaric. And people will say, I can't believe that humans like us had to live with that.
When they lost loved ones and they, they died before they were ready. I think that's the
ultimate achievement, but we need to stop criticizing and smearing people who you talk
about it. So you think where that's actually doable in the next two, 250 years. Okay. A lot
happens in 250 years, especially when technology is really exponentially. Yeah. And you think humans
will be around versus AI complete takes over? I mean, look, the optimist in me and maybe the
stupid kind of 20, 23 person in me says, yeah, of course we'll, we'll make it. We'll, we'll figure
it out. But you know, I mean, we are going into, um, uh, you know, I have a friend who knows as
much about the future as anyone I know. I mean, he's really, he's a big investor and stuff, you
know, future tech. And he, um, he's really on the pulse of things and he just says, future is going
to be weird. That's what he says. Future is going to be weird. And it's, it's going to be weird.
Don't look at your, the last few decades of your life and apply that forward and say,
that's just what life is like. No, no, no. It's going to be weird and different.
Well, some of my favorite things in this world, they're weird. And speaking of which,
it's good to have this conversation is good to have you as friends. This was an incredible one.
Thanks for coming back and live. Thanks for talking with me a bunch more times. This was
awesome. Thank you, Lex. Thank you. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Tim Urban.
To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave
you with some words from Winston Churchill. When there's no enemy within, the enemies outside
cannot hurt you. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.