Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics

00:00:00.000 | A radical political movement, of which there will always be a lot in the country, has managed

00:00:06.280 | to do something that a radical movement is not supposed to be able to do in the US, which

00:00:10.880 | is they've managed to hijack institutions all across the country, and hijack medical

00:00:16.400 | journals and universities and the ACLU, all the activist organizations and non-profits

00:00:24.000 | and many tech companies.

00:00:26.280 | And the way I view a liberal democracy is it is a bunch of these institutions that were

00:00:30.840 | trial and error crafted over hundreds of years, and they all rely on trust, public trust,

00:00:38.560 | and a certain kind of feeling of unity that actually is critical to a liberal democracy's

00:00:43.680 | functioning.

00:00:44.680 | And what I see this thing is, is a parasite on that, whose goal is—and I'm not saying

00:00:50.920 | each individual in this, I don't think they're bad people.

00:00:54.360 | I think that it's the ideology itself has the property of, its goal is to tear apart

00:00:59.960 | the pretty delicate workings of the liberal democracy and shred the critical lines of

00:01:04.560 | trust.

00:01:07.600 | The following is a conversation with Tim Urban, his second time on the podcast.

00:01:11.880 | He's the author and illustrator of the amazing blog called "Wait, But Why?" and is the author

00:01:17.720 | of a new book coming out tomorrow called "What's Our Problem?"

00:01:21.640 | A self-help book for societies.

00:01:23.920 | We talk a lot about this book in this podcast, but you really do need to get it and experience

00:01:29.160 | it for yourself.

00:01:30.160 | It is a fearless, insightful, hilarious, and I think important book in this divisive time

00:01:36.080 | that we live in.

00:01:37.280 | The Kindle version, the audiobook, and the web version should be all available on date

00:01:41.800 | of publication.

00:01:42.800 | I should also mention that my face might be a bit more beat up than usual.

00:01:48.840 | I got hit in the chin pretty good since I've been getting back into training Jiu-Jitsu,

00:01:55.360 | a sport I love very much, after recovering from an injury.

00:01:59.120 | So if you see marks on my face during these intros or conversations, you know that my

00:02:05.200 | life is in a pretty good place.

00:02:07.480 | This is the Lex Friedman Podcast.

00:02:09.640 | To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.

00:02:12.560 | And now, dear friends, here's Tim Urban.

00:02:16.960 | You wrote an incredible book called What's Our Problem?

00:02:20.160 | A Self-Help Book for Societies.

00:02:23.400 | In the beginning, you present this view of human history as a thousand-page book where

00:02:32.200 | each page is 250 years.

00:02:35.680 | And it's a brilliant visualization because almost nothing happens for most of it.

00:02:40.280 | So what blows your mind most about that visualization when you just sit back and think about it?

00:02:46.000 | It's a boring book.

00:02:47.720 | So 950 pages, 95% of the book, hunter-gatherers kind of doing their thing.

00:02:52.120 | I'm sure there's obviously some major cognitive advancements along the way in language.

00:02:57.560 | And I'm sure the bow and arrow comes around at some point.

00:03:00.320 | So tiny things, but it's like, oh, now we have 400 pages until the next thing.

00:03:03.600 | But then you get to page 950, and things start moving.

00:03:07.000 | Recorded history starts at 976.

00:03:09.000 | Right, right.

00:03:10.000 | So basically, the bottom row is when anything interesting happens.

00:03:13.120 | There's a bunch of agriculture for a while before we know anything about it.

00:03:18.200 | And then recorded history starts.

00:03:19.600 | Yeah, 25 pages of actual recorded history.

00:03:24.160 | So when we think of prehistoric, we're talking about pages 1 through 975 of the book.

00:03:31.200 | And then history is page 976 to 1000.

00:03:35.920 | If you were reading the book, it would be like epilogue AD, the last little 10 pages

00:03:40.380 | of the book.

00:03:41.380 | We think of AD as super long, right?

00:03:43.400 | 2,000 years, the Roman Empire, 2,000 years ago.

00:03:46.320 | That's so long.

00:03:48.440 | Human history has been going on for over 2,000 centuries.

00:03:53.760 | That is-- it's just-- it's hard to wrap your head around.

00:03:57.320 | And this is-- I mean, even that's just the end of a very long road.

00:04:01.000 | The 100,000 years before that, it's not like that was that different.

00:04:06.840 | So it's just-- there's been people like us that have emotions like us, that have physical

00:04:12.280 | sensations like us for so, so long.

00:04:17.880 | And who are they all?

00:04:19.940 | And what was their life like?

00:04:21.220 | And it's-- I think we have no idea what it was like to be them.

00:04:25.420 | The thing that's craziest about the people of the far past is not just that they had

00:04:29.820 | different lives, they had different fears, they had different dangers and different responsibilities,

00:04:33.660 | and they lived in tribes and everything, but they didn't know anything.

00:04:37.460 | We just take it for granted that we're born on top of this tower of knowledge.

00:04:41.060 | And from the very beginning, we know that the Earth is a ball floating in space.

00:04:46.700 | And we know that we're going to die one day.

00:04:48.780 | And we know that we evolved from animals.

00:04:54.060 | Those were all incredible epiphanies quite recently.

00:04:58.100 | And the people a long time ago, they just had no idea what was going on.

00:05:01.500 | And I'm kind of jealous, because I feel like it-- I mean, it might have been scary to not

00:05:04.660 | know what's going on, but it also, I feel like, would be-- you'd have a sense of awe

00:05:07.660 | and wonder all the time.

00:05:09.300 | And you don't know what's going to happen next.

00:05:10.660 | And once you learn, you're kind of like, oh, that's a little grim.

00:05:14.100 | But they probably had the same capacity for consciousness to experience the world, to

00:05:20.100 | wander about the world, maybe to construct narratives about the world and myths and so

00:05:24.220 | on.

00:05:25.220 | They just had less grounded, systematic facts to play with.

00:05:30.660 | They still probably felt the narratives, the myths, they constructed as intensely as we

00:05:35.980 | do.

00:05:36.980 | Oh, yeah.

00:05:37.980 | They also fell in love.

00:05:38.980 | They also had friends.

00:05:41.260 | And they had falling outs with friends.

00:05:43.340 | Didn't shower much, though.

00:05:44.340 | No, they did not smell nice.

00:05:47.820 | Maybe they did.

00:05:49.540 | Maybe beauty's in the eye of the beholder.

00:05:51.820 | Maybe it's all relative.

00:05:52.820 | So how many people in history have experienced a hot shower?

00:05:56.820 | Like almost none.

00:05:58.460 | That's like, when were hot showers invented?

00:06:00.020 | 100 years ago?

00:06:01.820 | Like less?

00:06:03.660 | So like George Washington never had a hot shower.

00:06:07.580 | It's like, it's just kind of weird.

00:06:08.740 | Like he took cold showers all the time.

00:06:12.980 | And again, we just take this for granted.

00:06:14.220 | But that's like an unbelievable life experience to have a rain, a controlled little booth

00:06:20.420 | where it rains hot water on your head.

00:06:23.440 | And then you get out and it's not everywhere.

00:06:24.900 | It's like contained.

00:06:27.380 | That was like, a lot of people probably lived and died with never experiencing hot water.

00:06:31.520 | Maybe they had a way to heat water over a fire.

00:06:33.940 | But like then it's, I don't know.

00:06:34.980 | It's just like, there's so many things about our lives now that are complete, just total

00:06:41.580 | anomaly.

00:06:42.580 | It makes you wonder like, what is the thing that would notice the most?

00:06:44.940 | I mean, the sewer system, like it doesn't smell in cities.

00:06:49.580 | Incredible.

00:06:50.940 | What does the sewer system do?

00:06:52.300 | I mean, it gets rid of waste efficiently in such a way we don't have to confront it, both

00:06:56.020 | with any of our senses.

00:06:58.220 | And that probably wasn't there.

00:06:59.540 | I mean, what else?

00:07:01.020 | Plus all the medical stuff associated with sewage.

00:07:02.700 | - Yeah, I mean, how about the disease?

00:07:03.700 | - Yeah.

00:07:04.700 | - How about the cockroaches and the rats and the disease and the plagues?

00:07:10.340 | And then when they got, so they caught more diseases, but then when they caught the disease,

00:07:13.960 | they also didn't have treatment for it.

00:07:15.960 | So they often would die or they would just be in a huge amount of pain.

00:07:20.620 | They also didn't know what the disease was.

00:07:22.860 | They didn't know about microbes.

00:07:24.020 | That was this new thing.

00:07:25.020 | They just had this tiny little animals that are causing these diseases.

00:07:27.980 | So what did they think?

00:07:28.980 | In the bubonic plague, in the black death, the 1300s, people thought that it was an act

00:07:35.500 | of God because God's angry at us.

00:07:38.220 | Because why would you not think that if you didn't know what it was?

00:07:42.760 | And so the crazy thing is that these were the same primates.

00:07:45.020 | So I do know something about them.

00:07:46.580 | I know in some sense what it's like to be them, because I am a human as well.

00:07:51.740 | And to know that this particular primate that I know what it's like to be experienced such

00:07:57.260 | different things.

00:07:59.140 | And like this isn't, our life is not the life that this primate has experienced almost ever.

00:08:04.220 | So it's just a bit strange.

00:08:06.940 | - I don't know.

00:08:07.940 | I have a sense that we would get acclimated very quickly.

00:08:11.740 | Like if we threw ourselves back a few thousand years ago, it would be very uncomfortable

00:08:16.580 | at first, but the whole hot shower thing, you'll get used to it.

00:08:19.500 | - Oh yeah.

00:08:20.500 | - You would not even like miss it.

00:08:22.860 | There's a few, I'm trying to remember which book that talks about hiking the Appalachian

00:08:27.780 | Trail, but you kind of miss those hot showers.

00:08:31.420 | But I have a sense like after a few months, after a few years.

00:08:35.060 | - Your skill recalibrates.

00:08:36.060 | - Yeah.

00:08:37.060 | - Yeah, I was saying the other day to a friend that whatever you're used to, you start to

00:08:40.860 | think that, oh, that the people that have more than me or are more fortunate, like it

00:08:44.780 | just sounds incredible.

00:08:45.780 | I would be so happy.

00:08:47.100 | But you know that's not true.

00:08:48.100 | Because the experience, what would happen is you would get these new things or you would

00:08:53.420 | get these new opportunities and then you would get used to it and then you would, the hedonic

00:08:56.780 | treadmill, you'd come back to where you are.

00:08:58.940 | And likewise though, because you think, oh my God, what if I had to have this kind of

00:09:03.340 | job that I never would want or I had this kind of marriage that I never would want?

00:09:07.900 | You know what?

00:09:08.900 | If you did, you would adjust and you get used to it and you might not be that much less

00:09:12.180 | happy than you are now.

00:09:13.700 | So on the other side of the, you being okay going back, we would survive if we had to

00:09:18.100 | go back.

00:09:19.100 | We'd have to learn some skills, but we would buck up and people have gone to war before

00:09:23.860 | that were in the shopkeepers a year before that.

00:09:26.380 | They were in the trenches the next year.

00:09:28.720 | But on the other hand, if you brought them here, I always think it would be so fun to

00:09:32.420 | just bring, forget the hunter gatherers, bring a 1700s person here and tour them around,

00:09:36.900 | take them on an airplane and show them your phone and all the things it can do.

00:09:40.160 | Show them the internet, show them the grocery store.

00:09:42.580 | And take them to a Whole Foods.

00:09:45.140 | Likewise I think they would be completely awestruck and on their knees crying tears

00:09:49.620 | of joy.

00:09:50.900 | And then they'd get used to it and they'd be complaining about like, "You don't have

00:09:53.380 | the oranges in stock?"

00:09:55.880 | And that's-

00:09:56.880 | - The grocery store is a tough one to get used to.

00:09:58.860 | Like when I first came to this country, the abundance of bananas was the thing that struck

00:10:04.540 | me the most.

00:10:05.540 | Or like fruits in general, but food in general.

00:10:09.660 | But bananas somehow struck me the most.

00:10:11.620 | That you could just eat them as much as you want.

00:10:14.060 | That took a long time for me.

00:10:16.940 | Probably took several years to really get acclimated to that.

00:10:21.940 | - Why didn't you have bananas?

00:10:25.060 | - The number of bananas, fresh bananas, that wasn't available.

00:10:29.900 | Bread, yes.

00:10:32.020 | Bananas, no.

00:10:33.020 | - Yeah, it's like we don't even know what to, like we don't even know the proper levels

00:10:37.780 | of gratitude.

00:10:38.780 | Like, you know, walking around the grocery store, I don't know to be like, "The bread's

00:10:41.780 | nice, but the bananas are like, we're so lucky."

00:10:43.900 | I don't know.

00:10:44.900 | I'm like, "Oh, I could have been the other way.

00:10:45.900 | I have no idea."

00:10:46.900 | - Well, it's interesting then where we point our gratitude in the West, in the United States.

00:10:55.260 | Probably, do we point it away from materialist possessions towards, or do we just aspire

00:11:04.660 | to do that towards other human beings that we love?

00:11:07.740 | Because in the East, in the Soviet Union, growing up poor, it's having food is the gratitude.

00:11:15.740 | Having transportation is gratitude.

00:11:18.700 | Having warmth and shelter is gratitude.

00:11:21.820 | And now, but see within that, the deep gratitude is for other human beings.

00:11:26.860 | The penguins huddling together for warmth in the cold.

00:11:30.100 | - I think it's a person-by-person basis.

00:11:32.420 | I mean, I'm sure, yes, of course, in the West, people on average feel gratitude towards different

00:11:36.460 | things or maybe a different level of gratitude.

00:11:38.700 | Maybe we feel less gratitude than countries that...

00:11:41.700 | Obviously, I think the easiest, the person that's most likely to feel gratitude is going

00:11:46.380 | to be someone whose life happens to be one where they just move up, up, up throughout

00:11:50.860 | their life.

00:11:51.900 | A lot of people in the greatest generation, people who were born in the '20s or whatever,

00:11:55.980 | and a lot of the boomers too.

00:11:57.580 | This story is the greatest generation grew up dirt poor and they often ended up middle

00:12:00.700 | class.

00:12:02.060 | And the boomers, some of them started off middle class and many of them ended up quite

00:12:05.740 | wealthy.

00:12:06.740 | And I feel like that life trajectory is naturally going to foster gratitude, right?

00:12:15.420 | Because you're not going to take for granted these things because you didn't have them.

00:12:18.380 | I didn't go out of the country really in my childhood very much.

00:12:23.340 | We traveled, but it was to Virginia to see my grandparents or Wisconsin to see other

00:12:27.620 | relatives or maybe Florida for going to the beach.

00:12:30.900 | And then I started going out of the country like crazy in my '20s because I really became

00:12:35.620 | my favorite thing.

00:12:36.980 | And I feel like because I, if I had grown up always doing that, it would have been another

00:12:40.500 | thing.

00:12:41.500 | I'm like, yeah, it's just something I do.

00:12:42.500 | But I still, every time I go to a new country, I'm like, oh my God, this is so cool.

00:12:46.420 | And in another country, this thing I've only seen on the map, I'm like, I'm there now.

00:12:50.340 | And so I feel like a lot of times it's a product of what you didn't have and then you suddenly

00:12:55.860 | had.

00:12:57.060 | But I still think it's case by case in that there's like a meter in everyone's head that

00:13:04.220 | I think at a 10, you're experiencing just immense gratitude, which is a euphoric feeling.

00:13:12.740 | It's a great feeling.

00:13:14.860 | And it makes you happy to savor what you have, to look down at the mountain of stuff that

00:13:21.860 | you have that you're standing on, to look down at it and say, oh my God, I'm so lucky.

00:13:27.220 | And I'm so grateful for this and this and this.

00:13:29.300 | And obviously, that's a happy exercise.

00:13:31.580 | Now when you move that meter down to six or seven, maybe you think that sometimes, but

00:13:36.300 | you're not always thinking that because you're sometimes looking up at this cloud of things

00:13:42.220 | that you don't have and the things that they have but you don't or the things you wished

00:13:45.580 | you had or you thought you were going to have or whatever.

00:13:48.460 | And that's the opposite direction to look.

00:13:50.700 | And either that's envy, that's yearning, or often it's, if you think about your past,

00:13:58.060 | it's grievance.

00:13:59.780 | And so then you go down to a one and you have someone who feels like a complete victim.

00:14:03.860 | They are just a victim of the society, of their siblings and their parents and their

00:14:08.620 | loved one.

00:14:10.900 | And they are wallowing in everything that's happened wrong to me, everything I should

00:14:16.380 | have that I don't, everything that has gone wrong for me.

00:14:19.500 | And so that's a very unhealthy, mentally unhealthy place to be.

00:14:23.620 | Anyone can go there.

00:14:24.620 | There's an endless list of stuff it can be aggrieved about and an endless list of stuff

00:14:28.500 | you can have gratitude for.

00:14:30.340 | And so in some ways it's a choice and it's a habit.

00:14:33.260 | And maybe it's part of how we were raised or our natural demeanor, but it's such a good

00:14:36.180 | exercise.

00:14:37.180 | You are really good at this, by the way.

00:14:38.260 | Your Twitter is like--

00:14:39.260 | >>JONES: Go on.

00:14:40.260 | >>ZUKOFF: Well, like you are constantly just saying, "Man, I'm lucky," or like, "I'm so

00:14:47.300 | grateful for this."

00:14:48.500 | And it's a good thing to do because you're reminding yourself, but you're also reminding

00:14:52.620 | other people to think that way.

00:14:53.940 | And it's like, we are lucky.

00:14:58.100 | And so anyway, I think that scale can go from one to 10.

00:14:59.820 | And I think it's hard to be a 10.

00:15:01.020 | I think you'd be very happy if you could be.

00:15:02.640 | But I think trying to be above a five and looking down at the things you have more often

00:15:08.620 | than you are looking up at the things you don't or being resentful about the things

00:15:12.580 | that people have wronged you.

00:15:14.060 | >>KORELL: Well, the interesting thing, I think, was an open question, but I suspect that you

00:15:19.340 | can control that knob for the individual.

00:15:22.220 | Like you yourself can choose.

00:15:23.220 | It's like the Stoic philosophy.

00:15:24.700 | You could choose where you are as a matter of habit, like you said.

00:15:28.260 | But you can also probably control that on a scale of a family, of a tribe, of a nation,

00:15:33.980 | of a society.

00:15:36.300 | You can describe a lot of the things that happens in Nazi Germany and different other

00:15:39.780 | parts of history through a sort of societal envy and resentment that builds up.

00:15:46.020 | Maybe certain narratives pick up and then they infiltrate your mind and then now your

00:15:51.100 | knob goes to, from the gratitude for everything, it goes to resentment and envy and all the

00:15:56.180 | things.

00:15:57.180 | >>STEVE: Germany between the two world wars.

00:15:58.180 | Like you said, the Soviet kind of mentality.

00:16:04.780 | So yeah, and then when you're soaking in a culture, so there's kind of two factors, right?

00:16:10.980 | It's what's going on in your own head and then what's surrounding you.

00:16:13.660 | And what's surrounding you kind of has concentric circles.

00:16:16.020 | There's your immediate group of people, because that group of people, if they're a certain

00:16:20.260 | way, if they feel a lot of gratitude and they talk about it a lot, that kind of insulates

00:16:23.580 | you from the broader culture.

00:16:25.340 | Because people are going to have the most impact on you or the ones closest.

00:16:29.620 | But often, all the concentric circles are saying the same thing.

00:16:33.020 | The people around you are feeling the same way that the broader community, which is feeling

00:16:36.340 | the same way as the broader country.

00:16:39.500 | And this is why I think American patriotism, nationalism, can be tribal, can be not a good

00:16:47.020 | thing.

00:16:48.020 | But patriotism, I think, is a great thing.

00:16:52.260 | Because really, what is patriotism?

00:16:55.260 | If you love your country, you should love your fellow countrymen.

00:16:57.340 | That's a Reagan quote.

00:17:00.060 | Patriotism is, I think, a feeling of unity, but it also comes along with an implicit kind

00:17:08.420 | of concept of gratitude.

00:17:10.140 | Because it's like, we are so lucky to live in...

00:17:12.100 | People think it's chauvinist to say, "We live in the best country in the world."

00:17:15.780 | And yes, when Americans say that, no one likes it.

00:17:18.660 | But actually, it's not a bad thing to think.

00:17:20.860 | It's a nice thing to think.

00:17:21.860 | It's a way of saying, "I'm so grateful for all the great things this country gives to

00:17:26.140 | me and this country has done."

00:17:27.860 | And I think if you heard a Filipino person say, "You know what?

00:17:30.580 | The Philippines is the best country in the world."

00:17:31.980 | No one in America would say, "That's chauvinist."

00:17:33.900 | They'd say, "Awesome."

00:17:35.100 | Because when it's coming from someone who's not American, it sounds totally fine.

00:17:40.020 | But I think national pride is actually good.

00:17:42.340 | Now again, that can quickly translate into xenophobia, nationalism, and so you have

00:17:45.980 | to make sure it doesn't go off that cliff.

00:17:47.660 | Yeah, there's good ways to formulate that.

00:17:50.100 | Like you talk about, we'll talk about high rung progressivism, high rung conservatism.

00:17:55.660 | Those are two different ways of embodying patriotism.

00:18:02.100 | So you could talk about maybe loving the tradition that this country stands for, or you could

00:18:06.340 | talk about loving the people that ultimately push progress.

00:18:11.060 | And those are, from an intellectual perspective, a good way to represent patriotism.

00:18:15.620 | We've got to zoom out because this graphic is epic.

00:18:18.700 | A lot of images in your book are just epic on their own.

00:18:22.900 | It's brilliantly done.

00:18:24.260 | But this one has famous people for each of the cards.

00:18:29.620 | Like the best of.

00:18:30.620 | Yeah.

00:18:31.620 | And by the way, good for them to be the person that...

00:18:35.740 | It's not that I could have chosen lots of people for each card, but I think most people

00:18:39.140 | would agree.

00:18:40.140 | It's a pretty fair choice for each page.

00:18:43.020 | And good for them to be...

00:18:44.700 | You crushed it if you can be the person for your whole 250 year page.

00:18:48.100 | Well, I noticed you put Gandhi, you didn't put Hitler.

00:18:50.740 | I mean, there's a lot of people going to argue with you about that particular last page.

00:18:55.220 | True.

00:18:56.220 | Yes, you're right.

00:18:57.220 | I could have put...

00:18:58.220 | I actually, I was thinking about Darwin there too.

00:19:00.220 | Darwin, yeah.

00:19:01.220 | Einstein.

00:19:02.220 | Yeah, exactly.

00:19:03.220 | You really could have put anyone.

00:19:04.220 | Did you think about putting yourself for a second?

00:19:05.580 | Yeah, I should have.

00:19:06.580 | I should have.

00:19:07.580 | That would have been awesome.

00:19:08.580 | That would have endeared the readers to me from the beginning of the first page of the

00:19:11.460 | book.

00:19:12.460 | A little bit of a messianic complex going on.

00:19:14.940 | But yeah, so the list of people just so we know.

00:19:16.820 | So these are 250 year chunks.

00:19:19.620 | The last one being from 1770 to 2020.

00:19:23.020 | And so it goes Gandhi, Shakespeare, Joan of Arc, Genghis Khan, Charlemagne, Muhammad,

00:19:29.380 | Constantine, Jesus, Cleopatra, Aristotle, Buddha.

00:19:33.580 | It's so interesting to think about this very recent human history.

00:19:37.860 | It's 11 pages, so it would be 2750, almost 3000 years.

00:19:42.940 | Just that there's these figures that stand out and that define the course of human history.

00:19:49.100 | It's like the craziest thing to me is that Buddha was a dude.

00:19:53.460 | He was a guy with arms and legs and fingernails that he maybe bit and he liked certain foods

00:20:01.100 | and maybe he got like, you know, he had like digestive issues sometimes and like he got

00:20:07.820 | cuts and they stung.

00:20:09.220 | And like he was a guy and he had hopes and dreams and he probably had a big ego for a

00:20:14.020 | while before I guess Buddha totally overcame that one.

00:20:17.180 | But like, and it's like who knows, you know, the mythical figure Buddha, who knows how

00:20:22.360 | similar he was.

00:20:23.360 | But the fact, same with Jesus, this was a guy.

00:20:25.500 | Like to me, he's a primate.

00:20:28.300 | What an impact.

00:20:29.660 | He was a cell first and then a baby.

00:20:31.620 | Yeah, he was a fetus at some point.

00:20:33.620 | A dumb baby trying to learn how to walk.

00:20:35.700 | Yeah, like having tantrum because he's frustrated because he's in the terrible twos.

00:20:40.140 | Jesus was in the terrible twos.

00:20:41.540 | Buddha never had a tantrum, let's be honest.

00:20:44.660 | The mother was like, this baby's great.

00:20:46.660 | Like wow.

00:20:47.660 | Let's figure something out.

00:20:49.980 | It just, I mean, listen, hearing about Genghis Khan, it's incredible to me because it's just

00:20:55.060 | like this was some Mongolian, you know, herder guy who was taken as a slave and he was like

00:21:03.980 | dirt poor, you know, catching rats as a young teen to feed him and his mom and I think his

00:21:11.620 | brother.

00:21:12.620 | And it's just like the odds on when he was born, he was just one of, you know, probably

00:21:21.980 | tens of thousands of random teen boys living in Mongolia in the 1200s.

00:21:27.620 | The odds of that person, any one of them being a household name today that we're talking

00:21:32.020 | about, it's just crazy like what had to happen.

00:21:35.820 | And for that guy, for that poor, dirt poor herder to take over the world, I don't know.

00:21:42.420 | So history just like continually blows my mind.

00:21:44.820 | Like, you know.

00:21:45.820 | And he's the reason you and I are related probably.

00:21:48.260 | Yeah, no.

00:21:49.260 | I mean, it's also, that's the other thing is that some of these dudes by becoming king,

00:21:55.140 | by being, having a better army at the right time, you know, William the Conqueror or whatever

00:21:58.860 | has, is in the right place at the right time with the right army, you know, and there's

00:22:02.260 | a weakness at the right moment and he comes over and he exploits it and ends up probably

00:22:06.740 | having, you know, I don't know, thousand children and those children are high up people who

00:22:11.860 | might be have a ton of, the species is different now because of him.

00:22:16.540 | Like if that, forget England's different or, you know, European borders look different.

00:22:21.340 | Like, like we are, like we look different because of a small handful of people, you

00:22:27.300 | know.

00:22:28.300 | When I sometimes I think I'm like, oh, you know, this part of the world I can recognize

00:22:31.740 | someone's Greek, you know, someone's Persian, someone's wherever because, you know, they

00:22:34.860 | kind of have certain facial features.

00:22:36.700 | And I'm like, it may have happened.

00:22:38.140 | I mean, obviously it's that that's a population, but it may be that like someone 600 years

00:22:42.540 | ago that looked like that really spread their seed and that's why the ethnicity looks kind

00:22:48.500 | of like that now.

00:22:49.500 | Sorry.

00:22:50.500 | Anyway.

00:22:51.500 | Yeah.

00:22:52.500 | Yeah.

00:22:53.500 | Do you think individuals like that can turn the direction of history or is that an illusion

00:22:58.420 | that narrative we tell ourselves?

00:23:01.100 | Well it's both.

00:23:02.100 | I mean, so I said that William the Conqueror, right.

00:23:03.540 | Or Hitler, right.

00:23:05.780 | It's not that Hitler was born and destined to be great at all.

00:23:08.780 | Right.

00:23:10.020 | I mean, in a lot of cases he's frustrated artist with a temper who's turning over the

00:23:13.820 | table in his studio and hitting his wife and being kind of a dick and a total nobody.

00:23:19.580 | Right.

00:23:20.660 | I think almost all the times you could have put Hitler baby on earth.

00:23:24.500 | He's a he's a rando.

00:23:25.500 | Right.

00:23:26.500 | You know, and maybe he's a, you know, maybe sometimes he becomes a, you know, some kind

00:23:29.620 | of, you know, he uses the speaking ability because that ability was going to be there

00:23:32.660 | either way, but maybe he uses it for something else.

00:23:35.620 | But that said, I also think, but it's not that World War II was going to happen either

00:23:41.980 | way.

00:23:42.980 | Right.

00:23:43.980 | So it's both.

00:23:44.980 | It's that like these circumstances were one way and this person came along at the right

00:23:49.020 | time and those two made a match made in this case hell.

