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The following is a conversation with Tim Urban, his second time on the podcast.
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He s the author and illustrator of the amazing blog called Wait But Why, and is the author of a new book coming out tomorrow called What s Our Problem?
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A Self-Help Book for Societies.
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We talk a lot about this book in this podcast, but you really do need to get it and experience it for yourself.
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It is a fearless, insightful, hilarious, and I think important book in this divisive time that we live in.
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The Kindle version, the audiobook, and the web version should be all available on date of publication.
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I should also mention that my face might be a bit more beat up than usual.
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I got hit in the chin pretty good since I ve been getting back into training jiu-jitsu, a sport I love very much, after recovering from an injury.
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So, if you see marks on my face during these intros or conversations, you know that my life is in a pretty good place.
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And now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor.
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Check them out in the description.
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It s the best way to support this podcast.
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We got House of Macadamias for healthy snacks, Indeed for hiring excellent teams, and Athletic Greens for health.
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Choose wisely, my friends.
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Also, if you want to work with our amazing team, we re always hiring.
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Go to lexfriedman.com slash
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hiring.
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And now onto the full ad reads.
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As always, no ads in the middle.
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I try to make this interesting, but if you must skip them, please still check out our sponsors.
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I enjoy their stuff.
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Maybe you will too.
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This show is brought to you by a sponsor that brings a smile to my face.
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House of Macadamias, a company that ships delicious, high quality and healthy macadamia nuts directly to your door.
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The snacks that these guys make are delicious and they re in a small portion.
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I can share it with guests.
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I can share with friends when they come over and I feel like a normal adult.
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I feel like an adult because an adult can moderate their intake of snacks.
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I need my snacks portioned perfectly.
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Because otherwise, if you have like a giant jar of like macadamia nuts, they re too delicious, they re too good.
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So the fact that they re segmented perfectly for you is really nice.
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Whether it s bars or whole nuts, it s a variety of deliciousness that brings joy to my life.
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And I really love it.
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Go to HowSomeMacadamias.com slash Lux to get 20% off your order for every order, not just the first.
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You, the listener, will also get four-ounce bag of macadamias when you order three or more boxes of any macadamia product.
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That s houseofmacadamias.com slash lex.
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This show is also brought to you by Indeed, a hiring website.
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Like I mentioned, we re hiring, and you should be using the best tools for the job when you do that, because friends, there s nothing more important than the people you surround yourself with.
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And I m gonna go bro science for a second and pull out a random statistic.
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I remember reading an article yesterday
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about the amount of time that an average American spends in their workplace across different roles and positions and industries and so on.
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I don t remember what the number is, but it was tremendous.
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It was huge.
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So those hours are really important.
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It s really important not just for the productivity and the success of a company, but just for your happiness, for your fulfillment.
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To me, that s what hiring is.
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It s like building up a team of awesome people that make each other better, and you should use the best tools for the job.
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I certainly use Indeed.
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It s amazing.
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Indeed knows when you re growing your own business, every dollar counts.
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That s why with Indeed, you only pay for quality applications that match your job requirements.
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Visit indeed.com slash Lex to start hiring now.
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That s indeed.com slash Lex.
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Terms and conditions apply.
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This show is also brought to you by Athletic Greens and its AG1 drink, which is an all-in-one daily drink to support better health and peak performance.
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It replaced the multivitamin for me, it replaced so much for me, and it gave me so much.
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In fact, right after I m done saying the words I m saying now, I m walking over to the fridge.
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Which is where I made an AG1 drink.
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That s not cold.
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I m going to open the container I m going to consume the deliciousness knowing that my nutritional basis is taken care of There s certain things in life that if you take care of them, they give you the freedom to take on anything in any way you want
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just knowing that when I take care of the quote-unquote adult stuff, I m free to be a child, basically.
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Which is to explore the world, to follow my curiosity, to take big risks, to be fearless, but also to be joyful, all of that.
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And to me,
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It s kinda the nutrition side of that is Athletic Greens helped me with that.
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I also take electrolytes, that really helps.
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And fish oil as well, but that s pretty much about it.
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Oh yeah, I drink a lot of water, of course.
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Anyway, they ll give you one month supply of fish oil when you sign up at athleticgreens.com slash Lex.
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This is the Lex Friedman Podcast.
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To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.
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And now, dear friends, here s Tim Urban.
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You wrote an incredible book called What s Our Problem?
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A Self-Help Book for Societies.
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In the beginning, you present this view of human history as a 1,000-page book where each page is 250 years.
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And it s a brilliant visualization because almost nothing happens for most of it.
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So what blows your mind most about that visualization when you just sit back and think about it?
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It s a boring book.
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So 950 pages, 95% of the book, hunter-gatherers kind of doing their thing.
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I m sure there s obviously some major cognitive advancements along the way in language.
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And I m sure the bow and arrow comes around at some point.
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So tiny things, but it s like, oh, now we have 400 pages till the next thing.
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But then you get to page 950, and things start moving.
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Recorded history starts at 976.
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Right, right.
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So basically, the bottom row is when anything interesting happens.
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There s a bunch of agriculture for a while.
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before we know anything about it.
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And then recorded history starts.
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Yeah, 25 pages of actual recorded history.
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So when we think of prehistoric, we re talking about pages one through 975 of the book.
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And then history is page 976 to 1000.
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If you were reading the book, it would be like epilogue AD, the last little 10 pages of the book.
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And we think of A.D.
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as super long, right?
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2,000 years.
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The Roman Empire, 2,000 years ago.
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Like, that s so long.
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Human history has been going on for over 2,000 centuries.
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Like that is, it s just, it s hard to wrap your head around.
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And this is, I mean, even that s just the end of a very long road.
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Like, you know, the hundred thousand years before that, it s not like, you know, it s not like that was that different.
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So it s just, there s been people like us that have emotions like us, that have physical sensations like us.
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for so, so long, and who are they all, and what was their life like, and it s, you know, I think we have no idea what it was like to be them.
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The thing that s craziest about the people of the far past is not just that they had different lives, they had different fears, they had different dangers, and different responsibilities, and they lived in tribes and everything, but they didn t know anything.
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Like, we just take it for granted that we re born on top of this tower of knowledge, and from the very beginning,
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We know that the Earth is a ball floating in space, and we know that we re going to die one day, and we know that we evolved from animals.
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Those were all incredible epiphanies quite recently, and the people a long time ago, they just had no idea what was going on.
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I m kind of jealous, because I feel like it might have been scary to not know what s going on, but it also, I feel like, would be, you d have a sense of awe and wonder all the time, and you don t know what s going to happen next.
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Once you learn, you re kind of like, oh, that s a little grim.
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But they probably had the same capacity for consciousness to experience the world, to wander about the world, maybe to construct narratives about the world and myths and so on.
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They just had less grounded systematic facts to play with.
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They still probably felt the narratives, the myths they constructed as intensely as we do.
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Oh yeah, they also fell in love.
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They also had friends and they had falling outs with friends.
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They didn t shower much though.
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No, they did not smell nice.
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Maybe they did.
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Maybe beauty s in the eye of the beholder.
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Maybe it s all like relative.
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How many people in history have experienced a hot shower?
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Like almost none.
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That s like, when were hot showers invented?
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100 years ago?
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like less.
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So like George Washington never had a hot shower.
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It s like, it s just kind of weird.
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Like he took cold showers all the time or like.
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And again, we just take this for granted, but that s like an unbelievable life experience to have a rain, a controlled little booth where it rains hot water on your head.
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And then you get out and it s not everywhere.
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It s like contained.
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That was like, you know, a lot of people probably lived and died with never experiencing hot water.
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Maybe they had a way to heat water over a fire, but like then it s, I don t know.
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It s just like, there s so many things about our lives now that are complete, just total anomaly.
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It makes me wonder, like, what is the thing they would notice the most?
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I mean, the sewer system, like it doesn t smell in cities.
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Incredible.
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What does the sewer system do?
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I mean, it gets rid of waste efficiently in such a way we don t have to confront it, both with any of our senses.
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And that probably wasn t there.
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I mean, what else?
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Plus all the medical stuff associated with sewage.
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Yeah, I mean, how about the disease?
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Yeah.
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How about the cockroaches and the rats and the disease and the plagues?
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And then when they got, so they caught more diseases, but then when they caught the disease,
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They also didn t have treatment for it.
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So they often would die or they would just be in a huge amount of pain.
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They also didn t know what the disease was.
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They didn t know about microbes.
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That was this new thing, the idea that these tiny little animals that are causing these diseases.
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So what did they think?
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In the bubonic plague, in the Black Death, in the 1300s, people thought that it was an act of God because God s angry at us.
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Why would you not think that if you didn t know what it was?
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And so the crazy thing is that these were the same primates, so I do know something about them.
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I know in some sense what it s like to be them, because I am a human as well.
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And to know that this particular primate, that I know what it s like to be, experienced such different things.
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Our life is not the life that this primate has experienced almost ever.
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So it s just a bit strange.
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I don t know, I have a sense that we would get acclimated very quickly.
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If we threw ourselves back a few thousand years ago, it would be very uncomfortable at first, but the whole hot shower thing, you ll get used to it.
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After a year, you would not even miss it.
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There s a few, I m trying to remember which book that talks about hiking the Appalachian Trail, but you kind of miss those hot showers.
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But I have a sense after a few months, after a few years,
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Well, your scale recalibrates.
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I was saying the other day to a friend that whatever you re used to, you start to think that, oh, the people that have more than me or are more fortunate, it just sounds incredible.
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I would be so happy.
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But you know that s not true.
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Because the experience, what would happen is you would get these new things or you would
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get these new opportunities, and then you would get used to it, and then you would, that s the hedonic treadmill, you d come back to where you are.
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And likewise, though, because you think, oh my God, what if I had to, you know, have this kind of job that I never would want, or I had this kind of marriage that I never would want?
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You know what, if you did, you would adjust and get used to it, and you might not be that much less happy than you are now.
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So on the other side of the you being okay going back, you know, we would survive if we had to go back.
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You know, we d have to learn some skills, but we would buck up, and people have gone to war before, shopkeepers a year before that, they were in the trenches the next year.
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But on the other hand, if you brought them here, you know, I always think it would be so fun to just bring, forget the hunter-gatherers, bring a 1700s person here, and tour them around, take them on an airplane, show them your phone and all the things it can do, show them the internet, show them the grocery store, imagine taking them to a Whole Foods.
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Likewise, I think they would be completely awestruck and on their knees crying tears of joy.
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And then they d get used to it and they d be complaining about like, you know, you don t have the oranges in stock.
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It s like, you know, and that s- The grocery store is a tough one to get used to.
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Like when I first came to this country, the abundance of bananas was the thing that struck me the most.
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Or like,
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fruits in general, but food in general, but bananas somehow struck me the most, that you could just eat them as much as you want.
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That took a long time for me.
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Probably took several years to really get acclimated to that.
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Is that- Why didn t you have bananas?
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The number of bananas, fresh bananas, that wasn t available.
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Bread, yes.
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Bananas, no.
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Yeah, it s like we don t even know what
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Like, we don t even know the proper levels of gratitude.
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You know, walking around the grocery store, I don t know to be like, the bread s nice, but the bananas are like, we re so lucky.
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I don t know.
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I m like, oh, I could have been the other way.
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I have no idea.
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Well, it s interesting then where we point our gratitude in the West, in the United States.
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Probably,
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Do we point it away from materialist possessions?
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Or do we just aspire to do that towards other human beings that we love?
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Because in the East, in the Soviet Union, growing up poor, it s having food is the gratitude.
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Having transportation is gratitude.
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Having warmth and shelter is gratitude.
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And now, but see within that, the deep gratitude is for other human beings.
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It s the penguins huddling together for warmth in the cold.
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I think it s a person-by-person basis.
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I mean, I m sure, yes, of course, in the West, we will, on average, feel gratitude towards different things, or maybe it s a different level of gratitude.
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Maybe we feel less gratitude than countries that, you know, obviously, I think the easiest, the person that s most likely to feel gratitude is going to be someone whose life happens to be one where they just move up, up, up throughout their life.
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A lot of people in the greatest generation you know people who were born in the twenties or whatever and a lot of the boomers to this story is the greatest generation group dirt poor and they often ended up middle class and the boomers some of them started off middle class and many of them ended up quite wealthy.
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I feel like that life trajectory is naturally going to.
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foster gratitude, right?
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Because you re not going to take for granted these things because you didn t have them.
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You know, I didn t go out of the country really in my childhood very much.
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You know, like, you know, we traveled, but it was to Virginia to see my grandparents or Wisconsin to see other relatives or, you know, maybe Florida for going out to the beach.
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And then I started going out of the country like crazy in my 20s because I really, you know,
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became my favorite thing.
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And I feel like because if I had grown up always doing that, it would have been another thing.
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I m like, yeah, it s just something I do.
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But every time I go to a new country, I m like, oh my god, this is so cool.
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And in another country, this thing I ve only seen on the map, I m like, I m there now.
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And so I feel like.
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It s a lot of times it s a product of what you didn t have and then you suddenly had.
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But I still think it s case by case in that there s a there s like a meter in everyone s head, you know, that I think I m on.
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At a 10, you re experiencing just immense gratitude, which is a euphoric feeling.
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It s a great feeling, and it makes you happy to savor what you have, to look down at the mountain of stuff you have that you re standing on, to look down at it and say, oh my God, I m so lucky, and I m so grateful for this and this and this.
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Obviously, that s a happy exercise.
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Now, when you move the meter down to six or seven, maybe you think that sometimes, but you re,
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You re not always thinking that, because you re sometimes looking up at this cloud of things that you don t have, and the things that they have but you don t, or the things you wished you had or you thought you were going to have, or whatever.
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And that s the opposite direction to look, right?
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And that s the, either that s envy, that s yearning, or often it s, if you think about your past, it s grievance, right?
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And so then you go into a one and you have someone who feels like a complete victim.
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They are just a victim of the society, of their siblings and their parents and their loved one.
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And they are, they re wallowing in,
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everything that s happened wrong to me, everything I should have that I don t, everything that has gone wrong for me.
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And so that s a very unhealthy, mentally unhealthy place to be.
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Anyone can go there.
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There s an endless list of stuff it can be aggrieved about and an endless list of stuff you can have gratitude for.
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And so in some ways, it s a choice and it s a habit.
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And maybe it s part of how we were raised or our natural demeanor, but it s such a good exercise.
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You are really good at this, by the way.
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Your Twitter is like, go on.
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Well, you are constantly just saying, man, I m lucky.
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Or like, I m so grateful for this.
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And it s a good thing to do because you re reminding yourself, but you re also reminding other people to think that way.
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And it s like, we are lucky.
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And so anyway, I think that scale can go from 1 to 10.
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And I think it s hard to be a 10.
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I think you d be very happy if you could be.
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But I think trying to be above a 5 and looking down at the things you have
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more often than you are looking up at the things you don t or being resentful about the things that people have wronged you.
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Well, the interesting thing, I think, was an open question, but I suspect that you can control that knob for the individual.
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Like you yourself can choose.
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It s like the Stoic philosophy, you could choose.
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where you are as a matter of habit, like you said.
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But you can also probably control that on a scale of a family, of a tribe, of a nation, of a society.
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You can describe a lot of the things that happened in Nazi Germany and different other parts of history through a sort of societal envy and resentment that builds up.
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Maybe certain narratives pick up and then they infiltrate your mind and then now your knob goes to, from the gratitude for everything, it goes to resentment and envy and all the rest.
1
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Germany between the two world wars, you know, like you said, the Soviet...
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Kind of mentality so yeah and then when you re soaking in a culture so there s this kind of two factors right it s.
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It s it s what s going on in your own head and then what surrounding you and what surrounding you kind of has concentric circles there s your immediate.
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group of people, because that group of people, if they re a certain way, if they feel a lot of gratitude and they talk about it a lot, that kind of insulates you from the broader culture.
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Because people are going to have the most impact on you or the ones closest.
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But often, all the concentric circles are saying the same thing.
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The people around you are feeling the same way that the broader community, which is feeling the same way as the broader country.
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And I think this is why I think American patriotism
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You know, nationalism, you know, can be tribal, can be very, not a good thing.
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Patriotism, I think, is a great thing, because really, what is patriotism?
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I mean, it s, if you love your country, you should love your fellow countrymen.
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You know, that s a Reagan quote.
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It s like, patriotism is like, I think, a feeling of like, unity.
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And, but it also comes along with an implicit kind of concept of gratitude because it s like we are so lucky to live in, you know, people, you know, think it s chauvinist to say we live in the best country in the world, right?
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And, you know, yes, when Americans say that, no one likes it, right?
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But actually, it s not a bad thing to think.
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It s a nice thing to think.
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It s a way of saying I m so grateful for all the great things this country gives to me and this country has done.
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And I think if you heard a Filipino person say, you know what, the Philippines is the best country in the world, no one in America would say, that s chauvinist.
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They d say, awesome, right?
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SPEAKER_00
Because when it s coming from someone who s not American, it sounds totally fine.
1
SPEAKER_00
But I think national pride is actually good.
1
SPEAKER_00
Now, again, that can quickly translate into xenophobia and nationalism.
1
SPEAKER_00
And so you have to make sure it doesn t go off that cliff.
1
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, there s good ways to formulate that.
1
SPEAKER_01
Like you talk about, we ll talk about like high rung progressivism, high rung conservatism.
1
SPEAKER_01
Those are two different ways of embodying patriotism.
1
SPEAKER_01
So you could talk about maybe loving the tradition that this country stands for, or you could talk about loving the people.
1
SPEAKER_01
that ultimately push progress.
1
SPEAKER_01
And those are, from an intellectual perspective, a good way to represent patriotism.
1
SPEAKER_01
We gotta zoom out, because this graphic is epic.
1
SPEAKER_01
A lot of images in your book are just epic on their own.
1
SPEAKER_01
It s brilliantly done.
1
SPEAKER_01
But this one has famous people for each of the cards.
1
SPEAKER_01
like the best of.
1
SPEAKER_00
And by the way, good for them to be the person that, it s not that I could have chosen lots of people for each card, but I think most people would agree, you know, that s a pretty fair choice for each page.
1
SPEAKER_00
And good for them to be, you know, you crushed it if you can be the person for your whole 250 year page, so.
1
SPEAKER_01
Well, I noticed you put Gandhi, you didn t put Hitler.
1
SPEAKER_01
I mean,
1
SPEAKER_01
There s a lot of people gonna argue with you about that particular last page.
1
SPEAKER_00
True.
1
SPEAKER_00
Yes, you re right.
1
SPEAKER_00
I could have put, I actually, I was thinking about Darwin there too.
1
SPEAKER_00
Darwin, yeah.
1
SPEAKER_00
Einstein.
1
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, exactly.
1
SPEAKER_00
You really could have put anyone.
1
SPEAKER_00
Did you think about putting yourself for a second?
1
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I should have.
1
SPEAKER_00
I should have.
1
SPEAKER_00
That would have been awesome.
1
SPEAKER_00
I m sure that would have endeared the readers to me from right from the beginning of the first page of the book.
1
SPEAKER_01
A little bit of a messianic complex going on.
1
SPEAKER_01
But yeah, so the list of people just so you know, so these are,
1
SPEAKER_01
250-year chunks, the last one being from 1770 to 2020.
1
SPEAKER_01
And so it goes Gandhi, Shakespeare, Joan of Arc, Genghis Khan, Charlemagne, Muhammad, Constantine, Jesus, Cleopatra, Aristotle, Buddha.
1
SPEAKER_01
It s so interesting to think about this very recent human history.
1
SPEAKER_00
That s 11 pages, so it would be 2750, almost 3,000 years.
1
SPEAKER_01
just that there s these figures that stand out and that define the course of human history.
1
SPEAKER_00
It s like the craziest thing to me is that Buddha was a dude.
1
SPEAKER_00
He was a guy with arms and legs and fingernails that he maybe bit and he liked certain foods and maybe he got, he had digestive issues sometimes and he got cuts and they stung and he was a guy.
1
SPEAKER_00
And he had hopes and dreams and he probably had a big ego for a while before he, I guess Buddha totally overcame that one.
1
SPEAKER_00
But like, and it s like, who knows, you know, the mythical figure of Buddha, who knows how similar he was, but the fact, same with Jesus, like this was a guy, like to me, he s a primate.
1
SPEAKER_00
What a impact.
1
SPEAKER_01
He was a cell first and then a baby.
1
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
1
SPEAKER_01
He was a fetus at some point.
1
SPEAKER_01
He was a dumb baby trying to learn how to walk.
1
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, like having a tantrum because he s frustrated because he s in the terrible twos.
1
SPEAKER_00
Jesus was in the terrible twos at some point.
1
SPEAKER_01
Buddha never had a tantrum, let s be honest.
1
SPEAKER_01
The myth.
1
SPEAKER_00
The mother was like, this baby s great.
1
SPEAKER_00
Wow.
1
SPEAKER_00
Let s figure something out.
1
SPEAKER_00
It just, I mean, listen, hearing about Genghis Khan, it s incredible to me because it s just like, this was some Mongolian,
1
SPEAKER_00
you know, herder guy who was taken as a slave and he was like dirt poor, you know, catching rats as a, you know, young teen with, you know, to feed him and his mom and his, I think his brother.
1
SPEAKER_00
And it was just like, the odds on when he was born, he was just one of
1
SPEAKER_00
you know, probably tens of thousands of random teen boys living in Mongolia in the 1200s.
1
SPEAKER_00
The odds of that person, any one of them being a household name today that we re talking about, it s just crazy, like what had to happen.
1
SPEAKER_00
And for that guy, for that poor
1
SPEAKER_00
dirt poor herder to take over the world.
1
SPEAKER_00
I don t know, so history just like continually blows my mind, like, you know.
1
SPEAKER_01
And he s the reason you and I are related, probably.
1
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, no, I mean, it s also, that s the other thing, is that some of these dudes, by becoming king, by having a better army at the right time, you know, William the Conqueror, whatever, is in the right place at the right time with the right army, you know, and there s a weakness at the right moment, and he comes over and he exploits it and ends up,
1
SPEAKER_00
probably having, I don t know, 1,000 children, and those children are high up people who might have a ton of, the species is different now because of him.
1
SPEAKER_00
Forget England s different or European borders look different.
1
SPEAKER_00
We look different because of a small handful of people.
1
SPEAKER_00
Sometimes I think, I m like, oh, this part of the world,
1
SPEAKER_00
I can recognize someone s Greek, someone s Persian, someone s wherever, because they kind of have certain facial features.
1
SPEAKER_00
And I m like, it may have happened.
1
SPEAKER_00
I mean, obviously, that s a population, but it may be that someone 600 years ago that looked like that really spread their seed.
1
SPEAKER_00
And that s why the ethnicity looks kind of like that now.
1
SPEAKER_00
Sorry, anyway.
1
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
1
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
1
SPEAKER_01
Do you think individuals like that can turn the direction of history?
1
SPEAKER_01
Or is that an illusion, that narrative we tell ourselves?
1
SPEAKER_00
Well, it s both.
1
SPEAKER_00
I mean, so I said that William the Conqueror, right, or Hitler, right?
1
SPEAKER_00
It s not that Hitler was born and destined to be great at all, right?
1
SPEAKER_00
I think in a lot of cases, he s some frustrated artist with a temper who s turning over the table in his studio and hitting his wife and being kind of a dick and a total nobody, right?
1
SPEAKER_00
I think almost all the times you could have put Hitler baby on earth.
1
SPEAKER_00
He s a rando, right?
1
SPEAKER_00
And maybe sometimes he becomes some kind of, he uses the speaking ability, because that ability was going to be there either way, but maybe he uses it for something else.
1
SPEAKER_00
But that said, I also think, but it s not that, oh, World War II was gonna happen either way, right?
1
SPEAKER_00
So it s both.
1
SPEAKER_00
It s that these circumstances were one way, and this person came along at the right time, and those two made a match made in, in this case, hell.
1
SPEAKER_01
But it makes you wonder, yes, it s a match in hell, but are there other people that could have taken this place, or do these people that stand out, they re the rarest spark of,
1
SPEAKER_01
that genius, whether it take us towards evil, towards good, whether those figures singularly define the trajectory of humanity.
1
SPEAKER_01
You know, what defines the trajectory of humanity in the 21st century, for example, might be the influence of AI, might be the influence of nuclear war, negative or positive, not in the case of nuclear war, but the bioengineering, nanotech,
1
SPEAKER_01
virology, what else is there?
1
SPEAKER_01
Maybe the structure of governments and so on.
1
SPEAKER_01
Maybe the structure of universities.
1
SPEAKER_01
I don t know.
1
SPEAKER_01
There could be singular figures that stand up and lead the way for human.
