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I'm Barry Weiss and this is Honestly.
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Tim
0:36
Urban is the only cartoonist who
0:38
has elicited an existential crisis
0:40
in me. It's not because he's some great
0:42
illustrator. Tim's drawings are comically
0:45
simple. They're of stick figures. Or if he's feeling
0:47
fancy, maybe he'll do a chart.
0:49
What makes them so affecting is the way
0:52
he's able to capture and distill the
0:54
most complex and profound questions
0:57
we face.
0:58
Questions like, what does it
1:00
mean to be a human being? What
1:03
is the purpose of our lives?
1:05
Are we spending our finite time on earth wisely?
1:07
And do we even grasp how short
1:09
that time is?
1:11
By capturing the length of our days in, say,
1:13
the amount of times we have left to swim in the ocean,
1:16
or the books we have left to read, or the dumplings
1:18
we have left to eat, assuming we live to the age
1:20
of 90, Tim takes an abstract
1:23
subject like time and makes
1:25
it tangible.
1:27
In one of my favorite blog posts of his, Tim breaks
1:29
down the amount of time, realistically, that we have left to spend with our parents.
1:35
Did you know that by the age of 18, you've
1:37
already used up like 95% of your parent time? It's
1:41
something
1:41
that stuck with me. So
1:45
Tim's done this sort of thing for years on his singular
1:47
and must-read blog, Wait But
1:49
Why, which is full of everything
1:51
from posts on AI to aliens to the Fermi
1:53
paradox to marriage.
1:56
But a few years ago, like six years ago,
1:59
like many
1:59
of us, Tim was troubled
2:02
by what he was seeing going on in the
2:04
world around him. He noticed
2:06
that while technology was progressing
2:09
in unbelievable ways, people were going
2:11
to the moon on private rocket ships, computers
2:13
were the size of Starbucks coffee cups, and foraging
2:16
was a thing of the past. Yet
2:19
we were seemingly more unhappy
2:21
than ever before. We were petty. We
2:24
were turning against each other. And
2:26
the very things that have allowed for this kind
2:28
of progress, things like democracy
2:31
and liberalism and humanism, those
2:34
were under siege. Why,
2:36
Tim wondered, was everything such
2:39
a mess? When did things
2:41
get so tribal? And why
2:43
do humans do this stuff to each other? His
2:46
new book, called What's Our Problem,
2:49
a self-help book for societies, is
2:51
an answer to those questions and more. Tim
2:54
looks back at hundreds of thousands
2:57
of years of history. Trust me, it works. He
2:59
condenses.
2:59
And he argues that we are living through more
3:02
change, more rapidly, than
3:04
at any time ever. And
3:06
the stakes of that are almost too
3:09
high to comprehend.
3:11
But what he argues is that the danger
3:13
we face in the end is not global warming,
3:16
it's not an asteroid racing toward Earth,
3:18
it's not an impending alien invasion. It's
3:22
ourselves. And Tim argues
3:24
that we got ourselves into this mess,
3:27
but he's pretty sure we can
3:29
also get ourselves out of it.
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5:44
Tim Urban, welcome to Honestly. Thank
5:46
you for having me. You just published this
5:49
book called What's Our Problem? A self-help
5:51
book for societies. You've been working on this
5:53
book for more than seven years I think. Is
5:55
that right?
5:56
About six and a half. Okay. You're
5:59
sort of a famous procrastinator. I am.
5:59
which we're going to get to later in this conversation.
6:02
But that is not my sense of why
6:05
this book, which has made up at least half
6:07
of cartoons, took so long to get
6:09
into the world.
6:11
What was so hard about getting
6:13
this book out into the public?
6:15
Well, if you're trying to assess
6:18
what's going on in a society and
6:20
why things are the way they are, there are
6:22
so many other
6:25
topics that feed into that. So it
6:27
was an overwhelming amount of material
6:30
to try to kind of put together and synthesize,
6:32
but also on top of that, I
6:34
just had all of this
6:37
resistance to it, saying anything besides politics.
6:40
And then other people would feed into that. They'd
6:42
say, are you crazy? Don't write about
6:44
that. You don't have any haters right now.
6:46
Why would you go and write about politics? Just write about anything
6:48
else. And that to me was interesting. I said,
6:50
well, what's good? This is like, I'm supposed to, I write
6:52
about whatever I want, right? I write it if something's important
6:55
in society. I wrote when AI first became a
6:57
big topic in 2015. I wrote a huge thing about
6:59
it. You know, whatever I'm thinking about, I write
7:01
about. So this one topic, which is so important,
7:03
it's how we all are living together. It's how
7:06
the fate of our society.
7:09
There's this incredible
7:12
incentive to stay away from it. What
7:15
is going on there? And that got
7:17
me thinking, this is part of the story, the
7:19
fear I have of talking about it. That's, there's
7:22
a much bigger topic here.
7:24
You recently wrote in your wonderful blog, Wait
7:26
But Why, about this six and
7:28
a half year journey. And you said this about
7:30
starting the book in 2016. Something
7:33
seemed off about the society around
7:35
me, like there had been a subtle foreboding shift
7:38
in the balance between reason and madness.
7:40
It felt like we were losing our grip on something
7:43
important. Let's talk a little bit
7:45
about that shift. What were you starting to witness
7:47
in 2016 that
7:50
made you feel like the balance
7:52
between reason and madness was tipping into madness?
7:54
And to what did you attribute
7:56
the shift? So
7:58
think about me. middle school
8:00
and how people act in middle school. You
8:03
know, there's popular kids and then
8:05
there's unpopular kids and there's kind of like the
8:08
most popular person is often kind of a mean
8:10
person that everyone's a little bit scared of and then there's
8:13
real in-group and there's out-group and
8:15
people are cruel, right? And I
8:18
started noticing that the grownups
8:21
were acting like this.
8:23
We all have that middle school persona
8:25
in us somewhere, whether we were the person who was
8:28
the bully or the person who was the sidekick
8:30
of the bully, sucking up to the bully or the person who
8:32
was the target of the bully or, you know,
8:35
if we were especially
8:36
grown up at that age, maybe we were the
8:38
person who stood up to the bully, you know, but either
8:40
way, that person's still in us and
8:43
something was bringing it out. And the
8:46
shift I noticed was not just that more people were acting
8:48
this way, but that people that
8:50
would normally criticize this kind of behavior,
8:52
that would criticize cruelty or
8:55
overt tribalism or, you know, gross
8:58
stereotyping of giant groups of people, you
9:00
know, or just kind of old school bigotry.
9:03
The people that would normally stand up and criticize that
9:05
were all doing it only in private. And
9:08
you know, it seemed like the power shifted where
9:10
the people acting kind of in that
9:12
unadmissible way
9:14
had some kind of power that everyone was scared of.
9:17
And it felt like something crazy news story would be happening
9:19
that any reasonable person watching it would say, well,
9:22
that's ridiculous. But no one's saying
9:24
it out loud, right? We're all either saying it in private
9:26
or in some cases you find even in private
9:29
a private dinner party, you see that
9:31
people are even the no one knows who's thinking what
9:33
at that dinner party and everyone's kind of virtue
9:36
signaling to each other at the dinner party. And so
9:38
it didn't feel like it was always like that. It felt
9:40
like this was happening more than it used
9:42
to. Meanwhile, as I'm right as I'm
9:45
thinking about this, you know, Donald Trump is ascending
9:47
in power and he's this is, you know, as the primary
9:50
was going on. And he has a total disregard
9:52
for
9:52
truth and a disregard
9:54
for a lot of the kind of norms that most
9:57
other politicians had had to follow. And he was
9:59
rising up.
9:59
And so there should be things
10:02
happening across the political spectrum, across society
10:04
that, again, felt kind of foreboding. We
10:07
were losing our grip on the
10:09
kind of things that keep a liberal society
10:12
kind of healthy and strong.
10:13
To me, it seems like everyone
10:16
has what I think of as
10:18
their, I guess it's like a play on woke,
10:20
like their waking up moment where they realize
10:23
something's a little off here. Like right for me,
10:25
it was the Tom Cotton op-ed
10:28
and my boss James Bennett being like struggle session
10:30
and fired and then ultimately leaving the New York Times
10:33
and sort of looking at the capturing
10:35
of the institutions. For other people, it was the
10:37
Trump years. For other people, it was the
10:39
COVID lockdowns. For others, it was the moment
10:42
where Kenosha was burning,
10:44
but CNN had the chyron saying,
10:46
you know, fiery but mostly peaceful protests.
10:49
Did you have a kind of like aha
10:52
moment that,
10:53
or was it just kind of a series of
10:55
dinner parties like the
10:57
ones you just alluded to? Yeah. So
11:00
when you talk about these aha moments, I think the
11:02
way they work is
11:03
you don't just see one example of something
11:06
for the first time and suddenly your whole worldview
11:08
shifts. It's more that there's,
11:10
we have these priors, right? You have a prior worldview,
11:13
but somewhere in your subconscious, you've
11:16
been noticing
11:18
things that conflict with that prior and
11:20
maybe it's in your subconscious or maybe your conscious notices
11:22
it and disregards it and you keep noticing things and
11:24
saying, well, that's a freak incident noticing. And
11:27
then the aha moment, I think comes at the
11:29
end of a bunch of these. It's that moment
11:31
when
11:32
you realize that, you know what? I might have
11:35
to question that prior
11:37
and suddenly all those other examples
11:39
that you had been pushing away or that you're only your
11:41
subconscious has been noticed, they all come into
11:43
your consciousness and you realize, wait a second. This
11:46
is a whole pattern. I've been wrong about
11:48
this whole thing. And now
11:50
it's like all these other things fall into place
11:52
in your head. And so
11:54
for me, the
11:56
closest I can come to that exact moment was
11:59
Greg Luciano. took a, you know, who's the head
12:01
of fire, took this video. He happened
12:03
to be walking through Yale campus of Nicholas
12:06
Christakis getting essentially
12:08
struggle sessioned out in the quad
12:10
by a bunch of students over an email
12:13
his wife had written, which was suggesting
12:16
that the school had gone
12:18
too far in telling
12:20
students
12:21
what they should and shouldn't wear for Halloween. And
12:24
she in very gentle wording basically said, I don't
12:26
think it's our job to tell students what they should or shouldn't
12:28
wear. And maybe even if a student
12:30
wears something that's kind of offensive, maybe that's something
12:32
that college students should be able to do. And
12:35
if they and if other students don't like it, maybe the students
12:37
should talk to them and not the administrator, whatever.
