Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics | Lex Fridman Podcast #360

Of radical um political movement of which there will always be a lot in the country has managed to do something that a radical movement is not supposed to be able to do in the U.S which is they've managed to hijack institutions all across the country and hijack medical journals and universities and you know the ACLU you know saying all the you know activist organizations and Non-profits and many tech companies and the way I view a liberal democracy is it is that it is is a bunch of these institutions that were that were trial and error

crafted over you know hundreds of years and they all rely on trust public trust and there's certain kind of feeling of unity that actually is critical to a liberal democracy's functioning and with I see this thing is as a parasite on that that whose goal is and I'm not Saying each by the way each individual in this is I don't think they're bad people I think that it's it's the ideology itself has the property of its goal is to tear apart the pretty delicate workings of the liberal democracy and Shred the critical lines of trust

the following is a conversation with Tim Urban his second time in the podcast he's the author and illustrator of the amazing blog called wait but why and as The author of a new book coming out tomorrow called what's our problem a self-help book for societies we talk a lot about this book in this podcast but you really do need to get it and experience it for yourself it is a Fearless insightful hilarious and I think important book in this divisive time that we live in the Kindle version the audiobook and the web version should be

all available on day of publication I should also mention that my face might Be a bit more beat up than usual I got hit in the chin pretty good since I've been getting back into uh training Jiu Jitsu a sport I love very much after recovering from an injury so if you see marks on my face during these intros or conversations you know that my life is in a pretty good place this is the Lex Friedman podcast to support it please check out our sponsors in the description and now dear friends here's Tim Urban You

wrote an incredible book called what's our problem a self-help book for societies in the beginning you uh present this view of uh human history as a thousand page book where each page is 250 years and it's a brilliant visualization because almost nothing happens for most of it so what blows your mind most about that visualization we just sit back and think about it it's a boring book so 950 Pages 95 of the book hunter-gatherer is kind of doing their thing I'm sure there's you know there's some there's obviously some major cognitive advancements along the way

in language and I'm sure you know the bow and arrow comes around at some point you know so so tiny things but it's like oh now a 400 Pages tell the next thing but then you get to page 950 and things start moving recorded history starts at 9.76 right right it's basically the bottom Row is when anything interesting happens there's a bunch of Agriculture for a while before we know anything about it and then recorded history starts yeah 25 pages of actual like recorded history so when we think of prehistoric we're talking about pages one

through 975 of the book uh and then history is Page you know 976 to 1000. if you were reading the book it would be like epilogue a d you know the last little 10 pages of the book and we Think of a d is super long right 2000 years the Roman Empire 2 000 years ago like that's so long yeah human history has been going on for over 2 000 centuries like that is it's just it's hard to wrap your head around um and this is I mean even that's just the end of a very

long road like you know uh the hundred thousand years before that it's not like you know it's not like that was that different so it's Just there's been People Like Us that have emotions like us that have physical Sensations like us um for for so so long and who who are they all and what was their life like and it's you know I think we have no idea what it was like to be them the the thing that's craziest about the people of the far past is not just that they had different lives they had

different fears they had different dangers and Different responsibilities and they lived in tribes and everything but they didn't know anything like we just take it for granted that we're born on top of this Tower of knowledge and from the very beginning we we know that the Earth is a ball floating in space um and we know that we're going to die one day and we know that um you know we evolved from animals and all the those were all like incredible You know epiphanies quite recently and the people a long time ago they just had

no idea what was going on and like I'm kind of jealous because I feel like it I mean 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 and you don't know what's going to happen next and once you learn you're kind of like oh that's like it's a little Grim but they probably had the same capacity for Consciousness to experience the world to wander about the world maybe to construct narratives about the world and

myths and so on they just had less grounded systematic effects to play with they still probably felt the narratives the myths they constructed as intensely as we do oh yeah they also fell in love they also had friends and they had falling outs with friends they didn't shower much though they did not smell nice uh maybe They did maybe beauty is in the eye of the beholder yeah maybe it's all like relative so how about how many people in history have experienced a hot shower like almost none that's like when we're hot showers invented 100

years ago like less um so like like George Washington never had a hot shower it's like it's just kind of weird like he he took cold showers all the time or like Um and again we just take this for granted but that's like an unbelievable life experience to have a rain a controlled little booth where it rains hot water on your head and then you get out and it's not everywhere it's like contained um that was like you know they a lot of people probably lived and died with never experiencing hot water maybe they had

a way to heat water over a fire but like then it's I don't know it's just Like there's a there's so many things about our lives now that are completely just total anomaly it makes me wonder like what is the thing they've noticed the most I mean the sewage system like it doesn't smell in cities so what does the sewer system do I mean it gets rid of waste efficiently Etc we don't have to confront it both with our with any of our senses and that's probably wasn't there I mean what else plus all the

medical stuff associated With yeah I mean how about the disease yeah how about the the Cockroaches and the rats and the and the disease and the the plagues and you know and and then when they got so they they caught more diseases but then when they caught the disease they also didn't have treatment for it so they often would die or they would just be in a huge amount of pain they also didn't know what the disease was they didn't know about microbes that was this new thing the idea that these Tiny little animals that

are causing these diseases so what did they think you know in the the Bubonic plague you know and the black death um the 1300s people thought that it was an act of God because you know God's angry at us because why would you know why would you not think that if you didn't know what it was um and so the crazy thing is that these were the same primates so I do know something about them I know in some Sense what it's like to be them because I'm a human as well and to know that

this particular primate that I know what it's like to be experienced such different things it's and and like this isn't our life is not the life that this primate has experienced almost ever so it's just uh it's a bit strange I don't know I I have a sense that we would get acclimated very quickly like if we threw ourselves back a few thousand years ago it would be very uncomfortable at first But the whole hot shower thing you'll get used to it after a year you would not even like miss it because uh was there's

a few uh trying to remember which book that talks about hiking that Appalachian Trail but you kind of miss those hot showers but I have a sense like after a few months after a few years well you use your scale recalibrates yeah yeah I was saying the other day to a friend that whatever you used to you start to think That oh that the people that have more than me are more fortunate like it just sounds incredible I would be so happy but you know that's not true because you experience what would happen is you

would you would you would get these new things or you would you would get these new opportunities and then you would get used to it and then you would this the hedonic treadmill you'd come back to where you are and likewise though 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 you know what if you did you would adjust and you get used to it and you might not be that

much less happy than you are now so on the other side of the you being okay going back you know you we would survive if we had to go back um you know we'd have to learn some skills and but but we would buck up and you know people have gone to war before That were in the you know shopkeepers the year before that they were in the trenches the next year but on the other hand if you brought them here you know I always think it'd be so fun to just bring forget the hunter

gatherers bring a 1700s person here and tour them around take them on an airplane and show them your phone and all the things it can do show them the internet show them the grocery store Imagine taking them to A Whole Foods likewise I think they would be completely awestruck and on their knees crying tears of joy and then they'd get used to it and they'd be a complaining about like they don't you don't have these oranges in stock is like you know and that's you know the grocery store is a tough one to get used

to like when I when I first came to this country the uh the abundance of bananas was the thing that struck me the most or like Fruits in general but food in general but banana somehow struck me the most that you could just eat them as much as you want that took a long time for me probably took several years to really like get get acclimated to that is that why didn't you have bananas uh the number of bananas fresh bananas I don't that that wasn't available bread yes bananas no yeah it's like we don't

even know what to have like we don't even know the Proper levels of gratitude yeah you know walking around the grocery store I don't know to be like the bread's nice but the bananas are like we're so lucky I don't know I'm like oh I could have been the other way I have no idea well it's interesting then where we point our gratitude in the west in the United States probably do we point it away from materialist possessions towards or do we just Aspire That to do that towards other human beings that we love because

in the East and the Soviet Union growing up poor is having food is the gratitude having transportation is gratitude having warmth and shelters gratitude and now but see within that the Deep gratitude is for other human beings it's the Penguins huddling together for warmth in the cold I think it's a person by person basis I mean I'm sure yes of course in the west we will on average Feel gratitude towards different things or maybe a different level of gratitude maybe we feel less gratitude than some than countries that um you know obviously I think the

easiest that the person that's most likely to feel gratitude is going to be someone who's on who's whose life happens to be one where they just move up up throughout their life a lot of people in the greatest Generation you know people who were born in the 20s or Whatever and a lot of the Boomers too the 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 and I feel like that life trajectory

is naturally going to Foster gratitude right um because you're not going to take for granted these things because you didn't have them Um you know I didn't go out of the country really in my childhood very much um 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 after going on to the beach and then I started going out of the country like crazy in my 20s because I I really you know okay my favorite thing and I feel

like because I if I had grown up always doing That it would have been another thing I'm like yeah that's just something I do but I I still every time I go to a new country I'm like oh my God this is so cool and in another country this thing I've only seen on the map I'm like I'm there now and so I feel like it it it's a lot of times it's a product of what you didn't have and then you suddenly had but I still think it's Case by case in that there's a

there's like a meter in in everyone's had you know uh that I Think on on a at a 10 you are you're experiencing just immense gratitude right which is a euphoric feeling it's a great feeling um and it's um it makes you happy it's it's to savor what you have to look down at the mountain of stuff you have that you're standing on right to look to look down at and say oh my God I'm so lucky and I'm so grateful for this and this and this and I you know obviously that's a Happy exercise

now when you move the meter down to six or seven maybe you think that sometimes but you're you're not always thinking that um uh 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 and that's the opposite direction to look right and and that's the either that's that's Envy that's Yearning um or often it's it's if you think about your past um it's it's grievance right and

so then you go into a one and you have someone who feels like a complete victim they are just a victim of the Society of the their their their their siblings and their parents and their their loved one um and they are um they're wallowing in everything that's happened wrong to me Everything I should have that I don't everything that has gone wrong for me and so that's a very unhealthy mentally unhealthy place to be um anyone can go there you know there's an endless list of stuff you can you it can be aggrieved about

and an endless list of stuff you can have gratitude for and so it's it's in some ways it's a choice and it's a habit and maybe it's part of how we were raised our natural demeanor but it's such a good ex you are Really good at this by the way your Twitter is like go on well like uh like you're you you you were constantly just saying man I'm lucky or like I'm I'm so grateful for this and that's it's it's a good thing to do because you're reminding yourself but you're also reminding other people

to think that way it's like we are lucky um you know and um and so anyway I think that scale can go from one to ten and I think it's hard to be a ten I think You'd be very happy if you could be but I think trying to be above a five and looking down at the things you have more often than you are looking up at the things you don't or being you know resentful about the things that people have wronged you and well the interesting thing I think was an open question but

I suspect that you can control that knob for for the individual like you yourself can choose like the stoic philosophy you could choose where You are as a matter of habit like you said but you can also probably control that in a scale of a family of a tribe of us of a nation of a society I mean a lot you can describe a lot of the things that happens in Nazi Germany and different other parts of History through sort of societal envy and resentment that builds up maybe certain narratives pick up and then they

infiltrate your mind and then now your knob goes to from the gratitude for everything it goes to Resentment and envy and all Germany between the two World Wars you know like like you said the Soviet um kind of mentality um so yeah and then when you're soaking in a culture so there's kind of two factors right it's um it's it's what's going on in your own head and then what's surrounding you and what's surrounding you kind of has Concentric circles there's your immediate group of people because that group of people if they're a certain way

if they feel a lot of gratitude and they talk about it a lot that kind of insulates you from the broader culture because you know the the the people are gonna have the most impact on you are the ones closest but often they're all the all the concentric circles are saying the same Thing the people around you or they're feeling the same way that the broader Community which is feeling the same way as the broader country um and you know them I think this is why I think American patriotism you know nationalism you know can

be tribal can be very not not a good thing patriotism um I think is is a great thing because really what is patriotism I mean it's if you love your country you should love Your fellow countrymen you know Patriot you know that's a Reagan quote it's like patriotism is like I think a feeling of like um Unity um and but it also comes along with an implicit kind of concept of gratitude because it's like we are so lucky to live in you know people you know think it's chauvinist to say we live in the best

country in the world right and you know yes when Americans say that no one Likes it right but actually it's not a bad thing to think it's a nice thing to think it thinks it's a way of saying I'm so grateful for all the great things this country gives to me in this country has done and and I think you know if you heard the Philip you know a Filipino person say you know what the Philippines is the best country in the world no one in America would say that's chauvinist they'd say awesome right because

when you're coming from someone you know Who's not American it sounds totally fine um but I think I think you know national pride is actually good now again that can quickly translate into xenophobia nationalism and so you know you have to make sure it doesn't go off that Cliff but yeah there's good ways to formulate that like you talk about we'll talk about like high wrong progressivism higher on conservatism those are two different ways of Of uh embodying patriotism so you could talk about maybe loving the tradition that this country stands for or you could

talk about loving the people the uh that ultimately push progress and those are from an intellectual perspective a good way to represent uh patriotism we've got to zoom out because this this graphic is epic a lot of images in your book are just Epic on their own is brilliantly done but this one has uh famous people For each of the cards foreign like the best of yeah uh for you by the way good for them to be the person yeah that that it's not that I could have chosen lots of people for each card but

I think most people would agree you know that's a pretty fair choice for each each page and to good for them to be able you know you crushed it if you can be the person for your whole 250 year page so well I noticed you put Gandhi Didn't put Hitler I mean there's a lot of people gonna argue with you about that particular last page true yes you're right I could have I could have put a I actually I was thinking about Darwin there too though um yeah exactly you really could have put anyone anything

about putting yourself for a second yeah I should have I should have that would have been awesome I'm sure that would have endeared the readers to me from right From the beginning of the first page of the book a little bit of a Messianic complex going on but yeah so the list of people just you know so these are 250 year chunks the last one being from 1770 to 2020 And So It Goes Gandhi Shakespeare Joan of Arc Genghis Khan Charlemagne Muhammad Constantine Jesus Cleopatra Aristotle it's so interesting to think about this very recent human

history that's 11 pages so it would be 27.50 almost 3 000 Years just that there's these figures that stand out and then Define the course of human history and it's like the create the craziest thing to me is that like Buddha was a dude he was a guy with like arms and legs and fingernails that he may be bit and like he likes certain foods and maybe he got like uh you know he had like digestive issues sometimes and like he got cuts and they stung and like he was a guy Um and he had

hopes and dreams and he probably had a big ego for a while before he gets Buddha totally overcame that one but like and it's like who knows you know you know what the myth the mythical figure who knows how similar he was but the fact same with Jesus like this was a good guy like to me it's he's a primate yeah what uh impact he was a cell first and then a baby yeah and he was a fetus at some point he's a dumb baby trying to Learn how to walk yeah like having tantrum yeah

um because he's frustrated because he's in the terrible twos Jesus was in the terrible twos who didn't never had a tantrum let's be honest the myth the mother was like this this Baby's great like wow let's figure something out it just I mean this I mean listen hearing learning about Genghis Khan it's incredible to me because it's just like this was some um Mongolian You know herder guy who was it taken as a slave and he was like dirt poor you know catching rats is it you know young teen with you know to feed him

and his mom and his I think his brother um and it was just like the the the odds on when he was born he was just one of you know probably tens of thousands of random teen boys living in Mongolia in the 1200s the odds of that person any one of them being a household name today That we're talking about it's just crazy like what had to happen um and for that guy to for that poor dirt poor herder to take over the world I don't know so history just like continually blows my mind like

you know and here's the reason you and I are related probably yeah no I mean we're it's it's also that's the other thing is that some of these dudes by becoming King by being having a better Army at the right time you know William the Conqueror whatever has is in the right place at the right time with the right Army you know and there's a weakness at the right moment and he comes over and he exploits it and ends up probably having you know I don't know a thousand children and those children are high up

people who might be have a ton this species is different now because of him like if that if I forget England's different or you know European borders look different like like we are like we Look different and because of a small handful of of people um you know yeah certain when I sometimes I think I'm like oh you know this part of the world I can recognize someone's Greek you know someone's Persian someone's wherever because you know they kind of have certain facial features and I'm like it may have happened I mean obviously it's that's

a population but it may be that like someone 600 years ago that looked like that really spread their seed and That's why the ethnicity looks kind of like that now sorry anyway yeah yeah do you think individuals like that can turn the direction of History or is that an illusion that narrative would tell ourselves well it's both I mean so I said William the Conqueror right or Hitler right it's not that Hitler was born and destined to be great at all right I think in a lot of cases he's um frustrated artist with a temper

who's Turning over the table in his studio and hitting his wife and being kind of a dick uh and a total nobody right um I think almost all the times you could have put Hitler baby on Earth he's uh he's a rando right you know and maybe he's a you know maybe sometimes he becomes a you know some kind of you know he uses the speaking ability because that ability was going to be there either way but maybe he uses it for something else But um but that said I don't also do I think you