00:23:52.060 | But it makes you wonder, yes, it's a match in hell, but are there other people that could

00:23:57.940 | have taken his place or do these people that stand out, they're the rare spark of that

00:24:04.100 | genius, whether it take us towards evil, towards good, whether those figures singularly define

00:24:11.060 | the trajectory of humanity.

00:24:13.580 | You know, what defines the trajectory of humanity in the 21st century, for example, might be

00:24:17.860 | the influence of AI, might be the influence of nuclear war, negative or positive, not

00:24:23.740 | in the case of nuclear war, but the bioengineering, nanotech, virology, what else is there?

00:24:36.500 | Maybe the structure of governments and so on.

00:24:39.660 | Maybe the structure of universities.

00:24:40.660 | I don't know.

00:24:41.660 | There could be singular figures that stand up and lead the way for human.

00:24:45.860 | - There will be.

00:24:46.860 | - But I wonder if the society is the thing that manifests that person or that person

00:24:52.740 | really does have a huge impact.

00:24:55.800 | - I think it's probably a spectrum where there are some cases when a circumstance was such

00:25:00.800 | that something like what happened was gonna happen.

00:25:04.460 | If you pluck that person from the earth, I don't know whether the Mongols is a good example

00:25:08.540 | or not, but maybe it could be that if you plucked Genghis Khan as a baby, there was

00:25:13.860 | because of the specific way Chinese civilization was at that time and the specific climate

00:25:21.860 | that was causing a certain kind of pressure on the Mongols and the way they still had

00:25:25.340 | their great archers and they had their horses and they had a lot of the same advantages.

00:25:28.860 | So maybe it was waiting to happen.

00:25:31.340 | It was gonna happen either way and it might not have happened to the extent or whatever.

00:25:35.820 | So maybe.

00:25:36.820 | Or you could go the full other direction and say, actually, this was probably not gonna

00:25:39.580 | happen.

00:25:42.220 | I think World War II is an example.

00:25:44.100 | I think World War II really was the work of, of course, it relied on all these other circumstances.

00:25:50.260 | You had to have the resentment in Germany.

00:25:51.740 | You have to have the Great Depression.

00:25:53.420 | But I think if you take Hitler out, I'm pretty sure World War II doesn't happen.

00:25:59.580 | - Well then, it seems easier to answer these questions when you look at history, even recent

00:26:03.700 | history, but let's look at now.

00:26:05.220 | Let's look at, I'm sure we'll talk about social media.

00:26:07.740 | So who are the key players in social media?

00:26:10.420 | Mark Zuckerberg.

00:26:11.420 | What's the name of the MySpace guy?

00:26:13.740 | Tom?

00:26:14.740 | - Tom, it's just Tom, yeah.

00:26:17.660 | - There's a meme going around where MySpace is the perfect social media 'cause no one

00:26:21.700 | algorithmic involvement.

00:26:23.780 | Everybody's happy and positive.

00:26:24.780 | - Also, Tom did it right.

00:26:26.060 | At the time, we were like, oh man, Tom only made a few million dollars.

00:26:29.740 | Ooh, he sucks to not be Zuck.

00:26:32.980 | Tom might be living a nice life right now where he doesn't have this nightmare that

00:26:36.820 | these other people have.

00:26:38.140 | - Yeah, and he's always smiling in his profile picture.

00:26:42.300 | So there's Larry Page with Google.

00:26:44.500 | That's kind of intermingled into that whole thing, into the development of the internet.

00:26:48.140 | Jack Dorsey, now Elon.

00:26:50.900 | Who else?

00:26:51.900 | I mean, there's people playing with the evolution of social media.

00:26:54.900 | And to me, that seems to be connected to the development of AI.

00:27:01.540 | And it seems like those singular figures will define the direction of AI development and

00:27:06.260 | social media development with social media seeming to have such a huge impact on our

00:27:11.500 | collective intelligence.

00:27:13.700 | - It does feel in one way like individuals have an especially big impact right now in

00:27:19.140 | that a small number of people are pulling some big levers.

00:27:24.300 | And there can be a little meeting of three people at Facebook and they come out of that

00:27:28.860 | meeting and make a decision that totally changes the world, right?

00:27:32.380 | On the other hand, you see a lot of conformity.

00:27:37.020 | You see a lot of, they all pulled the plug on Trump the same day, right?

00:27:41.660 | So that suggests that there's some bigger force that is also kind of driving them, in

00:27:46.420 | which case it's less about the individuals.

00:27:49.140 | I think, what is leadership, right?

00:27:51.460 | I mean, to me, leadership is the ability to move things in a direction that the cultural

00:27:57.140 | forces are not already taking things, right?

00:28:00.620 | A lot of times people seem like a leader because they're just kind of hopping on the cultural

00:28:05.380 | wave and they happen to be the person who gets to the top of it.

00:28:07.900 | Now it seems like they're, but actually the wave was already going.

00:28:11.580 | Like real leadership is when someone actually changes the wave, changes the shape of the

00:28:18.940 | wave.

00:28:19.940 | Like I think Elon with SpaceX and with Tesla, like genuinely shaped a wave.

00:28:27.740 | Maybe you could say that EVs were actually, they were going to happen anyway, but there's

00:28:31.740 | not much evidence about at least happening when it did.

00:28:35.700 | You know, if we end up on Mars, you can say that Elon was a genuine leader there.

00:28:40.420 | And so there are examples now, like Zuckerberg definitely has done a lot of leadership along

00:28:44.640 | the way.

00:28:46.220 | He's also potentially kind of like caught in a storm that is happening and he's one

00:28:53.060 | of the figures in it.

00:28:54.060 | So I don't know.

00:28:55.060 | - And it's possible that he is a big shaper if the metaverse becomes a reality.

00:29:00.160 | If in 30 years we're all living in a virtual world.

00:29:03.240 | To many people it seems ridiculous now that that was a poor investment.

00:29:06.780 | - He talked about getting, you know, I think it was something like a billion people with

00:29:11.140 | a VR headset in their pocket in by, you know, I think it was 10 years from now back in 2015.

00:29:16.660 | So we're behind that.

00:29:19.180 | But when he was talking about that, and honestly, this is something I've been wrong about.

00:29:23.980 | Because I went to like one of the Facebook conferences and tried out all the new Oculus

00:29:30.340 | stuff.

00:29:31.340 | And I was like, you know, pretty early talking to some of the major players there.

00:29:34.060 | Because I was going to write a big post about it that then got swallowed by this book.

00:29:38.420 | But I would have been wrong in the post.

00:29:39.900 | Because what I would have said was that this thing is, when I tried it, I was like, this

00:29:45.780 | is, you know, some of them suck.

00:29:47.420 | Some of them make you nauseous and they're just not that, you know, the headsets were

00:29:50.500 | big and, you know.

00:29:51.940 | But I was like, the times when this is good, it is, I have this feeling I haven't had,

00:29:56.060 | it reminds me of the feeling I had when I first was five and I went to a friend's house

00:29:59.340 | and he had Nintendo.

00:30:00.900 | And he gave me the controller and I was looking at the screen and I pressed a button and Mario

00:30:04.900 | jumped.

00:30:05.900 | And I said, I can make something on the screen move.

00:30:10.700 | And the same feeling I had the first time someone showed me how to send an email.

00:30:13.220 | It was like really early.

00:30:14.220 | And he's like, you can send this.

00:30:15.220 | And I was like, it goes, I can press enter on my computer and something happens on your

00:30:18.260 | computer.

00:30:19.260 | Those were obviously, you know, when you have that feeling, it often means you're witnessing

00:30:22.800 | a paradigm shift.

00:30:24.380 | And I thought, this is one of those things.

00:30:27.060 | And I still kind of think it is, but it's kind of weird that it hasn't, you know, like

00:30:31.020 | where's the VR revolution?

00:30:33.020 | Like, yeah, I'm surprised.

00:30:34.660 | Because I'm with you.

00:30:35.660 | My first and still instinct is this feels like it changes everything.

00:30:39.460 | VR feels like it changes everything, but it's not changing anything.

00:30:43.220 | Like a dumb part of my brain is genuinely convinced that this is real.

00:30:46.780 | And then the smart part knows it's not.

00:30:48.060 | But that's why the dumb part was like, we're not walking off that cliff.

00:30:50.900 | The smart part's like, you're on your rug.

00:30:52.660 | It's fine.

00:30:53.660 | The dumb part of my brain is like, I'm not walking off the cliff.

00:30:56.180 | So it's like, it's crazy.

00:30:57.180 | - I feel like it's waiting for like that revolutionary person who comes in and says, I'm going to

00:31:02.660 | create a headset.

00:31:03.660 | Like, honestly-

00:31:04.660 | - Yeah, Steve Jobs, iPhone of-

00:31:06.020 | - Honestly, a little bit of a Carmack type guy, which is why it was really interesting

00:31:09.220 | for him to be involved with Facebook.

00:31:11.060 | It's basically, how do we create a simple dumb thing that's a hundred bucks, but actually

00:31:15.820 | creates that experience.

00:31:17.380 | And then there's going to be some viral killer app on it.

00:31:20.300 | And that's going to be the gateway into a thing that's going to change everything.

00:31:23.780 | I mean, I don't know what exactly was the thing that changed everything with a personal

00:31:27.340 | computer.

00:31:28.340 | Is that understood?

00:31:30.540 | Why that maybe graphics?

00:31:33.660 | What was the use case?

00:31:35.140 | - I mean-

00:31:36.140 | - Exactly.

00:31:37.140 | - Wasn't the '84 Macintosh like a moment when it was like, this is actually something that

00:31:43.540 | normal people can and want to use?

00:31:45.460 | - Because it was less than $5,000, I think.

00:31:48.140 | - And I just think it had some like Steve Jobs user friendliness already to it that

00:31:52.020 | other ones hadn't had.

00:31:53.380 | I think Windows 95 was a really big deal.

00:31:55.980 | I remember like, because I'm old enough to remember the MS-DOS when I was like, kind

00:31:59.820 | of remember the command.

00:32:01.460 | And then suddenly this concept of like a window you drag something into, or you double click

00:32:05.220 | an icon, which now seems like so obvious to us, was like revolutionary because it made

00:32:10.380 | it intuitive.

00:32:12.540 | So I don't know.

00:32:14.380 | - Windows 95 was good.

00:32:15.820 | - It was crazy, yeah.

00:32:16.820 | - I forget what the big leaps was, because that was Windows 2000, it sucked.

00:32:20.340 | And then Windows XP was good.

00:32:22.980 | I moved to Mac around 2004, so I stopped.

00:32:26.020 | - You sold your soul to the devil?

00:32:27.540 | - Yeah.

00:32:28.540 | - I see.

00:32:29.540 | Well, us, the people, still use Windows and Android, the device in the operating system

00:32:35.780 | of the people, not you elitist folk with your books and your, what else?

00:32:42.340 | And success.

00:32:44.300 | Okay.

00:32:46.820 | You write, "More technology means better good times, but it also means badder bad times.

00:32:52.500 | And the scary thing is, if the good and bad keep exponentially growing, it doesn't matter

00:32:56.780 | how great the good times become.

00:32:58.900 | If the bad gets to a certain level of bad, it's all over for us."

00:33:02.900 | Can you elaborate on this?

00:33:04.380 | Why is there, why does the bad have that property?

00:33:09.860 | That if it's all exponentially getting more powerful, then the bad is gonna win in the

00:33:13.580 | end?

00:33:14.580 | Was, am I misinterpreting that?

00:33:16.020 | - No.

00:33:17.020 | One of the things I noticed a trend, which was like, the centuries, the good is getting

00:33:23.180 | better every century.

00:33:24.380 | Like the 20th century was the best century yet in terms of prosperity, in terms of GDP

00:33:30.140 | per capita, in terms of life expectancy, in terms of poverty and disease, every metric

00:33:34.860 | that matters.

00:33:35.860 | The 20th century was incredible.

00:33:37.780 | It also had the biggest wars in history, the biggest genocide in history, the biggest existential

00:33:41.860 | threat yet with nuclear weapons, right?

00:33:45.580 | The depression was probably as big an economic.

00:33:48.500 | So it's this interesting thing where the stakes are getting higher in both directions.

00:33:53.380 | And so the question is like, if you get enough good, does that protect you against the bad?

00:33:59.780 | The dream, and I do think this is possible too, is the good gets so good.

00:34:03.700 | You know, have you ever read the culture series, the Ian Banks books?

00:34:06.100 | - Not yet, but I get criticized on a daily basis by some of the mutual folks we know

00:34:10.620 | for not having done so.

00:34:11.620 | - Yeah, lots of us.

00:34:12.620 | - And I feel like a lesser man for it.

00:34:13.860 | Yes, I need to change that.

00:34:14.860 | - Yeah, that's how I got onto it.

00:34:16.340 | And I read six of the 10 books and they're great.

00:34:19.660 | But the thing I love about them is like, it just paints one of these futuristic societies

00:34:25.020 | where the good has gotten so good that the bad is no longer even an issue.

00:34:31.100 | Like basically, and the way that this works is the AI, you know, the AIs are benevolent

00:34:38.140 | and they control everything.

00:34:39.420 | And so like, there's one random anecdote where they're like, you know, what happens if you

00:34:43.180 | murder someone in, 'cause you're still, you know, there's still people with rage and jealousy

00:34:47.660 | or whatever.

00:34:48.660 | So someone murders someone, first of all, that person's backed up.

00:34:51.540 | So it's like they have to get a new body and it's annoying, but it's like, it's not death.

00:34:56.180 | And secondly, that person, what are they gonna do?

00:34:57.500 | Put them in jail?

00:34:58.500 | No, no, no.

00:34:59.500 | They're just gonna send a slap drone around, which is this little like tiny, you know,

00:35:01.740 | random drone that just will float around next to them forever.

00:35:04.340 | And by the way, kind of be their servants.

00:35:05.460 | Like, it's kind of fun to have a slap drone, but it's just making sure that they never

00:35:07.780 | do anything.

00:35:08.820 | And it's like, I was like, oh man, it could just be, everyone could be so safe and everything

00:35:13.140 | could be so like, you know, you want a house, you know, the AIs will build you a house.

00:35:16.660 | There's endless space, there's endless resources.

00:35:18.840 | So I do think that that could be part of our future.

00:35:21.060 | That's part of what excites me is like, there is, like today would seem like a utopia to

00:35:24.860 | Thomas Jefferson, right?

00:35:26.300 | Thomas Jefferson's world would seem like a utopia to a caveman.

00:35:30.260 | There is a future, and by the way, these are happening faster, these jumps, right?

00:35:34.600 | So the thing that would seem like a utopia to us, we could experience in our own lifetimes,

00:35:38.780 | right?

00:35:39.780 | It's, especially if, you know, life extension combines with exponential progress.

00:35:44.900 | I want to get there.

00:35:45.900 | And I think in that part of what makes it utopia is you don't have to be as scared of

00:35:50.220 | the worst bad guy in the world trying to do the worst damage because we have protection.

00:35:54.860 | But that said, I'm not sure how that happens.

00:35:57.860 | Like it's, it's, it's, it's either easier said than done.

00:36:01.740 | Nick Bostrom uses the example of if nuclear weapons could be manufactured by microwaving

00:36:06.740 | sand, for example, we probably would be in the stone age right now because 0.001% of

00:36:14.180 | people would love to destroy all of humanity, right?

00:36:16.700 | Some 16 year old with huge mental health problems who right now goes and shoots up a school

00:36:21.380 | would say, oh, even better, I'm going to blow up a city.

00:36:24.580 | And now suddenly there's copycats, right?

00:36:27.020 | And so that's like, as our technology grows, it's going to be easier for the worst bad

00:36:35.460 | guys to do in tremendous damage.

00:36:39.660 | And it's easier to destroy than to build.

00:36:41.700 | So it takes a tiny, tiny number of these people with enough power to do bad.

00:36:46.460 | So that to me, I'm like the stakes are going up because what we have to lose is this incredible

00:36:51.420 | utopia.

00:36:52.420 | But also like dystopia is real.

00:36:54.300 | It happens.

00:36:55.300 | The Romans ended up in a dystopia.

00:36:56.540 | They probably earlier thought that was never possible.

00:36:58.700 | Like we should not get cocky.

00:37:01.860 | And so to me, that trend is the exponential tech is a double edged sword.

00:37:07.260 | It's so exciting.

00:37:08.700 | I'm happy to be alive now overall because I'm an optimist and I find it exciting.

00:37:12.840 | But it's really scary.

00:37:14.980 | And the dumbest thing we can do is not be scared.

00:37:18.060 | Dumbest thing we can do is get cocky and think, well, my life is always-- the last couple

00:37:21.020 | generations everything's been fine.

00:37:23.700 | Stop that.

00:37:25.180 | What's your gut?

00:37:26.420 | What percentage of trajectories take us towards the, as you put, unimaginably good future

00:37:31.500 | versus unimaginably bad future?

00:37:34.420 | As an optimist.

00:37:36.980 | It's really hard to know.

00:37:38.060 | I mean, all I can-- one of the things we can do is look at history.

00:37:42.220 | And on one hand, there's a lot of stories.

00:37:45.580 | I'm actually listening to a great podcast right now called The Fall of Civilizations.

00:37:50.660 | And it's literally every episode is like a little two hour deep dive into some civilization.

00:37:55.900 | Some are really famous, like the Roman Empire.

00:37:57.700 | Some are more obscure, like the Norse and Greenland.

00:38:03.300 | But each one is so interesting.

00:38:05.380 | But what's-- I mean, there's a lot of civilizations that had their peak.

00:38:11.140 | There's always the peak, right, when they're thriving.

00:38:12.660 | And they're at their max size.

00:38:15.220 | And they have their waterways.

00:38:17.100 | And they have their-- it's civilized.

00:38:19.900 | And it's representative.

00:38:20.900 | And it's fair.

00:38:21.980 | And whatever.

00:38:22.980 | Not always.

00:38:23.980 | But the peak is the great-- you know, if I could go back in time.

00:38:25.860 | It's not that the farther you go back, the worse it gets.

00:38:28.740 | No, no, no.

00:38:29.740 | You want to go back to a civilization during-- I would go to the Roman Empire in the year

00:38:32.620 | 100.

00:38:33.620 | Sounds great, right?

00:38:34.620 | You don't want to go to the Roman Empire in the year 400.

00:38:36.540 | We might be in the peak right now here, whatever this empire is.

00:38:39.700 | Honestly, I think about the '80s, the '70s, the '80s.

00:38:43.900 | Oh, here we go.

00:38:44.900 | The music.

00:38:45.900 | No, no.

00:38:46.900 | I hate the '80s.

00:38:47.900 | It's so much better.

00:38:48.900 | No, the '80s culture is so annoying.

00:38:49.900 | It's just like-- when I listen to these things, I'm thinking, you know, the '80s and '90s.

00:38:54.260 | Oh, my god, the '90s was popular.

00:38:56.620 | People forget that now.

00:38:57.620 | Like, Clinton was a superstar around the world.

00:39:00.060 | Michael Jordan was exported internationally.

00:39:02.540 | Then basketball was everywhere suddenly.

00:39:04.540 | You had, like, music, the sports, whatever.

00:39:07.100 | It was a little probably like the '50s, you know, coming out of the World War and the

00:39:10.820 | Depression before it.

00:39:11.820 | It was like this kind of like everyone was in a good mood kind of time, you know?

00:39:15.420 | It's like, finish a big project and it's Saturday.

00:39:17.540 | It was like-- I feel like the '50s was kind of like everyone was having it.

00:39:21.020 | You know, the '20s, I feel like everyone was in a good mood randomly.

00:39:25.580 | Then the '30s, everyone was in a bad mood.

00:39:28.360 | But the '90s, I think we'll look back on it as a time when everyone was in a good mood.

00:39:32.040 | And it was like, you know, again, of course, at the time, it doesn't feel that way necessarily.

00:39:35.380 | But I look at that, I'm like, maybe that was kind of America's peak.

00:39:39.200 | And like, maybe not, but like it hasn't been popular since really worldwide.

00:39:44.180 | It's gone in and out depending on the country, but like it hasn't reached that level of like

00:39:47.860 | America's awesome around the world.

00:39:50.900 | And the political situation has gotten really ugly.

00:39:55.460 | And maybe it's social media, maybe who knows.

00:39:57.980 | But I wonder if it'll ever be as simple and positive as it was then.

00:40:03.900 | Like, maybe we are in the-- it feels a little like maybe we're in the beginning of the downfall--

00:40:09.780 | or not.

00:40:10.780 | Because these things don't just-- it's not a perfect smooth hill.

00:40:12.980 | It goes up and down, up and down.

00:40:14.220 | So maybe there's another big upcoming.

00:40:15.940 | - It's unclear whether public opinion, which is kind of what you're talking to, is correlated

00:40:21.620 | strongly with influence.

00:40:23.700 | You could say that even though America has been on a decline in terms of public opinion,

00:40:27.980 | the exporting of technology, that America has still, with all the talk of China, has

00:40:33.460 | still been leading the way in terms of AI, in terms of social media, in terms of just

00:40:38.380 | basically any software-related product.

00:40:40.380 | - Like chips.

00:40:41.380 | - Yeah, chips.

00:40:42.380 | So hardware and software.

00:40:43.380 | I mean, America leads the way.

00:40:45.380 | You could argue that Google and Microsoft and Facebook are no longer American companies.

00:40:50.340 | They're international companies.

00:40:51.580 | But they really are still headquartered in Silicon Valley, broadly speaking.

00:40:57.260 | So and Tesla, of course, and just all of the technological innovation still seems to be

00:41:02.980 | happening in the United States.

00:41:05.780 | Although culturally and politically, this is not--

00:41:10.900 | - No, it's not good.

00:41:13.420 | - Well, maybe that could shift at any moment when all the technological development can

00:41:18.180 | actually create some positive impact in the world.

00:41:22.180 | That could shift it with the right leadership and so on, with the right messaging.

00:41:26.740 | - Yeah, I think, I don't feel confident at all about whether, no, no, I don't mean that.

00:41:32.980 | I don't mean, I don't feel confident in my opinion that we may be on the downswing or

00:41:37.260 | that we may be, 'cause I truly don't know.

00:41:39.180 | It's like, I think the people, these are really big macro stories that are really hard to

00:41:44.580 | see when you're inside of them.

00:41:45.900 | It's like being on a beach and running around a few miles this way and trying to suss out

00:41:51.180 | the shape of the coastline.

00:41:53.020 | It's just really hard to see the big picture.

00:41:56.620 | You get caught up in the micro stories, the little tiny ups and downs that are part of

00:42:00.980 | some bigger trend.

00:42:03.300 | And also giant paradigm shifts happen quickly nowadays.

00:42:05.780 | The internet came out of nowhere and suddenly was like, changed everything.

00:42:09.860 | So there could be a changed everything thing on the way.

00:42:11.660 | It seems like there's a few candidates for it.

00:42:14.300 | But I mean, it feels like the stakes are just high, higher than it even was for the Romans,

00:42:19.060 | higher than it was for because that we're more powerful as a species.

00:42:24.460 | We have God-like powers with technology that other civilizations at their peak didn't have.

00:42:30.500 | I wonder if those high stakes and powers will feel laughable to people that live, humans,

00:42:37.140 | aliens, cyborgs, whatever lives 100 years from now.

00:42:40.700 | That maybe are a little like, this feeling of political and technological turmoil is

00:42:46.300 | nothing.

00:42:47.300 | - Well, that's the big question.

00:42:48.780 | So right now, you know the 1890s was like a super politically contentious decade in

00:42:54.500 | the US.

00:42:55.500 | There was like immense tribalism and the newspapers were all like lying and telling,

00:43:00.660 | you know, there was a lot of like what we would associate with today's media, the worst

00:43:04.060 | of it.

00:43:05.060 | And it was over gold or silver being this, I don't know, it was very, it's something

00:43:08.220 | that I don't understand.

00:43:09.220 | But the point is, it was a little bit of a blip, right?

00:43:12.220 | It happened, it felt, it must've felt like the end of days at the time.

00:43:14.960 | And then now we look, and most people don't even know about that.

00:43:17.980 | Versus, you know, again, the Roman Empire actually collapsed.

00:43:21.420 | And so the question is just like, is yeah, you know, will in 50 years, will this be like,

00:43:26.820 | or like McCarthyism?

00:43:27.820 | Oh, they had like, oh, that was like a crazy few years in America and then it was fine.

00:43:32.680 | Or is this the beginning of something really big?

00:43:34.980 | And that's what I don't know.

00:43:37.220 | - Well, I wonder if we can predict what the big thing is at the beginning.

00:43:41.240 | It feels like we're not, we're just here along for the ride.

00:43:44.260 | And at the local level, and at every level, we're trying to do our best.

00:43:48.060 | - Well, how do we do our best?

00:43:50.780 | That's the one thing I know for sure is that we need to have our wits about us and do our

00:43:55.160 | best and the way that we can do that.

00:43:57.380 | You know, we have to be as wise as possible, right?

00:44:00.500 | To proceed forward.

00:44:01.900 | And wisdom is an emergent property of discourse.

00:44:06.340 | - So you're a proponent of wisdom versus stupidity?

00:44:08.660 | 'Cause you can make an, I can steal a man in the case for stupidity.

00:44:12.980 | - Do it.

00:44:13.980 | - I probably can't.

00:44:15.540 | But there's some, I think wisdom, and you talk about this, can come with a false confidence,

00:44:21.300 | arrogance.

00:44:22.300 | I mean, you talk about this in the book.

00:44:24.180 | That's too easy.

00:44:25.180 | - That's not wisdom then.

00:44:26.260 | If you're being arrogant, you're being unwise.

00:44:27.820 | - Unwise.

00:44:28.820 | - Yeah, I think wisdom is doing what people 100 years from now with the hindsight that

00:44:33.380 | we don't have would do if they could come back in time and they knew everything.

00:44:36.300 | It's like, how do we figure out how to have hindsight when we actually are not?

00:44:39.820 | - What if stupidity is the thing that people from 100 years from now will see as wise?

00:44:45.500 | - I mean--

00:44:46.500 | - The idiot by Dostoevsky being naive and trusting everybody, maybe that's the one.

00:44:50.300 | - Well, then you get lucky.

00:44:52.740 | Then maybe you get to a good future by stumbling upon it.

00:44:57.100 | But ideally, you can get there.

00:44:59.260 | I think a lot of, America, the great things about it are a product of the wisdom of previous

00:45:06.500 | Americans.

00:45:07.500 | The Constitution was a pretty wise system to set up.

00:45:12.860 | - There's not much stupid stumbling around.

00:45:14.660 | - Well, there is, I mean, with Dostoevsky's The Idiot, Prince Mishkin, and Brothers Karamazov,

00:45:21.460 | there's Alyosha Karamazov, you err on the side of love and almost like a naive trust

00:45:31.100 | in other human beings.

00:45:32.860 | And that turns out to be, at least in my perspective, in the long term, for the success of the species

00:45:38.060 | is actually wisdom.

00:45:39.740 | - It's a compass.

00:45:40.740 | - But we don't know.

00:45:41.740 | - It's a compass when you're in the fog.

00:45:43.100 | - In the fog, yeah.

00:45:44.100 | - Love is a compass.

00:45:45.100 | - Okay, but here's the thing.

00:45:46.100 | So I think we should have, a compass is nice, but you know what else is nice?

00:45:50.340 | It's a flashlight in the fog.

00:45:51.660 | You can't see that far, but you can see, oh, you can see four feet ahead instead of one

00:45:54.860 | foot.

00:45:55.860 | And that, to me, is discourse.

00:45:57.380 | That is open, vigorous discussion in a culture that fosters that is how the species, how

00:46:04.820 | the American citizens as a unit can be as wise as possible, can maybe see four feet

00:46:11.700 | ahead instead of one foot ahead.

00:46:13.220 | - That said, Charles Bukowski said that love is a fog that fades with the first light of

00:46:17.780 | reality.

00:46:18.780 | So I don't know how that works out, but I feel like there's intermixing of metaphors

00:46:22.460 | that works.

00:46:23.460 | Okay, you also write that quote, "As the authors of the story of us," which is this 1,000-page

00:46:28.780 | book, "we have no mentors, no editors, no one to make sure it all turns out okay.

00:46:35.860 | It's all in our hands.

00:46:37.520 | This scares me, but it's also what gives me hope.

00:46:40.540 | If we can all get just a little wiser together, it may be enough to nudge the story onto a

00:46:45.300 | trajectory that points towards an unimaginably good future."

00:46:51.260 | Do you think we can possibly define what a good future looks like?