1
SPEAKER_01
But I wonder if the society is the thing that manifests that person or that person,
1
SPEAKER_01
really does have a huge impact.
1
SPEAKER_00
I think it s probably a spectrum where there are some cases when a circumstance was such that something like what happened was gonna happen.
1
SPEAKER_00
If you pluck that person from the earth, I don t know whether the Mongols is a good example or not, but maybe it could be that if you plucked Genghis Khan as a baby, there was, because of the specific way Chinese civilization was at that time and the specific
1
SPEAKER_00
you know, climate, you know, that was causing a certain kind of pressure on the Mongols, and the way they still had their great archers, and they had their horses, and they had a lot of the same advantages.
1
SPEAKER_00
So maybe it was like, it was waiting to happen, right?
1
SPEAKER_00
It was going to happen either way, and it may not have happened to the extent or whatever.
1
SPEAKER_00
So maybe, or you could go the full other direction and say, actually, this was probably not going to happen.
1
SPEAKER_00
And, you know, I think World War II is an example.
1
SPEAKER_00
I kind of think World War II really was kind of the work of – of course, it relied on all these other circumstances.
1
SPEAKER_00
You had to have the resentment in Germany.
1
SPEAKER_00
You have to have the Great Depression.
1
SPEAKER_00
But like I think if you take Hitler out, I m pretty sure World War I – World War II doesn t happen.
1
SPEAKER_01
Well then, it seems like easier to answer these questions when you look at history, even recent history, but let s look at now, let s look at, I m sure we ll talk about social media.
1
SPEAKER_01
So who are the key players in social media?
1
SPEAKER_01
Mark Zuckerberg, what s the name of the MySpace guy, Tom?
1
SPEAKER_01
Tom, it s just Tom, yeah.
1
SPEAKER_01
There s a meme going around where MySpace is the perfect social media, because no algorithmic involvement, everybody s happy and positive.
1
SPEAKER_00
Also, Tom did it right.
1
SPEAKER_00
At the time we were like, oh man, Tom only made like a few million dollars, ooh, sucks to not be Zuck.
1
SPEAKER_00
Tom might be living a nice life right now where he doesn t have this nightmare that these other people have.
1
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, and he s always smiling in his profile picture.
1
SPEAKER_01
And so there s like Larry Page with Google, that s kind of intermingled into that whole thing, into the development of the internet.
1
SPEAKER_01
Jack Dorsey, now Elon, who else?
1
SPEAKER_01
I mean, there s people playing with the evolution of social media, and to me, that seems to be
1
SPEAKER_01
connected to the development of AI, and it seems like those singular figures will define the direction of AI development and social media development, with social media seeming to have such a huge impact on our collective intelligence.
1
SPEAKER_00
It does feel in one way like individuals have an especially big impact right now in that a small number of people are pulling some big levers.
1
SPEAKER_00
There can be a little meeting of three people at Facebook and they come out of that meeting and make a decision that totally changes the world, right?
1
SPEAKER_00
On the other hand, you see a lot of conformity.
1
SPEAKER_00
They all pulled the plug on Trump the same day, right?
1
SPEAKER_00
So that suggests that there s some bigger force that is also kind of driving them.
1
SPEAKER_00
in which case it s less about the individuals.
1
SPEAKER_00
I think, you know, this is, you know, what is leadership, right?
1
SPEAKER_00
I mean, to me, leadership is the ability to move things in a direction that the cultural forces are not already taking things, right?
1
SPEAKER_00
A lot of times people seem like a leader because they re just kind of hopping on the cultural wave and they happen to be the person who gets to the top of it and now it seems like they re, but actually the wave was already going.
1
SPEAKER_00
Real leadership is when someone actually changes the wave, changes the shape of the wave.
1
SPEAKER_00
I think Elon with SpaceX and with Tesla genuinely shaped a wave.
1
SPEAKER_00
Maybe you could say that EVs were actually going to happen anyway, but it s
1
SPEAKER_00
There s not much evidence about at least happening when it did.
1
SPEAKER_00
If we end up on Mars, you can say that Elon was a genuine leader there.
1
SPEAKER_00
There are examples.
1
SPEAKER_00
Zuckerberg definitely has done a lot of leadership along the way.
1
SPEAKER_00
He s also potentially kind of like caught in a storm that is happening, and he s one of the figures in it.
1
SPEAKER_00
So I don t know.
1
SPEAKER_01
And it s possible that he is a big shaper if the metaverse becomes a reality.
1
SPEAKER_01
If in 30 years, we re all living in a virtual world.
1
SPEAKER_01
To many people, it seems ridiculous now, that that was a poor investment.
1
SPEAKER_00
Well, he talked about getting, you know, 10, you know, I think it was something like a billion people with a VR headset in their pocket in by, you know, I think 10 years from now back in 2015.
1
SPEAKER_00
So we re behind that.
1
SPEAKER_00
But when he was talking about that, and honestly, I
1
SPEAKER_00
This is something I ve been wrong about, because I went to one of the Facebook conferences and tried out all the new Oculus stuff.
1
SPEAKER_00
And I was pretty early talking to some of the major players there, because I was going to write a big post about it that then got swallowed by this book.
1
SPEAKER_00
But I would have been wrong in the post, because what I would have said was that this thing is, when I tried it, I was like,
1
SPEAKER_00
This is, you know, some of them suck.
1
SPEAKER_00
Some of them make you nauseous and they re just not that you re, you know, the headsets were big and, you know, but I was like, the times when this is good, it is, I have this feeling I haven t had, it reminds me of the feeling I had when I first was five and I went to a friend s house and he had Nintendo and I, and he gave me the controller and I was looking at the screen and I pressed a button and Mario jumped.
1
SPEAKER_00
And I said, I said,
1
SPEAKER_00
I can make the something on the screen move.
1
SPEAKER_00
And the same feeling I had the first time someone showed me how to send an email, it was like really early, and he s like, you can send this.
1
SPEAKER_00
And I was like, it goes, I can press enter on my computer and something happens on your computer.
1
SPEAKER_00
Those were obviously, you know, when you have that feeling, it often means you re witnessing a paradigm shift.
1
SPEAKER_00
And I thought this is one of those things.
1
SPEAKER_00
And I still kind of think it is, but it s kind of weird that it hasn t, you know, like, where s the VR revolution?
1
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I m surprised, because I m with you.
1
SPEAKER_01
My first and still instinct is this feels like it changes everything.
1
SPEAKER_01
VR feels like it changes everything, but it s not changing anything.
1
SPEAKER_00
Like, a dumb part of my brain is genuinely convinced that this is real.
1
SPEAKER_00
And then the smart part knows it s not.
1
SPEAKER_00
But that s why the dumb part was like, we re not walking off that cliff.
1
SPEAKER_00
The smart part s like, you re on your rug.
1
SPEAKER_00
It s fine.
1
SPEAKER_00
The dumb part of my brain is like, I m not walking off the cliff.
1
SPEAKER_00
So it s like, it s crazy.
1
SPEAKER_01
I feel like it s waiting.
1
SPEAKER_01
for like that revolutionary person who comes in and says I m gonna create a headset like I don t Steve Jobs iPhone of honestly a little bit of a Carmack type guy which is why I was really interesting for him to be involved with Facebook is basically how do we create
2
SPEAKER_00
a simple dumb thing that s a hundred bucks but actually creates that experience and then there s going to be some viral killer app on it and that s going to be the gateway into a thing that s going to change everything.
2
SPEAKER_00
I mean I don t know what exactly was the thing that changed everything with the personal computer.
2
SPEAKER_00
Is that understood?
2
SPEAKER_00
Maybe graphics?
2
SPEAKER_00
What was the use case?
2
SPEAKER_00
Exactly.
2
SPEAKER_01
Wasn t the 84 Macintosh a moment when it was like, this is actually something that normal people can and want to use?
2
SPEAKER_01
Because it was less than $5,000, I think.
2
SPEAKER_01
And I just think it had some like Steve Jobs user friendliness already to it that other ones hadn t had.
2
SPEAKER_01
I think Windows 95 was a really big deal.
2
SPEAKER_01
I remember like, because I m old enough to remember the MS-DOS when I was like kind of remember the command.
2
SPEAKER_01
And then suddenly this concept of like a window you drag something into or you double click an icon, which now seems like so obvious to us was like revolutionary because it made it intuitive.
2
SPEAKER_01
So, you know, I don t know.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
2
SPEAKER_00
Windows 95 was good.
2
SPEAKER_00
It was crazy, yeah.
2
SPEAKER_00
I forget what the big leaps was, because Windows 2000 sucked, and then Windows XP was good.
2
SPEAKER_01
I moved to Mac around 2004, so I stopped.
2
SPEAKER_00
You sold your soul to the devil?
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
2
SPEAKER_00
I see.
2
SPEAKER_00
Well, us, the people, still use Windows and Android, the device in the operating system of the people, not you elitist folk with your books.
2
SPEAKER_00
And you re, what else?
2
SPEAKER_00
And success.
2
SPEAKER_00
Okay.
2
SPEAKER_00
You write, more technology means better good times, but it also means badder bad times.
2
SPEAKER_00
And the scary thing is, if the good and bad keep exponentially growing, it doesn t matter how great the good times become.
2
SPEAKER_00
If the bad gets to a certain level of bad, it s all over for us.
2
SPEAKER_00
Can you elaborate on this?
2
SPEAKER_00
Why is there, why does the bad have that property?
2
SPEAKER_00
that if it s all exponentially getting more powerful, then the bad is gonna win in the end.
2
SPEAKER_00
Am I misinterpreting that?
2
SPEAKER_01
No.
2
SPEAKER_01
So the first thing is I noticed a trend, which was like the centuries, the good is getting better every century.
2
SPEAKER_01
Like the 20th century was the best century yet in terms of prosperity, in terms of GDP per capita, in terms of life expectancy, in terms of poverty and disease, every metric that matters.
2
SPEAKER_01
The 20th century was incredible.
2
SPEAKER_01
It also had the biggest wars in history, the biggest genocide in history, the biggest existential threat yet with nuclear weapons, right?
2
SPEAKER_01
The depression was probably as big an economic.
2
SPEAKER_01
So it s this interesting thing where the stakes are getting higher in both directions.
2
SPEAKER_01
And so the question is like, if you get enough good, does that protect you against the bad, right?
2
SPEAKER_01
The dream, and I do think this is possible too, is the good gets so good.
2
SPEAKER_01
You know, have you ever read the culture series, the Ian Banks books?
2
SPEAKER_00
Not yet, but I get criticized on a daily basis by some of the mutual folks we know for not having done so.
2
SPEAKER_00
And I feel like a lesser man for it.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yes, I need to change that.
2
SPEAKER_01
So that s how I got onto it, and I read six of the ten books.
2
SPEAKER_01
And they re great.
2
SPEAKER_01
But the thing I love about them is it just paints one of these
2
SPEAKER_01
futuristic societies where the good has gotten so good that the bad is no longer even an issue.
2
SPEAKER_01
Like, basically, and the way that this works is the AI, you know, the AIs are benevolent and they control everything.
2
SPEAKER_01
And so like, there s one random anecdote where they re like, you know, what happens if you murder someone?
2
SPEAKER_01
because there s still people with rage and jealousy or whatever.
2
SPEAKER_01
So if someone murders someone, first of all, that person s backed up.
2
SPEAKER_01
So it s like they have to get a new body and it s annoying, but it s not death.
2
SPEAKER_01
And secondly, that person, what are they going to do?
2
SPEAKER_01
Put them in jail?
2
SPEAKER_01
No, no, no.
2
SPEAKER_01
They re just going to send a slap drone around, which is this little tiny random drone that just will float around next to them forever.
2
SPEAKER_01
And by the way, kind of be their servant.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s kind of fun to have a slap drone, but just making sure that they never do anything again.
2
SPEAKER_01
And it s like, I was like, oh man, it could just be, everyone could be so safe and everything could be so like, you know, you want a house, you know, the AIs will build you a house, there s endless space, there s endless resources.
2
SPEAKER_01
So I do think that that could be part of our future.
2
SPEAKER_01
That s part of what excites me is like there is, like today would seem like a utopia to Thomas Jefferson, right?
2
SPEAKER_01
Thomas Jefferson s world would seem like a utopia to a caveman.
2
SPEAKER_01
There is a future, and by the way, these are happening faster, these jumps, right?
2
SPEAKER_01
So the thing that would seem like a utopia to us, we could experience in our own lifetimes, right?
2
SPEAKER_01
Like it s, especially if life extension combines with exponential progress, I wanna get there.
2
SPEAKER_01
And I think in that part of what makes it utopia is you don t have to be as scared of the worst bad guy in the world trying to do the worst damage because we have protection.
2
SPEAKER_01
But that said, I m not sure how that happens.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s easier said than done.
2
SPEAKER_01
Nick Bostrom uses the example of, if nuclear weapons could be manufactured by microwaving sand, for example, we probably would be in the Stone Age right now.
2
SPEAKER_01
Because 0.001% of people would love to destroy all of humanity, right?
2
SPEAKER_01
Some 16-year-old with huge mental health problems who right now goes and shoots up a school would say, oh, even better, I m going to blow up a city.
2
SPEAKER_01
And now suddenly there s copycats, right?
2
SPEAKER_01
That s like is our technology grows it s going to be easier for the worst bad guys.
2
SPEAKER_01
to do tremendous damage.
2
SPEAKER_01
And it s easier to destroy than to build.
2
SPEAKER_01
So it takes a tiny, tiny number of these people with enough power to do bad.
2
SPEAKER_01
So that, to me, I m like, the stakes are going up, because what we have to lose is this incredible utopia.
2
SPEAKER_01
But also, like, dystopia is real.
2
SPEAKER_01
It happens.
2
SPEAKER_01
The Romans ended up in a dystopia they probably earlier thought that was never possible.
2
SPEAKER_01
Like, we should not get cocky.
2
SPEAKER_01
And so to me, that trend,
2
SPEAKER_01
is the exponential tech is a double-edged sword.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s so exciting.
2
SPEAKER_01
I m happy to be alive now, overall, because I m an optimist and I find it exciting.
2
SPEAKER_01
But it s really scary.
2
SPEAKER_01
And the dumbest thing we can do is not be scared.
2
SPEAKER_01
Dumbest thing we can do is get cocky and think, well, my life is always the last couple generations.
2
SPEAKER_01
Everything s been fine.
2
SPEAKER_01
Stop that.
2
SPEAKER_00
What s your gut, what percentage of trajectories take us towards the, as you put, unimaginably good future versus unimaginably bad future?
2
SPEAKER_00
As an optimist.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s really hard to know.
2
SPEAKER_01
One of the things we can do is look at history.
2
SPEAKER_01
On one hand, there s a lot of stories.
2
SPEAKER_01
I m actually listening to a great podcast right now called The Fall of Civilizations.
2
SPEAKER_01
And it s literally every episode is a little two-hour deep dive into some civilizations.
2
SPEAKER_01
Some are really famous, like the Roman Empire.
2
SPEAKER_01
Some are more obscure, like the Norse and Greenland.
2
SPEAKER_01
But each one is so interesting.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s, I mean, there s a lot of civilizations that had their peak.
2
SPEAKER_01
There s always the peak, right, when they re thriving, and they re at their max size, and they have their waterways, and they have their, it s civilized, and it s representative, and it s fair, and whatever.
2
SPEAKER_01
Not always, but it s, the peak is a great, you know, if I could go back in time, you know, it s not that the farther you go back, the worse it gets.
2
SPEAKER_01
No, no, no, you want to go back to a civilization during, I would go to the Roman Empire in the year 100.
2
SPEAKER_01
It sounds great.
2
SPEAKER_01
You don t want to go to the Roman Empire in the year 400.
2
SPEAKER_01
We might be in the peak right now here, whatever this empire is.
2
SPEAKER_01
Honestly, I think about the 80s, the 70s, the 80s, the 90s.
2
SPEAKER_01
Oh, here we go.
2
SPEAKER_01
The music.
2
SPEAKER_00
No, no, I hate the 80s.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s so much better.
2
SPEAKER_01
No, the 80s culture is so annoying.
2
SPEAKER_01
When I listen to these things, I m thinking the 80s and 90s.
2
SPEAKER_01
America in the 90s was popular.
2
SPEAKER_01
People forget that now.
2
SPEAKER_01
Clinton was a superstar around the world.
2
SPEAKER_01
Michael Jordan was exported internationally.
2
SPEAKER_01
Then basketball was everywhere suddenly.
2
SPEAKER_01
You had music, the sports, whatever.
2
SPEAKER_01
It was a little probably like the 50s coming out of the World War and the Depression before it.
2
SPEAKER_01
It was like this kind of like
2
SPEAKER_01
everyone was in a good mood kind of time, you know?
2
SPEAKER_01
It s like I finished a big project and it s Saturday, it was like, I feel like the 50s was kind of like everyone was having it, you know, the 20s, I feel like everyone was in a good mood randomly.
2
SPEAKER_01
Then the 30s, everyone was in a bad mood.
2
SPEAKER_01
But the 90s, I think we ll look back on it as a time when everyone was in a good mood.
2
SPEAKER_01
And it was like, you know, again, of course, at the time, it doesn t feel that way necessarily, but I look at that, I m like, maybe that was kind of America s peak.
2
SPEAKER_01
And like, no, maybe not, but like,
2
SPEAKER_01
It hasn t been popular since, really, worldwide.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s gone in and out, depending on the country, but it hasn t reached that level of, like, America s awesome around the world.
2
SPEAKER_01
And the political situation s gotten really ugly.
2
SPEAKER_01
And maybe it s social media, maybe who knows.
2
SPEAKER_01
But I wonder if it ll ever be as simple
2
SPEAKER_01
and positive as it was then.
2
SPEAKER_01
Maybe we are in the, it feels a little like maybe we re in the beginning of the downfall, or not, because these things don t just, it s not a perfect smooth hill.
2
SPEAKER_01
It goes up and down and up and down.
2
SPEAKER_01
So maybe there s another big upcoming.
2
SPEAKER_00
And it s unclear whether public opinion, which is kind of what you re talking to, is correlated strongly with influence.
2
SPEAKER_00
Because you could say that even though America s been on a decline in terms of public opinion, the exporting of technology
2
SPEAKER_00
America has still, with all the talk of China, has still been leading the way in terms of AI, in terms of social media, in terms of just basically any software-related product.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, like chips.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, chips.
2
SPEAKER_00
So hardware and software, I mean, America leads the way.
2
SPEAKER_00
You could argue that Google and...
2
SPEAKER_00
Microsoft and Facebook are no longer American companies, they re international companies, but they really are still at the, you know, headquartered in Silicon Valley, broadly speaking.
2
SPEAKER_00
So, and Tesla, of course, and just all of the technological innovation still seems to be happening in the United States.
2
SPEAKER_00
Although culturally,
2
SPEAKER_00
and politically, this is not good.
2
SPEAKER_00
Well, maybe that could shift at any moment when all the technological development can actually create some positive impact in the world.
2
SPEAKER_00
That could shift it, with the right leadership and so on, with the right messaging.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I think...
2
SPEAKER_01
I don t feel confident at all about whether no, no, I don t mean that.
2
SPEAKER_01
I don t mean I don t feel confident in my opinion that we may be on the downswing or that we may be.
2
SPEAKER_01
I truly don t know.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s like I think the people.
2
SPEAKER_01
These are really big macro stories that are really hard to see when you re inside of them.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s like being on a beach and running around a few miles this way and trying to suss out the shape of the coastline.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s just really hard to see the big picture.
2
SPEAKER_01
You get caught up in the micro stories, the little tiny ups and downs that are part of some bigger trend.
2
SPEAKER_01
And also giant paradigm shifts happen quickly nowadays.
2
SPEAKER_01
The internet came out of nowhere and suddenly was like,
2
SPEAKER_01
So there could be a change everything thing on the way.
2
SPEAKER_01
It seems like there s a few candidates for it.
2
SPEAKER_01
But I mean, it feels like the stakes are just high, higher than it even was for the Romans, higher than it was for because we re more powerful as a species.
2
SPEAKER_01
We have godlike powers with technology that other civilizations at their peak didn t have.
2
SPEAKER_00
I wonder if those high stakes and powers will feel laughable to people that live, humans, aliens, cyborgs, whatever lives 100 years from now.
2
SPEAKER_00
That maybe our little, like, this feeling of political and technological turmoil is nothing compared to that.
2
SPEAKER_01
Well, that s the big question.
2
SPEAKER_01
So right now, you know the 1890s was like a super politically contentious decade in the US.
2
SPEAKER_01
It was like immense tribalism and newspapers were all like lying and telling, you know, there was a lot of like what we would associate with today s media, the worst of it.
2
SPEAKER_01
And it was over gold or silver being this, I don t know, it was very, it s something that I don t understand.
2
SPEAKER_01
The point is, it was a little bit of a blip, right?
2
SPEAKER_01
It happened, it felt, it must have felt like the end of days at the time, and then now we, and most people don t even know about that.
2
SPEAKER_01
Versus, you know, again, the Roman Empire actually collapsed.
2
SPEAKER_01
And so the question is just like, is yeah, you know, will, in 50 years, will this be like, or like McCarthyism?
2
SPEAKER_01
Oh, they had like a, oh, that was like a crazy few years in America, and then it was fine.
2
SPEAKER_01
Or is this the beginning of something really big?
2
SPEAKER_01
And that s what I don t know.
2
SPEAKER_00
Well, I wonder if we can predict what the big thing is at the beginning.
2
SPEAKER_00
It feels like we re not, we re just here along for the ride, and at the local level, and at every level, we re trying to do our best.
2
SPEAKER_01
But we re all just- How do we do our best?
2
SPEAKER_01
The one thing I know for sure is that we need to have our wits about us and do our best.
2
SPEAKER_01
And the way that we can do that, we have to be as wise as possible to proceed forward, and wisdom,
2
SPEAKER_01
is an emergent property of discourse.
2
SPEAKER_00
So you re a proponent of wisdom versus stupidity?
2
SPEAKER_00
Because you can make an, I can steal man the case for stupidity.
2
SPEAKER_00
Do it.
2
SPEAKER_00
I probably can t.
2
SPEAKER_00
But there s some, I think wisdom, and you talk about this, can come with a false confidence, arrogance.
2
SPEAKER_00
I mean, you talk about this in the book.
2
SPEAKER_00
That s too easy.
2
SPEAKER_01
That s not wisdom then.
2
SPEAKER_01
If you re being arrogant, you re being unwise.
2
SPEAKER_00
Unwise.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, you know, I think wisdom is doing what people 100 years from now with the hindsight that we don t have would do if they could come back in time and they knew everything.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s like how do we figure out how to have hindsight when we actually are not?
2
SPEAKER_00
What if stupidity is the thing that people from 100 years from now will see as wise?
2
SPEAKER_00
The idiot by Dostoevsky, being naive and trusting everybody, maybe that s the one.
2
SPEAKER_01
Well, then you get lucky.
2
SPEAKER_01
Then maybe you get to a good future by stumbling upon it.
2
SPEAKER_01
But ideally, you can get there.
2
SPEAKER_01
I think a lot of—America, the great things about it are a product of
2
SPEAKER_01
the wisdom of previous Americans.
2
SPEAKER_01
You know, the Constitution was a pretty, you know, pretty wise system to set up.
2
SPEAKER_00
There s not much stupid stumbling around.
2
SPEAKER_00
Well, there is, I mean, with Dostoevsky s The Idiot, Prince Mishkin, and Brothers Karamazov, there s Alyosha Karamazov, You Err on the Side of Love.
2
SPEAKER_00
and almost like a naive trust in other human beings.
2
SPEAKER_00
And that turns out to be, at least in my perspective in the long term, for the success of the species is actually wisdom.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s a compass.
2
SPEAKER_00
But we don t know.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s a compass when you re in the fog.
2
SPEAKER_00
In the fog, yeah.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s a compass, yeah.
2
SPEAKER_00
Love is a compass.
2
SPEAKER_01
Okay, but here s the thing.
2
SPEAKER_01
So I think we should have a compass is nice, but you know what else is nice is a flashlight in the fog that can help.
2
SPEAKER_01
You can t see that far, but you can see, oh, you can see four feet ahead instead of one foot.
2
SPEAKER_01
And that to me is discourse.
2
SPEAKER_01
That is open, vigorous, like discussion in a culture that fosters that is how the species, how the American citizens as a unit can be
2
SPEAKER_01
as wise as possible, can maybe see four feet ahead instead of one foot ahead.
2
SPEAKER_00
That said, Charles Bukowski said that love is a fog that fades with the first light of reality.