12:40
Meanwhile, that turns into now her husband,
12:42
Nicholas Christakis, being screamed
12:45
at and this happened to be captured by Greg, put
12:47
on YouTube, so it went viral, a lot of people saw
12:49
it. But it was watching that video,
12:52
it
12:52
was noticing what kids were saying, which was stuff like,
12:55
you know, this is supposed to be a safe space, saying
12:58
that he's disgusting, that, you know, that
13:00
word disgusting, you know, they've been basically
13:03
subhuman
13:04
and snapping. And
13:06
what I mean by that is, you know, that they were
13:08
when one kid would say something, all the other kids would
13:11
snap in unison. And I know if I were
13:13
there and I'm one of those students, whether I agree or not,
13:15
it's going to be hard to, you know, not snap or
13:17
at least just
13:18
stay silent. Because that's scary
13:20
when everyone is, you know, kind of, you know,
13:23
that snapping is saying, you know, the group is behind
13:25
you. We are behind you. We are one, right, against
13:28
this man. And so it was
13:30
looking at that and saying that Yale is so safe. And
13:32
the idea that this woman's
13:35
email, it makes things
13:37
unsafe. That is just so counter
13:40
to everything that I think and
13:43
the way I think a college campus should be. So now
13:45
I'm thinking, though, but the prior I had
13:47
for a long time was kind of blue,
13:49
good, red, bad, right, in the U.S.
13:52
Just in general, not blue is perfect, but like
13:55
the people on the blue side were the ones who were pushing the
13:57
country forward in a good direction,
13:59
it back. You know, I grew up in a progressive suburb and
14:02
went to progressive college and lived
14:04
in LA and then lived in New York. So, you know, I was surrounded by
14:06
this. And I was an independent thinker in a
14:08
lot of areas, but, you know, these priors, especially with
14:10
something like politics, can be very strong. You know,
14:12
everyone around you thinks this thing, it can make
14:15
us otherwise independent thinker pretty beholden
14:17
to this other framework. And
14:20
I remember looking at that and thinking like, if this
14:22
is what blue is today, then like, something is incredibly
14:25
wrong. And I don't think that, you know, it just kind of,
14:27
it's that moment when your head explodes
14:29
a little,
14:29
because the house of cards that was my
14:32
prior, that was based basically on a
14:35
kind of on tribalism on a feeling that
14:37
I'm part of the good team. And that whole thing
14:39
just kind of shattered over the next couple months.
14:41
And I was reading and I was thinking and I was reflecting
14:44
on everything and looking back at my own emails,
14:46
like, like a year earlier, two years earlier,
14:49
and man, I was like, wow, I was really close
14:51
minded about this stuff. So then I
14:53
said, okay, this is something I have to I have to
14:55
write about.
14:56
You describe your book, which I love as
14:58
a self-help book for societies. And
15:01
I want to get into the self-help portion in just
15:03
a minute. But first I want to talk about how we
15:05
got to the place where we need help. You
15:08
start this book in this wonderful
15:10
way by giving a brief history
15:12
of humanity, which you call the story of us.
15:15
And you say this, you say, if we wrote the story
15:17
of us out in a thousand pages, here's
15:19
what it would look like. From page one
15:21
to page 950, there's basically not
15:24
much going on. And
15:26
then on page 976 of recorded history, it begins ish,
15:29
as you put it. And Christianity
15:34
isn't even born until page 993. So basically, the
15:36
first 95% of the book of human history
15:41
is so, so unbelievably slow
15:44
and boring. And the last 5% is a page
15:46
turner. Why
15:47
is that? What
15:50
is the spark that creates
15:53
the propulsive change that
15:55
we see in those last
15:57
few pages? So
16:00
one of the things that separates humans from other animals
16:03
is language and the
16:05
ability for people to take what's
16:07
in their brain and put it in
16:09
a very detailed way into other people's brains and
16:12
then people can pass the idea on
16:14
through language to their children. And
16:17
so if I learn something about the world, I
16:19
can tell my whole tribe who then can tell
16:21
their descendants and the tribe now
16:24
knows that. And it's like this kind
16:26
of collective knowledge, like a tower of
16:28
knowledge in the middle of that tribe that
16:30
kind of grows and builds and builds. And
16:33
then right around page 975, you start having writing. And
16:38
so now someone can take an idea and
16:40
put it on a tablet or later a book and
16:43
send it into the minds of millions of people. And
16:45
it can last for centuries and it can last in the
16:47
exact wording it was meant to be transmitted
16:49
in. So you have instead of a tribe
16:51
of 150 people's collective knowledge, you now
16:54
have 10,000 or 50,000. And
16:57
so that knowledge tower becomes a skyscraper.
16:59
And so things start happening very
17:02
quickly. You start being able to do things that
17:04
no individual human or no small tribe could
17:06
ever do, like build giant temples and
17:08
understand that the world is round and
17:11
start to come up with governing structures
17:13
that are based on trial and error of hundreds
17:15
of years of governing structures before that. And
17:17
so things start to advance much faster.
17:20
But the craziest thing is this has an exponential
17:23
kind of effect because a more advanced species with
17:25
the bigger knowledge tower makes progress faster
17:28
than a less advanced species. So not
17:30
only do things keep building, but they build faster
17:33
and faster and faster. And
17:35
eventually this comes to a point where things are soaring
17:38
ahead and you're
17:39
making more progress in a century than you did
17:41
in all of human history before that when
17:43
it comes to tech and knowledge building. The
17:45
reason I like the thousand page book thing
17:47
is it allows you to look at the last page alone,
17:50
just page 1000. So now we're not talking
17:52
about the last 5% of the book. We're talking about the last 0.1%
17:55
of the book. And
17:57
that goes from like 1770s to today.
17:59
right, 250 years per page. And
18:03
it is a total anomaly
18:05
compared to all the pages before it. And
18:08
it's again, I don't think it just happened on its own. It's
18:10
what eventually happens if you keep this pattern
18:12
going of exponential growth, exponential
18:14
growth, which is awesome, right? I mean, we have an amazing
18:17
quality of life. Modern tech is great. And
18:19
none of us, I don't think, want to go back to the
18:21
1600s. It's also
18:23
really scary. It's also really scary because
18:26
when things start racing forward ahead, you can
18:28
get very reckless and you
18:29
have a lot of godlike power from all of this tech.
18:32
And so that's kind of, to me, it's exciting
18:34
and it's scary. The other thing that's
18:37
anomalous about that page from call
18:39
it the mid 1700s till now, isn't
18:42
just all of the unbelievable leaps ahead
18:44
in terms of technology. It's also the advent of
18:46
liberal democracy, as being
18:48
completely ahistorical and
18:51
miraculous.
18:52
How do you understand sort of the rise
18:55
of liberal democracy in the story
18:57
of us? Because to me, that is the
18:59
background to this entire book is frankly
19:02
your
19:03
love and gratitude for a system
19:05
that I think you feel is really
19:08
under siege in ways that many
19:10
people aren't appreciating.
19:11
A liberal democracy is
19:14
a totally artificial invention.
19:17
And it's not that, you know, the
19:19
enlightenment thinkers of the 16 and 1700s,
19:22
it's not that they invented this from scratch, but
19:25
this is kind of the best crack yet. And they finally
19:28
came up with a way to do it in a way that could last
19:30
for centuries. It was robust. So
19:33
it's this kind of, it seems obvious to us because
19:35
I think of it as a house. It's a house
19:38
that is built, right? The support beams
19:40
of the liberal democracy and the structure
19:42
and the roof, all of this is an
19:44
invention. It's not the law of
19:46
nature. We made the house. And
19:49
so we now are growing up within
19:51
the house and so did our parents and so did our
19:53
grandparents. And so it's been a lot
19:55
of generations in the place like America,
19:58
at least for a lot of people.
19:59
since someone has been outside this house. My
20:02
wife, she's Persian, her parents immigrated
20:05
here in 1979, or they left Iran
20:07
then, like a lot of Iranians,
20:10
and
20:11
they do not take the house for granted. They
20:13
think the liberal house is unbelievable,
20:16
right? And talk to someone who's coming from a communist country
20:18
or coming from a dictatorship, and you
20:20
will hear a love for this house because they're saying,
20:22
oh my God, look around, this house is incredible. And
20:24
we're saying, huh, it is, I guess, I don't know. It's
20:27
the house, it's just the house. That's where we all live.
20:29
That's all fine until
20:32
the house is under threat. And then
20:35
this cockiness about the house will always
20:37
be here, of course. We have to get rid of
20:39
that and say, well, hold on. Why is
20:41
the house under threat? What does that mean, and
20:43
how do we preserve it?
20:44
I think one of the paradoxes of the last
20:47
page of the book that we're on is that
20:49
on the one hand, we're enjoying more
20:51
abundance, more progress, more
20:54
genuine historical privilege than
20:57
any group ever has before, ever. And
20:59
yet that
21:01
exponential progress, as you describe it,
21:04
is also the source of
21:06
a lot of chaos, a lot of misery,
21:09
and a lot of our uncertainty. And you really
21:11
lay these out in a powerful way in the book.
21:13
So I wanna kind of go through them.
21:16
One of the things that you
21:18
write about in the book is this distinction between
21:20
what you call the primitive mind and what you
21:22
call the higher mind, right? And the thing
21:25
that sets human beings apart from other animals
21:27
is this higher mind because the higher mind
21:29
is rational. It feels complex emotions
21:32
like empathy and ego. It makes long-term
21:34
goals for the future.