00:46:55.900 | I mean, this is the problem that we ran into with communism, of thinking of utopia, of

00:47:06.460 | having a deep confidence about what a utopian world looks like.

00:47:11.220 | - Well, it's a deep confidence.

00:47:13.020 | That was a deep confidence about the instrumental way to get there.

00:47:17.020 | It was that, you know, I think a lot of us can agree that if everyone had everything

00:47:21.500 | they needed and we didn't have disease or poverty and people could live as long as they

00:47:25.180 | wanted to and choose when to die and there was no existential, major existential threat

00:47:31.260 | because we control, I think almost everyone can agree that would be great.

00:47:34.940 | That communism is a, that was, they said, "This is the way to get there."

00:47:40.500 | And that is, that's a different question, you know?

00:47:44.340 | So the unimaginably good future I'm picturing, I think a lot of people would picture, and

00:47:48.820 | I think most people would agree.

00:47:50.060 | Now, not everyone.

00:47:51.060 | There's a lot of people out there who would say humans are the scourge on the earth and

00:47:53.580 | we should de-growth or something, but I think a lot of people would agree that, you know,

00:47:58.060 | just again, take Thomas Jefferson, bring him here.

00:47:59.980 | You would see it as a utopia for obvious reasons, the medicine, the food, the transportation,

00:48:07.540 | just how, the quality of life and the safety and all of that.

00:48:11.700 | So extrapolate that forward for us.

00:48:14.500 | Now we're Thomas Jefferson, you know, what's the equivalent?

00:48:17.940 | That's what I'm talking about.

00:48:19.100 | And the big question is, I actually don't, I don't try to say, "Here's the way to get

00:48:22.980 | there.

00:48:23.980 | Here's the actual specific way to get there."

00:48:26.140 | I try to say, "How do we have a flashlight so that we can together figure it out?

00:48:30.420 | Like how do we give ourselves the best chance of figuring out the way to get there?"

00:48:33.940 | And I think part of the problem with communists and people, ideologues, is that they're way

00:48:40.340 | too overconfident that they know the way to get there.

00:48:44.140 | And it becomes a religion to them, this solution.

00:48:47.440 | And then you know, you can't update once you have a solution as a religion.

00:48:50.440 | And so.

00:48:51.440 | - I felt a little violated when you said communists and stared deeply into myself.

00:48:57.880 | In this book, you've developed a framework for how to fix everything.

00:49:02.580 | It's called The Ladder.

00:49:03.580 | Can you explain it?

00:49:04.580 | - Okay, it's not a framework for how to fix everything.

00:49:07.060 | I would never say that.

00:49:08.060 | - I'll explain it to Tim Urban at some point.

00:49:09.900 | - Okay.

00:49:10.900 | - How this humor thing works.

00:49:11.900 | - Yeah, no.

00:49:12.900 | - It's a framework of how to think about collaboration between humans such that we could fix things.

00:49:20.080 | - I think it's a compass.

00:49:21.080 | - Yeah, it's like a, it's a ruler that we can, once we look at it together and see what

00:49:28.040 | it is, we can all say, oh, we want to go to that side of the ruler.

00:49:30.760 | Not this side.

00:49:33.040 | And so it gives us a direction to go.

00:49:34.440 | - And so what are the parts of The Ladder?

00:49:36.960 | - So I have these two characters.

00:49:38.280 | This orange guy, this primitive mind, is, this is our software.

00:49:42.400 | That is the software that was in a 50,000 BC person's head that was specifically optimized

00:49:50.520 | to help that person survive in that world.

00:49:52.480 | And not even, not just not really survive, but help them pass their genes on in that

00:49:55.440 | world.

00:49:58.720 | And civilization happened quickly and brains change slowly.

00:50:04.040 | And so that unchanged dude is still running the show in our head.

00:50:10.560 | And I use the example of like Skittles.

00:50:13.240 | Like why do we eat Skittles?

00:50:15.560 | It's trash.

00:50:16.560 | It's obviously bad for you.

00:50:18.720 | And it's because the primitive mind in the world that it was programmed for, there was

00:50:24.720 | no Skittles.

00:50:25.720 | It was just fruit.

00:50:27.640 | And if there was a dense, chewy, sweet fruit like that, it meant you just found like a

00:50:31.640 | calorie gold mine.

00:50:33.160 | Energy, energy, take it, take it, eat as much as you can.

00:50:36.760 | Gorge on it.

00:50:37.760 | Hopefully you get a little fat.

00:50:38.760 | That would be the dream.

00:50:40.320 | And now we're so good with energy for a while.

00:50:42.160 | We don't have to stress about it anymore.

00:50:44.240 | So today Mars Inc is clever and says, let's not sell things to people's higher minds,

00:50:51.520 | who's the other character.

00:50:52.800 | Let's sell to people's primitive minds.

00:50:54.360 | Primitive minds are dumb.

00:50:55.360 | And let's trick them into thinking this is this new, this, this thing you should eat

00:50:58.920 | and then they'll eat it.

00:50:59.920 | Now Mars Inc is a huge company.

00:51:01.480 | Actually, just to linger real quick.

00:51:03.000 | So you said primitive mind and higher mind.

00:51:04.800 | So those are the two things that make up this bigger mind that it, that is the modern human

00:51:09.480 | being.

00:51:10.480 | Yeah.

00:51:11.480 | It's like, you know, it's not perfect.

00:51:12.480 | Obviously there's a lot of crossover.

00:51:13.480 | There's people who will yell at me for saying there's two minds and you know that, but to

00:51:16.920 | me it's still a useful framework where you have this software that has making decisions

00:51:22.640 | based on a world that you're not in anymore.

00:51:25.080 | And then you've got this other character.

00:51:26.720 | I call it the higher mind.

00:51:27.720 | And it's the part of you that knows that skills are not good and can override the instinct.

00:51:31.240 | And the reason you don't always eat Skittles is because the higher mind says, no, no, no,

00:51:34.560 | we're not doing that because that's bad.

00:51:36.360 | And I know that right now you can apply that to a lot of things.

00:51:39.480 | The higher mind is the one that knows I shouldn't procrastinate.

00:51:41.560 | The primitive mind is the one that wants to conserve energy and not do anything icky and

00:51:45.080 | you know, can't see the future.

00:51:46.080 | So he procrastinates that, you know, you can apply this.

00:51:48.280 | No, I, in this book, apply it to, to how we form our beliefs is one of the ways.

00:51:54.880 | And then eventually to politics and political movements.

00:51:56.880 | But like, if you think about what, well, what's the equivalent of the Skittles tug of war

00:52:01.960 | in your head for how do you form your beliefs?

00:52:06.840 | And it's that the primitive mind in the world that it was optimized for, it wanted to feel

00:52:18.080 | conviction about its beliefs.

00:52:20.600 | It wanted to be sure that it was, it wanted to feel conviction and it wanted to agree

00:52:27.840 | with the people around them.

00:52:28.840 | It didn't want to stand out.

00:52:29.840 | It wanted to, to fervently agree with the tribe about the tribe's sacred beliefs.

00:52:33.320 | Right?

00:52:34.320 | And there's a big part of us that wants to do that, that doesn't like changing our mind.

00:52:37.280 | It feels like it's part of our, the primitive mind identifies with beliefs.

00:52:40.320 | It feels like it's a threat, a physical threat to you, to your primitive mind when you change

00:52:45.120 | your mind or when someone disagrees with you in a smart way.

00:52:48.800 | So there's that huge force in us, which is confirmation bias.

00:52:51.560 | That's where that comes from.

00:52:52.560 | It's, it's this, this, this desire to keep believing what we believe and this desire

00:52:56.980 | to also fit in with our beliefs, to believe what the people around us believe.

00:53:01.920 | And that can be fun in some ways.

00:53:03.920 | We all like the same sports team and we're all super into it and we're all going to be

00:53:07.040 | biased about that call together.

00:53:08.560 | I mean, that it's not always bad, but it's not a very smart way to be.

00:53:13.000 | And you're actually, you're working kind of for those ideas.

00:53:15.980 | Those ideas are like your boss and you're working so hard to keep believing those.

00:53:20.000 | Those ideas are, you know, a really good paper comes in that you read that, that, that conflicts

00:53:23.960 | with those ideas.

00:53:24.960 | And you will do all this work to say that paper is bullshit because you're, you're a

00:53:30.360 | faithful employee of those ideas.

00:53:32.720 | Now the higher mind, to me, the same party that can override the Skittles can override

00:53:36.320 | this and can, and can search for something that makes a lot more sense, which is truth.

00:53:41.240 | Because what rational being wouldn't want to know the truth who wants to be delusional.

00:53:45.600 | And so there's this tug of war because the higher mind doesn't identify with ideas.

00:53:51.020 | Why would you, it's an experiment you're doing and it's a mental model.

00:53:53.920 | And if someone can come over and say, you're wrong, you'd say, where, where, show me, show

00:53:56.520 | me.

00:53:57.640 | And if they point out something that is wrong, you'd say, oh, thanks.

00:54:00.320 | Oh, good.

00:54:01.320 | I just got a little smarter, right?

00:54:02.320 | I'm not going to identify with the thing.

00:54:03.320 | I'll go, yeah, kick it.

00:54:04.320 | See if you can break it.

00:54:05.320 | If you can break it, it's not that good.

00:54:06.320 | Right?

00:54:07.320 | So there's both of these in our heads and there's this tug of war between them.

00:54:11.280 | And sometimes, you know, if you're telling me about something with AI, I'm probably going

00:54:14.400 | to think with my higher mind because I'm not identified with it.

00:54:16.600 | But if you go and you criticize the ideas in this book or you criticize my religious

00:54:20.000 | beliefs or you criticize, I might have a harder time because the primitive mind says, no,

00:54:23.320 | no, no, those are, are special ideas.

00:54:26.000 | So yeah, so that's, that's one way to use this ladder is like, it's a spectrum, you

00:54:30.080 | know, at the top, the higher mind is doing all the thinking.

00:54:32.520 | And then as you go down, it becomes more of a tug of war.

00:54:34.280 | And at the bottom, the primitive mind is in total control.

00:54:37.120 | And this is distinct as you show from the spectrum of ideas.

00:54:40.960 | So this is how you think versus what you think.

00:54:43.320 | And those are distinct.

00:54:44.320 | Those are different dimensions.

00:54:46.240 | We need, we need a vertical axis.

00:54:48.820 | We have all these horizontal axes, left, right, center, or, you know, this opinion all the

00:54:52.520 | way to this opinion.

00:54:53.520 | But it's like, what's much more important than where you stand is how you got there,

00:54:58.320 | right?

00:54:59.320 | So this helps if, if I can say this person's kind of on the left or on the right, but they're

00:55:04.920 | up high, I think, I think, in other words, I think they got there using evidence and

00:55:08.880 | reason and they were willing to change their mind.

00:55:10.880 | Now that means a lot to me what they have to say.

00:55:12.560 | If I think they're just a tribal person and I can predict all their beliefs from hearing

00:55:16.120 | one because it's so obvious what political beliefs, that person's views are irrelevant

00:55:20.080 | to me because they're not real.

00:55:21.540 | They didn't come from information.

00:55:23.820 | They came from a tribe's kind of, you know, sacred 10 commandments.

00:55:29.340 | I really like the comic you have in here about with the boxer.

00:55:32.900 | This is the best boxer in the world.

00:55:34.500 | Wow, cool.

00:55:35.500 | Who has he beaten?

00:55:37.700 | No one.

00:55:38.700 | He's never fought anyone.

00:55:39.700 | Then how do you know he's the best boxer in the world?

00:55:42.140 | I can just tell.

00:55:43.140 | Now, I mean, this connects with me and I think with a lot of people just because in martial

00:55:46.680 | arts, it's especially kind of true that this is this whole legend about different martial

00:55:50.740 | artists and that kind of would construct like action figures like, you know, thinking that

00:55:58.820 | Steven Seagal is the best fighter in the world or Chuck Norris.

00:56:01.460 | But Chuck Norris is actually backed up.

00:56:03.380 | He's done really well in competition, but still the ultimate test for particular for

00:56:07.180 | martial arts is what we now know as mixed martial arts, UFC and so on.

00:56:12.260 | That's the actual scientific testing ground.

00:56:14.140 | It's a meritocracy.

00:56:15.140 | Yeah, exactly.

00:56:16.140 | I mean, there's within certain rules and you can criticize those rules like this doesn't

00:56:19.500 | actually represent the broader combat that you would think of when you're thinking about

00:56:23.220 | martial arts.

00:56:24.220 | But reality is you're actually testing things.

00:56:26.540 | And that's when you realize that Aikido and some of these kind of woo woo martial arts

00:56:31.740 | in their certain implementations don't work in the way you think they would in the context

00:56:36.940 | of fighting.

00:56:37.940 | And I think this is one of the places where everyone can agree, which is why it's a really

00:56:41.700 | nice comic because then you start to talk about.

00:56:46.580 | Tap this onto ideas that people take personally.

00:56:50.300 | It starts becoming a lot more difficult to basically highlight that we're thinking with

00:56:57.500 | not with our higher mind, but with our primitive mind.

00:57:00.020 | Yeah.

00:57:01.020 | I mean, if I'm thinking with my higher mind and now here is I can use different things

00:57:04.980 | for an idea as a metaphor.

00:57:06.340 | So here the metaphor is a boxer for one of your conclusions, one of your beliefs.

00:57:12.820 | And if all I care about is truth, in other words, that means all I care about is having

00:57:20.100 | a good boxer.

00:57:21.800 | I would say, go, yeah, try, see if this person is good.

00:57:26.420 | In other words, I would get into arguments, which is throwing my boxer out there to fight

00:57:29.900 | against other ones.

00:57:31.620 | And if I think my argument is good, by the way, I love boxing.

00:57:33.860 | If I think my guy is amazing, Mike Tyson, I'm thinking, oh yeah, bring it on.

00:57:40.100 | Who wants to come see?

00:57:41.100 | I bet no one can beat my boxer.

00:57:42.460 | I love a good debate, right, in that case.

00:57:45.620 | Now what would you think about my boxer if not only was I telling you he was great, but

00:57:51.100 | he's never boxed anyone.

00:57:52.140 | But then you said, OK, well, your idea came over to try to punch him.

00:57:55.740 | And I screamed and I said, what are you doing?

00:57:57.860 | That's violence.

00:57:58.860 | And you're an awful person.

00:58:01.780 | And I don't want to be friends with you anymore because you would think this boxer obviously

00:58:05.300 | sucks.

00:58:06.300 | Or at least I think it sucks deep down because why would I be so anti anyone?

00:58:11.700 | No boxing allowed.

00:58:13.900 | So I think if you're in-- so I call this a ladder, right?

00:58:19.140 | If you're in low-rung land, whether it's a culture or whatever, a debate, an argument,

00:58:23.620 | when someone says, no, that's totally wrong, what you're saying about that, and here's

00:58:27.620 | why.

00:58:28.620 | You're actually being totally biased.

00:58:31.100 | It sounds like a fight.

00:58:32.180 | People are going to say, oh, wow, we got in a fight.

00:58:34.540 | It was really awkward.

00:58:35.540 | Are we still friends with that person?

00:58:37.460 | Because that's not a culture of boxing.

00:58:39.700 | It's a culture where you don't touch each other's ideas.

00:58:41.620 | It's insensitive.

00:58:42.620 | Versus in a high-rung culture, it's sport.

00:58:48.620 | I mean, like every one of your podcasts, whether you're agreeing or disagreeing, the tone is

00:58:54.220 | the same.

00:58:55.220 | It's not like, oh, this got awkward.

00:58:56.220 | It's like the tone is identical because you're just playing intellectually either way because

00:58:59.900 | it's a good high-rung space.

00:59:00.900 | - At his best, but people do take stuff personally.

00:59:05.140 | And that's actually one of the skills of conversation just as a fan of podcasts is when you sense

00:59:09.780 | that people take a thing personally, you have to like, there's sort of methodologies and

00:59:15.460 | little paths you can take to calm things down.

00:59:18.500 | Go around.

00:59:20.140 | Don't take it as a violation of like that.

00:59:21.540 | - You're trying to suss out which of their ideas are sacred to them.

00:59:24.380 | And which ones are, bring it on.

00:59:26.660 | - And sometimes it's actually, I mean, that's the skill of it, I suppose, that sometimes

00:59:29.700 | it's certain wordings in the way you challenge those ideas are important.

00:59:35.140 | You can challenge them indirectly and then together, walk together in that way.

00:59:40.100 | Because what I've learned is people are used to their ideas being attacked in a certain

00:59:46.940 | way, in a certain tribal way.

00:59:49.420 | And if you just avoid those, like for example, if you have political discussions and just

00:59:53.580 | never mentioned left or right or Republican and Democrat, none of that, just talk about

00:59:59.380 | different ideas and avoid certain kind of triggering words.

01:00:03.780 | You can actually talk about ideas versus falling into this path that's well-established through

01:00:10.340 | battles that people have previously fought.

01:00:12.420 | - When you say triggering, I mean, who's getting triggered?

01:00:14.740 | The primitive mind.

01:00:15.740 | So what you're trying to do, what you're saying in this language is how do you have conversations

01:00:19.740 | with other people's higher minds, almost like whispering without waking up the primitive

01:00:23.780 | mind.

01:00:24.780 | The primitive mind is there sleeping, right?

01:00:25.780 | And as soon as you say something, the left primitive mind gets up and says, "What?

01:00:29.540 | What are you saying about the left?"

01:00:30.540 | And now everything goes off the rails.

01:00:33.340 | - What do you make of conspiracy theories under this framework of the latter?

01:00:37.740 | - So here's the thing about conspiracy theories is that once in a while they're true, right?

01:00:43.780 | 'Cause sometimes there's an actual conspiracy.

01:00:45.720 | Actually humans are pretty good at real conspiracies, secret things.

01:00:50.260 | And then I just watched the Madoff doc, great new Netflix doc, by the way.

01:00:56.540 | And so the question is, how do you create a system that is good at, you put the conspiracy

01:01:06.220 | theory in and it either goes, "Eh," or it says, "This is interesting, let's keep exploring

01:01:11.820 | it."

01:01:12.820 | How do you do something that it can, how do you assess?

01:01:14.060 | And so again, I think the high-run culture is really good at it because a real conspiracy,

01:01:21.420 | what's gonna happen is you put it, it's like a little machine you put in the middle of

01:01:24.620 | the table and everyone starts firing darts at it or bow and arrow or whatever, and everyone

01:01:27.900 | starts kicking it and trying to, and almost all conspiracy theories, they quickly crumble,

01:01:33.060 | right?

01:01:34.060 | Because they actually, Trump's election one is, I actually dug in and I looked at like

01:01:38.540 | every claim that he or his team made and I was like, "All of these, none of these hold

01:01:43.900 | up to scrutiny, none of them."

01:01:44.900 | I was open-minded, but none of them did.

01:01:46.900 | So that was one that as soon as it's open to scrutiny, it crumbles.

01:01:51.320 | The only way that conspiracy can stick around in a community is if it is a culture where

01:01:58.020 | that's being treated as a sacred idea that no one should kick or throw a dart at because

01:02:02.340 | if you throw a dart, it's gonna break.

01:02:03.740 | So it's being, and so what you want is a culture where no idea is sacred.

01:02:10.180 | Anything can get thrown at.

01:02:11.180 | And so I think that then what you'll find is that 94 out of 100 conspiracy theories

01:02:15.940 | come in and they fall down.

01:02:17.580 | The other, maybe four of the others come in and there's something there, but it's not

01:02:21.080 | as extreme as people say.

01:02:22.080 | And then maybe one is a huge deal and it's actually a real conspiracy.

01:02:25.360 | - Well, isn't there a lot of gray area and there's a lot of mystery.

01:02:28.920 | Isn't that where the conspiracy theories seep in?

01:02:32.560 | So it's great to hear that you've really looked into the Trump election fraud claims, but

01:02:40.000 | aren't they resting on a lot of kind of gray area, like fog, basically saying that there

01:02:46.080 | is dark forces in the shadows that are actually controlling everything.

01:02:49.840 | I mean, the same thing with maybe you can, there's like safer conspiracy theories, less

01:02:55.840 | controversial ones like, have we landed on the moon?

01:02:58.720 | Did the United States ever land on the moon?

01:03:02.720 | There's, you know, like the reason those conspiracy theories work is you could construct, there's

01:03:08.800 | incentives and motivation for faking the moon landing.

01:03:11.880 | There's a lot of, there's very little data supporting the moon landing.

01:03:20.000 | Like that's very public and it kind of looks fake, space kind of looks fake.

01:03:22.800 | - And that would be a big story if it turned out to be fake.

01:03:26.080 | - That's the argument, that would be the argument against it.

01:03:28.080 | Like are people really as a collective going to hold onto a story that big?

01:03:33.960 | Yeah, so that, but there's a lot, the reason they work is there's mystery.

01:03:38.560 | - Yeah, there's a great documentary called Behind the Curve about flat earthers.

01:03:42.480 | And one of the things that you learn about flat earthers is they believe all the conspiracies,

01:03:47.880 | not just the flat earth.

01:03:49.640 | They are convinced the moon landing is fake, they're convinced 9/11 was an American con

01:03:53.680 | job.

01:03:55.240 | They're convinced, you know, that, name a conspiracy and they believe it.

01:03:59.480 | And so it's so interesting is that I think of it as a skepticism spectrum.

01:04:07.520 | So on one side, you, it's like a filter in your head, a filter in the beliefs section

01:04:13.120 | of your brain.

01:04:14.120 | On one end of the spectrum, you are gullible, perfectly gullible.

01:04:18.000 | You believe anything someone says, right?

01:04:19.280 | On the other side, you're paranoid.

01:04:20.280 | You think everyone's lying to you, right?

01:04:22.920 | Everything is false.

01:04:23.920 | Nothing anyone says is true, right?

01:04:24.920 | So obviously those aren't good places to be.

01:04:27.720 | Now the healthy place, I think that the, so I think the healthy place is to be somewhere

01:04:32.280 | in the middle.

01:04:33.280 | And, but also you can learn to trust certain sources and then, you know, you don't have

01:04:36.120 | to do as much, apply as much skepticism to them.

01:04:38.960 | And so here's what, like, when you start having a bias, just say you have a political bias,

01:04:46.480 | when your side says something, you will find yourself moving towards the gullible side

01:04:50.280 | of the spectrum.

01:04:51.280 | You read an article written that supports your views, you move to the gullible side

01:04:54.440 | of the spectrum and you just believe it and you don't have any, where's that skepticism

01:04:57.280 | that you normally have, right?

01:04:58.280 | And then you move, and then you, soon as it's the other person talking, the other team talking,

01:05:01.840 | you move to the skeptical, the closer to the, you know, in denial, paranoid side.

01:05:07.120 | Now, flat earthers are the extreme.

01:05:09.600 | They are either a 10 or one.

01:05:13.080 | So it's like, it's so interesting because they're the people who are saying, ah, nah,

01:05:15.880 | I won't believe you.

01:05:16.880 | I'm not gullible.

01:05:17.880 | No, everyone else is gullible about the moon landing.

01:05:19.240 | I won't.

01:05:20.240 | And then yet when there's this evidence like, oh, because you can't see Seattle, you can't

01:05:24.360 | see the buildings over that horizon and you should, which isn't true.

01:05:28.140 | You should be, if the earth around you wouldn't be able to see them.

01:05:32.100 | Therefore it's, so suddenly they become the most gullible person.

01:05:34.060 | Hear any theory about the earth flat, they believe it.

01:05:35.980 | It goes right into their beliefs.

01:05:37.380 | So they're actually jumping back and forth between refusal to believe anything and believe

01:05:41.700 | anything.

01:05:42.700 | And so they're the extreme example.

01:05:44.220 | But I think when it comes to conspiracy theories, the people that get themselves into trouble

01:05:48.220 | are the ones who, they become really gullible when they hear a conspiracy theory that kind

01:05:52.100 | of fits with their worldview.

01:05:53.820 | And they likewise, when there's something that's kind of obviously true and it's not

01:05:57.260 | a big lie, they will actually, they'll think it is.

01:06:01.700 | They just tighten up their kind of skepticism filter.

01:06:04.620 | And so, yeah.

01:06:05.980 | So I think the healthy places to be is where you are not, because you also don't want to

01:06:09.540 | be the person who says every conspiracy, you hear the word conspiracy theory and it sounds

01:06:12.600 | like a synonym for like quack job crazy theory.

01:06:17.660 | Right?

01:06:18.660 | So, yeah.

01:06:19.660 | So I think, yeah, I think it's be somewhere in the middle of that spectrum and to learn

01:06:22.820 | to fine tune it.

01:06:23.820 | Which is a tricky place to operate.

01:06:25.220 | Because you kind of have to, every time you hear a new conspiracy theory, you should approach

01:06:29.500 | it with an open mind.

01:06:31.700 | And you know, and also if you don't have enough time to investigate, which most people don't,

01:06:36.860 | kind of still have a humility not to make a conclusive statement that that's nonsense.

01:06:41.500 | There's a lot of social pressure, actually, to immediately laugh off any conspiracy theory,

01:06:48.660 | if it's done by the bad guys, right?

01:06:50.940 | You will quickly get mocked and laughed at and not taken seriously.

01:06:54.420 | If you give any credence, you know, back to the lab leak was a good one, where it's like,

01:06:59.020 | turned out that that was at least very credible, if not true.

01:07:03.700 | And that was a perfect example of one where when it first came out, and not only so, so

01:07:09.700 | Brett Weinstein talked about it.

01:07:11.820 | And then I, in a totally different conversation, said something complimentary about him on

01:07:16.500 | a totally different subject.

01:07:19.040 | And people were saying, Tim, you might have gone a little off the deep end.

01:07:22.180 | You're like quoting someone who is like a lab leak person.

01:07:24.900 | So I was getting my reputation dinged for complimenting on a different topic, someone

01:07:31.220 | whose reputation was totally sullied, because they had, you know, they questioned an orthodoxy,

01:07:36.820 | right?

01:07:37.820 | So you see, so what does that make me want to do?

01:07:41.380 | Distance myself from Brett Weinstein.

01:07:42.740 | That's the, at least that's the incentive that's, and what does that make other people

01:07:45.500 | want to do?

01:07:46.500 | Don't become the next Brett Weinstein.

01:07:47.500 | Don't say it out loud, because you don't want to become someone that no one wants to compliment

01:07:50.900 | anymore, right?

01:07:51.900 | So you can see the social pressure, and that's, and of course, when there is a conspiracy,

01:07:55.700 | that social pressure is its best friend.

01:07:59.040 | - Because then they see the people from outside are seeing that social pressure enact, like

01:08:06.140 | Tim Urban becoming more and more and more extreme to the other side, and so they're

01:08:09.180 | going to take the more and more and more extreme.

01:08:11.260 | I mean, this, what do you see that the pandemic did, that COVID did to our civilization in

01:08:19.660 | that regard, in the forces?

01:08:21.700 | Why was it so divisive?

01:08:23.540 | Do you understand that?

01:08:26.580 | - Yeah, so COVID, I thought might be, we always know the ultimate example of a topic that

01:08:32.460 | will unite us all is the alien attack.

01:08:34.140 | - Yeah.

01:08:35.140 | - Although honestly, I don't even have that much faith then.

01:08:36.260 | I think there'd be like, some people are super pro-alien, and some people are anti-alien,

01:08:41.420 | but anyway.

01:08:42.420 | - I was actually sorry to interrupt, because I was talking to a few astronomers, and they're

01:08:47.460 | the first folks that made me kind of sad in that if we did discover life on Mars, for

01:08:55.020 | example, that there's going to be potentially a division over that too, whereas half the

01:08:59.820 | people will now believe that's real.

01:09:02.060 | - Well, because we live in a current society where the political divide has subsumed everything,

01:09:12.340 | and that's not always like that.

01:09:15.380 | It goes into stages like that.

01:09:17.020 | We're in a really bad one where it's actually, in the book, I call it like a vortex, almost

01:09:22.860 | like a whirlpool that pulls everything into it.

01:09:27.740 | And so normally you'd say, okay, immigration, naturally going to be contentious.

01:09:31.700 | That's always political, right?

01:09:33.860 | But COVID seemed like, oh, that's one of those that will unite us all.

01:09:39.020 | Let's fight this not human virus thing.

01:09:43.300 | No one's sensitive, no one's getting hurt when we insult the virus.

01:09:46.940 | Let's all be, we have this threat, this common threat that's a threat to everyone of every

01:09:50.620 | nationality and every country, every ethnicity.