2
SPEAKER_00
So I don t know how that works out, but I feel like there s intermixing of metaphors that works.
2
SPEAKER_00
Okay, you also write that, quote, as the authors of the story of us, which is this 1,000-page book, we have no mentors, no editors, no one to make sure it all turns out okay.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s all in our hands.
2
SPEAKER_00
This scares me.
2
SPEAKER_00
but it s also what gives me hope.
2
SPEAKER_00
If we can all get just a little wiser together, it may be enough to nudge the story onto a trajectory that points towards an unimaginably good future.
2
SPEAKER_00
Do you think we can possibly define what a good future looks like?
2
SPEAKER_00
I mean, this is the problem that we ran into with communism, of thinking of utopia.
2
SPEAKER_00
of having a deep confidence about what a utopian world looks like.
2
SPEAKER_01
Well, it s a deep confidence.
2
SPEAKER_01
That was a deep confidence about the instrumental way to get there.
2
SPEAKER_01
It was that, you know, I think a lot of us can agree that if everyone had everything they needed, and we didn t have disease or poverty, and people could live as long as they wanted to and choose when to die, and there was no existential, major existential threat could be controlled.
2
SPEAKER_01
I think almost everyone can agree that would be great.
2
SPEAKER_01
That communism is a, that was, they said, this is the way to get there.
2
SPEAKER_01
And that is,
2
SPEAKER_01
That s a different question, you know, so the unimaginably good future I m picturing, I think a lot of people would picture and I think most people would agree.
2
SPEAKER_01
Now, not everyone, there s a lot of people out there who would say humans are the scourge on the earth and we should de-growth or something, but I think a lot of people would agree that, you know, just again, take Thomas Jefferson, bring him here.
2
SPEAKER_01
He would see it as a utopia for obvious reasons, the medicine, the food, the transportation,
2
SPEAKER_01
just how the quality of life and the safety and all of that.
2
SPEAKER_01
So extrapolate that forward for us.
2
SPEAKER_01
Now, we re Thomas Jefferson.
2
SPEAKER_01
What s the equivalent?
2
SPEAKER_01
That s what I m talking about.
2
SPEAKER_01
And the big question is, I don t try to say, here s the way to get there.
2
SPEAKER_01
Here s the actual specific way to get there.
2
SPEAKER_01
I try to say, how do we have a flashlight so that we can together figure it out?
2
SPEAKER_01
How do we give ourselves the best chance of figuring out the way to get there?
3
SPEAKER_01
The problem with communists and people – ideologues is that they re way too overconfident that they know the way to get there and it becomes a religion to them, this solution.
3
SPEAKER_01
Then you can t update once you have a solution as a religion.
3
SPEAKER_00
I felt a little violated when you said communist and stared deeply into myself.
3
SPEAKER_00
In this book, you ve developed a framework for how to fix everything.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s called The Ladder.
3
SPEAKER_00
Can you explain it?
3
SPEAKER_01
Okay, it s not a framework for how to fix everything.
3
SPEAKER_01
I would never say that.
3
SPEAKER_00
I ll explain it to Tim Urban at some point, how this humor thing works.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s a framework of how to think about collaboration between humans such that we could fix things.
3
SPEAKER_01
I think it s a compass.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s like a,
3
SPEAKER_01
It s a ruler that we can, once we look at it together and see what it is, we can all say, oh, we want to go to that side of the ruler, not this side.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so it gives us a direction to go.
3
SPEAKER_01
So what are the parts of the ladder?
3
SPEAKER_01
So I have these two characters, this orange guy, this primitive mind is, this is our software.
3
SPEAKER_01
That is the software that was in a 50,000 BC person s head that was specifically optimized for, to help that person survive in that world.
3
SPEAKER_01
And not even, not just not really survive, but help them pass their genes on in that world.
3
SPEAKER_01
Um, and.
3
SPEAKER_01
civilization happened quickly and brains change slowly.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so that unchanged dude is still running the show in our head.
3
SPEAKER_01
And I use the example of like Skittles.
3
SPEAKER_01
Like, why do we eat Skittles?
3
SPEAKER_01
It s trash.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s obviously bad for you.
3
SPEAKER_01
And it s because the primitive mind
3
SPEAKER_01
in the world that it was programmed for.
3
SPEAKER_01
There was no Skittles.
3
SPEAKER_01
It was just fruit, and if there was a dense, chewy, sweet fruit like that, it meant you just found a calorie goldmine.
3
SPEAKER_01
Energy, energy, take it.
3
SPEAKER_01
Take it, eat as much as you can.
3
SPEAKER_01
Gorge on it.
3
SPEAKER_01
Hopefully you get a little fat.
3
SPEAKER_01
That would be the dream, and now we re so good with energy for a while.
3
SPEAKER_01
We don t have to stress about it anymore.
3
SPEAKER_01
So today, Mars Inc.
3
SPEAKER_01
is clever and says, let s not sell things to people s higher minds, who s the other character, let s sell to people s primitive minds.
3
SPEAKER_01
Primitive minds are dumb, and let s trick them into thinking this is this thing you should eat, and then they ll eat it.
3
SPEAKER_01
Now, Mars Inc.
3
SPEAKER_01
is a huge company.
3
SPEAKER_00
Actually, just to linger real quick, you said primitive mind and higher mind, so those are the two things that make up
3
SPEAKER_00
this bigger mind that is the modern human being?
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s not perfect.
3
SPEAKER_01
Obviously, there s a lot of crossover.
3
SPEAKER_01
There s people who will yell at me for saying there s two minds.
3
SPEAKER_01
But to me, it s still a useful framework, where you have this software that has making decisions based on a world that you re not in anymore.
3
SPEAKER_01
And then you ve got this other character, I call it the higher mind, and it s the part of you that knows that skills are not good and can override the instinct.
3
SPEAKER_01
And the reason you don t always eat Skittles is because the higher mind says, no, no, no, we re not doing that, because that s bad, and I know that, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
Now, you can apply that to a lot of things.
3
SPEAKER_01
The higher mind is the one that knows I shouldn t procrastinate.
3
SPEAKER_01
The primitive mind is the one that wants to conserve energy and not do anything icky and can t see the future, so he procrastinates.
3
SPEAKER_01
You can apply this.
3
SPEAKER_01
Now, I, in this book, apply it to
3
SPEAKER_01
to how we form our beliefs is one of the ways, and then eventually to politics and political movements.
3
SPEAKER_01
But like, if you think about, well, what s the equivalent of the Skittles tug of war in your head for how do you form your beliefs?
3
SPEAKER_01
And it s that the primitive mind in the world that it was optimized for, it wanted to
3
SPEAKER_01
feel conviction about its beliefs.
3
SPEAKER_01
It wanted to be sure that it was, it wanted to feel conviction and it wanted to agree with the people around it.
3
SPEAKER_01
It didn t want to stand out.
3
SPEAKER_01
It wanted to perfectly agree with the tribe about the tribe s sacred beliefs, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
And so there s a big part of us that wants to do that, that doesn t like changing our mind.
3
SPEAKER_01
It feels like it s part of our, the primitive mind identifies with beliefs.
3
SPEAKER_01
It feels like it s a threat, a physical threat to you.
3
SPEAKER_01
to your primitive mind when you change your mind, or when someone disagrees with you in a smart way.
3
SPEAKER_01
So there s that huge force in us, which is confirmation bias.
3
SPEAKER_01
That s where that comes from.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s this desire to keep believing what we believe, and this desire to also fit in with our beliefs, to believe what the people around us believe.
3
SPEAKER_01
And that can be fun in some ways.
3
SPEAKER_01
We all like the same sports team, and we re all super into it, and we re all going to be biased about that call together.
3
SPEAKER_01
I mean, it s not always bad.
3
SPEAKER_01
but it s not a very smart way to be, and you re actually, you re working kind of for those ideas.
3
SPEAKER_01
Those ideas are like your boss, and you re working so hard to keep believing those.
3
SPEAKER_01
Those ideas are, you know, a really good paper comes in that you read that conflicts with those ideas, and you will do all this work to say that paper s bullshit because.
3
SPEAKER_01
You re a faithful employee of those ideas.
3
SPEAKER_01
Now the higher mind, to me, the same party that can override the Skittles, can override this and can search for something that makes a lot more sense, which is truth.
3
SPEAKER_01
Because what rational being wouldn t want to know the truth?
3
SPEAKER_01
Who wants to be delusional?
3
SPEAKER_01
And so there s this tug of war because
3
SPEAKER_01
The higher mind doesn t identify with ideas.
3
SPEAKER_01
Why would you?
3
SPEAKER_01
It s an experiment you re doing.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s a mental model.
3
SPEAKER_01
And if someone can come over and say, you re wrong, you say, where?
3
SPEAKER_01
Show me, show me.
3
SPEAKER_01
And if they point out something that is wrong, you say, oh, thanks.
3
SPEAKER_01
Oh, good.
3
SPEAKER_01
I just got a little smarter, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
You re not going to identify with the thing.
3
SPEAKER_01
Go, yeah, kick it.
3
SPEAKER_01
See if you can break it.
3
SPEAKER_01
If you can break it, it s not that good, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
So there s both of these in our heads.
3
SPEAKER_01
And there s this tug of war between them.
3
SPEAKER_01
And sometimes, if you re telling me about something with AI, I m probably going to think with my higher mind, because I m not identified with it.
3
SPEAKER_01
But if you go and you criticize the ideas in this book, or you criticize my religious beliefs, or you criticize, I might have a harder time, because the primitive mind says, no, no, no.
3
SPEAKER_01
Those are our special ideas.
3
SPEAKER_01
So yeah, so that s one way to use this ladder, is like, it s a spectrum.
3
SPEAKER_01
At the top, the higher mind is doing all the thinking.
3
SPEAKER_01
And then as you go down, it becomes more of a tug of war.
3
SPEAKER_01
And at the bottom, the primitive mind is in total control.
3
SPEAKER_00
And this is distinct as you show from the spectrum of ideas this is how you think vs what you think and those are distinct those are different dimensions.
3
SPEAKER_01
We need we need a vertical axis we have all these horizontal axes left right center or you know this opinion all the way to this opinion but it s like.
3
SPEAKER_01
What s much more important than where you stand is how you got there, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
And how you think.
3
SPEAKER_01
So this helps if I can say this person s kind of on the left or on the right, but they re up high, I think.
3
SPEAKER_01
In other words, I think they got there using evidence and reason and they were willing to change their mind.
3
SPEAKER_01
Now that means a lot to me what they have to say.
3
SPEAKER_01
If I think they re just a tribal person and I can predict all their beliefs from hearing one because it s so obvious what political beliefs, that person s views are irrelevant to me because they re not real.
3
SPEAKER_01
They didn t come from,
3
SPEAKER_01
information, they came from a tribe s kind of, you know, sacred Ten Commandments.
3
SPEAKER_00
I really like the comic you have in here about the boxer.
3
SPEAKER_00
This is the best boxer in the world.
3
SPEAKER_00
Wow, cool.
3
SPEAKER_00
Who has he beaten?
3
SPEAKER_00
No one.
3
SPEAKER_00
He s never fought anyone.
3
SPEAKER_00
Then how do you know he s the best boxer in the world?
3
SPEAKER_00
I can just tell.
3
SPEAKER_00
I mean, this connects with me and I think with a lot of people just because in martial arts, it s especially kind of true that this is this whole legend about different martial artists and
3
SPEAKER_00
that kind of would construct action figures, like thinking that Steven Seagal is the best fighter in the world, or Chuck Norris.
3
SPEAKER_00
Chuck Norris is actually backed up, he s done really well in competition, but still, the ultimate test, particularly for martial arts, is what we now know as mixed martial arts, UFC and so on.
3
SPEAKER_00
and that s the actual scientific testing ground.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s a meritocracy.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, exactly.
3
SPEAKER_00
I mean, there s within certain rules and you can criticize those rules like this doesn t actually represent the broader combat that you would think of when you re thinking about martial arts, but reality is you re actually testing things.
3
SPEAKER_00
And that s when you realize that Aikido and some of these kind of woo-woo martial arts in their certain implementations don t work in the way you think they would in the context of fighting.
3
SPEAKER_00
And I think this is one of the places where everyone can agree, which is why it s a really nice comic.
3
SPEAKER_00
Because then you start to talk about, map this onto ideas that people take personally, it starts becoming a lot more difficult to basically highlight that we re thinking with, not with our higher mind, but with our primitive mind.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I mean, if I m thinking with my higher mind, and now here, you can use different things for an idea as a metaphor.
3
SPEAKER_01
So here, the metaphor is a boxer for one of your conclusions, one of your beliefs.
3
SPEAKER_01
And if all I care about is truth, in other words, that means all I care about is having a good boxer, I would,
3
SPEAKER_01
Say, go, yeah, try.
3
SPEAKER_01
See if this person s good.
3
SPEAKER_01
In other words, I would get into arguments, which is throwing my boxer out there to fight against other ones.
3
SPEAKER_01
And if I think my argument s good, by the way, I love boxing.
3
SPEAKER_01
If I think my guy is amazing, Mike Tyson, I m thinking, oh, yeah, bring it on.
3
SPEAKER_01
Who wants to come see?
3
SPEAKER_01
I bet no one can beat my boxer.
3
SPEAKER_01
I love a good debate in that case.
3
SPEAKER_01
Now, what would you think about my boxer if not only was I telling you he was great, but he s never boxed anyone, but then you said, okay, well, your idea, came over to try to punch him, and I screamed, and I said, what are you doing?
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SPEAKER_01
That s violence, and you re an awful person, and I don t wanna be friends with you anymore, because you would think this boxer obviously sucks, or at least I think it sucks, deep down, because why would I be so anti anyone, no boxing allowed?
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SPEAKER_01
I call this a ladder, right?
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If you re in low-rung land, whether it s a culture or whatever, a debate, an argument, when someone says, no, that s totally wrong, what you re saying about that, and here s why.
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SPEAKER_01
You re actually being totally biased.
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SPEAKER_01
It sounds like a fight.
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People are going to say, oh wow, we got in like a fight.
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It was really awkward.
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SPEAKER_01
Like, are we still friends with that person?
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SPEAKER_01
Because that s not a culture of boxing.
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SPEAKER_01
It s a culture where you don t touch each other s ideas.
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That s insensitive.
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Versus in a high rung culture, it s sport.
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SPEAKER_01
I mean, like every one of your podcasts,
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Whether you re agreeing or disagreeing, the tone is the same.
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It s not like, oh, this got awkward.
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It s like, the tone is identical, because you re just playing intellectually either way, because it s a good higher rung space.
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At his best, but people do take stuff personally.
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SPEAKER_00
And that s actually one of the skills of conversation, just as a fan of podcasts, is when you sense that people take a thing personally,
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SPEAKER_00
You have to like, there s sort of methodologies and little paths you can take to like calm things down.
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SPEAKER_00
Like go around, don t take it as a violation of like that.
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SPEAKER_01
You re trying to suss out which of their ideas are sacred to them.
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Yeah.
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And which ones are, ah, bring it on.
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And sometimes it s actually, I mean, that s the skill of it, I suppose, that sometimes it s the certain wardings.
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in the way you challenge those ideas are important.
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You can challenge them indirectly and then together, walk together in that way.
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Because what I ve learned is people are used to their ideas being attacked in a certain way.
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in a certain tribal way, and if you just avoid those, like for example, if you have political discussions and just never mention left or right or Republican and Democrat, none of that.
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Just talk about different ideas and avoid certain kind of triggering words.
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You can actually talk about ideas versus falling into this
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that s well established through battles that people have previously fought.
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SPEAKER_01
When you say triggering, I mean, who s getting triggered?
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The primitive mind.
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SPEAKER_01
So what you re trying to do, what you re saying in this language is how do you have conversations with other people s higher minds, almost like whispering, without waking up the primitive mind.
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SPEAKER_01
The primitive mind is there sleeping, right?
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SPEAKER_01
And as soon as you say something, the left primitive mind gets up and says, what?
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SPEAKER_01
What are you saying about the left?
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And now everything goes off the rails.
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SPEAKER_00
What do you make of conspiracy theories under this framework of the latter?
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SPEAKER_01
So here s the thing about conspiracy theories is that once in a while, they re true, right?
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Because sometimes there s a natural conspiracy.
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SPEAKER_01
Actually, humans are pretty good at real conspiracies, secret things.
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SPEAKER_01
And then, you know, I just watched the Madoff doc, great new Netflix doc, by the way.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so the question is,
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how do you create a system that is good at you put the conspiracy theory in and it either goes or it says is interesting let s keep exploring it like how do you put how do you do something that it can how do you assess and so again I think the higher on culture.
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is really good at it because a real conspiracy, what s gonna happen is you put it, it s like a little machine you put in the middle of the table, and everyone starts firing darts at it, or bow and arrow, or whatever, and everyone starts kicking it and trying to, and almost all conspiracy theories, they quickly crumble, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
Because they actually, you know, Trump s election one, I actually dug in and I looked at like every claim that he or his team made, and I was like,
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SPEAKER_01
All of these don t none of these hold up to scrutiny.
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None of them.
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I was open minded, but none of them did.
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SPEAKER_01
So that was one that as soon as it s open to scrutiny, it crumbles.
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SPEAKER_01
The only way that conspiracy can stick around in a community is if
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It is a culture where that s being treated as a sacred idea that no one should kick or throw a dart at.
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Because if you throw a dart, it s going to break.
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And so what you want is a culture where no idea is sacred.
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Anything can get thrown at.
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SPEAKER_01
And so I think that then what you ll find is that 94 out of 100 conspiracy theories come in, and they fall down.
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SPEAKER_01
Maybe four of the others come in, and there s something there, but it s not as extreme as people say.
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SPEAKER_01
And then maybe one is a huge deal, and it s actually a real conspiracy.
3
SPEAKER_00
Well, isn t there a lot of gray area and there s a lot of mystery?
3
SPEAKER_00
Isn t that where the conspiracy theories seep in?
3
SPEAKER_00
So it s great to hear that you ve really looked into the Trump election fraud claims, but aren t they resting on a lot of kind of gray area?
3
SPEAKER_00
Fog, basically saying that there is dark forces in the shadows that are actually controlling everything.
3
SPEAKER_00
I mean, the same thing with maybe you can, there s like safer conspiracy theories, less controversial ones, like have we landed on the moon?
3
SPEAKER_00
Did the United States ever land on the moon?
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SPEAKER_00
The reason those conspiracy theories work is you could construct, there s incentives and motivation for faking the moon landing.
3
SPEAKER_00
There s a lot of, there s very little data supporting the moon landing.
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SPEAKER_00
like that s very public and kind of looks fake, space kind of looks fake.
3
SPEAKER_00
And that would be a big story if it turned out to be fake.
3
SPEAKER_00
That s the argument, that would be the argument against it, like are people really as a collective going to hold on to a story that big?
3
SPEAKER_00
But the reason they work is there s mystery.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, there s a great documentary called Behind the Curve about flat earthers.
3
SPEAKER_01
And one of the things that you learn about flat earthers is they believe all the conspiracies, not just the flat earth.
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SPEAKER_01
They are convinced the moon landing is fake.
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SPEAKER_01
They re convinced 9-11 was an American con job.
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SPEAKER_01
They re convinced, you know, name a conspiracy and they believe it.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so it s so interesting is that I think of it as a,
3
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as a skepticism spectrum.
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SPEAKER_01
So on one side, it s like a filter in your head, a filter in the beliefs section of your brain.
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On one end of the spectrum, you are gullible, perfectly gullible.
3
SPEAKER_01
You believe anything someone says, right?
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SPEAKER_01
On the other side, you re paranoid.
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SPEAKER_01
You think everyone s lying to you, right?
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SPEAKER_01
Everything is false.
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SPEAKER_01
Nothing anyone says is true, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
So obviously, those aren t good places to be.
3
SPEAKER_01
Now, the healthy place, I think,
3
SPEAKER_01
So I think the healthy place is to be somewhere in the middle, but also you can learn to trust certain sources and then you don t have to apply as much skepticism to them.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so here s what, when you start having a bias, just say you have a political bias,
3
SPEAKER_01
When your side says something, you will find yourself moving towards the gullible side of the spectrum.
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SPEAKER_01
You read an article written that supports your views, you move to the gullible side of the spectrum, and you just believe it, and you don t have any, where s that skepticism that you normally have, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
And then you move, and then as soon as it s the other person talking, the other team talking, you move to the skeptical, closer to the in denial, paranoid side.
3
SPEAKER_01
Now, flat earthers are the extreme.
3
SPEAKER_01
They are either at 10 or one.
3
SPEAKER_01
So it s like, it s so interesting because they re the people who are saying, ah, no, I won t believe you.
3
SPEAKER_01
I m not gullible.
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SPEAKER_01
No, everyone else is gullible about the moon landing.
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SPEAKER_01
I won t.
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SPEAKER_01
And then yet when there s this evidence like, oh, because you can t see Seattle, you can t see the buildings over that horizon.
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SPEAKER_01
And you should, which isn t true.
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SPEAKER_01
You should be, if it were, if the earth around you wouldn t be able to see them.
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SPEAKER_01
So suddenly they become the most gullible person.
3
SPEAKER_01
They hear any theory about the earth flat, they believe it.
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SPEAKER_01
It goes right into their beliefs.
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SPEAKER_01
So they re actually jumping back and forth between refusing to believe anything and believe anything.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so they re the extreme example.
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SPEAKER_01
But I think when it comes to conspiracy theories, the people that get themselves into trouble are the ones who they become really gullible when they hear a conspiracy theory that kind of fits with their worldview.
3
SPEAKER_01
And they likewise, when there s something that s kind of obviously
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SPEAKER_00
true and it s not a big lie, they will actually, they ll think it is.
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SPEAKER_00
They just tighten up their kind of skepticism filter.
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SPEAKER_00
And so, yeah.
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SPEAKER_00
So I think the healthy place is to be is where you are not, because you also don t want to be the person who says every conspiracy, you hear the word conspiracy theory and it sounds like a synonym for like quack, job, crazy theory, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
So, yeah.
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SPEAKER_00
So I think, yeah, I think it s be somewhere in the middle of that spectrum and to learn to fine tune it.
4
SPEAKER_01
which is a tricky place to operate, because you kind of have to, every time you hear a new conspiracy theory, you should approach it with an open mind.
4
SPEAKER_01
And also, if you don t have enough time to investigate, which most people don t, kind of still have a humility not to make a conclusive statement that that s nonsense.
4
SPEAKER_00
There s a lot of social pressure, actually, to immediately laugh off any conspiracy theory, if it s done by the bad guys, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
You will quickly get mocked and laughed at and not taken seriously if you give any credence.
4
SPEAKER_00
You know, back to the lab leak was a good one, where it s like, turned out that that was at least very credible, if not true.
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SPEAKER_00
That was a perfect example of one where when it first came out, and not only so, so Brett Weinstein talked about it.
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SPEAKER_00
And then I, in a totally different conversation, said something complimentary about him on a totally different subject.
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SPEAKER_00
And people were saying, Tim, you might have gone a little off the deep end.
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SPEAKER_00
You re like quoting someone who is like a lab leak person.
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SPEAKER_00
So I was getting my reputation dinged.
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SPEAKER_00
for complimenting on a different topic someone whose reputation was totally sullied because they questioned an orthodoxy.
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SPEAKER_00
So what does that make me want to do?
4
SPEAKER_00
Distance myself from Brett Weinstein.
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SPEAKER_00
At least that s the incentive.
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SPEAKER_00
And what does that make other people want to do?
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SPEAKER_00
Don t become the next Brett Weinstein.
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SPEAKER_00
Don t say it out loud because you don t want to become someone that no one wants to compliment anymore.
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SPEAKER_00
You can see the social pressure.
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SPEAKER_00
And of course, when there is a conspiracy, that social pressure is its best friend.
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SPEAKER_01
because then they see the people from outside are seeing that social pressure enact, like Tim Urban becoming more and more and more extreme to the other side, and so they re going to take the more and more and more extreme.
4
SPEAKER_01
I mean, what do you see that the pandemic did, that COVID did to our civilization in that regard, in the forces?
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SPEAKER_01
Why was it so divisive?
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SPEAKER_01
Do you understand that?
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah, so COVID, you know, I thought might be, you know, we always know the ultimate example of a topic that will unite us all is the alien attack.
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SPEAKER_00
Although honestly, I don t even have that much faith then.
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SPEAKER_00
I think there d be like, some people are super like, you know, pro-alien and some people are anti-alien.
4
SPEAKER_00
But anyway.
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SPEAKER_01
I was actually starting to interrupt because I was talking to a few astronomers and they re the first folks that made me kind of sad in that if we discover life on Mars, for example,
4
SPEAKER_01
that there s going to be potentially a division over that too, whereas half the people will not believe that s real.