but it's not that um oh World War II was gonna happen either way right so it's both it's that like these circumstances were one way and this person came along at the right time and those two made a match made in in this case hell but it makes you wonder yes it's a match in hell but are there other people that could have taken this Place or do these people that stand out they're the rare spark of uh that genius whether to take us towards evil towards good whether those figures singularly Define the trajectory of

humanity you know what defines the trajectory of humanity in the 21st century for example might be the influence of AI might be the influence of nuclear war negative or positive not in the case of a nuclear war but uh the bioengineering Nanotech virology what else is there maybe the structure of governments and so on maybe the structure of universities I don't know there could be singular figures that stand up and lead the way for human there will be but I wonder if the society is the thing that manifests that that person or that person really

does have a huge impact I think it's probably a spectrum where there are some cases When a circumstance was such that something like what happened was gonna happen if you pluck that person from the earth I don't know whether the Mongols is a good example or not but maybe it could be that if you plucked Genghis Khan as a baby there was because of the specific way Chinese civilization was at that time and the specific you know climate you know that was that was causing a certain kind of pressure On the Mongols and the way

they they still had their great archers and they had their horses and they had a lot of the same advantages so maybe it was like it was waiting to happen right it was going to happen either way and uh may not have happened to sit to the extent or whatever so maybe or you could go the full other direction and say actually this was probably not gonna happen um and you know I think World War II is an example right I kind of think World War II really was kind of the the work of it

of course it relied on all these other circumstances you had to have the resentment in German you have had the Great Depression but like um I think if you take Hitler out I'm pretty sure World War One World War II doesn't happen 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 so who are the key players in social media Mark Zuckerberg what's the name of the Myspace Guy Tom Tom yeah um there's

a meme going around where like Myspace is like the perfect social media because no algorithmic involvement everybody's happy and positive but also Tom did it right yeah at the time you're like oh man Tom only made like a few million dollars he sucks to not be Zuck Tom might be living a nice life right Now where he doesn't have this in nightmare that these other people have yeah and he's always smiling his profile picture and then so there's like Larry Page so with Google that's kind of intermingled into that whole thing into the development of

the internet Jack Dorsey now Elon um who else I mean there's people playing with the evolution of social media and to me that seems to be Connected to the development of AI and it seems like those singular figures will Define the direction of AI development and social media development with social media seeming to have such a huge impact on our collective intelligence it does feel in one way like individuals have an especially big impact right now in that a small number of people are pulling some big levers um and you know there can be a

little Meeting of three people at Facebook and they come out and they come in they come out of that meeting and make a decision that totally changes the world right on the other hand you see a lot of a lot of Conformity you see a lot of you know they all pulled the plug on Trump the same day right so that suggests that there's some bigger force that is also kind of driving them in which case it's less about the individuals I think you know This is what you know what is leadership right I mean

to me leadership is the ability to move things in a direction that the cultural forces are not already taking things right A lot of times people seem like a leader because they're just kind of hopping on the cultural wave and they happen to be the person who gets to the top of it now it seems like they're but actually the the wave was already going like real leadership is when Um is is when someone actually changes the wave changes the shape of the wave like I think Elon with you know SpaceX and and with Tesla

like genuinely like shaped a wave you know maybe you could say that EVS were actually like they were gonna happen anyway but it's there's no it's not much evidence about at least happening when it did uh you know if we end up on Mars you know you can you can say that Elon was a genuine like leader there and so there are Examples now like Zuckerberg definitely has done a lot of leadership along the way he's also um potentially kind of like caught in a a storm that is happening and you know he's one of

the figures in it so I don't know and it's possible that he is a big shaper if the metaverse becomes a reality if in 30 years we're all living in a virtual world to many people it seems ridiculous now that that was a Poor investment we talked about getting you know 10 you know I think it was something like a billion people with um a VR headset in their pocket and by you know I think 10 years from now back in 2015 so we're hyper behind that but when I he was talking about that and

honestly I I this is something I've been wrong about because I I went to like one of the Facebook conferences and tried out all the new Oculus stuff and I was like you Know pretty early talking to some of the you know major players there because I was going to write a big post about it that then got swallowed by this book but um but I would have been wrong in the post because in what I would have said was that this thing is when I tried it I was like this is you know some

of them were suck 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 and I said I said I can make this

something on the screen move and the same feeling I had the first time someone showed me how to send an email it was like really early and He's like you can send this and I was like it goes I can press enter on my computer and something happens on your computer those were obviously you know when you have that feeling it often means you're you're witnessing a paradigm shift and I thought this is one of those things and I still kind of think it is but it's kind of weird that it hasn't you know like

where's the VR Revolution like yeah I'm surprised because I'm I'm with you My first and still instinct is this feels like it changes everything VR feels like it changes everything but it's not changing anything like and a dumb part of my brain is genuinely convinced that this is real but then the smart part knows it's not but that's why the dumb part was like we're not walking off that Cliff the smart part's like you're on your rug it's fine the dumb part of my brain is like I'm not walking off the cliff so it's like

it's crazy I Feel like it's waiting for like that revolutionary person who comes in and says I'm going to create a headset like honestly yeah Steve Jobs iPhone of honestly a little bit of a Carmack type guy which is why it was really interesting for him to be involved with with Facebook is basically how do we create 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

I mean I don't know what exactly was the thing that changed everything with the personal computer does that understood why that maybe Graphics what well was the use case I mean exactly it wasn't it wasn't the the not 84 Macintosh like a a moment when it was like this is actually something that normal people can and want to use because it was less than five thousand Dollars I think it was and I just think it had some like Steve Jobs user friendliness already to it that other ones hadn't had I think Windows 95 was a

really big deal yet they I remember like because I I'm old enough to remember the MS-DOS when I was like kind of remembered the command and then suddenly this concept of like a window you drag something into or you double click an icon which now seems like so obvious to us was like revolutionary because it Made it it made it intuitive so you know I don't yeah Windows 95 was good it was crazy yeah I forget what the big leaps was because those Windows 2000 it sucked and then Windows XP was good I moved to

Mac around 2004 so I stopped I sold your soul to the devil I see well us the people still use uh Windows and Android uh the device in the operating system of the people not you elitist folk with your books and your uh what else and success okay Uh you write more technology means better good times but it also means better bad times and the scary thing is if the good and bad keep exponentially growing it doesn't matter how great the good times become if the bad gets to a certain level of bad it's all

over for us can you elaborate on this why why is there why does the bad have uh that property that if it's all exponentially getting more powerful then the bat is going to Win in the end was is my misinterpreting that no so the first thing is I noticed a trend which was like the centuries the good is getting better every Century like the 20th century was the best Century yet in terms of prosperity in terms of GDP per capita in terms of life expectancy in terms of poverty and disease and every metric that matters

the 20th century was incredible it also had the biggest Wars In history the biggest genocide in history the biggest existential threat yet with nuclear weapons right you know it the Depression was you know probably as big an economic so it's this interesting thing where the stakes are getting higher in both directions and so the question is like if you get enough good does that protect you against the bat right the the the the dream and I do think this is possible too is the good gets so good you know have you ever read The culture

series The Ian Banks books not yet but I get criticized on a daily basis but some of the mutual folks we know for not having done so lots and I feel like a lesser man for it yes I need to say so that that that's how I got onto it and I read six of the ten books um and they're great but the thing I love about them is like it just paints one of these futuristic societies where the good has has gotten so good that the bad is no Longer even an issue like basically

and the way that this this works is the AI you know the AIS um are benevolent and they control everything and so like there's one random anecdote where they're like you know what happens if you murder someone in because he's still you know there's still people with rage and jealousy or whatever so so someone murdered someone um first of all that person's backed up So it's like they help to get a new body and it's it's annoying but it's like it's not death and secondly that person what are they gonna do put them in jail

no no they're just gonna send a slap drone around which is this little like tiny you know random drone that just will float around next to them forever and by the way kind of be their servants like it's kind of fun to have a slap drone but just making sure that they never do anything and it's like I was Like oh man it could just be everyone could be so safe and everything could be so like you know you want a house you know the as will build your house there's endless space there's endless resources

so I do think that that could be part of our future that's part of what excites me is like there is like today would seem like a utopian to Thomas Jefferson right Thomas Jefferson's world would seem like a Utopia to a caveman There is a future and by the way these are happening faster these jumps right so the thing that would seem like a Utopia to us we could experience in our own lifetimes right like it's especially a female life extension it combines with exponential progress um I want to get there and I think if

in that part of what makes it Utopia is you don't have to be as scared of the the worst bad guy in the world trying to do the worst damage because we have Protection but that said um I'm not sure how that happens like it's it's either easier said than done Nick Bostrom uses the example of if nuclear weapons could be manufactured by microwaving sand for example we'd probably be in the Stone Age right now because 0.001 of people would love to destroy all Humanity right some 16 year old with Huge mental health problems who

right now goes and shoots up a school would say oh even better I'm going to blow up a city and now suddenly there's copycats right and so that's like as our technology grows it's going to be easier for the worst bad guys to do and tremendous damage and it's easier to destroy than to build so it takes a tiny tiny number of these people with enough power to do bad so that to Me I'm like the stakes are going up because the the what we have to lose is this incredible Utopia but also like dystopia

is real it happens the Romans ended up in a dystopia they've probably earlier thought that was never possible like we should not get cocky and so to me that that trend is the exponential Tech is a double-edged sword it's so exciting I'm happy to be alive now overall because I'm an optimist and I find it exciting but it's really scary and we and and the the the the the dumbest thing we can do is not be scared dumbest thing we can do is get cocky and think well my life is always the last couple Generations

everything's been fine stop that what's Your Gut what percentage of trajectories take us towards the as you put unimaginably good future versus unimaginably bad future is I think are You as an optimist it's really hard to know I mean it all like you know one of the things we can do is look at history and on one hand there's a lot of stories actually listening to a great podcast right now called the fall of civilizations um and it's literally every episode is like you know a little like two hour Deep dive into some civilization some

are really famous like the Roman Empire Some are more obscure like the the Norse in Greenland but um but it's each one is so interesting but what's it's I mean there's a lot of civilizations that had their Peak there's always the peak right when they're thriving and they're they're Max size and and and they have their waterways and they have their civilized and it's representative and it's fair and whatever I'm not not always but it's It's uh the peak is a great you know if I could go back in time you know it's not that

you don't you know the farther you go back the worse it gets no no you want to go back to a civilization during I would go to the Roman Empire in the year 100. it sounds great right you don't want to go to the Roman Empire in the year 400. we might be in the peak right now here whatever honestly I I think about like the 80s you know the 70s the 80s Here We Go the music no no It's so much better no the 80s culture is so annoying it's just like I'm I'm when

I re when I listen to these things I'm thinking you know the 80s and 90s America the 90s was popular if people forget that now like Clinton was a superstar around the world Michael Jordan was exported internationally then basketball was everywhere suddenly you had like music the sports whatever it was a little probably like the 50s you know you're coming out of the World War And the depression before it was like this kind of like everyone was in a good mood kind of time you know it's like a finish a big project and it's Saturday

it was like I feel like the 50s was kind of like everyone was having it you know the the um 20s I feel like everyone was in good mood randomly um then the the 30s everyone was in a bad mood um but the 90s I think we'll look back On it as a time when everyone was in a good mood and it was like you know again of course at the time it doesn't feel that way necessarily but I look at that I'm like maybe that was kind of America's Peak and like no maybe not

but like it hasn't been popular since really worldwide um it's gone in and out depending on the country but like it hasn't reached that level of like America's awesome around the world and the political you know situations gotten You know really ugly and you know maybe it's social media maybe who knows but I I wonder if it'll ever be a simple and and positive as it was then like maybe we are in the in the you know it feels a little like maybe we're in the beginning of the downfall or not because because these things

don't just go it's not a perfect smooth Hill it goes up and down and up and down so maybe we're there's another big upcoming and it's unclear whether public opinion which is Kind of what you're talking to is uh correlated strongly with influence as you could say that even though America's been on a decline in terms of public opinion the exporting of Technology that America has still with all the talk of China has still been leading the way in terms of AI in terms of social media in terms of just basically any software related product

like chips yeah chips so hardware and software I mean America leads the way you could argue that Google and Microsoft and Facebook are no longer American companies they're International companies but they really are still at the you know headquarters in Silicon Valley broadly speaking so uh in Tesla of course and just all of its all the technological innovation still seems to be happening in the in the United States although culturally and politically it this is not it's not it's not good well maybe that could shift at any Moment when all the technological development can actually

be create some positive impact in the world yeah that can shift it with the right leadership and so on with the right messaging yeah I I think um I I don't feel confident at all about whether no no I don't mean that I don't mean I don't feel confident in my opinion that we may be on the downswing or that we may be I truly don't know It's like I think the people foreign stories that are really hard to see when you're inside of them it's like it's like being on a beach and and running

around you know a few miles this way I've been trying to suss out the shape of the coastline like it's just really hard to see the big picture you know you get caught up in the the the micro Stories the little tiny you know ups and downs that are part of some bigger Trend And and also giant Paradigm shifts happen quickly nowadays the internet you know came out of nowhere and suddenly was like you know change everything so there could be a changed everything thing on the way it seems like there's a few candidates for

it and like but but I mean it feels like the stakes are just High it higher than it even was for the Romans higher than it was for because um that we we're more powerful as a Species we have god-like powers with technology that other civilizations at their Peak didn't have and so I I wonder if those high stakes and Powers will feel laughable to people that live humans aliens cyborgs whatever lives 100 years from now that maybe maybe are a little like this feeling of political and technological turmoil is is nothing well that's the

big question you could EAS so right now you know you know the 1890s was like a super politically Contentious decade in the U.S it was like immense tribalism um and the newspapers were all like lying and telling you know you know there was a lot of like what we would associate with today's media the worst of it um and it was over gold or silver being this I don't know it was very it's something that I don't understand but the point is it was a little bit of a blip right it happened it felt it

must Have felt like the end of days at the time and then now we most people don't even know about that uh versus you know again the Roman Empire actually collapsed and so the the question is just like is yeah you know will in 50 years will this be like or like McCarthyism oh they had like uh oh that was like a crazy few years in America and then it was fine um or is this the beginning of something really big and then that's what Well I wonder if we can predict uh what the big

thing is at the beginning it feels like we're not we're just here along for the ride and at the local level and at every level of trying to do our best how do we do our best what's the that's the one thing I know for sure is that we need to have our wits about us and do our best and the way that we can do that you know we have to be as why is this possible Right to proceed forward and wisdom Ever is an emergent property of discourse so your proponent of wisdom versus

stupidity because you can make an uh uh I can still man the case for stupidity do it I probably can't but there's some I think wisdom and you talk about this can come with a false confidence arrogance I mean you talk about this in the book that's too easy that's not wisdom then if you're being arrogant you're being unwise unwise yeah you know I think I think wisdom is doing what people a hundred years from now with the hindsight that we don't have would do if they could come back in time and they knew everything

it's like how do we figure out how to have hindsight when we actually are not what if stupidity is the thing that people from 100 years from now will see us wise being naive and uh trusting everybody maybe that well then you get lucky then then you you know then maybe you get to A good a good future by stumbling upon it um but ideally you you can get there like I think a lot of we America the great things about it are a product of the wisdom of previous Americans you know the Constitution was

a pretty you know pretty wise system to set up there's not much stupid stumbling around well there is I mean with the Huskies uh the idiot Prince Michigan and uh Brothers karmazov there's uh uh aliosha You err on the side of love and almost like a naive trust in other human beings and that turns out to be at least in my perspective and long term for the success of the species is actually wisdom it's a compass we don't know it's because you're in the fog in the fog it's a compass yeah love is a compass

okay but but here's the thing so I think we should have a compass is nice but you know what else Is nice is a flashlight in the fog that can help you can't see that far but you can see oh you can see four feet ahead instead of one foot and that to me is discourse that is open vigorous like discussion in a culture that Fosters that is how the species is how the the the the the American citizens as a unit can be as wise as possible can maybe see four feet ahead instead of

one foot ahead that said uh Charles Bukowski said that Love is a fog that Fades with the first light of reality so I don't know how that works out but I feel like there's intermixing of metaphors that works okay uh you also write that quote as the authors of the story of us which is this thousand page book we have no mentors no editors no one to make sure it all turns out okay it's all in our hands this scares me but it's also what gives me hope 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 do you think we can possibly Define what a good future looks like I mean this is uh the problem with that we ran into with Communism of thinking of utopia of having a deep confidence about what a utopian world looks like well it's a deep confidence that was a Deep confidence about the instrumental way to get there it was that you know I think a lot of us can agree that if everyone had everything they needed

and we didn't have disease or poverty and people could live as long as they wanted to and choose when to die and there was no existential major existential threat because we control I think almost everyone can agree that would be great that communism is a that was they said this is the way to get There and that is that that's a different question you know so the the unimaginably good future I'm PR I'm picturing I think a lot of people would picture and I think most people would agree now not everyone there's a lot of

people out there who would say humans are the scourge on the earth and we should degrowth or something but I think a lot of people would agree that you know just again take Thomas Jefferson bring him here he Would see it as utopia for obvious reasons for the the medicine the the food the transportation um just how uh the quality of life and the safety and all of that so extrapolate that forward for us now we were Thomas Jefferson you know what's the equivalent that's what I'm talking about and the and the big question is