21:36
It's able to look beyond itself. And
21:39
yet, like all other animals, we
21:41
also have another mind inside
21:43
of us. And that is what you call the primitive mind
21:45
or what a lot of people call our lizard brains. And
21:48
that's the part of our brains that
21:50
hunts for prey, that protects our
21:52
kin, that privileges people that
21:54
look like us or animals that look like us above
21:56
others. And as you explained it in the book,
21:58
the higher mind's goal.
21:59
is to get to the truth, but
22:02
the primitive mind has a very different goal. It's
22:04
confirmation of its existing beliefs. So
22:07
in an era in which, Tim, there's just so
22:09
much abundance, there's objectively
22:11
so much freedom, you know, and the structures
22:14
that support the higher mind
22:16
are all around us. Why is it
22:18
that the primitive mind feels so
22:21
often like it's taking over? When
22:23
did the higher minds become less powerful
22:25
than the primitive ones?
22:27
Yeah, I mean, the primitive
22:29
mind is kind of our survival brain, and
22:31
it was programmed for a world
22:34
living in a small tribe. But what's cool
22:36
about humans, like you said, is that the
22:38
primitive mind in our brain, that's kind of the preprogrammed
22:40
software, and that will never, not
22:43
just does it start off thinking it's
22:45
in 30,000 B.C., it will never understand
22:47
that it's not there. Meanwhile, the higher
22:49
mind is this cool part of us that can
22:51
override, can see what's happening, see
22:53
that our instincts don't make sense here, it's in
22:56
one area or another, and
22:57
actually override them. I use the example
22:59
of candy. When we
23:01
binge on candy, and then we regret it, or any kind of unhealthy
23:03
food, it makes no sense, right? We're
23:05
mad at ourselves later, and this is the thousandth time this
23:07
has happened. And what's happening is
23:09
that the primitive mind is programmed for
23:11
a world where calories are hard to come by, and
23:14
if you don't eat this dense, chewy
23:16
fruit that you just came by, of course it's candy, right now, you might not find
23:18
calories for two weeks, binge,
23:21
right, which makes sense then. It
23:24
doesn't make sense today. And so our higher minds
23:26
can actually get in there and override this. That's
23:28
why we don't always eat unhealthy food, and
23:30
some people can be really good at developing healthy eating
23:32
habits, and other ones not so much, because
23:35
it's this kind of tug of war in our heads between
23:37
this one voice that wants to do what
23:39
it's programmed for, and the other voice that says, wait a second,
23:41
wait a second, and the world we live in,
23:43
what we're programmed for, makes no sense here. So
23:46
it's a general concept, but you can apply it to lots of
23:48
things. You can apply it to how we think, right? So
23:51
you can say that it makes sense in today's world to
23:53
try to find the truth. We don't want to be delusional, and,
23:56
you know, we want to
23:57
play with ideas and change our mind and get wiser.
23:59
as we grow older, that makes sense. But
24:02
the other part of our brain, the pre-programmed
24:04
software, is made for
24:06
a world where the tribe has their beliefs,
24:08
their sacred beliefs. And people
24:10
who can challenge those sacred
24:13
beliefs and were too independent
24:15
thinking and said, this doesn't actually make sense,
24:17
where's our evidence? They didn't fare very well.
24:20
And so it is our nature to identify
24:23
with
24:24
our sacred beliefs. They're part of
24:26
us, they're part of who we are, and they're part of our
24:28
group. The people like us, we believe these
24:31
things. And the last thing you'd ever want
24:33
to do is change your mind about that. So you
24:35
go through all this effort to confirm the sacred beliefs, and
24:37
you'll spend time with people talking about how great
24:39
the sacred beliefs are and how bad the people are who disagree
24:42
with it. And that's the survival brain
24:44
mode we're in when we're doing that. Or we
24:46
can override that. And we can say, you know what? I
24:48
know I have the urge to confirm my
24:50
beliefs right now, but that's unwise, and I
24:52
need to overcome that and actually
24:54
get better at changing my mind.
24:57
That's this kind of initial seed of a framework
24:59
that then I take into politics. And I'll just talk
25:02
about the higher mind's way
25:04
of doing politics and
25:06
the primitive mind's way of doing politics. And
25:08
I think that that's a framework we can add into our
25:10
existing discussions.
25:12
What is the higher mind's way of doing politics
25:14
and what is the primitive mind's way of doing politics?
25:16
I use a ladder because it's a spectrum, right?
25:18
It's not just one mind is doing the thinking, the other
25:20
is not. It's not as simple as that. Sometimes
25:23
it's a mix, right? Sometimes you're conflicted between
25:25
two things. You're doing honest research,
25:28
but you find a little confirmation bias there. So
25:30
maybe you're in the middle or whatever it is. So
25:32
the ladder is kind of a spectrum. And when you're
25:35
up in the high rungs, maybe you have some conflict,
25:37
but the higher mind is running the show. And
25:39
down in the low rungs, the primitive mind is running the show.
25:41
And then in groups, the primitive
25:43
minds in the group will kind of band together, and
25:46
the
25:46
whole group will be politically low rung together.
25:49
And it's very hard to get out of that once you're in it. And
25:51
likewise, a whole group can kind of work hard to stave
25:54
off those instincts and actually stay up on the high rungs
25:56
together. So we just talked about ideas.
25:58
That's one way you can think about this.
25:59
at the top, in
26:02
high rung politics, people care about
26:04
truth. They're open to debate, they're open to changing
26:06
their minds. And when they're right about something, they will argue
26:08
it fully. But they're open to being challenged
26:10
and they don't identify with the ideas. If they're wrong about
26:12
something, they don't have this fight or flight instinct.
26:15
They will admit they're wrong and they'll move on. But
26:18
principles are consistent, again, because this is what makes sense.
26:20
So if you believe that government overreach
26:23
is bad, then you care about that when both
26:25
parties are in office. If you believe
26:27
that discrimination based
26:29
on skin color is bad, you care about that regardless
26:32
of the skin color being discriminated against. And
26:34
then finally with tactics, in politics
26:36
you want to change things, right? You want to make things happen.
26:39
You do it via persuasion in a liberal democracy.
26:42
So there's a focus on truth, there's consistency
26:44
with principles, and you try to get your
26:46
way by persuading others
26:49
and building a mind changing movement. And these
26:51
all go together. When a group is doing
26:53
one of those things, they tend to be doing all three.
26:55
Now, low rung politics, which
26:57
I think is born of our survival
26:59
brain's instincts, and when it gets, you know, bands
27:01
together with others, they do politics the
27:04
old school way, just pure tribalism.
27:06
So there's the good people and there's the bad people
27:08
with the good ideas and the bad ideas, completely
27:11
not open to changing their mind. There's tons of
27:13
confirmation bias. They don't give the other
27:15
side a fair hearing. They're really not usually open to
27:17
an honest debate. That's in the ideas realm.
27:19
And then again, with principles, there's total flip-flopping
27:22
on principles based on whether it helps the
27:24
tribe or not. So there's total lack of
27:26
consistency. We've seen a million
27:29
examples of this. And then tactics, you know, again,
27:31
the old school way to get what you want
27:33
is not persuasion. That's the way in this weird
27:36
house of liberal democracy that we do it. The
27:38
way we're programmed to do it is coercion. We will
27:40
try to force our way and force
27:42
people to do things with blackmail and fear and
27:45
violence sometimes. And so when
27:47
I look around at low rung politics, again,
27:50
people who are doing one of those things tend to be doing all
27:52
three. And I think this is just kind of like a vertical
27:54
axis. We can add to the left, center,
27:56
right, horizontal political axis
27:58
rather than saying, are you, you know,
27:59
Left wing, right wing, far right, far left, are
28:02
you centrist? Well, how about making it a square
28:04
and being like... Are you high rung or low rung?
28:06
Yeah. And now you can be far
28:08
left and high rung, or you can be centrist and low
28:11
rung, or far right and in the middle somewhere.
28:13
And I think it's useful.
28:15
Why in our culture right now do
28:17
we so... I wouldn't even say reward
28:19
the low rung politicians, but I think people are actually
28:22
addicted to them. Like, I think people
28:24
really enjoy watching the
28:26
AOCs, watching the Marjorie Taylor Greens. Obviously,
28:29
those people are very different. I don't mean to compare
28:31
them, but what is going on in our
28:34
current culture where the low
28:36
rung people seem to be the ones that get
28:38
all of the attention, all of the rewards,
28:41
and no one really seems to care very much
28:44
about the high rung principled
28:45
ones? They're like the also-rans. Yeah.
28:48
People do care. What happened
28:50
is the media
28:52
landscape has totally shifted. And we're
28:54
in a world now where 24-hour
28:57
news networks, they
28:59
didn't used to exist, used to be a half hour of news
29:01
at night on three networks that broadcast to
29:03
the whole country. Now you've got 24-hour
29:06
news networks going all day to one
29:08
political tribe. And these
29:10
networks realize you could make... I think Fox
29:12
News probably pioneered this and
29:15
other ones have caught on. This idea that
29:18
you can make a lot more money if you kind
29:20
of say what you're doing is news and what you're really
29:22
doing is kind of political entertainment. And
29:25
I use the example of
29:27
like reality show. Reality
29:30
show is interesting all the time, even
29:32
though the actual reality is not that interesting,
29:34
because the editors cut
29:36
in a constant string of conflict with bombastic
29:39
characters
29:39
and it's fun, right? It's our
29:42
primitive minds get addicted to that thing. The same way we
29:44
get addicted to junk food, this
29:46
is political junk food. And
29:48
so these stations realized that
29:50
the same thing that Mars Inc. realized
29:52
about selling candy, you could make a ton
29:54
of money by selling junk food. And so
29:57
these news networks are really entertainment
29:59
networks that sell... to kind of our primitive
30:01
minds, they sell political junk food to our primitive
30:04
minds. And unfortunately, unlike Candy, this
30:06
has major implications,
30:08
which is that the politicians who get cast
30:11
on the show, you see AOC is one of 400 something
30:14
people in the house, their bills passed every
30:16
week that never get talked about, right? There's all these other, but
30:19
AOC is one of the characters on the show. She's
30:22
been cast on the reality show, and so
30:24
is Marjorie Taylor Greene, right? And Trump is one of
30:26
the major characters on the show. And so
30:28
they're going to be on all the time.