4
SPEAKER_00
Well, because we live in a current society where the political divide has subsumed everything.
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SPEAKER_00
And that s not
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always like that.
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SPEAKER_00
It goes into stages like that.
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We re in a really bad one where it s, I actually, in the book I call it like a vortex, almost like a whirlpool that pulls everything into it.
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SPEAKER_00
It pulls, and so normally you d say okay, immigration, naturally gonna be contentious.
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SPEAKER_00
That s always political, right?
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SPEAKER_00
But like,
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COVID seemed like, oh, that s one of those that will unite us all.
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SPEAKER_00
Let s fight this not human virus thing.
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Obvious, no one s sensitive.
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SPEAKER_00
No one s getting hurt when we insult the virus.
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SPEAKER_00
We have this threat, this common threat that s a threat to everyone of every nationality in every country, every ethnicity.
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SPEAKER_00
And it didn t do that at all.
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SPEAKER_00
The whirlpool was too powerful.
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SPEAKER_00
So it pulled COVID in, and suddenly masks, if you re on the left, you like them.
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SPEAKER_00
If you re on the right, you hate them.
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SPEAKER_00
And suddenly, lockdowns, if you re on the left, you like them, and on the right, you hate them.
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SPEAKER_00
And vaccines, this is, people forget this.
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SPEAKER_00
When Trump first started talking about the vaccine, Biden, Harris, Cuomo, they re all saying, I m not taking that vaccine, not from this CDC.
4
SPEAKER_01
Because it was too rushed or something like that?
4
SPEAKER_00
No, because I m not trusting anything that Trump says.
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SPEAKER_00
If Trump wants me to take it, I m not taking it.
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SPEAKER_00
I m not taking it from this CDC.
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SPEAKER_00
This was, Trump was almost out of office, but at the time, if Trump had been, it would have been, I m pretty sure it would have stayed, right likes vaccines, the left doesn t like vaccines.
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SPEAKER_00
Instead, the president switched.
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SPEAKER_00
And all those people are suddenly saying,
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SPEAKER_00
They were actually specifically saying that if you re saying the CDC is not trustworthy, that s misinformation, which is exactly what they were saying about the other CDC.
4
SPEAKER_00
And they were saying it because they genuinely didn t trust Trump, which is fair.
4
SPEAKER_00
But now when other people don t trust the Biden CDC, suddenly it s this kind of misinformation that needs to be censored.
4
SPEAKER_00
So it was a sad moment because it was a couple of months, even a week or so, I mean a month or so at the very beginning when
4
SPEAKER_00
it felt like a lot of our other squabbles were kind of like, oh, I feel like they re kind of irrelevant right now.
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SPEAKER_00
And then very quickly the whirlpool sucked it in.
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SPEAKER_00
And in a way where I think it damaged the reputation of these, a lot of the trust in a lot of these institutions for the long run.
4
SPEAKER_01
But there s also an individual psychological impact.
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SPEAKER_01
It s like a vicious negative feedback cycle where they were deeply affected on an emotional level and people just were not their best selves.
4
SPEAKER_00
That s definitely true.
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I mean, talk about the primitive mind.
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SPEAKER_00
I mean, one thing that we ve been dealing with for our whole human history is pathogens.
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SPEAKER_00
And it s emotional, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
It brings out, you know, there s really interesting studies where like, if, they study the phenomenon of disgust, which is one of these like,
4
SPEAKER_00
Smiling is universal.
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SPEAKER_00
You don t have to ever translate a smile, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
Throwing your hands up when your sports team wins is universal because it s part of our coding.
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SPEAKER_00
And so is disgust, to kind of make this face where you wrinkle up your nose and you kind of put out your tongue and maybe even gag.
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SPEAKER_00
That s to expel, expel whatever, because it s the reaction when something is potentially a pathogen that might harm us, right?
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SPEAKER_00
Feces, vomit, whatever.
4
SPEAKER_00
But they did this interesting study where people,
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SPEAKER_00
who in two groups, the control group was shown images of, and I might be getting two studies mixed up, but they were shown images of car crashes and disturbing but not disgusting.
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SPEAKER_00
And the other one was shown rotting things and just things that were disgusting.
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SPEAKER_00
And then they were asked about immigration.
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SPEAKER_00
These were Canadians.
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SPEAKER_00
And the group that had the disgust feeling pulsing through their body was way more likely to prefer immigrants from white countries.
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SPEAKER_00
And the group that had been shown car accidents, they still prefer the groups from white countries, but much less so.
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SPEAKER_00
And so what does that mean?
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SPEAKER_00
It s because the disgust impulse makes us scared of sexual practices that are foreign, of ethnicities that don t look like us, of stoke xenophobia.
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SPEAKER_00
So it s ugly.
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SPEAKER_00
It s really ugly stuff.
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SPEAKER_00
This is, of course, also how
4
SPEAKER_00
Nazi propaganda with cockroaches and, or it was, Rwandan was cockroaches, you know, the Nazis was rats.
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SPEAKER_00
And, you know, it s specifically, it s a dehumanizing emotion.
4
SPEAKER_00
So anyway, we were talking about COVID, but I think it does, it taps deep into like the human psyche and it s, I don t think it brings out our, I think, like you said, I think it brings out an ugly side in us.
4
SPEAKER_01
You describe an idea lab as being opposite of echo chambers.
4
SPEAKER_01
So we know what echo chambers are.
4
SPEAKER_01
And you said there s basically no good term for the opposite of an echo chamber.
4
SPEAKER_01
So what s an idea lab?
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, well, first of all, both of these, we think of an echo chamber as like a group maybe or even a place, but it s a culture.
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SPEAKER_00
It s an intellectual culture.
4
SPEAKER_00
Sure.
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SPEAKER_00
And this goes along with the high rung.
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SPEAKER_00
So high rung and low rung thinking is individual.
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SPEAKER_00
That s what I was talking about, what s going on in your head.
4
SPEAKER_00
But this is very connected to the social scene around us.
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SPEAKER_00
And so groups will do high rung and low rung thinking together.
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SPEAKER_00
So an echo chamber to me is a collaborative low rung thinking.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s a culture where the cool, it s based around a sacred set of ideas.
4
SPEAKER_00
And it s the coolest thing you can do in an echo chamber culture is talk about how great the sacred ideas are and how bad and evil and stupid and wrong the people are who have the other views.
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SPEAKER_00
And it s quite boring.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s quite boring.
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SPEAKER_00
It s very hard to learn.
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SPEAKER_00
And changing your mind is not cool in an echo chamber culture.
4
SPEAKER_00
It makes you seem wishy-washy.
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SPEAKER_00
It makes you seem like you re waffling, and you re flip-flopping, or whatever.
4
SPEAKER_00
Showing conviction about the sacred ideas in echo chamber culture is awesome.
4
SPEAKER_00
If you re just like, obviously, this makes you seem smart, while being humble makes you seem dumb.
4
SPEAKER_00
So now flip all of those things on their heads, and you have the opposite, which is idea lab culture, which is collaborative high-rung thinking.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s collaborative truth-finding.
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SPEAKER_00
But it s also just a totally different vibe.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s a place where,
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SPEAKER_00
Arguing is a fun thing.
4
SPEAKER_00
No one s getting offended.
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SPEAKER_00
And criticizing the thing everyone believes actually makes you seem interesting.
4
SPEAKER_00
Like, oh, really?
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SPEAKER_00
Why do you think we re all wrong?
4
SPEAKER_00
Expressing too much conviction makes people lose trust in you.
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SPEAKER_00
It doesn t make you seem smart, it makes you seem stupid if you don t really know what you re talking about, but you re acting like you do.
4
SPEAKER_01
I really like this diagram of where on the x-axis is agreement, on the y-axis is decency.
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SPEAKER_01
That s in an idea lab.
4
SPEAKER_01
In an echo chamber, there s only one axis.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s asshole to non-asshole.
4
SPEAKER_01
This is a really important thing to understand about the difference between, you call it decency here, about asshole-ishness and disagreement.
4
SPEAKER_00
So my college friends, we love to argue, right?
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SPEAKER_00
And no one thought anyone was an asshole for, it was just for sport.
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SPEAKER_00
Sometimes we d realize we re not even disagreeing on something and that would be disappointing and be like, oh, I think we agree.
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SPEAKER_00
And it was kind of like sad.
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SPEAKER_00
It was like, oh, well, there goes the fun.
4
SPEAKER_00
And one of the members of this group has this, she brought her new boyfriend to one of our like hangouts.
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SPEAKER_00
And there was like a heated, heated debate, you know, just, just, just one of our typical things.
4
SPEAKER_00
And afterwards, you know, the next day, he said, like, is everything okay?
4
SPEAKER_00
And she was like, what do you mean?
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SPEAKER_00
And he said, like, after the fight, and she was like, what fight?
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SPEAKER_00
And he was like, you know, the fight last night, and she was like, and she had to, and she was like, you mean like the arguing?
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SPEAKER_00
And he was like, yeah.
4
SPEAKER_00
And so that s someone who is not used to Idealab culture coming into it.
4
SPEAKER_00
And seeing it is like, that was like, this is like, are they still friends?
4
SPEAKER_00
Right?
4
SPEAKER_00
And Idealab is nice for the people in them, because individuals thrive.
4
SPEAKER_00
You don t want to just conform.
4
SPEAKER_00
It makes you seem boring in an idea.
4
SPEAKER_00
But you want to be yourself.
4
SPEAKER_00
You want to challenge things.
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SPEAKER_00
You want to have a unique brain.
4
SPEAKER_00
So that s great.
4
SPEAKER_00
And you also have people criticizing your ideas, which makes you smarter.
4
SPEAKER_00
It doesn t always feel good, but you become more correct and smarter.
4
SPEAKER_00
An echo chamber is the opposite, where it s not good for the people in it.
4
SPEAKER_00
Your learning skills atrophy.
4
SPEAKER_00
And I think it s boring.
4
SPEAKER_00
But the thing is, they also have emergent properties.
4
SPEAKER_00
The emergent property of an ideal lab is like super intelligence, just you and me alone, just the two of us.
4
SPEAKER_00
If we re working together on something, but we re being really grown up about it, we re disagreeing, we re not, you know, no one s sensitive about anything.
4
SPEAKER_00
We re gonna each find flaws in the other one s arguments that you wouldn t have found on your own.
4
SPEAKER_00
And we re going to have double the epiphanies, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
So it s almost like the two of us together is like as smart as 1.5.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s like 50% smarter than either of us alone, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
So you have this 1.5 intelligent kind of.
4
SPEAKER_00
joint being that we ve made now bring a third person in fourth person and right you see it starts to scale up this is why science institutions can discover relativity and quantum mechanics and these things that no individual human you know was going to come up with without a ton of collaboration because it s this giant idea lab so it has an emergent property of super intelligence and echo chamber is the opposite where it has the emergent property of
4
SPEAKER_00
I mean, it has the emergent property of a bunch of people all paying fealty to this set of sacred ideas.
4
SPEAKER_00
And so you lose this magical thing about language and humans, which is collaborative intelligence.
4
SPEAKER_00
You lose it.
4
SPEAKER_00
It disappears.
4
SPEAKER_01
But there is that axis of decency, which is really interesting, because you kind of painted this picture of you and your friends arguing really harshly.
4
SPEAKER_01
But underlying that is a basic camaraderie, respect.
4
SPEAKER_01
There s all kinds of mechanisms we humans have constructed to communicate.
4
SPEAKER_01
like mutual respect, or maybe communicate that you re here for the Idea Lab version of this.
4
SPEAKER_00
Totally, you don t get personal, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
You re not getting personal, you re not taking things personally.
4
SPEAKER_00
People are respected in an Idea Lab, and ideas are disrespected.
4
SPEAKER_01
And there s ways to signal that.
4
SPEAKER_01
With friends, you ve already done the signaling, you ve already established a relationship.
4
SPEAKER_01
The interesting thing is online, I think you have to do some of that work.
4
SPEAKER_01
to me, sort of steel manning the other side, or no, having empathy and hearing out, being able to basically repeat the argument the other person is making before you, and showing respect to that argument.
4
SPEAKER_01
I could see how you could think that before you make a counter-argument.
4
SPEAKER_01
There s just a bunch of...
4
SPEAKER_01
ways to communicate that you re here not to do kind of, what is it, low rung, you know, shit talking, mockery, derision, but are actually here ultimately to discover the truth in the space of ideas and the tension of those ideas.
4
SPEAKER_01
And I think it s, you know,
4
SPEAKER_01
I think that s a skill that we re all learning as a civilization of how to do that kind of communication effectively.
4
SPEAKER_01
I think disagreement, as I m learning on the internet, is actually a really tricky skill, like high effort, high decency disagreement.
4
SPEAKER_01
I gotta listen to, there s a really good debate podcast, Intelligence Squared.
4
SPEAKER_01
And they can go pretty hard in the paint.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s a classic idea lab.
4
SPEAKER_01
Exactly, but how do we map that to social media?
4
SPEAKER_01
When people will say, well, like Lex or anybody, you hate disagreement.
4
SPEAKER_01
You wanna censor disagreement.
4
SPEAKER_01
No, I love intelligent square type of disagreement.
4
SPEAKER_01
That s fun.
4
SPEAKER_00
You wanna reduce assholery.
4
SPEAKER_01
And for me personally, I don t want to reduce assholery
4
SPEAKER_01
I kind of like assholery, it s fun in many ways.
4
SPEAKER_01
But the problem is when the asshole shows up to the party, they make it less fun for the party that s there for the idea lab.
4
SPEAKER_01
And the other people, especially the quiet voices at the back of the room, they leave.
4
SPEAKER_01
And so all you re left is with assholes.
4
SPEAKER_00
Political Twitter to me is one of those parties.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s a big party where a few assholes have really sent a lot of the quiet,
4
SPEAKER_00
thinkers away.
4
SPEAKER_00
And so if you think about this graph again, a place like Twitter, a great way to get followers is to be an asshole with a certain, pumping a certain ideology.
4
SPEAKER_00
You ll get a huge amount of followers.
4
SPEAKER_00
And for those followers, and the followers you re gonna get, the people who like you,
4
SPEAKER_00
are probably going to be people who are really thinking with their primitive mind because they re seeing you re being an asshole, but because you agree with them, they love you.
4
SPEAKER_00
And they don t see any problem with how you re being.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, they don t see the asshole.
4
SPEAKER_01
This is a fascinating thing.
4
SPEAKER_00
Well, because look at the thing on the right.
4
SPEAKER_00
Agreement and decency are the same.
4
SPEAKER_00
So if you re in that mindset, the bigger the asshole, the better.
4
SPEAKER_00
If you re agreeing with me, you re my man.
4
SPEAKER_00
I love what you re saying.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yes, show them, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
And the algorithm helps those people.
4
SPEAKER_00
Those people do great on the algorithm.
4
SPEAKER_01
There s a fascinating dynamic that happens because I have currently hired somebody that looks at my social media and they block people because the assholes will roll in.
4
SPEAKER_01
They re not actually there to have an interesting disagreement, which I love.
4
SPEAKER_01
They re there to do kind of mockery.
4
SPEAKER_01
And then when they get blocked,
4
SPEAKER_01
they then celebrate that to their echo chamber, like, look at this, I got him, or whatever.
4
SPEAKER_00
Or they ll say some annoying thing like, oh, so he talks about he likes, if I d done this, they ll say, oh, he says he likes Idea Labs, but he actually wants to create an echo chamber.
4
SPEAKER_00
But I m like, nope, you re an asshole.
4
SPEAKER_00
Look at the other 50 people in this thread that disagreed with me respectfully.
4
SPEAKER_01
They re not blocked.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yep, exactly, you know, and so they see it as some kind of hypocrisy because again, they only see the thing on the right and They re not understanding that there s two axes or that I see it as two axes
5
SPEAKER_00
And so you seem petty in that moment, but it s like, no, no, no, this is very specific what I m doing.
5
SPEAKER_00
You re actually killing the conversation.
5
SPEAKER_01
And generally, I give all those folks a pass and just send them love telepathically.
5
SPEAKER_01
But yes, like it s getting rid of assholes in the conversation is the way you allow for the disagreement.
5
SPEAKER_00
You do a lot of like, when I think when like primitive mindedness comes at you, at least on Twitter, I don t know what you re feeling internally in that moment, but you do a lot of like,
5
SPEAKER_00
I m gonna meet that with my higher mind.
5
SPEAKER_00
And you come out and you ll be like, thanks for all the criticism, I love you.
5
SPEAKER_00
And that s actually an amazing response because it just, what it does is it, it unriles up that person s primitive mind and actually wakes up their higher mind who says, oh, okay, you know, this guy s not so bad.
5
SPEAKER_00
And suddenly like, civility comes back.
5
SPEAKER_00
So it s a very powerful.
5
SPEAKER_01
hopefully long-term, but the thing is they do seem to drive away high-quality disagreement.
5
SPEAKER_01
Because it takes so much effort to disagree in a high-quality way.
5
SPEAKER_00
I ve noticed this on my blog.
5
SPEAKER_00
One of the things I pride myself on is my comment section is awesome.
5
SPEAKER_00
Everyone s being respectful.
5
SPEAKER_00
No one s afraid to disagree with me and say, you know, tear my post apart, but in a totally respectful way where the underlying thing is like, I m here because I like this guy and his writing.
5
SPEAKER_00
And people disagree with each other.
5
SPEAKER_00
And they get in these long, and it s interesting, and I read it and I m learning.
5
SPEAKER_00
And then I, you know, a couple posts, especially the ones I ve written about politics, it s not like, it seems like any other comment section.
5
SPEAKER_00
People are being nasty to me, they re being nasty to each other.
5
SPEAKER_00
And then I looked down one of them and I realized like, almost all of this is the work of like three people.
5
SPEAKER_00
That s who you need to block.
5
SPEAKER_00
Those people need to be blocked.
5
SPEAKER_00
You re not being thin-skinned.
5
SPEAKER_00
You re not being petty doing it.
5
SPEAKER_00
You re actually protecting an idea lab.
5
SPEAKER_00
Because what really aggressive people like that do is they ll turn it into their own echo chamber.
5
SPEAKER_00
Because now everyone is scared to kind of disagree with them.
5
SPEAKER_00
It s unpleasant.
5
SPEAKER_00
And so people who will chime in are the people who agree with them.
5
SPEAKER_00
And suddenly, like, they ve taken over the space.
5
SPEAKER_01
And I kind of believe that those people, on a different day, could actually do high effort disagreement.
5
SPEAKER_01
It s just that they re in a certain kind of mood.
5
SPEAKER_01
And a lot of us, just like you said, with a primitive mind, could get into that mood.
5
SPEAKER_01
And I believe it s actually the job of the technology, the platform, to incentivize those folks to be like, are you sure this is the best you can do?
5
SPEAKER_01
Like, if you really want to talk shit about this idea, do better.
5
SPEAKER_01
And then we need to create incentives where you get likes for high-effort disagreement.
5
SPEAKER_01
Because currently you get likes for something that s slightly funny and is a little bit like mockery.
5
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, basically signals to some kind of echo chamber that this person is a horrible person, is a hypocrite, is evil, whatever.
5
SPEAKER_01
That feels like it s solvable with technology.
5
SPEAKER_01
Because I think in our private lives, none of us want that.
5
SPEAKER_00
I wonder if it s making me think that I wanna like, because a much easier way for me to do it just for my world would be to say something like, here s this axis, this is part of what I like about the ladder, is it s a language that we can use, it s like specifically what we re talking about is,
5
SPEAKER_00
High rung disagreement, good.
5
SPEAKER_00
Low rung disagreement, bad, right?
5
SPEAKER_00
And so it gives us a language for that.
5
SPEAKER_00
And so what I would say is I would have my readers understand this axis.
5
SPEAKER_00
And then I would specifically say something like, please do the do it but why a favor and upvote regardless of what they re saying horizontally, regardless of what their actual view is.
5
SPEAKER_00
Upvote high rungness.
5
SPEAKER_00
They can be tearing me apart, they can be saying great, they can be praising me, whatever.
5
SPEAKER_00
Uproot high rungness and downvote low rungness.
5
SPEAKER_00
And if enough people are doing that, suddenly there s all this incentive to try to say, no, I need to calm my emotion down here and not be personal because I m gonna get voted into oblivion by these people.
5
SPEAKER_01
I think a lot of people would be very good at that.
5
SPEAKER_01
And not only would they be good at that, they would want that.
5
SPEAKER_01
That task of saying, I know I completely disagree with this person, but this was a high-effort, high-rung disagreement.
5
SPEAKER_00
It gets everyone thinking about that other axis, too.
5
SPEAKER_00
You re not just looking at where do you stand horizontally.
5
SPEAKER_00
You re saying, well, how did you get there, and how are you, you know?
5
SPEAKER_00
Are you treating ideas like machines, or are you treating them like little babies?
5
SPEAKER_01
And that there should be some kind of labeling on personal attacks versus idea disagreement.
5
SPEAKER_01
Sometimes people throw in both a little bit.
5
SPEAKER_01
That s like, all right, no, there should be a disincentive at personal attacks versus idea attacks.
5
SPEAKER_00
Well, you can also, one metric is a respectful disagreement.
5
SPEAKER_00
If I see, just to say someone else s Twitter, and I see you put out a thought, and I see someone say, someone say,
5
SPEAKER_00
I don t see it that way.
5
SPEAKER_00
Here s where I think you went wrong, and they re just explaining.
5
SPEAKER_00
I m thinking that if Lex reads that, he s going to be interested.
5
SPEAKER_00
He s going to want to post more stuff, right?
5
SPEAKER_00
He s going to like that.
5
SPEAKER_00
If I see someone being like,
5
SPEAKER_00
Wow, this really shows the kind of person that you become.
5
SPEAKER_00
I m thinking, that person is making Lex want to be on Twitter less.
5
SPEAKER_00
It s making him, and so what s that doing?
5
SPEAKER_00
What that person s actually doing is they re putting, is they re actually, they re chilling discussion, because they re making it unpleasant, they re making it scary to say what you think.
5
SPEAKER_00
And the first person isn t at all.
5
SPEAKER_00
The first person is making you want to say more stuff.
5
SPEAKER_00
And those are both disagreed, those are people who both disagree with you.
5
SPEAKER_00
Exactly, exactly.
5
SPEAKER_01
I want to, great disagreements with friends in meatspace is like, they disagree with you, they could be even yelling at you.
5
SPEAKER_01
Honestly, they could even have some shit talk where it s like personal attacks.
5
SPEAKER_01
It still feels good.
5
SPEAKER_00
Because you know them well, and you know that that shit talk, because yeah, friends shit talk all the time, playing a sport or a game.
5
SPEAKER_00
And again, it s because they know each other well enough to know that this is fun.
5
SPEAKER_00
We re having fun, and obviously I love you.
5
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, exactly.
5
SPEAKER_00
And that s important online, it s a lot harder.
5
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, that obviously I love you that underlies a lot of human interaction seems to be easily lost online.
5
SPEAKER_01
I ve seen some people on Twitter and elsewhere just behave their worst.
5
SPEAKER_01
And it s like, I know that s not who you are.
5
SPEAKER_01
Like, why are you, who is this human?
5
SPEAKER_00
I know someone personally who is one of the best people.
5
SPEAKER_00
I love this guy.
5
SPEAKER_00
One of the best, fun, funny, nicest dudes.
5
SPEAKER_00
And he, if you looked at his Twitter only, you would think he s a culture warrior, an awful culture warrior.
5
SPEAKER_00
And, you know, biased and just stoking anger.
5
SPEAKER_00
And it comes out of a good place.
5
SPEAKER_00
And I m not gonna give any other info about it, you know, specific, but like, it comes out of-
5
SPEAKER_00
It comes out of a good place because he really cares about what he, you know, it comes out, but it s just, I can t square the two.
5
SPEAKER_00
It s so, and that s, you have to, once you know someone like that, you can realize, okay, apply that to everyone, because a lot of these people are lovely people.
5
SPEAKER_00
And it s just bring, even just, you know, back in the before social media, you ever had a friend who like, was just like, they had this like dickishness on text or email that they didn t have in person.
5
SPEAKER_00
And you re like, wow, like email you is like kind of a dick.
5
SPEAKER_00
And it s like, it just, certain people have a different persona behind the screen.
5
SPEAKER_01
It has, for me personally, become a bit of a meme that Lex blocks with love.
5
SPEAKER_01
But there is a degree to that where this is, I don t see people on social media as representing who they really are.
5
SPEAKER_01
I really do have love for them.
5
SPEAKER_01
I really do think positive thoughts of them throughout the entirety of the experience.