I actually don't I I don't try to say here's the way to get there here's the actual specific way To get there I try to say how do we have a flashlight so that we can together figure it out like how do we give ourselves the best chance of figuring out the way to get there and I think part of the problem with with Communists um and people is ideologues is that they're they're way too overconfident that they know the way to get there and and it's it becomes a religion to them this solution and

then you're not you can't update once you have a solution as A religion and so I felt a little violated when you said Communists and stare deeply into myself um in this book you've developed a framework for how to fix everything um it's called the latter can you explain it okay it's not a framework for how to fix everything just I would never say that I'll explain it to Tim Urban at some point okay how this humor thing works yeah framework of uh how to think About collaboration between humans such that we could fix things

I think it's a compass it's like uh it's like a 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 sure not this side um and so it gives us a direction to go and so what are the parts of the ladder so I have these two characters this orange guy this primitive mind is this is our software 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 and not even not just not really survive but help them pass their genes on in that world um and civilization happened quickly and brains changed slowly and so that unchanged dude is still running the show in our head Um and I use the example of like Skittles like why do we eat Skittles it's trash it's obviously bad for you and it's because the Primitive mind in the world that it was programmed for there was no Skittles and it was just fruit and you know and and if

there was a dense chewy Sweet fruit like that it meant you just found like a calorie Gold Mine energy energy take it take it eat As much as you can gorge on it hopefully you get a little fat that would be the dream and now we're so good with energy for a while we don't have to stress about it anymore so today Mars Inc is clever and says let's not sell things to people's higher Minds who's the other character let's sell the people's primitive Minds primitive minds are dumb and let's trick them into thinking this

is this new this this thing you should eat and then they'll eat it now Mars Inc Is a huge company actually just a little real quick see you said primitive mind and higher mind so those are the two things that make up this bigger mind that it that is the modern human being yeah it's like you know it's not perfect obviously there's a lot of crossover um there's people who will yell at me for saying there's two minds and you know that but to me it's just still a useful framework where you have this software

that has making Decisions based on a world that you're not in anymore and then you've got this other character I call it the higher mind and it's the part of you that knows that skills are not good and can override the Instinct and the reason you don't always eat Skittles is because the higher Minds says no no no we're not doing that because that's bad and I know that right now you can apply that to a lot of things the higher Minds the one that knows I shouldn't procrastinate the Primitive Minds the one that wants

to conserve energy and not do anything icky and you know can't see the future so he procrastinates that you know you can apply this no I in this book apply it to um to how we form our beliefs is one of the ways and then eventually the politics and political movements but like if you think about what well what's the equivalent of the Skittles tug of war in your head for how do you form your Beliefs um and it's that the Primitive mind in the world that it was optimized for um it wanted to feel

conviction about its beliefs it wanted to be sure that it was um I wanted to feel conviction and it wanted to agree with the people around there didn't want to stand out it wanted to to perfectly agree with the tribe about the tribe's sacred beliefs right And so there's a big part of us that wants to do that that doesn't like changing our mind it feels like it's part of our the Primitive mind identifies with beliefs feels like it's a threat a physical threat to you to your primitive mind when you change your mind or

when someone disagrees with you in a smart way so there's that huge force in us which is confirmation bias that's where that comes from it's it's this this desire to keep believing what We believe and this desire to also fit in with our beliefs to believe what the people around us believe and that can be fun in some ways we all like the same sports team and we're all super into it and we're all gonna be biased about that call together I mean that it's not always bad but um it's not a very smart way

to be and it you're actually you're working kind of for those ideas those ideas are like your boss and you're working so hard to keep believing those Those ideas are you know a really paper comes in that you read that that conflicts with those ideas and you will do all this work to say that paper is bullshit because you're a faithful employee of those ideas now the higher mind to me the same party that can override the Skittles can override this and can and can search for something that makes a lot more sense which is

Truth uh because what rational being wouldn't want to know the truth Who wants to be delusional and so there's this tug of war because the higher mind doesn't identify with ideas why would you it's an experiment you're doing it's a mental model and if someone can come over and say you're wrong you'd say where show me show me and if they point out something that is wrong and say oh thanks oh good I just got a little smarter right you're not going to identify with the thing go yeah kick it see if you can break

it if you can break It it's not that good right so there's both of these in our heads and there's this tug of war between them uh and sometimes you know if you're telling me about something with AI I'm probably gonna think with my higher mind because I'm not identified with it but if you go when you criticize the ideas in this book or you criticize my religious beliefs or your criticize I might have a harder time because the Primitive mind says no no those are our special ideas And so yeah so that's that's one

way to use this ladder is like it's a spectrum you know at the top the higher mind is doing all the thinking and then as you go down it becomes more of a tug of war and at the bottom the Primitive mind is in total control and this is distinct as you show from the spectrum of ideas so this is how you think versus what you think and those are distinct those are different dimensions we need we need a vertical axis we have all these Horizontal axes Left Right Center or you know you know this

opinion all the way to this opinion but it's like what's much more important than where you stand is how you got there right and how you think so this helps if if I can say this person's kind of on the left or on the right but they're up high I think I think in other words I think they got there using evidence and reason and they were willing to change their mind now that means a lot to me what they have to Say if I think they're just a tribal person and I can predict all

their beliefs from hearing one because it's so obvious what political beliefs that person's views are irrelevant to me because they're not real they didn't come from information they came from a tribe's kind of you know sacred Ten Commandments I really like the comic you have in here but with the boxer uh this is the best boxer in the world wow cool who has he beaten no one he's never Fought anyone then how do you know he's the best boxer in the world I can just tell now I mean this connects with me and I think

with a lot of people just because in martial arts it's especially kind of true that this is this whole legend about different martial artists and that kind of would construct like action figures like you know thinking that uh Steven Seagal is the best fighter in the world or Chuck Norris But Chuck Norris is actually backed up he's Done really well in competition but still the ultimate test for particularly for martial arts is what we now know is uh mixed martial arts UFC and so on and that's the actual scientific testing ground some meritocracy yeah exactly

I mean there's within certain rules and you can criticize those rules like this doesn't actually represent the broader combat that you would think of when you're thinking about martial arts but reality is you're actually testing Things and that's when you realize that Aikido and some of these kind of woo-woo martial arts in their certain limitations don't work in the way you think they would in the context of fighting I think this is one of the places where everyone can agree which is why it's a really nice comic because then you start to talk about map

this onto ideas that people take personally it starts becoming a lot more difficult to um To basically highlight that we're thinking with uh not with our higher mind but without primitive mind yeah I mean if if I'm thinking with my higher mind and now here is you can use different things for an idea as a metaphor so here the metaphor is a boxer yeah for and for one of your conclusions one of your beliefs and if I'm if I'm if I'm if all I care about is truth and up in other words for the That

means all I care about is having a good boxer I would say go go yeah try see if this person's good go go in other words I would get into arguments which is throwing my boxer out there to fight against other ones um and if I think my argument's good by the way I love boxing if I if I think my guy is is amazing you know Mike Tyson I'm thinking oh yeah bring it on who Wants to come see I bet no one can beat my boxer I love a good debate right in that

case now what would you think about my boxer if not only had was I telling you he was great but he's never boxed anyone but then you said okay well your idea came over to try to punch him and I screamed and I said what are you doing that's violence and you're you're in your and you're an awful person and I don't want to be friends with you anymore because You you would think this boxer obviously sucks and or at least I think it sucks deep down because uh why would I be so empty anyone

note boxing aloud you know people so I I think if you're in so this I call this a ladder right if you're in low wrong land you know whether it's a culture or whatever a debate an argument when someone says no that's totally wrong uh what you're saying about that and here's why you're actually being totally biased It sounds like a fight people are gonna say oh wow we got in like a fight it was really awkward like are we still friends with that person because that's not a culture or boxing it's a culture where

you don't touch each other's ideas that's just that's insensitive versus an in a night in a you know a high rung culture uh it's sport that's I mean look at every one of your podcasts your your agree whether you're agreeing or disagreeing the tone is the same it's Not like oh this got awkward it's like it's it's the tone is identical because you're just playing intellectually either way because it's a good high wrong space at his best at his best but people do take stuff personally and then that's actually one of the skills of conversation

just as a fan of podcast is when you sense that people take a thing personally you have to like there's sort of methodologies and little paths you can take to like calm things down like Go around don't don't take it as a violation of like you're trying to suss out which of their ideas are sacred to them yeah and which ones are uh bring it on and sometimes it's actually I mean that's the skill of it I suppose that sometimes it's a certain wordings in the way you challenge those ideas are important you can you

can challenge them indirectly and then together walk together in that way because they're what I've learned Is people are used to their ideas being attacked in a certain way in a certain Tribal Way and if you just avoid those like for example if you have political discussions and just never mention left or right or uh Republican and Democrats none of that just talk about different ideas and and avoid certain kind of triggering words you can actually talk about ideas versus falling into this path that's well established through Battles that people have previously fought when you

say triggering I mean who's getting triggered the Primitive mind so what you're trying to do what you're saying in this language is how do you have conversations with other people's higher Minds almost like Whispering without waking up the perimeters Criminal Mind as they're sleeping right and as soon as you say as soon as you say something the left primitive mind gets up and says what What are you saying about the left and now now that everything goes off the rails uh what do you make of conspiracy theories under this framework of the latter so here's

the thing about conspiracy theories is that once in a while they're true right so because sometimes there's a natural conspiracy actually humans are pretty good at real conspiracies secret things uh and then you know I just watched the Maid off doc um great new Netflix stock by the way um and um so the question is how do you create a system that is good at you put the conspiracy theory in and it either goes e or it says this is interesting let's keep exploring it like how do you put how do you do something that

it can how do you assess and so again I think the hiron culture is really good at it because a real Conspiracy you're what's going to happen is you put it it's like a little machine you put in the middle of the table and everyone starts firing darts at it or bow and arrow or whatever and everyone starts kicking it and trying to and almost all conspiracy theories they quickly crumble right because they actually you know you know Trump's election one is and I actually dug in and I looked at like every claim that he

or his team made and I was like All of these none of these hold up to scrutiny none of them I was open-minded but none of them did so that was one that as soon as it's open to scrutiny it crumbles the only way that conspiracy can stick around in a community is if it is a culture where that's being treated as a sacred idea that no one should kick or throw a dart at because if we throw a dart it's going to break so it's being it's and so the what you Want is this

is a culture where no idea is sacred anything can get thrown out and so I think that then what you'll find is that 994 out of 100 conspiracy theories come in and they fall down the other maybe four of the others come in and there's something there but it's not as Extreme as people say and then maybe one is a huge deal and it's actually a real conspiracy well isn't there a lot of gray area and there's a lot of mystery isn't that where the conspiracy Theories seep in so uh it's great to hear that

you've really looked into the the the Trump election fraud claims but aren't they resting on a lot of kind of gray area like fog basically saying that there is dark Forces in the shadows that are actually controlling everything I mean the same thing with uh maybe we can there's like safer conspiracy theories more less controversial ones like have we landed on the moon right the United States ever land on the Moon There's you know you like the reason those conspiracy theories work is you could construct there's incentives and motivation for faking the moon landing there's

a lot of um there's a there's very little data supporting the moon landing like that's very public and kind of looks fake space and that would be a big story if it turned out to be fake that's the art that's that would be the argument against it like our people really as a Collective going to hold on to a story that big um yeah so that but but there's a lot that the reason they work is there's mystery yeah it's a great documentary called behind the curve about flat earthers and one of the things that

you learn about flat earthers is they believe all the conspiracies not just the Flat Earth they're they're convinced the moon landing is fake they're convinced 911 Was an American con job they're convinced you know that name a conspiracy and they believe it and so it's so interesting is that I think of it as a um as a skepticism Spectrum yeah so on one side you it's like a filter in your head a filter in your in the beliefs section of your brain on one end of the spectrum you are gullible perfectly gullible you believe anything

someone says right on the other side you're paranoid you think Everyone's lying to you right everything's everything is false nothing that anyone says is true right so obviously those aren't good places to be um now the healthy place I think that that the so so I think the healthy place is to be somewhere in the middle and but also you can learn to trust certain sources and then you know you don't have to do as much apply as much skepticism to them and so here's what like and when you start having a bias Just so

you have a political bias when your side says something you you will find yourself moving towards the gullible side of the spectrum you read an article written that's that supports your views you move to the gullible side of the spectrum and you just believe it and you don't have any where's that skepticism that you normally have right and then you move and then you soon as soon as it's the other person talking the other team talking you move to the Skeptical the the closer to the to the you know denial paranoid side now flat earthers

are the extreme they are either at 10 or 1. so it's like it's so interesting because they're the people who are saying ah nah I won't believe you I'm not gullible no everyone else is gullible about the moon landing I won't and then yet when there's this evidence like oh because you can't see Seattle you can't see the buildings over that Horizon and you Should which isn't true you should be if it were or if the Earth around you wouldn't be able to see them therefore it's so suddenly they become the most gullible person here

any theory about the earth flat they believe it it goes right into their beliefs so they're actually jumping back and forth between refuses to believe anything and believe anything and so they're the extreme example but I think when it comes to conspiracy theories the people that get Themselves into trouble are the ones who they they become really gullible when they hear a conspiracy theory that kind of fits with their world view and they likewise when there's something that's kind of obviously true and it's not a big lie they will actually uh they'll they'll think it

is they they just tighten up their kind of skepticism filter and and so yeah so I I think the healthy places 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 like a synonym for like quack job crazy Theory right so yeah so I I think yeah I think it's be somewhere in the middle of that spectrum and to learn to fine tune it which is a tricky place to operate because you kind of have

to every time you hear a new conspiracy theory you should approach it with an open mind and you know and also if you don't have Enough time to investigate which most people don't kind of still have a humility not to make a conclusive statement that that's nonsense there's a lot of um social pressure actually yeah to immediately laugh off any conspiracy theory if it's done by the the bad guys right you will quickly get mocked and laughed at and not taken seriously if you give any Credence you know back the lab leak was it was

a good one where it's like uh turned out that that was at Least very credible if not true and that was a perfect example of one where when it first came out and not only so so Brett Weinstein talked about it and then I in a totally different conversation said something complimentary about him on a totally different subject and people were saying Tim you might have gone a little off the deep end you're like quoting someone who is like a lab leak person so I was getting my Reputation dinged for complimenting on a different topic

someone whose reputation was totally sullied because they have you know they questioned an Orthodoxy right so it's you see in so what what does that make me want to do distance myself from Brett Weinstein that's the at least that's the incentive that's uh and what does that make other people want to do don't become the next Brit Weinstein don't say it out loud Because you don't want to become someone that no one wants to compliment anymore right you can see the social pressure and that's and of course when there is a conspiracy that social pressure

is its best friend because then they see the people from outside are seeing that social pressure enact like a Tim Urban becoming more and more and more extreme to the other side and so they're going to take the more and more and more extreme I mean this What what do you see that the pandemic did that kova did to our civilization in that regard in the forces why was it so divisive do you understand that yeah so covet I you know I thought might be you know we always you know the ultimate example of the

topic that will unite us all is the alien attack yeah although honestly I don't even have that much Faith then I think there'd be like some people are super like you know Pro-alien and some people are anti-alien but anyway I was a surgeon to interrupt because I was talking to a few um astronomers and they they're the first folks that maybe kind of sad in that if we discover Life on Mars for example that there's going to be potentially a division over that too where half the people will not believe that's real well because We

we live in a current Society where the political divide has subsumed everything and that's not always like that uh it goes into stages like that we're in a really bad one where it's I think actually in the the book I call it like a Vortex like a like a like a almost like a Whirlpool that pulls everything into it it pulls it pulls um and so normally you'd say okay you know immigration naturally going to be Contentious that's always political right yeah but like covid seemed like oh that's one of those that will unite us

all let's fight this not human virus thing like obvious is no no one's sensitive no one's like getting hurt when we insult the virus like let's all be we have this threat it's common threat it's a threat to everyone of every nationality in every country every ethnicity and and what it didn't do that at all the Whirlpool was too powerful so it pulled coveted in and suddenly masks if you're on the left you like them if you're on the right you hate them and suddenly lockdowns if you're on the left you like them and on