01:09:55.380 | And it didn't do that at all.

01:09:57.380 | The whirlpool was too powerful.

01:09:59.000 | So it pulled COVID in, and suddenly masks, if you're on the left, you like them.

01:10:03.380 | If you're on the right, you hate them.

01:10:05.300 | And suddenly lockdowns, if you're on the left, you like them, and on the right, you hate

01:10:08.580 | them.

01:10:09.580 | And vaccines, this is, people forget this.

01:10:11.780 | When Trump first started talking about the vaccine, Biden, Harris, Cuomo, they're all

01:10:18.780 | saying I'm not taking that vaccine, not from this CDC.

01:10:21.380 | - Because it was too rushed or something like that?

01:10:24.020 | - Because I'm not trusting anything that Trump says.

01:10:26.620 | Trump wants me to take it, I'm not taking it.

01:10:28.060 | I'm not taking it from this CDC.

01:10:29.980 | So this was, Trump was almost out of office, but at the time, if Trump had been, it would've

01:10:35.220 | been, I'm pretty sure it would've stayed.

01:10:37.340 | Right likes vaccines, the left doesn't like vaccines.

01:10:40.380 | Instead, the president switched.

01:10:42.180 | And all those people are suddenly saying, they were actually specifically saying that

01:10:46.420 | if you, that like, if you're saying the CDC is not trustworthy, that's misinformation,

01:10:51.540 | which is exactly what they were saying about the other CDC.

01:10:54.380 | And they were saying it because they genuinely didn't trust Trump, which is fair, but now

01:10:58.060 | when other people don't trust the Biden CDC, suddenly it's this kind of misinformation

01:11:02.620 | that needs to be censored.

01:11:03.900 | So it was a sad moment, 'cause it was a couple months, even a week or so, I mean a month

01:11:08.260 | or so at the very beginning when it felt like a lot of our other squabbles were kind of

01:11:12.860 | like, oh, I feel like they're kind of irrelevant right now.

01:11:15.700 | And then very quickly the whirlpool sucked it in.

01:11:19.300 | And in a way where I think it damaged the reputation of these, a lot of the trust in

01:11:23.060 | a lot of these institutions for the long run.

01:11:25.300 | - But there's also an individual psychological impact.

01:11:27.900 | It's like a vicious negative feedback cycle where they were deeply affected on an emotional

01:11:32.700 | level and people just were not their best selves.

01:11:36.380 | - That's definitely true.

01:11:37.380 | I mean, talk about the primitive mind.

01:11:39.900 | I mean, one thing that we've been dealing with for our whole human history is pathogens.

01:11:45.780 | And it's emotional, right?

01:11:47.460 | It brings out, you know, there's really interesting studies where like, if, they studied the phenomenon

01:11:56.460 | of disgust, which is one of these like, you know, smiling is universal.

01:12:01.260 | You don't have to ever translate a smile, right?

01:12:03.980 | Throwing, you know, throwing your hands up when your sports team wins is universal because

01:12:08.700 | it's part of our coding.

01:12:10.780 | And so is disgust to kind of make this like, you know, face where you wrinkle up your nose

01:12:13.900 | and you kind of put out your tongue and maybe even gag.

01:12:17.020 | That's to expel, expel whatever, because it's the reaction when something is potentially

01:12:22.220 | a pathogen that might harm us, right?

01:12:24.740 | Feces, vomit, whatever.

01:12:26.700 | But they did this interesting study where people who, in two groups, the control group,

01:12:33.500 | you know, was shown images of, and I might be getting two studies mixed up, but they

01:12:37.940 | were showing images of like car crashes and like disturbing but not disgusting.

01:12:41.580 | And the other one was shown like, you know, like, you know, rotting things and just things

01:12:45.180 | that were disgusting.

01:12:46.260 | And then they were asked about immigration.

01:12:47.260 | These were Canadians.

01:12:48.740 | And the group that had the disgust feeling pulsing through their body was way more likely

01:12:54.160 | to prefer like immigrants from white countries.

01:12:58.980 | And the group that was, had been shown car accidents, they were, they still prefer the

01:13:02.820 | groups from white countries, but much less so.

01:13:05.300 | And so what does that mean?

01:13:06.820 | It's because with the disgust impulse makes us scared of, you know, sexual practices that

01:13:12.060 | are foreign, of ethnicities that are not, that don't look like us, of, it's still xenophobia.

01:13:17.180 | So it's ugly.

01:13:18.180 | It's really ugly stuff.

01:13:19.180 | This is, of course, also how, you know, the Nazi propaganda with cockroaches and, or it

01:13:24.540 | was, Rwandan was cockroaches, you know, the Nazis was rats.

01:13:27.500 | And, you know, it's specifically, it's a dehumanizing emotion.

01:13:31.660 | So anyway, we were, we were, we were, we were talking about COVID, but I think it does,

01:13:37.900 | it taps deep into like the human psyche and it, and it's, I don't think it brings out

01:13:41.180 | our, I think, like you said, I think it brings out an ugly side in us.

01:13:45.100 | - You describe an idea lab as being opposite of echo chambers.

01:13:50.220 | So we know what echo chambers are.

01:13:51.540 | And you said like, there's basically no good term for the opposite of an echo chamber.

01:13:56.540 | So what's an idea lab?

01:13:57.900 | - Yeah, well, first of all, both of these, we think of an echo chamber as like a group

01:14:01.500 | maybe, or even a place, but it's, it's a culture.

01:14:04.460 | It's an intellectual culture.

01:14:06.820 | And this goes along with the high rung, low, so high rung and low rung thinking is individual.

01:14:10.460 | So I was talking about what's going on in your head, but this is very connected to the

01:14:14.660 | social scene around us.

01:14:16.860 | And so groups will do high rung and low rung thinking together.

01:14:24.100 | Basically it's, so an echo chamber to me is, is a collaborative low rung thinking.

01:14:27.740 | It is, it's a culture where the cool, it's based around a sacred set of ideas.

01:14:34.700 | And it's the coolest thing you can do in an echo chamber culture is talk about how great

01:14:39.420 | the sacred ideas are and how bad and evil and stupid and wrong the people are who have

01:14:45.740 | the other views.

01:14:47.580 | And this, and it's quite boring, you know, it's quite boring, you know, it's very hard

01:14:53.260 | to learn and changing your mind is not cool in an echo chamber culture.

01:14:57.540 | It makes you seem wishy-washy.

01:14:58.940 | It makes you seem like, you know, like you're waffling and you're flip-flopping or whatever.

01:15:06.700 | Showing conviction about the sacred ideas in echo chamber culture is awesome.

01:15:10.020 | If you're just like, you know, obviously this, it makes you seem smart while being, you know,

01:15:14.220 | humble makes you seem dumb.

01:15:15.220 | So now flip all of those things on their heads and you have an, you have the opposite, which

01:15:18.900 | is idea lab culture, which is collaborative high rung thinking.

01:15:21.980 | It's collaborative truth finding.

01:15:23.820 | But it's also just, it's just a totally different vibe.

01:15:26.460 | It's a place where arguing is a fun thing.

01:15:31.620 | It's not, no one's getting offended.

01:15:33.180 | And criticizing like the thing everyone believes is actually, it makes you seem like interesting.

01:15:37.980 | Like, oh, really?

01:15:38.980 | Like, why do you think we're all wrong?

01:15:40.300 | And expressing too much conviction makes people lose trust in you.

01:15:44.300 | It doesn't make you seem smart, it makes you seem stupid if you don't really know what

01:15:46.860 | you're talking about, but you're acting like you do.

01:15:48.940 | - I really like this diagram of where on the X axis is agreement, on the Y axis is decency.

01:15:54.140 | That's in an idea lab.

01:15:55.980 | In echo chamber, there's only one axis.

01:15:58.100 | It's asshole to non-asshole.

01:16:00.300 | - Right.

01:16:01.300 | - I think this is a really important thing to understand about the difference between,

01:16:05.900 | you call it decency here, about asshole-ishness and disagreement.

01:16:10.500 | - So my college friends, we love to argue, right?

01:16:13.060 | And no one thought anyone was an asshole for, it was just for sport.

01:16:16.640 | Sometimes we'd realize we're not even disagreeing on something and that would be disappointing

01:16:19.580 | and be like, oh, I think we agree.

01:16:20.580 | And it was kind of like sad.

01:16:22.060 | It was like, oh, well, there goes the fun.

01:16:24.820 | And one of the members of this group has this, she brought her new boyfriend to one of our

01:16:31.180 | like hangouts and there was like a heated, heated debate.

01:16:35.380 | You know, just one of our typical things.

01:16:37.780 | And afterwards, you know, the next day he said like, is everything okay?

01:16:40.900 | And she was like, what do you mean?

01:16:42.260 | And he said like, after the fight.

01:16:43.260 | And she was like, what fight?

01:16:44.920 | And he was like, you know, the fight last night.

01:16:46.220 | And she was like, and she had to, and then she was like, you mean like the arguing?

01:16:49.620 | And he was like, yeah.

01:16:51.260 | And so that's someone who is not used to Idea Lab culture coming into it.

01:16:55.220 | And seeing it is like, that was like, this is like, are they still friends, right?

01:16:59.100 | And Idea Lab is nice for the people in them because individuals thrive.

01:17:04.100 | You don't want to just conform.

01:17:05.100 | That makes you seem boring in an idea.

01:17:06.820 | But you want to be yourself.

01:17:07.820 | You want to challenge things.

01:17:08.820 | You want to have a unique brain.

01:17:10.020 | So that's great.

01:17:11.020 | And you also have people criticizing your ideas, which makes you smarter.

01:17:14.100 | It doesn't always feel good, but you become more correct and smarter.

01:17:18.580 | And Echo Chamber is the opposite, where it's not good for the people in it.

01:17:22.180 | Your learning skills atrophy, and I think it's boring.

01:17:26.860 | But the thing is, they also have emergent properties.

01:17:29.420 | So the emergent property of an Idea Lab is like super intelligence.

01:17:34.620 | Just you and me alone, just the two of us.

01:17:37.620 | If we're working together on something, but we're being really grown up about it, we're

01:17:42.500 | not disagreeing, we're not, you know, no one's sensitive about anything.

01:17:45.860 | We're going to each find flaws in the other one's arguments that you wouldn't have found

01:17:48.980 | on your own.

01:17:50.420 | And we're going to have double the epiphanies, right?

01:17:52.780 | So it's almost like the two of us together is like as smart as 1.5.

01:17:56.500 | It's like 50% smarter than either of us alone, right?

01:17:58.460 | So you have this 1.5 intelligent kind of joint being that we've made.

01:18:03.420 | Now bring the third person and fourth person in, right?

01:18:05.540 | It starts to scale up.

01:18:06.540 | And this is why science institutions can discover relativity and quantum mechanics and these

01:18:12.820 | things that no individual human was going to come up with without a ton of collaboration,

01:18:17.860 | because it's this giant Idea Lab.

01:18:19.540 | So it has an emergent property of super intelligence.

01:18:22.180 | An echo chamber is the opposite, where it has the emergent property of stupidity.

01:18:27.380 | I mean, it has the emergent property of a bunch of people all paying fealty to this

01:18:35.260 | set of sacred ideas.

01:18:37.020 | And so you lose this magical thing about language and humans, which is collaborative intelligence,

01:18:43.060 | you lose it.

01:18:44.060 | It disappears.

01:18:45.300 | But there is that axis of decency, which is really interesting, because you kind of painted

01:18:50.420 | this picture of you and your friends arguing really harshly.

01:18:54.000 | But underlying that is a basic camaraderie, respect.

01:19:01.260 | There's all kinds of mechanisms we humans have constructed to communicate mutual respect,

01:19:07.980 | or maybe communicate that you're here for the Idea Lab version of this.

01:19:11.580 | Totally.

01:19:12.580 | You don't get personal, right?

01:19:15.220 | You're not getting personal.

01:19:16.220 | You're not taking things personally.

01:19:20.660 | People are respected in an Idea Lab, and ideas are disrespected.

01:19:24.420 | And there's ways to signal that.

01:19:26.380 | So with friends, you've already done the signaling.

01:19:29.660 | You've already established a relationship.

01:19:31.380 | The interesting thing is online, I think you have to do some of that work.

01:19:35.900 | To me, sort of steelmanning the other side, or no, having empathy and hearing out, being

01:19:42.940 | able to basically repeat the argument the other person is making before you, and showing

01:19:47.380 | like respect to that argument.

01:19:48.820 | I could see how you could think that before you make a counter-argument.

01:19:52.380 | There's just a bunch of ways to communicate that you're here not to do kind of, what is

01:20:00.140 | it, low rung, you know, shit talking, mockery, derision, but are actually here ultimately

01:20:06.620 | to discover the truth in the space of ideas and the tension of those ideas.

01:20:10.660 | And I think it's, I think that's a skill that we're all learning as a civilization of how

01:20:17.340 | to do that kind of communication effectively.

01:20:20.340 | I think disagreement, as I'm learning on the internet, it's actually a really tricky skill,

01:20:24.700 | like high effort, high decency disagreement.

01:20:27.820 | I got to listen to, there's a really good debate podcast, Intelligence Squared.

01:20:34.780 | And like, they can go pretty hard in the paint.

01:20:37.260 | - It's a classic idea lab.

01:20:38.820 | - It's exactly, but like, how do we map that to social media?

01:20:42.700 | When people like will say, will say, well, like Lex or anybody, you're not, you hate

01:20:48.980 | disagreement.

01:20:49.980 | You want to censor disagreement.

01:20:51.700 | No, I love Intelligence Squared type of disagreement.

01:20:55.260 | That's fun.

01:20:56.260 | - You want to reduce assholery.

01:20:58.260 | - And for me personally, I don't want to reduce assholery.

01:21:01.940 | I kind of like assholery, it's like fun in many ways.

01:21:04.860 | But the problem is when the asshole shows up to the party, they make it less fun for

01:21:11.140 | the party that's there for the idea lab.

01:21:12.940 | And the other people, especially the quiet voices at the back of the room, they leave.

01:21:17.260 | And so all you're left is with assholes.

01:21:20.220 | - Well, Twitter, political Twitter to me is one of those parties.

01:21:23.580 | It's a big party where a few assholes have really sent a lot of the quiet thinkers away.

01:21:34.740 | And so if you think about this graph again, what, some place like Twitter, a great way

01:21:43.300 | to get followers is to be an asshole with a certain, you know, pumping a certain ideology.

01:21:49.380 | You'll get a huge amount of followers.

01:21:50.980 | And for those followers, and the followers you're going to get, the people who like you

01:21:56.780 | are probably going to be people who are really thinking with their primitive mind because

01:22:00.660 | they're seeing you're being an asshole, but because you agree with them, they love you.

01:22:06.140 | And they think, they don't see any problem with how you're being.

01:22:07.980 | - Yeah, they don't see the asshole.

01:22:09.260 | This is a fascinating thing.

01:22:10.260 | - Well, because look, look at the thing on the right.

01:22:12.180 | Decent and decency are the same.

01:22:14.620 | So if you're in that mindset, the bigger the asshole, the better.

01:22:17.380 | If you're agreeing with me, you're my man.

01:22:18.820 | I love what you're saying.

01:22:19.820 | Yes, show them.

01:22:20.820 | Right?

01:22:21.820 | And the algorithm helps those people.

01:22:23.860 | Those people do great on the algorithm.

01:22:25.820 | - There's a fascinating dynamic that happens because I have currently hired somebody that

01:22:31.420 | looks at my social media and they block people because the assholes will roll in.

01:22:35.580 | They're not actually there to have an interesting disagreement, which I love.

01:22:40.340 | They're there to do kind of mockery.

01:22:42.700 | And then when they get blocked, they then celebrate that to their echo chamber.

01:22:47.940 | Like, look at this.

01:22:48.940 | I got them or whatever.

01:22:51.020 | - Or they'll say some annoying thing like, oh, so he talks about he likes, if I had done

01:22:56.140 | this, they'll say, oh, he says he likes Idea Labs, but he actually wants to create an echo

01:23:00.080 | chamber.

01:23:01.080 | I'm like, nope, you're an asshole.

01:23:04.820 | Look at the other 50 people on this thread that disagreed with me respectfully.

01:23:07.860 | They're not blocked.

01:23:08.860 | - Yep, exactly.

01:23:09.860 | - And so they see it as some kind of hypocrisy because again, they only see the thing on

01:23:13.580 | the right.

01:23:14.900 | And they're not understanding that there's two axes or that I see it as two axes.

01:23:18.940 | And so you seem petty in that moment, but it's like, no, no, no, this is very specific

01:23:22.860 | what I'm doing.

01:23:23.860 | You're actually killing the conversation.

01:23:26.300 | - And generally, I give all those folks a pass and just send them love telepathically.

01:23:31.540 | But yes, getting rid of assholes in the conversation is the way you allow for the disagreement.

01:23:38.520 | You do a lot of like, I think when primitive mindedness comes at you, at least on Twitter,

01:23:44.340 | I don't know what you're feeling internally in that moment, but you do a lot of like,

01:23:48.840 | I'm gonna meet that with my higher mind.

01:23:50.740 | And you come out and you'll be like, thanks for all the criticism, I love you.

01:23:56.440 | And that's actually an amazing response because what it does is it unrails up that person's

01:24:07.740 | primitive mind and actually wakes up their higher mind who says, oh, okay, you know,

01:24:10.820 | this guy's not so bad.

01:24:11.820 | And suddenly like, civility comes back.

01:24:14.380 | So it's a very powerful--

01:24:15.380 | - Hopefully long term.

01:24:17.060 | But the thing is, they do seem to drive away high quality disagreement.

01:24:23.060 | 'Cause it takes so much effort to disagree in a high quality way.

01:24:28.260 | - I've noticed this on my blog.

01:24:30.620 | One of the things I pride myself on is like my comment section is awesome.

01:24:36.660 | They're being respectful.

01:24:38.940 | No one's afraid to disagree with me and say, tear my post apart, but in a totally respectful

01:24:44.080 | way where the underlying thing is like, I'm here 'cause I like this guy and his writing.

01:24:48.620 | And people disagree with each other and they get in these long, and it's interesting and

01:24:51.380 | I read it and I'm learning.

01:24:53.020 | And then I, a couple posts, especially the ones I've written about politics, it's not

01:24:56.780 | like it seems like any other comment section.

01:24:59.140 | People are being nasty to me, they're being nasty to each other.

01:25:02.200 | And then I looked down one of them and I realized like, almost all of this is the work of a

01:25:06.640 | group of like three people.

01:25:08.460 | That's who you need to block.

01:25:09.660 | Those people need to be blocked.

01:25:10.660 | You're not being thin-skinned, you're not being petty doing it.

01:25:13.700 | You're actually protecting an idea lab.

01:25:17.180 | Because what really aggressive people like that do is they'll turn it into their own

01:25:20.420 | echo chamber.

01:25:21.820 | Because now everyone is scared to kind of disagree with them, it's unpleasant.

01:25:24.760 | And so people who will chime in are the people who agree with them and suddenly they've taken

01:25:28.540 | over the space.

01:25:29.540 | - And I kind of believe that those people on a different day could actually do high-effort

01:25:33.980 | disagreement, it's just that they're in a certain kind of mood.

01:25:37.620 | And a lot of us, just like you said, with a primitive mind, could get into that mood.

01:25:41.900 | And I believe it's actually the job of the technology, the platform, to incentivize those

01:25:47.680 | folks to be like, "Are you sure this is the best you can do?

01:25:52.180 | If you really want to talk shit about this idea, do better."

01:25:57.260 | And then we need to create incentives where you get likes for high-effort disagreement.

01:26:02.740 | Because currently you get likes for something that's slightly funny and is a little bit

01:26:08.580 | like mockery.

01:26:10.580 | Like, basically signals to some kind of echo chamber that this person is a horrible person,

01:26:18.060 | is a hypocrite, is evil, whatever.

01:26:20.460 | That feels like it's solvable with technology.

01:26:23.020 | Because I think in our private lives, none of us want that.

01:26:26.140 | - I wonder if it's making me think that I want a like, because a much easier way for

01:26:30.460 | me to do it just for my world would be to say something like, "Here's this axis.

01:26:37.460 | This is part of what I like about the latter."

01:26:40.460 | It's a language that we can use.

01:26:42.460 | Specifically what we're talking about is high-rung disagreement, good.

01:26:47.020 | Low-rung disagreement, bad.

01:26:48.980 | So it gives us a language for that.

01:26:50.460 | So what I would say is I would have my readers understand this axis.

01:26:56.000 | And then I would specifically say something like, "Please do the do it but why a favor

01:27:03.280 | and upvote regardless of what they're saying horizontally, regardless of what their actual

01:27:07.780 | view is.

01:27:08.780 | Upvote high-rungness.

01:27:09.780 | They could be tearing me apart.

01:27:11.700 | They can be saying great, they can be praising me, whatever.

01:27:16.060 | Uproot high-rungness and downvote low-rungness."

01:27:19.040 | And if enough people are doing that, suddenly there's all this incentive to try to say,

01:27:22.180 | "I need to calm my emotion down here and not be personal because I'm going to get voted

01:27:26.400 | into oblivion by these people."

01:27:28.400 | I think a lot of people would be very good at that.

01:27:32.680 | And not only would they be good at that, they would want that.

01:27:36.880 | That task of saying, "I know I completely disagree with this person, but this was a

01:27:40.360 | high-effort, high-rung disagreement."

01:27:44.680 | It gets everyone thinking about that other axis too.

01:27:46.280 | You're not just looking at where do you stand horizontally.

01:27:48.400 | You're saying, "Well, how did you get there and how are you...

01:27:51.840 | Are you treating ideas like machines or are you treating them like little babies?"

01:27:56.040 | - And that there should be some kind of labeling on personal attacks versus idea disagreement.

01:28:01.200 | Sometimes people throw in both a little bit.

01:28:03.080 | - Right.

01:28:04.080 | - That's like, "All right, no, there should be a disincentive at personal attacks versus

01:28:07.040 | idea attacks."

01:28:08.040 | - Well, you can also...

01:28:09.040 | One metric is a respectful disagreement.

01:28:12.640 | If I see, just say someone else's Twitter and I see you put out a thought and I see

01:28:17.240 | someone say, "I don't see it that way.

01:28:23.200 | Here's where I think you went wrong," and they're just explaining.

01:28:26.040 | I'm thinking that if Lex reads that, he's going to be interested.

01:28:29.440 | He's going to want to post more stuff, right?

01:28:31.120 | He's going to like that.

01:28:32.120 | If I see someone being like, "Wow, this really shows the kind of person that you become,"

01:28:37.320 | or shows something...

01:28:38.320 | I'm thinking, "That person is making Lex want to be on Twitter less."

01:28:41.240 | It's making him...

01:28:42.240 | And so what's that doing?

01:28:43.240 | What that person's actually doing is they're putting...

01:28:45.400 | Is they're actually...

01:28:46.400 | They're chilling discussion because they're making it unpleasant to...

01:28:48.760 | They're making it scary to say what you think.

01:28:50.920 | And the first person isn't at all.

01:28:52.160 | The first person is making you want to say more stuff.

01:28:54.880 | And those are both disagreed.

01:28:55.880 | Those are people who both disagree with you.

01:28:57.680 | - Exactly, exactly.

01:28:59.240 | I want to...

01:29:00.240 | Great disagreements with friends in meat space is like you're...

01:29:06.360 | They disagree with you.

01:29:08.240 | They could be even yelling at you.

01:29:10.440 | Honestly, they could even have some shit talk where it's like personal attacks.

01:29:14.080 | It still feels good.

01:29:15.360 | - Because you know them well and you know that that shit talk...

01:29:18.280 | Because, yeah, friends shit talk all the time playing a sport or a game.

01:29:22.360 | And again, it's because they know each other well enough to know that this is fun.

01:29:27.120 | We're having fun and obviously I love you.

01:29:30.880 | And that's important online.

01:29:32.120 | It's a lot harder.

01:29:33.120 | - Yeah, that "obviously I love you" that underlies a lot of human interaction seems to be easily

01:29:38.960 | lost online.

01:29:39.960 | I've seen some people on Twitter and elsewhere just behave their worst.

01:29:44.600 | And it's like, I know that's not who you are.

01:29:46.840 | Like why are you...

01:29:47.840 | Who is this human?

01:29:49.240 | - I know someone personally who is one of the best people.

01:29:54.280 | I love this guy.

01:29:56.160 | One of the best, fun, funny, nicest dudes.

01:30:01.160 | And if you looked at his Twitter only, you would think he's a culture warrior, an awful

01:30:05.940 | culture warrior.

01:30:07.800 | And biased and just stoking anger.

01:30:14.040 | And it comes out of a good place.

01:30:15.040 | And I'm not going to give any other info about it, specific.

01:30:17.840 | But like...

01:30:18.840 | - I think you're describing a lot of people.

01:30:19.840 | - It comes out of a good place because he really cares about what...

01:30:21.720 | You know, it comes out...

01:30:22.760 | But it's just, I can't square the two.

01:30:24.440 | And that's...

01:30:25.440 | You have to...

01:30:26.440 | Once you know someone like that, you can realize, okay, apply that to everyone.

01:30:28.960 | Because a lot of these people are lovely people.

01:30:31.480 | And it's just bring...

01:30:32.480 | Even just, you know, back in the before social media.

01:30:34.280 | Did you ever had a friend who like...

01:30:37.160 | Was just like...

01:30:38.160 | They had this like dickishness on text or email that they didn't have in person.

01:30:41.760 | And you're like, "Wow, email you is kind of a dick."

01:30:44.640 | And it's like, it just...

01:30:45.720 | Certain people have a different persona behind the screen.

01:30:48.440 | - It has, for me personally, become a bit of a meme that Lex blocks with love.

01:30:54.000 | But there is a degree to that where this is...

01:30:56.400 | I don't see people on social media as representing who they really are.

01:30:59.640 | I really do have love for them.

01:31:01.160 | I really do think positive thoughts of them.

01:31:03.160 | Throughout the entirety of the experience.

01:31:04.600 | I see this as some weird side effect of online communication.

01:31:09.800 | And so it's like, to me, blocking is not some kind of a derisive act towards that individual.

01:31:16.320 | It's just like saying...

01:31:17.320 | - Well, a lot of times what's happened is they have slipped into a very common delusion

01:31:23.760 | that dehumanizes others.

01:31:26.120 | So that doesn't mean they're a bad person.

01:31:27.240 | We all can do it.

01:31:28.240 | But they're dehumanizing you or whoever they're being nasty to, because in a way they would

01:31:33.720 | never do in person.

01:31:34.840 | Because in a person, they're reminded that's a person.

01:31:36.840 | Remember I said the dumb part of my brain when I'm doing VR won't step off the cliff,

01:31:41.240 | but the smart part of my brain knows I'm just on the rug.

01:31:43.640 | That dumb part of our brain is really dumb in a lot of ways.

01:31:47.760 | It's the part of your brain where you can set the clock five minutes fast to help you

01:31:51.800 | not be late.

01:31:52.800 | The smart part of your brain knows that you did that, but the dumb part will fall for

01:31:55.760 | it.

01:31:56.760 | So that same dumb part of your brain can forget that the person behind that screen, behind

01:32:01.200 | that handle is a human that has feelings.

01:32:05.040 | And that doesn't mean they're a bad person for forgetting that, because it's possible.

01:32:08.600 | - Well, this really interesting idea, and I wonder if it's true that you're right, is

01:32:12.920 | that both primitive mindedness and high mindedness tend to be contagious.

01:32:18.760 | I hope you're right that it's possible to make both contagious.

01:32:23.400 | Because our sort of popular intuition is only one of them, the primitive mindedness is contagious,

01:32:31.000 | as exhibited by social media.

01:32:32.680 | - To compliment you again, don't you think that your Twitter to me is like, I was just

01:32:37.480 | looking down, and I mean it is a, it's just high mindedness.

01:32:41.880 | It's just high mindedness, down, down, down, down, down.

01:32:44.380 | It's gratitude, it's optimism, it's love, it's forgiveness, it's all these things that

01:32:48.880 | are the opposite of grievance and victimhood and resentment and pessimism, right?

01:32:54.280 | And there's I think a reason that a lot of people follow you, because it is contagious.

01:33:00.480 | It makes other people feel those feelings.

01:33:02.200 | - I don't know, I've been recently, over the past few months, attacked quite a lot.

01:33:08.720 | And it's fascinating to watch, because it's over things that, I think I probably have

01:33:13.400 | done stupid things, but I'm being attacked for things that are totally not worthy of

01:33:18.280 | attack.