5
SPEAKER_01
I see this as some weird side effect of online communication.
5
SPEAKER_01
So it s like, to me, blocking is not some kind of a derisive act towards that individual.
5
SPEAKER_01
It s just like saying, all right.
5
SPEAKER_00
Well, a lot of times what s happened is they have slipped into a very common delusion that dehumanizes others.
5
SPEAKER_00
So that doesn t mean they re a bad person.
5
SPEAKER_00
We all can do it.
5
SPEAKER_00
But they re dehumanizing you, or whoever they re being nasty to, in a way they would never do in person, because in a person, they re reminded that s a person.
5
SPEAKER_00
Remember I said the dumb part of my brain when I m doing VR won t step off the cliff, but the smart part of my brain knows I m just on the rug?
5
SPEAKER_00
That dumb part of our brain...
5
SPEAKER_00
is really dumb in a lot of ways.
5
SPEAKER_00
It s the part of your brain where you can set the clock five minutes fast to help you not be late.
5
SPEAKER_00
The smart part of your brain knows that you did that, but the dumb part will fall for it, right?
5
SPEAKER_00
That same dumb part of your brain can forget that the person behind that screen, behind that handle, is a human that has feelings.
5
SPEAKER_00
And that doesn t mean they re a bad person for forgetting that, because it s possible.
5
SPEAKER_01
But this really interesting idea, and I wonder if it s true that you re right, is that both primitive mindedness and high mindedness tend to be contagious.
5
SPEAKER_01
I hope you re right, that it s possible to make both contagious.
5
SPEAKER_01
Because our sort of popular intuition is only one of them, the primitive mindedness is contagious, as exhibited by social media.
5
SPEAKER_00
To compliment you again, don t you think that your, your Twitter to me is like,
5
SPEAKER_00
I was just looking down, and I mean, it is a – it s just high-mindedness.
5
SPEAKER_00
It s just high-mindedness, down, down, down, down, down.
5
SPEAKER_00
It s gratitude.
5
SPEAKER_00
It s optimism.
5
SPEAKER_00
It s love.
5
SPEAKER_00
It s forgiveness.
5
SPEAKER_00
It s all these things that are the opposite of grievance and victimhood and resentment and pessimism, right?
5
SPEAKER_00
There s, I think, a reason that a lot of people follow you because it is contagious.
5
SPEAKER_00
It makes other people feel those feelings.
5
SPEAKER_01
I don t know.
5
SPEAKER_01
I ve been recently, over the past few months, attacked quite a lot.
5
SPEAKER_01
And it s fascinating to watch because it s over things that, I think I probably have done stupid things, but I m being attacked for things that are totally not worthy of attack.
5
SPEAKER_01
I got attacked for a book list.
5
SPEAKER_00
I saw that, by the way, I thought it was great.
5
SPEAKER_01
But you can always kind of find ways to, I guess the assumption is this person surely is a fraud or some other explanation.
5
SPEAKER_01
He sure has dead bodies in the basement he s hiding or something like this.
5
SPEAKER_01
And then I m going to construct a narrative around that and mock and attack that.
5
SPEAKER_01
I mean, I don t know how that works, but there is, there does, and I think you write this in the book, there seems to be a gravity
5
SPEAKER_01
pulling people towards the primitive mind.
5
SPEAKER_00
When it comes to anything political, right?
5
SPEAKER_00
Religious, certain things are bottom heavy, you know, for our psyche.
5
SPEAKER_00
They have a magnet that pulls our psyches downwards on the ladder.
5
SPEAKER_00
And why?
5
SPEAKER_00
Why does politics pull our psyches down on the ladder?
5
SPEAKER_00
Because it
5
SPEAKER_00
For the tens of thousands of years that we were evolving, you know, during human history, it was life or death.
5
SPEAKER_00
Politics was life or death.
5
SPEAKER_00
And so, there s actually an amazing study where it s like...
5
SPEAKER_00
they challenged like 20 different beliefs of a person.
5
SPEAKER_00
And different parts of the person s brain, and they had an MRI going, different parts of the person s brain lit up when non-political beliefs were challenged versus political beliefs were challenged.
5
SPEAKER_00
When political beliefs were challenged, when non-political beliefs were challenged,
5
SPEAKER_00
Like the rational, like the prefrontal cortex type areas were lit up.
5
SPEAKER_00
When the political beliefs were challenged, and I m getting over my head here, but it s like the parts of your brain, the default mode network, the parts of your brain associated with like introspection and like your own identity were lit up.
5
SPEAKER_00
They were much more likely to change their mind on all the non-political beliefs.
5
SPEAKER_00
When that default mode network part of your brain lit up, you were going to, if anything, get more firm in those beliefs when you had them challenged.
5
SPEAKER_00
Politics is one of those topics that just literally lights up different part of our brain.
5
SPEAKER_00
Again, I think we come back to primitive mind, higher mind here.
5
SPEAKER_00
This is one of the things our primitive mind comes programmed to care a ton about.
5
SPEAKER_00
And so it s going to be very hard for us to stay rational and calm and looking for truth because we have all this gravity.
5
SPEAKER_01
Well, it s weird because politics like what is politics like talk about it s a bunch of different issues and each individual issue If we really talk about tax policy, like why are we being emotional about this?
5
SPEAKER_01
I don t think we re actually that I mean, we re yeah, we re emotional about Something else.
5
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I think what we re emotional about is
5
SPEAKER_00
my side, the side I ve identified with, is in power and making the decisions, and your side is out of power.
5
SPEAKER_00
And if your side s in power, that s really scary for me, because that goes back to the idea of who s pulling the strings in this tribe, right?
5
SPEAKER_00
Who s the chief?
5
SPEAKER_00
Is it your family s patriarch, or is it mine?
5
SPEAKER_00
We might not have food if we don t win this kind of whatever chief election.
5
SPEAKER_00
I think that it s not about the tax policy or anything like that.
5
SPEAKER_00
And then it gets tied to this like broader, I think a lot of our tribalism has really coalesced around this.
5
SPEAKER_00
We don t have that much religious tribalism in the US, right?
5
SPEAKER_00
Now they know the Protestants and the Catholics hate each other.
5
SPEAKER_00
We don t have that really, right?
5
SPEAKER_00
And honestly, you say people like to say we have racial tribalism and everything, but
5
SPEAKER_00
A white, even kind of a racist white conservative guy, I think takes the black conservative over the woke white person any day of the week right now.
5
SPEAKER_01
So that s the strongest source of the division.
5
SPEAKER_00
It tells me that I think politics is way stronger tribalism right now.
5
SPEAKER_00
I think that that white racist guy loves the black
5
SPEAKER_00
conservative guy compared to the white woke guy, right?
5
SPEAKER_00
So again, not that racial tribalism isn t a thing, of course it s always a thing, but like political tribalism is the number one right now.
5
SPEAKER_01
So race is almost a topic for the political division versus the actual sort of element of the tribe.
5
SPEAKER_00
It s a political football.
5
SPEAKER_00
It s, yeah.
5
SPEAKER_01
So there s a, I mean, this is dark because, so this is a book about human civilization, this is a book about
5
SPEAKER_01
human nature, but it s also a book of politics, about politics.
5
SPEAKER_01
It is, just the way you list it out in the book, it s kind of dark how we just fall into these left and right checklists.
5
SPEAKER_01
So if you re on the left, it s maintain Roe v. Wade,
5
SPEAKER_01
Universal healthcare good, mainstream media fine, guns kill people, US is a racist country, protect immigrants, tax cuts bad, climate change awful, raise minimum wage, and on the right is a flip of that, reverse where we weighed universal healthcare bad, mainstream media bad,
5
SPEAKER_01
People kill people, not guns kill people.
5
SPEAKER_01
U.S.
5
SPEAKER_01
was a racist country, protect borders, tax cuts good, climate change overblown, don t raise minimum wage.
5
SPEAKER_01
I mean, it has, you almost don t have to think about any of this.
5
SPEAKER_00
It s like literally.
5
SPEAKER_00
So when you say it s a book about politics, it s interesting because it s a book about the vertical axis.
5
SPEAKER_00
It s specifically not a book about the horizontal axis in that I m not talking, I don t actually talk about any of these issues.
5
SPEAKER_00
I don t put out an opinion on them.
5
SPEAKER_00
Those are all horizontal, right?
5
SPEAKER_00
But rather than having another book about those issues, about right versus left, I wanted to do a book about this other axis.
5
SPEAKER_00
And so on this axis.
5
SPEAKER_00
The reason I had this checklist is that this is a low, part of the low rung politics world, right?
5
SPEAKER_00
Low rung politics is a checklist.
5
SPEAKER_00
And that checklist evolves, right?
5
SPEAKER_00
Like Russia suddenly is like popular with the right as opposed to, you know, it used to be, you know, in the sixties, the left was the one defending Stalin.
5
SPEAKER_00
Like, so they ll switch.
5
SPEAKER_00
It doesn t even matter.
5
SPEAKER_00
The substance doesn t matter.
5
SPEAKER_00
It s that this is the approved checklist of the capital P party.
5
SPEAKER_00
And this is what everyone believes.
5
SPEAKER_00
That s a low rung thing.
5
SPEAKER_00
The high rungs,
5
SPEAKER_00
This is not what it s like.
5
SPEAKER_00
High rung politics, you tell me your one view on this, I have no idea what you think about anything else, right?
5
SPEAKER_00
And you re gonna say I don t know about a lot of stuff because inherently you re not gonna have that strong an opinion because you don t have that much, these are complex things.
5
SPEAKER_00
So there s a lot of I don t know and people are all over the place.
5
SPEAKER_00
You know you re talking to someone who has been subsumed with low-rung politics when, if they tell you their opinion on any one of these issues, you know you could just rattle off their opinion on every single other one.
5
SPEAKER_00
And if in three years it becomes fashionable to have this new view, they re gonna have it.
5
SPEAKER_00
You re not thinking, that s echo chamber culture.
5
SPEAKER_01
And I ve been using kind of a shorthand of centrist to describe this kind of high-rung thinking, but people tend to, I mean, it seems to be difficult to be a centrist or whatever, a high-rung thinker.
5
SPEAKER_01
It s like people want to label you as a person who s too cowardly to take a stance.
5
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
5
SPEAKER_00
Somehow as opposed to asking saying I don t know as a first statement The problem with centrist is that would mean that in each of these tax cuts bag tax cuts good It means that you are saying I am in that I think we should have some tax cuts But not that many you might not think that you might actually
6
SPEAKER_00
do some research and say, actually, I think tax cuts are really important.
6
SPEAKER_00
That doesn t mean, oh, I m not a centrist anymore.
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SPEAKER_00
I guess I m a far, you know.
6
SPEAKER_00
No, no, no.
6
SPEAKER_00
That s why we need the second axis.
6
SPEAKER_00
So what you re trying to be when you say centrist is high rung, which means you might be all over the place horizontally.
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SPEAKER_00
You might agree with the far left on this thing, the far right on this thing.
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SPEAKER_00
You might agree with the centrists on this thing.
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SPEAKER_00
But calling yourself a centrist actually is putting yourself
6
SPEAKER_00
the prison on the horizontal axis.
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SPEAKER_00
And it s saying that whatever on the different topics, I m right in between the two policy-wise.
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SPEAKER_00
That s not where you are.
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SPEAKER_00
So yeah, we re badly missing this other axis.
6
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I mean, I still do think it s a...
6
SPEAKER_01
Like, for me, I am a centrist when you project it down to the horizontal, but the point is, you re missing so much data by not considering the vertical.
6
SPEAKER_01
Because, like, on average, maybe it falls somewhere in the middle, but in reality, there s just a lot of nuance, issue to issue, that involves just thinking, and uncertainty, and changing, and the,
6
SPEAKER_01
given the context of the current geopolitics and economics, and just always considering, always questioning, always evolving your views, all of that.
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SPEAKER_00
Not just about like, oh, I think we should be in the center on this, but another way to be in the center is if there s some phenomenon happening, you know, there s a terrorist attack, you know, and one side wants to say this has nothing to do with Islam, and the other side wants to say this is radical Islam.
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SPEAKER_00
right?
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SPEAKER_00
What s in between those?
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SPEAKER_00
The saying, this is complicated and nuanced and we have to learn more and it probably has something to do with Islam and something to do with the economic circumstances and something to do with, you know, geopolitics.
6
SPEAKER_00
So in a case like that, you actually do get really un-nuanced when you go to the extremes and all of that nuance, which is where all the truth usually is, is going to be in the middle.
6
SPEAKER_00
So yeah.
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SPEAKER_01
truth to the fact that if you take that nuance on those issues, like war in Ukraine, COVID, you re going to be attacked by both sides.
6
SPEAKER_01
Yes.
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SPEAKER_00
People who are really strongly on one side or the other hate centrist people.
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SPEAKER_00
I ve gotten this myself.
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SPEAKER_00
And the slur that I ve had thrown at me is I m an enlightened centrist in a very mocking way.
6
SPEAKER_00
So what are they actually saying?
6
SPEAKER_00
What does enlightened centrist mean?
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SPEAKER_00
It means someone who is, you know, Steven Pinker or Jonathan Haidt gets accused of is, you know, that they re
6
SPEAKER_00
highfalutin, you know, intellectual world, and they don t actually have any, they don t actually take a side, they don t actually get their hands dirty, and they can be superior to both sides without actually taking a stand, right?
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SPEAKER_00
So I see the argument, and I disagree with it, because I firmly believe that the hardcore tribes
6
SPEAKER_00
They think they re taking a stand, and they re out in the streets, and they re pushing for something.
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SPEAKER_00
I think what they re doing is they re just driving the whole country downwards.
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SPEAKER_00
And I think they re hurting all the causes they care about.
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SPEAKER_00
And so it s not that we need everyone to be sitting there refusing to take a side.
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SPEAKER_00
It s that you can be far left and far right, but be upper left.
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SPEAKER_01
and upper right.
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SPEAKER_01
If we talk about the, you use the word liberal a lot in the book to mean something that we don t in modern political discourse mean.
6
SPEAKER_01
So it s this higher philosophical view.
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SPEAKER_01
And then you use the words progressive to mean the left and conservative to mean the right.
6
SPEAKER_01
Can you describe the concept of liberal games and power games?
6
SPEAKER_00
So the power games is what I call the like, basically just the laws of nature as the,
6
SPEAKER_00
When laws of nature are the laws of the land, that s the power game.
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SPEAKER_00
So animals, watch any David Attenborough special.
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SPEAKER_00
And when the little lizard is running away from the bigger animal or whatever, I use an example of a bunny and a bear.
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SPEAKER_00
I don t even know if bears eat bunnies.
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SPEAKER_00
They probably don t.
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SPEAKER_00
But pretend bears eat bunnies.
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SPEAKER_00
So it s like, in the power games, the bear is chasing the bunny.
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SPEAKER_00
There s no fairness.
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SPEAKER_00
There s no, OK, well, what s right?
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SPEAKER_00
What s legal?
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SPEAKER_00
No, no, no.
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SPEAKER_00
If the bear is fast enough,
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SPEAKER_00
It can eat the bunny.
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SPEAKER_00
If the bunny can get away, it can stay living.
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SPEAKER_00
And so that s it.
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SPEAKER_00
That s the only rule.
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SPEAKER_00
Now, humans have spent a lot of time in essentially that environment.
6
SPEAKER_00
So when you have a totalitarian dictatorship.
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SPEAKER_00
And so what s the rule of the power games?
6
SPEAKER_00
It s everyone can do whatever they want if they have the power to do so.
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SPEAKER_00
It s just a game of power.
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SPEAKER_00
So if the bunny gets away, the bunny actually has more power than the bear in that situation.
6
SPEAKER_00
And likewise, the totalitarian dictatorship, there s no rules.
6
SPEAKER_00
A dictator can do whatever they want.
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SPEAKER_00
They can torture.
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SPEAKER_00
They can flatten a rebellion with a lot of murder because they have the power to do so.
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SPEAKER_00
What are you going to do?
6
SPEAKER_00
And that s kind of the state of nature.
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SPEAKER_00
That s our natural way.
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SPEAKER_00
When you watch a mafia movie,
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SPEAKER_00
You know, there s, we do a lot of, we have it in us.
6
SPEAKER_00
We all have, we all can snap into power games mode when it becomes all about, you know, just actual raw power.
6
SPEAKER_00
Now, the liberal games is,
6
SPEAKER_00
It s something that civilizations for thousands of years have been working on.
6
SPEAKER_00
It s not invented by America or modern times, but America was the latest crack at it yet, which is this idea, instead of everyone can do what they want if they have the power to do so, it s everyone can do what they want as long as it doesn t harm anyone else.
6
SPEAKER_00
Now, that s really complicated.
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SPEAKER_00
How do you define harm?
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SPEAKER_00
And the idea is that everyone has a list of rights which are protected by the government,
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SPEAKER_00
And then they have their inalienable rights, and they re protected, you know, those are protected, again, by, you know, from an invasion by other people.
6
SPEAKER_00
And so you have this kind of fragile balance.
6
SPEAKER_00
And so the idea with the liberal games is that there are laws, but it s not totalitarian.
6
SPEAKER_00
They will build very clear, strict laws kind of around the edges of what you can and can t do, and then everything else, freedom.
6
SPEAKER_00
So unlike a totalitarian dictatorship, actually, it s very loose.
6
SPEAKER_00
There s a lot of things can happen and it s kind of up to the people, but there are still laws that protect the very basic and alienable rights and stuff like that.
6
SPEAKER_00
So it s this much looser thing.
6
SPEAKER_00
Now, the vulnerability there is that it—so the—
6
SPEAKER_00
The benefits of it are obvious, right?
6
SPEAKER_00
Freedom is great.
6
SPEAKER_00
It seems like it s the most fair.
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SPEAKER_00
That equality of opportunity seemed like the most fair thing, and equality before the law, due process, and all of this stuff.
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SPEAKER_00
So it seems fair.
6
SPEAKER_00
to the founders of the US and other enlightenment thinkers.
6
SPEAKER_00
And it also is a great way to manifest productivity, right?
6
SPEAKER_00
You know, you have Adam Smith saying, it s not from the benevolence of the butcher or the baker that we get our dinner, but from their own self-interest.
6
SPEAKER_00
So you can harness kind of selfishness for progress.
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SPEAKER_00
But it has a vulnerability, which is that because of the laws, it s like the totalitarian laws, they don t have
6
SPEAKER_00
an excess of laws for no reason.
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SPEAKER_00
They want to control everything.
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SPEAKER_00
And the U.S., you know, in the U.S., we say they re not going to do that.
6
SPEAKER_00
And so the second, it s almost two puzzle pieces.
6
SPEAKER_00
You have the laws and then you ve got a liberal culture.
6
SPEAKER_00
Liberal laws have to be married to liberal culture, kind of a defense of liberal spirit in order to truly have the liberal games going on.
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SPEAKER_00
And so that s vulnerable because free speech, you can have
6
SPEAKER_00
The First Amendment, that s the law s part.
6
SPEAKER_00
But if you re in a culture where anyone who speaks out against orthodoxy is going to be shunned from the community, well, you re lacking the second piece of the puzzle there.
6
SPEAKER_00
You re lacking liberal culture.
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SPEAKER_00
And so therefore, you might as well not even have the First Amendment.
6
SPEAKER_00
And there s a lot of examples like that where the culture has to do its part for the true liberal games to be enjoyed.
6
SPEAKER_00
So it s just much more complicated, much more nuanced than the power games.
6
SPEAKER_00
It s kind of a set of basic laws that then are coupled with a basic spirit to create this very awesome human environment that s also very vulnerable.
6
SPEAKER_01
So what do you mean the culture has to play along?
6
SPEAKER_01
So for something like a freedom of speech to work, there has to be a basic, what, decency?
6
SPEAKER_01
That if all people are perfectly good, then perfect freedom without any restrictions is great.
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SPEAKER_01
It s where the human nature starts getting a little iffy.
6
SPEAKER_01
We start being cruel to each other, we start being greedy and,
6
SPEAKER_01
desiring of harm and also the narcissists and sociopaths and psychopaths in society, all of that, that s when you start to have to inject some limitations on that freedom.
6
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I mean if, so what the government basically says is we re going to let everyone be mostly free, but no one is gonna be free to,
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SPEAKER_00
physically harm other people or to steal their property, right?
6
SPEAKER_00
And so we re all agreeing to sacrifice that 20% of our freedom.
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SPEAKER_00
And then in return, all of us in theory can be 80% free.
6
SPEAKER_00
And that s kind of the bargain.
6
SPEAKER_00
But now that s a lot of freedom to leave people with.
6
SPEAKER_00
A lot of people choose, it s like you re so free in the US, you re actually free to be unfree if you choose.
6
SPEAKER_00
That s kind of what an echo chamber is to me.
6
SPEAKER_00
It s, you know, you can choose to kind of be friends with people who essentially make it so uncomfortable to speak your mind that it s no actual effective difference for you than if you lived in a country.
6
SPEAKER_00
If you can t, you know, criticize
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SPEAKER_00
Christianity in a certain community, that you have a First Amendment, so you re not going to get arrested by the government for criticizing Christianity.
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SPEAKER_00
But if the social penalties are so extreme that it s just never worth it, you might as well be in a country that imprisons people for criticizing Christianity.
6
SPEAKER_00
And so that same thing goes for wokeness, right?
6
SPEAKER_00
This is what people get, cancel culture and stuff.
6
SPEAKER_00
So the reason these things are bad is because they re actually
6
SPEAKER_00
They re depriving Americans of the beauty of the freedom of the liberal games by imposing a social culture that is very Power Games-esque.
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SPEAKER_00
It s basically a Power Games culture comes in, and you might as well be in the Power Games now.
6
SPEAKER_00
And so if you live in a liberal democracy, there will always be challenges to a liberal culture.
6
SPEAKER_00
There will always be challenges to a liberal culture from people who are much more interested in playing the power games.
6
SPEAKER_00
And there has to be kind of an immune system that stands up to that culture and says, that s not how we do things here in America, actually.
6
SPEAKER_00
We don t excommunicate people for not having the right religious beliefs.
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SPEAKER_00
We don t disinvite a speaker from campus for having the wrong political beliefs.
6
SPEAKER_00
And if it doesn t stand up for itself, it s like the immune system of the country failing and Power Games rushes in.
6
SPEAKER_01
So, before chapter four in your book, and the chapters that will surely result in you being burned at the stake, you write, quote, we ll start our pitchfork tour in this chapter by taking a brief trip through the history of the Republican Party.
6
SPEAKER_01
Then, in the following chapters, we ll take a Tim s career tanking deep dive into America s social justice movement, as you started to talk about.
6
SPEAKER_01
Okay, so let s go.
6
SPEAKER_01
What s the history of the Republican Party?
6
SPEAKER_00
I m looking at this through my vertical ladder.
6
SPEAKER_00
I m saying, what is this familiar story of the Republicans from the 60s to today, what does it look like through the vertical lens, right?
6
SPEAKER_00
Does it look different?
6
SPEAKER_00
And is there an interesting story here that s been kind of hidden because we re always looking at the horizontal?
6
SPEAKER_00
Now, the horizontal story, you ll hear people talk about it, and they ll say something like the Republicans have moved farther and farther to the right.
6
SPEAKER_00
And to me, that s not really true.
6
SPEAKER_00
Like, was Trump more right-wing than Reagan?
6
SPEAKER_00
I don t think so.
6
SPEAKER_00
I think he s less.
6
SPEAKER_01
In terms of actual policy, yeah.
6
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
6
SPEAKER_00
So we re using this, again, it s just like you re calling yourself centrist when it s not exactly what you mean, even though it also is.
6
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
6
SPEAKER_00
So again, I was like, okay, look, this vertical lens helps with other things.
6
SPEAKER_00
Let s apply it to the Republicans.
6
SPEAKER_00
And here s what I saw is, I looked at the 60s, and
6
SPEAKER_00
I saw an interesting story, which I don t think that, you know, not everyone s familiar with like what happened in the early 60s, but in 1960, the Republican Party was very, it was a plurality.
6
SPEAKER_00
You had progressives, like genuine Rockefeller, you know, pretty progressive people.
6
SPEAKER_00
all the way to, you know, then you had the, you know, moderates like Eisenhower and Dewey.
6
SPEAKER_00
And then you go all the way to the, you know, farther right, you had Goldwater and, you know, what you might call, I call them the fundamentalists.
6
SPEAKER_00
And so it s this interesting plurality, right?
6
SPEAKER_00
Something we don t have today.
6
SPEAKER_00
And what happened was the Goldwater contingent
6
SPEAKER_00
which was the underdog.
6
SPEAKER_00
They were small, right?