the right you hate them and vaccines this is people who forget this when when Trump first started talking about the vaccine Biden Harris Cuomo they're all saying I'm not taking that vaccine not from this CDC because It was too rushed or something like that but because I'm not trusting anything that Trump says Trump wants me to take it I'm not taking it I'm not taking it from this CDC so this was if Trump this 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 Wright likes vaccines the left blood doesn't like vaccines instead the president switched and all those people are suddenly saying They were actually specifically saying that if you you know that that like if if you're saying the CDC is not trustworthy that's misinformation which is exactly what they were saying about the other CDC and they were saying it because they genuinely didn't trust Trump which is fair but now and other people don't trust the Biden CDC Suddenly It's this kind of misinformation that needs to be censored so it was a sad moment because

it was a Couple months at the very even a week or so the I mean a month or so at the very beginning when it felt like a lot of our other squabbles were kind of like oh I feel like they're kind of irrelevant right now yeah and then very quickly the whirlpool sucked it in and and in a way where I think it damaged the reputation of these a lot of the the Trust In A lot of these institutions for the long run but there's also an Individual psychological impact it's like a vicious negative

feedback cycle where they were deeply affected on an emotional level and people just were not their best cells that's definitely true yeah I mean talk about the Primitive mind I mean what one thing that we've been dealing with for our whole human history is pathogens yeah and it's it's emotional right it it brings out you know there's really interesting studies where like If they they studied the the the the phenomenon of disgust which is one of these like you know smiling is universal you don't have to ever translate a smile right certain you know you

know throwing your hands up when you're when your sports team wins it's Universal because it's part of our we're coding and so is disgust to kind of make this like you know face where you wrinkle up your nose And you kind of put out your tongue and maybe even gag that's to expel expel whatever's because it's It's the reaction when something is potentially a pathogen that might harm us right feces vomit whatever but they did this interesting study where people who in in two two groups the control group you know was shown images of um

in my beginning two studies mixed up but they were showing they were showing Images of like car crashes and like disturbing but not disgusting and the other one was showing like you know like you know rotting things and just just things that were disgusting and then they were asked about immigration these were Canadians and the group that was had the disgust feeling going pulsing through their body was way more likely to prefer like immigrants from White countries and the group that was had been showing Car accidents they were they still preferred the groups from White

countries but much less so and so what what does that mean it's because with the disgust impulse makes us scared of you know sexual practices that are foreign of ethnicities that are not look they don't look like us of of it's still xenophobia so it's ugly it's this really ugly stuff this is of course also how you know the the Nazi propaganda with cockroaches and uh or it was uh Rwandan Was cockroaches you know the Nazis was rats and you know it's it's specifically it's a dehumanizing emotion so anyway we were we were we were

talking about um covid but I think it does it Taps deep into like the human psyche in it and it's I don't think it brings out our I think like you said I think it brings out an ugly side in US you describe an idea lab as uh being Opposite of echo Chambers so we know what Echo Chambers are and you said like there's basically no good term for the opposite of an echo chamber so what's an ideal lab yeah well first of all both of these we think of an echo chamber as like a

group maybe or even a place but it's it's a culture it's an intellectual culture and this goes along with the high run low so high rung and low wrong thinking is individual so I was talking about What's going on in your head but this is very connected to the Social Scene around us and so groups will do high rung and low rung thinking together um basically it's collect so an echo chamber to me is a collaborative low rung thinking it is it's a culture where the cool it it's based around a sacred set of ideas

and it's the coolest thing you can do in an echo chamber culture is talk about how great the sacred ideas are and how bad and evil and stupid and Wrong the people are who have the other views and this and and and and it's it's quite boring you know it's quite boring you know it's very hard to learn and changing your mind is not cool in an echo chamber culture it makes you seem wishy-washy it makes you seem um like you know uh like you're waffling and you're flip-flopping or whatever it showing conviction about the

sacred ideas in Echo chamber culture is awesome if you're just like you know obviously This it makes you seem smart while being you know humble makes you seem dumb so now flip all of those things on their heads and you haven't you have the opposite which is ideal lab culture which is collaborative High wrong thinking it's collaborative truth finding um but it's also just it's just a totally different vibe it's uh it's a place where arguing is a fun thing it's not no one's getting offended and and criticizing like the thing everyone Believes is actually

it makes you seem like interesting like oh really like why why do you think we're all wrong and um expressing too much conviction makes people lose trust in you doesn't make you seem smart it makes you seem stupid if you don't really know what you're talking about but you're acting like you do I really like this diagram of where on the x-axis agreement on the y-axis is decency that's in an idea lab in an echo chamber there's only one axis it's uh Asshole to non-ass hole right this is a really important thing to understand about

the difference between you call a decent see here about ass hoolishness and disagreement so my college friends we love to argue right and and no one thought anyone was an asshole for it was just for sports sometimes we'd realize we're not even disagreeing on something and that would be disappointing and be like oh I think we agree it was kind of like sad it was like oh well there goes The fun and one of the members of this group has this she brought her new boyfriend to one of our like Hangouts and there was like

a heated heated debate you know just just one of our typical things and afterwards you know the next day he said like is everything okay and she was like what do you mean and he said like after you know the fight and she was like what fight and he was like you know the fight last night and she was like and she had To then she was like you mean like the the arguing and he was like yeah and she and so that's someone who is not used to idea lab culture coming into it and

seeing it is like that was like this is like are they still friends right and ideal lab is nice for the people in them because you're it individuals Thrive you don't want to just conform that does it makes you seem boring in an idea but you want to be yourself you want to challenge things you want to have a Unique brain so that's great and and you also have people criticizing your ideas which makes you smarter it doesn't always feel good but you you become more correct and smarter an echo chamber is the opposite where

it's not good for the people and it does your learning skills atrophy um and uh and I think it's boring but the thing is they also have emergent properties so the emergent property of an ID lab is Like super intelligence just you and me alone just the two of us if we're working together on something but we're being really um grown up about it we're disagreeing we're not you know no one's sensitive about anything we're going to each find flaws in the other ones arguments that you wouldn't have found on your own and we're going

to have a piffy double the epiphanies right so it's almost like the two of us together is like as smart as 1.5 it's like 50 smarter than either of us alone right so you have this 1.5 intelligent kind of joint being that we've made now bring the third person in fourth person in right you see it starts to scale up this is why science institutions can discover relativity in 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 an echo chamber is the opposite where it has the emergent property of stupidity I mean has the emergent property of a bunch of people all you know you know paying field you know fealty to this set of sacred ideas and and um so you lose this magical thing about language and humans which is collaborative intelligence you lose it it disappears 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 but underlying

that is a basic camaraderie respect there's there's a all kinds of mechanisms we humans have constructed to communicate like mutual respect or maybe communicate that you're here for the idea lab version of this totally it doesn't you don't take it you don't get personal right you're not getting personal you're Not um you're not taking things personally people are respected in an idea lab and ideas are disrespected and there's way ways to signal that so like for with friends you've already done the signaling you've already established a relationship the interesting thing is online I think you

have to do some of that work I mean to me the sort of uh steel Manning the other side or no uh having empathy and hearing out being Able to basically repeat the argument the other person is making before you and showing like respect to that argument I could see how you could think that before you make a counter argument there's just a bunch of ways to communicate that you're here not to uh do kind of what is it low rung you know shit talking mockery derision but are actually here ultimately to discover the truth

and the space of ideas and the tension of those ideas and I I think It's uh I think that's a skill that we're all learning as a civilization of how to do that kind of communication effectively because I think disagreement as I'm learning on the Internet is actually a really tricky skill like high effort High decency disagreement like I listened to uh there's a really good debate podcast uh intelligent squared and like they they can go pretty hard in the paint the classic idea lab exactly But like how do we map that to social media

when people like will say um will say well like Lex or anybody you're not you hate disagreement you you want to censor disagreement no um I love intelligent Square type of disagreement that's fun you want to reduce asshole and for me personally I don't want to reduce asshole if you know I kind of like ask over it's like fun in many ways but the problem is when the Asshole shows up to the party they make it less fun for the for the party that's there for the idea lab and the other people especially the quiet

voices at the back of the room they leave and so all you're left is was with assholes well that Twitter political Twitter to me is one of those parties it's a big party where a few assholes have really sent a lot of the quiet thinkers away yeah um and and so so if you think about this Graph again what the what Twi some place like Twitter um a great way to get followers is to be an asshole with a certain you know pumping a certain ideology you'll get a huge amount of followers and for those

followers and the followers you're gonna get the people who like you know not the people who like you are probably going to be people who are really thinking with their primitive Mind because they're seeing your your being you're being an asshole but because you agree with them they love you and they think they don't see any problem with how you're being yeah they don't see the asshole this is a fascinating thing people because look because look at the thing on the right agreement and decency are the same yeah so if you're in that mindset the

bigger the asshole the better if you're agreeing with me you're my man I love What you're saying yes show them right and the algorithm helps those people does those people do great on the algorithm this is a fascinating Dynamic that happens uh because I have I've currently hired somebody that looks on my social media and they block people because the assholes Will Roll in they're not actually there to have a interesting disagreement which I love they're there to do kind of mockery and then when they get blocked They then celebrate that to their Echo chamber

like look at this I got them or whatever they do or they'll say some annoying thing like oh so it's so he talks about he likes you know if I'd done this they'll say he oh he says he likes idea Labs but he actually wants to create an echo chamber but I'm like nope you're an asshole I'm not I'm not I I this look at the other 50 people and this threat that disagreed with me yeah respectfully they're not blocked yep Exactly you know and so they see it as some kind of hypocrisy because again

they only see the thing on the right and they're not understanding that there's two axes or that I see it as two axes and so you it's you seem Petty in that moment but it's like no no you're this is very specific what I'm doing you're actually killing the conversation I I in generally I give all those folks a pass and just send them love telepathically but yes like it's getting rid of Assholes in the conversation is the way you allow for the disagreement you do a lot of like when I think when like primitive

mindedness comes at you at least on Twitter I don't know you feeling internally in that moment but you do a lot of like I'm gonna meet that with my higher mind and just come out and you'll be like and you'll be like thanks for all the criticism I love you yeah and that's that that that's actually a an amazing Response because it just it what it does is it it that 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

and suddenly like civility comes back so it's a very powerful hopefully long term but the thing is they do seem to drive away high quality disagreement because like because it takes so much effort to uh disagree in a high quality way I've Noticed this on my blog like my one of the things I pride myself on is like my comment section is awesome like there's there's there's every everyone's being respectful no one's afraid to disagree with me until 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 in his writing and people disagree with each other and They get in these long entry and it's interesting and I read it and I'm learning and then I you know a couple posts especially the ones I've got written about politics it's not like it seems like any other comment section people are being nasty to me they're being nasty to each other and then I looked down one of them and I realized like almost all of this is the work of like three people yeah that's who you

need to block those people need to be Blocked you're not being thin-skinned you're not being petty doing it you're actually protecting an idea lab because what people would really aggressive people like that do is they'll turn it into their own Echo chamber because now everyone is scared to kind of disagree with them this is unpleasant and so people who will chime in are the people who agree with them and suddenly like they've taken over the space and I kind of believe that those people on a Different day could actually do high effort disagreement it's just

that they're in a in a certain kind of mood and a lot of us just like you said with the Primitive mind could get into that mood and it's I believe it's actually the job of the technology of the platform to incentivize those folks to be like are you sure this is the best you can do like if you really want to talk shit about this idea like do better like yeah and then we need to create Incentives where you get likes for high effort disagreement because currently you get likes for like uh something that's

slightly funny and is a little bit like mockery like um yeah basically signals to some kind of echo chamber that this person is a horrible person it's a hypocrite as evil whatever that feels like it's solvable with technology because I think in our private lives none of us want that I Wonder if it's making me think that I want to like because a much easier way for me to do it just for my my world would be to say something like you know here's this axis this high this is this is part of what I

part of what I like about the latter is is it's a language that we can use it's like specifically what we're talking about is High rung disagreement good low rung disagreement bad right and so so it gives us like a language for that and so What I would say is I would you know my you know I would have my you know readers you know understand this axis and then I would specifically say something like please do the the do the do it but why a favor and upvote regardless of what they're saying horizontally right

regardless of what their actual view is upvote high wrongness they could be tearing me apart they can be saying great they can be praising me Whatever uproad High running this and down vote low rugness 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 I think a lot of people would be very good at that they and they not are only would they be good at that they

would want that that Task of saying I know I completely disagree with this person but this was a high effort uh High rung disagreement I guess everyone thinking about that other access too you're not just looking at where do you stand horizontally you're saying well how did you get there and how are you you know are you treating ideas like machines are you treating them like little you know babies and there should be some kind of labeling on personal attacks versus idea Disagreement sometimes people like throw in both a little bit right that's like all

right no there should be a disincentive at personal attacks versus idea attacks well you can also what one metric is a a respectful disagreement if I see just say someone else's Twitter and I see you know you put out a thought and I see someone say you know as you know someone say um you know I don't see it that way Here's here's where I think you went wrong and they're just explaining I'm thinking that if Lex reads that he's gonna be interested he's gonna he's Gonna Wanna post more stuff right because he's gonna like

that if I see someone being like um uh wow this really shows the kind of person that you become or shows up I'm thinking that person is making Lex want to be on Twitter less it's making him It's and so what's that doing what that person is actually doing is they're putting is they're actually they're chilling discussion because they're making it unpleasant to they're making it scary to say what you think and the first person isn't at all the first person is making you want to say more stuff so and those are both disagree those

are people who both disagree with you exactly exactly I want to it's a great disagreements With friends in Meet space is like you're they disagree with you they could be even yelling at you honestly they could even have some shit talk where it's like personal attacks it still feels good because you know them well and you know that that shit talk because like yeah friends should talk all the time playing us playing a sport or a game and again it's it's it's because they know each other well enough to know that this is fun we're

having Fun and obviously I love you like exactly you know and and that's that's important online it's a lot harder yeah the that obviously I love you that underlies a lot of human interaction right seems to be easily Lost online I've seen some people on Twitter and elsewhere just behave their worst yeah and it's like I know that's not who you are totally like why are you I actually you know I know who's this human I know someone personally who is one of the Best people yeah I'm it's just I love this guy like one

of the best like fun funny like nicest dudes and he if you would if you looked at his Twitter only you would think he's a culture worry or an awful culture Warrior and you know you know biased and just stoking anger and and it comes out of a good place and I'm not going to give any other info about it you know specific but like I think he's describing a lot of people it Comes out of a good place because he really cares about what he you know it comes up but it's just I can't