30:29
And so of course,
30:32
it incentivizes politicians
30:34
to say, well, getting on the show is a huge career
30:36
break. I need to be bombastic. And
30:38
so that's going to have a lot of effects on
30:40
people. Otherwise, normal people are
30:43
going to get addicted to this reality show, and they're
30:45
going to be kind of sucked into kind of
30:47
hardcore political tribalism.
30:49
In addition to the sort of distinction you make between
30:51
primitive mind and higher mind, which I
30:53
loved, and the idea of sort
30:55
of high-rung political thinkers and
30:58
actors and low-rung ones, you also
31:01
make a distinction between two different
31:03
intellectual cultures, one that you
31:05
call idea labs and the other
31:07
that you call echo chambers. I would
31:09
love if you could give me an example of
31:12
an idea lab and an example of an echo
31:14
chamber.
31:15
Yeah.
31:17
So every group of friends has a culture that
31:19
includes how they do birthdays, how
31:22
they do texting, how they do
31:24
emojis, how they talk behind each other's
31:26
backs, what's acceptable, what's distasteful. Every
31:28
group, no matter what you're in, you're full of rules
31:31
about how we do things, your social rules. And
31:34
an idea lab to me is a group that has a high-rung
31:36
intellectual culture, where how we do
31:38
things here is
31:41
truth comes first. Truth matters. And
31:43
disagreement is great. Respectful
31:46
disagreement. People are to be respected.
31:48
Ideas are not. It's not cool to identify
31:51
with your ideas and get super offended if someone
31:53
disagrees with your idea, where
31:55
people call each other out on bias and on
31:57
logical fallacies.
31:59
You know, unearned conviction, someone who's acting
32:02
like they're sure and they turn out to be wrong a bunch
32:04
of times. That person is not cool in
32:06
the idea lab culture. They quickly lose
32:08
respect. People don't take them very seriously.
32:11
And so primitive minds in the group act up,
32:14
someone will again get really offended, but everyone keeps
32:16
them in check. And kind of the idea
32:18
labs immune system kicks in and says, wow,
32:21
you're upset about that, like, you know, and they get made
32:23
fun of for that, and then they don't want to do
32:25
that again next time. And that keeps the whole
32:27
group kind of up on the high rungs, and it keeps every individual,
32:29
because all of us are subject to this kind of internal
32:32
tug of war, it keeps every individual, their
32:34
mind up in the high rungs. You can't really get away with
32:36
slipping down too far, or the idea lab will call
32:38
you out. And so sometimes you can have a couple,
32:41
a married couple has an intellectual culture.
32:44
If one person knows that you just never
32:46
disagree with my husband on politics,
32:49
or it's gonna be a nightmare, that husband is imposing
32:51
the other kind of culture on the marriage. And
32:54
this can happen in groups. One person in the group
32:56
can, if they have enough cultural power
32:58
in the group, can kind of say,
32:59
no one is allowed to... Disagree
33:02
about acts. Right. And so you quickly
33:04
can slip into the other culture, the echo chamber culture. And
33:07
groups do it together. When one person starts doing it, sometimes
33:10
everyone's just scared of them, but often the whole group starts doing
33:12
it together without even realizing they're doing it. And that's when
33:14
the primitive minds have taken over. And if you think
33:16
the primitive minds go in your head, in an
33:18
individual's head, is to confirm
33:20
the beliefs, your sacred beliefs, well, the group has
33:23
their sacred beliefs, and the primitive
33:25
minds band together to protect those
33:27
beliefs. So they're very hostile
33:29
to someone who says, I think we might be wrong, or I think the
33:32
other side is not so bad, or is right about
33:34
this thing. People will
33:36
call them a bad, you know, they'll basically be relegated
33:38
to the out group. They'll get a really negative
33:40
reaction, because they violated
33:42
something sacred. You know, in an ideal lab, no idea
33:44
is sacred, but in an echo chamber, there's very sacred
33:46
ideas, and it's like going into a church and you're
33:49
slandering Christ. You don't do that in a church.
33:51
And so I don't think this is, you know, some people
33:54
do this and other people do that. I think we all can
33:56
think of different groups at different times of
33:58
the year. And you find
33:59
Oh my, we're being really echo chambery about
34:02
this right now. Oh, it's one of those things where we're
34:04
all getting a little too much pleasure about all
34:06
agreeing and all, we
34:08
constantly are just all on the same side and we're always
34:10
just talking shit about the people who disagree. And
34:13
you know it's bad when you realize that it's something, you
34:15
see something's being a little distasteful or going a little
34:17
too far and you have this incentive not
34:19
to say it because it's gonna kill the vibe. It's
34:21
gonna, people are gonna be kind of like, you know, roll their eyes
34:23
at you and maybe they'll talk shit about you now behind
34:25
your back. That means that the group has
34:28
slipped down down the rungs of the ladder
34:29
into echo chamber land. And that's
34:32
fine, by the way, in a liberal democracy, you're welcome
34:35
to be part of echo chambers or idea labs as
34:37
long as you live and let live. When
34:39
you don't live and let live, that's when there's a problem.
34:41
Tim, is there an example from your life of
34:44
being in an atmosphere that was really
34:46
idea labsy or like a moment
34:49
over the course of the past few decades that you feel like, aha,
34:52
that was like a high watermark of America
34:55
celebrating the idea labs culture
34:57
because I don't think anyone listening to this
34:59
would disagree that we're in a culture
35:02
overall right now in which it feels
35:04
like echo chambers are the thing that are actively
35:07
being cultivated. Maybe another way of asking
35:09
this is, when did the idea lab go out of
35:11
fashion and are there any
35:13
pockets of it, you know, whether
35:16
it's a friend group or an institution or whatever
35:18
that you feel like are trying to revive it? I
35:21
think a ton of people, individuals want
35:23
to revive it. And there are pockets, Intelligence
35:26
Squared is a great
35:28
podcast. It's a two on two Oxford
35:30
style debate. And it's a classic idea
35:32
lab. Everyone's respectful. It's
35:35
two people taking one side, two people taking another
35:37
side. And it's basically
35:39
like, you know, you have two attorneys in that courtroom
35:42
and the audience and anyone listening can play juror
35:45
and listen to them clash and learn a little more
35:47
along the way. And you know, you hear really,
35:49
but everyone's really smart. You hear really compelling ideas
35:52
from both sides. It's fascinating intellectually.
35:55
And the way echo chambers
35:58
get formed is when it becomes kind
36:00
of social norm to say that one
36:02
side of this particular debate is
36:04
not welcome here because, and it's almost, it's never
36:07
the same because we're an echo chamber, no one admits that.
36:10
It's almost always because
36:11
those ideas are dangerous. Those
36:13
ideas are harmful. Or it's because we're
36:16
moral and that's immoral. Yes. The
36:18
idea that the other side of this debate
36:21
is actively, only bad
36:23
people would hold it. And actually
36:25
it's dangerous to even have
36:28
it in the room. And
36:31
the key is that you live and let live, right? So echo
36:33
chamber, you want to go form that with your group of friends or
36:35
you want to start an institution and they're openly dedicated
36:38
to a religion or to a certain set of
36:40
ideas. Great. You're welcome
36:42
in the US to go form your echo chamber. Just leave
36:44
everyone else alone.
36:45
And when you have that, if you scale that
36:47
up, what you have is a lot of idea lab
36:50
pockets and a lot of echo chamber pockets, but
36:52
that inherently makes the whole country a big idea
36:55
lab because each echo chamber is going to argue their
36:57
one position. Idea labs are all over the place.
36:59
They're going to change their mind, but they're still going to be arguing different
37:02
positions and you have this big mix
37:04
of ideas.
37:05
It's the federalism of echo chambers
37:07
makes a national ideas lab. I got
37:09
you. Exactly. And that's
37:12
in general, the idea with liberal democracy is that
37:14
you can have this low rung stuff going on
37:16
everywhere, just as long, but it has to be contained.
37:18
It can't go and start messing with other people
37:21
and infringing upon others. So you
37:23
have this grand idea lab. And what I think
37:25
the trajectory has been is that
37:28
echo chambers have begun forcefully,
37:30
kind of again, using coercion to
37:33
not
37:33
just police their own members, which is
37:35
okay coercion. Again, it's not admirable, but
37:37
there's nothing wrong with it from a liberal sense.
37:40
They've been using coercion to forcefully
37:43
expand, which I compared to like the
37:45
difference between a benign tumor and a malignant
37:48
tumor. The first
37:50
way is benign. It's going to police its own people.
37:52
It's going to, it's going to say, no one can disagree with me.
37:54
You know, or you're not my friend. Okay.
37:56
I can choose to be your friend or not. It's
37:59
this other mentality.
37:59
that's saying actually no one outside,
38:02
even outside of our friends, is allowed to have these ideas.
38:05
And not only is that mentality increasing, but
38:08
it's been succeeding. I call that idea
38:11
supremacy, which is a distinct
38:13
difference from kind of the zealotry or just no
38:15
one can change my mind. Idea supremacy says no
38:17
one else, whether I know you
38:20
or not, is allowed to express these ideas. It's
38:22
trying to kind of play a cultural
38:24
dictator. And so you've had
38:26
these echo chambers expanding across
38:28
the land and kind of
38:30
forceful, coercive expansion and
38:33
kind of holding pockets that used to be
38:35
idea labs, now hostage and
38:37
saying the new rules here are the rules of our
38:39
echo chamber.
38:43
After the break, Tim
38:46
Urban explains why what happened
38:48
to our universities matters. Stay
38:50
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38:55
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honestly.
41:15
The ultimate idea lab is supposed
41:17
to be the university, right? The university is
41:19
supposed to exist for a singular
41:21
goal. Maybe they're a secondary, but the key
41:24
goal is the pursuit of truth, right?