6
SPEAKER_00
Eisenhower was the president, or had just been the president, and it seemed like the moderates were, you know, he said you have to be close to the center of the chessboard.
6
SPEAKER_00
That s how you maintain power.
6
SPEAKER_00
These people were very far from the center of the chessboard, but they ended up basically having like a hostile takeover.
6
SPEAKER_00
They conquered their own party, and they did it by breaking all of the kind of unwritten rules and norms.
6
SPEAKER_00
So they did things like they first started with like the college Republicans, which was like this feeder group that turned in, you know, a lot of the politicians started there.
6
SPEAKER_00
And they went to the election and they wouldn t let the current president, the incumbent, speak.
6
SPEAKER_00
And they were throwing chairs and there were fistfights.
6
SPEAKER_00
And eventually people gave up and they just sat there and they sat in the chair talking for, you know, their candidate until everyone eventually left and then they declared victory.
6
SPEAKER_00
Basically, they came in, there was a certain set of rules, agreed upon rules, and they came in playing the power games, saying, well, actually, if we do this, you won t have the power.
6
SPEAKER_00
We have the power to take it if we just break all the rules.
6
SPEAKER_00
And so they did, and they won.
6
SPEAKER_00
And that became this hugely influential thing, which then they conquered California through, again, these people were taken aback.
6
SPEAKER_00
These proper Republican candidates were appalled by the insults that were being hurled at them and the intimidation and the bullying.
6
SPEAKER_00
And eventually, they ended up
6
SPEAKER_00
and the National Convention, which was called like the right wing Woodstock.
6
SPEAKER_00
It was like, you know, the Republican National Convention in 64 was just, again, there was jeering and they wouldn t let the moderates or the progressives even speak.
6
SPEAKER_00
And there was racism, you know, you know, Jackie Robinson was there and he was a proud Republican.
6
SPEAKER_00
And he said that, like, he feels like he was a Jew in Hitler s Germany with the way that blacks were being treated there.
6
SPEAKER_00
And it was nasty, but what did they do?
6
SPEAKER_00
They had fiery plurality enough to win, and they won.
6
SPEAKER_00
They ended up getting crushed in the general election, and they kind of faded away.
6
SPEAKER_00
But to me, I was like, that was an interesting story.
6
SPEAKER_00
I see it as, I have this character in the book called the Golem, which is a big, kind of a big, dumb, powerful monster that s the emergent property of a political echo chamber.
6
SPEAKER_00
It s like this big giant.
6
SPEAKER_00
It s stupid, but it s powerful and scary.
6
SPEAKER_00
And to me, I was like, a golem rose up, conquered the party for a second, knocked it on its ass, and then faded away.
6
SPEAKER_00
And to me, when I look at the Trump revolution in a lot, and not just Trump, the last 20 years, I see that same lower right, that lower right monster kind of
6
SPEAKER_00
making another charge for it, but this time succeeding and really taking over the party for a long period of time.
6
SPEAKER_00
I see the same story, which is the power games are being played in a situation when it had always been the government relies on all these unwritten rules and norms to function.
6
SPEAKER_00
But for example, you have in 2016 Merrick Garland gets nominated by Obama.
6
SPEAKER_00
And the unwritten norm says that
6
SPEAKER_00
when the president nominates a justice, then you pass them through unless there s some egregious thing.
6
SPEAKER_00
That s what has happened.
6
SPEAKER_00
But they said, actually, this is the last year of his presidency, and the people should choose.
6
SPEAKER_00
I don t think we should set a new precedent where the president can t nominate people, nominate a Supreme Court justice in the last year.
6
SPEAKER_00
So they passed it through, and it ends up being Gorsuch.
6
SPEAKER_00
And so they lose that seat.
6
SPEAKER_00
Now, three years later, it s Trump s last year, and it s another election year.
6
SPEAKER_00
and Ginsburg dies.
6
SPEAKER_00
And what do they say?
6
SPEAKER_00
They say, oh, let s keep our precedent.
6
SPEAKER_00
They said, no, oh, actually, we changed our mind.
6
SPEAKER_00
We re going to nominate Amy Barrett.
6
SPEAKER_00
So to me, that is classic power games, right?
6
SPEAKER_00
There s no actual rule, and what you re doing is they did technically have the power to block the nomination then, and then they technically had the power to put someone in, and they re pretending there s some principle to it, but they re just going for
6
SPEAKER_00
The short term edge at the expense of what is like the workings of the system in the long run.
6
SPEAKER_00
And then one of the Democrats have to do in that situation, because both parties have been doing this, is they either can lose now all the time or they start playing the power games too.
6
SPEAKER_00
And now you have a prisoner s dilemma where it s like both end up doing this thing and everyone ends up worse off.
6
SPEAKER_00
the debt ceiling, all these power plays that are being made with these holding the country hostage, this is power games.
6
SPEAKER_00
And to me, that s what Goldwater was doing in the 60s, but it was a healthier time in a way, because there was this plurality.
7
SPEAKER_01
within the parties reduced some of the national tribalism, and there wasn t as much of an appeal to that.
7
SPEAKER_01
But today, it s just like, do whatever you have to do to beat the enemies.
7
SPEAKER_01
And so I m seeing a rise in power games.
7
SPEAKER_01
And I talk about the Republicans because they did a lot of these things first.
7
SPEAKER_01
They have been a little bit more egregious, but both parties have been doing it over the last 20, 30 years.
7
SPEAKER_00
Can you place blame, or maybe there s a different term for it, at the subsystems of this?
7
SPEAKER_00
So is it the media, is it the politicians, like in the Senate, in Congress?
7
SPEAKER_00
Is it Trump, so the leadership?
7
SPEAKER_00
Is it, or maybe it s us, human beings?
7
SPEAKER_00
Maybe social media versus mainstream media?
7
SPEAKER_00
Is there a sense of where, what is the cause and what is the symptom?
7
SPEAKER_01
It s very complex.
7
SPEAKER_01
So Ezra Klein has a great book, Why We re Polarized, where he talks about a lot of this.
7
SPEAKER_01
And there s some of these, it s really no one s fault.
7
SPEAKER_01
First of all, it s the environment has changed in a bunch of ways you just mentioned.
7
SPEAKER_01
And what happens when you take human nature, which is a constant, and you put it into an environment, behavior comes out.
7
SPEAKER_01
The environment s the independent variable.
7
SPEAKER_01
When that changes, the dependent variable, the behavior, changes with it, right?
7
SPEAKER_01
And so the environment has changed in a lot of ways.
7
SPEAKER_01
So one major one is,
7
SPEAKER_01
It used to, for a long time actually, first it was the Republicans and then the Democrats just had a stranglehold on Congress.
7
SPEAKER_01
There was no, it was not even competitive.
7
SPEAKER_01
The Democrats for 40 years had the majority.
7
SPEAKER_01
And so therefore, it actually is a decent environment to compromise it.
7
SPEAKER_01
Because now we can both, what you want is Congress people thinking about their home district and voting yes on a national policy because we re going to get a good deal on it back at home.
7
SPEAKER_01
That s actually healthy, as opposed to voting in lockstep together because this is what the red party is doing, regardless of what s good for my home district.
7
SPEAKER_01
An example is Obamacare.
7
SPEAKER_01
There were certain Republican districts that would have actually officially been
7
SPEAKER_01
benefited by Obamacare, but every Republican voted against it.
7
SPEAKER_01
And part of the reason is because there s no longer this obvious majority.
7
SPEAKER_01
Every few years it switches.
7
SPEAKER_01
It s a 50-50 thing.
7
SPEAKER_01
And that s partially because we ve been so subsumed with this one national divide of left versus right that people are voting for the same party for president
7
SPEAKER_01
all the way down the ticket now.
7
SPEAKER_01
And so you have this just kind of 50-50 color war.
7
SPEAKER_01
And that s awful for compromise.
7
SPEAKER_01
So there s like 10 of these things, you know, that have redistricting.
7
SPEAKER_01
But also, it is social media, it is, I call it hypercharged tribalism.
7
SPEAKER_01
We ve, you know, in the 60s, you had kind of distributed tribalism, you had some people that are worked up about the USSR.
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They re national, that s what they care about.
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U.S.
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versus a foreign.
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You had some people that were saying left versus right, like they had today, and then other people that were saying that they were fighting within the party.
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But today you don t have that.
7
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You have ideological realignment, so you kind of got rid of a lot of the in-party fighting, and then there hasn t been that big of a foreign threat, nothing like the USSR for a long time.
7
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So you kind of lost that, and what s left is just this left versus right thing.
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And so that s kind of this hyper-charged whirlpool that subsumes everything.
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And so, yeah, it s, I mean, people point to Newt Gingrich, and people like, there s certain characters that enacted policies that stoked this kind of thing, but I think this is a much bigger kind of environmental shift.
7
SPEAKER_00
Well, that s going back to our questions about the role of individuals in human history.
7
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So the interesting, one of the many interesting questions here is about Trump.
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Is he a symptom or a cause?
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because he seems to be, from the public narrative, such a significant catalyst for some of the things we re seeing.
7
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This goes back to what we were talking about earlier, right?
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Like, is it the person or is it the times?
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I think he s a perfect example of it s a both situation.
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I don t think, if you pluck Trump out of this situation, I don t think a Trump was inevitable, but I think we were very vulnerable to a demagogue.
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And if you hadn t been, Trump would have had no chance.
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And so why were we vulnerable to a demagogue is because you have these, I mean, I think it s specifically on the right.
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If you actually look at the stats, it s pretty bad.
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Because it s not just who voted for Trump.
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A lot of people just vote for the red.
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What s interesting is who voted for Obama against Romney and then voted for Trump?
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These are not racists.
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These are not hardcore Republicans.
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They voted for Obama.
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And where did the switch come from?
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Places that had economic despair, where bridges were not working well.
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That s a signifier.
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You know, where paint s chipping in the schools.
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You know, these little things like this.
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So I think that, you know, you had this, a lot of these kind of rural towns, you have true despair, and then you also have, the number one indicator of voting for Trump was distrust in media.
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And the media has become much less trustworthy, you know, and so you have,
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All these ingredients that actually make us very vulnerable to a demagogue, and a demagogue is someone who takes advantage, right?
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There s someone who comes in and says, I can pull all the right strings and push all the right emotional buttons right now and get myself power by taking advantage of the circumstances.
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And that is what Trump totally did.
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It makes me wonder how easy it is for somebody who s a charismatic leader to capitalize on cultural resentment when there s economic hardship to channel that.
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So John Haidt wrote a great article about, basically, truth is at an all-time low right now.
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The media s not penalized for lying, right?
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MSNBC, Fox News, these are not penalized for being inaccurate.
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They re penalized if they stray from the orthodoxy.
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on social media.
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It s not the truest tweets that go viral, right?
7
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And so Trump understood that better than anyone, right?
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He took advantage of it.
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He was living in the current world when everyone else was stuck in the past.
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And he saw that and he just
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lied.
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Everything he said, truth was not relevant at all.
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It s just truly, it s not relevant to him and what he s talking about.
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He doesn t care and he knew that neither do a subset of the country.
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I was thinking about this, just reading articles by journalists.
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especially when you re not a famous journalist in yourself, but you re more like a New York Times journalist.
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So the big famous thing is the institution you re a part of.
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You can just lie, because you re not going to get punished for it.
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You re going to be rewarded for the popularity of an article.
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So if you write 10 articles,
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there s a huge incentive to just make stuff up.
7
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You gotta get clicks.
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To get clicks, that s first and foremost.
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And like culturally, people will attack that article to say it s dishonest, like one half the country will attack that article for saying it s dishonest.
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But they ll kind of forget.
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You will not have a reputational hit.
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There won t be a memory like this person made up a lot of stuff in the past.
7
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No, they ll take one article at a time and they ll attach the reputation hits will be to New York Times, the institution.
7
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And so for the individual journalist, there s a huge incentive to make stuff up.
7
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Totally.
7
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It s wild.
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And it s scary because it s almost like you can t survive if you re just an old school honest journalist who really works hard and tries to get it right and does it with nuance.
7
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What you can be is you can be a big time substacker or a big time podcaster.
7
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A lot of people do have a reputation for accuracy and rigor, and they have huge audiences.
7
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But if you re working in a big company right now,
7
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It s, I mean, especially, I mean, I think that many of the big media brands are very much controlled by the left.
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But I will say that the ones that are controlled by the right are even more egregious, not just in terms of accuracy, but also in terms of, you know, the New York Times, for all of its criticisms,
7
SPEAKER_01
They have a handful of, here and there, they put out a pretty, you know, an article that strays from the, you know, Barry Weiss wrote there for a long time, and then you ve got, they wrote an article criticizing free speech on campus stuff, you know, recently, and they have, you know, they have a couple very, you know, left, progressive-friendly conservatives, but they have conservatives that are operating the op-eds.
7
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Fox News,
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You re not seeing thoughtful, Breitbart, you re not seeing thoughtful progressives writing there, right?
7
SPEAKER_00
There s some degree to which the New York Times I think still incentivizes and values the vertical, the high effort.
7
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So you re allowed to have a conservative opinion if you do a really damn good job.
7
SPEAKER_00
Like if it s a very thorough, in-depth kind of- And if you,
7
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kind of pander to the progressive senses in all the right ways.
7
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You know, I always joke that, you know, Ted, they always have a couple, you know, token conservatives, but they get on stage and they re basically like, so totally, you re all, you know, the progressivism is right about all of this, but maybe, maybe, you know, libertarianism isn t
7
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I ll bet.
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So there is an element, but you know what?
7
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It s something.
7
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It s better than being a total tribal.
7
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I think you can see the New York Times tug of war, the internal tug of war.
7
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You can see it because then they also have these awful instances, like the firing of James Bennett, which is a whole other story.
7
SPEAKER_01
Yeah you can see it going both ways but in the sixties what did you have you had a bbc nbc cbs you know the seventies you had these three news channels and they weren t always right and they definitely sent them spun a narrative together maybe about the vietnam or whatever but,
7
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If one of them was just lying, they d be embarrassed for it.
7
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They would be penalized.
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They d be dinged, and they d be known as, this is the trash one.
7
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And that would be terrible for their ratings, because they weren t just catering to half the country.
7
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They all were catering to the whole country.
7
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So both on the axis of accuracy and on the axis of neutrality, they had to try to stay somewhere in the reasonable range.
7
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And that s just gone.
7
SPEAKER_00
One of the things I m really curious about is, I think your book is incredible.
7
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I m very curious to see how it s written about by the press.
7
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because I could see, I could myself write, with the help of Chad JPT, of course, clickbait articles in either direction.
7
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It s easy to imagine.
7
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Your whole book is beautifully written for clickbait articles.
7
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If any journalists out there need help, I can help.
7
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I can write the most atrocious criticisms.
7
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I m ready, I m braced.
7
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, so speaking of which, you write about social justice.
7
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You write about two kinds of social justice, liberal social justice and SJF, social justice fundamentalism.
7
SPEAKER_00
What are those?
7
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Yeah, so like the term wokeness is so loaded with baggage.
7
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It s kind of like mocking and derogatory and that s I was trying not to do that in this book.
7
SPEAKER_01
If it s a term loaded with baggage, you re already kind of you re you re you re from from the first minute you re already behind.
7
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To me, also, when people say wokeness is bad, social justice is bad, they re throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
7
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Because the proudest tradition in the US is liberal social justice.
7
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And what I mean by that, again, liberal meaning lowercase l.
7
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It is intertwined with liberalism.
7
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So Martin Luther King, classic example, his I Have a Dream speech, he says stuff like, this country, you know, has made a promise to all of its citizens, and it has broken that promise to its black citizens, right?
7
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In other words, liberalism, the Constitution, the core ideals, those are great.
7
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We re not living up to them.
7
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We re failing on some of them.
7
SPEAKER_01
So civil disobedience, the goal of it wasn t to hurt liberalism, it was to specifically break the laws that were already violating, the laws that were a violation of liberalism to expose that this is illiberal, that the Constitution should not have people of different skin color sitting in different parts of the bus.
7
SPEAKER_01
And so it was kind of a, it was really patriotic, you know, the Civil Rights Movement.
7
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It was saying this is a beautiful, you know, we have a, liberalism is this beautiful thing and we need to do better at it.
7
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So I call it liberal social justice, and it used the tools of liberalism to try to improve the flaws that were going on.
7
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So free speech.
7
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You know, Mario Savio in the 60s, he s a leftist.
7
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And what were the leftists doing in the 60s on Berkeley campus?
7
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You know, they were saying, we need more free speech.
7
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because that s what liberal social justice was fighting for.
7
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But you can also go back to the 20s, women s suffrage.
7
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Emancipation, the thing that America obviously has all of its, these are all ugly things that it had to get out of, but it got out of them, one by one.
7
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And it s still getting out of them.
7
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That s what s cool about America.
7
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And liberal social justice basically is the practice of saying, where are we not being perfect liberals?
7
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And now let s fix that.
7
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So that s the idea of liberalism that permeates the history of the United States, but then there s interplay.
7
SPEAKER_00
You have so many good images in this book, but one of them is highlighting the interplay of different ideas over the past, let s say, 100 years.
7
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So liberalism is on one side, there s that thread.
7
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There s Marxism on the other, and then there s postmodernism.
7
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How do those interplay together?
7
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So it s interesting because Marxism
7
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And all of its various, you know, descendants, obviously there s a lot of things that are rooted in Marxism that aren t, you know, the same thing as what Karl Marx preached.
7
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But what do they all have in common?
7
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They think liberalism is bad, right?
7
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They actually think that
7
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that the opposite of what Martin Luther King and other people in the civil rights and other movements, they think the opposite.
7
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They think he thinks, you know, liberalism is good.
7
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We need to preserve it.
7
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They said liberalism is the problem.
7
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These other problems with racism and inequality that we re seeing, those are inevitable results of liberalism.
7
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Liberalism is a rigged game and it s just the power games in disguise.
7
SPEAKER_01
There is no liberal games, it s just the power games in disguise and there s the upper people that oppress the lower people and they convince the lower people, it s all about false consciousness, they convince the lower people that everything is fair and now the lower people vote against their own interests and they work to preserve the system that s oppressing them.
7
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And what do we need to do?
7
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We need to actually, it s much more revolutionary, we need to overthrow liberalism.
7
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Right?
7
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So people think is, oh, you know, like what we call a wokeness is just, you know, a normal social justice activists activism, but it s like more extreme, right?
7
SPEAKER_01
It s this, no, no, it s the polar opposite, polar opposite.
7
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And so now that s, that s, that s the Marxist thread.
7
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Now, postmodernism is kind of, you know, this term that is super controversial and I don t think anyone calls themselves a postmodernist or take all of this with a grain of salt in terms of the term, but what s the definition of radical?
7
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The definition of radical to me is how deep
7
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you want change to happen at.
7
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So a liberal progressive and a conservative progressive will disagree about policies.
7
SPEAKER_01
The liberal progressive wants to, you know, change a lot of policies.
7
SPEAKER_01
Change, change, change, right?
7
SPEAKER_01
And the conservative is more wants to keep things the way they are.
7
SPEAKER_01
But they re both conservative when it comes to liberalism.
7
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beneath it, the liberal kind of foundation of the country, they both become conservatives about that.
7
SPEAKER_01
The Marxist is more radical because they want to go one notch deeper and actually overthrow that foundation.
7
SPEAKER_01
Now, what s below liberalism is kind of the core tenets of modernity, this idea of reason and the notion that there is an objective truth.
7
SPEAKER_01
science as a scientific method, right?
7
SPEAKER_01
These things are actually beneath, and even the Marxist, if you look at the Frankfurt School, you know, these post-Marxist thinkers and Marx himself, they were not anti-science.
7
SPEAKER_01
They believed in that bottom-bottom foundation.
7
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They actually wanted to preserve modernity, but they wanted to get rid of liberalism on top of it.
7
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The post-modernist is even more radical because they want to actually go down to the bottom level and overthrow it.
7
SPEAKER_01
They think science itself
7
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is a tool of oppression.
7
SPEAKER_01
They think it s a tool where oppression kind of flows through, you know, they think that the white Western world has invented these concepts like, you know, they claim that there s an objective truth and that there s, you know, reason and science, and they think all of that is just one meta-narrative, and it goes a long way to serve the interests of the powerful.
7
SPEAKER_00
So in the sense that it s almost caricatured, but that is to the core of their belief that math could be racist, for example.
7
SPEAKER_00
Oh yeah, absolutely.
7
SPEAKER_00
Not the education of math, but literally math, mathematics.
7
SPEAKER_01
The notion in math that there s a right answer and a wrong answer, that they believe is a meta-narrative that serves white supremacy.
7
SPEAKER_01
And the postmodernists might have said it serves just the powerful.
8
SPEAKER_01
or the wealthy.
8
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What social justice fundamentalism is, is you take the Marxist thread that has been going on in lots of countries and whoever the upper and lower is, that s what they all have in common.
8
SPEAKER_01
The upper and lower, for Marx, was the ruling class and the oppressed class.
8
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It was economic.
8
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And then, but you come here and the economic class doesn t, you know, doesn t resonate as much here as it did maybe in some of those other places.
8
SPEAKER_01
But what does resonate here in the 60s and 70s is race and gender and these kind of social justice disagreements.
8
SPEAKER_01
And so what social justice fundamentalism is, is this basically this tried and true framework of Marx, you know, this Marxist framework
8
SPEAKER_01
kind of with a new skin on it, which is American social justice.
8
SPEAKER_01
And then made even more radical with the infusion of postmodernism, where not just is liberalism bad, but actually, like you said, math can be racist.
8
SPEAKER_01
So it s this kind of philosophical Frankenstein, this stitched together of these.
8
SPEAKER_01
And so again, they wear the same uniform as the liberal social justice.
8
SPEAKER_01
They say social justice, racial equality.
8
SPEAKER_01
but it has nothing to do with liberal social justice.
8
SPEAKER_01
It is directly opposed to liberal social justice.
8
SPEAKER_00
It s fascinating, the evolution.
8
SPEAKER_00
of ideas, if we ignore the harm done by it, it s fascinating how humans get together and evolve these ideas.
8
SPEAKER_00
So as you show, Marxism is the idea that society s a zero-sum, I mean, I guess zero-sum is a really important thing here.
8
SPEAKER_00
Zero-sum struggle between the ruling class and the working class with power being exerted through politics and economics.
8
SPEAKER_00
Then you add,
8
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critical theory, Marxism 2.0 on top of that, and you add to politics and economics, you add culture and institutions.
8
SPEAKER_00
And then on top of that, for postmodernism, you add science, you add morality, basically anything else you can think of.
8
SPEAKER_01
To stitch together Frankenstein, and if you notice, which is not necessarily bad, but in this case I think it s actually violating the Marxist tradition by being anti-science.
8
SPEAKER_01
And it s violating the postmodernism because what postmodernists were, they were radical skeptics.
8
SPEAKER_01
They were radical skeptics not just of the way things were, but of their own beliefs.
8
SPEAKER_01
Social justice fundamentalism is not at all self-critical.
8
SPEAKER_01
It says that we have the answers, which is the opposite of what post-modernists would ever say.
8
SPEAKER_01
No, you just have another meta-narrative.
8
SPEAKER_01
It s also violating, of course, the tradition of liberal social justice in a million ways because it s anti-liberal.
8
SPEAKER_01
This Frankenstein comes together.
8
SPEAKER_01
Meanwhile,
8
SPEAKER_01
liberal social justice doesn t have a Frankenstein.
8
SPEAKER_01
It s very clear.
8
SPEAKER_01
It s a crisp ideology that says, we re trying to get to a more perfect union.
8
SPEAKER_01
They re trying to keep the promises made in the Constitution.
8
SPEAKER_01
And that s what it s trying to do.
8
SPEAKER_01
And so it s much simpler in a lot of ways.
8
SPEAKER_00
So you re right that my big problem with social justice fundamentalism isn t the ideology itself.
8
SPEAKER_00
It s what scholars and activists started to do sometimes around 2013 when they began to wield a cudgel that s not supposed to have any place in the country like the U.S.
8
SPEAKER_00
So it s the actions, not the ideas.
8
SPEAKER_01
Well, to be clear, I don t like the ideology.
8
SPEAKER_01
I think it s a low-rung ideology.
8
SPEAKER_01
I think it s morally inconsistent based on its flip-flops on its morals depending on the group.
8
SPEAKER_01
I think it s echo chamber-y.
8
SPEAKER_01
I think it s full of inaccuracies and can t stand up to debate.
8
SPEAKER_01
But there s a ton of low-rung ideologies I don t like.
8
SPEAKER_01
I don t like a lot of religious doctrines.
8
SPEAKER_01
I don t like a lot of political doctrines.