Square the two it's so and that's it you have to once you know someone like that you can realize okay apply that to everyone because a lot of these people are lovely people and it's just bring even just you know back in the before social media did you ever had a friend who like was just like they had this like dickishness on text or email that they Didn't have in person you're like wow like email you is like kind of a dick and it's like it just certain people have a different Persona behind the screen

it has for me a person has become a bit of a meme that uh Lex blocks with love but there is a degree to that where this is I don't see people on social media as representing who they really are I really do have love for them I really do think positive thoughts of them throughout the entirety of the Experience I see this as some weird side effect of uh online communication and so it's like to me blocking is not some kind of a derisive act towards that individual it's just like saying well a lot

of times what's happened is they have slipped into a very common delusion that dehumanizes others so that doesn't mean they're a bad person we all can do it but they're dehumanizing you or whoever they're being nasty to because they in a way they would never do in Person because in a person they're reminded that's a person remember I said the dumb part of my brain when I'm doing VR like won't step off the cliff but the smart part of my brain knows I'm just on the rug that dumb part of our brain is really dumb

in a lot of ways um it's the part of your brain where you can set the clock five minutes fast to help you not be late the smart part of your brain knows that you did that but the dumb part will fall for it right that Same dumb part of your brain can forget that the person behind that screen that behind that handle is a human that has feelings and and that doesn't mean they're a bad person for forgetting that because it's it's possible well this really interesting idea and I wonder if it's true that

you're right is that both primitive mindedness and high-mindedness tend to be contagious I hope you're right that it's possible to make both contagious because there Are sort of um popular intuition is only one of them the Primitive mindedness is contagious as as exhibited by social media they complement you again don't you think that your your Twitter to me is like I was just looking down and I mean it is a it's just high-mindedness it's just high-mindedness down down down down down it's it's gratitude it's optimism it's love it's forgiveness it's all these things they're the

opposite of grievance And victimhood and resentment and pessimism right and there's I think a reason that a lot of people follow you because it is contagious it makes other people feel those feelings I don't know there's been I've been recently over the past few months attacked quite a lot it is fascinating to watch because there's is over things that I think I probably have done stupid things but I'm being attacked for things that are totally not Worthy of attack I got attacked for a book list I saw that by the way I thought I thought

it was great but like you can always kind of find ways to you know I guess the assumption is this person surely is a fraud or some other explanation he's sure it has dead bodies in the basement he's hiding or something like this and then I'm going to construct The Narrative around that and ma can attack that I don't know how that Works but there there is um there does and I think you write this in the book there seems to be a gravity pulling people towards the Primitive mindedness to anything political right religious certain

things sure are bottom heavy you know yeah for our psyche they they they they they they they have a magnet that pulls our psyches downwards on the ladder and and why why does politics pull our psyches down on the ladder because it For for the tens of thousand years that we were evolving um you know during human history it was life or death politics was life or death and and and so um it was actually an amazing study where it's like um they challenged like 20 different beliefs of a person and different parts of the

person's brain and they had an MRI going Different parts of the person's brain lit up when non-political beliefs were challenged versus political beasts were challenged when political beliefs were challenged when non-political beliefs were challenged the like the the rational like the prefrontal cortex type areas were lit up when the political beliefs were challenged and then I'm getting over my head here but it's like the the parts of Your brain the default mode Network the parts of your brain associated with like inter introspection and like your own identity were lit up and they were much more

likely to change their mind on all the beliefs the non-political beliefs when that default mode Network part of your brain uh lit up you were you were gonna if anything get more firm in those beliefs when you when you had them challenged so politics is one of those topics that Just it literally literally lights up different part of our brain it's again I think we come back to primitive mind higher mind here it's like it it gets our higher this is one of the things our primitive mind comes programmed to care a ton about and

so it's going to be very hard for us to stay rational and calm and and looking for truth because we have all this gravity towards well it's weird because politics like what is politics like to 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 I don't think we're actually that I mean we're yeah we're emotional about something else yeah I think what we're emotional about is this my side the side I've identified with is in power and making

the decisions and your side is out of power and if your side's in power that's really scary for me because that goes Back to you know the idea of who's making who's who's pulling the strings in this tribe right who's and who's the chief is it your family's patriarch or is it mine you know like we might not have food if if we don't win this you know kind of whatever you know Chief election so I I think that it's not about the tax policy or anything like that and then and then it gets tied

to this like broader I think a lot of our tribalism Has really coalesced around this we don't have that much religious tribalism in the U.S right now they know the the the Protestants and the Catholics hate each other we don't have that really right and honestly you you say people like to you know say we have racial tribalism and everything but uh White cons you know a white even a kind of a racist white conservative guy I think takes the black conservative Over the woke white person any day of the week right now so that's

the strongest it tells me that Source television is way stronger tribalism right now I think that that that that white racist guys you know loves the black conservative guy compared to the white wolf guy right there's no so so to me not again not that racial tribalism isn't a thing of course it's always a thing but like political tribalism is The number one right now so race is almost a topic for the political division versus the actual sort of element of the attractive it's a political football it's yeah so there's uh I mean this is

dark because so this is a book about human civilization this is a book about human nature but it's also a book of politics yeah about politics um it is just the way you listed out in the book It's kind of dark how we just fall into these left and right checklists so if you're on the left it's maintained where we weighed universal healthcare good mainstream media fine guns kill people us is a racist country protect immigrants tax costs bad climate change awful raise minimum wage and on the right is the flip of that reverse where

we weighed Universal Health Care bad mainstream media bad people kill people not guns Kill people us was a racist country protect borders tax Gods good climate change overblown don't raise minimum wage I mean it has you almost don't have to think about any of this well it's like literally So when you say it's a book about politics it's interesting because it it's a book about the vertical axis right it's specifically not a book about the horizontal axis and that I'm not talking I don't actually talk about any of these issues I I don't Put out

an opinion on them um those are all horizontal right but when you so and rather than are you know having you know another book about those issues about right versus left I wanted to do a book about this other axis and so on this axis the reason I had this checklist is that this is a low part of the low rung politics world right low wrong politics is a checklist and that checklist evolves right like Russia suddenly is Like popular with the right as opposed to you know it used to be you know in the

60s the left was the one defending Stalin like so they'll switch it doesn't even matter the substance doesn't matter it's that this is the approved checklist of the capital P party and this is what everyone believes that's a low rung thing the high rungs this is not what it's like high rung politics you you tell me your one view on this I have no idea what you think about anything else Right and you're gonna say I don't know about a lot of stuff because inherently you're not going to have that strong an opinion because you

don't have that much info these are complex things so there's a lot of I don't know and people are all over the place it's that when it you know you're in you know you're talking to someone who has been subsumed with low rung politics when if they tell you their opinion on any One of these issues you could just you know you could just rattle off their opinion on every single other one and if and if in three years it becomes fashionable to to have this new view they're gonna have it that's you're not thinking

that's Echo that's Echo chamber culture and I've been using kind of a shorthand uh of Centrist to describe this kind of a high wrong thinking but people tend to I mean it seems to be difficult to be a Centrist or whatever a hiring thinker it's like people want to label you as a person because it's too cowardly to take stance yeah um somehow as opposed to ask saying I don't know is the 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 I think we should have some tax cuts but not that many you might not think that you might actually come do Some research and say actually I think tax cuts are really important that doesn't mean oh I'm not a Centrist anymore I guess I'm a far you know no no that's why we need the second axis so what you're trying to be when you say Centrist is Hiram which means you might be all over the place horizontally you might agree with the far left on this thing the far right

on this thing that you might agree with the centrists on this thing but but calling yourself a Centrist actually like is putting yourself in a prison on the horizontal axis and um and it's saying that you know I I whatever the on the on the different topics I'm right in between the two policy wise that's not what you are so yeah that's what we we're badly missing this other axis yeah I mean I I still do think it's this like for me I am a Centrist when you project it down to the horizontal but the

point is you're missing so much data By not considering the vertical because like on average maybe it falls somewhere in the middle but in reality there's just a lot of nuance issue to issue that involves just thinking and uncertainty and changing in the given the context of the current geopolitics and economics and just always considering always questioning always evolving your views all of that not just not just about like oh I think we should be in the center on this but another way to be in the center Is if there's some phenomenon happening um you

know there's a terrorist attack you know and one side wants to say this has nothing to do with Islam and the other one the other side wants to say this is radical Islam right what's in between those is saying This is complicated and nuanced and we have to learn more and it probably has something to do with Islam and something to do with um the economic circumstances and Something to do with you know geopolitics so in in a case like that you actually do get really unnuanced when you go to the extremes and all of

the Nuance which is where all the truth usually is is going to be in the middle so yeah but there is a truth to the fact that if you take that Nuance on those issues like warn Ukraine covid you're going to be attacked by both sides yes people who have who are really strongly on one side or the other hate Centrist people I've gotten this myself and you know the this the the slur that I've had thrown at me is I'm an enlightened Centrist in a very mocking way so what are they actually saying what

does enlightened centers mean it means someone who is you know Stephen Pinker or Jonathan height gets accused of is you know that they're highfalutin you know intellectual world and they don't actually have any they don't actually take a side they don't Actually get their hands dirty and they can be superior to both sides without actually taking a stand right so I I see the argument and I disagree with it because I firmly believe that the hardcore tribes they think they're taking a stand and they're out in the streets and they're pushing for something I think

what they're doing is they're just driving the whole country downwards and I think they're they're hurting all the Causes they care about and so it's not that it's not that you know it's not that we need everyone to be sitting there you know refusing to take aside it's that you can be far left and far right but be upper left and upper right if we talk about the you use the word liberal a lot in the book to mean something that we don't in modern political discourse mean uh since this higher philosophical View and then

you use the words Progressive to mean the Left and uh conservative to mean the right can you describe the concept of liberal games and power games so the power games is is what I call the like basically just the laws of nature as the when laws of nature are the laws of the land that's the power game so animals watch any David Attenborough special and when the little lizard is running away from the the you know the bigger animal or whatever Um and I use an example of a bunny and a bear I don't even

know if bears eat bunnies they probably don't but pretend bears eat bunnies right so it's like in the power games the bear is chasing the bunny there's no fairness there's no okay well what's right but you know what what what what what's legal no no if the bear is fast enough it can eat the bunny if the bunny is can get away it can say living in so that's It that's the Only Rule now humans have spent a lot of time in essentially that environment so when you have a totalitarian dictatorship it's and so what's

the rule of the power games it's everyone can do whatever they want if they have the power to do so it's just a game of power so if the bunny gets away the bunny actually has more power than the Bear in that situation right and likewise the totalitarian dictatorship there's no Rules that dictator can do whatever they want they can they can they can torture they can you know flatten a rebellion with a lot of murder because they have the power to do so what are you gonna do right and that's that's kind of the

state of nature that's our natural way you know that you know when you look at the Muff watch a mafia movie you know there's we do a lot of we have we have it in us we all have we all can snap into power games mode when uh it Becomes all about you know just just actual raw power now the liberal games is is you know something that's Civilizations for thousands of years have been working on it's not invented by America or modern times but America's kind of was like the latest crack at it yet

which is this idea instead of everyone can do what they want if they have the power to do so it's everyone can do what they want as long as it doesn't harm anyone else now that's Really complicated how do you define harm and and the idea is that everyone has their a list of rights which are protected by the government and then they have they're inalienable rights and they're they're protected you know those are protected uh uh Again by you know um from from an invasion by other people and so you have this kind of

fragile balance and so the idea with the liberal games is you that there are laws but it's not totalitarian they will Build very clear strict laws kind of around the edges of what you can and can't do and then everything else Freedom so unlike a totalitarian dictatorship actually it's it's very loose 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 so it's this much looser thing now the vulnerability there is that It so

so the the benefits of it are obvious right freedom is great it seems like it's the most Fair they you know that that equality of opportunity seemed like the most fair thing and um and you know equality before the law you know due process and all of this stuff so it seems fair to the founders of the Us and other Enlightenment thinkers and it also is a great way to manifest productivity right you know you Have um you have Adam Smith saying it's not from the benevolence of the butcher or the baker that we get

our dinner but from their from their own self-interest so you have you can harness kind of selfishness for for progress but um it has a vulnerability which is that because the laws it's like the totalitarian laws they don't have an excessive loss for no reason they want to control everything and the US you know in the US we say they're not going To do that and so the the second it's almost two puzzle pieces you have the laws and then you've got a liberal culture liberal laws have to be married to Liberal culture kind of

a defense of liberal Spirit in order to truly have the liberal games going on and so that's vulnerable because Free Speech you can have the First Amendment that's the the laws part but if if you're in a culture where anyone who you know speaks out uh against Orthodoxy is going to be shunned From the community well you're lacking the second piece of the puzzle there you're lacking liberal culture and so therefore you um you might as well be in it you might as well not even have the First Amendment and there's a lot of examples

like that where the culture has to do its part for the true liberal games to be enjoyed so it's just much more complicated much more nuanced than the power games it's kind of it's kind of a set of basic laws That then are coupled with a basic Spirit to create this very awesome in human environment that's also very vulnerable so what do you mean the culture has to play along so for something like a freedom of speech to work there has to be a basic what decency that if all people are perfectly good then perfect

freedom without any restrictions is great it's where the Human nature starts getting a little iffy without being cruel to each other or start being uh greedy and uh Desiring of harm and also the narcissist and sociopaths and Psychopaths and Society all of that that's when you start to have to inject some limitations on that freedom yeah I mean if if um so that what the government basically says is we're going to let everyone be mostly free um but no one no one is going to be free To physically harm other people or distill their property

right um and so we're stuck we're also we're all agreeing to sacrifice that you know that that 20 of our freedom and then in return all of us in theory can be 80 free and that's kind of the the bargain um but now that's a lot of freedom to leave people with and a lot of people choose it's like you're so free in the U.S you're actually free To be unfree if you choose that's kind of what an echo chamber is to me it's you know um you can you can choose to kind of be

friends with people who uh essentially make it make it so uncomfortable to speak your mind that it's no actual effective difference for you than if you lived in a country if if you can't you know criticize Christianity in a certain community That you have a First Amendment so you're not going to get arrested by the government for criticizing Christianity but if you if but if you have this if the social penalties are so extreme that you it's just never worth it you might as well be in a country that it imprisons people for criticizing Christianity

and so that same thing goes for for wokeness right this is what people get you know cancel culture and stuff so when the reason these things Are bad is because they're actually they're depriving Americans of the beauty of the freedom of the liberal games by you know imposing a social culture that is very power games it's basically a power games culture comes in and you might as well be in the power games now and so liberal if you live in a liberal democracy it's it's you there will be always be challenges to a liberal culture

now lowercase L labral um there'll Always be challenges to a liberal culture from people who are much more interested in playing the power games and would and and there has to be kind of an immune system that stands up to that culture and says that's not how we do things here in America actually we don't excommunicate people for not having the right religious beliefs or not you know we don't disinvite a speaker from campus for having the wrong political beliefs uh and if it doesn't Stand up for itself it's it's like the immune system of

the country failing and power games rushes in so uh before chapter four in your book uh uh and the chapters that will surely result in you being burned at the stake you write quote we'll start our Pitchfork tour in this chapter by taking a brief trip through the history of the Republican party then in the following chapters we'll take a Tim's career Tanking Deep dive into America's social justice movement as you started to talk about okay so let's go uh what's the history of the Republican Party and looking at this through my vertical ladder I'm

saying what is this this familiar story of the Republicans from the 60s to today what does it look like through the vertical lens right does it look different and and and is there is there an interesting story here that's been kind of hidden because we're always Looking at the horizontal now the horizontal story you'll hear people talk about it and it's they'll say something like the Republicans have moved farther and farther to the right and um and to me that that's not really true like it was Trump more right-wing than Reagan I don't think so

I think he's a lot of actual policy yeah yeah so it's so we're using this again it's just like you're calling yourself Centrist but it's not exactly what you mean even Though it also is yeah so I again this I was like okay look this vertical lens helps with other things let's apply it to the Republicans and here here's what I saw is I looked at the 60s and 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 you Had progressives like genuine you know Rockefeller you know pretty Progressive people um all the way to you know then you had them you know moderates like Eisenhower and Dewey and then you go all the way to the you know farther right you had gold water and you know what you might call I I call them the fundamentalists um and so it's this interesting plurality right something we don't have today and what Happened was the the Goldwater contingent which was the Underdog they were small right the Eisenhower was

the president uh who had just been the president and was it seemed like the moderates were you know it was that's the he said you have to be close to the center of the chess board that's where that's that's how you maintain power these people were very far from the center of the chessboard but they ended up basically Have like a hostile takeover they conquered their own party and they did it by breaking all of the kind of Unwritten rules and Norms so they did things like they first started with like the college Republicans which

was like this feeder group that turned in you know a lot of the politicians started there and they they went to the election and they wouldn't let the the current president the incumbent speak and they were throwing chairs and they were fist Fights and eventually people gave up and they just sat there and they sat in the chair talking for you know their got their candidate until everyone eventually left and then they declared Victory so they basically they they they they they came in there there was a there was a certain set of rules agreed

upon rules and they came in playing the power games saying well actually if we do this you won't have the power You know we have the power to to take it if we just break all the rules right and so they did and they won and that became this hugely influential thing which then they then they conquered California through again these these people were taken aback these you know these these proper Republican candidates were appalled by the kind of like you know the insults that are being hurled to them and the intimidation and the bullying

and eventually they ended up in The National Convention which was called like the right wing Woodstock it was like you know the Republican National Convention in 64 was just they again it was jeering and they wouldn't let their moderates so their their progressives even speak and there was racism you know you know Jackie Robinson was there and he was a proud Republican and he said that like he feels like he was a Jew in Hitler's Germany with the way the blacks were being treated there and it was Nasty and but what did they do they

they had they had fiery you know plurality enough to win um and they won they ended up getting crushed in the general election and they kind of faded away but to me I was like what that was an interesting story I see it as um I have this character in the book called The Golem which is a big kind of a big dumb powerful monster that's the you know the emergent property of like a political Echo chamber it's like this Big giant it's stupid but it's powerful and scary um and to me I was like

a Golem rose up conquered the party for a second knocked it on its ass and then and then faded away and to me when I looked at the Trump Revolution and a lot and not just Trump the last 20 years I see that same lower right that lower right monster kind of um making another charge for it but this Time succeeding and really taking over the party for a long period of time I see the same story which is the power games are being played um in a situation when it had always been the government

relies on all these Unwritten rules and Norms to function but for example you have in 2016 Merrick Garland gets a gets nominated by Obama and their Unwritten Norm says that when the president nominates a Justice then you pass them through unless there's Some egregious thing that's what has happened but they said actually this is the last year of his presidency and the people should choose I don't think we should set a new precedent where you the president can't nominate people uh nominate a Supreme Court Justice in the last year so they they passed the throw

and it ends up being Gorsuch um and so they they lose that seat now three years later it's Trump's last year and it's another election year And Ginsburg dies and what did they say they say oh let's keep our president they said no oh actually we changed our mind we're going to nominate Amy Barrett so to me that is classic power games right that there there's there's no actual rule in what you're doing is they had they did technically have the power to block the nomination then and then they technically had the power to put

someone and they and they're pretending there's some principle to it but they're Just extra they're going for the a short-term Edge at the expense of what is like the workings of the system in the long run and then what do the Democrats have to do in that situation because both parties have been doing this is they either can lose now all the time or they start playing the power games too and now you have a prisoner's dilemma where it's like both are end up doing this thing because and then everyone ends up worse off the

debt Ceiling All these power plays that are being made with these these holding the country hostage this is power games 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 within the parties reduced some of the national tribalism and that there wasn't as much of an appeal to that but today it's just like do whatever you have to do to beat the enemies and so I'm seeing a rise in power games and I talk about The Republicans because they did a

lot of these things first they have been a little bit more Regis but both parties have been doing it over the last 20 30 years can you place uh blame or maybe there's a different term for it at uh the subsystems of this so is it the media is it the politicians like in the senate in Congress is it Trump so the leadership is it um or maybe it's us human beings uh maybe social media Versus mainstream media is there a sense of where what is the cause of what is the symptom it's very complex

so Ezra client's a great book while we're polarized where he talks about a lot of this and there's there's some of these are you know it's really no one's fault first of all it's the environment has changed in a bunch of ways you just mentioned and what happens when you take human nature which is a constant and you put it into an environment Behavior comes out the environment is the independent variable when that changes the dependent variable the behavior changes with it right and so the environment has changed in a lot of ways so one

major one is it used to for a long time actually the the the the first there was the Republicans and then the Democrats just had a Stranglehold on Senate on Congress there was no it was not even competitive the Democrats for 40 years had the Majority and so therefore it actually isn't a decent environment to compromise it because now we can both you know what you want is Congress people thinking about their home district and and you know voting yes on a national policy because we're going to get a good deal on it back at

home that's actually healthy as opposed to voting and lockstep together because this is what the red party is doing regardless of What's good for my home District you know an example is Obamacare you know there are certain Republican districts that would have actually officially been benefited by Obamacare but every Republican voted against it so and part of the reason is because there's no longer this obvious majority every few years it switches it's a 50 50 thing and that's you know partially because it's become so we've been so subsumed with this one National divide of left

versus Right that um that that that that people are not people are whoever you know they're voting for the same party for president uh all the way down the ticket now and so you have this just kind of 50 50 color war and that's awful for compromise so there's like 10 of these things you know that have redistricting but also it is social media it is you know I call it hypercharged tribalism you know in the 60s you had kind of Distributed tribalism you had some people that are worked up about the USSR right they're