41:26
And I think
41:27
one of the ways that
41:29
is most illustrative to the point you're making
41:31
in the book is to look at what has happened
41:33
to universities. And you dedicate almost
41:35
an entire chapter in your book to the problem
41:38
of universities today, and
41:40
the way that they've sort of been transformed from
41:42
idea labs into either echo
41:45
chambers or idea supremacist
41:47
chambers. You'll tell me the difference. And
41:49
you do this with this amazing illustration
41:52
that you call the social justice horse. And
41:54
it's sort of similar to the idea of the Trojan
41:56
horse, right? Except you have this social justice
41:58
horse which you draw
41:59
with this little... very cute rainbow mane
42:01
and tail. And the
42:04
social justice horse says
42:06
very, very lovely progressive
42:08
sounding things. Like the horse will say an inclusive
42:11
environment.
42:13
And yet the actual
42:15
idea that they're smuggling in under the
42:17
idea of an inclusive environment is
42:20
disagree with us and we'll smear you, for
42:22
example. Or the social justice
42:25
horse will say something like diversity
42:27
statements, but really the thing being
42:30
brought in
42:31
under this rhetoric is, as
42:33
you put it, McCarthyist political litmus test
42:36
and loyalty oaths, right? And this sort
42:38
of theory of the social justice
42:41
horse or the mechanics of the social justice horse
42:44
is happening
42:45
all over the country, not just in elite schools,
42:48
but in schools coast to coast, everywhere in
42:50
between. And we've gotten to
42:52
a point in
42:53
which something like 52% of college
42:55
students, according
42:57
to one recent survey say, they always
43:00
or often refrain from expressing
43:02
views on political and social issues in classrooms
43:05
because of concern for how
43:07
it will be perceived, for concern to the reputation,
43:09
for the concern to their grades. How
43:12
did we get here? How was this
43:15
social justice horse so
43:18
unbelievably effective? So
43:21
one of the first things I wanted to do when I was getting into
43:23
this very spicy topic of social justice
43:26
is I
43:27
said, we need two terms here because
43:29
there's two completely different
43:31
things that are called social justice. The
43:33
first is what I would call liberal
43:36
social justice, liberal meaning classic liberal.
43:38
And so we talked about the liberal house, right?
43:40
This idea of liberal, this
43:43
house we live in that has liberal rules and liberal
43:45
norms and liberal laws and liberal
43:47
social justice,
43:49
its goal is to make
43:51
the house more perfect. It says liberalism
43:54
is great. The constitution
43:56
is awesome,
43:56
but we don't always succeed in keeping.
43:59
its promises. There are flaws
44:02
in the house. This awesome house
44:05
has some, you know, some people
44:07
or policies or norms have, have
44:09
made it weaker and have made it actually
44:12
some people in this house are being treated
44:15
unfairly in a way they're not supposed to be treated
44:17
in the liberal house. This
44:19
was of course what Martin Luther King, you know, in his I
44:22
have a dream speech, he talked about a promissory
44:24
note and how the US has
44:26
defaulted on its check to
44:28
black Americans, right? So that's him saying this house
44:31
is great, but black Americans are
44:33
not being treated the way this house is supposed to treat them.
44:35
Let's fix the house. That's the goal. Let's
44:37
make it the best house it can be. And
44:40
so not only does it have liberal goals,
44:42
right, which is he wants more liberalism, but it has,
44:44
it uses liberal means, right? The
44:46
civil rights movement was all about free
44:49
assembly and free speech and,
44:51
you know, protest and all of these tools
44:53
of liberalism, they're tools that the house gives you
44:56
to fix the house. And you know,
44:58
this idea of colorblindness is a very liberal
45:00
idea, the individualism, right? It's not
45:02
about the color of your skin. It's about who
45:04
you are as a person. This idea of your
45:06
character is, is another way of valuing
45:09
individuals.
45:09
Each individual is a sacred thing, period.
45:11
It doesn't matter what else is, you know, about them. And
45:16
so that's liberal social justice. This is, this is the
45:18
movement behind gay marriage in 2012. This
45:20
is the movement behind women's suffrage
45:22
back in the 1910s. So
45:25
it's a great tradition in the US and it's something that most
45:27
Americans, you know, for sure progressive, but even
45:29
a lot of conservatives are very proud of this movement.
45:32
Now, what's the other thing? There's another
45:34
thing called social justice right now, which
45:37
is what I call social justice fundamentalism, otherwise
45:39
known as wokeness. And it's
45:41
important because wokeness itself sounds derogatory.
45:43
It sounds like it's, you know, it has a lot of cultural
45:46
baggage there. So I try to just
45:48
use a different term to describe what it actually is, which I
45:50
call social justice fundamentalism or SJF.
45:53
And this movement is self-proclaimed
45:56
outside the house with a wrecking ball. The
45:59
house is because the house
46:01
was built by flawed people. And it's rotten
46:03
to its core. Its foundation
46:05
is built to uphold the power
46:08
of the powerful, in
46:10
this case, you know, white supremacy or the patriarchy.
46:13
And that liberalism itself is an
46:15
invention of those ideas
46:17
in order that
46:19
has the, whether it was intended or not,
46:22
it has the property of being exploitative
46:25
and of enhancing inequality
46:28
and of entrenching the power of the powerful
46:31
and holding down the oppressed. And
46:33
so that's a fundamental disagreement. Liberal social
46:36
justice and social justice fundamentalism have
46:38
opposite, not different, but opposite goals. One
46:40
wants to make the house better and one wants to
46:43
break the house down. They use words like
46:45
liberate, liberate from this whole
46:47
system. It's very revolutionary,
46:49
much more revolutionary than liberal social justice.
46:51
Liberal social justice wants to overhaul norms
46:54
and policies and laws. Social
46:56
justice fundamentalism wants to overhaul the whole
46:58
house, just level it and build
47:00
something new. And that's
47:03
okay. That's the thing is what liberalism is
47:05
awesome because in a liberal democracy, it actually
47:07
has room for even critique of itself. Sure, bring
47:09
it in, bring it in. You hate liberalism, bring it into
47:11
the discussion. You're allowed to be here. Go
47:14
make your arguments, do whatever you want. Try to persuade people.
47:16
Maybe we're all missing something. Sure, go for
47:18
it. What's not okay is
47:20
illiberal tactics. And
47:22
that's kind of goes together. Because if you think the house is bad,
47:24
well, you also think that the same tools that
47:26
were used by the civil rights movement, those liberal tools
47:29
like free speech and all those things, that
47:31
those things are bad too. Black
47:33
feminist, Audre Lorde says, you can't dismantle
47:36
the master's house with the master's tools.
47:38
So there's a lot in that statement. It's the idea that A,
47:40
this is the master's house. It doesn't belong to all of
47:42
us. It is a house for slave masters.
47:45
And therefore the tools themselves are rotten, just
47:48
as rotten as the house itself. And so
47:50
they will be hostile to all kinds
47:52
of liberal things,
47:54
free speech. So free speech
47:57
is actually dangerous, right? It's allowing to...
47:59
the platforming of dangerous ideas.
48:02
Not the First Amendment necessarily, but the culture of free speech
48:05
is bad. The US and the West, they're
48:07
bad. The group is what matters, much
48:09
more than the individual. And that's
48:11
why they will talk about, they
48:14
will make broad generalizations about white
48:16
people and black people. They treat these groups as monoliths.
48:19
There's a common enemy kind of tone to it instead of
48:21
the much more classic liberal common humanity
48:24
tone. Equality of opportunity is
48:26
a liberal staple. But social
48:29
justice fundamentalism believes
48:29
that
48:31
because groups are the same, there's no such thing
48:33
as equality of opportunity that doesn't lead to equality
48:35
of outcome. And so they actually
48:38
are for equality of outcome. That is
48:40
very anti-liberal, because you
48:42
can't have freedom with equality of outcome, enforced
48:45
equality of outcome. So there's a lot of these examples,
48:47
but again, it is like you mentioned with the social
48:49
justice horse, it's tricky, right? It's
48:53
a little bit, they don't quite go
48:55
out and say this. They'll say, we wanna
48:58
save space. But really
49:00
what they're saying is a space that
49:02
doesn't have free speech in it. Where
49:05
our ideas are treated as sacred. And
49:07
they'll use things like the harm principle and saying
49:09
that, well, this thing is harmful, so therefore it must
49:11
be stopped. So back to universities.
49:14
That's, back to universities. What's happened
49:16
is this, social, SJF was
49:18
a, in the 60s, liberal social
49:20
justice was the major thing at universities, right?
49:22
You have Berkeley, you have free speech protests,
49:25
right? And we want more liberalism. But there
49:27
was also developing, in the corners of universities,
49:30
this concept of SJF, this neo-Marxist
49:32
kind of take on social justice. And
49:35
what's happened much more recently is, as
49:38
universities have gone from kind of pluralistic
49:41
with some conservatives,
49:43
more progressive, but some conservatives, it's
49:45
transitioned to be almost entirely
49:48
progressive. And the numbers are stark. The
49:50
ratio of professors
49:53
left to right has gone from like four to one to,
49:55
in some departments, 17 to one, 40 to one,
49:57
sometimes 100 to one.
49:59
And so when an environment
50:02
is kind of purple, it has good
50:04
defenses against extreme
50:06
components, both from red and blue. But
50:08
when an environment becomes bright blue and
50:10
things get really kind of tribal, it
50:13
becomes weak. It develops
50:15
a soft spot to kind of illiberalism
50:17
of its own color. So social
50:20
justice fundamentalism has taken advantage
50:22
of this transition to political
50:25
purity at a university and
50:27
has been able to
50:29
rise up and actually institute
50:32
its own values. And so like
50:34
you said, the university is supposed
50:37
to be the ultimate idea lab, right? Veritas
50:39
is written on the gate above the university. And
50:42
for Veritas to happen, you have to have not
50:45
just ideas put out, but people who will challenge
50:47
those ideas. Or else there
50:49
is no way for a group of people to
50:52
find truth together if no one's allowed to disagree.
50:56
But as SJF has risen up, it
50:58
has created new rules and
51:00
has basically said, we live in a small echo chamber
51:03
that now actually is going to be the rules of the
51:05
entire campus. And
51:08
ideas that disagree with SJF in
51:10
particular, with our tenants, are
51:12
going to lead to firings or
51:15
to ostracism or to the investigation
51:17
of students. And that completely topples the whole
51:19
point
51:23
of a university on its head.