01:33:19.280 | I got attacked for a book list.

01:33:22.160 | - I saw that, by the way, I thought it was great.

01:33:24.840 | - But you can always kind of find ways to, I guess the assumption is, this person surely

01:33:32.280 | is a fraud, or some other explanation, he sure has dead bodies in the basement he's

01:33:37.240 | hiding or something like this, and then I'm going to construct a narrative around that

01:33:41.200 | and mock and attack that.

01:33:42.480 | I don't know how that works, but there is, there does, and I think you write this in

01:33:46.920 | the book, there seems to be a gravity pulling people towards the primitive mind.

01:33:52.080 | - When it comes to anything political, right, religious, certain things are bottom heavy,

01:33:58.840 | you know, for our psyche.

01:34:01.640 | They have a magnet that pulls our psyches downwards on the ladder.

01:34:05.320 | And why, why does politics pull our psyches down on the ladder?

01:34:09.200 | Because for the tens of thousands of years that we were evolving, you know, during human

01:34:17.800 | history, it was life or death.

01:34:20.800 | Politics was life or death.

01:34:22.500 | And so there's actually an amazing study where it's like, they challenged like 20 different

01:34:30.600 | beliefs of a person.

01:34:32.960 | And different parts of the person's brain, and they had an MRI going, different parts

01:34:36.960 | of the person's brain lit up when non-political beliefs were challenged versus political beliefs

01:34:41.000 | were challenged.

01:34:42.080 | When political beliefs were challenged, when non-political beliefs were challenged, the

01:34:46.560 | rational, like the prefrontal cortex type areas were lit up.

01:34:52.020 | When the political beliefs were challenged, and I'm getting over my head here, but it's

01:34:55.600 | like the parts of your brain, the default mode network, the parts of your brain associated

01:34:58.880 | with like introspection and like your own identity were lit up.

01:35:03.840 | And they were much more likely to change their mind on all the beliefs, the non-political

01:35:09.080 | beliefs.

01:35:10.080 | When that default mode network part of your brain lit up, you were going to, if anything,

01:35:15.160 | get more firm in those beliefs when you had them challenged.

01:35:18.260 | So politics is one of those topics that just literally, literally lights up different part

01:35:24.560 | of our brain.

01:35:25.560 | And again, I think we come back to primitive mind, higher mind here.

01:35:28.200 | It's like it gets our higher, this is one of the things our primitive mind comes programmed

01:35:33.680 | to care a ton about.

01:35:34.760 | And so it's going to be very hard for us to stay rational and calm and looking for truth

01:35:40.400 | because we have all this gravity to it.

01:35:42.080 | - Well, it's weird because politics, like what is politics?

01:35:44.600 | Like you talk about, it's a bunch of different issues and each individual issue, if we really

01:35:49.280 | talk about it- - Yeah, tax policy.

01:35:50.800 | Like why are we being emotional about this?

01:35:52.760 | - I don't think we're actually that, I mean, yeah, we're emotional about something else.

01:35:57.560 | - Yeah, I think what we're emotional about is my side, the side I've identified with

01:36:03.000 | is in power and making the decisions and your side is out of power.

01:36:08.040 | And if your side's in power, that's really scary for me because that goes back to the

01:36:12.360 | idea of who's pulling the strings in this tribe, right?

01:36:16.980 | Who's the chief?

01:36:17.980 | Is it your family's patriarch or is it mine?

01:36:21.520 | We might not have food if we don't win this kind of whatever, chief election.

01:36:26.560 | So I think that it's not about the tax policy or anything like that.

01:36:30.800 | And then it gets tied to this like broader, I think a lot of our tribalism has really

01:36:36.000 | coalesced around this.

01:36:37.120 | We don't have that much religious tribalism in the US, right?

01:36:39.480 | Now they know the Protestants and the Catholics hate each other.

01:36:42.120 | We don't have that really, right?

01:36:44.080 | And honestly, people like to say we have racial tribalism and everything, but even a kind

01:36:51.800 | of a racist white conservative guy, I think takes the black conservative over the woke

01:36:57.840 | white person any day of the week right now.

01:37:00.000 | So that's the strongest source of division.

01:37:01.480 | It tells me that I think politics is way stronger tribalism right now.

01:37:05.200 | I think that that white racist guy loves the black conservative guy compared to the white

01:37:12.040 | woke guy, right?

01:37:13.040 | So again, not that racial tribalism isn't a thing.

01:37:16.440 | Of course, it's always a thing, but like political tribalism is the number one right now.

01:37:21.560 | So race is almost a topic for the political division versus the actual sort of element

01:37:26.400 | of the tribe.

01:37:27.400 | It's a political football.

01:37:28.400 | Yeah.

01:37:29.400 | Yeah.

01:37:30.400 | So there's a, I mean, it's, this is dark because, so this is a book about human civilization.

01:37:36.520 | This is a book about human nature, but it's also a book of politics about politics.

01:37:44.160 | It is just the way you list it out in the book.

01:37:48.680 | It's kind of dark how we just fall into these left and right checklists.

01:37:54.640 | So if you're on the left, it's maintain Roe v. Wade, universal healthcare, good, mainstream

01:38:01.640 | media, fine, guns kill people, US is a racist country, protect immigrants, tax cuts bad,

01:38:07.480 | climate change awful, raise minimum wage.

01:38:09.160 | And on the right is the flip of that, reverse Roe v. Wade, universal healthcare bad, mainstream

01:38:14.600 | media bad, people kill people, not guns kill people.

01:38:17.880 | US was a racist country, protect borders, tax cuts good, climate change overblown, don't

01:38:23.560 | raise minimum wage.

01:38:24.560 | I mean, it has, you almost don't have to think about any of this.

01:38:28.160 | It's like literally.

01:38:29.160 | Well, so when you say it's a book about politics, it's interesting because it's a book about

01:38:33.120 | the vertical axis.

01:38:34.120 | Right.

01:38:35.120 | It's specifically not a book about the horizontal axis in that I'm not talking, I don't actually

01:38:38.760 | talk about any of these issues.

01:38:40.360 | I don't put out an opinion on them.

01:38:43.200 | Those are all horizontal, right?

01:38:45.440 | But when you, so rather than arguing or having another book about those issues, about right

01:38:50.440 | versus left, I wanted to do a book about this other axis.

01:38:54.600 | And so on this axis, the reason I had this checklist is that this is a low part of the

01:39:00.520 | low rung politics world, right?

01:39:03.800 | Low rung politics is a checklist and that checklist evolves, right?

01:39:08.000 | Like Russia suddenly is like popular with the right as opposed to, you know, it used

01:39:11.400 | to be, you know, in the sixties that left was the one defending Stalin.

01:39:14.960 | So they'll switch.

01:39:15.960 | It doesn't even matter.

01:39:16.960 | The substance doesn't matter.

01:39:17.960 | This is the approved checklist of the capital P party.

01:39:20.680 | And this is what everyone believes.

01:39:22.360 | That's a low rung thing.

01:39:23.680 | The high rungs, this is not what it's like high rung politics.

01:39:28.400 | You tell me your one view on this.

01:39:29.640 | I have no idea what you think about anything else, right?

01:39:32.440 | And you're going to say, I don't know about a lot of stuff because inherently you're not

01:39:36.440 | going to have that strong an opinion because you don't have that much in for these are

01:39:38.960 | complex things.

01:39:39.960 | So there's a lot of, I don't know.

01:39:42.080 | And people are all over the place.

01:39:44.000 | It's when you know, you're in, you know, you're talking to someone who has been subsumed with

01:39:48.440 | low rung politics.

01:39:50.120 | When, if they tell you their opinion on any one of these issues, you could just, you know,

01:39:54.400 | you could just rattle off their opinion on every single other one.

01:39:56.960 | And if, and if in three years it's becomes fashionable to, to have this new view, they're

01:40:00.760 | going to have that's, you're not thinking that's echo, that's echo chamber culture.

01:40:05.240 | And I've been using kind of a shorthand of centrist to describe this kind of a high rung

01:40:11.680 | thinking, but people tend to, I mean, it's, it seems to be difficult to be a centrist

01:40:16.400 | or whatever, a high rung thinker.

01:40:18.440 | It's like people want to label you as a person who's too cowardly to take a stance somehow

01:40:26.040 | as opposed to asking, saying, I don't know, as a first statement.

01:40:28.920 | Well, the problem with centrist is that would mean that in each of these tax cuts, bag tax

01:40:34.080 | cuts, good.

01:40:35.080 | It means that you are saying I am in, I think we should have some tax cuts, but not that

01:40:38.560 | many.

01:40:39.560 | You might not think that you might actually come do some research.

01:40:41.640 | You say, actually, I think tax cuts are really important.

01:40:45.600 | That doesn't mean, oh, I'm not a centrist anymore.

01:40:47.160 | I guess I'm a far, you know, no, no, no.

01:40:49.440 | That's why we need the second axis.

01:40:50.840 | So what you're trying to be when you say centrist is high rung, which means you might be all

01:40:54.160 | over the place horizontally.

01:40:55.660 | You might agree with the far left on this thing, the far right on this thing, you might

01:40:58.560 | agree with the centrists on this thing, but, but calling yourself a centrist actually like

01:41:03.020 | is putting yourself in a prison on the horizontal axis.

01:41:07.480 | And it's saying that, you know, I, I, whatever the, on the, on the different topics, I'm

01:41:10.840 | right in between the two policy-wise.

01:41:12.960 | That's not where you are.

01:41:14.080 | So yeah, that's what we, we're badly missing this other axis.

01:41:17.080 | Yeah.

01:41:18.080 | I mean, I still do think it's like, for me, I am a centrist when you project it down to

01:41:24.680 | the horizontal, but the point is you're missing so much data by not considering the vertical

01:41:30.600 | because like on average, maybe it falls somewhere in the middle, but in reality, there's just

01:41:35.720 | a lot of nuance issue to issue that involves just thinking and uncertainty and changing

01:41:40.840 | in the, given the context of the current geopolitics and economics is just always considering,

01:41:47.800 | always questioning, always evolving your views, all of that.

01:41:50.640 | Not just, not just about like, oh, I think we should be in the center on this.

01:41:53.860 | But another way to be in the center is if there's some phenomenon happening, you know,

01:41:58.280 | there's a terrorist attack, you know, and one side wants to say, this has nothing to

01:42:02.700 | do with Islam.

01:42:03.700 | And the other one, the other side wants to say, this is radical Islam, right?

01:42:08.480 | What's in between those, the saying, this is complicated and nuanced and we have to

01:42:11.940 | learn more.

01:42:12.940 | And it probably has something to do with Islam and something to do with the economic circumstances

01:42:17.060 | and something to do with, you know, geopolitics.

01:42:19.660 | So in a case like that, you actually do get really un-nuanced when you go to the extremes

01:42:24.740 | and all of that nuance, which is where all the truth usually is, is going to be in the

01:42:27.980 | middle.

01:42:28.980 | So yeah.

01:42:29.980 | - And there's a lot of truth to the fact that if you take that nuance on those issues, like

01:42:33.420 | war in Ukraine, COVID, you're going to be attacked by both sides.

01:42:37.900 | - Yes.

01:42:38.900 | People who have, who are really strongly on one side or the other hate centrist people.

01:42:43.780 | I've gotten this myself and you know, the, this, the, the slur that I've had thrown at

01:42:47.860 | me is I'm an enlightened centrist in a very mocking way.

01:42:51.620 | So what are they actually saying?

01:42:52.620 | What does enlightened centrist mean?

01:42:53.620 | It means someone who is, you know, Steven Pinker or Jonathan Haidt gets accused of is,

01:42:58.040 | you know, that they're highfalutin, you know, intellectual world, and they don't actually

01:43:03.260 | have any, they don't actually take a side.

01:43:05.840 | They don't actually get their hands dirty and they can be superior to both sides without

01:43:10.460 | actually taking a stand.

01:43:11.460 | Right.

01:43:12.460 | So I see the argument and I disagree with it because I firmly believe that the hardcore

01:43:17.740 | tribes, they think they're taking a stand and they're out in the streets and they're

01:43:21.660 | pushing for something.

01:43:22.660 | I think what they're doing is they're just driving the whole country downwards.

01:43:25.260 | And I think they're, they're hurting all the causes they care about.

01:43:28.380 | And so it's not that, it's not that, you know, it's not that we need everyone to be sitting

01:43:31.420 | there, you know, refusing to take a side.

01:43:33.180 | It's that you can be far left and far right, but be upper left and upper right.

01:43:37.260 | If we talk about the, you use the word liberal a lot in the book to mean something that we

01:43:43.260 | don't in modern political discourse mean.

01:43:45.540 | So it's this higher philosophical view.

01:43:48.060 | And then you use the words progressive to mean the left and conservative to mean the

01:43:53.180 | right.

01:43:54.180 | Can you describe the concept of liberal games and power games?

01:43:58.340 | So the power games is, is what I call the like, basically just the laws of nature as

01:44:05.540 | the, when laws of nature are the laws of the land, that's the power game.

01:44:10.140 | So animals, watch any David Attenborough special.

01:44:13.860 | And when the little lizard is running away from the, you know, the bigger animal or whatever,

01:44:19.940 | I use an example of a bunny and a bear.

01:44:21.540 | I don't even know if bears eat bunnies.

01:44:22.900 | They probably don't, but pretend bears eat bunnies.

01:44:24.460 | All right.

01:44:25.460 | So it's like in the power games, the bear is chasing the bunny.

01:44:28.780 | There's no fairness.

01:44:29.780 | There's no, okay, well, what's right.

01:44:31.100 | But you know, what, what, what, what, what's legal?

01:44:32.540 | No, no, no.

01:44:33.540 | If the bear is fast enough, it can eat the bunny.

01:44:36.460 | If the bunny is, can get away, it can say living in mid.

01:44:39.820 | So that's it.

01:44:40.820 | That's the only rule.

01:44:41.820 | Now humans have spent a lot of time in essentially that environment.

01:44:45.620 | So when you have a totalitarian dictatorship, it's, and so what's the rule of the power

01:44:50.260 | games?

01:44:51.260 | The bear can do whatever they want if they have the power to do so.

01:44:53.300 | It's just a game of power.

01:44:54.620 | So if the bunny gets away, the bunny actually has more power than the bear in that situation.

01:44:58.300 | Right.

01:44:59.300 | And likewise, the totalitarian dictatorship, there's no rules.

01:45:02.540 | A dictator can do whatever they want.

01:45:04.220 | They can, they can, they can torture, they can, you know, flatten a rebellion with a

01:45:08.340 | lot of murder because they have the power to do so.

01:45:10.740 | What are you going to do?

01:45:11.740 | Right.

01:45:12.740 | And that's, that's kind of the state of nature.

01:45:14.180 | That's our natural way.

01:45:15.180 | You know, that would, you know, when you look at a mafia, watch a mafia movie, you know,

01:45:19.540 | there's, we do a lot of, we have, we have it in us.

01:45:21.180 | We all have, we all can snap into power games mode when it becomes all about, you know,

01:45:28.980 | just, just actual raw power.

01:45:30.500 | Now the liberal games is, is, you know, something that civilizations for thousands of years

01:45:36.300 | have been working on.

01:45:37.300 | It's not invented by America or modern times, but America's kind of was like the latest

01:45:42.100 | crack at it yet, which is this idea instead of everyone can do what they want if they

01:45:46.780 | have the power to do so, it's everyone can do what they want as long as it doesn't harm

01:45:49.980 | anyone else.

01:45:50.980 | Now that's really complicated.

01:45:51.980 | How do you define harm?

01:45:52.980 | And, and the idea is that everyone has their, a list of rights which are protected by the

01:45:57.580 | government and then they have their inalienable rights and they're, they're protected, you

01:46:02.780 | know, those are protected again by, you know, from, from an invasion by other people.

01:46:08.620 | And so you have this kind of fragile balance.

01:46:11.020 | And so the idea with the liberal games is you, that there are laws, but it's not totalitarian.

01:46:16.500 | They will build very clear, strict laws kind of around the edges of what you can and can't

01:46:21.660 | do.

01:46:22.660 | And then everything else, freedom.

01:46:24.340 | So unlike a totalitarian dictatorship, actually it's, it's very loose.

01:46:27.740 | You can, there's a lot of things can happen and it's kind of up to the people, but there

01:46:31.500 | are still laws that protect the very basic inalienable rights and stuff like that.

01:46:34.820 | So it's this much looser thing.

01:46:36.020 | Now the vulnerability there is that it, so, so, so the, the benefits of it are obvious,

01:46:44.140 | right?

01:46:45.140 | Freedom is great.

01:46:46.140 | It's fair.

01:46:47.140 | They, you know, that, that equality of opportunity seemed like the most fair thing and, and,

01:46:53.900 | you know, equality before the law, you know, due process and all of this stuff.

01:46:57.340 | So it seems fair to the founders of the US and other enlightenment thinkers.

01:47:01.420 | And it also is a great way to manifest productivity, right?

01:47:04.940 | You know, you have, you have Adam Smith saying it's not from the benevolence of the butcher

01:47:09.500 | or the baker that we get our dinner, but from their own, from their own self-interest.

01:47:12.420 | So you have, you can harness kind of selfishness for, for progress.

01:47:16.260 | But it has a vulnerability, which is that because the laws, it's like the totalitarian

01:47:21.540 | laws, they don't have an excess of laws for no reason.

01:47:25.460 | They want to control everything.

01:47:26.740 | And the US, you know, in the US we say, we're, they're not going to do that.

01:47:29.060 | And so the, the second, it's almost two puzzle pieces.

01:47:31.900 | You have the laws and then you've got a liberal culture.

01:47:35.620 | Liberal laws have to be married to liberal culture, kind of a defense of liberal spirit

01:47:40.820 | in order to truly have the liberal games going on.

01:47:44.100 | And so that's vulnerable because free speech, you can have the first amendment, that's the

01:47:48.980 | laws part.

01:47:50.140 | But if, if you're in a culture where anyone who, you know, speaks out against orthodoxy

01:47:56.660 | is going to be shunned from the community, well, you're lacking the second piece of the

01:48:00.420 | puzzle there.

01:48:01.420 | You're lacking liberal culture.

01:48:02.500 | And so therefore you, you might as well be in a, you might as well not even have the

01:48:06.700 | first amendment.

01:48:08.080 | And there's a lot of examples like that where the culture has to do its part for the true

01:48:11.860 | liberal games to be enjoyed.

01:48:14.380 | So it's just much more complicated and much more nuanced than the power games.

01:48:17.740 | It's kind of, it's kind of a set of basic laws that then are coupled with a basic spirit

01:48:25.100 | to create this very awesome human environment that's also very vulnerable.

01:48:32.420 | So what do you mean the culture has to play along?

01:48:34.320 | So for something like a freedom of speech to work, there has to be a basic, what, decency?

01:48:41.300 | That if all people are perfectly good, then perfect freedom without any restrictions is

01:48:46.900 | great.

01:48:47.900 | It's where the human nature starts getting a little iffy.

01:48:50.700 | We start being cruel to each other, we start being greedy and desiring of harm, and also

01:48:56.980 | the narcissists and sociopaths and psychopaths in society, all of that, that's when you start

01:49:01.980 | to have to inject some limitations on that freedom.

01:49:05.020 | Yeah, I mean if, so what the government basically says is we're going to let everyone be mostly

01:49:12.340 | free, but no one is going to be free to physically harm other people or to steal their property,

01:49:20.740 | right?

01:49:21.860 | And so we're all agreeing to sacrifice that, you know, that 20% of our freedom, and then

01:49:27.500 | in return, all of us in theory can be 80% free, and that's kind of the bargain.

01:49:34.700 | But now that's a lot of freedom to leave people with, and a lot of people choose, it's like

01:49:39.900 | you're so free in the US, you're actually free to be unfree if you choose.

01:49:42.840 | That's kind of what an echo chamber is to me.

01:49:45.100 | It's, you know, you can choose to kind of be friends with people who essentially make

01:49:53.980 | it so uncomfortable to speak your mind that it's no actual effective difference for you

01:50:02.780 | than if you lived in a country.

01:50:04.340 | If you can't, you know, criticize Christianity in a certain community, you have a First Amendment,

01:50:11.180 | so you're not going to get arrested by the government for criticizing Christianity.

01:50:16.300 | But if you have this, if the social penalties are so extreme that it's just never worth

01:50:22.460 | it, you might as well be in a country that imprisons people for criticizing Christianity.

01:50:29.420 | And so that same thing goes for wokeness, right?

01:50:31.860 | This is what people get, you know, cancel culture and stuff.

01:50:34.700 | So when the reason these things are bad is because they're actually, they're depriving

01:50:40.180 | Americans of the beauty of the freedom of the liberal games by, you know, imposing a

01:50:46.620 | social culture that is very Power Games-esque.

01:50:49.300 | It's basically a Power Games culture comes in and you might as well be in the Power Games

01:50:53.460 | now.

01:50:54.460 | And so liberal, if you live in a liberal democracy, there will always be challenges to a liberal

01:51:01.460 | culture, lowercase l, liberal.

01:51:05.860 | There'll always be challenges to a liberal culture from people who are much more interested

01:51:10.140 | in playing the Power Games.

01:51:12.740 | And there has to be kind of an immune system that stands up to that culture and says, "That's

01:51:16.220 | not how we do things here in America, actually.

01:51:18.740 | We don't excommunicate people for not having the right religious beliefs or not rent, you

01:51:23.500 | know, we don't disinvite a speaker from campus for having the wrong political beliefs."

01:51:28.060 | And if it doesn't stand up for itself, it's like the immune system of the country failing

01:51:33.220 | and Power Games rushes in.

01:51:37.900 | So before chapter four in your book, and the chapters that will surely result in you being

01:51:45.260 | burned at the stake, you write, "We'll start our pitchfork tour in this chapter by taking

01:51:51.420 | a brief trip through the history of the Republican Party.

01:51:54.020 | Then in the following chapters, we'll take a Tim's career tanking deep dive into America's

01:52:00.140 | social justice movement," as you started to talk about.

01:52:03.260 | Okay, so let's go.

01:52:05.980 | What's the history of the Republican Party?

01:52:08.500 | I'm looking at this through my vertical ladder.

01:52:10.380 | What is this familiar story of the Republicans from the '60s to today, what does it look

01:52:17.140 | like through the vertical lens?

01:52:18.940 | Right?

01:52:19.940 | Does it look different?

01:52:21.740 | And is there an interesting story here that's been kind of hidden because we're always looking

01:52:24.500 | at the horizontal?

01:52:25.500 | Now, the horizontal story, you'll hear people talk about it and they'll say something like

01:52:29.820 | the Republicans have moved farther and farther to the right.

01:52:36.740 | And to me, that's not really true.

01:52:38.980 | Like, was Trump more right-wing than Reagan?

01:52:42.060 | I don't think so.

01:52:43.060 | I think he's left.

01:52:44.060 | In terms of actual policy, yeah.

01:52:45.060 | Yeah.

01:52:46.060 | So we're using this, again, it's just like you're calling yourself centrist when it's

01:52:48.340 | not exactly what you mean, even though it also is.

01:52:52.380 | So again, I was like, "Okay, look, this vertical lens helps with other things.

01:52:56.020 | Let's apply it to the Republicans."

01:52:57.020 | And here's what I saw is I looked at the '60s and I saw an interesting story, which I don't

01:53:04.260 | think not everyone's familiar with what happened in the early '60s.

01:53:08.900 | But in 1960, the Republican Party was a plurality.

01:53:14.460 | You had progressives, like genuine Rockefeller, pretty progressive people, all the way to

01:53:20.660 | – then you had the moderates like Eisenhower and Dewey.

01:53:25.180 | And then you go all the way to the farther right, you had Goldwater and what you might

01:53:30.340 | call – I call them the fundamentalists.

01:53:34.900 | And so it's this interesting plurality, right?

01:53:39.140 | Something we don't have today.

01:53:40.420 | And what happened was the Goldwater contingent, which was the underdog, they were small, right?

01:53:47.540 | Eisenhower was the president, or had just been the president, and was – it seemed

01:53:52.400 | like the moderates were – he said, "You have to be close to the center of the chess

01:53:56.060 | board.

01:53:57.060 | That's how you maintain power."

01:53:58.980 | These people were very far from the center of the chess board, but they ended up basically

01:54:02.260 | having like a hostile takeover.

01:54:03.940 | They conquered their own party.

01:54:06.220 | And they did it by breaking all of the kind of unwritten rules and norms.

01:54:12.020 | So they did things like they first started with like the college Republicans, which was

01:54:15.220 | like this feeder group that turned in – a lot of the politicians started there.

01:54:19.500 | And they went to the election and they wouldn't let the current president, the incumbent,

01:54:25.700 | speak.

01:54:26.700 | And they were throwing chairs and there were fistfights.

01:54:28.580 | And eventually people gave up and they just sat there and they sat in the chair talking

01:54:31.100 | for their candidate until everyone eventually left and then they declared victory.

01:54:35.560 | So basically they came in – there was a certain set of rules, agreed upon rules, and

01:54:41.980 | they came in playing the power games, saying, "Well, actually, if we do this, you won't

01:54:47.460 | have the power – we have the power to take it if we just break all the rules."

01:54:52.260 | And so they did and they won.

01:54:53.500 | And that became this hugely influential thing, which then they conquered California through

01:54:57.220 | again – these people were taken aback.

01:55:00.740 | These proper Republican candidates were appalled by the kind of like the insults that were

01:55:04.740 | being hurled at them and the intimidation and the bullying.

01:55:07.140 | And eventually they ended up in the National Convention, which was called like the right-wing

01:55:11.500 | Woodstock.

01:55:12.500 | It was like the Republican National Convention in '64 was just – again, there was jeering

01:55:16.780 | and they wouldn't let the moderates or the progressives even speak.

01:55:20.780 | And there was racism.

01:55:21.780 | You know, Jackie Robinson was there and he was a proud Republican and he said that he

01:55:25.300 | feels like he was a Jew in Hitler's Germany with the way that blacks were being treated

01:55:28.620 | there.

01:55:29.620 | And it was nasty.

01:55:30.620 | But what did they do?

01:55:31.620 | They had fiery, you know, plurality enough to win and they won.

01:55:36.660 | They ended up getting crushed in the general election and they kind of faded away.

01:55:39.660 | But to me, I was like, "What's – that was an interesting story."

01:55:42.220 | I see it as – I have this character in the book called the Golem, which is a big, kind

01:55:46.420 | of a big, dumb, powerful monster that's the emergent property of like a political

01:55:50.980 | echo chamber.

01:55:51.980 | It's like this big giant.

01:55:52.980 | It's stupid, but it's powerful and scary.

01:55:56.340 | And to me, I was like a golem rose up, conquered the party for a second, knocked it on its

01:56:00.460 | ass and then faded away.

01:56:05.260 | And to me, when I look at the Trump revolution and a lot – and not just Trump, the last

01:56:09.220 | 20 years, I see that same lower right, that lower right monster kind of making another

01:56:17.780 | charge for it, but this time succeeding and really taking over the party for a long period

01:56:21.820 | of time.

01:56:22.820 | And I see the same story, which is the power games are being played in a situation when

01:56:28.340 | it had always been – the government relies on all these unwritten rules and norms to

01:56:32.260 | function.

01:56:33.260 | But for example, you have in 2016, Merrick Garland gets nominated by Obama and the unwritten

01:56:40.420 | norm says that when the president nominates a justice, then you pass them through unless

01:56:45.620 | there's some egregious thing.

01:56:46.620 | That's what has happened.

01:56:47.620 | But they said, "Actually, this is the last year of his presidency and the people should

01:56:50.820 | choose.

01:56:51.820 | So you set a new precedent where the president can't nominate a Supreme Court justice in

01:56:57.540 | the last year."

01:56:58.540 | So they pass it through and it ends up being Gorsuch.

01:57:02.100 | And so they lose that seat.

01:57:04.140 | Now three years later, it's Trump's last year and it's another election year and Ginsburg

01:57:09.140 | dies.

01:57:10.820 | And what did they say?

01:57:11.820 | They say, "Oh, let's keep our precedent."

01:57:12.980 | They said, "No, actually, we changed our mind.

01:57:14.860 | We're going to nominate Amy Barrett."

01:57:17.460 | So to me, that is classic power games, right?

01:57:20.420 | There's no actual rule and what you're doing is they did technically have the power to

01:57:23.740 | block the nomination then and then they technically had the power to put someone in and they're

01:57:26.780 | pretending there's some principle to it, but they're just going for the short-term edge

01:57:31.860 | at the expense of what is like the workings of the system in the long run.