National that's what they care about U.S versus a foreign some people that were saying left versus right like they today and then other people that were saying that they were fighting within the party but today you don't have that it's it's the the you have ideological realignment so you kind of got rid of a lot of the in-party fighting and then there's hasn't been That big of a foreign threat not nothing like the USSR for a long time so you kind of lost that and what's left is Justice left versus right thing and so that's

kind of this hypercharged Whirlpool that subsumes everything and um and so yeah yeah it's I mean you people point to Newt Gingrich you know people like there's certain characters that enacted policies that stoked this kind of thing but I I think this is a much bigger kind of environmental shift Well that's going back to our questions about the role of individuals in human history so the the interesting one of the many interesting questions here is about Trump is he a symptom or a Cause because it seems to be from the public narrative such a significant

Catalyst for some of the things we're seeing this goes back to what we were talking about earlier right like is it is it the person or is the times I think he's a perfect example of it's a both Situation I don't think that I don't think if you pluck Trump out of the situation I don't think that Trump was inevitable but I think we were very vulnerable to a demagogue and if you hadn't been Trump would have had no chance and so what and why were we vulnerable to a demagogue is because you have these

Mommy I think it's specifically on the right if you actually look at the stats it's Pretty bad like the people who because because it's not just who voted for Trump a lot of people just vote for the red right what's interesting is who voted for Obama Against Romney and then voted for Trump who you know these are not racists right these are not hardcore Republicans they voted for Obama and where did the switch come from places that had economic despair where Bridges were not working well that's a signifier you know we're we're paint Chipping in

the schools you know these little things like this so I think that you know you had this a lot of these kind of rural towns you have true Despair and then you also have a and the number one indicator of voting for Trump was distrust in media and the media has become much less trustworthy you know and so you you have the the all these ingredients that actually make us very vulnerable to a demagogue and a demagogue is someone who takes advantage Right there's someone who comes in and says I can pull all the right

strings and Pull and and and push all the right emotional buttons right now and get myself Power by taking advantage of the circumstances and that is what Trump totally did it makes me wonder how easy it is for somebody who's a charismatic leader to uh capitalize on cultural resentment when when there's economic hardship to channel that so John height wrote a great article about like the true we basically we like truth is in an all-time low right now like it's the media is not penalized for lying yeah right MSNBC Fox News these are not penalized

for being inaccurate or penalized if they stray from the Orthodoxy on social media it's not the truest tweets that go viral right and so Trump understood that better than anyone right he he took advantage of it he he was Living in the current world when everyone else was stuck in the past and he saw that and he just lied he everything he said you know it doesn't the truth was not relevant at all right it's just it's just truly it's not relevant to him and what he's talking about he doesn't care and and he knew

that neither do is a subset of the country I was thinking about this just reading articles by journalists Especially when you're not a a famous journalist in yourself but you're more like in your times journalist so the big famous thing is the institution you're a part of to do like you can just lie yeah because you're not going to get punished for it you're going to be rewarded for of the popularity of an article so if you write 10 articles it's there's a huge incentive to just make stuff up you got to get clicks to

Get clicks that's the first and foremost and like culturally people will attack that article that says it's not like one half the country will attack that article saying is dishonest but they'll kind of forget the um you will not have a reputational hit right there won't be a memory like this person made up a lot of stuff in the past no they'll take one article at a time and they'll attach the reputation hits will be to New York Times the Institution yeah and so for the individual journalists there's a huge incentive to make stuff up

totally it's it's it it is and it's scary because it's almost you can't survive if you're just an old school honest journalist who really works hard and tries to get it right and does it with Nuance like what you can be is you can be a big time sub stacker or big time podcaster A lot of people do have a reputation for accuracy and rigor and they have huge audiences But um if you're working in a big company right now um it's I mean especially I mean I like I I I think that many of

the big media brands are very much controlled by the left and but I will say that that the ones that are controlled by the right or even more egregious not just in terms of accuracy but also in terms of you know the New York Times for all of its criticisms They have a handful of uh they they every they here and there they put out a pretty you know a an article that Strays from the they know Barry Weiss wrote there for a long time and then you've got um they wrote an article criticizing free

speech on campus stuff you know recently um and they have you know they have a couple very you know left uh Progressive friendly conservatives but they have conservatives that are Operating the op-eds Fox News you know you're not seeing thoughtful uh Breitbart you're not seeing thoughtful progressives writing there right there's some degree to which the New York Times I think still incentivizing the values the vertical the high effort so the you're allowed to have a conservative opinion if you do a really damn good job yeah like if it's a very thorough in-depth art kind of

and if you kind of Pander to the progressive Senses in all the right ways you know I always joke that you know Ted you 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 where the the progressive systems are that's right about all of this but maybe maybe you know libertarianism isn't all about you know it's just so there is an element but you know what it's it's something it's better than than being a total tribal I Think you can you can see

the New York Times tug of war the internal tug of war you can see it because then they also have these awful instances you know or like you know the firing of James Bennett which is this whole other story but like they have you yeah you can see it going both ways but in the 60s what did you have you had ABC NBC CBS you know the 70s you know you had these three news channels and they weren't always right and they definitely Sometimes narrative together maybe about the Vietnam or whatever but they if one

of them was just lying they'd be embarrassed for it they would be penalized they'd be dinged and they'd be known as this is the trash one and that would be terrible for their ratings because they weren't just catering to half the country they're kidding they all located under the whole country so both on the axis of accuracy and on the axis of neutrality they had to You know try to stay somewhere in the the reasonable range and that's just gone one of the things I'm really curious about is I think your book is incredible I'm

very curious to see how it's written about by the Press because I could see click I could myself write with the help of charge GPT of course click bait articles in either direction yeah it's easy to imagine your whole book is beautifully written for Click bait articles yeah if any journalists out there need help I can I can help you yeah okay I can write out the most atrocious criticisms yeah uh I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm ready I'm braced um yeah so speaking of which uh you write about social justice you write about two

kinds of social justice liberal social justice and uh sjf social justice fundamentalism what are those yeah so like the term wokeness is so loaded with baggage it's kind of like Mocking and derogatory and that's I was trying not to do that in this book um if it's the terms a little bit baggage you're already kind of you're you're from from the first minute you're already behind um so to me uh it also that when it when people say wokeness is bad social justice is bad they're throwing the baby out with the bathwater um because the

the pro you know the Proudest tradition in the U.S is liberal social justice and what I mean by that again liberal meaning with lowercase L it is it is intertwined with liberalism so Martin Luther King Classic example his I Have a Dream speech he says stuff like this country you know is you know has has made a promise to all of its citizens and it has broken that promise to to its black citizens right in other words liberalism the Constitution the core ideals those are great we are not living up to them we're failing on

some of them so Civil Disobedience the goal of it wasn't to to hurt liberalism is to specifically break the laws that were already violating Liberty that were the laws that were a violation of liberalism to expose that this is illiberal that the constitution should not have people of different skin color sitting in different parts of the bus and so it was It was kind of a it was really patriotic you know the Civil Rights Movement was saying this is a beautiful you know we have a we have a liberalism is this beautiful thing and we

need to do better at it so I call it liberal social justice and it used the tools of liberalism to try to uh to try to uh improve the flaws and that we're going on so free speech you know Mario Savio in the 60s was a you know he's a leftist and what would the Leftists doing in the 60s on Berkeley campus you know they were saying we need more free speech um because that's what social liberal social justice was fighting for but you can also go back to the 20s women's suffrage I mean so

the the you know the Emancipation the the thing that America obviously has all of its these These are these are all ugly things that it had to get out of but it got out of them you know one by one and it's still getting Out of them that's what's cool about America and liberal social justice basically is the practice of saying where are we not being perfect liberals and now let's fix that so that that's the idea of liberalism that permeates the history of the United States but then there's interplay heaven and so many good

images in this book but one of them is uh is highlighting the interplay of different ideas over the past uh let's say 100 years so Liberalism is on one side there's that thread there's Marxism on the other and then there's post-modernism how do those interplay together so it's interesting because Marxism is and all of its various you know descendants obviously there's a lot of things that are rooted in Marxism that aren't you know the same thing as what Karl Marx preached but what do they all have in common They think liberalism is bad right they

actually think that um that the opposite of what Martin Luther King and other people uh in the Civil Rights and other movements they think the opposite they think he thinks you know liberalism is good we need to preserve it they said liberalism is the problem these other problems with racism and inequality that we're seeing those are inevitable results of liberalism Liberalism is a rigged game and it's just the power games in Disguise there is no liberal games it's just the power games in Disguise and there's the upper people that oppress the lower people and they

convince the lower people it's all about false consciousness they convince the lower people that everything is fair and now the lower people vote against their own interests and they and they work to preserve the system that's suppressing them and what do we need to Do we need to actually there's much more revolutionary we need to overthrow liberalism right so people think is oh you know like what we call a wokeness is just you know a normal social justice activists activism but it's like more extreme right it's this no no it's the polar opposite polar opposite

and so um now that's that's the Marxist thread now post-modernism is kind of you know this term that is super controversial and I don't think anyone calls himself a Postmodernist or take all this with a grain of salt in terms of the term but what's the definition of radical the definition of radical to me is how deep you want change to happen at so so um a liberal Progressive and and a conservative Progressive will disagree about policies the liberal Progressive wants to you know change a lot of policies change change change change right and the

conservative is More wants to keep things the way they are but they're both conservative when it comes to liberalism um beneath it the liberal kind of foundation of the country they both wanted they both are become conservatives about that the Marxist is more radical because they want to go one notch deeper and actually overthrow that Foundation now what's below what's below liberalism is kind of the Core tenets of modernity um this idea of reason and um the notion that there is an objective truth and um uh science as it's the scientific method right these things

are actually beneath and even the Marxist if you look at the Frankfurt School you know these these these these post-marxist thinkers and and Marx himself they were not anti-science they believed in that bottom bottom Foundation they were they were they were they were actually wanted to preserve modernity but they wanted to get rid of liberalism on top of it the post-modernist is even more radical because they want to actually go down to the bottom level and overthrow they think science itself is a tool of Oppression they think it's a tool uh where oppression kind of

flows through you know they think that the white Western world has invented these Concepts like you know they claim that there's an objective truth and that there's you know reason in science and they think all of that is just one meta-narrative and right and and it goes a long way to serve the interests of the powerful so in the sense that so it's almost caricatured but that that is to the core of their beliefs that math could be racist for example oh yeah absolutely not the educational math but literally math 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 or in in in the post-modernist might have said it serves just the powerful um or the wealthy but to so what social justice fundamentalism is is you take the Marxist thread that has been going on in lots of countries and has and and who over the upper and lower is that's what they all have in common but the Upper and lower you know and for Marx was the ruling class and the oppressed class it was economic um and

then uh but you come here and and the economic class doesn't you know doesn't resonate as much here as it did maybe in some of those other places but what does resonate here in the 60s and 70s is race and gender and these kind of social justice disagreements and so what social justice fundamentalism is is basically this this tried and true Framework of you know this Marxist framework kind of with a new skin on it which is American social justice and then made even more radical with the infusion of post-modernism where you know not just

as liberalism bad but actually the sign you know that like you said math can be racist so it's this kind of like philosophical Frankenstein this like stitched together of these it and has and and so again it's called you you Know they they wear the same uniform as the liberal social justice they say social justice right you know Racial equality but it has nothing to do with liberal social justice it is directly opposed to Liberal social justice this is fascinating the evolution of ideas if if we ignore the harm done by it it's fascinating how

humans get together and evolve these ideas so as you show Marxism is the idea that Society is a zero-sum I mean I guess zero sum is a really important thing here uh zero-sum struggle between the ruling class and the working class with power being exerted through politics and economics then you add critical theory Marxism 2.0 on top of that and you add to politics and economics you add culture and institutions and then on top of that for postmodernism you add science you have morality basically anything else you can Think to stitch together Frankenstein and if

you notice and which is not necessarily bad but in this case I think it's actually violating the Marxist tradition by being anti-science and and you know and it's violating the post-modernism because what post-modernists were they were Radical Skeptics not just of they were Radical Skeptics not just of the way things were but of their own beliefs they and what and social justice fundamentalism is Suddenly is not at all uh self self critical it says that we have the answers which is the opposite of what post-modernists would ever say this no you just have another meta-narrative

so and it's also violating of course the tradition of like liberal social justice in a million ways because it's it's anti-liberal um and so this Frankenstein comes together meanwhile liberal social justice doesn't have a Frankenstein it's Very clear it's very it's a crisp ideology that says we need we there are trying to make we're trying to get to a more perfect union they're trying to to to keep the promises made in the Constitution and that's what it's trying to do and so it's it's much simpler in a lot of ways so you write that my

big problem with social justice fundamentalism isn't the ideology itself it's what it's Scholars and activists started to do sometimes around 2013 when They began to wield a Kajol that's not supposed to have any place in the country like the US so it's the actions not the ideas I don't like the ideology I think it's a low-rung ideology I think it's morally inconsistent based on you know it flip-flops on on its morals depending on the the group I think it's Echo chambery I think it's um I I think it's it's it's full of inaccuracies and kind

of can't stand up to debate so I think it's a lot But but there's a ton of lowering ideologies I don't like I don't like a lot of religious doctrines I don't like a lot of political doctrines right the U.S is a place inherently that is a mishmash of a ton of ideologies and I'm not going to like two-thirds of them at any given time so my problem the reason I'm writing about this is not because I'm like by the way this ideology is not something I like that's not interesting the reason that it must

be written about Right now this particular ideology is because it's not playing nicely with others what what I if you want to be a hardcore you know Evangelical Christian go in the US says Live and Let Live not only are you allowed to to have an echo chamber of some kind you're it's actively protected here Live and Let Live they can do what they want you do what you want now if the Evangelical 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 they might like you but they don't have the power but I'd be able to get anyone fired who they want and they're able to actually change the curriculum in all these schools in class to to suddenly not conflict with no more evolution in the in the textbooks because they don't want it now I would Write a book about why about Evangelical Christianity because that's what every liberal regardless of what you think of the actual horizontal beliefs doesn't matter what they believe when

it when they start violating Live and Let Live and shutting down other area other segments of society and in kind of it's almost like a you know not to you know it's not the best analogy but like it's like a a Neco chamber is like a benign Tumor and what you what you have to watch out for is a tumor that starts to metastasis that starts to forcefully spread and damage the tissue around it and that's what this particular ideology has been doing do you worry about it you know as an existential threat to to

liberalism in in the west in the United States is it a problem or is it the biggest problem that's threatening all of human civilization it's I I would Never I would not say it's the biggest problem it it might be I wouldn't if someone if it turns out in 50 years someone says actually it was I wouldn't be shocked but I also I would I wouldn't bet on that because there's a lot of problems I'm a little Sergeant drop it it is popular to say that kind of thing though and it's less popular to say

the same thing about AI or nuclear weapons which worries me that I'm more worried about Nuclear weapons even still than I am about wokeism so I've gotten I've had probably a thousand arguments about this that's one nice thing about spending six years procrastinating on getting a book done is you end up test battle testing your ideas a million times so I've heard this one a lot right which is there's kind of three groups of former Obama voters one is super woke now yeah another one is super anti-woke now and the third is what you just

said which is Sure Wellness is over the top right they're not you're not woke but I think that the anti-woke people are totally lost their mind and it's just not that big a deal right now here's why I disagree with that because it's not it's not wokeness itself it's that a of radical um political movement of which there will always be a lot in the country Has managed to do something that a radical movement is not supposed to be able to do in the U.S which is they've managed to hijack institutions all across the country

and hijack medical journals and universities and you know the ACLU you know saying all the you know activist organizations and non-profits and and certain ngos yeah and many and many tech companies and What so it's not that I think this thing is so bad it's a little like we said with Trump it's that what I'm what's the reason Trump scares me is not because Trump's so bad it's that because it shows it's it reveals that we were vulnerable to a demagogue candidate and what wokeness reveals to me is that we are currently and until something

changes will continue to be vulnerable to a um A bully a bully movement and a forcefully expansionist movement that wants to actually um destroy the workings you know their liberal gears and tear them apart and so so here's the way I view a liberal democracy is it is a it is is a bunch of these institutions that were that were trial and error crafted over you know hundreds of years and they all rely on trust public trust And there's certain kind of feeling of unity that actually is critical to a liberal democracy's functioning and with