8
SPEAKER_01
The U.S.
8
SPEAKER_01
is a place, inherently, that is a mishmash of a ton of ideologies, and I m not gonna like two-thirds of them at any given time.
8
SPEAKER_01
So my problem, and the reason I m writing about this is not because I m like, by the way, this ideology is not something I like.
8
SPEAKER_01
That s not interesting.
8
SPEAKER_01
The reason that it must be written about right now, this particular ideology, is because it s not playing nicely with others.
8
SPEAKER_01
If you wanna be a hardcore evangelical Christian, in the U.S.
8
SPEAKER_01
says live and let live.
8
SPEAKER_01
Not only are you allowed to have an echo chamber of some kind, it s actively protected here.
8
SPEAKER_01
Live and let live, they can do what they want, you do what you want.
8
SPEAKER_01
Now, if the Evangelical Christians started saying, by the way, anyone who says anything that conflicts with Evangelical Christianity is going to be severely socially punished, and they have the cultural power to do so, which they don t in this case.
8
SPEAKER_01
They might like to, but they don t have the power, but they re able to get anyone fired who they want.
8
SPEAKER_01
and they re able to actually change the curriculum in all these schools and classes to suddenly not conflict with, no more evolution in the textbooks because they don t want it.
8
SPEAKER_01
Now I would write a book about evangelical Christianity because that s what every liberal, regardless of what you think of the actual horizontal beliefs, it doesn t matter what they believe, when they start violating live and let live,
8
SPEAKER_01
and shutting down other segments of society and in kind of, it s almost like a, it s not the best analogy, but an echo chamber is like a benign tumor.
8
SPEAKER_01
And what you have to watch out for is a tumor that starts to metastasize, starts to forcefully spread and damage the tissue around it.
8
SPEAKER_01
And that s what this particular ideology has been doing.
8
SPEAKER_00
Do you worry about it as an existential threat to liberalism in the West, in the United States?
8
SPEAKER_00
Is it a problem or is it the biggest problem that s threatening all of human civilization?
8
SPEAKER_01
I would not say it s the biggest problem.
8
SPEAKER_01
It might be.
8
SPEAKER_01
If it turns out in 50 years someone says actually it was, I wouldn t be shocked.
8
SPEAKER_01
But I also, I wouldn t bet on that, because there s a lot of problems.
8
SPEAKER_00
I m a little sorry to interrupt.
8
SPEAKER_00
It is popular to say that kind of thing, though.
8
SPEAKER_00
And it s less popular to say the same thing about AI or nuclear weapons, which worries me, that I m more worried about nuclear weapons, even still, than I am about wokeism.
8
SPEAKER_01
So I ve gotten, I ve had probably a thousand arguments about this.
8
SPEAKER_01
That s one nice thing about spending six years procrastinating on getting a book done is you end up test battle testing your ideas a million times.
8
SPEAKER_01
So I ve heard this one a lot, right?
8
SPEAKER_01
Which is, there s kind of three groups of former Obama voters.
8
SPEAKER_01
One is super woke now.
8
SPEAKER_01
Another one is super anti-woke now.
8
SPEAKER_01
And the third is what you just said, which is, sure, wokeness is over the top, right?
8
SPEAKER_01
You re not woke, but
8
SPEAKER_01
I think that the anti-woke people totally lost their mind, and it s just not that big a deal, right?
8
SPEAKER_01
Now, here s why I disagree with that, because it s not wokeness itself.
8
SPEAKER_01
It s that a radical political movement, of which there will always be a lot in the country, has managed to do something that a radical movement s not supposed to be able to do in the US, which is they ve managed to,
8
SPEAKER_01
hijack institutions all across the country, and hijack medical journals, and universities, and the ACLU, all the activist organizations, and non-profits, and NGOs.
8
SPEAKER_01
And certain tech companies.
8
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, and many tech companies.
8
SPEAKER_01
So it s not that I think this thing is so bad.
8
SPEAKER_01
It s a little like we said with Trump.
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The reason Trump scares me is not because Trump s so bad.
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It s that because it reveals that we were vulnerable to a demagogue candidate.
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And what wokeness reveals to me is that we are currently, and until something changes, we ll continue to be vulnerable to a demagogue candidate.
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a bully movement and a forcefully expansionist movement that wants to actually destroy the workings, their liberal gears and tear them apart.
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And so here s the way I view a liberal democracy is it is a bunch of these institutions that were trial and error crafted over hundreds of years.
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And they all rely on trust, public trust, and a certain kind of feeling of unity that actually is critical to a liberal democracy s functioning.
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And what I see this thing is, is there s a parasite on that whose goal is, and I m not saying each, by the way, each individual in this is, I don t think they re bad people.
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I think that it s the ideology itself has the property of its goal is to tear apart the pretty delicate workings of the liberal democracy and shred the critical lines of trust.
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And so you talk about AI and you talk about all these other big problems, nuclear, right?
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The reason I stopped, I like writing about that stuff a lot more than I like writing about politics.
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This wasn t a fun topic for me, is because I realized that all of those things, if we re gonna have a good future with those things and they re actually threats, like I said, we need to have our wits about us and we need the liberal gears and levers working.
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We need the liberal machine working.
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And so if something s threatening to undermine that, it affects everything else.
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We need to have our scientific mind about us, about these foundational ideas.
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But I guess my sense of hope comes from observing the immune system respond to wokeism.
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There seems to be a pro-liberalism immune system.
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And not only that, so like there s intellectuals, there s people that are willing to do the fight, you talk about courage, being courageous, and there is a hunger for that such that those ideas can become viral and they take over.
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So I just don t see a mechanism by which wokeism,
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accelerates exponentially and takes over.
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It feels like as it expands, the immune system responds.
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The immune system of liberalism, of basically a country, at least in the United States, that still ultimately at the core of the individual values the freedom of speech, just freedoms in general, the freedom of an individual.
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But that s the battle, which is stronger.
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So to me it is like a virus in an immune system.
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And I totally agree.
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I see the same story happening.
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And I m sitting here rooting for the immune system.
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Are you still worried?
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Well, here s the thing.
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So a liberal democracy is always going to be vulnerable to a movement like this, right?
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And there will be more.
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because it s not a totalitarian dictatorship, because if you can socially pressure people to not say what they re thinking, you can suddenly start to just take over, right?
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You can break the liberalism of the liberal democracy quite easily, and suddenly a lot of things are illiberal.
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On the other hand, the same vulnerability, the same system that s vulnerable to that also is hard to truly conquer, because now the Maoists
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Right, similar kind of vibe.
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They were saying that science is evil, and that the intellectuals are, it s all this big conspiracy.
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But they could murder you.
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And they had the hard cudgel in their hand, right?
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And the hard cudgel is scary, and you can conquer a country with a hard cudgel, but you can t use that in the US.
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So what they have is a soft cudgel, which can have the same effect.
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initially.
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You can scare people into shutting up.
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You can t maybe imprison them and murder them, but if you can socially ostracize them and get them fired, that basically is going to have the same effect.
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So the soft cudgel can have the same effect for a while, but the thing is, it s a little bit of a house of cards, because it relies on fear.
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And as soon as
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that fear goes away, the whole thing falls apart, right?
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The soft cudgel requires people to be so scared of getting canceled or getting whatever.
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And as soon as some people start, you know, Toby Lutka of Shopify, I always like think about, you know, he just said, you know what, I m not scared of this soft cudgel and spoke up and said, we re not political at this company and we re not a family, we re a team and we re going to do this.
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And you know what?
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They re thriving.
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He will be on this podcast.
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He seems like a fascinating human being.
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He s amazing.
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He spoke up.
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He s one of the smartest and kindest dudes, but he s also, he has courage at a time when it s hard.
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But here s the thing, is that it s different than that you need so much less courage against a soft cudgel than you do.
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The Iranians throwing their hijabs into the fire, those people s courage just blows away any courage we have here, because they might get executed.
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That s the thing, is that you can actually have courage right now, and it s, so.
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I m not sure I understand.
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Don t worry about it.
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Oh man, the irony of that.
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And you talk about, so two things, to fight this, there s two things, awareness and courage.
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What s the awareness piece?
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The awareness piece is, first, just understanding the stakes.
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Like getting our heads out of the sand and being like, technology is blowing up exponentially.
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Our society s trust is devolving, like we re kind of falling apart in some important ways.
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We re losing our grip on some stability at the worst time.
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That s the first point, just the big picture.
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And then also awareness of, I think this vertical axis or whatever your version of it is, this concept of how do I really form my beliefs?
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Where do they actually come from?
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Are they someone else s beliefs?
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Am I following a checklist?
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How about my values?
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I used to identify with the blue party or the red party, but now they ve changed, and I suddenly am okay with that.
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Is that because my values changed with it, or am I actually anchored to the party, not to any principle?
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Asking yourself these questions.
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Looking for where do I feel disgusted by fellow human beings?
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Maybe I m being a crazy tribal person without realizing it.
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How about the people around me?
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Am I being bullied by some echo chamber without realizing it?
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Am I the bully somewhere, right?
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So that s the first, I think just to kind of do a self-audit.
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And I think that just some awareness like that, just a self-audit about these things can go a long way, but if you keep it to yourself, it s almost useless.
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because if you don t have, awareness without courage does very little.
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So courage is when you take that awareness and you actually export it out into the world and it starts affecting other people.
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And so courage can happen on multiple levels.
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It can happen by, first of all, just stop saying stuff you don t believe.
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If you re being pressured by a kind of a ideology or a movement to say stuff that you don t actually believe, just stop, just stay on your ground and don t say anything.
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That s courage, that s one first step.
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Start speaking out in small groups.
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Start, you know, actually speaking your mind.
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See what happens.
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The sky doesn t usually fall.
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Actually, people usually respect you for it.
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Like, you know, and it s not every group, but like, you d be surprised.
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And then eventually, you know, maybe start speaking out in bigger groups.
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Start going public.
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You know, go public with it.
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And you don t need everyone doing this.
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Look, some people will lose their jobs for it.
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I m not talking to those people.
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Most people won t lose their jobs, but they have the same fear
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as if they would, right?
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And it s like, what, are you gonna get criticized or are you gonna get a bunch of people, you know, angry Twitter people will criticize you?
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Like, yeah, it s not pleasant, but actually that s a little bit like our primitive minds fear that really back when it was programmed, that kind of ostracism or criticism will leave you out of the tribe and you ll die.
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Today, it s kind of a delusional fear.
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It s not actually that scary.
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And the people who realize that can exercise incredible leadership right now.
8
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So you have a really interesting description of censorship, of self-censorship also, as you ve been talking about.
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Who s King Mustache?
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And this gap, I think, I hope you write even more, even more than you ve written in the book about these ideas, because it s so strong.
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This censorship gaps that are created between the dormant thought pile
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and the kind of thing under the speech curve.
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Yeah.
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So first of all, I like to think of, I think it s a useful tool, is this thing called a thought pile, which is, if you have a, on any given issue, you have a horizontal spectrum, and just say I could take your brain out of your head, and I put it on the thought pile right where you happen to believe about that issue.
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Now, I do that for everyone in the community or in a society.
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and you re gonna end up with a big mushy pile that I think will often form a bell curve.
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If it s really politicized, it might form like a camel with two humps, because it s like concentrated here, but for a typical issue, it ll just form, you know, a fear of AI.
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You re gonna have a bell curve, right?
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You know, things like this.
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That s the thought pile.
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Now the second thing is a line that I call the speech curve, which is what people are saying.
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So the speech curve is high when not just a lot of people are saying it, but it s being said from the biggest platforms, being said in the, you know, in the New York Times, and it s being said
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by the president on the state of the union.
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Those things are the top of the speech curve.
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And then when the speech curve s lower, it means it s being said either whispered in small groups or it s just not very many people are talking about it.
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Now a healthy, when a free speech democracy is healthy on a certain topic, you ve got the speech curve sitting right on top of the thought pile.
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They mirror each other, which is naturally what would happen.
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More people think something that s gonna be said more often and from higher platforms.
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What censorship does, and censorship can be from the government, so I use the tale of King Mustache, and King Mustache, he s a little tiny tyrant, and he s very sensitive, and people are making fun of his mustache, and they re saying he s not a good king, and he does not like that.
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So what does he do?
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He enacts a policy, and he says, anyone who is heard criticizing me or my mustache or my rule will be put to death.
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And immediately at the town, it was because his father was a very liberal.
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There was always free speech in his kingdom.
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But now King Mustard has taken over and he s saying this is a new rules now.
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And so a few people yell out and they say, that s not how we do things here.
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And that moment, it s what I call a moment of truth.
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Did the king s guards stand with the principles of the kingdom and say, yeah, King Mustache, that s not what we do.
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In which case, he would kind of have to, there s nothing he can do.
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Or are they going to execute?
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So in this case, it s as if he laid down an electric fence over a part of this thought pile and said, no one s allowed to speak over here.
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The speech curve, maybe people will think these things, but the speech curve cannot go over here.
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But the electric fence wasn t actually electrified until the king s guards, in a moment of truth, get scared and say, OK, and they hang the five people who spoke out.
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So in that moment, that fence just became electric.
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And now, no one criticizes King Mustache anymore.
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So I use this as an allegory.
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Now, of course, he has a hard cudgel, because he can execute people.
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But now, when we look at the US, what you re seeing right now is a lot of pressure, which is very similar.
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An electric fence is being laid down, saying no one can criticize these ideas.
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And if you do, you won t be executed, you ll be canceled.
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You ll be fired.
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Now, is that fence electrified from there?
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No, they don t work at the company, they can t fire you.
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But they can start a Twitter mob when someone violates that speech curve, when someone violates that speech rule, and then the leadership at the company has the moment of truth.
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And what the leaders should do is stand up for their company s values, which is almost always in favor of the employee and say, look, even if they made a mistake, they make people make mistakes.
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We re not going to fire them.
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Or maybe that person actually said something that s reasonable and we should discuss it.
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But either way, we re not going to fire them.
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And if they said no, what happens is the
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The Twitter mob actually doesn t have, they can t execute you.
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They go away.
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And the fence has proven to have no electricity.
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The problem with the past few years is what s happened again and again is the leader gets scared, and they get scared of the Twitter mob, and they fire them.
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Boom.
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That fence has electricity.
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And now, actually, if you cross that,
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It s not just a threat.
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You ll be out of a job.
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It s really bad.
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You ll have a huge penalty.
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You might not be able to feed your kids.
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So that s an electric fence that goes up.
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Now, what happens when an electric fence goes up and it s proven to actually be electrified?
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The speech curve morphs into a totally different position.
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And now these new people say, instead of having the marketplace of ideas that turns into a natural bell curve, they say, no, no, no.
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These ideas are OK to say, and not just OK.
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You ll be socially rewarded.
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And these ones don t.
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That s the rules of their own echo chamber that they re now applying to everyone.
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And it s working.
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And so the speech curve distorts.
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And so you end up with now, instead of one region, which is a region of active communal thinking, what people are thinking and saying, you now have three regions.
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You have a little active communal thinking, but mostly you now have this dormant thought pile, which is all these opinions that suddenly everyone s scared to say out loud.
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Everyone s thinking, but they re scared to say it out loud.
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Everyone s thinking, but no one s saying.
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And then you have this other region, which is the approved ideas of this now cultural kind of dictator.
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And those are being spoken from the largest platforms, and they re being repeated by the president, and they re being repeated all over the place, even though people don t believe it.
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And that s this distortion.
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And what happens is the society becomes really stupid.
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Because active communal thinking is the region where we can actually think together.
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And now no one can think together.
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And it gets siloed into small, private conversations.
9
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It s really powerful what you said about institutions and so on.
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It s not trivial to, from a leadership position, to be like, no, we defend the employee or we defend the, yeah, the employee, the person with us on our, like, because we don t, there s, because there s no actual,
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ground to any kind of violation we re hearing about.
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So the mob, they resist the mob.
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It s ultimately to the leader, I guess, of a particular institution, of a particular company, and it s difficult.
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It s difficult.
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Oh yeah, no, no, it s not.
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If it were easy, there wouldn t be all of these failings.
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And by the way, that s the immune system failing.
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That s the liberal immune system of that company failing, but also then, it s an example, which means that a lot of other, you know, it s failing kind of to the country.
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It s not easy, of course it s not, because we have primitive minds that are wired to care so much about what people think of us.
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And even if we re not gonna, first of all, we re scared that it s gonna start a, what do mobs do?
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They don t just say, I m going to criticize you.
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I m going to criticize anyone who still buys your product.
9
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I m going to criticize anyone who goes on your podcast.
9
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So it s not just you.
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It s now, suddenly, if Lex becomes tarnished enough, now I go on the podcast and people are saying, oh, I m not buying his book.
9
SPEAKER_01
You went on Lex Friedman?
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No thanks, right?
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And now I get, I call it a smear web.
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Like, you ve been smeared, and we re in such a bad time that it smear travels to me.
9
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And now, meanwhile, someone who buys my book and tries to share it, someone says, you re buying that guy s book?
9
SPEAKER_01
He goes on Lex Freeman.
9
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You see how this happens, right?
9
SPEAKER_01
So that hasn t happened in this case, but that, so we are so wired.
9
SPEAKER_01
A, that is kind of bad, right?
9
SPEAKER_01
Like that is actually like bad for you, but we re wired to care about it so much because it meant life or death back in the day.
9
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Yeah, yeah.
9
SPEAKER_00
And luckily in this case, we re both, probably can smear each other in this conversation.
9
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Yes.
9
SPEAKER_00
This is wonderful.
9
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I smear you all the time.
9
SPEAKER_00
Given the nature of your book.
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What do you think about freedom of speech as a term and as an idea, as a way to resist the mechanism, this mechanism of dormant thought pile and artificially generated speech, this ideal of the freedom of speech and protecting speech and celebrating speech?
9
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Well, so this is kind of the point I was talking about earlier about King Mustache.
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made a rule against, he s created official.
9
SPEAKER_00
I just love, one of the amazing things about your book, as you get later and later in the book, you cover more and more difficult issues as a way to illustrate the importance of the vertical perspective.
9
SPEAKER_00
But there s something about using hilarious drawings throughout
9
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that make it much more fun and it takes you away from the personal somehow and you start thinking in the space of ideas versus like outside of the tribal type of thinking.
9
SPEAKER_00
So it s a really brilliant, I mean, I would advise for anybody to do, when they write controversial books, to have hilarious drawings.
9
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It s true, like put a silly stick figure in your thing and it lightens, it does, it lightens the mood.
9
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It gets people s guard down a little bit.
9
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And it works.
9
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It reminds people that we re all friends here, right?
9
SPEAKER_01
Let s laugh at ourselves, laugh at the fact that we re in a culture war a little bit, and now we can talk about it, as opposed to getting religious about it.
9
SPEAKER_01
But basically, King Mustache had no First Amendment.
9
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the government is censoring, right, which is very common around the world, right?
9
SPEAKER_01
Governments censor all them.
9
SPEAKER_01
The U.S., you know, again, there s some—you can argue there s some controversial things recently, but basically, the U.S., the First Amendment isn t the problem, right?
9
SPEAKER_01
No one is being arrested for saying the wrong thing, but this graph is still happening, and so
9
SPEAKER_01
So freedom of speech, what people like to say is, if someone s complaining about a cancel culture and saying, this is an anti-free speech, people like to point out, no, it s not.
9
SPEAKER_01
The government s not arresting you for anything.
9
SPEAKER_01
This is called the free market, buddy.
9
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This is called you re putting your ideas out, and you re getting criticized, and your precious marketplace of ideas, there it is.
9
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And I ve gotten this a lot.
9
SPEAKER_01
And this is not making a critical distinction between cancel culture and criticism culture.
9
SPEAKER_01
Criticism culture is a little bit of this kind of high rung idea lab stuff we talked about.
9
SPEAKER_01
Criticism culture attacks the idea and encourages further discussion, right?
9
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It enlivens discussion.
9
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It makes everyone smarter.
9
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Cancel culture attacks the person.
9
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Very different.
9
SPEAKER_01
Criticism culture says, here s why this idea is so bad.
9
SPEAKER_01
Let me tell you.
9
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Cancel culture says, here s why this person is bad, and no one should talk to them, and they should be fired.
9
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And what does that do?
9
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It doesn t enliven the discussion.
9
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It makes everyone scared to talk, and it s the opposite.
9
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It shuts down discussion.
9
SPEAKER_01
So you still have your First Amendment.
9
SPEAKER_01
But First Amendment plus cancel culture equals you might as well have government censorship.
9
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First Amendment plus criticism culture, great.
9
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Now you have this vibrant marketplace of ideas.
9
SPEAKER_01
There s a very clear difference.
9
SPEAKER_01
And so when people criticize the cancel culture, and then someone says, oh, see, you re so sensitive now.
9
SPEAKER_01
Look, you re doing the cancel culture yourself.
9
SPEAKER_01
You re trying to punish this person for criticizing.
9
SPEAKER_01
No, no, no, no, no.
9
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Every good liberal, and I mean that in the lower case, which is that anyone who believes in liberal democracies, regardless of what they believe, should stand up and say no to cancel culture and say, this is not OK, regardless of what the actual topic is.
9
SPEAKER_01
and that makes them a good liberal, versus if they re trying to cancel someone who s just criticizing, they re doing the opposite.
9
SPEAKER_01
Now they re shutting, so it s the opposite of things, but it s very easy to get confused.
9
SPEAKER_01
You can see people take advantage of the, and sometimes they just don t know it themselves.
9
SPEAKER_01
The lines here can be very confusing.
9
SPEAKER_01
The wording can be very confusing, and without that wording, suddenly it looks like someone who s criticizing cancel culture is canceling, but they re not.
9
SPEAKER_00
You applied this thinking to universities in particular.
9
SPEAKER_00
There s a great, yet another great image on the trade-off between knowledge and conviction, and it s what s commonly, actually you can maybe explain to me the difference, but it s often referred to as the Dunning-Kruger effect, where you, when you first learn of a thing, you have an extremely high confidence about self-estimation of how well you understand that thing.
9
SPEAKER_00
You actually say that Dunning-Kruger means something else.
9
SPEAKER_01
So yeah, when I post this, everyone s like, Dunning-Kruger.
9
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And it s what everyone thinks Dunning-Kruger is.
9
SPEAKER_01
Dunning-Kruger is a little different.
9
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It s you have a diagonal line like this one, which is the place you are.
9
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I call it the humility tightrope.
9
SPEAKER_01
It s the humility sweet spot.
9
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It s exactly the right level of humility based on what you know.
9
SPEAKER_01
If you re below it, you re insecure.
9
SPEAKER_01
You actually have too much humility.
9
SPEAKER_01
You don t have enough confidence, because you know more than you re giving yourself credit for.
9
SPEAKER_01
And when you re above the line, you re in the arrogance zone.
9
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You need a dose of humility.
9
SPEAKER_01
You think you know more than you do.
9
SPEAKER_01
So we all want to stay on that tightrope.
9
SPEAKER_01
And Dunning-Kruger is basically a straight line that just has a lower slope.
9
SPEAKER_01
So you start off, you still are getting more confident as you go along.
9
SPEAKER_01
but you start off above that line, and as you learn more, you end up below the line later.
9
SPEAKER_00
So this wavy thing... This wavy thing is a different phenomenon, and it s related, but... So this idea, so for people just listening, there s a child s hill
9
SPEAKER_00
pretty damn sure you know a whole lot and feeling great about it, that s in the beginning, and then there s an insecure canyon, you crash down, acknowledging that you don t know that much, and then there s a growth mountain.
9
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Grown-up mountain.
9
SPEAKER_00
Grown-up mountain, where after you feel ashamed and embarrassed about not knowing that much, you begin to realize that knowing how little you know is the first step in becoming someone who actually knows stuff, and that s the grown-up mountain.
9
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and you climb and climb and climb.
9
SPEAKER_00
You re saying that in universities we re pinning people
9
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at the top of the child s hill.
9
SPEAKER_01
So for me, I think of myself with this, because I went to college like a lot of 18-year-olds, and I was very cocky.
9
SPEAKER_01
I just thought I knew a lot.
9
SPEAKER_01
And when it came to politics, I was like bright blue, just because I grew up in a bright blue suburb, and I wasn t thinking that hard about it.
9
SPEAKER_01
And what I did when I went to college is met a lot of smart conservatives and a lot of smart progressives.
9
SPEAKER_01
But I met a lot of people who weren t just going down a checklist, and they knew stuff.
9
SPEAKER_01
And suddenly I realized that a lot of these views I have are not based on knowledge.
9
SPEAKER_01
They re based on other people s conviction.
9
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Everyone else thinks that s true, so now I think it s true.