01:57:36.540 | And then what do the Democrats have to do in that situation?

01:57:38.860 | Because both parties have been doing this is they either can lose now all the time or

01:57:42.420 | they start playing the power games too.

01:57:44.260 | And now you have a prisoner's dilemma where it's like both end up doing this thing and

01:57:48.860 | everyone ends up worse off, the debt ceiling, all these power plays that are being made

01:57:53.380 | with these holding the country hostage, this is power games.

01:57:56.740 | And to me, that's what Goldwater was doing in the '60s, but it was a healthier time in

01:57:59.500 | a way because there was this plurality within the parties, reduced some of the national

01:58:04.620 | tribalism and there wasn't as much of an appeal to that.

01:58:07.780 | But today, it's just like do whatever you have to do to beat the enemies.

01:58:11.000 | And so I'm seeing a rise in power games and I talk about the Republicans because they

01:58:15.140 | did a lot of these things first.

01:58:16.240 | They have been a little bit more egregious, but both parties have been doing it over the

01:58:18.880 | last 20, 30 years.

01:58:20.200 | - Can you place blame, or maybe there's a different term for it, at the subsystems of

01:58:27.640 | this?

01:58:28.640 | So is it the media?

01:58:29.680 | Is it the politicians like in the Senate and Congress?

01:58:33.600 | Is it Trump?

01:58:34.600 | So the leadership?

01:58:36.160 | Is it, or maybe it's us human beings, maybe social media versus mainstream media?

01:58:44.480 | Is there a sense of where, what is the cause and what is the symptom?

01:58:48.120 | - It's very complex.

01:58:49.120 | So Ezra Klein has a great book, Why We're Polarized, where he talks about a lot of this.

01:58:52.280 | And there's some of these, it's really no one's fault.

01:58:56.120 | First of all, the environment has changed in a bunch of ways you just mentioned.

01:59:00.160 | And what happens when you take human nature, which is a constant, and you put it into an

01:59:02.960 | environment, behavior comes out.

01:59:05.840 | The environment's the independent variable.

01:59:07.240 | When that changes, the dependent variable, the behavior, changes with it, right?

01:59:11.600 | And so the environment has changed in a lot of ways.

01:59:13.620 | So one major one is, it used to, for a long time, actually, first it was the Republicans

01:59:22.240 | and then the Democrats just had a stranglehold on Congress.

01:59:26.200 | There was no, it was not even competitive.

01:59:28.280 | The Democrats for 40 years had the majority.

01:59:32.040 | And so therefore, it actually is a decent environment to compromise it.

01:59:37.440 | Because now we can both, what you want is Congress people thinking about their home

01:59:40.680 | district and voting yes on a national policy because we're going to get a good deal on

01:59:45.640 | it back at home.

01:59:46.640 | That's actually healthy, as opposed to voting in lockstep together because this is what

01:59:51.880 | the red party is doing, regardless of what's good for my home district.

01:59:55.720 | An example is Obamacare.

01:59:56.720 | There were certain Republican districts that would have actually officially been benefited

02:00:01.800 | by Obamacare, but every Republican voted against it.

02:00:04.720 | So and part of the reason is because there's no longer this obvious majority.

02:00:08.920 | Every few years, it switches.

02:00:09.920 | It's a 50/50 thing.

02:00:11.960 | And that's partially because it's become so, we've been so subsumed with this one national

02:00:17.060 | divide of left versus right that people are not, people are whoever, they're voting for

02:00:23.840 | the same party for president all the way down the ticket now.

02:00:27.400 | And so you have this just kind of 50/50 color war, and that's awful for compromise.

02:00:31.240 | So there's like 10 of these things that have redistricting, but also it is social media.

02:00:36.560 | It is, I call it hypercharged tribalism.

02:00:39.680 | In the sixties, you had kind of distributed tribalism.

02:00:41.800 | You had some people that are worked up about the USSR, right?

02:00:45.200 | They're national.

02:00:46.200 | That's what they care about.

02:00:47.200 | US versus foreign.

02:00:48.200 | You had some people that were saying left versus right, like they are today.

02:00:51.380 | And then other people that were saying that they were fighting within the party.

02:00:54.860 | But today you don't have that.

02:00:57.560 | You have ideological realignment.

02:00:59.080 | So you kind of got rid of a lot of the in-party fighting.

02:01:01.200 | And then there's hasn't been that big of a foreign threat, nothing like the USSR for

02:01:04.960 | a long time.

02:01:05.960 | So you kind of lost that.

02:01:06.960 | And what's left is just this left versus right thing.

02:01:09.560 | And so that's kind of this hypercharged whirlpool that subsumes everything.

02:01:14.760 | And so, yeah, I mean, people point to Newt Gingrich, and people like there's certain

02:01:19.520 | characters that enacted policies that stoked this kind of thing.

02:01:23.120 | But I think this is a much bigger kind of environmental shift.

02:01:26.120 | - Well, that's going back to our questions about the role of individuals in human history.

02:01:30.440 | So the interesting, one of the many interesting questions here is about Trump.

02:01:34.560 | Is he a symptom or a cause?

02:01:37.200 | Because he seems to be, from the public narrative, such a significant catalyst for some of the

02:01:43.440 | things we're seeing.

02:01:44.440 | - This goes back to what we were talking about earlier, right?

02:01:46.200 | Like is it the person or is it the times?

02:01:48.240 | I think he's a perfect example of it's a both situation.

02:01:51.320 | I don't think, if you pluck Trump out of this situation, I don't think that Trump was inevitable.

02:01:56.600 | But I think we were very vulnerable to a demagogue.

02:02:00.160 | And if you hadn't been, Trump would have had no chance.

02:02:03.440 | And why were we vulnerable to a demagogue is because you have these, I mean, I think

02:02:10.280 | it's specifically on the right.

02:02:13.000 | If you actually look at the stats, it's pretty bad.

02:02:15.080 | Like the people who, because it's not just who voted for Trump.

02:02:17.680 | A lot of people just vote for the red, right?

02:02:19.520 | What's interesting is who voted for Obama against Romney and then voted for Trump?

02:02:25.320 | These are not racists, right?

02:02:27.120 | These are not hardcore Republicans.

02:02:29.560 | They voted for Obama.

02:02:31.460 | And where did the switch come from?

02:02:33.280 | Places that had economic despair, where bridges were not working well.

02:02:36.920 | That's a signifier.

02:02:39.320 | Where paint's chipping in the schools.

02:02:41.640 | These little things like this.

02:02:42.640 | So I think that you had this, a lot of these kind of rural towns, you have true despair.

02:02:47.880 | And then you also have the number one indicator of voting for Trump was distrust in media.

02:02:54.580 | And the media has become much less trustworthy.

02:02:57.880 | And so you have all these ingredients that actually make us very vulnerable to a demagogue.

02:03:04.840 | And a demagogue is someone who takes advantage, right?

02:03:06.880 | There's someone who comes in and says, "I can pull all the right strings and push all

02:03:11.880 | the right emotional buttons right now and get my self-power by taking advantage of the

02:03:16.240 | circumstances."

02:03:17.320 | And that is what Trump totally did.

02:03:20.520 | It makes me wonder how easy it is for somebody who's a charismatic leader to capitalize on

02:03:27.360 | cultural resentment when there's economic hardship to channel that.

02:03:32.680 | So John Haidt wrote a great article about, basically, truth is at an all-time low right

02:03:37.440 | now.

02:03:38.720 | The media is not penalized for lying.

02:03:41.440 | MSNBC, Fox News, these are not penalized for being inaccurate.

02:03:45.600 | They're penalized if they stray from the orthodoxy.

02:03:49.880 | On social media, it's not the truest tweets that go viral.

02:03:53.240 | And so Trump understood that better than anyone.

02:03:57.840 | He took advantage of it.

02:03:59.240 | He was living in the current world when everyone else was stuck in the past.

02:04:02.820 | And he saw that, and he just lied.

02:04:06.760 | Everything he said, truth was not relevant at all.

02:04:11.040 | It's just truly, it's not relevant to him and what he's talking about.

02:04:14.440 | He doesn't care, and he knew that neither do a subset of the country.

02:04:17.960 | I was thinking about this, just reading articles by journalists, especially when you're not

02:04:23.960 | a famous journalist in yourself, but you're more like a New York Times journalist.

02:04:30.520 | So the big famous thing is the institution you're a part of.

02:04:34.400 | You can just lie, 'cause you're not going to get punished for it.

02:04:38.120 | You're going to be rewarded for the popularity of an article.

02:04:41.240 | So if you write 10 articles, there's a huge incentive to just make stuff up.

02:04:46.880 | - You got to get clicks.

02:04:47.920 | - To get clicks.

02:04:48.920 | That's the first and foremost.

02:04:49.920 | And culturally, people will attack that article to say it's dishonest.

02:04:54.480 | One half the country will attack that article for saying it's dishonest.

02:04:57.520 | But they'll kind of forget.

02:05:00.320 | You will not have a reputational hit.

02:05:03.080 | There won't be a memory like, "This person made up a lot of stuff in the past."

02:05:06.160 | No, they'll take one article at a time, and they'll attach the reputation hits will be

02:05:11.140 | to New York Times, the institution.

02:05:13.880 | So for the individual journalist, there's a huge incentive to make stuff up.

02:05:17.000 | - Totally.

02:05:18.000 | - It's wild.

02:05:19.000 | - And it's scary, because it's almost like you can't survive if you're just an old-school,

02:05:24.120 | honest journalist who really works hard and tries to get it right and does it with nuance.

02:05:27.640 | What you can be is you can be a big-time substacker or a big-time podcaster.

02:05:31.880 | A lot of people do have a reputation for accuracy and rigor, and they have huge audiences.

02:05:38.000 | But if you're working in a big company right now, I think that many of the big media brands

02:05:48.160 | are very much controlled by the left.

02:05:50.640 | But I will say that the ones that are controlled by the right are even more egregious, not

02:05:54.800 | just in terms of accuracy, but also in terms of...

02:05:57.680 | The New York Times, for all of its criticisms, they have a handful of...

02:06:05.000 | Here and there, they put out a pretty...

02:06:08.800 | An article that strays from the...

02:06:10.520 | Barry Weiss wrote there for a long time.

02:06:12.400 | And then you've got...

02:06:13.400 | They wrote an article criticizing free speech on campus stuff recently.

02:06:17.880 | And they have a couple very left-progressive-friendly conservatives, but they have conservatives

02:06:25.380 | that are writing the op-eds.

02:06:26.380 | Fox News, you're not seeing thoughtful...

02:06:30.240 | Breitbart, you're not seeing thoughtful progressives writing there.

02:06:34.520 | There's some degree to which the New York Times, I think, still incentivizes and values

02:06:40.280 | the vertical, the high effort.

02:06:42.760 | So you're allowed to have a conservative opinion if you do a really damn good job.

02:06:50.120 | If it's a very thorough, in-depth kind of...

02:06:53.080 | And if you kind of pander to the progressive senses in all the right ways.

02:06:58.400 | I always joke that TED, they always have a couple token conservatives, but they get on

02:07:02.760 | stage and they're basically like, "So totally, you're all...

02:07:06.920 | The progressivism's right about all of this, but maybe libertarianism isn't all about..."

02:07:13.240 | So there is an element, but you know what?

02:07:15.000 | It's something.

02:07:16.000 | It's better than being a total tribal.

02:07:18.520 | I think you can see the New York Times tug of war, the internal tug of war.

02:07:22.440 | You can see it, because then they also have these awful instances, like the firing of

02:07:26.120 | James Bennett, which is a whole other story.

02:07:28.440 | But they have...

02:07:29.440 | Yeah, you can see it going both ways.

02:07:31.960 | But in the '60s, what did you have?

02:07:34.520 | You had ABC, NBC, CBS.

02:07:35.520 | The '70s, you had these three news channels, and they weren't always right, and they definitely

02:07:40.880 | sometimes spun a narrative together maybe about the Vietnam or whatever.

02:07:44.160 | But if one of them was just lying, they'd be embarrassed for it.

02:07:48.720 | They would be penalized.

02:07:49.720 | They'd be dinged, and they'd be known as, "This is the trash one."

02:07:52.280 | And that would be terrible for their ratings, because they weren't just catering to half

02:07:54.920 | the country.

02:07:55.920 | They all were catering to the whole country.

02:07:57.200 | So both on the axis of accuracy and on the axis of neutrality, they had to try to stay

02:08:04.480 | somewhere in the reasonable range, and that's just gone.

02:08:08.920 | One of the things I'm really curious about is...

02:08:12.360 | I think your book is incredible.

02:08:14.400 | I'm very curious to see how it's written about by the press, because I could see...

02:08:19.760 | I could myself write, with the help of Chad J. Petit, of course, clickbait articles in

02:08:24.000 | either direction.

02:08:25.000 | Yeah.

02:08:26.000 | It's easy to imagine.

02:08:27.000 | Your whole book is beautifully written for clickbait articles.

02:08:30.520 | If any journalists out there need help, I can write the most atrocious criticisms.

02:08:37.400 | Yeah.

02:08:38.400 | I'm ready.

02:08:40.400 | I'm braced.

02:08:42.520 | Yeah.

02:08:43.680 | So speaking of which, you write about social justice.

02:08:48.840 | You write about two kinds of social justice, liberal social justice and SJF, social justice

02:08:55.800 | fundamentalism.

02:08:57.400 | What are those?

02:08:58.400 | Yeah.

02:08:59.400 | So the term "wokeness" is so loaded with baggage.

02:09:01.400 | It's kind of like mocking and derogatory, and I was trying not to do that in this book.

02:09:06.800 | If it's a term loaded with baggage, you're already kind of...

02:09:09.760 | You're from the first minute, you're already behind.

02:09:13.840 | So to me, also, when people say "wokeness is bad," "social justice is bad," they're

02:09:22.800 | throwing the baby out with the bathwater because the proudest tradition in the US is liberal

02:09:29.400 | social justice.

02:09:30.400 | And what I mean by that, again, liberal meaning with lowercase l.

02:09:35.960 | It is intertwined with liberalism.

02:09:37.620 | So Martin Luther King, classic example, his "I Have a Dream" speech, he says stuff like

02:09:41.640 | "This country has made a promise to all of its citizens, and it has broken that promise

02:09:51.040 | to its black citizens."

02:09:54.200 | In other words, liberalism, the Constitution, the core ideals, those are great.

02:09:59.360 | We're not living up to them.

02:10:00.720 | We're failing on some of them.

02:10:02.900 | So civil disobedience, the goal of it wasn't to hurt liberalism.

02:10:06.520 | It was to specifically break the laws that were already violating...

02:10:11.480 | The laws that were a violation of liberalism to expose that this is illiberal, that the

02:10:16.080 | Constitution should not have people of different skin color sitting in different parts of the

02:10:19.960 | bus.

02:10:20.960 | And so it was really patriotic, the Civil Rights Movement.

02:10:25.600 | It was saying, "Liberalism is this beautiful thing, and we need to do better at it."

02:10:31.520 | So I call it liberal social justice.

02:10:32.840 | And it used the tools of liberalism to try to improve the flaws that were going on.

02:10:42.480 | So free speech.

02:10:43.480 | Mario Savio in the '60s, he's a leftist.

02:10:47.600 | And what were the leftists doing in the '60s on Berkeley campus?

02:10:51.200 | They were saying, "We need more free speech," because that's what liberal social justice

02:10:56.640 | was fighting for.

02:10:57.640 | But you can also go back to the '20s, women's suffrage.

02:11:00.800 | Emancipation, the thing that America obviously has all of its...

02:11:05.200 | These are all ugly things that it had to get out of, but it got out of them one by one,

02:11:09.680 | and it's still getting out of them.

02:11:10.680 | That's what's cool about America.

02:11:12.480 | And liberal social justice basically is the practice of saying, "Where are we not being

02:11:16.960 | perfect liberals?

02:11:18.360 | And now let's fix that."

02:11:20.920 | So that's the idea of liberalism that permeates the history of the United States.

02:11:25.120 | But then there's interplay.

02:11:26.120 | You have so many good images in this book, but one of them is highlighting the interplay

02:11:32.320 | of different ideas over the past, let's say, 100 years.

02:11:36.900 | So liberalism is on one side, there's that thread.

02:11:40.360 | There's Marxism on the other, and then there's postmodernism.

02:11:45.200 | How do those interplay together?

02:11:47.080 | So it's interesting because Marxism is, and all of its various descendants, obviously

02:11:53.720 | there's a lot of things that are rooted in Marxism that aren't the same thing as what

02:11:58.280 | Karl Marx preached.

02:12:00.100 | But what do they all have in common?

02:12:02.600 | They think liberalism is bad.

02:12:06.360 | They actually think that the opposite of what Martin Luther King and other people in the

02:12:16.040 | civil rights and other movements, they think the opposite.

02:12:18.840 | He thinks liberalism is good, we need to preserve it.

02:12:20.960 | They said liberalism is the problem.

02:12:23.360 | These other problems with racism and inequality that we're seeing, those are inevitable results

02:12:29.720 | of liberalism.

02:12:30.880 | Liberalism is a rigged game, and it's just the power games in disguise.

02:12:34.520 | There is no liberal games.

02:12:35.720 | It's just the power games in disguise, and there's the upper people that oppress the

02:12:39.400 | lower people, and they convince the lower people, it's all about false consciousness,

02:12:43.320 | they convince the lower people that everything is fair.

02:12:46.200 | Now the lower people vote against their own interests, and they work to preserve the system

02:12:50.080 | that's oppressing them.

02:12:51.800 | What do we need to do?

02:12:52.800 | We need to actually, it's much more revolutionary, we need to overthrow liberalism.

02:12:58.840 | People think, oh, what we call a wokeness is just a normal social justice activism,

02:13:05.040 | but it's more extreme.

02:13:06.040 | No, no, it's the polar opposite, polar opposite.

02:13:11.280 | Now that's the Marxist threat.

02:13:12.800 | Now postmodernism is this term that is super controversial, and I don't think anyone calls

02:13:18.080 | themselves a postmodernist, or take all of this with a grain of salt in terms of the

02:13:20.800 | term, but what's the definition of radical?

02:13:23.600 | The definition of radical to me is how deep you want change to happen at.

02:13:30.600 | A liberal progressive and a conservative progressive will disagree about policies,

02:13:35.880 | the liberal progressive wants to change a lot of policies, change, change, change, and

02:13:41.760 | the conservative wants to keep things the way they are.

02:13:45.040 | But they're both conservative when it comes to liberalism, beneath it, the liberal foundation

02:13:50.880 | of the country, they both become conservatives about that.

02:13:55.400 | The Marxist is more radical because they want to go one notch deeper and actually overthrow

02:14:00.200 | that foundation.

02:14:01.640 | Now what's below liberalism is kind of the core tenets of modernity, this idea of reason

02:14:09.320 | and the notion that there is an objective truth and science as the scientific method.

02:14:17.560 | These things are actually beneath, and even the Marxist, if you look at the Frankfurt

02:14:20.320 | School, these post-Marxist thinkers and Marx himself, they were not anti-science, they

02:14:25.800 | believed in that bottom, bottom foundation.

02:14:29.960 | They actually wanted to preserve modernity, but they wanted to get rid of liberalism on

02:14:33.480 | top of it.

02:14:34.480 | The post-modernist is even more radical because they want to actually go down to the bottom

02:14:37.680 | level and overthrow it.

02:14:38.680 | They think science itself is a tool of oppression, they think it's a tool where oppression kind

02:14:44.400 | of flows through, they think that the white western world has invented these concepts,

02:14:50.760 | they claim that there's an objective truth and that there's reason and science, and they

02:14:54.320 | think all of that is just one meta-narrative, and it goes a long way to serve the interests

02:14:59.800 | of the powerful.

02:15:00.800 | - So in the sense that it's almost caricatured, but that is to the core their belief that

02:15:06.400 | math could be racist, for example.

02:15:08.480 | - Oh yeah, absolutely.

02:15:09.480 | - Not the education of math, but literally math, the mathematics.

02:15:13.760 | - The notion in math that there's a right answer and a wrong answer, that they believe

02:15:18.200 | is a meta-narrative that serves white supremacy, or the post-modernist might have said it serves

02:15:23.360 | just the powerful, or the wealthy.

02:15:27.080 | So what social justice fundamentalism is, is you take the Marxist thread that has been

02:15:31.720 | going on in lots of countries, and whoever the upper and lower is, that's what they all

02:15:38.360 | have in common, but the upper and lower, for Marx was the ruling class and the oppressed

02:15:43.360 | class, it was economic.

02:15:47.280 | But you come here and the economic class doesn't resonate as much here as it did maybe in some

02:15:53.280 | of those other places, but what does resonate here in the '60s and '70s is race and gender

02:15:58.440 | and these kind of social justice disagreements.

02:16:01.760 | And so what social justice fundamentalism is, is basically this tried and true framework

02:16:07.320 | of this Marxist framework, kind of with a new skin on it, which is American social justice,

02:16:16.200 | and then made even more radical with the infusion of post-modernism, where not just is liberalism

02:16:21.600 | bad, but actually, like you said, math can be racist.

02:16:25.360 | So it's this kind of philosophical Frankenstein, this stitched together of these, and so again,

02:16:34.120 | they wear the same uniform as the liberal social justice.

02:16:36.160 | They say social justice, racial equality, but it has nothing to do with liberal social

02:16:41.680 | justice.

02:16:42.680 | It is directly opposed to liberal social justice.

02:16:44.480 | - It's fascinating, the evolution of ideas, if we ignore the harm done by it, it's fascinating

02:16:51.120 | how humans get together and evolve these ideas.

02:16:53.280 | So as you show, Marxism is the idea that society is a zero-sum, I mean, I guess the zero-sum

02:16:59.320 | is a really important thing here.

02:17:01.920 | Zero-sum struggle between the ruling class and the working class with power being exerted

02:17:06.280 | through politics and economics.

02:17:08.160 | Then you add critical theory, Marxism 2.0 on top of that, and you add to politics and

02:17:14.400 | economics, you add culture and institutions.

02:17:17.040 | And then on top of that, for postmodernism, you add science, you add morality, basically

02:17:21.520 | anything else you can think of.

02:17:22.600 | - The stitched together Frankenstein, and if you notice, which is not necessarily bad,

02:17:26.560 | but in this case, I think it's actually violating the Marxist tradition by being anti-science.

02:17:32.080 | And it's violating the postmodernism, because what postmodernists were, they were radical

02:17:36.160 | skeptics.

02:17:37.240 | Not just of, they were radical skeptics, not just of the way things were, but of their

02:17:40.240 | own beliefs.

02:17:42.240 | And social justice fundamentalism is not at all self-critical.

02:17:48.840 | It says that we have the answers, which is the opposite of what postmodernists would

02:17:51.440 | ever say.

02:17:52.440 | No, you just have another meta-narrative.

02:17:54.160 | And it's also violating, of course, the tradition of liberal social justice in a million ways,

02:17:57.440 | because it's anti-liberal.

02:17:59.680 | And so this Frankenstein comes together.

02:18:01.720 | Meanwhile, liberal social justice doesn't have a Frankenstein.

02:18:04.600 | It's very clear.

02:18:05.720 | It's very, it's a crisp ideology that says, we need, they're trying to make, we're trying

02:18:10.880 | to get to a more perfect union, they're trying to keep the promises made in the Constitution.

02:18:17.480 | And that's what it's trying to do.

02:18:19.000 | And so it's much simpler in a lot of ways.

02:18:21.440 | - So you write that my big problem with social justice fundamentalism isn't the ideology

02:18:26.160 | itself.

02:18:27.160 | It's what scholars and activists started to do sometimes around 2013, when they began

02:18:32.000 | to wield a cudgel that's not supposed to have any place in the country like the US.

02:18:36.960 | So it's the actions, not the ideas.

02:18:40.080 | - Well, to be clear, I don't like the ideology.

02:18:43.000 | I think it's a low-rung ideology.

02:18:45.600 | I think it's morally inconsistent based on, you know, it's flip-flops on its morals, depending

02:18:50.680 | on the group.

02:18:52.440 | I think it's echo-chambery.

02:18:54.400 | I think it's full of inaccuracies and kind of can't stand up to debate.

02:19:01.000 | So I think it's a low, but there's a ton of low-rung ideologies I don't like.

02:19:04.360 | I don't like a lot of religious doctrines.

02:19:06.160 | I don't like a lot of political doctrines, right?

02:19:08.960 | The US is a place inherently that is a mishmash of a ton of ideologies, and I'm not going

02:19:14.320 | to like two-thirds of them at any given time.

02:19:16.360 | So my problem, the reason I'm writing about this is not because I'm like, "By the way,

02:19:19.280 | this ideology is not something I like."

02:19:21.400 | That's not interesting.

02:19:23.440 | The reason that it must be written about right now, this particular ideology, is because

02:19:29.160 | it's not playing nicely with others.

02:19:31.680 | If you want to be a hardcore, you know, evangelical Christian, in the US says, "Live and let

02:19:38.440 | live."

02:19:39.440 | Not only are you allowed to have an echo chamber of some kind, it's actively protected here.

02:19:43.400 | Live and let live.

02:19:44.400 | They can do what they want.

02:19:45.400 | You do what you want.

02:19:46.400 | Now, if the evangelical Christian started saying, "By the way, anyone who says anything

02:19:51.080 | that conflicts with evangelical Christianity is going to be severely socially punished,

02:19:56.280 | and they have the cultural power to do so," which they don't in this case.

02:20:00.200 | They might like to, but they don't have the power, but they're able to get anyone fired

02:20:03.920 | who they want, and they're able to actually change the curriculum in all these schools

02:20:07.760 | and classes to suddenly not conflict with, no more evolution in the textbooks, because

02:20:12.360 | they don't want it.

02:20:13.360 | Now I would write a book about evangelical Christianity, because that's what every liberal,

02:20:20.120 | regardless of what you think of the actual horizontal beliefs, doesn't matter what they

02:20:24.480 | believe when they start violating live and let live and shutting down other segments

02:20:32.000 | of society.

02:20:33.000 | It's almost like a, it's not the best analogy, but an echo chamber is like a benign tumor.

02:20:41.040 | What you have to watch out for is a tumor that starts to metastasize, starts to forcefully

02:20:44.080 | spread and damage the tissue around it.

02:20:48.040 | That's what this particular ideology has been doing.

02:20:51.840 | - Do you worry about it as an existential threat to liberalism in the West, in the United

02:21:01.560 | States?

02:21:03.680 | Is it a problem, or is it the biggest problem that's threatening all of human civilization?

02:21:11.400 | - I would not say it's the biggest problem.

02:21:14.880 | It might be.

02:21:15.880 | I wouldn't, if it turns out in 50 years someone says actually it was, I wouldn't be shocked,

02:21:20.860 | but I also wouldn't bet on that, because there's a lot of problems.

02:21:24.360 | - I'm a little sorry to interrupt.

02:21:26.640 | It is popular to say that kind of thing, though, and it's less popular to say the same thing

02:21:32.400 | about AI or nuclear weapons, which worries me that I'm more worried about nuclear weapons

02:21:39.440 | even still than I am about wokeism.

02:21:42.120 | - So I've gotten, I've had probably a thousand arguments about this.

02:21:45.520 | That's one nice thing about spending six years procrastinating on getting a book done is

02:21:49.640 | you end up test, battle testing your ideas a million times.

02:21:52.080 | So I've heard this one a lot, which is there's kind of three groups of former Obama voters.

02:21:58.360 | One is super woke now.

02:22:00.880 | Another one is super anti-woke now.

02:22:02.760 | And the third is what you just said, which is sure, wokeness is over the top.

02:22:08.320 | You're not woke, but I think that the anti-woke people are totally lost their mind, and it's

02:22:13.560 | just not that big a deal.

02:22:16.000 | Now here's why I disagree with that, because it's not wokeness itself.

02:22:22.920 | It's that a radical political movement, of which there will always be a lot in the country,

02:22:30.960 | has managed to do something that a radical movement is not supposed to be able to do

02:22:34.520 | in the US, which is they've managed to hijack institutions all across the country and hijack

02:22:44.200 | medical journals, and universities, and the ACLU, all the activist organizations, and

02:22:53.280 | nonprofits, and NGOs.

02:22:55.560 | And certain tech companies.

02:22:57.080 | Yeah, and many tech companies.

02:23:01.760 | So it's not that I think this thing is so bad.

02:23:03.440 | It's a little like we said with Trump.