I see this thing is as a parasite on that that whose goal is and I'm not saying by the way each individual in this is I don't think they're bad people I think that it's it's the ideology itself has the property of its goal is to tear apart the pretty delicate workings of the liberal democracy and Shred the critical lines of trust And so you talk about Ai and you talk about all these other big problems nuclear right the reason I I like writing about that stuff a lot more than I like writing about politics

this was a fun topic for me is because I realized that like all of those things if they're gonna have a good future with those things and they're actually threats like I said we need to have a wits about us and we need the the liberal you know gears and and levers working we need the Liberal machine working and so if something's threatening to undermine that it affects everything else we need to have our scientific mind about us about these foundational ideas but I I guess my sense of hope comes from observing the immune system

respond to wokism there seems to be a pro-liberalism immune system and not only that so like there's intellectuals there's people that are Willing to do the fight you talk about courage are being courageous and there is a hunger for that such that those ideas can become viral and they take over so I just don't see a mechanism by which wokism accelerates like exponentially and takes over like is expand it feels like as it expands the immune system responds uh of the the the immune system of the of liberalism of of basically a country in at

least the United States that's still Ultimately at the core of the individual values the freedom of speech Just freedoms in general the freedom of an individual but that's the battle so to me it is like a virus and an immune system yeah and I totally agree I see the same story happening and I you know I'm sitting here rooting for the immune system but you're still worried well here's the thing so a liberal democracy is in always going to be vulnerable to a Movement like this right and there will be more because it's not a

totalitarian dictatorship because if you can socially pressure people to not say what they're thinking you can suddenly start to just take over right you can break the liberalism of the liberal democracy quite easily and suddenly a lot of things are illiberal on the other hand the same vulnerability the same system that's vulnerable to that also is hard To truly conquer because now the maoists right similar kind of vibe they were saying that science is evil and as a you know and that they're the intellectuals are you know it's all it's all this big conspiracy but

they could murder you and they had the hard cudgel in their hand right and the hard cudgel is scary and um and and you can conquer a country With the hard cudgel but you can't use that in the U.S so what they have is a soft cudgel which can have the same effect initially you can scare people into shutting up you can't maybe imprison them and murder them but if you can socially ostracize them and get them fired that basically is going to have the same effect so the soft cudgel can have the same effect

for a while but the thing is It's it's a little bit of a house of cards because it relies on fear and as soon as that fear goes away the whole thing falls apart right the soft cultural requires people to be so scared of getting canceled or getting whatever and as soon as some people start you know Toby Luca 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 and you know what like they're thriving you will be on this podcast his seems like a fascinating he's amazing he spoke up he's one of the smartest and like kindest dudes but he's also um he has courage at a time when it's hard but here's the thing is that it's different than that you need so much less courage against a soft cudgel than You do the Iranians throwing their hijabs Into the Fire those people's courage just just blows away any courage we have here because they might

get executed that's the thing is that you can actually have courage right now and it's so don't worry about it um oh man the irony of that and you talk about so two things to fight this There's two things awareness and courage what's the awareness piece the awareness piece is um is is under first just no understanding the stakes like getting our heads out of the sand and being like technology is blowing up exponentially where our society's trust is devolving like we're kind of falling apart in some important ways we're losing our grip on some

stability at the Worst time that's the first point just a big picture and then also awareness of I think this vertical axis or whatever your version of it is this concept of how do I really form my beliefs where do they actually come from where you know did they are they someone else's beliefs am I following a checklist um how about my values you know I used to identify with the blue party or the red party but now they've changed and And I suddenly am okay with that is that because my values change with it

or am I actually anchored to the party not to any principle asking yourself these questions um asking you know looking for where do I feel disgusted by fellow human beings you know that maybe I'm I'm being a crazy tribal person without realizing it how about the people around me am I being bullied by some Echo chamber without realizing it Um am I the bully somewhere right so that's the first just just I think just to kind of do a self-audit and and and um and I think that like just just some awareness like that it's

just a self-audit about these things can can go a long way but if you don't if you keep it to yourself it's almost useless because if it doesn't if you don't have without you know awareness without courage does very little so courage is when you take that awareness and you Actually export it out into the world and it starts affecting other people and so courage can happen on multiple levels it can happen by first of all just stop saying stuff you don't believe if you're being pressured by a kind of a ideology or a movement

to say stuff that you don't actually believe just stop just just just stay in your ground and don't say anything that's that's courage that's one first step start speaking out in small groups Starts you know actually speaking around see what happens the sky doesn't usually fall actually people usually respect you for it like you know and it's not not every group but like you'd be surprised and then eventually you know maybe start speaking out in bigger groups start going public you know Global go public with it but and you don't need everyone doing this look

some people will lose their jobs for it I'm not talking to those people most people won't lose Their jobs but they have the same fear as if they would right and it's like what are you gonna get criticized or are you gonna get a bunch of people you know angry Twitter people will will criticize you like it yeah it's not pleasant but actually that's a little bit like our primitive Minds fear that really back when it was programmed that kind of ostracism or criticism will get leave you out of the tribe and you'll die today

it's kind of a delusional fear It's not actually that scary and the people who have realized that can can exercise incredible leadership right now so you have a really interesting description of censorship of self-censorship also as you've been talking about uh who's King mustache and uh this Gap I think I hope you write even more even more than you've written in the book about these ideas because it's so strong this this censorship gaps that are created between the dormant Thought pile and uh the kind of thing under the speech curve yeah so first of all

so I like to think of I think it's a useful tool is this thing called a thought pile which is if you have a On Any Given issue you have a horizontal spectrum and just say I could take your brain out of your head and I put it on the thought pile right where you happen to believe about that issue now I did that for everyone in the in The community or in a society and you're going to end up with a big mushy pile that I think will often form a bell curve if it's

really politicized it might form like a camel with two humps because it's like concentrated here but for a typical issue it'll just form you know a fear of AI you're going to have a bell curve right you know things like this that's the thought pile now the second thing is a line that's I call the speech curve which is what people are Saying so this feature curve is high when not just a lot of people are saying it but it's being said from the biggest platforms being said in the you know on the you know

in the New York Times and it's being said by the president on you know in the State of the Union those things are the top of the speech curve now and and then as you know and then when the speech occurs lower it means it's being said either whispered in small groups or it's just not very many People are talking about it now a healthy when a when a free speech democracy is healthy on a certain topic you've got the speech curve sitting right on top of the thought pile they they mirror each other which

is naturally what would happen more people think something is going to be said more often and from higher platforms what censorship does and that censorship can be from the government I so I use the tale of King mustache and King Mustache she's a little tiny Tyrant and he's very sensitive and people are making fun of his mustache and they're saying he's not a good King and he does not like that so what does he do he enacts a policy and he says anyone who has heard criticize anyone who's heard criticizing me or my mustache or

my rule will be put to death and immediately at the town was because his father was a very liberal it was always free speech in in his kingdom but Now King mustache has taken over and he's saying this is a new new rules now and so a few people yell out and they say that's not how we do things here and that moment it's what I call a moment of truth did the king's guards stand with the principles of the kingdom and say yeah King mustache that's not what we do in which case he would

kind of have to he's nothing he can do or are they going to execute so in this Case it's as if he laid down an electric fence over a part of this thought pile and said no one's allowed to speak over here the speech curve maybe people will think these things but the speech curve cannot go over here but the electric fence wasn't actually electrified until the king's guards in a moment of truth get scared and say okay and they hang the five people who spoke out so in that moment that fence just became electric

and now no one Criticizes King mustache anymore so I use this as an allegory now of course he has a hard cudgel because he can execute people but now when we look at the U.S what you're seeing right now is a lot of pressure which is very similar an electric fence is being laid down saying no one can criticize these ideas and if you do you won't be executed you'll be canceled you'll be you'll be you'll be fired now what is that fence Electrified from there no they can't actually they're not working the company they

can't fire you but they can start a Twitter mob when someone violates that speech curve when someone violates that speech Rule and then the leadership at the company has the moment of truth and what the leaders should do is stand up for their company's values which is almost always in favor of the employee and say look you know even if they made A mistake they make people make mistakes we're not going to fire them or maybe that person actually said something that's reasonable we should discuss it but either way we're not going to fire them

and if they said no what happens is the Twitter mom actually doesn't have they can't execute you they they go away and the fence has proven to have no electricity what's been the problem with the past few years is what's happened again and again is the leader gets Scared and they don't they get scared of the front when they fire them boom that fence has electricity and now actually if you cross that it's not just you know a threat like you will have you'll be out of a job like it's really bad like you'll have

a huge penalty you might not be able to feed your kids so that's an electric fence that goes up now what happens when an electric fence goes up and it's proven to actually be Electrified the speech curve morphs into a totally different position and now these new people say instead of having the kind of marketplace of ideas you know that turns into a kind of a natural belt curve they say no no these ideas are okay to say not just okay you'll be socially rewarded and these ones don't that's the rules of their own Echo

chamber that they're now applying to everyone and it's working and so the speech curve distorts and so you end up With now instead of one region which is a region of kind of active communal thinking what people are thinking and saying you now have three regions you have a little active communal thinking but mostly you now have this dormant thought pile which is all these these opinions that suddenly everyone's scared to say out loud everyone's thinking but they're scared to say everyone's thinking but no one's saying and then you have this other region Which is

this the the approved ideas of this now cultural kind of dictator and those are being spoken from the largest platforms and they're being repeated by the president and they're being repeated all over the place you know even though people don't believe it and that's this Distortion and what happens is the the society becomes really stupid because active communal thinking is the region where we can actually think together and now no one Can think together and it gets it gets siled into small private conversations it's really powerful what you said about institutions and so on it's

not trivial to from a leadership position to be like no we we defend the employee or defend the um yeah the the employee the person with us on our like because we don't there's because there's no actual uh ground to the any kind of violation we're hearing about so the mob they Resist the mob it's ultimately to the leader I guess of a particular institution of a particular company and it's difficult oh yeah no no it's not I don't if it were easy it wouldn't it it there wouldn't be all of these failings and by

the way this is that's the immune system failing that's the liberal immune system of that company failing but also then it's an example which means a lot of other you know it's failing kind of to the country it's not easy of course It's not because what because we have primitive Minds that are wired to care so much about what people think of us and even if we're not gonna you know maybe first of all we're scared that it's going to start a because you know what you know what what do mobs do they don't just

say I'm going to criticize you I'm going to criticize anyone who still buys your product I'm going to criticize anyone who goes on your podcast so it's not just you it's Now suddenly if if if if Lex becomes tarnished enough now I go on the podcast and people are saying oh I'm not buying his book he went on Lex Friedman no no thanks right and now I get by there it's a call I call it a smear web like you've been smeared and it's so we're in such a you know bad time that it smear

travels to me and now meanwhile someone buys my book and tries to share it someone said you're buying that guy's book you know he goes on Lex Freeman you see how this Happens right so that hasn't happened in this case but that so we are so wired hey that is kind of bad right like that is actually like bad for you but but we're wired to care about it so much because it meant life or death back in the dead yeah yeah yeah and luckily in this case we're both uh you probably can smear each

other in this conference this is wonderful I I smear you all given given the nature of your book um What do you think about freedom of speech as a term and as an idea as a way to resist the mechanism this mechanism of uh dormant thought pile and artificially generated speech this ideal of the freedom of speech and protecting speech and celebrating speech well so this is this is kind of the point I was talking about earlier about King mustache made a rule against for he's created Official because just I just love the the one

of the amazing things about your book as you get later and later in the book you cover more and more difficult issues as a way to illustrate the importance of the vertical perspective but there's something about using hilarious drawings throughout that make it much more fun and it takes you away from the personal somehow and you start thinking in the space of ideas versus like outside of the tribal type of Thinking so it's a really brilliant I mean I would advise for anybody to do con when they write controversial books to have hilarious drawings it's

true like put the silly stick figure in your thing and it lightens it does it lightens the mood it gets people's guard down a little bit you know and it works it it reminds people that like we're all friends here right like we're you know that's like you know laugh at ourselves laugh at the laugh at the fact that We're like in a culture War a little bit and now we can talk about it right as opposed to like getting like religious about it but but basically like King mustache had no First Amendment he said

we the government is censoring right which is very common around the world right Government Center all them the US you know again there's some you can argue there's some controversial things recently but basically the US the First Amendment isn't the problem Right no one is being arrested for saying the wrong thing but this graph is still happening and so so freedom of speech when people if what people like to say is if someone's can't complaining about like cancel culture and saying you know this is this is you know an anti-free speech people like to point

out no it's not the government's not arresting you for anything this is called like you know the free market buddy like this is Called you know you're putting your ideas out and you're getting criticized and your precious Marketplace of ideas there it is right I've gotten this a lot and this is not making a critical distinction between cancel culture and criticism culture um criticism culture is a little bit of this kind of high wrong idea lab stuff we talked about criticism culture Attacks the idea and and and and and and and encourages further discussion right

it enlivens discussion it makes everyone smarter cancel culture attacks the person very different can criticism culture says here's why this idea is so bad let me tell you cancer culture says here's why this person is bad and no one should talk to them and they should be fired and what does that do it doesn't enliven The discussion it makes everyone scared to talk and it's the opposite it shuts down discussion so you still have your first amendment but first amendment plus cancel culture equals you might as well be in king must you might as well

have government censorship right first amendment plus criticism culture great now you have this vibrant Marketplace of ideas so there's a very clear difference um and so when when people criticize the Cancel culture and then someone says oh see you're so sensitive now you look you're doing the cancel culture yourself you're trying to punish this person for critics like no no no no every good liberal and I and I mean that in the lower case which is that anyone who believes in Liberal democracies regardless of what they believe should stand up and say no to cancel

culture and say this is not okay regardless of what the actual topic is and that makes Them a good liberal versus if they're trying to cancel someone who's just criticizing they're doing the opposite now they're shutting so it's the opposite things but it's very easy to get confused you can see people take advantage of the and sometimes they just don't know it themselves the the lines here can be very confusing the wording can be very confusing and be without that wording suddenly it looks like someone who's Criticizing cancel culture is canceling but they're not you

uh applied this thinking to universities in particular there's a great yet another great image on the trade-off between knowledge and conviction and it's what's commonly actually can maybe explain to me the difference but you uh it's often referred to the dunning-kruger effect where you uh when you first learn everything you have an Extremely um high confidence about self-estimation of how well you understand that thing you actually say that dining cougar means something else so yeah it's everyone I post this everyone's like Dunning Krueger and it's a and it's what everyone thinks Dunning Kruger isn't Dunning