51:24
For the skeptical listener who's like,
51:27
I don't want to say SJF, but maybe sympathetic
51:30
to some of its aims, or who just
51:32
believes that what happens at universities
51:35
doesn't much matter, how has the
51:37
triumph of the social justice horse
51:40
in what is meant to be the ultimate ideas
51:42
lab, what has been the impact of that on the
51:44
broader culture in this country?
51:45
Well, it matters in two ways.
51:49
Universities educate young people
51:52
who then go and become our future leaders
51:55
and are running the country 20, 30 years later.
51:58
And what
52:00
universities are supposed to teach college
52:03
students is how to think, is
52:05
how to think, how to debate, how
52:07
to find the truth, how to be tougher more robust thinkers
52:10
and teach them a wide variety of lenses,
52:12
political lenses and other kinds
52:14
of lenses that they can then you know take into their
52:16
heads and use. It's kind of training for your brain
52:19
so you go you go to college you come out a better
52:21
thinker forever which of course would serve our society.
52:24
But it also teaches kind of general
52:27
liberal values.
52:29
It teaches students that disagreement is okay
52:31
and it's supposed to teach students that
52:34
enforcing an echo chamber on a
52:36
on an ideal lab institution is
52:38
not a good thing. So when an
52:40
ideology like SJF which is you know
52:43
kind of illiberal to its core takes
52:46
over it instead of teaching students
52:48
a wide variety of lenses it teaches
52:50
them one lens. So that's the difference between teaching them how
52:52
to think and arming them with a lot of tools and teaching
52:54
them what to think teaching them there is one
52:57
correct a worldview with
52:59
one correct you
53:01
know set of politics in it. And
53:04
if
53:04
you try to bring a speaker to campus that disagrees
53:06
with it we will you know disinvite the
53:09
speaker or shot them down. If
53:11
you try to teach us that wide
53:13
variety of views in a class that professor is
53:15
going to be reported. And so students
53:17
are soaking in instead of this thing
53:19
this ideal lab culture that makes them better
53:22
thinkers and more humble about what
53:24
they know it teaches students to be zealots
53:26
and to be intellectual bullies it teaches them that the
53:28
way to be a good person who
53:31
tries to fight against harm
53:32
you need to
53:34
punish anyone who shares harmful
53:37
ideas which happen to be of course the ideas that
53:39
conflict with SJF. So
53:41
it's kind of doing the exact opposite of what I
53:44
think
53:45
we want colleges teaching young people to do it's
53:47
and you know about both how you know
53:49
about what they're teaching them and also how they're teaching
53:51
them to be as thinkers and how they're teaching them to treat
53:53
others. So that's going to affect all of us then
53:55
those those students then go enter companies
53:57
and start wreaking havoc there with
53:59
this idea of someone
54:02
said something harmful and they need to be fired for it, we'll
54:04
start a petition and use our power
54:06
to try to get this person fired.
54:08
And eventually those people are our leaders and
54:10
they're making policies. So that of course affects
54:12
everybody. The other thing that universities do
54:14
is they're supposed to be our primary truth finding centers.
54:17
Universities are the center of
54:20
academic research and science that
54:22
happens at universities. And
54:25
what a society knows is basically
54:28
what universities produce for knowledge. And
54:32
when an ideology that does
54:34
not believe in Veritas
54:36
culture takes over, it starts
54:38
to affect what can and cannot be researched.
54:41
And it starts to maybe lower the standards
54:44
for
54:45
academic work that
54:46
confirms SJF and it starts
54:49
to retract papers
54:51
or not publish them in the first place or
54:53
maybe even fire the professor for having the nerve to write
54:56
it for ideas that conflict with its
54:58
ideology. And so that also harms
55:00
everyone because there's already a strain in this
55:02
country that doesn't believe the science, right?
55:04
And that's no matter what and that's not good. But
55:07
this
55:08
gives so much credence to those,
55:10
that whole idea. And so it's really
55:12
bad for knowledge production and it's bad for education
55:14
of our future leaders. And often
55:17
what happens at universities ends
55:19
up happening everywhere else a little bit later. Universities
55:22
social media started at universities with Facebook and
55:24
it soon was everywhere. There's a lot of cultural
55:27
fads. And so when you see something happening
55:29
at universities, people should take it seriously because it
55:31
very well might appear across society
55:34
five, 10 years later, which of course in this case it
55:36
has.
55:37
Tim, there are a lot of huge,
55:39
I would say almost existential themes to your work.
55:42
But one of the biggest themes that runs through
55:44
everything you write
55:45
is the question of time. And
55:48
I think you do such an incredible job of
55:50
making readers aware
55:53
of a thing that feels
55:55
perhaps more abstract than almost anything.
55:57
And you just do an incredible job of conquering.
55:59
advertising it, making it real for us.
56:02
One of the things that
56:04
you have talked about personally is that you're
56:07
an epic waster of time, or at least you used
56:09
to be. In 2016, you
56:11
gave this TED talk that I think now has something like 50
56:14
million views, which grants it a spot on the
56:16
most popular TED talks of all time, right
56:18
next to Brene Brown and Bill Gates. And
56:20
it's called Inside the Mind of a Master
56:22
Procrastinator. And it's all about how
56:25
the procrastinator's mind works, which
56:27
as you describe it, contains a rational
56:30
decision maker and an instant
56:32
gratification
56:32
monkey. And the instant
56:34
gratification monkey takes over
56:36
in the mind of procrastinators and
56:38
throws the rational decision maker part
56:41
of the mind out by the wayside.
56:43
But then toward the end of the talk, you
56:45
say that you had an epiphany, which
56:48
is that actually we're all procrastinators.
56:51
Why are human beings such skilled
56:53
procrastinators?
56:55
Well,
56:56
I think this relates to what we were just talking about.
56:58
I think that we're procrastinators for the
57:00
same reason we eat
57:03
unhealthy food and fall into tribal
57:05
politics, which is that the
57:08
primate we are, the world we were programmed
57:11
to be in didn't really have
57:13
long term projects that often. You
57:15
had to get food, you had to survive, you had
57:17
to mate, and you had
57:20
to sometimes fight. And so you conserved energy
57:22
most of the time and you expended it when you
57:24
had to. Now
57:27
we live in this world, we've been kidnapped out
57:30
of our home forest and we
57:32
are dropped into an advanced civilization where the
57:34
way to have a gratifying
57:36
successful career is to
57:39
think really long term and to work hard on stuff
57:42
today that you might not see the fruit of for months
57:44
or years. It's
57:45
to resist the marshmallow in the test. Yeah,
57:47
exactly. We have to work really hard to override
57:50
our sense of instant gratification because in the
57:53
world we were supposed to be in, you really didn't need to override
57:55
it very often. And
57:58
so I think procrastination is...
57:59
is a problem a lot of us have.
58:02
But I think there's kind of two kinds of
58:04
procrastination. There's the first
58:06
kind, which is the one that we usually talk about when people say, 20% of
58:09
people are chronic procrastinators, is we talk
58:11
about deadlines. And people who get
58:13
behind on deadlines or they're late to a meeting, they're
58:16
unable to do the work until
58:19
they absolutely panic. Basically, there's
58:22
this resistance in them that will
58:24
resist and resist and resist until this panic
58:27
gets bigger and bigger and bigger. And eventually, the
58:29
panic threshold crosses the
58:31
resistance threshold. And they will freak out
58:33
and cram for the test or whatever. Do
58:36
their work. And that often leads to, obviously, stress.
58:38
And it's not healthy. And often, you don't do your best work.
58:40
And it's a miserable way to live. But the
58:42
reason I said there was an epiphany that I think
58:44
that we're all procrastinators is that there's
58:47
a whole other much sneakier kind of procrastination.
58:49
And it happens in all the situations
58:51
when there's something important that has no deadline
58:53
at all around it. So
58:56
that's a lot of stuff at work, of course. We're
58:59
trying to improve on our skills
59:02
and to actually rethink
59:04
the company culture or whatever. There's a lot of examples
59:06
at work of stuff that you would call kind of important,
59:09
but not urgent. No deadline. But
59:12
there's a ton of stuff outside of work. There's
59:15
no deadline on seeing your family enough. And
59:17
how many people regret not spending more
59:19
time with their parents before they passed
59:21
away or not spending more time with their kids before
59:23
they left for college or whatever it is. That
59:25
is such a common regret.
59:29
Our brain is a tool. And it's not often that smart.
59:32
And one of the ways that your brain is not that smart is that
59:35
we have this kind of delusion in our heads that
59:38
time is unlimited,
59:39
that there's endless weeks ahead. And that's
59:41
not true. And time is
59:43
quite finite. If there is a friend
59:45
that you really love, but you see them,
59:48
I don't know, once every two years, because
59:50
they live in a different city. Every couple of years, you catch
59:52
up and you have an amazing four-hour drink and
59:54
dinner. And it was
59:56
such a good time. And then that's it. You see them two years
59:58
later. Okay. Well, just say
1:00:01
you're 30 and you, you know,
1:00:03
you may be, if you're lucky, both of you lived into
1:00:05
your 80s. That's 50 years. If
1:00:08
you're seeing them every two years,
1:00:10
it's this crazy moment when you realize that I'm seeing
1:00:12
them 25 more times ever. We
1:00:15
have 25 of these dinners left. What?
1:00:17
That doesn't, the math doesn't add up. And so
1:00:20
I think that when it comes to a lot
1:00:22
of really important things, when there's no deadline,
1:00:25
the combo of that and the, this delusion
1:00:27
that we have unlimited time and unlimited, you
1:00:29
know, rounds of something, makes
1:00:31
us very complacent in a way that we
1:00:34
shouldn't be. So you have two things you can do with that information.
1:00:36
Going back to that friend example, one is really
1:00:39
savor that time with your friend. Maybe that's true.
1:00:41
Maybe that's a sad but true fact that you're going to see them 25 more times
1:00:44
if you're lucky and
1:00:46
really enjoy it and appreciate what you're seeing here.