02:23:06.000 | The reason Trump scares me is not because Trump's so bad.

02:23:08.440 | It's that because it shows, it reveals that we were vulnerable to a demagogue candidate.

02:23:14.960 | And what wokeness reveals to me is that we are currently, and until something changes,

02:23:18.520 | will continue to be vulnerable to a bully movement, and a forcefully expansionist movement

02:23:29.120 | that wants to actually destroy the workings, their liberal gears, and tear them apart.

02:23:38.360 | And so here's the way I view a liberal democracy is it is a bunch of these institutions that

02:23:43.440 | were trial and error crafted over hundreds of years.

02:23:48.000 | And they all rely on trust, public trust, and a certain kind of feeling of unity that

02:23:53.440 | actually is critical to a liberal democracy's functioning.

02:23:57.280 | And what I see this thing is is a parasite on that whose goal is-- and I'm not saying

02:24:03.560 | each-- by the way, each individual in this is-- I don't think they're bad people.

02:24:07.000 | I think that it's the ideology itself has the property of its goal is to tear apart

02:24:12.600 | the pretty delicate workings of the liberal democracy and shred the critical lines of

02:24:17.160 | trust.

02:24:18.840 | And so you talk about AI, and you talk about all these other big problems, nuclear, right?

02:24:23.280 | The reason I-- I like writing about that stuff a lot more than I like writing about politics.

02:24:26.840 | This was a fun topic for me, is because I realized that all of those things, if we're

02:24:32.600 | going to have a good future with those things, and they're actually threats, like I said,

02:24:35.880 | we need to have our wits about us, and we need the liberal gears and levers working.

02:24:42.120 | We need the liberal machine working.

02:24:43.720 | And so if something's threatening to undermine that, it affects everything else.

02:24:48.440 | - We need to have our scientific mind about us, about these foundational ideas.

02:24:53.120 | But I guess my sense of hope comes from observing the immune system respond to wokeism.

02:25:00.680 | There seems to be a pro-liberalism immune system.

02:25:05.800 | And not only that, so like there's intellectuals, there's people that are willing to do the

02:25:10.280 | fight.

02:25:11.280 | You talk about courage, being courageous.

02:25:14.200 | And there is a hunger for that, such that those ideas can become viral, and they take

02:25:19.120 | over.

02:25:20.120 | So I just don't see a mechanism by which wokeism accelerates, like exponentially, and takes

02:25:27.800 | over, like it's expand.

02:25:29.320 | It feels like as it expands, the immune system responds.

02:25:34.480 | The immune system of liberalism, of basically a country, at least in the United States,

02:25:40.400 | that still ultimately at the core of the individual values the freedom of speech, just freedoms

02:25:45.600 | in general, the freedom of an individual.

02:25:48.160 | But that's the battle, which is stronger.

02:25:50.720 | - So to me it is like a virus in an immune system.

02:25:54.120 | And I totally agree, I see the same story happening.

02:25:57.440 | I'm sitting here rooting for the immune system.

02:25:59.680 | - But you're still worried.

02:26:01.360 | - Well, here's the thing.

02:26:03.000 | So a liberal democracy is always gonna be vulnerable to a movement like this, right?

02:26:09.360 | And there will be more.

02:26:10.880 | Because it's not a totalitarian dictatorship.

02:26:13.480 | Because if you can socially pressure people to not say what they're thinking, you can

02:26:17.280 | suddenly start to just take over, right?

02:26:19.680 | You can break the liberalism of the liberal democracy quite easily, and suddenly a lot

02:26:23.440 | of things are illiberal.

02:26:25.360 | On the other hand, the same vulnerability, the same system that's vulnerable to that

02:26:31.200 | also is hard to truly conquer.

02:26:34.240 | Because now the Maoists, right, similar kind of vibe.

02:26:37.600 | They were saying that science is evil, and that the intellectuals are, it's all this

02:26:43.320 | big conspiracy.

02:26:45.900 | But they could murder you.

02:26:49.560 | And they had the hard cudgel in their hand, right?

02:26:53.240 | And the hard cudgel is scary.

02:26:58.960 | And you can conquer a country with the hard cudgel.

02:27:01.040 | But you can't use that in the US.

02:27:03.200 | So what they have is a soft cudgel, which can have the same effect initially.

02:27:08.000 | You can scare people into shutting up.

02:27:10.200 | You can't maybe imprison them and murder them.

02:27:11.720 | But if you can socially ostracize them and get them fired, that basically is gonna have

02:27:15.240 | the same effect.

02:27:16.380 | So the soft cudgel can have the same effect for a while.

02:27:19.220 | But the thing is, it's a little bit of a house of cards, because it relies on fear.

02:27:25.360 | And as soon as that fear goes away, the whole thing falls apart, right?

02:27:31.320 | The soft cudgel requires people to be so scared of getting canceled or getting whatever.

02:27:37.540 | And as soon as some people start-- you know, Toby Lutka of Shopify I always think about.

02:27:42.280 | He just said, you know what, I'm not scared of this soft cudgel, and spoke up and said,

02:27:45.880 | we're not political at this company, and we're not a family, we're a team, and we're gonna

02:27:48.620 | do this.

02:27:49.620 | And you know what?

02:27:50.620 | Like, they're thriving.

02:27:51.620 | - He will be on this podcast.

02:27:52.620 | It seems like a fascinating-- - He's amazing.

02:27:54.740 | - He spoke up, he's saying that we're not gonna-- - He's one of the smartest and kindest

02:27:58.980 | dudes, but he's also, he has courage at a time when it's hard.

02:28:03.060 | But here's the thing, is that it's different than that you need so much less courage against

02:28:07.140 | a soft cudgel than you do-- the Iranians throwing their hijabs into the fire, those people's

02:28:12.540 | courage just blows away any courage we have here, 'cause they might get executed.

02:28:19.020 | That's the thing, is that you can actually have courage right now, and it's--

02:28:22.780 | - I'm not sure I understand.

02:28:25.900 | - Don't worry about it.

02:28:28.900 | - Oh man, the irony of that.

02:28:31.300 | And you talk about, so two things to fight this, there's two things, awareness and courage.

02:28:36.740 | What's the awareness piece?

02:28:39.380 | The awareness piece is first just understanding the stakes, like getting our heads out of

02:28:47.500 | the sand and being like, technology's blowing up exponentially, our society's trust is devolving,

02:28:53.340 | like we're kind of falling apart in some important ways, we're losing our grip on some stability

02:28:58.180 | at the worst time, that's the first point, just the big picture.

02:29:01.660 | And then also, awareness of, I think, this vertical axis, or whatever your version of

02:29:05.180 | it is, this concept of, how do I really form my beliefs, where do they actually come from?

02:29:12.460 | Are they someone else's beliefs, am I following a checklist?

02:29:17.260 | How about my values?

02:29:19.300 | I used to identify with the blue party or the red party, but now they've changed, and

02:29:23.620 | I suddenly am okay with that, is that because my values changed with it, or am I actually

02:29:27.300 | anchored to the party, not to any principle?

02:29:30.780 | Asking yourself these questions, asking, looking for where do I feel disgusted by fellow human

02:29:37.100 | beings?

02:29:38.100 | Maybe I'm being a crazy tribal person without realizing it.

02:29:41.020 | How about the people around me, am I being bullied by some echo chamber without realizing

02:29:45.020 | it?

02:29:46.020 | Am I the bully somewhere?

02:29:48.220 | So that's the first, I think just to kind of do a self-audit, and I think that just

02:29:57.220 | some awareness like that, just a self-audit about these things can go a long way, but

02:30:02.460 | if you keep it to yourself, it's almost useless, because if you don't have, you know, awareness

02:30:08.500 | without courage does very little.

02:30:10.780 | So courage is when you take that awareness and you actually export it out into the world,

02:30:15.740 | and it starts affecting other people.

02:30:17.420 | And so courage can happen on multiple levels.

02:30:19.180 | It can happen by, first of all, just stop saying stuff you don't believe.

02:30:23.220 | If you're being pressured by a kind of an ideology or a movement to say stuff that you

02:30:27.980 | don't actually believe, just stop, just stay on your ground and don't say anything.

02:30:32.420 | That's courage.

02:30:33.420 | That's one first step.

02:30:35.260 | Start speaking out in small groups.

02:30:38.100 | Start actually speaking your mind.

02:30:40.060 | See what happens.

02:30:41.060 | The sky doesn't usually fall.

02:30:42.060 | Actually, people usually respect you for it.

02:30:43.740 | And it's not every group, but you'd be surprised.

02:30:46.700 | And then eventually, maybe start speaking out in bigger groups.

02:30:50.420 | Start going public.

02:30:51.420 | Go public with it.

02:30:52.580 | And you don't need everyone doing this.

02:30:54.060 | Look, some people will lose their jobs for it.

02:30:55.700 | I'm not talking to those people.

02:30:57.620 | Most people won't lose their jobs, but they have the same fear as if they would, right?

02:31:02.140 | And it's like, what, are you going to get criticized?

02:31:03.140 | Or are you going to get a bunch of people, you know, angry Twitter people will criticize

02:31:08.060 | you?

02:31:09.060 | Like, yeah, it's not pleasant, but actually that's a little bit like our primitive minds

02:31:13.420 | fear that really back when it was programmed, that kind of ostracism or criticism will leave

02:31:19.460 | you out of the tribe and you'll die.

02:31:21.060 | Today, it's kind of a delusional fear.

02:31:22.900 | It's not actually that scary.

02:31:24.780 | And the people who realize that can exercise incredible leadership right now.

02:31:28.620 | - So you have a really interesting description of censorship, of self-censorship also, as

02:31:36.420 | you've been talking about.

02:31:37.940 | Who's King Mustache?

02:31:38.940 | And this gap, I think, I hope you write even more, even more than you've written in the

02:31:44.180 | book about these ideas, because it's so strong.

02:31:47.100 | These censorship gaps that are created between the dormant thought pile and the kind of thing

02:31:54.660 | under the speech curve.

02:31:55.940 | - Yeah.

02:31:56.940 | So first of all, so I like to think of, I think it's a useful tool is this thing called

02:32:01.780 | a thought pile, which is if you have a, on any given issue, you have a horizontal spectrum

02:32:07.620 | and just say, I could take your brain out of your head and I put it on the thought pile

02:32:11.300 | right where you happen to believe about that issue.

02:32:14.300 | Now I did that for everyone in the community or in a society.

02:32:17.740 | And you're gonna end up with a big mushy pile that I think will often form a bell curve.

02:32:21.220 | If it's really politicized, it might form like a camel with two humps, because it's

02:32:25.020 | like concentrated here.

02:32:26.020 | But for a typical issue, it'll just form a fear of AI.

02:32:28.420 | You're gonna have a bell curve, right?

02:32:30.300 | Things like this.

02:32:31.580 | That's the thought pile.

02:32:32.740 | Now the second thing is a line that I call the speech curve, which is what people are

02:32:37.060 | saying.

02:32:38.060 | So the speech curve is high when not just a lot of people are saying it, but it's being

02:32:40.860 | said from the biggest platforms, being said in the New York Times, and it's being said

02:32:46.700 | by the president on the State of the Union.

02:32:49.140 | Those things are the top of the speech curve.

02:32:52.060 | And then when the speech curve's lower, it means it's being said either whispered in

02:32:55.580 | small groups or it's just not very many people are talking about it.

02:32:58.540 | Now a healthy, when a free speech democracy is healthy on a certain topic, you've got

02:33:04.820 | the speech curve sitting right on top of the thought pile.

02:33:07.180 | They mirror each other, which is naturally what would happen.

02:33:09.940 | More people think something, it's gonna be said more often and from higher platforms.

02:33:14.700 | What censorship does, and censorship can be from the government, so I use the tale of

02:33:18.980 | King Mustache.

02:33:20.020 | And King Mustache, he's a little tiny tyrant, and he's very sensitive, and people are making

02:33:25.620 | fun of his mustache, and they're saying he's not a good king, and he does not like that.

02:33:28.540 | So what does he do?

02:33:29.540 | He enacts a policy, and he says, "Anyone who is heard criticizing me or my mustache or

02:33:35.640 | my rule will be put to death."

02:33:39.460 | And immediately at the town, because his father was very liberal, there was always free speech

02:33:44.700 | in his kingdom.

02:33:46.460 | But now King Mustache has taken over, and he's saying this is a new rules now.

02:33:49.580 | And so a few people yell out, and they say, "That's not how we do things here."

02:33:52.940 | And that moment, it's what I call a moment of truth.

02:33:56.300 | Did the king's guards stand with the principles of the kingdom and say, "Yeah, King Mustache,

02:34:00.300 | that's not what we do," in which case he would kind of have to, he's nothing he can do.

02:34:04.500 | Or are they going to execute?

02:34:05.500 | So in this case, it's as if he laid down an electric fence over a part of the stockpile

02:34:09.860 | and said, "No one's allowed to speak over here."

02:34:11.660 | The speech curve, maybe people will think these things, but the speech curve cannot

02:34:15.220 | go over here.

02:34:16.980 | But the electric fence wasn't actually electrified until the king's guards, in a moment of truth,

02:34:21.820 | get scared and say, "Okay," and they hang the five people who spoke out.

02:34:25.160 | So in that moment, that fence just became electric.

02:34:28.380 | And now no one criticizes King Mustache anymore.

02:34:31.660 | So I use this as an allegory.

02:34:32.660 | Now, of course, he has a hard cudgel because he can execute people.

02:34:36.100 | But now when we look at the US, what you're seeing right now is a lot of pressure, which

02:34:40.780 | is very similar.

02:34:41.780 | An electric fence is being laid down saying, "No one can criticize these ideas.

02:34:45.500 | And if you do, you won't be executed, you'll be canceled.

02:34:48.820 | You'll be fired."

02:34:49.820 | Now, is that fence electrified from there?

02:34:52.980 | No, they don't work at the company, they can't fire you.

02:34:56.100 | But they can start a Twitter mob when someone violates that speech curve, when someone violates

02:35:00.380 | that speech rule, and then the leadership at the company has the moment of truth.

02:35:07.100 | And what the leaders should do is stand up for their company's values, which is almost

02:35:11.780 | always in favor of the employee and say, "Look, even if they made a mistake, people make mistakes,

02:35:16.500 | we're not going to fire them.

02:35:17.500 | Or maybe that person actually said something that's reasonable and we should discuss it.

02:35:20.340 | But either way, we're not going to fire them."

02:35:22.540 | And if they said no, what happens is the Twitter mob actually doesn't have, they can't execute

02:35:26.780 | you.

02:35:27.780 | They go away.

02:35:28.780 | And the fence has proven to have no electricity.

02:35:29.780 | And that's been the problem with the past few years is what's happened again and again

02:35:33.020 | is the leader gets scared and they get scared of the Twitter mob and they fire them.

02:35:37.180 | Boom, that fence has electricity.

02:35:39.620 | And now, actually, if you cross that, it's not just a threat.

02:35:45.220 | You'll be out of a job.

02:35:46.860 | It's really bad.

02:35:48.140 | You'll have a huge penalty.

02:35:49.140 | You might not be able to feed your kids.

02:35:51.220 | So that's an electric fence that goes up.

02:35:52.500 | Now what happens when an electric fence goes up and it's proven to actually be electrified?

02:35:56.300 | The speech curve morphs into a totally different position.

02:35:59.860 | And now these new people say, instead of having the kind of marketplace of ideas that turns

02:36:04.000 | into a kind of a natural bell curve, they say, "No, no, no.

02:36:06.960 | These ideas are okay to say.

02:36:08.140 | Not just okay.

02:36:09.140 | You'll be socially rewarded.

02:36:10.440 | And these ones don't."

02:36:11.440 | That's the rules of their own echo chamber that they're now applying to everyone.

02:36:14.020 | And it's working.

02:36:15.140 | And so the speech curve distorts.

02:36:16.540 | And so you end up with now instead of one region, which is a region of kind of active

02:36:20.820 | communal thinking, what people are thinking and saying, you now have three regions.

02:36:25.380 | You have a little active communal thinking, but mostly you now have this dormant thought

02:36:28.780 | pile, which is all these opinions that suddenly everyone's scared to say out loud.

02:36:32.580 | Everyone's thinking, but they're scared to say it out loud.

02:36:33.980 | Everyone's thinking, but no one's saying.

02:36:35.580 | And then you have this other region, which is the approved ideas of this now cultural

02:36:40.800 | kind of dictator.

02:36:43.340 | And those are being spoken from the largest platforms, and they're being repeated by the

02:36:46.860 | president, and they're being repeated all over the place, even though people don't believe

02:36:51.700 | it.

02:36:52.700 | And that's this distortion.

02:36:53.700 | And what happens is the society becomes really stupid because active communal thinking is

02:36:58.420 | the region where we can actually think together.

02:37:00.540 | And now no one can think together.

02:37:01.700 | And it gets siloed into small private conversations.

02:37:06.020 | It's really powerful what you said about institutions and so on.

02:37:08.780 | It's not trivial from a leadership position to be like, "No, we defend the employee or

02:37:14.020 | we defend the employee, the person with us on our..." because there's no actual ground

02:37:24.460 | to any kind of violation we're hearing about.

02:37:26.740 | So they resist the mob.

02:37:28.340 | It's ultimately to the leader, I guess, of a particular institution or a particular company.

02:37:33.340 | And it's difficult.

02:37:34.340 | - Oh yeah, no, no.

02:37:35.340 | If it were easy, there wouldn't be all of these failings.

02:37:40.300 | And by the way, that's the immune system failing.

02:37:42.960 | That's the liberal immune system of that company failing, but also then it's an example, which

02:37:47.100 | means that a lot of other...

02:37:48.100 | It's failing to the country.

02:37:50.980 | It's not easy.

02:37:51.980 | Of course it's not, because we have primitive minds that are wired to care so much about

02:37:55.540 | what people think of us.

02:37:56.780 | And even if we're not gonna...

02:37:58.140 | First of all, we're scared that it's gonna start a...

02:38:00.700 | 'Cause what do mobs do?

02:38:03.500 | They don't just say, "I'm gonna criticize you.

02:38:05.220 | I'm gonna criticize anyone who still buys your product.

02:38:08.540 | I'm gonna criticize anyone who goes on your podcast."

02:38:10.620 | So it's not just you.

02:38:12.060 | It's now suddenly, if Lex becomes tarnished enough...

02:38:16.240 | Now I go on the podcast and people are saying, "Oh, I'm not buying his book.

02:38:18.440 | He went on Lex Friedman.

02:38:19.440 | No thanks."

02:38:20.800 | And now I get...

02:38:21.800 | I call it a smear web.

02:38:23.400 | You've been smeared and we're in such a bad time that it smear travels to me.

02:38:27.360 | And now meanwhile, someone who buys my book and tries to share it, someone said, "You're

02:38:29.960 | buying that guy's book?

02:38:30.960 | He goes on Lex Friedman."

02:38:32.880 | You see how this happens.

02:38:33.880 | So that hasn't happened in this case.

02:38:35.760 | So we are so wired.

02:38:37.720 | A, that is kind of bad.

02:38:39.480 | That is actually bad for you.

02:38:42.040 | But we're wired to care about it so much because it meant life or death back in the day.

02:38:46.280 | - Yeah, yeah.

02:38:47.280 | And luckily in this case, we're both...

02:38:51.200 | Probably can smear each other in this conversation.

02:38:53.240 | This is wonderful.

02:38:54.240 | - I smear you all the time.

02:38:55.920 | - Given the nature of your book.

02:39:00.640 | What do you think about freedom of speech as a term and as an idea, as a way to resist

02:39:04.740 | the mechanism, this mechanism of dormant thought pile and artificially generated speech?

02:39:10.680 | This ideal of the freedom of speech and protecting speech and celebrating speech.

02:39:14.880 | - Yeah.

02:39:15.880 | Well, so this is kind of the point I was talking about earlier about King Mustache made a rule

02:39:23.800 | against...

02:39:24.800 | He's created official...

02:39:25.800 | - I just love...

02:39:28.480 | One of the amazing things about your book, as you get later and later in the book, you

02:39:32.200 | cover more and more difficult issues as a way to illustrate the importance of the vertical

02:39:36.000 | perspective.

02:39:37.400 | But there's something about using hilarious drawings throughout that make it much more

02:39:45.120 | fun and it takes you away from the personal somehow.

02:39:47.840 | And you start thinking in the space of ideas versus outside of the tribal type of thinking.

02:39:53.120 | So it's a really brilliant...

02:39:54.640 | I mean, I would advise for anybody to do...

02:39:57.660 | When they write controversial books to have hilarious drawings.

02:40:00.240 | - It's true.

02:40:01.240 | Put a silly stick figure in your thing and it lightens...

02:40:03.600 | It does, it lightens the mood.

02:40:04.600 | It gets people's guard down a little bit.

02:40:06.200 | - Yeah.

02:40:07.200 | - It reminds people that we're all friends here.

02:40:11.800 | Let's laugh at ourselves, laugh at the fact that we're in a culture war a little bit and

02:40:16.680 | now we can talk about it as opposed to getting religious about it.

02:40:21.400 | But basically, King Mustache had no First Amendment.

02:40:24.040 | He said, "The government is censoring," which is very common around the world.

02:40:29.040 | Governments censor all that.

02:40:30.040 | The US, again, there's some...

02:40:32.200 | You can argue there's some controversial things recently, but basically the US, the First

02:40:36.240 | Amendment isn't the problem.

02:40:39.360 | No one is being arrested for saying the wrong thing, but this graph is still happening.

02:40:44.680 | And so freedom of speech, what people like to say is if someone's complaining about a

02:40:52.960 | cancel culture and saying, "This is an anti-free speech," people like to point out, "No, it's

02:40:58.720 | not.

02:40:59.720 | The government's not arresting you for anything.

02:41:00.720 | This is called the free market, buddy.

02:41:03.980 | This is called... you're putting your ideas out and you're getting criticized and your

02:41:07.960 | precious marketplace of ideas, there it is."

02:41:10.240 | I've gotten this a lot.

02:41:12.120 | And this is not making a critical distinction between cancel culture and criticism culture.

02:41:19.640 | Criticism culture is a little bit of this kind of high-rung idea lab stuff we talked

02:41:24.400 | about.Criticism culture attacks the idea and encourages further discussion.

02:41:34.500 | It enlivens discussion.

02:41:36.300 | It makes everyone smarter.

02:41:38.660 | Cancel culture attacks the person.

02:41:40.740 | Very different.

02:41:42.300 | Criticism culture says, "Here's why this idea is so bad.

02:41:44.100 | Let me tell you."

02:41:45.100 | Cancel culture says, "Here's why this person is bad and no one should talk to them and

02:41:48.540 | they should be fired."

02:41:50.220 | And what does that do?

02:41:51.280 | It doesn't enliven the discussion.

02:41:52.740 | It makes everyone scared to talk and it's the opposite.

02:41:55.140 | It shuts down discussion.

02:41:56.660 | So you still have your First Amendment.

02:41:58.100 | But First Amendment plus cancel culture equals you might as well be in King Must... you might

02:42:01.400 | as well have government censorship.

02:42:04.900 | First Amendment plus criticism culture, great.

02:42:07.020 | Now you have this vibrant marketplace of ideas.

02:42:09.380 | So there's a very clear difference.

02:42:13.660 | And so when people criticize the cancel culture and then someone says, "Oh, see, you're so

02:42:17.740 | sensitive now.

02:42:18.740 | Look, you're doing the cancel culture yourself.

02:42:20.340 | You're trying to punish this person for..."

02:42:22.300 | No, no, no, no, no.

02:42:24.220 | Every good liberal, and I mean that in the lower case, which is that anyone who believes

02:42:28.520 | in liberal democracies, regardless of what they believe, should stand up and say no to

02:42:32.700 | cancel culture and say, "This is not okay," regardless of what the actual topic is.

02:42:37.580 | And that makes them a good liberal versus if they're trying to cancel someone who's

02:42:41.440 | just criticizing, they're doing the opposite.

02:42:43.320 | Now they're shutting... so it's the opposite thing.

02:42:45.100 | But it's very easy to get confused.

02:42:46.420 | You can see people take advantage of the... and sometimes they just don't know it themselves.

02:42:51.500 | The lines here can be very confusing.

02:42:53.100 | The wording can be very confusing.

02:42:55.420 | Without that wording, suddenly it looks like someone who's criticizing cancel culture is

02:43:00.380 | canceling but they're not.

02:43:02.340 | - You apply this thinking to universities in particular.

02:43:07.580 | There's a great, yet another great image on the trade-off between knowledge and conviction.

02:43:14.980 | And it's what's commonly... actually, you can maybe explain to me the difference, but

02:43:20.300 | it's often referred to as the Dunning-Kruger effect, where you... when you first learn

02:43:24.420 | of a thing, you have an extremely high confidence about self-estimation of how well you understand

02:43:31.020 | that thing.

02:43:32.020 | You actually say that Dunning-Kruger means something else.

02:43:34.300 | - So yeah, when I post this, everyone's like, "Dunning-Kruger," and it's what everyone thinks

02:43:38.780 | Dunning-Kruger is.

02:43:39.780 | Dunning-Kruger is a little different.

02:43:41.780 | You have a diagonal line like this one, which is the place you are...

02:43:46.540 | I call it the humility tightrope.

02:43:48.140 | It's the humility sweet spot.

02:43:49.580 | It's exactly the right level of humility based on what you know.

02:43:52.380 | If you're below it, you're insecure.

02:43:53.380 | You actually have too much humility.

02:43:54.860 | You don't have enough confidence because you know more than you're giving yourself credit

02:43:57.420 | for.

02:43:58.420 | And when you're above the line, you're in the arrogance zone, right?

02:44:00.900 | You need a dose of humility, right?

02:44:02.780 | You think you know more than you do.

02:44:04.260 | So we all want to stay on that tightrope.

02:44:05.420 | And Dunning-Kruger is basically a straight line that's just... has a lower slope.

02:44:09.620 | So you start off... you still are getting more confident as you go along, but you start

02:44:17.740 | off above that line, and as you learn more, you end up below the line later.

02:44:22.460 | So, but anyway...

02:44:23.460 | So this wavy thing...

02:44:24.860 | This wavy thing is a different phenomenon.

02:44:27.340 | It's related, but...

02:44:28.860 | So this idea, so for people just listening, there's a child's hill, pretty damn sure you

02:44:35.580 | know a whole lot and feeling great about it.

02:44:37.980 | That's in the beginning.

02:44:39.180 | And then there's an insecure canyon, you crash down, acknowledging that you don't know that

02:44:44.220 | much.

02:44:45.220 | And then there's a growth mountain.

02:44:46.220 | - Grown up mountain.

02:44:48.140 | - Grown up mountain.

02:44:50.300 | Where after you feel ashamed and embarrassed about not knowing that much, you begin to

02:44:54.860 | realize that knowing how little you know is the first step in becoming someone who actually

02:44:59.940 | knows stuff.

02:45:00.940 | And that's the grown up mountain.

02:45:03.300 | And you climb and climb and climb.

02:45:05.940 | You're saying that in universities, we're pinning people at the top of the child's hill.

02:45:11.580 | - So for me, this is a very...

02:45:14.020 | I think of myself with this, because I went to college, like a lot of 18 year olds, and

02:45:17.820 | I was very cocky.

02:45:20.340 | I just thought I knew a lot, you know?

02:45:22.460 | And when it came to politics, I was like bright blue, just because I grew up in a bright blue

02:45:26.500 | suburb and I wasn't thinking that hard about it.

02:45:28.380 | And I thought that, you know...

02:45:30.420 | And what I did when I went to college is met a lot of smart conservatives and a lot of

02:45:33.840 | smart progressives.

02:45:35.420 | But I met a lot of people who weren't just going down a checklist and they knew stuff.

02:45:39.820 | And suddenly I realized that a lot of these views I have are not based on knowledge.

02:45:46.060 | They're based on other people's conviction.

02:45:49.020 | Everyone else thinks that's true, so now I think it's true.

02:45:51.900 | I'm actually like, I'm transferring someone else's conviction to me.

02:45:56.500 | And who knows why they have conviction?

02:45:57.780 | They might have conviction because they're transferring from someone else.

02:46:00.420 | And I'm a smart dude, I thought.

02:46:02.260 | Why am I giving away my own independent learning abilities here and just adopting other views?

02:46:13.020 | So anyway, it was this humbling experience.

02:46:14.500 | And it wasn't just about politics, by the way.