9
SPEAKER_01
Whoa, I m actually transferring someone else s conviction to me, and who knows why they have conviction.
9
SPEAKER_01
They might have conviction because they re transferring from someone else.
9
SPEAKER_01
And I m a smart dude, I thought.
9
SPEAKER_01
Why am I giving away my own independent
9
SPEAKER_01
you know, learning abilities here, and just adopting other views.
9
SPEAKER_01
So anyway, it was this humbling experience.
9
SPEAKER_01
And it wasn t just about politics, by the way.
9
SPEAKER_01
It was that I had strong views about a lot of stuff.
9
SPEAKER_01
And I just, I got lucky, or not lucky, I sought out, you know, the kind of people I sought out were the type that loved to disagree, and they were, man, they knew stuff.
9
SPEAKER_01
And so you re quickly in, again, ideal lab culture.
9
SPEAKER_01
It was an ideal lab.
9
SPEAKER_01
And also, I also went to, I started getting in the habit, I started loving listening to people who disagreed with me because it was so exhilarating listening to a smart, when I thought there was no credence to this other argument, right?
9
SPEAKER_01
This side of this debate is obviously wrong.
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SPEAKER_01
I wanted to see an Intelligence Squared on that debate.
9
SPEAKER_01
I actually got into Intelligence Squared in college.
9
SPEAKER_01
I wanted to see a smart person who disagrees with me talk.
9
SPEAKER_01
It became so fascinating to me.
9
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It was the most interesting thing.
9
SPEAKER_01
That was a new thing.
9
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I didn t think I liked that.
9
SPEAKER_01
And so what did that do?
9
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shoved me down the humble tumble here, number three, it shoved me down where I started to, and then I went the other way, where I realized that I had been, a lot of my identity had been based on this faux feeling of knowledge, this idea that I thought I knew everything.
9
SPEAKER_01
Now that I don t have that, I was like, I felt really like dumb, and I felt really almost like embarrassed of what I knew.
9
SPEAKER_01
And so that s where I call this insecure canyon.
9
SPEAKER_01
I think it s sometimes when you re so used to thinking you know everything, and then you realize you don t, it s like, it s,
9
SPEAKER_01
And then you start to realize that actually, really awesome thinkers, they don t judge me for this.
9
SPEAKER_01
They totally respect if I say, I don t know anything about this.
9
SPEAKER_01
They say, oh, cool, you should read this and this and this.
9
SPEAKER_01
They don t say, you don t know anything.
9
SPEAKER_01
They don t say that, right?
9
SPEAKER_01
And so, and not that I m, by the way, this is not to say I m now on Grownup Mountain and you should all join me.
9
SPEAKER_01
I often find myself drifting up with like a helium balloon.
9
SPEAKER_01
Oh, I think I read about the new thing and suddenly I think I have, I think I, you know, I read three things about, you know, a new AI thing and I m like, I ll go do a talk on this.
9
SPEAKER_01
I m like, no, I won t.
9
SPEAKER_01
I m going to just be spouting out the opinion of the person I just read.
9
SPEAKER_01
So I have to remind myself.
9
SPEAKER_01
But it s useful.
9
SPEAKER_01
Now, the reason my problem with colleges today is that I graduated in 2004.
9
SPEAKER_01
This is a recent change.
9
SPEAKER_01
All of those speakers I went who disagreed with me, a lot of them were conservative.
9
SPEAKER_01
So many of those speakers would not be allowed on campuses today.
9
SPEAKER_01
And so many of the discussions I had were in big groups or classrooms.
9
SPEAKER_01
And this was still, you know, this was a liberal campus.
9
SPEAKER_01
So many of those disagreements.
9
SPEAKER_01
They re not happening today, and I ve interviewed a ton of college students.
9
SPEAKER_01
It s chilly.
9
SPEAKER_01
It is, you know, people keep to themselves.
9
SPEAKER_01
So what s happening is not only are people losing that push off Child s Hill, which was so valuable to me, so valuable to me as a thinker, it kind of started my life as a better thinker.
9
SPEAKER_01
They re losing that, but actually what college, a lot of the college classes and the vibe in colleges, a lot of it is now saying that there is one right set of views, and it s this kind of woke ideology, and it s right, and anyone who disagrees with it is bad, and don t speak up unless you re gonna agree with it.
9
SPEAKER_01
It s teaching people that Child s Hill is, it s nailing people s feet to Child s Hill.
9
SPEAKER_01
It s teaching people that these are right, this views are right, and you don t have any, you should feel a complete conviction about them.
9
SPEAKER_00
How do we fix it?
9
SPEAKER_00
Is it part of the administration, is it part of the culture, is it part of the, is it part, like actually instilling in the individual, like 18 year olds, the idea that this is the beautiful way to live is to embrace a disagreement and the growth from that?
9
SPEAKER_01
It s awareness and courage.
9
SPEAKER_01
It s the same thing.
9
SPEAKER_01
So first of all, just get, awareness is, people need to see
9
SPEAKER_01
what s happening here, that kids are getting, losing the, they re not going to college and becoming better, tougher, more robust thinkers.
9
SPEAKER_01
They re actually going to college and becoming zealots.
9
SPEAKER_01
They re getting taught to be zealots.
9
SPEAKER_01
And the website still advertises, you know, wide variety of, you know, the website is a bait and switch.
9
SPEAKER_00
You list all the universities, yeah, Harvard.
10
SPEAKER_01
and switch.
10
SPEAKER_01
It s still saying, here, you re coming here for a wide intellectual.
10
SPEAKER_01
Basically, they re advertising this as an idea lab.
10
SPEAKER_01
And you get there, and it s like, actually, it s an echo chamber that you re paying money for.
10
SPEAKER_01
So if people realize that, they start to get mad, hopefully.
10
SPEAKER_01
And then courage, I mean, yes, brave students.
10
SPEAKER_01
There s been some very brave students who have started big think clubs and stuff like that, where it s like, we re going to have
10
SPEAKER_01
present both sides of a debate here, and that takes courage, but also courage and leadership.
10
SPEAKER_01
It s like, if you look at these colleges, it s specifically the leaders who show strength who get the best results.
10
SPEAKER_01
Remember, the cudgel is soft.
10
SPEAKER_01
So if a leader of one of these places says, you know, the college presidents who have shown some strength, they actually don t get as much trouble.
10
SPEAKER_01
It s the ones who pander, the ones who
10
SPEAKER_01
in that moment of truth, they shrink away, then they get a lot more trouble.
10
SPEAKER_01
The mob smells blood.
10
SPEAKER_00
For the listener, the podcast favorite Liv Burry just entered, and your friend just entered the room.
10
SPEAKER_00
Do you mind if she joins us?
10
SPEAKER_00
Please.
10
SPEAKER_00
I think there s a story she has about you.
10
SPEAKER_00
So Liv, you mentioned something that there s a funny story about.
10
SPEAKER_00
We haven t talked at all about the actual process of writing the book.
10
SPEAKER_00
Is there, you guys made a bet of some kind?
10
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
10
SPEAKER_00
Is this a true story?
10
SPEAKER_00
Is this a completely false fabric?
10
SPEAKER_01
No, no, it s true.
10
SPEAKER_01
Liv is, she s mean.
10
SPEAKER_01
I did not know mean Liv.
10
SPEAKER_01
She s like, she s like a bully.
10
SPEAKER_01
She s like scary.
10
SPEAKER_01
I have to have that screenshot.
10
SPEAKER_01
So Liv was FaceTiming me and she was like,
10
SPEAKER_01
She was like being intimidating.
10
SPEAKER_01
I took a screenshot and I made it my phone background.
10
SPEAKER_01
So every time I opened it, I was like, ah.
10
SPEAKER_02
So to give the background of this, it s because, if you hadn t noticed, Tim started writing this book, how many years ago?
10
SPEAKER_02
Six?
10
SPEAKER_01
2016, mid-2016.
10
SPEAKER_02
Right, as sort of a response to the Trump stuff.
10
SPEAKER_01
Not even.
10
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, it was just supposed to be a mini-post.
10
SPEAKER_01
I was like, I m looking at all these future tech things, and I feel this uneasiness.
10
SPEAKER_01
We re going to mess up all these things.
10
SPEAKER_01
Why?
10
SPEAKER_01
There s some cloud over our society.
10
SPEAKER_01
Let me just write a mini-post.
10
SPEAKER_01
And I opened it up to WordPress to write a one-day little essay.
10
SPEAKER_01
and things went.
10
SPEAKER_00
On politics.
10
SPEAKER_01
It was gonna be on this feeling I had that we were, our tech was just growing and growing, and we were becoming less wise.
10
SPEAKER_01
What s up with that?
10
SPEAKER_01
And I just wanted to write just a little thousand word essay on something I think we should pay attention to, and that was the beginning of this six year nightmare.
10
SPEAKER_00
Did you anticipate the blog post would take a long while?
10
SPEAKER_02
I don t remember the process fully in terms of... I remember you saying, oh, I m actually writing this.
10
SPEAKER_02
It s turning into a bigger thing.
10
SPEAKER_02
And I was like, hmm.
10
SPEAKER_02
Because the more we talked about it, I was like, oh, this goes deep.
10
SPEAKER_02
Because I didn t really understand the full scope of the situation, like nowhere near.
10
SPEAKER_02
And you sort of explained it.
10
SPEAKER_02
I was like, okay, yeah, I see that.
10
SPEAKER_02
And then the more we dug into it, the sort of the deeper and deeper and deeper it went.
10
SPEAKER_02
But no, I did not anticipate it would be six years, let s put it that way.
10
SPEAKER_00
When was your TED Talk on procrastination?
10
SPEAKER_01
So that was March of 2016, and I started this book three months later, and fell into the biggest procrastination hole that I ve ever fallen into.
10
SPEAKER_01
Oh, wow.
10
SPEAKER_01
The irony isn t lost on me.
10
SPEAKER_01
I like how much cred I have for that TED Talk.
10
SPEAKER_01
I m like, I am legit procrastinator.
10
SPEAKER_01
I m not just saying it.
10
SPEAKER_02
It wasn t just that.
10
SPEAKER_02
You did intend it to start out as a blog post, but then you re like, actually, this needs to be multiple.
10
SPEAKER_02
Actually, let s make it into a full series.
10
SPEAKER_02
You know what, I ll turn it into a book.
10
SPEAKER_01
But also what Liv witnessed a few times, and my wife has witnessed like 30 of these, is these
10
SPEAKER_01
these 180 epiphanies, where I ll be like, I ll like, I ll have a moment when I m, and I don t know what, you know, sometimes it s that there s a really good idea.
10
SPEAKER_01
Sometimes it s like, I m just dreading having to finish this the way it is.
10
SPEAKER_01
And so there s epiphanies where it s like, you know what, I need to start over from the beginning and just make this like a short, like 20 little blog post list.
10
SPEAKER_01
And then I ll do that.
10
SPEAKER_01
And they ll say, no, no, no, I have like a new epiphany.
10
SPEAKER_01
And it s these, and yeah, it s kind of like the crazy person a little bit.
10
SPEAKER_02
But anyway, can I tell the story of the bed?
10
SPEAKER_02
Things came to a head when we were all on vacation in Dominican Republic, Tim and his wife, me and Igor.
10
SPEAKER_02
We were in the ocean.
10
SPEAKER_02
I remember you d been in the ocean for like an hour, just bobbing in there, becoming it.
10
SPEAKER_02
We got talking and we were talking about the book.
10
SPEAKER_02
you were expressing just the horror of the situation, basically.
10
SPEAKER_02
You re like, look, I m so close, but there s still this, and then there s this.
10
SPEAKER_02
An idea popped into my head, which is poker players often, we will set ourselves negative bets.
10
SPEAKER_02
Like,
10
SPEAKER_02
Essentially, if we don t get a job done, then we have to do something we really don t want to do.
10
SPEAKER_02
Instead of having a carrot, like a really, really big stick.
10
SPEAKER_02
I had the idea to ask Tim, okay, what is the worst either organization or individual that you, if you had to, that you would loathe to give a large sum of money to?
10
SPEAKER_02
He thought about it for a little while and he gave his answer.
10
SPEAKER_02
I was like, all right, what s your net worth?
10
SPEAKER_02
He said his net worth, all right, 10 percent of your net worth to that thing if you don t get the draft.
10
SPEAKER_02
Just before that, I asked him, if you had a gun to your head or to your wife s head and you had to get the book into a state where you could send off a draft to your editor, how long?
10
SPEAKER_02
He s like, I guess I could get it 95 percent good in a month.
10
SPEAKER_02
I was like, okay, great.
10
SPEAKER_02
In one month s time, if you do not have that edit,
10
SPEAKER_02
10% of your net worth is going to this thing that you really, really think is terrible.
10
SPEAKER_01
But you re forgetting the kicker.
10
SPEAKER_01
The kicker was that, because, you know, procrastinators, they self-defeat.
10
SPEAKER_01
That s what they do.
10
SPEAKER_01
And then Liv says, I m gonna sweeten the deal.
10
SPEAKER_01
And I am going to basically match you.
10
SPEAKER_01
and I m going to put in, I m gonna send a huge amount of my own money there if you don t do it.
10
SPEAKER_01
And I can t, that would be really bad for her.
10
SPEAKER_01
So not only are you screwing yourself, you re screwing a friend.
10
SPEAKER_01
And she was like, and as your friend, because I m your friend, I will send it.
10
SPEAKER_01
I will send the money.
10
SPEAKER_01
I mean, like, you know, like, tyranny.
10
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
10
SPEAKER_01
And,
10
SPEAKER_01
I got the draft in.
10
SPEAKER_02
Just!
10
SPEAKER_01
Just!
10
SPEAKER_01
I know.
10
SPEAKER_02
Igor could attest to this.
10
SPEAKER_01
Actually, it was funny because it was supposed to be by the summer solstice or whatever it was.
10
SPEAKER_01
It was like a certain date.
10
SPEAKER_01
It was like four hours.
10
SPEAKER_01
No, I got it in at 4am, like the next morning.
10
SPEAKER_01
And they were both like, that doesn t count.
10
SPEAKER_01
I m like, it does.
10
SPEAKER_01
It s still, for me, it s the same day still.
10
SPEAKER_02
Can you imagine how fucked in the head you have to be to literally technically pass the deadline by four hours?
10
SPEAKER_02
for an obscene amount of money to a thing you loathe.
10
SPEAKER_02
That s how bad his sickness is.
10
SPEAKER_01
Because I knew the hard deadline.
10
SPEAKER_01
I knew that there was no way she was going to actually send that money because it was 4 a.m.
10
SPEAKER_01
So I knew I actually had the whole night.
10
SPEAKER_02
I should actually punish you.
10
SPEAKER_02
I should send like a nominal amount to that thing.
10
SPEAKER_01
No, thanks.
10
SPEAKER_01
No.
10
SPEAKER_00
But is there some micro like lessons from that from how to avoid procrastination writing a book that you ve learned?
10
SPEAKER_01
Yes, well, I ve learned a lot of things.
10
SPEAKER_01
I mean, first, don t write a dissertation about proving some grand theory of society, because that s really procrastinating.
10
SPEAKER_01
I would have been an awful PhD student for that reason.
10
SPEAKER_01
And so I m going to do another book, and it s going to be a bunch of short chapters that are one-offs, because it just doesn t feed into procrastination.
10
SPEAKER_00
But your book is a giant framework.
10
SPEAKER_00
There is grand theories all through your book.
10
SPEAKER_01
I know, and I learned not to do that again.
10
SPEAKER_01
I did it once, I don t wanna do it again.
10
SPEAKER_00
Oh, the book was a mistake, so the book is a giant mistake.
10
SPEAKER_01
Yes, don t do another one of these.
10
SPEAKER_01
Look, some people should, it s just not for me.
10
SPEAKER_01
But you just did it.
10
SPEAKER_01
I know, and it almost killed me.
10
SPEAKER_01
Okay, so that s the first one.
10
SPEAKER_01
But secondly, yeah, basically there s two ways to fix procrastination.
10
SPEAKER_01
One is you fix, it s like a picture you have a boat that s leaking and it s not working very well.
10
SPEAKER_01
You can fix it in two ways.
10
SPEAKER_01
You can get your hammer and nails out and your boards and actually fix the boat.
10
SPEAKER_01
Or you can duct tape it for now to get yourself across the river, but it s not actually fixed.
10
SPEAKER_01
So ideally down the road I have repaired whatever kind of bizarre mental illness that I have that makes me procrastinate in a very like I just don t self defeat in this way anymore.
10
SPEAKER_01
But in the meantime.
10
SPEAKER_01
I can duct tape the boat by bringing what I call the panic monster into the situation via things like this and this scary person.
10
SPEAKER_01
And having external pressure, to have external pressure of some kind is critical for me.
10
SPEAKER_01
It s, yes, I don t have the muscle to do the work I need to do without external pressure.
10
SPEAKER_00
By the way, Liv, is there a possible future where you write a book?
10
SPEAKER_01
And meanwhile, by the way, huge procrastinator, that s the funny thing about this.
10
SPEAKER_01
How long did your last video take you?
10
SPEAKER_01
Oh my God.
10
SPEAKER_00
Is there advice that you give to Liv, how to get the videos done faster?
10
SPEAKER_01
Well, it would be the same exact thing.
10
SPEAKER_01
I mean, actually, I can give good procrastination advice.
10
SPEAKER_01
Panic monster?
10
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, well, we should do it together.
10
SPEAKER_01
It should be like we have this date, but you know, it s...
10
SPEAKER_02
We should actually just do another bet.
10
SPEAKER_02
I have to have my script done by this time.
10
SPEAKER_02
Yes.
10
SPEAKER_02
I got to get the third part out.
10
SPEAKER_01
Because then you ll actually do it.
10
SPEAKER_01
And it s not the thing is the time in but it s like if you could take three weeks on a video and instead you take 10 weeks.
10
SPEAKER_01
It s not like, oh, well, I m having more fun in those 10 weeks.
10
SPEAKER_01
The whole 10 weeks are bad.
10
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, it s torture.
10
SPEAKER_01
Bad.
10
SPEAKER_01
So you re just having a bad time, and you re getting less work done and less work out.
10
SPEAKER_01
And it s not like you re enjoying your personal life.
10
SPEAKER_01
It s bad for your relationships.
10
SPEAKER_01
It s bad for your own.
10
SPEAKER_00
But you keep doing it anyway.
10
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, well, why do people have troubles keeping a diet, right?
10
SPEAKER_00
Primitive mind.
10
SPEAKER_00
Why d you point at me when you said that?
10
SPEAKER_00
That was offensive.
10
SPEAKER_02
What s your procrastination weakness?
10
SPEAKER_02
Do you have one?
10
SPEAKER_00
Everything, everything.
10
SPEAKER_00
What are you doing right now?
10
SPEAKER_00
Everything.
10
SPEAKER_00
Everything, preparing for a conversation.
10
SPEAKER_00
I had your book, amazing book.
10
SPEAKER_00
I really enjoyed it.
10
SPEAKER_00
I started reading it.
10
SPEAKER_00
I was like, this is awesome.
10
SPEAKER_00
It s so awesome that I m going to save it when I m behind a computer and can take notes, like good notes.
10
SPEAKER_00
Of course, that resulted in a last minute, everything, everything.
10
SPEAKER_00
Everything I m doing in my life.
10
SPEAKER_01
Not everyone s like that.
10
SPEAKER_01
People self-defeat in different ways.
10
SPEAKER_01
Some people don t have this particular problem.
10
SPEAKER_01
Adam Grant, he calls himself a pre-crastinator, where he gets an assignment, he will
10
SPEAKER_01
go home and do it until it s done and handed it, which is also not necessarily good.
10
SPEAKER_01
It s like you re rushing it either way, but it s better.
10
SPEAKER_01
Some people have the opposite thing, where the looming deadline makes them so anxious that they go and fix it.
10
SPEAKER_01
The procrastinator, I think, has a similar anxiety, but they resolve it in a totally different way.
10
SPEAKER_00
Or they don t solve it, they just live with the anxiety.
10
SPEAKER_01
Right, right, they just live with the anxiety.
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Now, I think there s an even bigger group of people, so there s these people, the Adam Grants, there s people like me, and then there s people who have a healthy relationship with deadlines, but they re still part of a bigger group of people that actually, they,
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they need a deadline there to do something.
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So they actually, they still are motivated by a deadline.
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And as soon as you have all the things in life that don t have a deadline, like working out and like working on that album you wanted to write, they don t do anything either.
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So there s actually like, that s why procrastination is a much bigger problem than people realize because it s not just the funny last second people.
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It s anyone who actually can t get things done that don t have a deadline.
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You dedicate your book, quote, to Tannis, who never planned on being married to someone who would spend six years talking about his book on politics, but here we are.
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What s the secret to a successful relationship with a procrastinator?
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That s maybe for both of you.
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Well, I think the first and most important thing.
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You already started with a political answer, I can tell.
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Okay, go ahead.
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No, the first and most important thing is, because people who don t procrastinate,
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If you re not, it s like, you will, people, their instinct is to judge it as like a...
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that either just think they re just being like a loser, or they ll take it personally, you know?
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And instead to see this as like, this is some form of addiction or some form of ailment.
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You know, they re not just being a dick, right?
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Like, they have a problem and some compassion, but then also maybe finding that line where you can, you know, maybe apply some tough love, some middle ground.
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On the other hand, you might say that, you know, you don t want the significant other
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relationship where it s like, they re the one nagging you.
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Maybe that s, you don t want them even being part of that.
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And I think maybe it s, you know, better to have a Liv do it instead.
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Right.
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Having someone who can like create the infrastructure where they aren t the direct stick.
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You need a bit of carrot and stick, right?
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Maybe they can be the person who keeps reminding them of the carrot.
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And then they set up a friend group to be the stick.
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And then that keeps your relationship in a good place.
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The stick, like looming in the background, that s your friend group.
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Okay, at the beginning of the conversation, we talked about how all of human history can be presented as a 1,000-page book.
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What are you excited about for the 1,000th, how do you say that, first page?
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So the next 250 years.
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What are you most excited about?
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I m most excited about, I don t know,
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Have you read The Fable of the Dragon?
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Okay, well, it s an allegory for death, and it s, you know, Nick Bostrom, and he talks about the, he compares death to a dragon that eats 60 million people, or whatever the number is, every year, and you just, every year, we shepherd those people up, and they feed them to the dragon, and that there s this Stockholm Syndrome, and we say, that s just a lot of man, and that s what we have to do, and anyone who says, maybe we should try to beat the dragon, they get called vain and narcissistic, but someone who,
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tries to, someone who does chemo, no one calls them bane or narcissistic, they say they re good, good for you, right?
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You re a hero, you re fighting the good fight.
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So I think there s some disconnect here, and I think that if we can get out of that Stockholm syndrome and realize that death is just the machine, the human physical machine failing, and that there s no law of nature that says you can t, with enough technology,
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repair the machine and keep it going until, I don t think anyone wants to live forever, people think they do, no one does, but until people are ready.
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And I think when we hit a world where we have enough tech that we can continue to keep the human machine alive until the person says, I m done, I m ready, I think we will look back and we will think that anything before that time, that ll be the real A.D., B.C.
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We ll look back at B.C.
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before the big advancement and it ll seem so sad and so heartbreaking, barbaric, and people will say, I can t believe
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that humans like us had to live with that when they lost loved ones and they died before they were ready.
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I think that s the ultimate achievement, but we need to stop criticizing and smearing people who talk about it.
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So you think that s actually doable in the next 250 years?
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Yes.
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A lot happens in 250 years, especially when technology really exponentially, yeah.
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And you think humans will be around versus AI completely takes over, where mortality means something completely different?
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I mean, look, the optimist in me, and maybe the stupid kind of 2023 person in me, says, yeah, of course, we ll make it, we ll figure it out.
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But you know, I mean.
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We are going into a, you know, I have a friend who knows as much about the future as anyone I know.
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I mean, he s really, he s a big investor in, you know, future tech, and he s really on the pulse of things, and he just says, the future s gonna be weird.
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That s what he says.
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The future s gonna be weird, and it s gonna be weird.
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Don t look at the last few decades of your life and apply that forward and say, that s just what life is like.
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No, no, no, it s gonna be weird and different.
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Well, some of my favorite things in this world are weird.
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And speaking of which, it s good to have this conversation.
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It s good to have you as friends.
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This was an incredible one.
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Thanks for coming back.
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And Liv, thanks for talking with me a bunch more times.
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This was awesome.
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Thank you, Lex.
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Thank you.
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Thanks for listening to this conversation with Tim Urban.
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To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.
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And now let me leave you with some words from Winston Churchill.
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When there s no enemy within, the enemies outside cannot hurt you.
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Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.