1:00:48
You have 20, this is, this is number two out of 25.
1:00:50
Next one is number three out of 25.
1:00:53
Or you can increase that
1:00:55
number 25 by prioritizing
1:00:57
that friend more. And maybe you're going to go and
1:00:59
try to see that friend twice a year. Okay. You
1:01:01
just expanded that number from 25 to a hundred. So
1:01:04
there is a lot of things you can do with time when you look
1:01:06
it in the face. And when you look it in the face,
1:01:08
it's often different than what you think it looks
1:01:10
like.
1:01:11
You have this blog post that I
1:01:13
got kind of obsessed with called the tail end.
1:01:16
And you just, it puts in perspective
1:01:18
visually how little time the average
1:01:21
person has to do the things
1:01:23
they love or spend time with the people
1:01:25
they love, you know, from how many dumplings
1:01:27
you have left to eat. You have like a whole graph of little
1:01:30
baby dumplings to the amount of oceans
1:01:32
you're likely to jump in before you die. And
1:01:34
I think the most affecting part of it is
1:01:37
about your parents. And you say, it turns
1:01:39
out that when I graduated high school, I had already
1:01:41
used up 93% of my
1:01:44
in-person parent time.
1:01:46
I'm now enjoying the last 5% of that
1:01:48
time we're in the tail end. In
1:01:50
other words,
1:01:52
you basically get 18 years with your
1:01:54
parents and then the whole rest of your life
1:01:56
is the additional year in terms of actual
1:01:59
time you spend with them.
1:01:59
with them. And I wonder in doing
1:02:02
all of these exercises that, if
1:02:04
I'm honest, have a huge impact on
1:02:06
me when I read them, and then I kind of am
1:02:08
lulled back into the sleep that most of us go
1:02:10
through life in when it comes to something that
1:02:13
seems infinite like time. Has
1:02:15
doing these exercises actually
1:02:18
changed the way that you function in the
1:02:20
world? Has it changed the way that you
1:02:22
prioritize time with your family,
1:02:24
time with your wife, time with your daughter? Has
1:02:27
it transformed the way that you live
1:02:29
out
1:02:29
your day to day? Yes,
1:02:32
but not as much as it should.
1:02:34
So I've been arguing
1:02:37
on the side of more family vacations. And
1:02:40
I used to think, oh, we're all going to be in this
1:02:42
house for a week. And I'll make it for the last four
1:02:44
days, but I have a lot going on. And
1:02:47
I stopped doing that. If there's a thing going on, I'm not
1:02:49
missing an hour of it. And
1:02:51
then the other side of it, when I am with people I love, I
1:02:54
do sometimes find myself thinking, this is
1:02:57
precious. This is precious. There
1:02:59
actually aren't a, there's a very finite number of these moments.
1:03:01
And so yes, it does have an effect on me,
1:03:04
but
1:03:04
I'm like you too, where I
1:03:06
then go and I, it's so easy to just
1:03:08
fall back into our happy human haze of
1:03:11
thinking time is endless. And
1:03:13
by the way, another delusion that goes
1:03:15
along with this, which is
1:03:17
this delusion that things are just, I'm
1:03:19
the way that I am. Things are the way they
1:03:21
are. This is how much I see people. This is the city I
1:03:23
live in. That's just what it is. And
1:03:26
that's actually not true at all. You have a lot
1:03:28
of agency over where to take your life and you can
1:03:30
make big changes if it's important. And
1:03:33
so yes, I can say all
1:03:34
this. Do I do it enough?
1:03:36
No. But because it's in my head, I do
1:03:39
feel like I can be on a path getting 10% better
1:03:41
about this every year. You know,
1:03:43
like I will say like my grandmother is
1:03:45
very old, right? And I, she's,
1:03:48
you know, 98 and, and
1:03:51
I'll, you know, I will try to
1:03:53
make sure I spend, you
1:03:55
know, I probably will, I probably spend double the time with her that
1:03:57
I, that I would have before I wrote this, this
1:03:59
post.
1:03:59
So I do think it has an effect, but I
1:04:02
think if you're really looking it in the face, people
1:04:04
should be doing things like moving to the city
1:04:07
that their parents or friends live in, even
1:04:09
though they don't like that. That's intense,
1:04:11
but that is kind of what's called for here,
1:04:13
but I don't do that and a lot of people don't do that.
1:04:16
How has the advent of
1:04:18
this piece of glass that I'm holding in my hand
1:04:21
made this challenge even more difficult,
1:04:23
the challenge of procrastination and avoiding
1:04:26
what's truly important in our lives?
1:04:27
Yeah, I mean the phone slash
1:04:30
the computer internet, all
1:04:32
of that to me goes together, because for me it's, if
1:04:34
I'm trying to write, I'm writing on the same
1:04:37
exact device that
1:04:39
I procrastinate on. I mean the world,
1:04:42
I could go into a prison cell for 100
1:04:44
years and never run out of shit
1:04:46
to do on the internet. You're tempting
1:04:49
the instant gratification monkey much, much more.
1:04:52
If you're someone who struggles with unhealthy eating, well a great
1:04:54
way to do that is to not have any unhealthy food in the house,
1:04:56
but the internet
1:04:57
basically is like filling all of our houses just
1:04:59
out there in front of us, is just junk food
1:05:01
everywhere. It's gonna, now the willpower
1:05:03
required is a lot greater. So yeah, that's
1:05:06
a big one.
1:05:07
Did people used to procrastinate on the typewriter?
1:05:10
Like will human beings always find
1:05:12
a way to procrastinate? I do wonder
1:05:13
how like people in the 1700s procrastinate on.
1:05:19
And it must have been something, they had books, so
1:05:21
it must have been something, but it was definitely
1:05:23
less tempting. But I think there's writers
1:05:26
who for
1:05:27
centuries who have said stuff like, I
1:05:29
love having written, but I hate the process
1:05:31
of writing. I mean, actually the
1:05:34
word procrastination
1:05:36
is a Latin word. It
1:05:38
means to put off till tomorrow. So
1:05:41
we're talking about the Roman Empire, this was
1:05:43
a problem. And by the way, there's another word
1:05:45
called perendination I think.
1:05:47
And to be a perendinator
1:05:50
is actually to put things off till the
1:05:53
day after tomorrow. So procrastination
1:05:55
is to put things off till tomorrow, perendinators to put things off till,
1:05:57
so they have a nuanced understanding of someone who's
1:05:59
a.
1:05:59
disaster or like a super disaster in
1:06:02
this regard. So yeah, like I'm sure Julius Caesar
1:06:04
was a procrastinator. I just don't know what
1:06:06
he exactly did when he was procrastinating. All
1:06:08
right. Let's talk a little bit about technology
1:06:11
and happiness and the way that technology
1:06:14
is either making us happier or more miserable.
1:06:17
You once tweeted this 300 year old quote
1:06:19
by Montesquieu that says this, if
1:06:21
you only wish to be happy, this could easily be
1:06:23
accomplished, but we wish to be happier
1:06:25
than other people. And this is always difficult
1:06:28
for we believe others to be happier than
1:06:30
they are.
1:06:31
And I think everyone would agree that social
1:06:34
media has made it impossible not
1:06:36
to compare ourselves to others,
1:06:39
right? It's what we do all of the time, every single time
1:06:41
we're looking at Instagram, they're happier on their vacation.
1:06:43
They're skinnier than I am. They have the better clothes,
1:06:46
right? How is social media put
1:06:48
the human urge to compete and compare
1:06:51
that Montesquieu talked about 300
1:06:52
years ago on steroids? And
1:06:55
is there any way to resist it?
1:06:57
I have a term I call like image crafting, which
1:06:59
is I think what people do on social
1:07:02
media, they image craft, right? They're going
1:07:04
to present a
1:07:06
person that
1:07:07
is not them,
1:07:09
but is who they want people to think they are,
1:07:11
which people, again, people have always done. But
1:07:14
social media, it's much,
1:07:16
yeah, it's like you said, it's on steroids.
1:07:19
A, people don't broadcast their failures
1:07:22
and they don't broadcast their shitty vacations.
1:07:24
So you're already seeing this distorted lens. One
1:07:27
of the crazy things about humans is that how
1:07:29
we feel about our own life is almost
1:07:31
entirely derived from
1:07:34
comparison. So it
1:07:36
used to be, if your car isn't as nice
1:07:38
as your neighbor's car, you feel poor.
1:07:40
But now
1:07:43
comparison is in our face. Instead of seeing our
1:07:45
neighbor and our couple of coworkers and our friends
1:07:47
and how they're doing,
1:07:48
we see everyone
1:07:51
and we see the most six. So instead of
1:07:53
seeing, you know, there's someone who's the most successful
1:07:55
person from your high school, right? Who you knew
1:07:57
in high school. Normally you might hear through
1:07:59
the great.
1:07:59
fine about them. Oh, you hear they're doing great,
1:08:02
whatever, whatever, you forget about it. You know, you
1:08:04
don't hear about them again for 10 years. Now that
1:08:06
person's in your face because everyone's talking about them online
1:08:08
and they're there and everyone's forwarding their things. And
1:08:11
so it's kind of a nightmare of comparison
1:08:13
now. And then you combine that with the fact that everyone's
1:08:16
presenting the best version of their life. And
1:08:19
you really have a recipe for
1:08:21
misery and you know, inequality is
1:08:24
always a problem, but inequality is really rubbed
1:08:26
in your face with social media.
1:08:29
There's this term coined by the sociologist
1:08:32
Ray Oldenburg called the third space, which
1:08:34
is exactly what it sounds like, right? It's a place outside
1:08:36
of home or work for adults or for
1:08:38
kids that cultivates a sense of community.
1:08:41
Starbucks wanted to pride itself on being
1:08:43
the third place. And for some people it's still a
1:08:45
bar, maybe a coffee shop or a community library
1:08:48
or a park or a playground, but it's meant to
1:08:50
be sort of like this common leveler where
1:08:52
everyone's welcome regardless of
1:08:55
social class, race, gender, et cetera.