02:46:16.580 | It was that I had strong views about a lot of stuff and I just, I got lucky, or not lucky,

02:46:21.460 | I sought out, you know, the kind of people I sought out were the type that love to disagree

02:46:26.180 | and they were, man, they knew stuff.

02:46:29.220 | And so you're quickly in, you know, again, an idea lab culture.

02:46:32.220 | It was an idea lab.

02:46:33.220 | And also, I also went to, I started getting in the habit, I started loving listening to

02:46:36.620 | people who disagreed with me because it was so exhilarating listening to a smart person.

02:46:39.900 | When I thought there was no credence to this other argument, right?

02:46:44.460 | This side of this debate is obviously wrong.

02:46:46.900 | I wanted to see an Intelligence Squared on that debate.

02:46:49.220 | I wanted to go see, I actually got into Intelligence Squared in college.

02:46:52.100 | I wanted to see a smart person who disagrees with me talk.

02:46:56.180 | It became so fascinating to me, right?

02:46:57.700 | It was the most interesting thing.

02:46:59.020 | That was a new thing.

02:47:00.020 | I didn't think I liked that.

02:47:01.180 | And so what did that do?

02:47:02.820 | That shoved me down the humble tumble here, number three.

02:47:06.340 | It shoved me down where I started to, and then I went the other way where I realized

02:47:09.740 | that I had been, a lot of my identity had been based on this faux feeling of knowledge,

02:47:14.780 | this idea that I thought I knew everything.

02:47:17.100 | Now that I don't have that, I was like, I felt really like dumb and I felt really almost

02:47:21.060 | like embarrassed of what I knew.

02:47:22.780 | And so that's where I call this insecure canyon.

02:47:24.340 | I think it's sometimes when you're so used to thinking you know everything and then you

02:47:27.100 | realize you don't.

02:47:28.100 | And then you start to realize that actually really awesome thinkers, they don't judge

02:47:33.940 | me for this.

02:47:34.940 | They totally respect if I say, I don't know anything about this.

02:47:37.300 | They say, oh cool, you should read this and this and this.

02:47:38.780 | They don't say, you don't know anything.

02:47:39.780 | They don't say that.

02:47:41.620 | And so, and not that I'm, by the way, this is not to say I'm now on Grown Up Mountain

02:47:45.460 | and you should all join me.

02:47:46.460 | I often find myself drifting up with like a helium balloon.

02:47:49.940 | Oh, I think I read about the new thing and suddenly I think I have, I think I read three

02:47:55.060 | things about, you know, a new AI thing and I'm like, I'll go do a talk on this.

02:47:58.820 | I'm like, no, I won't.

02:47:59.820 | I don't, I just, I'm going to just be spouting out the opinion of the person I just read.

02:48:04.060 | So I have to remind myself, but it's useful.

02:48:06.300 | Now what, the reason my problem with colleges today is that it's, I was a graduate in 2004.

02:48:12.660 | This is a recent change, is that all of those speakers I went who disagreed with me, a lot

02:48:19.260 | of them were conservative.

02:48:20.980 | So many of those speakers would not be allowed on campuses today.

02:48:24.100 | And so many of the discussions I had were in big groups or classrooms.

02:48:27.940 | And this was still, you know, this was a liberal campus.

02:48:31.180 | So many of those disagreements, they're not happening today.

02:48:35.900 | And I've interviewed a ton of college students.

02:48:37.740 | It's chilly.

02:48:38.740 | It is, you know, people keep to themselves.

02:48:41.220 | So what's happening is not only are people losing that push off Child's Hill, which was

02:48:45.420 | so valuable to me, so valuable to me as a thinker.

02:48:48.980 | It kind of started my life as a better thinker.

02:48:51.660 | They're losing that, but actually what college, a lot of the college classes and the vibe

02:48:55.380 | in colleges, a lot of what I was saying that there is one right set of views and it's this

02:48:59.860 | kind of woke ideology and it's right.

02:49:03.620 | And anyone who disagrees with it is bad and anyone, and don't speak up, you know, unless

02:49:08.380 | you're going to agree with it.

02:49:09.860 | It's teaching people that Child's Hill is that, you know, it's nailing people's feet

02:49:13.980 | to Child's Hill.

02:49:15.140 | It's teaching people that these are right, this views are right.

02:49:17.700 | And like, you don't have any, you should feel a complete conviction about them.

02:49:24.260 | - How do we fix it?

02:49:27.140 | Is it part of the administration?

02:49:28.140 | Is it part of the culture?

02:49:29.140 | Is it part of the, is it part of like actually instilling in the individual, like 18 year

02:49:34.700 | olds, the idea that this is the beautiful way to live is to embrace the disagreement

02:49:40.500 | and the growth from that?

02:49:41.980 | - It's awareness and courage.

02:49:43.540 | It's the same thing.

02:49:44.540 | It's the same thing.

02:49:45.540 | The idea of intellectual just get, when that awareness is people need to see what's happening

02:49:49.340 | here that kids are getting, losing the, they're not going to college and becoming better,

02:49:54.300 | tougher, more robust thinkers.

02:49:57.780 | They're actually going to college and becoming zealots.

02:49:59.500 | They're getting taught to be zealots.

02:50:00.860 | And the website still advertises, you know, wide variety of, you know, the website is

02:50:05.860 | a bait and switch.

02:50:06.860 | - You list all the universities, yeah, Harvard.

02:50:08.340 | - It's a bait and switch.

02:50:09.340 | It's still saying, here, you're coming here for a wide intellectual, basically they're

02:50:13.020 | advertising, this is an ideal lab and you get there and it's like, actually it's an

02:50:15.580 | echo chamber that you're paying money for.

02:50:17.380 | So if people realize that they start to get mad, hopefully, and then courage, I mean,

02:50:23.420 | starts, you know, yes, brave students.

02:50:25.220 | There's been some very brave students who have started, you know, big think clubs and

02:50:29.180 | stuff like that, where it's like, we're going to have, you know, present both sides of a

02:50:33.140 | debate here.

02:50:34.140 | And that, that takes courage, but also courage and leadership.

02:50:38.700 | Like it's like, if you look at these colleges, it's specifically the leaders who show strength,

02:50:46.620 | who get the best results.

02:50:48.220 | Remember, the cudgel is soft.

02:50:50.340 | So if a leader of one of these places says, you know, the college presidents who have

02:50:55.180 | shown some strength, they actually don't get as much trouble.

02:50:59.060 | It's the ones who pander, the ones who, in that, you know, in that moment of truth, they

02:51:06.940 | shrink away, then they get a lot more trouble.

02:51:10.420 | The mob smells blood.

02:51:12.060 | For the listener, the podcast favorite, Liv Burry just entered, and your friend just entered

02:51:18.380 | the room.

02:51:19.380 | Do you mind if she joins us?

02:51:21.060 | Please.

02:51:22.060 | I think there's a story she has about you.

02:51:24.860 | So Liv, you mentioned something that there's a funny story about, we haven't talked at

02:51:29.300 | all about the actual process of writing the book.

02:51:33.460 | Is there, you guys made a bet of some kind?

02:51:36.380 | Yeah.

02:51:37.380 | Is this a true story?

02:51:38.660 | Is this a completely false fabric?

02:51:40.260 | No, no, it's true.

02:51:41.980 | Liv is, she's mean.

02:51:44.340 | I did not know mean Liv.

02:51:46.780 | She's like, she's like a bully.

02:51:48.460 | She's like scary.

02:51:49.460 | I had to have that screenshot.

02:51:50.980 | So Liv was FaceTiming me and she was like, she was like being intimidating.

02:51:54.980 | I took a screenshot and I made it my phone background.

02:51:57.100 | So every time I opened it, I was like, ah.

02:51:59.100 | So to give the background of this, it's because, if you hadn't noticed, Tim started writing

02:52:03.280 | this book, how many years ago?

02:52:04.780 | Six?

02:52:05.780 | 2016.

02:52:06.780 | Mid 2016.

02:52:07.780 | Right.

02:52:08.780 | As sort of a response to like the Trump stuff.

02:52:10.860 | Not even, yeah, it was just supposed to be a mini post.

02:52:12.980 | I was like, oh, I'm so like, I was like, I'm looking at all these like future tech things

02:52:17.180 | and I feel this like uneasiness, like, ah, we're going to like mess up all these things.

02:52:20.460 | Why?

02:52:21.460 | There's like some cloud over our society.

02:52:22.460 | Let me just write a mini post.

02:52:23.460 | And I opened it up to WordPress to write a one day little essay.

02:52:28.220 | And things went.

02:52:29.220 | On politics.

02:52:30.340 | It was going to be on like this feeling I had that like this feeling I had that we were,

02:52:37.260 | our tech was just growing and growing and we were becoming less wise.

02:52:41.020 | What's up?

02:52:42.020 | What's up with that?

02:52:43.020 | And I just wanted to write like just like a little like a little thousand word essay

02:52:44.500 | on like something I think we should pay attention to.

02:52:46.700 | And that was the beginning of this six year nightmare.

02:52:49.860 | Did you anticipate the blog post would take a long while?

02:52:54.860 | I don't remember the process fully in terms of, I remember you saying, oh, I'm actually

02:52:58.740 | writing.

02:52:59.740 | I'm actually writing into a bigger thing.

02:53:00.740 | And I was like, hmm.

02:53:01.740 | You know, because the more we talked about, we were talking about it.

02:53:03.740 | I was like, oh, this goes deep because I didn't really understand the full scope of the situation.

02:53:07.740 | Like nowhere near.

02:53:09.780 | And you sort of explained it.

02:53:11.060 | I was like, OK, yeah, I see that.

02:53:12.700 | And then the more we dug into it, the sort of the deeper and deeper and deeper it went.

02:53:16.100 | But no, I did not anticipate it would be six years.

02:53:18.220 | Let's put it that way.

02:53:19.700 | And when was your TED talk on procrastination?

02:53:22.340 | So that was that was March of 2016.

02:53:25.260 | And I started this book three months later and fell into the biggest procrastination

02:53:29.620 | hole that I've ever fallen into.

02:53:32.500 | The irony isn't lost on me.

02:53:33.620 | I mean, it's like it's I just like I like how much credit I have as as for that TED

02:53:38.660 | talk.

02:53:39.660 | I'm like, I am legit procrastinator.

02:53:40.660 | That is not I'm not just saying it like.

02:53:43.300 | It wasn't just that.

02:53:44.620 | Because, I mean, he did you know, he did intend it to start out as a blog post.

02:53:48.140 | But then you're like, actually, this needs to be multiple.

02:53:50.060 | Actually, let's make it into a full series.

02:53:52.660 | You know what?

02:53:53.660 | I'll turn it into a book.

02:53:54.660 | Yeah, that's what and what but also what Liv witnessed a few times and my wife has

02:53:58.820 | witnessed like 30 of these is like these these 180 epiphanies where I'll be like, I'll

02:54:05.780 | like I'll have a moment when I'm and I don't know what you know, sometimes it's

02:54:09.260 | that there's a really good idea.

02:54:10.780 | Sometimes it's like I'm just dreading having to finish this the way it is.

02:54:14.180 | And so there's epiphanies where it's like, you know what, I need to start over from the

02:54:16.260 | beginning and just make this like a short like 20 little blog post list and then I'll

02:54:21.460 | do that.

02:54:22.460 | And I was like, no, no, no, I have like a new epiphany.

02:54:23.780 | I have to and it's these and yeah, it's kind of like the crazy person a little bit.

02:54:28.500 | But anyway, can I tell the story of the bed?

02:54:30.820 | Go for it.

02:54:31.820 | All right.

02:54:32.820 | So things came to a head when we were in we were all on vacation in Dominican Republic.

02:54:37.580 | Tim and his wife, me and Igor.

02:54:41.380 | And we were in the ocean.

02:54:43.460 | And I remember you'd been in the ocean for like an hour just bobbing in there becoming

02:54:47.460 | it.

02:54:48.460 | And we got talking and we were talking about the book.

02:54:51.060 | And you were expressing just like this, you know, just the horror of the situation basically.

02:54:58.220 | You're like, look, I just I'm so close, but there's still this and then there's this.

02:55:02.540 | And an idea popped into my head, which is that poker players often we will set ourselves

02:55:10.620 | like negative bets.

02:55:12.300 | You know, like essentially if we don't get a job done, then we have to do something we

02:55:16.900 | really don't want to do.

02:55:18.380 | So instead of having a carrot, like a really, really big stick.

02:55:21.780 | So I had the idea to ask Tim, OK.

02:55:26.260 | What is the worst either organization or individual that you if you had to, you know, that you

02:55:33.300 | would loathe to give a large sum of money to?

02:55:36.460 | And he thought about it for a little while and he gave his answer.

02:55:40.340 | And I was like, all right, what's your net worth?

02:55:43.100 | He said his net worth.

02:55:44.100 | All right.

02:55:45.100 | 10 percent of your net worth to that thing.

02:55:46.800 | If you don't get the draft because that's right.

02:55:49.480 | Just before that, I asked him how long, like if you had a gun to your head or to your wife's

02:55:53.900 | head and you had to get the book into a state where you could like send off an edit to the

02:55:58.940 | draft to your editor, how long?

02:56:01.820 | He's like, oh, I guess like I could get it like 95 percent good in a month.

02:56:04.780 | I was like, OK, great.

02:56:06.140 | In one month's time, if you do not have that edit handed in, there's a draft handed in,

02:56:12.380 | really scary.

02:56:13.380 | So 10 percent of your net worth is going to this thing that you really, really think is

02:56:16.960 | terrible.

02:56:17.960 | But you're forgetting the kicker.

02:56:20.240 | The kicker was that because, you know, procrastinators, they self-defeat.

02:56:25.000 | That's what they do.

02:56:26.000 | And then Liv says, I'm going to sweeten the deal and I am going to basically match you

02:56:33.920 | and I'm going to put in I'm going to send this like a huge amount of my own money there

02:56:40.400 | if you don't do it.

02:56:41.400 | So and I can't that's that would be really bad.

02:56:44.500 | Not only are you screwing yourself, you're screwing a friend.

02:56:46.740 | And she and she was like, and as your friend, because I'm your friend, I will send it.

02:56:52.300 | I will send the money.

02:56:55.660 | I mean, like that, you know, like tyranny.

02:57:00.940 | And I got the draft in.

02:57:03.060 | I got the draft in.

02:57:04.060 | Just!

02:57:05.060 | Just!

02:57:06.060 | I know.

02:57:07.060 | Well, I was.

02:57:08.060 | Ego can attest to this.

02:57:09.060 | Actually, it was it was funny because it was it was like supposed to be by the summer solstice

02:57:10.660 | or whatever it was.

02:57:11.660 | It was like a certain date.

02:57:13.620 | And I got it in at four.

02:57:15.220 | I got no, I got it in at four a.m. like the next morning.

02:57:18.700 | But then and and and they were both like, that doesn't count.

02:57:21.580 | I'm like, it does.

02:57:22.580 | It's still for me.

02:57:23.580 | It's the same day still.

02:57:24.580 | It's OK.

02:57:25.580 | Can you imagine how fucked in the head you have to be?

02:57:26.580 | Yeah.

02:57:27.580 | So like literally technically pass the deadline by four hours for an obscene amount of money

02:57:32.820 | to a thing you loathe.

02:57:34.260 | That's how bad his sickness is.

02:57:36.180 | Because I knew the hard deadline.

02:57:37.660 | I knew that there was no way she was going to actually send that money because it was

02:57:41.420 | four a.m.

02:57:42.420 | So I knew I actually had the whole night.

02:57:43.420 | So, yeah, I should actually punish you and just I should send like a nominal amount to

02:57:48.180 | that thing.

02:57:49.180 | No, thanks.

02:57:50.180 | No.

02:57:51.180 | But is there some micro like lessons from that from how to avoid procrastination writing

02:57:57.020 | a book that you've learned?

02:57:58.020 | Yes.

02:57:59.020 | Well, I've learned a lot of things.

02:58:00.020 | I mean, like first, don't take don't write like a dissertation about like proving some

02:58:03.300 | grand theory of society because that's.

02:58:06.980 | Really procrastinating.

02:58:08.620 | Like I would have been an awful PhD student for that reason.

02:58:11.460 | And so like I'm going to do another book and it's going to be like a bunch of short chapters

02:58:14.300 | that are one offs because that's like it just doesn't feed into your book is like a giant

02:58:18.580 | like framework.

02:58:19.580 | There is grand theory.

02:58:20.580 | I know through your book.

02:58:21.580 | I know.

02:58:22.580 | And I learned not to do that again.

02:58:23.580 | I did it once.

02:58:24.580 | I don't want to do it again.

02:58:25.580 | Oh, with the book.

02:58:26.580 | Yeah.

02:58:27.580 | I learned the book is a giant mistake.

02:58:28.580 | Yes.

02:58:29.580 | Don't do another one of this.

02:58:30.580 | Look, look, some people should.

02:58:31.580 | It's just not for me.

02:58:32.580 | I just did it.

02:58:33.580 | I know.

02:58:34.580 | And it almost killed me.

02:58:35.580 | OK, so that's the first one.

02:58:36.580 | The second one is like, secondly, yeah, like basically there's two ways to fix procrastination.

02:58:40.780 | One is you fix it's like a picture.

02:58:42.500 | You have a boat that's leaking and it's not working very well.

02:58:44.740 | You can fix it in two ways.

02:58:45.740 | You can get your hammer and nails out and your boards and actually fix the boat or you

02:58:50.780 | can duct tape it for now to get yourself across the river.

02:58:53.780 | But it's not actually fixed.

02:58:55.300 | So ideally, down the road, I have repaired whatever kind of bizarre mental illness that

02:59:01.660 | I have that makes me procrastinate in a very like I just don't self defeat in this way

02:59:05.980 | anymore.

02:59:06.980 | But in the meantime, I can duct tape the boat by bringing what I call the panic monster

02:59:11.540 | into the situation via things like this and this scary person and having external pressure

02:59:16.860 | to have external pressure of some kind is critical for me.

02:59:21.100 | It's yes, I don't have the muscle to do the work I need to do without external pressure.

02:59:25.700 | By the way, Liv, is there a possible future where you write a book?

02:59:31.580 | And meanwhile, by the way, huge procrastinator.

02:59:33.860 | That's the funny thing about this.

02:59:34.860 | Yeah, I mean, I'm how long did your last video take?

02:59:37.900 | Oh, my God.

02:59:38.900 | Is there advice you give to live how to get the videos done faster?

02:59:42.180 | Well, it would be the same exact thing.

02:59:43.860 | We actually I can give good procrastination advice.

02:59:46.100 | Panic monster.

02:59:47.100 | Yeah, well, we should do it together.

02:59:48.900 | It should be like we have this day.

02:59:50.220 | But right.

02:59:51.220 | You know, it's, it's, um, we should actually just do another bet.

02:59:54.260 | I have to have my script done by this time.

02:59:55.780 | Yes.

02:59:56.780 | I got to get the third part out.

02:59:57.820 | Because then you'll actually do it.

02:59:59.500 | And, and, and it's not the thing is the time.

03:00:02.860 | But it's like if you if you could take three weeks on a video, and instead you take 10

03:00:06.820 | weeks, it's not like, oh, well, I've also I'm having more fun in those 10 weeks.

03:00:11.420 | The whole 10 weeks are bad.

03:00:12.420 | Yeah, it's torture.

03:00:13.420 | Bad.

03:00:14.420 | So you're just you're just having a bad time.

03:00:15.740 | And you're getting less work done and less work out.

03:00:17.820 | And it's not like you're enjoying your personal life.

03:00:19.100 | It's bad for you for your relationships.

03:00:20.740 | It's bad for your your own.

03:00:22.380 | You keep doing it anyway.

03:00:23.940 | Yeah, well, a lot of people.

03:00:25.860 | Why do people have troubles keeping a diet?

03:00:28.460 | Right?

03:00:29.460 | Yeah.

03:00:30.460 | Primitive mind.

03:00:31.460 | Why'd you point at me?

03:00:32.460 | Because I'm expensive.

03:00:33.460 | What's your procrastination weakness?

03:00:35.340 | Do you have one?

03:00:36.340 | Everything.

03:00:37.340 | Everything.

03:00:38.340 | Everything.

03:00:39.340 | Everything.

03:00:40.340 | Preparing for a conversation.

03:00:41.660 | I had your book.

03:00:43.340 | Amazing book.

03:00:44.340 | I really enjoyed it.

03:00:45.340 | I started reading it.

03:00:46.340 | I was like, this is awesome.

03:00:48.580 | It's so awesome that I'm going to save it when I'm behind a computer and can take notes.

03:00:53.900 | Like good notes.

03:00:55.180 | Of course, that resulted in like last minute everything, everything, everything I'm doing

03:00:59.500 | in my life.

03:01:00.500 | Not everyone's like that.

03:01:01.500 | You know, people self-defeat in different ways.

03:01:02.980 | Some people don't have this particular problem.

03:01:04.820 | Adam Grant is a, he calls himself a pre-crastinator where he gets an assignment.

03:01:09.220 | He will go home and do it until it's done and handed it, which is also not necessarily

03:01:13.340 | good.

03:01:14.340 | You know, it's like you're rushing it either way, but it's better.

03:01:17.020 | But some people have the opposite thing where they will, the looming deadline makes them

03:01:23.940 | so anxious that they go and fix it.

03:01:25.820 | Right?

03:01:26.820 | And the procrastinator I think has a similar anxiety, but they resolve it in a totally

03:01:30.220 | different way.

03:01:31.220 | They don't solve it.

03:01:32.220 | They just live with the anxiety.

03:01:33.220 | Right.

03:01:34.220 | Right.

03:01:35.220 | They just live with the anxiety.

03:01:36.220 | Now, I think there's an even bigger group of people.

03:01:37.220 | So there's these people, the Adam Grants, there's people like me, and then there's people

03:01:40.900 | who have a healthy relationship with deadlines, but they're still part of a bigger group of

03:01:43.900 | people that actually, they need a deadline there to do something.

03:01:52.900 | So they actually, they still are motivated by a deadline.

03:01:57.140 | And as soon as you have all the things in life that don't have a deadline, like working

03:02:00.140 | out and like working on that album you wanted to write, they don't do anything either.

03:02:03.660 | So there's actually like, that's why procrastination is a much bigger problem than people realize,

03:02:07.140 | because it's not just the funny last second people.

03:02:09.500 | It's anyone who actually can't get things done that don't have a deadline.

03:02:14.780 | You dedicate your book, quote, to Tannis, who never planned on being married to someone

03:02:20.060 | who would spend six years talking about his book on politics, but here we are.

03:02:25.100 | What's the secret to a successful relationship with a procrastinator?

03:02:28.540 | Maybe for both of you.

03:02:30.460 | Well, I think the first and most important thing.

03:02:34.300 | You already started with a political answer, I can tell.

03:02:36.580 | Okay, go ahead.

03:02:37.580 | No, the first and most important thing is, because people who don't procrastinate, if

03:02:41.740 | you don't, it's like, you will, people, the instinct is to judge it as like, either just

03:02:48.540 | think they're just being like a loser, or they'll take it personally, you know.

03:02:52.700 | And instead to see this as like, this is some form of addiction, or some form of ailment.

03:03:01.580 | You know, they're not just being a dick, right?

03:03:03.140 | Like, they have a problem, and so some compassion, but then also maybe finding that line where

03:03:08.340 | you can, you know, maybe apply some tough love, some middle ground.

03:03:12.820 | On the other hand, you might say that, you know, you don't want the significant other

03:03:16.780 | relationship where it's like, they're the one nagging you.

03:03:18.640 | Maybe that's, you don't want them even being part of that.

03:03:20.780 | And I think maybe it's, you know, better to have a live, do it instead.

03:03:23.500 | Right, having someone who can like create the infrastructure where they aren't the direct

03:03:27.620 | stick, you need a bit of carrot and stick, right?

03:03:30.340 | Maybe they can be the person who keeps reminding them of the carrot.

03:03:34.100 | And then they set up the friend group to be the stick.

03:03:36.260 | And then that keeps your relationship in a good place.

03:03:39.620 | Yeah, a stick, like looming in the background, that's your friend group.

03:03:43.460 | Okay, at the beginning of the conversation, we talked about how all of human history can

03:03:47.700 | be presented as a thousand page book.

03:03:52.540 | What are you excited about for the 1000th, what do you say that, first page?

03:04:00.220 | So the next 250 years, what are you most excited about?

03:04:05.000 | I'm most excited about, have you read the Fable of the Dragon?

03:04:10.380 | No.

03:04:11.380 | Okay, well, it's an allegory for death and it's, you know, Nick Bostrom, and he talks

03:04:16.300 | about the, he compares death to a dragon that eats 60 million people or whatever the number

03:04:22.100 | is every year.

03:04:23.100 | And you just, every year we shepherd those people up and they feed them to the dragon.

03:04:26.180 | And that there's a Stockholm syndrome when we say that's just a lot of man.

03:04:29.820 | And that's what we have to do.

03:04:31.340 | And anyone who says maybe we should try to beat the dragon, they get called vain and

03:04:34.380 | narcissistic.

03:04:36.340 | But someone who tries to, someone who goes, does chemo, no one calls them vain or narcissistic.

03:04:40.760 | They say they're, they're, you know, good, good for you, right?

03:04:43.060 | You're a hero.

03:04:44.060 | You're fighting the good fight.

03:04:46.060 | So I think there's some disconnect here.

03:04:47.420 | And I think that if we can get out of that Stockholm syndrome and realize that death

03:04:51.740 | is just the machine, the human physical machine failing, and that there's no law of nature

03:04:59.340 | that says you can't, with enough technology, repair the machine and keep it going until

03:05:05.980 | no one, I don't think anyone wants to live forever.

03:05:08.060 | People think they do, no one does.

03:05:09.420 | But until people are ready.

03:05:11.780 | And I think when we hit a world where we can, we have enough tech that we can continue to

03:05:17.340 | keep the human machine alive until the person says, I'm done, I'm ready.

03:05:20.860 | I think we will look back and we will think that anything before that time, that'll be

03:05:24.260 | the real ADBC.

03:05:25.260 | You know, we'll look back at BC before the big advancement and it'll seem so sad and

03:05:30.580 | so heartbreaking, barbaric.

03:05:31.820 | And people will say, I can't believe that humans like us had to live with that when

03:05:36.180 | they lost loved ones and they died before they were ready.

03:05:39.240 | I think that's the ultimate achievement, but we need to stop criticizing and smearing people

03:05:46.360 | who talk about it.

03:05:47.760 | - So you think that's actually doable in the next 250 years?

03:05:51.400 | - Yes.

03:05:52.400 | - Okay.

03:05:53.400 | - A lot happens in 250 years, especially when technology really exponentially, yeah.

03:05:58.400 | - And you think humans will be around versus AI completely takes over, where mortality

03:06:02.800 | means something completely different?

03:06:03.800 | - I mean, look, the optimist in me, and maybe the stupid kind of 2023 person in me, says,

03:06:09.200 | yeah, of course, we'll make it, we'll figure it out.

03:06:11.360 | But you know, I mean, we are going into a, you know, I have a friend who knows as much

03:06:18.080 | about the future as anyone I know.

03:06:19.440 | I mean, he's really, he's a big investor in, you know, future tech and he's really on the

03:06:23.960 | pulse of things and he just says, the future's gonna be weird.

03:06:26.480 | That's what he says, the future's gonna be weird.

03:06:27.480 | - Good prediction.

03:06:28.480 | - And it's gonna be weird.

03:06:29.480 | Don't look at the last few decades of your life and apply that forward and say, that's

03:06:32.240 | just what life is like.

03:06:33.240 | No, no, no, it's gonna be weird and different.

03:06:34.840 | - Well, some of my favorite things in this world are weird.

03:06:38.600 | And speaking of which, it's good to have this conversation.

03:06:41.800 | It's good to have you as friends.

03:06:43.280 | This was an incredible one.

03:06:44.280 | Thanks for coming back.

03:06:45.800 | And thanks for talking with me a bunch more times.

03:06:48.520 | This was awesome.

03:06:49.520 | - Thank you, Lex.

03:06:50.520 | - Thank you.

03:06:51.520 | - Thanks for listening to this conversation with Tim Urban.

03:06:53.320 | To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.

03:06:57.440 | And now let me leave you with some words from Winston Churchill.

03:07:01.320 | When there's no enemy within, the enemies outside cannot hurt you.

03:07:06.880 | Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.

03:07:09.440 | - Bye.

03:07:10.440 | - Bye.

03:07:12.440 | - Bye.

03:07:16.440 | [Code Red Defense]

Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics | Lex Fridman Podcast #360

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