Kruger is a little different it's it's you have a diagonal line like this one right which is the place you are it's the I I call it like The humility tightrope it's a humility Sweet Spot it's exactly the right level of humility based on what you know if you're below it you're insecure you actually have too much humility you don't have enough confidence because you know more than you're giving yourself credit for and when you're above the line you're in the Arrogant zone right you're you need to you need a dose of humility right you

think you know more than you do so y'all want to stay on That tightrope and Dunning Kruger is basically a straight line that's just uh has a lower slope so you start off you still are you still are getting more confident as you go along but you start off above that line and as you learn more you end up below the line good later so but anyway so this wavy thing this wavy thing is is a different phenomenon and it's just related but so this idea so for people just listening Um there's a child's Hill

pretty damn sure you know a whole lot and feeling great about it that's in the beginning and then there's an insecure Canyon you crash down acknowledging that you don't know that much and then there's a growth Mountain growing up Mount grown-up Mountain uh 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 uh the grown-up mom and you climb and climb and climb uh you're saying that in universities we're pinning

people at the top of the child's Hill so so for me this is a very you know I think of myself with this because I went to college like a lot of 18 year olds and I was very cocky I just thought I knew it I know and um when it came to politics I was like bright blue just because I grew up in a bright blue suburb and I wasn't Thinking that hard about it and I thought that you know um and what I did when I went to college is met a lot of

smart conservatives and a lot of smart progressives um but I've met a lot of people who weren't just going down a checklist and they knew stuff and when I and suddenly I realized that like a lot of these views I have are not based on knowledge they're based on other people's Conviction everyone else thinks that's true now I think it's well you know I'm I'm actually like I'm I'm transferring someone else's conviction to me and who knows why they have conviction they might have conviction because they're transferring from someone else and I'm a smart dude

I thought why why am I why am I like giving away my own independent you know learning yeah abilities here and just adopting Other views so anyway it was this humbling experience it wasn't just about politics by the way it was that I had strong views about a lot of stuff and I just I got lucky not 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 and so you're quickly in you know in in again ideal

lab culture it was an idea lab and also I also went to I started Getting in the habit I Started Loving listening to people who disagreed to me because it was so exhilarating listening to a Smart part when I thought there was no no Credence to this other argument right the the the the this side of this debate is obviously wrong I wanted to see an Intelligence Squared on that debate in particularly I wanted to go see I actually got into Intelligence Squared in college I wanted to see a smart person who disagrees with me

talk It became so fascinating to me right it was the most interesting thing that was a new thing I didn't think I liked that and so what did that do that that shoved me down the humble tumble here and number three it shoved me down where I started to and then I and then I went the other way where I realized that I had been a lot of my identity had been based on this faux feeling of knowledge this idea that I thought I knew everything now that I don't have that I Was like I

felt really like dumb and I felt really almost like embarrassed of what I knew and so that's where I call this insecure Canyon I think it's sometimes when you're so used to thinking you know everything and then you realize you don't it's like it's and then you start to realize that actually really awesome thinkers they were if they they don't judge me for this they totally respect if I say I don't know anything about this and say oh cool you Should read this and this and this they don't say you don't know anything they don't

say that right and so and not that I'm by the way this is not to say I'm now on grown-up mountain and you should all join me I often find myself drifting up with like a helium balloon oh I think I read about the new thing and suddenly I think I have I think I I you know I read three things about you know a new AI thing and I'm like I'll go do a talk on this I'm like No I won't I don't I I just I'm gonna just be spouting out the opinion of

the person I just read so I have to remind myself but it's useful now what the reason my problem with colleges today is that it's I was a graduated in 2004. this is a recent change is that all of those speakers I went who disagreed with me a lot of them were conservative so many of those speakers would not be allowed on campuses today and so many of The discussions I had room big groups or classrooms and this is still you know this was a liberal campus so many of those disagreements um uh they're not

happening today and you I've interviewed a ton of college students it's chilly it is you know people keep to themselves so what's happening is not only are people losing that push-off child's Hill which was so valuable to me so valuable to me as a thinker it kind of started my life as a Better thinker they're losing that but actually what college a lot of the college classes and the vibe in colleges a lot of what is now saying that there is one right set of views and it's this kind of you know woke ideology um

and it's right and anyone who disagrees with it is bad and anyone and and don't speak up you know unless you're gonna agree with it it's teaching people that child's Hills that you know it's nailing people's feet to child's Hill it's teaching people that these are right this user right and like you don't have any you nothing to you should feel a complete conviction about them yeah how do we fix it is is it part of the administration is it part of the culture as a part of the uh is is a part like actually

instilling in the individual like 18 year olds the idea that this is the beautiful way to live is to embrace the disagreement and the growth from That it's awareness and courage it's the same thing so first of all just get when awareness is people need to see what's happening here that kids are getting losing the they're not going to college and becoming better tougher more robust thinkers yeah they're actually going to college and becoming zealots they're getting taught to be zealots and they at in the website still advertises you know wide variety of I've you

know the website is a bait And switch you listen to all the universities yeah it's a bait and switch it's it's still saying here you're coming here for a wide intellectual basically they're advertising this is an idea lab and you get there and it's like actually it's an echo chamber that you're paying money for so if people realize that they start to get mad hopefully and then courage I mean starts you know yes Brave students there's been some Very brave students who have started you know big think clubs and stuff like that where it's like

we're gonna have you know present both sides of a debate here and that that takes courage but also um courage and Leadership um like the the it's it's like if you look at these colleges it's specifically the leaders who show strength who get the best results remember the cultural is soft so if a Leader of one of these places says you know the the college presidents who have shown some strength um they actually don't get as much trouble it's the ones who Pander the ones who um uh in that you know in that moment of

truth they they they shrink away then they get a lot more trouble the mob smells blood for The Listener uh the the podcast Favorite Liv bury just entered and your friend just entered the room uh do you mind if she joins us please I think there's a story she has about you so live you mentioned something that there's a funny story about we haven't talked at all about the actual process of writing the book is is there you guys made a bet of some kind yeah is this a true story is this a Completely false

fact it's true Liv is she's mean when she I didn't I did not know mean live she's like she's like a bully she's like scary I have to have that have that screenshot so Liv was FaceTiming me and she was like she was like being intimidating I took a screenshot and I made it my phone background so every time I opened it I was like so to give the background of this it's because if you hadn't noticed Tim started writing this book how many Years ago six 2016. mid 2016. right as sort of a response

to like the Trump stuff not even yeah it was just supposed to be a mini post I was like oh I'm so like I was like I'm looking at all these like future Tech things and I feel this like uneasiness like ah we're gonna like mess up all these things why there's like some Cloud over our society let me just write a mini post and I open it up to Wordpress to write a one day little essay And things went on politics it was going to be on like this feeling I had that that like

this feeling I had that um we were our Tech was was just growing and growing and we were becoming less wise what's up what's up with that and I just wanted to write like just like a little like little thousand word essay on like something I think we should pay attention to and that was the beginning of this six-year nightmare did you anticipate those the blog post Would take a long while um I don't remember the process fully in terms of I remember you saying I'm actually writing this is it's turning into a bigger thing

and I was like um you know because the more we talked about remember we were talking about it I was like oh this goes deep because I didn't really understand the full scope of the situation like nowhere near and you sort of explained it I was like okay Yeah I see that and then the more we dug into it the sort of the deeper and deeper and deeper it went but no I did not anticipate it would be six years let's put it that way and when was your Ted Talk on uh procrastination so that

was that was March of 2016 and I started this book three months later it fell into the biggest procrastination Hall that I've ever fallen into oh wow the irony isn't lost on me I mean it's like it's I I just like I like how much cred I have as for that Ted talk I'm like I am legit procrastinator that is not I'm not just saying it like it wasn't just that sure because I mean it did you know you did intend it to start out as a blog post but then you're like actually this needs

to maybe multiple and she does make it into a full series you know what I'll turn it into a book and then as well and and what what also what Liv witnessed a few times and my wife has witnessed like 30 of these is like these These 180 epiphanies or 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 but sometimes it's like I'm just dreading having to finish this the way it is and so this epiphanies where it's like

you know what I need to start over from the beginning and just make this like a short like 20 little blog post list and then I'll do that and I was like no no I have like a new Epiphany I have to and It's these and and yeah it's kind of like the crazy person a little bit but anyway can I tell the story of the the the bed go for it all right so things came to my head when we were in we were on vacation in the Dominican Republic uh Tim and his wife

me an eagle and we were in the ocean and I remember you'd been in the ocean for like an hour just bobbing in there becoming it and we got talking and we were talking about the book and You know you were expressing just like this you know the just the horror of the situation basically you're like look I just I'm so close but there's still this and then there's this and um an idea popped into my head which is the you know poker players often uh we we will set ourselves like negative bets you know

like uh essentially if we don't get a job done then we have to do something we really don't want to do so Instead of having a carrot like a really really big stick um so I had the idea to ask Tim okay what is the worst either organization or individual uh or that you if you had to you know that you would loathe give a large sum of money to and he thought about it for a little while and he gave his answer and I was like all right what's your net worth he said his

net worth all right 10 of your net worth to That thing if you don't get the draft because oh that's sorry but just before that I'd asked him how long like if you had a gun to your head onto your wife's head and you had to get the book into a state where you could like send off an edit to the art to a draft to your editor how long he's like oh I guess like I could get it like 95 good in a month I was like okay great in one month's time if you

do not have that edit yeah Really scary ten percent of your net worth is going to this thing that you really really think is terrible but you're forgetting the kicker go on the kicker was that because you know procrastinators they self-defeat that's what they do and then Liv says I'm going to sweeten the deal and I am going to basically match you and I'm going to put in I'm going to send this like a huge amount of my own money there if you don't do it so and And I can't that's that would be really

bad so not only are you screwing yourself just screwing a friend and she and she was like and and as your friend because I'm your friend I will send it I will send the money I mean like that you know like tyranny yeah um and um I got the draft in yeah I know well I was Igor could have tested this like actually it was it was funny because it was it was like supposed to Be by the summer solstice or whatever it was it was like a certain date and it was like before I

got it in at four and I got no I got it in at four a.m like the next morning but then and and and and and they were both like that doesn't count I'm like it does it's still for me it's the same day still it's okay can you imagine how fucked in the head you have to be yeah so like literally technically pass the deadline by four hours An obscene amount of money to a thing you loathe that's how bad his his sickness because I knew the hard hard deadline I knew that there was

no way she was gonna actually send that money because it was 4am so I knew I actually had the whole night so yeah you know I should actually punish you and Justice I should send like a nominal amount to that thing no thanks no but uh is there some micro like lessons from that from how to avoid procrastination writing a Book that you've learned yes well I've learned a lot of things I mean like first don't take don't write like a dissertation about like proving some Grand theory of society because that's really procrastinating like I

I would have been an awful PhD student for that reason some and so like I'm gonna do another book and it's going to be like a bunch of short chapters that are one-offs because that's like it just doesn't feed into because your book is Like a giant like framework there's Grand theories I know all through your book I know and I learned not to do that again I did it once I don't want to do it again oh with the book yes yes don't do another one of it looks look some people should it's just

not for me I I you just did it I know and it and it almost killed me okay so that's the first one but secondly yeah like basically there's two ways to fix procrastination one is you fix it's like A picture you have a boat that's leaking and it's not working very well you can fix it in two ways you can get your hammer and nails out and your boards and actually fix the boat or you can duct tape it for now to get yourself across the river but it's not actually fixed so ideally down

the road I have repaired whatever kind of bizarre mental illness that I have that makes me procrastinate in a very like I just don't self-defeat in this way anymore But in the meantime I Can duct tape the boat by bringing what I call the Panic monster into the situation via things like this and this scary person and having external pressure to have external pressure of some kind is critical for me uh it's it's yes I don't have the muscle to do the work I need to do without external pressure by the way I live is

there a possible future where you write a book and Meanwhile by the way huge Procrastinator that's the funny thing about this yeah yeah I mean how long did your last video take oh my God is there advice would you do you give to Liv how to get the videos done faster well it would be the same exact thing I mean actually I can give good procrastination advice Panic monster um well we should do it together it should be like we have this date but right you know it's it's um we're actually just do another bet

I have to Have my script done by this time yes yeah if I go to get the third part out because then you'll actually do it um and um and and it's not the thing is the time in but it's like if you if you could take three weeks on a video and instead you take 10 weeks it's not like oh well I've also I'm having more fun in those times you're the whole 10 weeks bad so you're just you're just having a bad time and you're getting less work done and less work out it's

not like You're enjoying your personal life it's bad for you for your relationships it's bad for your your own you keep doing it anyway yeah well a lot of people why do people uh have troubles keeping a diet right yeah primitive mind why'd you point at me what's your procrastination weakness do you have one everything everything right now everything it's everything preparing for a conversation I had your book amazing book I really enjoyed it I Started reading it I was like this is awesome it's so awesome that I'm going to save it when I'm behind

the computer and can take notes like good notes of course that resulted in like last minute everything everything I'm doing in my life not everyone's like that you know people self-defeat in different ways some people don't have this particular problem Adam Grant is that he calls himself a precrastinator Where he gets an assignment he will go home and do it until it's done and handed it which is also not necessarily good you know it's like you're rushing it either way but it's better but some people have the opposite thing um where they will um the

the the the the the looming deadline makes them so anxious that they go and fix it right and the procrastinator I think has a similar anxiety but it they they resolve it in a totally different way well they Don't solve it they just live with the anxiety right right they deliver things that now I think there's a even bigger group of people so there's these people that Adam grants there's people like me and then there's people who have a healthy relationship with deadlines but they're still part of a bigger group of people that actually they

they um they need a deadline there to do something so they actually they still are motivated By a deadline and as soon as you have all the things in life that don't have a deadline like working out and like working on that album you wanted to write they don't do anything either so there's actually like that's why procrastination is a much bigger problem Than People realize because it's not just the funny last second people it's anyone who um actually can't get things done that don't have a deadline You dedicate your book quote to tandas who

never planned on being married to someone who would spend six years talking about his book on politics but here we are uh what's the secret to a successful relationship with a procrastinator that's maybe for both of you um well I think the the first most important thing you already started with a political answer I could tell okay good no no the first and most important Thing is because people who don't procrastinate if you don't it's like you will they people in the instinct is to judge it as like uh that's either either just think think

they're just being like a loser or they're taking it they'll take it personally you know uh and instead to see this as like this is this is a uh some form of addiction or some form of ailment you know they're not just being a dick right Like they have a problem and so so some compassion but then also maybe finding that line where you can you know maybe apply some tough love some middle ground on the other hand you might say that you know you don't want the the significant other relationship where it's like they're

into one nagging you maybe that's you don't want them even being part of that and I think maybe it's you know better to have a live do it instead right having someone who can like create The infrastructure where they aren't the direct stick you need a bit of carrot and stick right maybe they can be the person who keeps reminding them of the carrot and then they set up the friend group to be the stick and then that keeps your relationship yeah in a good steak like looming in the background that's your friend group okay

at the beginning of the conversation we talked about how all of human history can be presented as a Thousand page book uh what are you excited about for the 1000 what do you say that first page uh so the next 250 years what are you most excited about I'm most excited about um have you read the Fable of the Dragon 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 him to the dragon and that there's a Stockholm syndrome when we say that's just a lot of man and that's what we have to do and anyone who says maybe we should try to beat the dragon they get called Vain and narcissistic um but someone who tries to someone who goes does chemo no one calls them Vayner narcissistic they say they're they're you know good good For you right you're a hero you're you're fighting fighting the good fight so I think there's some disconnect

here and I think that if we can get out of that Stockholm syndrome and realize that death is just the machine the human physical machine failing and that there's no law of nature that says you can't with enough technology um uh repair the machine and keep it going until no one I don't think anyone Wants to live forever people think they do no one does but until people are ready and I think when we hit a world where we can ex 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 BC you know we'll look back at BC before the big advancement and it'll seem so sad and so heartbreaking barbaric and people Will say I can't believe that humans like us had to live with that when they lost loved ones and they they died before they were ready I think that's the ultimate achievement but we need to stop criticizing and smearing people who you talk about it so you think

where that's actually doable in the next two 250 years okay a lot happens in 250 years especially when technology is really Exponentially yeah and you think humans will be around versus AI complete takes over whereas I mean look The Optimist in me and maybe the stupid kind of 2023 person in me says yeah of course we'll we'll make it we'll we'll figure it out but you know I mean we are going into um create you know I have a friend who knows as much about the future as anyone I know I mean he's really he's

a big investor and you know future Tech and he Um he's really on the puzzle things and he just says Future's gonna be weird that's what he says if you're just gonna be weird don't look at your the last few Decades of your life and apply that for it and say that's just what life is like no no it's going to be weird and different well some of my favorite things in this world are weird and speaking of which it's good to uh have this conversation it's good to have you as friends this Was an

incredible one thanks for coming back and thanks for talking with me a bunch more times this is awesome thank you Lex thank you thanks for listening to this conversation with Tim Urban to support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description and now let me leave you with some words from Winston Churchill when there's no enemy within the enemies outside cannot hurt you Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time