1:08:57
But in our world today, I would
1:08:59
argue that the internet is
1:09:01
that third space,
1:09:03
right? And you can use it
1:09:05
to get lost in an app or Tik
1:09:07
TOK or Twitter or a game. And
1:09:10
in certain ways it's incredible. It attracts
1:09:12
those looking for a community. You know,
1:09:14
if you're living in a rural place, you can connect
1:09:16
to people all over the world that have a like-minded
1:09:19
view to you,
1:09:21
but it can also be this extremely destructive
1:09:23
thing in ways that I don't even need to go into because
1:09:25
everyone knows what I'm talking about, alienation,
1:09:28
isolation, radicalization, all of those
1:09:30
things. How do we
1:09:32
use this tool for the good? How
1:09:35
do we use this tool in a way that
1:09:37
cultivates our higher rung
1:09:40
values, our higher
1:09:42
mind? How do we protect
1:09:45
ourselves from slipping to the lower rungs,
1:09:48
from giving in to our primitive mind,
1:09:50
especially as technology is
1:09:53
continuing to advance? Who knows what's going
1:09:55
to be here six months from now because of AI?
1:09:57
People
1:10:00
who want to lose weight,
1:10:01
it's very logical to
1:10:04
keep only healthy food in the house. Surround
1:10:06
yourself by healthy food and you'll probably eat more of it.
1:10:08
You can do the same thing on the internet.
1:10:11
You can actually try to avoid junk food,
1:10:13
internet junk food, and surround yourself
1:10:16
with influences that'll make you better. Think
1:10:18
about Twitter. Twitter, people rag
1:10:20
on it as this hellscape, and it is, but
1:10:23
not for everyone. Just for us? Well,
1:10:26
yeah, certainly. But if
1:10:28
you're going to tweet about politics, you're going to invite
1:10:30
the hellscape into your world. But the point
1:10:33
is, a lot of people, they log on and they see a
1:10:35
bunch of interesting people talking about science and
1:10:37
history and making funny, comedians, making funny
1:10:39
jokes, and then some of their friends. And it's not a hellscape
1:10:41
at all. It's awesome, right? One thing I
1:10:43
did for this book is, because
1:10:45
I wanted to not end up in an echo chamber, people
1:10:48
who felt the way I did, is I tried to follow
1:10:51
on different social media platforms a
1:10:53
wide range of people. If someone
1:10:56
who was getting a lot of attention and I tested
1:10:58
what they thought, instant follow. I
1:11:00
want to see what they're saying. And then also, if someone
1:11:02
who I thought was a good thinker and they disagree with me, even
1:11:05
more so, instant follow. So you can
1:11:07
surround yourself by a wide variety
1:11:09
of views if you want to get the full picture and
1:11:11
not let yourself fall too much in an echo chamber. And
1:11:14
we talked about idea lab culture. You can choose
1:11:16
to go to the sites and listen
1:11:19
to the podcast and follow people that
1:11:21
you believe have a high-rung approach,
1:11:23
which means they might be anywhere on the political
1:11:26
axis or any other axis, but
1:11:28
they approach things like a grown-up,
1:11:31
not identifying with their ideas, not
1:11:33
attacking people who disagree with them,
1:11:35
but attacking their ideas. So you can
1:11:37
curate your own internet world pretty well,
1:11:40
I think, the same way. Again,
1:11:43
it's just like food. You're going to sometimes go
1:11:45
out or deliver. You're
1:11:49
going to still end up going into this. Someone's going
1:11:51
to send you a tweet. You're going to end up scrolling down the comment section
1:11:53
and getting angry and all that. But
1:11:55
you can go a long way. Now, at a macro scale,
1:11:57
how do we do better? Because
1:12:00
collectively, we can be very smart and wise.
1:12:03
And we can also be the lowest common denominator
1:12:05
can win out. And we can be the worst of our human
1:12:08
nature can come out collectively. But
1:12:10
what we can do is if we build enough awareness about this
1:12:12
concept, and people already, there's a lot more people
1:12:14
talking about how social media is bad, right? That's new.
1:12:17
People, you said that you
1:12:20
didn't even need to even list the things. You
1:12:22
said it was just obvious why the internet can be bad.
1:12:24
That's pretty new, actually. This
1:12:27
idea that these algorithms make us miserable.
1:12:29
And so right there, you're going to start having some
1:12:31
pressure. You're going to start having some
1:12:34
kind of shaming of the people who own the platforms
1:12:36
if their algorithms are geared towards engagement,
1:12:39
which of course, usually, it means geared towards
1:12:41
amplifying anger and bombastic
1:12:44
people. And I think we could get to
1:12:46
a world where that's very, no one
1:12:48
would ever join a platform that still
1:12:51
has an algorithm like that. We all know that that's
1:12:53
not so. And in that world, everyone's
1:12:55
suddenly incentivized to make their algorithms
1:12:58
better and more pleasant. I think we could get there, where there's kind
1:13:00
of a mass shift where it becomes the,
1:13:02
it looks like the Wild West back when the algorithms were
1:13:04
just going for engagement. And now, of course, we don't do that
1:13:06
anymore. And it wouldn't be
1:13:08
that hard for algorithms to find ways
1:13:11
to drive different behavior,
1:13:13
to reward different kinds of behavior.
1:13:15
Just turning back to your book and the story
1:13:17
of us that we started this conversation with, and
1:13:20
where we are on your 1,000 page historical
1:13:23
timeline of humanity, you
1:13:25
say that the disasters on page 1,000
1:13:28
of the history of us are exponential
1:13:32
compared to the disasters on page 999.
1:13:35
Why is that? Technology's
1:13:38
a double-edged sword. I mean, look at the 20th
1:13:40
century. It had record
1:13:42
numbers in terms of GDP per capita
1:13:44
and the eradication of disease and
1:13:47
the fewest people ever in extreme poverty
1:13:51
and just general prosperity. But it also saw
1:13:53
the two biggest wars in history. It
1:13:55
saw the two biggest genocides in history.
1:13:58
And it saw the advent of...
1:13:59
of the biggest existential risk
1:14:02
weapon in history, the nuclear weapon. So
1:14:06
the same century that was the
1:14:08
best ever was also the scariest
1:14:10
ever, and in some ways the worst ever in certain
1:14:12
areas. So what does that mean
1:14:14
about the next century, right? What does that mean about
1:14:17
everything, if tech is continuing to explode?
1:14:20
It means that we could solve
1:14:22
everything, just advancements in AI
1:14:24
alone. I mean, we could solve all
1:14:27
disease, we could solve world hunger
1:14:29
and eradicate poverty, we
1:14:31
could solve climate change, we could solve
1:14:34
aging even, people could die
1:14:36
when they want to. This is all
1:14:37
realistic, this really could happen. But
1:14:39
the existential risk, now there's not just one,
1:14:42
there is many, and they go together,
1:14:44
they feed on each other. So
1:14:46
you can look at that and you could sum that up and say the
1:14:48
stakes are higher than ever. If
1:14:51
we can kind of move forward wisely, we
1:14:53
can live in what would seem like a utopia to
1:14:55
people today. And
1:14:58
if
1:14:59
we don't, then if you live in this
1:15:01
advanced society, the fall might be
1:15:04
the worst ever. So the point is people should be scared,
1:15:06
we shouldn't be cocky. And the reason
1:15:08
I like the liberal house, and I talk about it a lot,
1:15:11
is that I think that gives us our best
1:15:13
chance to proceed wisely. I think liberalism
1:15:16
is the tool and the system that
1:15:19
can get us to a really good future.
1:15:22
And I think the destruction of liberalism is
1:15:25
the ultimate existential threat because I think
1:15:27
it enhances all the other existential
1:15:29
threats. And so yeah, I don't want us to get
1:15:31
cocky about what we have and the stability
1:15:33
we have because we really need it going
1:15:36
forward and she'd never take it for granted.
1:15:39
You have a baby daughter. What
1:15:41
is the biggest piece of advice you
1:15:44
could give someone, maybe like
1:15:46
her, when she understands words, about
1:15:49
the world and the world she's being
1:15:51
born into as we move on to that
1:15:53
thousandth and one page?
1:15:55
I would try
1:15:58
to teach her. independent
1:16:01
reasoning. Conventional wisdom from 10, 30,
1:16:04
50 years ago is often not accurate anymore. It's
1:16:07
not wise anymore. Conventional wisdom does
1:16:09
not stay wise for long, and
1:16:11
it's always going to lag behind.
1:16:13
And so I
1:16:14
would encourage her to trust her
1:16:16
independent reasoning, and when
1:16:18
it conflicts with conventional wisdom about
1:16:21
how the world is, about where it's going, about,
1:16:23
you know, who the, you know, who the harmful
1:16:25
people and the productive
1:16:27
people are, to continually
1:16:30
observe and reflect. And when her,
1:16:33
what she comes up with there disagrees with conventional
1:16:35
wisdom, to trust it
1:16:36
and to continually stay
1:16:38
humble so that she can continue to change her
1:16:41
mind. Because if you live in 50,000 BC,
1:16:43
the world is the way it is. Your great grandparent
1:16:45
lived the same life you did. Conventional wisdom is the
1:16:48
same as it always has been, and it's wise. When
1:16:50
the world is rapidly changing, you have
1:16:52
to be nimble as a thinker and continue to adjust. So
1:16:54
I would want her to do that.
1:16:58
Tim Urban, thanks for coming on
1:17:00
today. Thank you, Barry.
1:17:10
Thanks for listening. If you like this conversation,
1:17:12
if it moved you in some way, or if
1:17:15
Tim said something you appreciated or disagreed
1:17:17
with or were provoked by, it's all
1:17:19
good. Share this conversation
1:17:21
with your friends, with your family, with your community,
1:17:24
and use it to have a discussion of your own. And
1:17:26
if you want to support Honestly, there's only one way to
1:17:28
do that. Go to thefp.com,
1:17:31
T-H-E-F-P dot com,
1:17:34
and become a subscriber today. We'll see
1:17:36
you next time. Transcribed
1:17:50
by https://otter.ai
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